If it is confirmed now (sort of) that underground places are not phased, and can be entered by everyone, does that not also confirm some death mechanics?
If you die in a randomly generated dungeon underground, you can not have a world that resets itself on your corpse. So can not have corpse or body retrieval. This means death will equal a respawn (permadeath will certainly not be the response on normal servers) and feature no interconnectivity. Fitting with their slogan of everyone taking care of themselves.
Also, if you dig down, explore and find a dungeon. Have there been any timelines to these earthquakes that reset/changes landmasses? Read that they can close at different intervals, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. Will reset earthquakes be like geysers? Predictable and can be timed down to seconds, perhaps even with an automatic UI warning of resets. Just like the timer of a server restart warning you to get to safety, the world would tell you that in X time, the next earthquake is due and you should get out of the underground. If not then a group playing in a Tier 2c area, getting close to finding the Tier 3 entrance, could risk an earthquake suddenly wiping them and returning to spawn. Having to not only do Tier 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 2c again, but they have to find a new area like that again too. And are earthquakes/resets tied to that spesific area/hole, or as the whole for Norrath? Meaning there is one universal timer for resets. Or would it work in a way where individual dungeon X is permanent until discovered, then timer starts ticking for it to be closed?
Which brings me to the question of how large a part of the landmass features content beneath it? Would they show up on a map? In a landmass supposedly as big as EQ1 and EQ2 combined + all expansions, you could have a hundred different rotating generated dungeons underground and people would still have to dig everywhere to hope to randomly find one that might dissapear again at any moment.
It sounds good, I am just curious as to how it can be pulled off as a feature that is not just a gimmic, but also works functionally without having players rage over spending 10 hours finding a dungeon that resets 5 minutes after you found it. Seems fast combat and DPS is certainly the priority of the game as groups will need to work hard and fast to progress quickly enough in the randomly generated dungeons to get to the higher tiers before it closes up on them.