Luclin and PoP were the second golden age of EQ. The original team designing it clearly had goals relating to the interaction between Sanctus Seru and Katta Castellum. However, halfway through making it, that team was dismantled and packaged to designing EQ, and much of what we can see in EQ2's version of Freeport and Qeynos can be seen reflecting what was originally planned for SS and Katta. I don't know if Shadowhaven was ever supposed to be what it ended up being.
Anyways the new team came in. Luclin was a horizontal expansion, meaning a lot of additional choices for leveling up, not just vertical progression. Unfortunately the risk/reward ratio was off and it became undesirable to level up in anything BUT Luclin zones, especially Paludal. It DID have vertical progression of course for the raiders. For some reason they put in the most mind numbing raid mechanics ever devised in mmorpgdom, huge hp high armor endurance boss fights with stupid amounts of trash that led to guilds having dozens of coth bots ready to go.
I find it hard to be nostalgic for that.
PoP came in as entirely vertical progression. This is why it would be desirable to a server like P1999 with a grossly overcrowded top end. There's little from Luclin worth salvaging, except perhaps Nexus to replace the worst thing that PoP added, which was PoK. PoK was a community destroyer and would be a fatal blow, slow in coming but unstoppable, to P1999.
|