EverQuest Claws of Veeshan Expansion Struggles to Launch

On the one hand when a company is launching the 27th expansion for its game from 1999, you might reasonably expect that they have the process down.

On the other hand, an MMORPG has a lot of moving parts and the EverQuest team at Daybreak is pretty small in size compared to the crew supporting World of Warcraft, and even Blizzard had some issues with the Shadowlands launch two weeks back.

But the Claws of Veeshan expansion went live at some point last night or this morning.

Dragons, always dragons

The plan was the usual noon launch window for the expansion, and the forum post announcing the availability of the expansion went up at three minutes after noon.  I saw the announcement hit Twitter via the official EverQuest account, then three minutes later saw the follow up saying they were investigating a crash issue.  The servers were locked and spent most of the rest of yesterday locked or down as status reports popped up sporadically.

As late as 11:40pm last night there was an announcement that all servers would be down for emergency maintenance for two hours, after which I think the person who does their social media went to bed as there have been no further updates.

But the patch works and when I checked this morning the servers seemed to be up, unlocked, and ready for business, so perhaps things are ready at last.

The expansion itself sees the game return to Velious with the following lead-in:

Velious is overwhelmed with writhing ice. Frozen undead swarm everywhere. The few survivors throw aside old hatreds, for now at least, and band together to survive. The heroes of Norrath arrive to help them, but they have not discovered the source of the deadly ice. The remaining giants of Kael Drakkel, now more able to move around their city, carve a tunnel out to the Cobalt Scar. It is time for the bravest heroes of Norrath to challenge the dragons of Velious and put an end to the deadly magic that has tormented the citizens of the continent

And so it goes.  You can find the patch notes here.  I expect there will be a few more issues to resolve with the expansion, but once settled EQ tends to be pretty solid and reliable.