Everquest Mac site Open

On July 17, 2002, Sony Online Entertainment announced that they will be releasing its flagship game, EverQuest®, on the Mac OSX. The following FAQ has been provided to answer some questions you may have about this exciting conversion of EverQuest which is anticipated to ship in Spring of 2003. Q. What is included in EverQuest for the Mac? A. EverQuest for the Mac will be a single package that includes the original EverQuest, and the expansions EverQuest: The Ruins of Kunark?, EverQuest: The Scars of Velious?, and EverQuest: The Shadows of Luclin?. This means Mac players with one product will gain access to over 150 zones, many times the size and scope of original EverQuest. Additionally, from the outset Mac users will have access to the enhanced and upgraded graphics provided in the various expansions, including the new character models and terrain provided by EverQuest: The Shadows of Luclin?. Q. Isn?t EQ three years old? Why bring it to the Mac now? A. While the game EverQuest has indeed been running for quite some time, as mentioned above it has been continually updated over that period, and Macintosh users will be gaining access to all of those updates with EverQuest for the Mac, including updated graphics, new zones, new character races and classes, and refined features like a new User Interface. Q. How much will EQ/Mac cost? A. Pricing is undetermined at this time, but as a single package the retail pricing will reflect typical costs for premium Macintosh games. Subscriber rates will be equivalent to the PC EverQuest service cost. Q. When will EQ/Mac be available? A. We anticipate EQ for the Mac to ship in the Spring of 2003 and we hope to begin Beta testing at the end of 2002. Further details will be announced on www.everquest.com. Q. Will PC/Mac users play together on the same server? A. No, Mac users will play on servers expressly created for the Mac community. There are several reasons for this, but the most compelling are game play related. Since most of the Mac users will be first-time customers of EQ, they will receive the best value and enjoyment out of the game by starting on an ?even playing field?, and not having to compete with PC users who have a substantial head start in time. Also, over time we have continually made refinements to the play characteristics of the game, the rarity or abundance of certain items, etc. In deference to players who may have legitimately obtained an item before we considered it fully tuned, we often leave these in play on existing servers, even if they are slightly unbalanced. A fresh server set with existing rules provides the most balanced environment we can establish; and we feel the gains in enjoyment of playability outweigh the potential negatives. We do understand there are a few Mac owners who also own PCs and are currently playing EverQuest, who would like to keep their PC characters and move them to Mac servers. Unfortunately for the reasons discussed here that would not seem to be fair to new Mac users playing for the first time. Q. With PC and Mac users on separate servers, won?t the Mac server have less players? A. We will scale the number of Mac EQ servers using the same balance factors we do for PC, resulting in roughly the same player densities per server. This way there will always be plenty of other Mac EQ users to play with. Q. What kind of machine requirements will EQ/Mac have? A. It is still too early to establish the machine requirements but we are interested in making EverQuest generally accessible for the Mac audience. We have performed internal testing on the basic EQ client and graphics on the entry level iMac (700Mhz G4/128MB RAM/Geforce 2MX). We are initially estimating that it will require a processor of 600Mhz or higher, at least 128MB of RAM, and an OpenGL compatible graphics card with 16MB of RAM. Due to the wide variety of graphic detail level options for EverQuest, activating optional features will likely require more memory and processor power. EverQuest for the Mac is being developed exclusively for OS X. Q. Who is developing EverQuest for the Mac? A. Sony Online Entertainment has enlisted Westlake Interactive, an established developer and provider of numerous conversions of software entertainment titles for the Mac platform, to convert EverQuest to the Mac.