By Odin.Blazza 2009-10-31 19:20:51
There have been times when things have been put into the .dats for a future update (like the mini update we recently saw, it was in preparation for the actual update to come) and then never used, but it's always been one or two obscure items that they changed their mind about at the last minute.
You don't upload 150 (30 armour sets, 5 slots) new .dats unless you're damn sure you're going to implement them. My guess is that they'll be either walk of echos (new end-game event inside Atomos) or turning Beauc or Xarc into SCNM areas (there is a noticeable lack of NM's in these two areas). Now this is assuming it's only hume that you downloaded the other day, I think I heard that taru had also been displayed, which makes me assume that all 5 races have been added, so that's probably more like 1050 .dats + weapons, special animations, crafting cloaks (prolly for npc's as mentioned above) and npc/mob weapons and you're looking pretty close to the 1600 or so files that were in that download.
tl,dr; The gear is very much real, although we might not see it this update (we will see the weapons though). There will NOT be any new zones unless it's walk of echos. Zones are in the .dats too, the only zone in the .dats not being used is Walk of Echos.