Hate Rising

Hate Rising is a game update to be released in January 2014. It is "Part 2" of Call of the Forsaken.

Initial announcement
Just around the corner in January, we will be launching Call of the Forsaken: Hate Rising. In Hate Rising, you will be able to continue your adventure with all new Heroic Adventures, new raids and missions; new equippable gear across group and raid content, and a nice set of rare items you’ll hardly believe.

Also, a big change will be coming to our Heroic Adventures. We have scaled our existing Heroic Adventures by level, so you can play this exciting content earlier. So that means if you are level 85 and you haven’t played Call of the Forsaken yet, you will now be able to receive the tasks and quests from the quest givers. A little side note on level spread for missions: stay tuned for some more information from Prathun in the very near future on what we’re hoping to accomplish!

Call of the Forsaken: Hate Rising will go into an Open Beta early January. If you participated in Beta for the expansion, you will be able to enter as soon as we launch. If you did not participate beforehand, don’t fret. We’ll have a timeframe in January that you’ll be able to apply and get in very quickly, and soon discover how an iconic EverQuest character will play a large role in Norrath over the next year.

Beta information
Hey folks,

The EverQuest Game Update: Hate Rising Beta is now live! Currently everyone flagged for the Call of the Forsaken Beta has been allowed access to the Hate Rising Beta and Beta Forums. We plan on opening up signups for the Beta for those who are interested sometime in the fairly near future.

This Beta is different in several ways from an expansion Beta, so I wanted to call these changes out specifically.


 * Universal Chat is still active
 * There is no NDA on the Hate Rising Beta

While there is no NDA for the Beta, we do ask that you still limit discussion of Beta to the Beta forums. Our developers are going to be very active in reading feedback in those forums specifically; if you post feedback elsewhere, it will be missed. Similarly, discussing Beta contents with people who aren’t in Beta isn’t very productive. If you want to discuss Beta, it’s much better to get involved in the Beta yourself. Once our signups are open we will be very quick in handing out invites, so don’t worry!

For those of you who need to download the Beta Client, it is available here.

Thanks, and I’ll be seeing a lot of you in Beta!

Details

 * No new zones.
 * More Heroic Adventures.
 * There are no new spells / AAs for the Call of the Forsaken: Hate Rising.

Our focus in this content release for group level content is providing content via the Heroic Adventures system rather than new zones. We've got a number of zones in development (both on the Art and Design sides), and could have prioritized in such a way as to release a couple of them with Hate Rising but that wasn't our goal. Instead we want to focus on really expanding the potential for Heroic Adventures. This includes releasing a number of new Heroic Adventures as well as increasing the level range for those who can participate in them.

Because Heroic Adventures scale, they have a lot more potential for content for the long term rather than single zones. We're not in any way shape or form moving away from releasing more zones in the future (some of the ones I've seen are just gorgeous); instead we're moving in a slightly different direction specifically for this release.