With EverQuest’s 25th anniversary having just passed, I am not only a veteran player, but a person who lived and breathed Norrath from its earliest origins. I have walked its roads, fought its dragons, and created lasting relationships within its vast, magical world. EverQuest changed my life.
For two decades-plus, I have played on and off ever since its release back in 1999. And beyond that, I gave back to the community as a Senior Guide, volunteering many years of my life helping players with issues, creating and implementing quests and events—some still run today.
In respect and love for this world and its players, I started this website twenty years ago, where I have chronicled what made EverQuest magical and offered constructive, well-argued criticism for how the franchise has been mishandled by those responsible for its stewardship. From Sony Online Entertainment to Daybreak Games and now Enad Global 7 ownership, the EverQuest franchise has suffered from poor management, lack of vision, and an ever-widening gulf between developers and their loyal players.
EverQuest Deserved Better
The facts are clear: EverQuest should have been the foundation for a billion-dollar MMORPG empire. Instead of building on its monumental success, however, SOE let someone else do it. Blizzard Entertainment, with World of Warcraft, took much of what EverQuest had initially experimented with—raiding, factions, dungeon crawls, even core class archetypes—and perfected it for a broader audience. They built their empire on your foundation, raking in billions of dollars, as EverQuest languished.
Most of the original talent for EQ development have long since moved on to work on WoW and other projects at studios that offered innovation, growth, and a chance to work on well-funded, high-aim projects. Why? Bad management. Lack of innovation. Opportunities for advancement didn’t exist. The brightest minds that created EverQuest were stifled, and into that vacuum sprouted up companies like Blizzard.
Let’s talk about Holly Longdale. Having served as Executive Producer on EverQuest, she understood community and stewardship. Daybreak Games’ dithering—its failure to commit to a vision for what EverQuest’s future would look like—pushed her out, however. Now, she’s Vice President and Executive Producer on World of Warcraft Classic at Blizzard. It’s intended as a wake-up call. It’s not just players leaving, but your leaders, as well. And why should they not leave when there’s not a glimmer that the company will produce something new, something bold, something worthy of EverQuest’s heritage?
The Community is Losing Faith
The EverQuest community isn’t just aging, it’s aging fatigued. We’re tired of waiting. Tired of corporate silence. Tired of empty PR. Tired of waiting for someone at the wheel to do more than maintain the servers on life support.
We’ve all heard rumors—whispers that a new EverQuest title is simply in the “ideation” phase, with an announcement window years away, perhaps 2028. That’s too long. On this schedule, the community you’re attempting to win back will have outpaced you, or outgrown relevance. And what do we see in the meantime? A company that doesn’t communicate with its players anymore. An incompetent, indifferent studio head. A tyrannical community manager with a lack of respect for the community. A development team gone dark. That’s not how you position for a renaissance. That’s how you write a eulogy.
Mr. Ham, your time is running out. You will oversee the gradual decline of one of gaming’s all-time great franchises if you do not act. It does not have to end on this note, however. Time is still there for you to do something special.
What Must Be Done
Here’s what I urge you to do:
- Commit publicly to EverQuest’s future
You owe us, your fans, a clear, unambiguous statement that a new entry into the EverQuest franchise is in development. Not brainstorming. Not pre-production. Development. Give us a team, a vision, and a timeline. - Restablish communication with the community
Restore your players’ trust. We’re not customers, but caretakers with you for this world. Open up again. Hold Q&As on a regular basis. Give your community managers the leeway to really engage. Include us in the discussion. - Create a bold vision for EQ3
A new EverQuest will have to look back at what preceded it but not be limited by it. Make a game that embodies modern gameplay but holds on to what made original EQ great: danger, interdependence, discovery, social connections, and a living world. That vision is still valid today. - Empower visionary leadership
Holly Longdale is gone. Replace her with someone who understands what EQ once was and what it can become. Put a leadership team with EQ in their genes—and let them have the freedom to create something amazing. - Fix the studio culture at Darkpaw Games
Restore your internal culture that previously made EQ a leader in innovation for game design. Invest in your developers. Give them a future. Give your best and brightest minds a chance to dream again—before they leave for somewhere else.
The Time is Now
Mr. Ham, there is still time for a change, but EverQuest’s reckoning has come. We do not wish, after 25 years of discovery through Norrath, for this franchise to fade away slowly due to corporate apathy, weak leadership, or a lack of vision.
What the world does not need is another soulless live service experience, another superficial nostalgia cash-grab. What the world needs is a new EverQuest.
We stay here. We stay waiting. We will not, though, wait for all eternity.
You have an unprecedented opportunity. With vision and the right team, you could be the one to go down in history as the leader who restored EverQuest to greatness. You could be the one to usher in a new golden age for one of the most innovative and influential MMORPGs in history. That’s not a maybe—that’s within your grasp. But it starts with vision, courage, and doing something.
Now is the time for leadership.
— Wolfshead
Founder, WolfsheadOnline.com
It hurts me to see your passion for EverQuest. You know it yourself what kind of company Enad Global 7 is, they buy and exploit a brand/name but they do not invest much into it or create anything themselves. Their business plan is criticized, they make so little out of their franchises and talent that it just hurts to see. They are good at milking existing franchises and their loyal fans.
I checked the list of MMOs for 2025, and rumored upcoming or at least long term projects. Doesn’t look good at all for MMOs. There are similar genres both single- and multiplayer, but the massive world itch still wants to be scratched.
We played MMOs when they were still great and we were younger, a magical period. Games were way better, today games are greedy F2P and the mobile gold rush created a lot of terrible games, while creativity and new ideas are falling short these days. Also terrible is how super woke games get promoted and also willingly swallowed by the modern audience.
We live in a Dark Age of Gaming. But the wish and love for truly great games will never die, wokeness/DEI hopefully will go away even more, maybe we will see the rebirth of MMOs with a so super successful new take on them that everyone is going to copy it for decades.
We have ever more games nowadays, yet they stand really small compared to my early gaming experiences. It’s not just nostalgia, we talked about that already several times.
I made friends playing MMOs and reading blogs, even if most faded away over time, I am still in contact with some.
It really hurts me to say it again, but hoping for EQ is a very, very lost hope. Don’t look back, look forward to the next Golden Age of MMOish gaming. I am afraid that will take a while, though.
Thanks for the kind words. This is my last attempt to convince Ji Ham and Enad Global 7. I hope this isn’t a lost cause but the evidence doesn’t look good.
I realize the chance of a new EverQuest is probably slim to none. The video game industry has been captured by cruel and heartless investors who don’t care about video games. Many of the devs are no better.
The true author of the EQ’s misfortune is John Smedley. He’s the person who mismanaged the franchise all these years. It was Smedley who saw WoW and refused to learn any lessons from Blizzard.
For all of Blizzard’s faults, you have to hand it to them for using the MMORPG genre into the stratosphere and keeping the WoW franchise alive.
As far as the EQ community is concerned they are a great disappointment. They are like passengers on the Titanic who see the iceberg looming ahead but are content to do nothing and shrug their shoulders.
And what of the EQ developer alumni? Where is Jeff Butler? Where is Scott Hartsman? Why have they abandoned the good ship EverQuest? Why don’t they speak out?
Smedley was general manager at Amazon Games but supposedly departed late 2023. No idea what he is doing right now. To an Amazon manager who wants to make gaming a business his resume sounds good. They soak up all the talentless people that failed. But then, the whole games industry is rather small pool and we have seen how the least talented can still make a buck and rise surprisingly high nowadays.
I cannot really attest him being good at business things or anything gaming related. Blizzard stole his thunder, he had some great ideas, he was a fan of Planetside but it never quite lived up to the huge potential I saw. Seems to be a common theme for Verant that became SOE that became Daybreak.
Jeff Butler is working on Avalon, but… you can see yourself. Raph Koster is also again working on something, they have in common that they are key note speakers imparting their wisdom on an audience that is just interested in the name likely.
What a way to make a living, somehow not satisfying, IMO. Has such a flair of their best days are long over.
Hartsman had Rift – Planes of Telara and Trion Worlds. Didn’t quite work out, but hey, he did and tried.
You can google to find the medium entry of his 2023 reminiscence of Rift.
“The First Million Players that Weren’t in Azeroth Anymore”
It will likely be new enthusiast who rediscover the fire. Lessons learnt are probably unknown for them, but they will perhaps find the idea/spark again how to make fire.
I am focusing right now on War Thunder and Mount & Blade II, which announced a Viking expansion. Funnily, I played the very same game already decades ago, so little if anything new got added to the sequel. At least they kept the core gameplay.
At least still non-woke literature can be found. Plus some disturbing examples how authors who want to become more mainstream suddenly go woke or like a certain Sanderson totally nuts.