EQ 'Next'

[Shatter]

Definitely still need more info, it has some promising areas but a lot of that can still suck.  Disappointed in the WOW graphics

[Mrbloodworth]

It looked pretty interesting. Curious how they're going handle the inevitable urban sprawl and penis castles. It wasn't clear to me if the tools are just for buildings or if you can make custom item looks.

Quite sure that the first "game". Landmark. Is purely for data generation. They will take the best assets created in that, and port them over to EQnext and toss it on the procedural pile as options/content to be injected into the generation. Quite brilliant if you think about it, as they have 10 year old games to be compared too. This is one way to generate content and locations well before launch.

You can not directly sculpt and such in EQnext, only submit VIA Studio.

This is exactly the direction I said MMO's would go. Voiced over, Action combat, sandbox and player generation and the death of retarded AI. I think EQnext will be a watershed though, if they botch this, well, sandboxes go back in the box of no funded land.

I believe this is the true second generation of MMO's, all else before were merely iterations of the same.

[Sky]

But they went into how you would get land claims and 'earn' more in Landmark, then have to travel through other player's claims to seek out raw materials to bring back to yours so you can build.

That sounds like the parts of UO/SWG where sprawl negatively impacts gameplay.

Landmark would be much better as a single player/private server venture, I think.

I also completely agree with Gore that letting the lifeless blowhards that will inundate them with votes and ideas be the community sourced design is a recipe for the shittiest game possible.

[Mrbloodworth]

But they went into how you would get land claims and 'earn' more in Landmark, then have to travel through other player's claims to seek out raw materials to bring back to yours so you can build.

That's the "game" part. I'm 100% positive this is just a tool for them to extract data for generation in EQNext. 100's of unpaid monkeys, who love minecraft spitting out tons of structures and areas for content.

Even the addition of a quest wont require level designers in this method. Its just another data point to be attached to a random NPC. Location of the objective is handled by generation. Similar to what we were doing in WURM in terms of what spawns where, nothing ( Except landmarks ) is pre-placed, EQNext takes that to structures as well.

[Soln]

The tools include different-sized voxel cursors, rotation on three axes, copy and paste, undo, smoothing, brushes.

(from kotaku)

What's their engine for this?  Are they streaming? 

[Nonentity]

I like the art style. We'll see how magic fairy world building works.

[Trippy]

What is a Voxel?

A three dimensional pixel -- i.e. a cube in a 3D game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel

[Goreschach]

The tools include different-sized voxel cursors, rotation on three axes, copy and paste, undo, smoothing, brushes.

(from kotaku)

What's their engine for this?  Are they streaming?  

The actual dynamic geometry processing system is most likely in-house. The engine, proper, could be anything, really, as this isn't a 'voxel engine'. You could argue semantics over whether or not the data structures they're using even constitute volumetric pixels, but the main thing to take home is that they're just using a cube array to dynamically generate an extemporaneous static polygon mesh geometry. I don't work for them, so this would all be conjecture, but if you want I can do a writeup of how it probably works. I'd wager it would probably be 90+% accurate.

[Abelian75]

That's the "game" part. I'm 100% positive this is just a tool for them to extract data for generation in EQNext. 100's of unpaid monkeys, who love minecraft spitting out tons of structures and areas for content.

Even the addition of a quest wont require level designers in this method. Its just another data point to be attached to a random NPC. Location of the objective is handled by generation. Similar to what we were doing in WURM in terms of what spawns where, nothing ( Except landmarks ) is pre-placed, EQNext takes that to structures as well.

Yeah, your imagining of it is too perfect for it not be basically correct.  That definitely makes sense.

This definitely looks technically cool, that's for sure.

The cynical part of me doesn't really see how any of the technically neat stuff really connects to a game in any meaningful way, though.

[Rendakor]

I like all of the features promised but hate the art style. We'll see how things actually pan out, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

[Threash]

Any link to the video yet?

[Ruvaldt]

I really like the limitation of 8 abilities at a time. 

In fact, I like a lot of this.  Except for the character art.  I'll forgive that though if everything else works out.  That's a big if, of course, but I already know I'll give it a shot, and that's something I haven't said about an MMO in several years.

[Kitsune]

Looks nice so far but what we've seen is about 1% of the content, so reserving judgment until I see:

- The UI
- Combat mechanics
- The classes
- Player housing
- Crafting
- Quest mechanics
- NPCs
- The world in general

Given that it's pretty much inevitably going to be F2P my playing it is essentially guaranteed in any event, the question is whether I stick around and spend station cash on it or uninstall it the next day.  The details are what made EQ great, stuff like the different vision types of different races, rangers and druids being liked by animals, the various illusion spells for enchanters, and several of the more subtle quests.  EQ2 followed up with some fantastic stuff like being able to learn monster languages (which changed their voice acting from gibberish to English) and their housing system and abundant house trophies from quests, screwed up some things like infravision and ultravision becoming mostly useless, and totally dropped the ball in gameplay and environment when they made everything brown.

If they put out a shiny Disney graphics world with a thorough subterranean section (I totally had a nerd boner for Neriak in EQ1 when I thought the dark elves had a huge underground all to themselves, before I actually got to play and found how small it was.) and that still has pleasing details throughout it, I will give them all of the money.  I'm not holding out a lot of hope for that result, however.

[Lantyssa]

I'm waiting to see if Iksar look good, or they go the route of TSO's Argonians.

[Margalis]

It's kind of amazing how long it took for a major publisher to copy Minecraft.

I'm curious how the building actually works. I think the fact that in Minecraft you do stuff through your character rather than a toolset or editor is very important, it makes the building feel more like part of the game and less like a separate editing mode. It also makes the controls simpler and the metaphor more immediate. I think that's part of the reason why Minecraft succeeded in way most build-your-own-content games did not. It just feels different to have your guy building stuff than you messing with an editor.

[Venkman]

Dammit I knew my day would get away from me.

Can some/anyone confirm this is the full pitch:

http://www.twitch.tv/everquestnext/c/2681152

[Mrbloodworth]

Dammit I knew my day would get away from me.

Can some/anyone confirm this is the full pitch:

http://www.twitch.tv/everquestnext/c/2681152

Yes. Skip to: 26:27

[Mrbloodworth]

The tools include different-sized voxel cursors, rotation on three axes, copy and paste, undo, smoothing, brushes.

(from kotaku)

What's their engine for this?  Are they streaming?  

The actual dynamic geometry processing system is most likely in-house. The engine, proper, could be anything, really, as this isn't a 'voxel engine'. You could argue semantics over whether or not the data structures they're using even constitute volumetric pixels, but the main thing to take home is that they're just using a cube array to dynamically generate an extemporaneous static polygon mesh geometry. I don't work for them, so this would all be conjecture, but if you want I can do a writeup of how it probably works. I'd wager it would probably be 90+% accurate.

Foreglight is module based, so it everything you see in Planetside 2, including rendering/pipeline/lighting/physics, with the Terrain system swapped out with a voxel one.

[Triforcer]

If killing pumas lowers your beggar faction, I'm in. 

[Bzalthek]

I like just about everything they promised and showed.  I really liked how the human woman looked (especially the emotes, though I kept expecting her to hand Booker some money she just found).  I did not like the kerran, but I'm sure I'll get over it.  One thing about combat I hated was every move kept obscuring vision.  Half the combat was just looking at dust.

[KallDrexx]

Hrm, this was quite a bit more interesting than I thought.  I really liked what I saw in the twitch tv recording.  I wonder if their revenue model is merely reselling player creations (and some of their own).

That being said, a lot of their ideas seem awesome in a small scale game but I am not sure how it's going to manage in a large scale MMO.  I'm really interested to see how the "voxel" stuff pans out, because that seems like an extremely huge amount of data to stream to a lot of players in an area (especially around a popular rallying call point).  You better have a good connection when that golem off in the distance starts destroying buildings while you are fighting something that is destroying the ground under you.

The rallying call points seem extremely similar to Wish's quest system, where the devs would input broad things and different outcomes that can come with it.

It will be interesting to see what happens (and good to see a big budget MMO try something new) but there seem to be a lot of technology and game design issues that could easily turn this game to shit and unless they magically have solved them all it will leave a lot to be desired.

[Soln]

The comment about procedural generation at 54:35 is confusing to me.  What is the whole "pick up a shovel and tunnel your way" between zones to get at dynamic quests mean?  [55:00]  That can't be real.   Or the world resets periodically?  I haven't gotten to the end of the preso.

I like some of this, but... you know, it's SOE.

EDIT:  hey, how much of this is instanced?

EDIT: this rallying call reminds me of LotRO's skirmish system, which is why I wonder about instancing.

[Stormwaltz]

I really liked how the human woman looked

She reminded me of Disney's Belle. The basic look was legitimate next-door pretty, not exploitative supermodel sexy. And she was mostly dressed.

[Margalis]

Kudos to them for taking a big-budget stab at something relatively new, regardless of how it turns out.

[Typhon]

Agree.  I'd like to say, "some big balls there", but so many MMOs have crashed and burned anyone not trying something radically different is just throwing away cash.

Would love, love LOVE if the different races had rallying cries that conflicted and that was what generated RvR.

[Venkman]

Yes. Skip to: 26:27

Thanks! Site is down for me, though I doubt it's down in general and instead just COX being a bitch. Tracert timeouts at one of the local steps. Was working before though. Read the kotaku article and between that and what I can piece together from this thread it does seem like what a lot of you are saying: Minecraft/Landmark to build the world that'll go live in Next with algorithm-based rules that impact how mobs populate, how artifacts generate and therefore how players will play. Then broken down by branches between servers maybe?

Shit, even without each server being its own world, this is an extremely ambitious re-aggregation of old and new MMO concepts that other genres have ripped off and I can applaud the company that kicked MMOs into high gear for dragging it all back together. And an absolute QA nightmare. The Trenches writes itself for like two years 

• Optimisically: Minecraft self-generating and deformable world meets SWG procedurally generated POIs meets Spore player-generated library/sharing.
• Pessimistically: Dawn (insert high concept shit here) meets Atriarch (fully self-evolving and deformable shared environment) meets on-paper Horizons (dynamic mob population behavior) meets delivered-Spore.
  

I don't know if anyone said it yet, but given that the other big MMO highlights at E3 was Wildstar (since ESO is still a yawnfest), I can honestly see why TTH gave this one best of show. As fun as Wildstar is, most of it is expected.

No idea if it will work. Landmark itself isn't seemingly impossible. Plenty of precedent, both as an experience and as an established market. And shit, I'll blow weeks /played in that alone. If EQ next merely inherits all those creations and even passably weaves in 10% of the imagined algorithms, it could be awesome.

[Modern Angel]

I watched and read fully prepared, even looking forward to, pointing and laughing as SOE once again pulled a turd out of their butts. Instead, I'm sort of blown away.

Which absolutely, 100% is NOT to say that this doesn't have the likelihood of blowing up. But, wow, that's ambitious. And, maybe more importantly, it seems reasonably well thought out. I just... I'm not sure how to react. This is Sony doing this. They're not supposed to be the people doing this, I guess.

Even if it fails, that's a shot across the bow of every MMO studio. At least on a creative level, I'd be scrambling for a relook at my impending content if I were at a studio with something in development.

[taolurker]

Twitch TV is probably slammed, and I watched it there before but now their site is timing out.

Basically all the footage you need is in this youtube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE4jwGhoDQw

[Venkman]

This is Sony doing this. They're not supposed to be the people doing this, I guess.

Even if it fails, that's a shot across the bow of every MMO studio.

Lol that's a great way to put that. So maybe developmentally SOE isn't looked at by the competition as something to be worried about. I have no idea. But, these are a spread of small to indie to midcore to already-proven concepts and with an obviously big development budget. It's not just big budget retreading old shit. It's not just an indie studio trying something new. It's not even just a big budget plus big marketing trying something quasi interesting on paper but failing first contact with the players.

Doesn't mean it won't fail first contact with actual development of course. But I applaud them for going big.

And to be completely honest, it's kinda nice to be impressed by SOE again too 

[Margalis]

It's interesting how the tide turns. SOE has been largely irrelevant for a long time, with this one fell swoop they've at least sparked a lot of interest. Meanwhile Blizzard is just sort of fading away.

[Sky]

I thought the models were pretty decent. Maybe not my favorite, but I do like the stylized look of them. The woman looked much like the way I paint minis :) The lion I thought looked really awesome, but the super chunky armor was a bit unfortunate.

I wonder how much was instancing and how quickly destructable areas regenerate in non-instanced areas.

[Stormwaltz]

I'm trying to temper my enthusiasm with memories of how the last "shot across the bow," Guild Wars 2, turned out. (I played for a month, and now it's about as high on my radar as Vanguard.)

[Modern Angel]

I didn't mean shot across the bow as in "games Stormwaltz likes". I meant creatively, first, and commercially, second. Given the influence GW2 has had on EQ Next and how well it's doing commercially, I think it counts.

[Stormwaltz]

I didn't mean shot across the bow as in "games Stormwaltz likes".

I think you may be forgetting all the GW2 videos where the designers shook their fists at the camera and declared that their game would be different, by god, they'd drag MMGs kicking and screaming into a new era. :P

[Venkman]

I don't know how much of this they slapped together this year, but while i see parallels to GW2, I'd be curious if that was a source of inspiration or rather a parallel proof of a concept they were already chasing. The genre isn't light on action-y RPG-style MMOs with world events wrapped with public quests

I'm trying to temper my enthusiasm with memories of how the last "shot across the bow," Guild Wars 2, turned out. (I played for a month, and now it's about as high on my radar as Vanguard.)

Yea totally. I loved GW2 but feel no need to return. It was a great MMO with a video game timeframe for me.

But that's more about me the 40-something father of two corporate stooge than anything endemic to the MMO medium. If I was how old I was when I first stepped into UO, all bets are off on whether I'd still even be alive 

Reality being what it is, I'm curious if I'd spend more time in Landmore or Next proper...