Just wanted to round up a lot of the EverQuest Next reveal impressions I’ve been reading from my fellow bloggers:
- MMO Symposium: “Sony has essentially set the bar high, if they pull this off they will take the crown back.”
- The Ancient Gaming Noob
- EtcMMO.com: “I do look forward to hearing more about EQN, I am excited about it – but – I don’t want to get all foamy at the mouth just yet!”
- Inventory Full: “EQNext may be the rising star in Norrath’s firmament but that doesn’t mean the other two need fall.”
- Party Business: “Here’s my main gripe, though: when you leave out the voxels, what’s revealed so far could just be Guild Wars 2 again.”
- GamingSF: “In reality though will the world constantly look half-wrecked as a horde of the players run around in circles constantly smashing anything they can?”
- I Have Touched The Sky: “I’ve written about Storybricks before; I think it’s a great idea and am delighted that a AAA enterprise like SOE picked up on its potential.”
- Gaming with Sauce: “My only disappointment is that I’m not seeing how EQN will itself be a sandbox.”
- Ald Shot First: “I feel the art direction is a huge improvement over the old one in the EQ world.”
- Dicejockey: “EverQuest Next sounds like the game I’ve been waiting for my entire gaming life.”
Bio Break 
Thanks for the link! Off to get in those two – three hours of EQN makeup work.
Cheers for the pingback
Thanks for the linklove. Just posted another piece and probably more to follow as I work through the various panels on YouTube during the week.
My main complaint about EQNext is that I’m not playing it RIGHT NOW!
I think after everyone digest all infor we will see a lot of bloggers complaints. Like theat one: “Here’s my main gripe, though: when you leave out the voxels, what’s revealed so far could just be Guild Wars 2 again.”
IMHO EQNext want advance the sandbox (making it more minecraft) and the themepark (making the dynamic events/public quests more organic and fluid).
The era of WoW clones is dead…
“Here’s my main gripe, though: when you leave out the voxels, what’s revealed so far could just be Guild Wars 2 again.”
That’s kind of my view at this point, too. I’m just not sure if this is a positive or a negative. I liked a lot of the ideas GW2 had, and it’s still a very good game in many ways, but there’s a reason I’m not still playing.
The questions is, will EQN be the game that takes the GW2 formula and refines it to something truly excellent (sort of like what WoW did with the original EQ formula), or will it just present the same ideas in a new package (like Rift did with WoW’s mechanics)?
@Tyler
“The questions is, will EQN be the game that takes the GW2 formula and refines it to something truly excellent […], or will it just present the same ideas in a new package[…]?”
From what I saw, EQN try to advance in both fronts:
1- to make a better sandbox, refining the minecraft formula;
2- to make a better dynamic events/public quests than /gw2 get, using the storybricks as tool for build a better IA for mobs and NPC.
In both cases hey are using diferent formulae and tools that other MMO and games tested and trying to refine them: the minecraft sanbox and the public quest from WAR/Rift/GW2.
The public quests they want get is like a living story with a chain of dynamic events like we see at GW2 Orr and Brisban. So, EQN pq will span for months, will have diferent stages, but they will not say when and where the events will happens, players will just see the mobs behaving diferent.
The example they give is the settlement (that growth to a city) where goblins and orcs live near. Players will fight the mobs there, players will help to build the city and the stone wall, players will help to open the quarry where the city will harvest the stones for build the walls and fortress and that quarry is underground and it will make possible mobs from underground come to surface and to players explroe the underground dungeons. The goblins and orcs will answer to players attacking first runing to a safer place (where they will destroy the ecology there? can we see later mobs moving from that area to near the players because they do’nt have food?), organizating themselves, geting higher number and better gear (I guess a lot of tress will go down and it will be a big deforestation…) and returning for attack the city. If the city survive to the goblin/orc army attack will depend upon the players help.
So, from that description (I tryed to summarize what the dev talked about that pq), we can see a lot of diferent events will happen for a long time until the conclusion of that public quest.
We too can see that a lot of diferent paths will open to players while the pq advbance, players can engage in crafting, harversting, hunting mobs, attacking the goblins, stoping the goblins to put down trees, there is a great quantity of possibilities.
I can see they will have problems implementing this, so maybe the end result will not be like it. I fear they will be forced to create something similar to GW2 hearts, for show to players where and when things are happening. I am not sure if they will make storybrick work as intended. I am not sure if players will have any idea about what they need do. I am not sure if players will commit themselves to a huge span of time in one task like defend that growing city.
The worse thing I can see is that we will see the same complaints about temporally content, because EVERYTHING in EQN will be temporally. If plaeyrs win the final battle against the Goblin King, that NPC is gone. If the players lose the battle, the city is gone and there are ruins there. It is an ONE TIME event.
I know the best plans never survive to implementation, but if they can make 80% from that work like intented they will advance the MMO genre a lot.
As a person that has played EQ2 and GW2, I agree that on the face of it the announcement sounds similar to GW2, particularly in regards to class. Where I think that EQN will be distinctive is in the crafting and housing aspects. Given the lineup of people they have making the game (dedicated crafting folks) and how wildly popular the housing/crafting feature is in EQ2, It would be massively disappointing if they screwed that part of it up. If they do good work there, then I think that many players will be fine playing something akin to GW2 in EQN with greater customization/housing/crafting.
I dont play EQ or GW and this looks, sounds and reads great!
Hey, thanks for the link!
Also, thanks for the link!