Published by Daybreak Games and developed by Game Jawn, EverQuest Legends launched earlier this year. Dedicated to recapturing the original EverQuest, all the way down to pursuing the use of original code for both systems and animations, with some modern UI updates, EverQuest Legends has felt like an archival project. The small team of developers has matched its dedication to preserving the past with a goal to create an MMO that can be played solo or in small parties, in small bites.
During Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, Germany, we sat down with the developers to look at what’s coming down the pipeline this year. To sum it up, it’s different. While the game’s development approach embraced preserving the past, the roadmap for its future focuses on bringing players something new.
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
When the game was first announced, the community’s Discord was small. After the launch of EverQuest Legends, one of the developers shared that their Discord community had grown to more than 60,000 users. And despite some negative reviews, developers have taken much of the feedback to heart; more importantly, they’ve listened to their community as they develop their path forward, and they’ve never felt more support.
EverQuest Legends is building itself bigger with lore as its guide.
With the Kunark, the game’s first expansion, set for Winter 2026, the developers are making some new additions to EverQuest Legends first that will both bring better quality-of-life improvements and new content for players. Right now, they’ve added the new Kerran race, which is a cat race mixed with lion, tiger, and lynx aesthetics and adjusted maps for better ease with more defined tracking circles (especially for characters with tracking abilities). On the quality-of-life side, the developers have added 4K scaling to help the game’s windows match the resolution of 4K monitors.
Finally, the most interesting announcements from my meeting with the development team are the Rujarkian Hills and Nektropos Castle mini-expansion. Ahead of Kunark, EverQuest Legends is implementing a new lore strategy that isn’t just bringing back EverQuest as a 1:1 in terms of lore and places that players can go. Instead, the development team shared that the additions of the Rujarkian Hills and Nektropos Castle would each independently expand elements of the EverQuest lore and areas that players haven’t gotten to explore in all that much detail.
Similar to the strategy that other media have used, most recently War of the Rohirrim, the development team is looking at the gaps in lore to begin contributing their own. That doesn’t mean that they’re playing fast and loose with EQ lore. Instead, the team is looking to add form and context to zone names players got to see in the game, and to the insides of buildings players weren’t able to enter. Oh, and did I mention Lake Neriuss? That’s on the way too.
To put it into perspective, the developers explained that the “ideas have existed in internal documents for a long time,” referring to taking EverQuest 2‘s Nektropos Castle and putting it into EverQuest Legends (which up until now has been a mirror for EverQuest). Adding, “It was just never used in EverQuest One, and then they end up using EverQuest 2 instead.”
From the Rujarkian to Kunark, Game Jawn is looking for ways to explore places we haven’t seen in Norrath.
Starting with the addition of Rujarkian Hills, the developers looked at the map of the first EverQuest game and found areas that had not yet been explored in the original. This gave the team ample storytelling leeway while ensuring every creation fits within the world of the franchise they all love.
For the Rujarkian Hills, they’ve made this new zone home to the Death Fist Clan of orcs. They’ve built a society around a war god and created a gladiator pit to add flavor to the zone. Effectively, the lore just notes that the orcs have been coming from the area, but players have gotten no exploration of their life.
They took the same approach with their mini-expansion. They explained that the Nektropos Castle mini-expansion is essentially a marriage of the internal documents from the first game, the location and experience from the second game, and the developers’ creativity as they fill in the gaps when needed. With Nektropos Castle, players will get a new race and also two new zones, one of which is Lake Neriuss.
While the Rukarkian Hills sees the dev team establishing new lore within the franchise, it’s really the Nektropos Castle and specifically Lake Neriuss that stands out as the team’s most mammoth undertaking in regards to building something new, at least until Kunarck.
Nestled in Lake Neriuss, the Castle is run by the Everling family, who have spent their time building their land into a full-fledged merchant hub. After a brief questline, access to the Castle will be immediately available for players in EverQuest Legends.
EverQuest Legends offers something new for players to grab onto with its post-launch roadmap.
As for the surrounding zone, it is home to Dark Elves. As noted above, this mini-expansion also brings in a new race, and this one feels like a “why not have them before” moment. With Nektropos Castle, players will unlock the Half-Dark Elf race. With Half-Elf already in the game, this addition lets the developers expand the story around Nektropos Castle, with the new race connected to the Castle but not the family that runs it.
In our time together and as the team took me through a hands-off look at the in-development zones, it was abundantly clear how much the game meant to them. Not just as former fans turned developers, but as developers who now see their job as stewards for the lore now that they have the chance to help define it.
Additionally, the approach to carving out new areas of creativity is exciting, to say the least, because it confronts the primary issues that the game ran into when it went live. What is the value add when people can still log into EverQuest today?
That answer takes shape in the reduced party size, quality-of-life changes, and condensed progression that caters to players with less time to devote to the MMORPG. Still, that wasn’t enough for some, and now that the game can offer new experiences, it’s easy to see it building its already growing community even bigger.
EverQuest Legends’ largest step forward is coming in Winter with the release of the new Reincarnation feature and its first major content release, Kunark. The former will let players go back to Level 1 and level up again to unlock and raise their skill caps, boosting replayability.
The creative excitement we saw makes EverQuest Legends an exciting project to keep tabs on.
Outside of the new feature, though, EverQuest Legends‘ post-launch content is following the same path as the original title in more ways than one. For the team, matching their expansions with those rolled out with the game’s original launch is important. And that is why EverQuest Legends is starting with Kunark.
Still, they’re looking at how the developers originally used Kunark as their inspiration for EverQuest Legends‘ approach to growing. With the original game, Kunark served as a split in the timeline. The developers explained that Kunark gave them a chance to build out more of the original EverQuest while also branching out into their own thing.
As an expansion, Kunark was a lore element that let EverQuest and EverQuest 2 coexist without issues in story development. For EverQuest Legends, the developers are using Kunark as a similar exercise in creative freedom while still honoring the preservation element of sticking to original documentation, code, and more.
As EverQuest Legends begins its next chapter this Winter, the team has the chance to contribute to a world that inspired them to become developers in the first place. As their story continues to unfold, it’s important that the game has moved beyond just an example of a passion project with one foot in preservation and into writing something new without throwing out the past.
