Nearly 25 years after laying the foundation for the MMORPG genre, Everquest continues to roll out expansions that tell new stories, add new content, and meaningfully update the game’s systems. In addition to the usual content additions players would expect, Everquest’s 30th expansion Laurion’s Song has brought a new Alternate Persona system that makes it incredibly easy for players to experiment with the game’s numerous classes without having to create and develop new characters.
In an exclusive interview with Game Rant, Everquest Executive Producer Jennifer Chan detailed the Alternate Personas system and the team’s motivation for adding the feature in Laurion’s Song. She spoke about how the team wishes to enable players to experience more of the game’s content, and for the game to be more supportive of “altoholic” players who love to try a little of everything.
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Everquest Developers Want Players To Experience All of the Game’s Content
Naturally, an MMORPG 30 expansions deep is positively loaded with content, and the team understandably wants players to experience as much of it as possible. This extends to the game’s various classes, each of which possesses unique mechanics and playstyles that have been lovingly tweaked and updated by the developers over the years. Allowing players to more conveniently explore the class options lets them appreciate more of the game and possibly discover a new favorite way to play.
We’re always looking for new ways for people to experience the game – not completely new ways – but asking, “How can we change up that experience a little bit and get more mileage out of the vastness of the game that it is?” Because certainly, we ship new expansions, but we don’t want people to just be in the new expansions, we want people to actually get to experience the content that we’ve been developing and releasing for the past almost 25 years now.
Although players are always looking forward to the next batch of new content, it’s important for games as big as Everquest to find ways to make existing content more accessible or relevant to players. Everquest expansions occasionally revamp earlier zones for this reason, showing that the developers continue to appreciate the game’s content offerings as a whole rather than fixating on the latest endgame regions.
Everquest’s Alternate Persona System Is Perfect For Altoholics
Everquest boasts an impressive roster of 16 classes, and although players can unlock more character slots, many players fall short of being able to have a character with each class. Alternate Personas let players swap to other classes on the same character, and this works especially well between classes that share much of the same gear like Wizards and Magicians. This new persona system supports the community that loves to build alts, all while not opening up more character slots. It also helps with fence-sitters who are unsure if they want to make an alt or not.
Because a lot of the archetype gear works on all classes in that archetype, right? So if you’re going out and you’re playing a Magician, there’s going to be a lot of parts in the world where your gear will be the same as a Wizard. They share a lot of the same gear archetypes. So it’s a way to help people who are like “Do I really want us to start a new character?” or “I really like all my gear and I don’t want to have to reacquire all my gear, but I really want to experience it as another class and see how that plays.” So it’s definitely a way to ease people in and it’s also another way for people that are all about alts to be able to get a character of all classes.
The system works similarly to Final Fantasy 14‘s Jobs system, only players can go even further by choosing different races for their various personas as well. Achievements and progression like keys and flags remain with the personas, but players will still need to level them up. Thanks to the Alternate Personas system, Laurion’s Song may prove to be a great time for new players to try out Everquest as earlier zones see an uptick in activity as players get to work on their personas.
Everquest is available on PC.
