As posted at Zam:

Destiny of Velious Scheduled for February 8, 2011

The EverQuest II expansion panel was sketchy on details, but what we saw was promising.  Destiny of Velious, slated to launch February 8, will return Norrathians to the fabled continent of Velious.  Here players will continue the Order of Rime storyline, discover the fate of Thurgadin, and learn more about what happened in the 500 years between EverQuest and EverQuest II. The expansion will be levels 86+, to compliment Sentinel's Fate.  There is no level cap increase and there will be new AA although the details have not been hammered out yet. 

Apparently this early in development there are still quite a few things under discussion.  We were given a list of zones and features, and told that there are more things planned that they have not yet finalized.  So far there are:

• Hundreds of new weapons, including Velium weapons
• 300+ quests
• 10 instances
• 1 massive contested dungeon
• 4 Heritage Quests including the Coldain Prayer Shawl
• 6 Raids
• 2 Overland Zones

We were treated to concept art and a flyover video, both of which should be available online later today.  The Othmir are indeed present in Velious, but will not be available as player races.  Flying mounts will be introduced: we saw a griffon and something dragonish, and were told the first one is quested.  The existing cloud and carpet mounts will not be changed to "real" flying mounts.

We were warned that this is part one of Velious.  When pressed we were told that they absolutely will finish the Velious story, but it has not yet been determined if that will happen as game updates or a later expansion.

No date was given for the start of Beta testing but we suspect we'll see it sometime before Christmas.  We look forward to bringing you more details as they become available!

Stropp said:

I must say I'm surprised that with 300 new quests, 10 new instances, plus all the extra bits mentioned, that there is no increase in the level cap. I know the tradition is the level cap increases every second expansion, but still that's a huge amount of content.

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The amount of content is just about identical to what they put in TSF, so I'm guessing that it represents basically the amount of stuff that the current EQ2 team can produce in a year.  My gut says that they should have capped TSF at 85 and used DOV for 86-90, but I guess they think that this way is theoretically less disruptive to group players (even if most of them will move on to DOV when it comes out and never use TSF content again other than to get epic updates for their alts).

Stropp said:

I thought TSF only had about 150 quests, based on the counts required to get each acheivement. 

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I'm pretty sure that each of the outdoor zones has more quests than needed to get the respective achievements.  On top of that, there are approximately 2-4 non-repeatable quests for each of the dozen single group dungeons.  Then there's new writs and repeatables (a couple daily variants for each dungeon), which I'm guessing are included for the press release quest count (as they are with other games). 

I do agree that we could use a bit more leveling content, and my guess is that we're going to see the game moving in that direction with free to play.