A milestone 25th expansion pack has been announced for 19-year-old online game EverQuest. It's called The Burning Lands and will be released 11th December 2018.

What's left for a 25th expansion to add? A luck statistic, luckily, as well as six new expansion zones themed around the planes of air, smoke and fire. You can see these in an archived Burning Lands livestream below.

EverQuest today is obviously a different place to when it launched in 1999, when it was queen bee - the MMO all other MMOs aspired to be. Today the herd has moved on, to WOW and beyond, but the committed veterans remain. And they remain to raid, it seems. EQ still goes in for big-numbers raids, you see - raids with 40 people or more. WOW scaled back to 25 players years ago in an effort to make raiding less hardcore (it takes a lot of organisation getting 40 people in one place at one time).

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