Everquest Next a.k.a. Pipe Dream Online

[Bad^Hat]

So SOE just unveiled the new Everquest (was anyone even aware they were making one?), and it sounds all kinds of too good to be true, in a "I wonder how they're going to **** this up" kind of way. Here's the press release version for the lazy.

• Multi-Classing - EQN will offer players the ability to explore and interact with the world according to their individual style of play. There are no levels in EQN, but there will be more than 40 distinct classes (or professions) at launch, with multi-tiered abilities and specialized weapon skills to collect and master. Players will even mix and match abilities from each class, creating truly custom characters that feel distinct and powerful.
• Destructible Environments – No modern MMO has successfully implemented destructible environments that stretch across an entire seamless game world — this changes forever with EQN. Every piece of the world is fully destructible and players will have the ability to manipulate almost all of it. They will interact with and explore the world in amazing ways; venturing down into the deep bedrock beneath the surface and using powerful combat abilities to blow gaping holes into the ground. The EQN world will extend far into the heavens and deep into the procedurally-generated earth through 10,000 years of known lore and history.
• Permanent Change – Players will also have the ability to cause the world to change around them, permanently, in dramatic ways. Through the concerted effort of the world’s inhabitants, including players, creatures, and non-player characters (NPCs), city walls will be built and destroyed, large-scale wars will be fought and won, and epic stories will unfold over months and years.
• Emergent AI – In EQN, NPCs will have specific motivations and preferences that direct behavior in nuanced and unpredictable ways. Players will find themselves in a world where NPC decisions are based on core values, not dictated by static spawn points. For example, Orcs may attack opportunistically because they want an adventurer’s gold, not simply because a careless hero wanders into an attack radius.
• A Life of Consequence – Finally, each character in EQN will have a unique story; they will not follow a predetermined path. Instead, they will seek out adventure, fame and fortune in a constantly changing sandbox world. The game will remember every choice and action that players make and will organically deliver increasing opportunities to do more of the things players like to do … from crafting armor and exploring the wilderness to purging goblins from the forests.

And here's a taster of some in-game stuff.

But I didn't really get a true sense of what they were trying to accomplish until I watched the event, which got me a little too excited because it sounds like my ****ing dream MMO, and is therefore destined to fail in some horrible way.

(Go to about 26:30 of the first one to skip a bunch of stupid bullshit.)

Thoughts?

Beta sign-ups are here, but it seems like they're full up for the time being: https://www.everquestnext.com/beta-registration

 

[Lobster]

It is exciting, but I have to ask the obvious question. How will they prevent the shapable enviroment from becoming a forest of penis statues, and abusive words carved into the side of cliffs?

 

[Eejit]

Wow, sounds like a great game for them to ruin with another NGE!

 

[trunk_slamchest]

i think it will crash and burn.

it revolves around the saying "jack of all trades, master of nothing."

and that dudes pony tail is ****ing brutal. just brutal.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Environments aren't permanently destructible, a developer confirmed at the panel that the world would fix itself after a short time but that they're still tweaking how long that'll be. Anyone who's played on a Minecraft server knows why this is necessary.

Don't know how that'll apply to Landmark, though. I guess you're free to destroy whatever you want in your own land, but then the world itself is procedurally generated so you'd think large scale destruction might not be so much of an issue? What I'm really curious about is if Landmark will have any kind of combat/questing stuff or if it'll really just be gathering and building. That would get boring quick, especially since it just seems to function as a way for SOE to outsource their architecture.

And yeah I have to wonder how well the class system will really work out given they want to move away from having certain roles required to complete content. Didn't that end kind of terribly for GW2?

Edit: Panels are here. Don't know if there were more. http://www.eqnextfans.com/news/25312-multiclassing-panel-info-and-thoughts

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Free to play.

Beta thing let me opt-in though. Here's to hoping.

 

[Eejit]

What I'm really curious about is if Landmark will have any kind of combat/questing stuff or if it'll really just be gathering and building. That would get boring quick, especially since it just seems to function as a way for SOE to outsource their architecture.

And yeah I have to wonder how well the class system will really work out given they want to move away from having certain roles required to complete content. Didn't that end kind of terribly for GW2?

Looks like for questing:

Spoiler

What we are doing is embracing a concept we call Permanent Change. The way that we are doing that is through a mechanism we call Rallying Calls. Rallying Calls are this really cool way to set up a story that takes a long time for players to work through, but constantly and permanently changes the world as you go through it. The easiest way for me to describe that is through an example.

So we start with the Raisng of Halas. The Combine accord has you go out here and set up the city of Halas. And of course that starts out as a little tent city, and no one knows what is in the area, and there are all kinds of little dynamic quest opportunities that appear.

Just so you understand what a Rallying Call is, I think everyone here knows what a public quest is. A Rallying Call is kind of like a public quest where every single person in the game is on that Rallying Call together at the same time. And it is going to take two maybe three months of real time for it to be accomplished. But the trick is, you don’t know where the stages are, you don’t know what events will trigger the story to move forward, and it is different on every server. You will progress it a lot differently, and we’ll show you that as it goes through.

So as the Combine Accord tells you to go out and establish that tent city, you can ignore what they said and just go out and explore on your own, that’s always an option. But if you want to participate in the rallying call, you want to go to that tent city and find the little ways that you can participate in it. One of the ways that you can participate is more of a crafting sort of thing by gathering resources, helping to build a palisade log wall around the city, so on and so forth. You might also get together with your friends and form a group to strike out into the woods to find out what is out there and possibly pacify any dangers that you find.

And that is where the fun begins. Because you don’t exactly know why the next stage might trigger; it might be because you got the log walls up, or it might be because you pacified the Goblins in the wood too greatly. Whatever it is, you trigger the next stage of the Rallying Call and the Goblins show up and start burning the outlying walls of your village.

Now that creates a whole new set of dynamic quest opportunities. You can help to repair the buildings, you can help to defend them against the Goblins, you can try to find out where the Goblins are coming from and try to pacify them out there. In addition, the towns people might actually create a quarry because they want to create a stone wall now that the Goblins are burning stuff. As the villagers are digging down into the ground, they are going to uncover those tiers of depth that I talked to you about and things might start coming out of the tunnels. So there are more quest opportunities: defending the miners, exploring those tunnels, etc. etc. Additionally, you might want to help build those stone walls and make that permanent change I was talking about.

Eventually you are going to erect those stone walls and make a really great keep, or pacify those woods too much, and eventually you are going to really tick off that Goblin King. He is going to go off and make allies with the Gnolls and the Orcs and they are going to come back with a big siege army. And when that siege army is sitting there, this is what we would call, as an example, the final stage of that Rallying Call, the Siege of Halas.
Now there are all sorts of new quest opportunities of course, stopping the catapults, fighting against the things, defending the walls, perhaps combating against espionage, preventing Sappers from undermining your walls, so on and so forth. And of course, we have some randomness that comes in because the quarry has been abandoned and the monsters come in and not only mess with you, but with the Gnolls and Orcs and Goblins. So all of those things continue until eventually the players do enough damage to that siege army that it breaks its back and retreats.

Now that’s the end of that Rallying Call. What we would do at that point is roll out another Rallying Call somewhere else in the world. And it is not always somewhere else in the world, it might be here again. We might destroy the city that you just helped build. All sorts of things can happen on a regular basis. And the really cool thing is, after launch, a couple of years down the line, one of your friends says ‘Hey man, what was it like back at launch?” You are going to say “Oh man, Halas didn't even exist back then, that was before the Dragon army attacked, or the Civil War” or all these unique stories. And as the world progresses it will constantly change, you will constantly be finding new experiences.

In fact, it is almost impossible to recreate your same gameplay experiences if you roll up a new ALT. Because, honestly, not only do you have to make the exact same gameplay decisions to even have a chance at that, because remember the world is remembering everything you've done, but the world has changed underneath you. You are going to need to constantly explore and learn about this world as you move through it.

And for other quests

we don’t have the guy with the feather over his head. We just don’t have that any more. As you journey through the world, you kind of need to keep your eye open. There will always be things that you see that make you go “I wonder why that’s happening,” and when you do that, you’re going to want to go over there and find out what is going on. For instance, if you saw a little girl crying on the side of the street that might intrigue you, and you might ask her ‘why,’ and you might find out there is a quest opportunity available. Or you might be walking down a road and see a barn burning on a hill and there are Orcs chasing humans around. It is up to you what you do in that case, either save the humans or help the Orcs slaughter them. But the game is going to remember everything you did. It is as if everything in the world is keeping track of what you are doing. Essentially, everything in the world has a faction bar just for you.

As for class roles that's really down to the nitty-gritty of implementing abilities and the supposedly next-level NPC AI and really will be make-or-break. I think the system for classes looks pretty neat though. They do still sound like they're having healing, tanking and damaging roles but they won't all be straightforward due to how the AI is meant to be smarter - i.e. somewhat intelligent targeting. So presumably blocking/positioning will be a large part of tanking rather than just spamming threat abilities.

- http://www.eqnexus.com/forums/threads/quests-and-rallying-calls.506/

it revolves around the saying "jack of all trades, master of nothing."

That's a pretty unintelligent thing to assume.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

That's a pretty unintelligent thing to assume.

not really, if anyone focuses on a wide variety of new innovations rather than just focusing on innovating 1 or 2 specific elements, the quality of everything the project encompasses will suffer instead of being strong in 1 or 2 suits. atleast in a single player game, which is MUCH better suited for what EQN is proposing, you dont have an unforeseeable amount of social variables and technical problems that will come after EQN is released (just as any MMO faces) and enough control over the player's experience where you can shape a worldspace with ground breaking mechanics and not have to worry about people ruining other people's experience for one reason or another. you simply cannot predict how people will react to concepts and mechanics that have never been implemented in an MMO before.

im not saying what they are doing isnt possible. procedural worlds, destructible environments, social NPC's have all been done before in some way or another. but they have to get everything perfect in order to do what they are proposing, and 9 times out of 10, the first MMO to do something isn't the one that does it perfectly. as an MMO, there has to be a perfect balance of freedom and restriction in order for the player to buy into what EQN is selling. if the game offers too much freedom, there will be penises everywhere and general "internet" will take over the game and ruin the immersion. if the game is too restrictive or buggy, it immediately takes away from the immersion they are selling because the game isnt free enough and EQN starts becoming just another MMO. if people arent active and creative, the game will be boring and repetitive.

SPRPGs still struggle to be completely open ended without making the player feel restricted, because even after 500 hours of Skyrim, you start seeing where the lines are drawn (ex: where NPC's spawn or you learn exploits in order to complete quests/kill enemies) and the game starts becoming repetitive. i simply dont see how an MMO can do what SPRPG's are just starting to eclipse.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Your argument has no weight without having played the game. That being said, their goals are rather broad and ambitious. But hell, this is MMO marketing, what are we to expect?

 

[Bad^Hat]

Looks like for questing:

I meant whether Landmark would have that stuff. They're making two games, the main game which will come out later, and Landmark which is the Minecraft-y thing where people claim land and build shit which has a chance of being put into the main game, which is coming out later this year.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

Your argument has no weight without having played the game.

it has weight, but no validity.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Not feelin' it, dude.

The answer to "why?" you see, is most often "why not?"

Skepticism is neither valid nor weighty. It's just what it is. Or rather, it's what you think it isn't going to be.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Yeah but, it's an MMO. Based on the majority of past examples failing to live up to expectations, and given the incredibly ambitious nature of this project, why should skepticism not be the default position? Seems totally reasonable to me.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

Not feelin' it, dude.

The answer to "why?" you see, is most often "why not?"

Skepticism is neither valid nor weighty. It's just what it is. Or rather, it's what you think it isn't going to be.

skepticism is based off context. its definition is conditional based off the context it is used in. if we are going to argue the definition of words just to try and poke holes in my opinion (just like everytime i post) i can "bill gates" my posts and act like im giving his deposition.

the answer to "why?" is most often "why not?" because that is the easiest answer and people often accept easy answers to things they cannot explain, or do not have the ability or interest to define themselves. that is why traditional religion is so mindless and so many people follow it.

religion teaches to obey; science teaches to question and answer. If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

religion teaches to obey; science teaches to question and answer. If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

Cool bro

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Yeah but, it's an MMO. Based on the majority of past examples failing to live up to expectations, and given the incredibly ambitious nature of this project, why should skepticism not be the default position? Seems totally reasonable to me.

I never suggested that it wasn't.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

Cool bro

santa claus isnt real, either.

 

[Eejit]

I meant whether Landmark would have that stuff. They're making two games, the main game which will come out later, and Landmark which is the Minecraft-y thing where people claim land and build shit which has a chance of being put into the main game, which is coming out later this year.

Ah right. Nah just looks like Landmark is a Minecraft-like which they may use to source some architecture they use or sell.

 

[Bad^Hat]

santa claus isnt real, either.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

hey.

knock it off.

if you keep it up, we arent going to McDonalds.

 

[Edeslash]

"Expressiveness like this just doesn't exist in any other game."

I'm kinda interested but what the **** is wrong with this guy

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

I'm gonna go ahead and come forward with saying I haven't read past the titles of any articles or watched a single video regarding EQN or EQL. Not sure why I'm posting in this thread.

 

[Mogi67]

Only way I'll play this game is if there's open-world FFA pvp servers with item loss on death

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Yeah... that's not gonna happen.