I'd been reading about missing Luclin zones recently and it got me thinking about how unfinished PoP was on the original AK. I started making a list of some of the things I remembered, but it got me thinking about the encyclopedia that is the AK/TAKP community. What items, dialogue, quests, factions, or zones feel unfinished, missing, or useless? What NPCs don't respond to prompted dialogue or feel like they should be a part of something?
staff of the observers quest is missing, borxx didn't spawn anymore in AK era. There is a bunch of iksar quests that weren't functioning past a certain point on AK, warrior pike / necro skullcap etc. Here's a few items that are flagged as "Quest Items" on live, and I couldn't find much about what quests they belong to. Highkeep Flask Large Velium Candy Jar Gantor's Eye Sarnak Skull (lumpy goo)
There's that blank zone line in Shadweaver's Thicket that always intrigued me. Is that was you were reading about with missing Luclin zone?
PoP was a rushed expansion. It wasn't as rushed as Luclin but I noticed things when recreating it for us. Plane of Disease for example was clearly rushed/incomplete and had missing named NPCs with drops. Daybreak added these back in on Live servers several years back when they dug around and found them. Either their spawn rates were stupidly crazy low and they raised them or they weren't spawning. PoP zones are lacking in named NPCs in general and are just fields of regular mobs. Plane of War was scrapped even though it has a stone. Events like Mujaki (which at least worked) look like they were made quickly and then just forgotten instead of balanced/tuned. Sony made invisible walls in zones and failed to consider that levitate exists. PoP NPCs hit much harder but their diversity in terms of classes and the difficulty in pulling them or kiting them is much reduced. Making fields of mobs is quick/easy if they're just low aggro warrior NPCs with a proc. There was an incomplete cloak quest people figured out a few years back that was undoable until Daybreak fixed it which required maintaining HoH faction. Factions went out the window for PoP. Sony of course launched PoP way before PoTime was ready and even before the elemental planes were ready. AK forked like a month or so after launch. The elemental plane bosses were bugged on AK in some form. (I guess Fennin worked?) It took them half a year to get PoTime ready on PC. There wasn't much missing on AK that wasn't missing on PC before elementals though.
There was the theory that an enchanter who hadn't killed anything in HoHa/b would be capable of getting their faction high enough to do that quest, but it never got properly tested. Apparently things like the quest NPC only spawning once per server reset, and only being up for a few minutes, and being surrounded by kos mobs that you couldn't kill without hurting your faction made playing with it a bit too difficult.
Elroz and Torven, considering how much effort both you have put into classic conservation, I'd be interested to know what else you found in Pre-PoP content that feels like empty or unfinished. As Elroz already mentioned, there's the Iksar Necro Skullcap Quest, the Iksar Warior Pike quest, the Iksar Beastlord Claw quest. I also have stuff like The Steel Warrior quest The Green and Blue, the Rivervale quest Shakey's Stuffing that was added to Live servers, and the Plane of Underfoot alluded to in The Hole which became it's own expansion. Yeah, I was reading about that. It was intended to be a place called Firefall Keep. There isn't much info about it other than the name and the zone connections from what I could find. Supposedly the tower seen in the background of the Shadows of Luclin promo material was connected to VT and should have been the "real," endgame of Luclin, but that promo artwork is suspect and it could just be a message board myth.
the spot where the POK book is in the nexus used to be a tunnel leading to paludal caverns i think? one of the npcs i got dialogue from in the nexus had some lines on it. There was a dwarf that was missing and his brother was by the pok book, they both end up in shadowhaven though. [Mon Jan 16 15:07:35 2023] You say, 'Hail, Defender Narthem' [Mon Jan 16 15:07:35 2023] Defender Narthem says, 'Hello, ___. Behind me lies the doomed passageway to the Paludal Caverns. It's a very sore subject that we really don't like to talk about... Some of our own were lost in the accident.' [Mon Jan 16 15:22:16 2023] You say, 'what accident?' [Mon Jan 16 15:22:16 2023] Defender Narthem says, 'Like I said before, I really don't like to talk about it. If Serisn is back there, he might be able to tell you more.'
Well Luclin was full of unfinished stuff. They were going to have a Plane of Shadow but scrapped that, which is unfortunate because there's no way it would not have been better than VT. VT was not done very well, with highly monotonous trash clearing, uninteresting pinata bosses and the drops are just a lot of +gooder borderline OP stat items (some clickable items aside) which is bad because they make better content irrelevant, including PoP content. Inner Acrylia Caverns was largely unfinished because the developer working on it left the company. Luclin was crazy ambitious though; no way they'd have done everything they wanted in a single year even if they hadn't of lost developers. Brad left around then to form Sigil as well. Grimling Forest is notable for how much work that was put into the zone that went to complete waste. I spent two full months on that zone because it was supposed to be the Luclin equivalent to the ring war event and it has six smaller events in it. Sony was trying to make more elaborate events after the success of the ring war but the problem with these Luclin events (ring of fire and ring of vulak included) is that the scripted mechanics are Fing obnoxious and don't enhance the gameplay. Protecting a low HP cat from grimlings spawning at them from multiple nearby spawnpoints in all directions, for potentially hours, is lame. (can't even heal the cat) Nobody did/does these. Grimling Forest has a ton of invisible men NPCs which are used as controllers. The entire mine also had some weird respawn behavior that I could not figure out. It was a kludgy mess. The 'infinity spawn' is the result of bugged respawn behavior that the dev was trying to accomplish using invisible men controllers. For all the scripted work put into that zone, they couldn't even be bothered to itemize the final event properly and the weapon drops mistakenly have a haste proc instead of it being flagged a worn effect which ironically makes them better in a way as a toy but this a major oversight that was left in until the item was removed from drop tables in the zone revamp after our era. It's hard to think up this stuff off the top of my head, but another one that comes to mind is Siren's Grotto. I really like that zone's geometry and atmosphere but it had almost no drops in it before the revamp, which is a real shame. (not much after either) Velious was otherwise fairly complete and well done IMO. Chardok is what I call the biggest mistake of Kunark. Before the revamp it was a complete waste of a zone. It was criminal not to itemize that place and instead put all the good drops in Sebilis. We have the post revamp version and it has some nice toys here but it was too late to matter. I feel that EQ could have been a much better game just from smarter itemization and better risk vs. reward consideration although as-is it's still my GOAT. More broadly speaking I feel that the game lost some depth post-Velious and they moved away from factions mattering, dungeon crawls, lore and quests. Shar Vahl is not a bad city though. Again this is partially because of the post-Velious brain-drain at Sony as game devs like to change employers. In the Classic era they were more concerned with building a world that felt alive and immersive so you had things like lore NPCs that appeared to travel and they could appear in Qeynos Hills and also in Highpass or Innothule. Classic has a lot of NPCs that only spawn at night; has NPCs that pick stuff up off the ground; has the most factions; meaningful travel; risk of corpse loss etc. Sony gradually shifted to being a raid focused game and the non-raid game content suffered as developer priorities changed, resulting in more bland and neglected non-raid zones. (Marus Seru anyone? bet many people forgot that zone's name like I just did)
Umbral Plains also has those caves and tunnels with a zoneline that goes nowhere. It's interesting that with PoP having so much content, there is still more that is unfinished. Plane of War would have been cool, but rip faction wars
I'm pretty late to this party, but a while back I was putting together a list of all of the unused zonelines I could find. This doesn't include Luclin at all, and some zones there may be something there that I'm just not aware of. Some of these might be questionable (Permafrost). I was just trying to include everything I could imagine or if it had a little bit of that classic zoneline zag. Crystal Caverns Off of the Chasm https://i.imgur.com/Jjwo8T4 Kaesora Basement Zoneline Far east side. This would certainly lead to Teraaz/Chosooth zone. https://i.imgur.com/eayFmrk.png Kurn's Tower Basement Zoneline I don't think this was supposed to inexplicably zone you to FoB. Early cancelled Burynai zone? Oggok North East Side https://i.imgur.com/IASrhr6.png Permafrost NW of Flag Room Z hallway Permafrost Diplomat room Z hallway Stonebrunt Mountains North East https://i.imgur.com/aV9wqa0.png The Hole Living Wall (Pit) Entrance to Plane of the Underfoot https://i.imgur.com/XnHDGIY.jpeg Neriak 3rd Gate East side Neriak D probably. https://i.imgur.com/vypJ4AL.jpeg Ehhh maybe these were initially going to be zonelines? Field of Bone North East Looks like the start of what would might have led to The Lake of Dismay. Is the lake of Dismay just that tiny pond in EJ? Lake Rathetear South West Maybe. Looks like the start of what would might have led to The Dead Hills / Tower of Rot area https://i.imgur.com/DkRZxWF.jpeg Oasis of Marr Orc Highway Would lead to Rujarkian Hills area? https://i.imgur.com/E336xHD.jpeg Paineel Newbie Yard Looks like the start of what would might have led to Barren Coast/Stonebrunt area Definitely not an all inclusive list... yet? Kinda just throwing in some areas I thought were interesting/underutilized too. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j9OWP2L-tAnQ0Otj1r8Z1ZNFjGs7rU7MOPaYZDB7he8/edit#gid=0
The Blocked tunnel in Jaggedpine Forest comes to mind. Clearly they put this in with an intention to be a zoneline down the road. I can't recall if they ended up using that in a later expansion
There's 2 right? One eventually went to Nedarias Landing? during LDON. the one on the river, I have no idea. East Cabilis Downstairs Trooper Guild Blocked ramp in Trooper guild Less of unfinished/Missing and more of an artifact? This one had me so excited like wait.. was this leading to a Cabilis catacomb? Is there anything in lore *under* Cab? It's just a remnant of when Cabilis was a single zone :\, it was going to lead down to the maze that is in West Cab behind the waterfall. if you look around you can see pieces of the other zone still hanging out in each.
On live I used an instanced zone off of Jaggedpine that was a novelty because there was nothing but mobs that scaled to your char lvl and the instance could be requested solo. I wish I could remember the name of the zone, it would be so much easier to google. I think the eastern unused zone from Jaggedpine was used for the instanced zone.
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zones.html?zstrat=258 Looks like the instanced zone is off of Nedaria's Landing and the extra tunnel in Jaggedpine isn't related.
