When he wasn't discussing the game's past, last week Mr. Hartsman was explaining the new Neriak and Darklight Woods areas of EverQuest II. These zones are free content created by the SOE-Taiwan, the Soga studio, and will be patched into the game at no cost to the player later this month. Along with the two new zones, the darkly 'emo' Arasai faerie race will be added to the roster of evil races.

And about other future changes:

But what's changing? "In our case, our big experimentation this time is the concept of having 'superzones'. I don't want to make them sound cheesy, but they're gigantic regions. You could place two, three, or four older EQ2 zones, outdoor zones, and make them as distinct areas inside this one all-encompassing zone. We're going to have a few of these regions out there, and then each of those regions will have a few zones inside them. What that lets us do is make an expansion where there is less zoning. We're going to have zone names that sound a little foreign to people. "The Jarsath Wastes", "The Kylon Plains" - that kind of thing. Inside of those areas, you'll see Skyfire Mountains, you'll see the Dread Lands, the Lake of Ill Omen. And so those will be full zone-sized areas inside these much larger areas. You can go back and forth and not have to be worrying about zoning the whole time."

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