EverQuest Reveals Favors of Fortune, Its 2026 Expansion
EverQuest has a name for its next chapter, and it's a gamble. Literally.
The 2026 expansion is called Favors of Fortune, and it was announced in the team's newest producer's letter. Pre-orders open on October 6th. That's the headline, and if you only came for the headline, you can stop here. But there's a bit more to it than a name and a date.
Scorn Is Back, and Your Luck Is Running Out
The setup picks up after what was described as a brief but brutal war between the gods. When the dust settled, Scorn apparently didn't stay gone. The sign that something is wrong is a very simple one: the odds keep getting worse. Any matter left to chance in Norrath is now tilting away from the player, and it's getting steadily worse over time.
It's a neat hook for an expansion built around fortune. Most MMORPG villains announce themselves with a giant army or a burning city. This one shows up as a string of bad rolls. Anyone who has spent an evening chasing a loot drop that never comes will probably find that relatable, maybe more than they'd like.
Then there's the key art, which shows a group of black cats. Striking ones, too. Whether players will actually get to make friends with them is an open question. The producer's letter doesn't say, and for now nobody outside the team knows what those cats are doing there. Given the theme, black cats and bad luck are a pretty obvious pairing, but the details will have to wait.
What We Still Don't Know
Quite a lot, honestly. There's no word yet on what adventurers will spend their time doing in Favors of Fortune. Zones, systems, level changes and rewards haven't been laid out. The next real chance to learn more is a developer livestream scheduled for November 17th, so players are looking at roughly six weeks between pre-orders going live and the first proper deep dive.
That's a slightly odd order of events. You can put your money down on October 6th, well before the team has shown what it's selling. Longtime players may not mind. Newer or lapsed ones might want to hold off until the stream.
The Rest of the Producer's Letter
The expansion reveal wasn't the only thing in the letter. The team also used it to walk through what it has been working on over the past few months, and one item stands out: changes to make the Hero's Journey quests more group-friendly. That's a quality-of-life point rather than a big splashy feature, but it matters for anyone who prefers to level with friends instead of alone.
The letter also covers the events and activities planned across the fall, along with a summary of the team's summer work. If you want the full rundown, the letter itself is the place to go.
Our Take
On paper, Favors of Fortune looks like a confident, theme-first expansion. Building a threat around luck itself is a clever way to tie story and gameplay together, and it could make RNG feel like part of the fiction instead of just a nuisance. Whether it does depends entirely on what the November 17th livestream shows.
The timing also puts EverQuest in busy company. Autumn is shaping up as expansion season for veteran MMORPGs, with LOTRO setting a date for its Wolves of Mordor launch and RuneScape pushing what it calls its largest area expansion. That suggests long-running games are still betting heavily on annual content drops to keep their communities engaged.
It's worth watching whether the group-friendly Hero's Journey changes signal a broader push to make EverQuest easier to play together. And yes, whether those cats turn out to be friends.