Since people have apparently NOT read/listened to the interview:
There is ONE leve 1-20 zone, Timorous Deep. It is the starting area for the Sarnak and other neutral races. After that they are being fed back into old content.
Timorous Deep is an ocean full of islands and the new city of Gorowin. And that area is going to be level 1-20. And once you get beyond that, the Sarnak story line for those folks who are starting out brand new characters, their whole story is all about getting back home and rejoining their race and finding out what happened. Because really so much time has gone on that these people are exiles. It's essentially the classic hero's journey where they go through this period of innocence, they go through the rediscovering of the fact that there's an outside world, and then there's the eventual triumphant return home to defeat the bad guys and be reunited with their own history. So, that journey will take them from Timorous Deep back to the old world, up through Kingdom of Sky and Desert of Flames if people choose to go and level up there and then come back over to Kunark where the real bad guys are.
Epics won't be the "sit in Lake Rathe for days" like it was.
Scott: That's a very good question. What we're looking to do with these is we're looking to make sure... The refer to that as: What's your gating factor? In order for there to be a certain amount of rarity there has to be a gating factor. One of the big points of frustration that happened with a lot of the original EQ epics was the gating factor was always rare and long spawns. Rare long contested spawns, whether that was Cazic Thule or whether that was Ragefire or whether that was... ya know. And those things turned out to be an excellent way to make sure that there were very few epics or there was a very steady controlled stream of epics coming into the world at a predictable rate. These days, 2007, people don't really balance MMOs that way anymore. EQ doesn't even balance their later upgrades, they don't make those mistakes of the past either. In a lot of ways we've been learning a lot from the EverQuest Live team as they've enhanced and changed their way of doing work too. So what we'll be doing is trying to make sure our quests are gated on the difficulty of events, the difficulty of the quests, your ability to find other people to go help. It's things that are in your control to go do. What we will not be doing is having you sit on a spot for three days hoping some guy is gonna spawn. There's no need to control player action to that level. It's just not important for the overall health of the game. The most important thing is to make sure that when a person logs on their next step is in their control, not at the control of some arbitrary delay. So, yeah. We like the good parts of the original EverQuest epics which was everyone had a cool way and there was this feeling of brotherhood with other people of your class who all went through the same stuff. You know, you see the weapon and you go: I know you've killed Cazic Thule cause you have this thing, congratulations. Without the bad parts of, you know, you have your cleric one, you must have sat in Sol B for 900 weeks, I'm so sorry. So yeah, we're aiming for power and we're aiming for a satisfying quest but we're not aiming for all the frustration that occured in the first generation.
And those other TWELVE zones that aren't the 1-20 content?
Instead of just making our outdoor areas single zones, we're making them bigger and making them full on regions of the continent. So the continent is broken up into a number of these regions and within each of these regions you're going to find very distinct zones that will have some familiarity. Yes the environment is going to change, the lighting will change, the sky changes, you get a little pop up on screen that says: Now entering the Burning Wood, but you didn't have to zone to do that. There will still be zoning between these big huge regions, but the zoning shouldn't be any worse a user experience than it was in Echoes of Faydwer. So you'll be able to see a whole lot of areas that you did see in the past. We're actually really really excited about that, one of the things that we've always wanted to do was making zoning less of a factor when it comes to gameplay. Tamat: More seamless. Scott: Exactly. And you can ever really take one of these zoned worlds and make them fully seamless, at least not on the scale that our world is, but we can do stuff with these ginormous regions that we have now that we're a few years in and the engine is optimized a whole lot better than it ever has been before so we're able to do stuff like have a Field of Bone and have Dreadlands and Burning Wood. We can have a lot of these areas that you're familiar with but you'll actually be playing in a larger region and so... But there's the standard compliment of dungeons and instances that will be around too.
Honestly, if people are going to complain about something you would expect them to complain about something that wasn't covered in the interview.