EQ 'Next'

[Bzalthek]

Personally, once I got over the MMO newness (EQ and WoW) and that was several years, a typical MMO itched the video game need but really didn't go much beyond that.  Minecraft had me hooked for years with the ability to show off.  Even with a ghost town server, there's always the chance someone can pop in and say "You're fucking broken"  (Negative reinforcement is STILL reinforcement god dammit!).

GW2 is fun, but even after 2 80's and lots of achievements, I don't feel like I have fuck all to do with the world.  I really enjoy most of the game play (fuck orr) but there's not a lot of drive to explore after you cleared all the zones.

This has some promise, and I'm already feeling a bit of hype (some heroin should fix that) because I can dig motherfucker.  I can dig.

[Shatter]

I don't think that EQNext when it launches is the big deal here, although it has the potential to offer a better and more social gaming experience then current MMO's under a different mold.  What this title offers is the future game, the fact that its destructible / constructable means future content has almost limitless potential PvE and PvP wise.  It will be interesting to see where all this goes down the road from launch

[Venkman]

Personally, I think Landmark is the bigger news first. It's coming in a I-can-care-about-it timeframe and has enough open ended questions about its relevance to Next to keep it potentially hype-worthy for awhile. Within MMOs, I think I still have spent more time in EQ than any other. But within all games, Minecraft tops that for sure. I'd pay full AAA title for a better Minecraft, though so far all I know about Landmark is "high resolution Minecraft without the mechanisms".

Jury is out. Like not even at that point in a lawsuit way out. But I'm interested and excited for what I've convinced myself this might be after an hour or so presentation.

[Falconeer]

I think it's safe to say that there's a huge untapped potential for something REALLY like Minecraft in a shared big universe... (...) I think, as I just said, that there is obviously room for something that groundbreaking, that shaking and shocking as Minecraft recently, and EVE back in the days, have been. (...)

Probably not this time around, and almost certainly not SOE and Smed, but I have a hard time thinking five years from now we won't have bigger, more ambitious Minecrafts. Newer, less broken UO/SWG. Or less spread-sheety, less spacey EVEs.

I'm really too lazy to use the search function, but I'll see if Evernote will let me tag this one for laughs.  This discussion has been had before. It's always "next time!" or "Well they ALMOST had it!  They just needed more time/ focus/ budget/ carrots/ unobtanium"

I really feel bad for you sandbox believers sometimes.

Pulling this one up just in case you didn't tag it on your Evernote, Merusk. Looks like we might have to wait way less than five years to see if you can have your laughs.

[Rendakor]

Just a heads up, I got a phising email about the beta for this already. Looks legit but all the links lead to some e-sonyonline website.

Scratch that, I guess it is legit. Got my user name wrong and man do those links look shady.

[Nija]

The voxel and building/destroying shit could be really interesting.

Imagine matches like GW2 world vs world, where it resets after a certain time.

Okay, now you can build and add on to your fortifications and completely demolish the other guys stuff.

Who knows what they are actually going to do, but the building/destroying is going to be a big part of some of the game I'd imagine.

I think Smed mentioned something about procedural minecraft-like areas where you can dig down to different levels of lore and it's all randomly generated stuff that just resets every so often.

So you can do all the normal content then just grab some people, go into the cat litter box, and start diggin' around for turds.

Sounds better than most other things that are coming up anyways. Good luck to 'em.

[Mrbloodworth]

What is the whole "pick up a shovel and tunnel your way" between zones to get at dynamic quests mean?

Allow me to attempt to translate, I think he is using internal terms here. You can dig tunnels and such in the terrain ALA Minecraft. What he means by dynamic quest opportunities is simply that there are areas that the world generates that can likely have quests attached to them ( or they did when bob found them, but not you, this time ). IE: you are tunneling along, minding your own business, but break a wall into an area containing a sleeping mini-boss, or you discover a Dwarf town underground. They are not static spawns, as they were Dynamically placed during generation, the NPC's can possibly have a quest, or the fact you found Ragnar king of the candy people IS a quest ( mini-boss fight or something ). They are opportunities, because you can just walk a way, and areas you may uncover have the possibility of A quest as well. IE: Highly likely there are no quest hubs in this byond tutorial, its all dynamic quest opportunities. If this sounds highly unpredictable, that's the point.

That's what I got out of the description anyway.

EDIT:  hey, how much of this is instanced?

I'm going to take a guess and say, none. Based on what PS2 has shown. There are no instances in PS2, and Contents larger than most MMO landmasses ( before loading screen, or any "Tunneling" systems ) that can support more than many shards in a typical MMO. To boot, this is not appear to be a synchronous system like Plantside, giving even more elbow room.

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

More akin to Public quests that take three months and are server wide events, but in this case, not an event, but rather a natural function of the changing world. rallying call can progress differently on every server, Creating divergent experiences. Entire towns could be missing from different servers, ETC..

As for "Resetting", I take what he said as a "Reverse erosion", he said Constructable tied with destructible. So, while you may instantly knock down that wall, the games systems can rebuild them over time, gradually*, likely at a pace you would not notice. Except in cases where they hide it in the guise of "earthquakes".

*As opposed to the normal technique with static meshes of a mesh swap to show damage or decay. This system would be more akin to Morph targets, data is still there, and you can transition seamlessly from one target to another, at any speed.

[Sky]

(Negative reinforcement is STILL reinforcement god dammit!).

dammit

[Venkman]

More akin to Public quests that take three months and are server wide events, but in this case, not an event, but rather a natural function of the changing world. rallying call can progress differently on every server, Creating divergent experiences. Entire towns could be missing from different servers, ETC..

Or Firefall on a REALLY long timer

This is where I see the QA nightmare. They either nail the algorithm with aggressive QA beforehand, I feel like they'll need more QA and dev people post launch than they did to build the thing, contingent on the number of shards and whether the deformations are instantiated or public space.

My guess is that a lot of it will be instanced with a WoW-style phasing approach. Besides QA, that pre-resolves thousands of hours of customer service time. And really, it's not like the business really requires the first person to hit an area fundamentally alters that area forever more until the next person shows up for thousands of people.

The Landmark trappings are great to kick things off, but I don't feel like that's a requirement in shared space MMO. I'd go further and say that isn't really what players would want either. Too many nightmare scenarios. Heck, full PK was devolved out of the genre in part because one person could screw up the time spent by hundreds. World deformation, even within narrow conditions, amps that up quite a degree.

[Modern Angel]

they'd drag MMGs kicking and screaming into a new era. :P

Yeah, but they sort of did, I think. Look at what EQN is doing here. Eight abilities. Four based on weapon. Jumping puzzles. Big explorable world. Eyes on the screen rather than the UI philosophy. Scaling PQs. Big temporary events. I think it's all there: GW2 as the template for an even bigger company to iterate on. Obviously there are lots of other influences, but I don't think you can dismiss the obvious GW2 influence in this already.

I'm also of the mindset that GW2 proves the final nail in the coffin of the sub model. By all accounts, they're making fucktons of money by just being buy a box competent. That's the new model.

[Mrbloodworth]

Watching the Youtube versions of the videos. PhysX is all up in this, hardware type.

[Venkman]

they'd drag MMGs kicking and screaming into a new era. :P

Yeah, but they sort of did, I think. Look at what EQN is doing here. Eight abilities. Four based on weapon. Jumping puzzles. Big explorable world. Eyes on the screen rather than the UI philosophy. Scaling PQs. Big temporary events. I think it's all there: GW2 as the template for an even bigger company to iterate on. Obviously there are lots of other influences, but I don't think you can dismiss the obvious GW2 influence in this already.

I'm also of the mindset that GW2 proves the final nail in the coffin of the sub model. By all accounts, they're making fucktons of money by just being buy a box competent. That's the new model.

I'm with you on all that except the subs. That model died with social network "games". It just took the AAA-level publishers awhile to catch up.

My own personal "I'm old" moment came when I started to miss the idea of a AAA purchase plus subs. I personally would rather have a publisher have THAT kind of level of confidence in their game and business than this current model of "eh, let's spend a little, focus all our shit on how soon we can monetize and if it all falls apart in the first month, build something new". Too iterative, hard to feel confident in the longevity of a game. Thought as I mentioned above, hard to even BE long in a game at this age and lifestyle, so wtf do i know?

[Kitsune]

Some of my enthusiasm is feeling dampened by that whole eight slots thing.  Meaty, interesting classes need more than eight skills, as GW2 taught me.  They don't need the thirty+ skills that fill your screen with skillbars, but it gets repetitive fast if you only have actiony weapon skills 1-4 and non-weapon misc skills 1-4.  If they go the Tera route and have basic weapon attack chain skills on the right and left mouse buttons and 1-8 are for more situational skills, that could be doable, but I'm still worried.

[Abalieno]

Just popping in to say to give a look at the people for once instead of the vaporware feature set.

EQ Next Lead Designer is the same guy who designed Vanguard combat system and classes. While EQ Next Creative Director was the President of Sigil and exec producer, again on Vanguard. These are the guys who have this new thing firmly in their hands.

Oh, and there's Moogard too, coming straight from that other amazing success that was Kingdoms of Amalur.

Only hiring Brad McQuaid himself would have made this "newer" than how it is already.

[Margalis]

EQ Next Lead Designer is the same guy who designed Vanguard combat system and classes. While EQ Next Creative Director was the President of Sigil and exec producer, again on Vanguard. These are the guys who have this new thing firmly in their hands.

I get what you're trying to do here but I'm not sure it works. Were the combat and classes in Vanguard bad? I don't know - like 5 people do.

Oh, and there's Moogard too, coming straight from that other amazing success that was Kingdoms of Amalur.

If you mean Reckoning then Reckoning was decent. If you mean the MMO (I assume that's what you mean) I don't think you can pin anything from that on him. The MMO failed for management reasons, who knows what the game was like.

I do think it's fair to say that it's SOE so something will probably go wrong.

[Abalieno]

If you mean Reckoning then Reckoning was decent. If you mean the MMO (I assume that's what you mean) I don't think you can pin anything from that on him. The MMO failed for management reasons, who knows what the game was like.

Both. He was above even Lead Designer at 38 Studios. He worked on everything, from lore to actual game design. He hired people, did everything.

Smart enough to not notice anything wrong till the very end. He's at least responsible of having little more than a tech demo ("we are THIS close to being done! here's a flyby demo to demonstrate it. We even have a chat working"). While it failed because of management it was still another pie in the sky that wouldn't have been closed to be ready even a year later. It's was just meant to burn money at insane speed. If you're leading that kind of thing you ought to be aware you're going full speed against a wall. Can't blame the wall for being too close.

(and Reckoning was a project they bought. and it's what actually started the trainwreck since they expected to make so much more money from it than they did)

[Rendakor]

Some of my enthusiasm is feeling dampened by that whole eight slots thing.  Meaty, interesting classes need more than eight skills, as GW2 taught me.  They don't need the thirty+ skills that fill your screen with skillbars, but it gets repetitive fast if you only have actiony weapon skills 1-4 and non-weapon misc skills 1-4.  If they go the Tera route and have basic weapon attack chain skills on the right and left mouse buttons and 1-8 are for more situational skills, that could be doable, but I'm still worried.

This. GW2 bored me because you unlock your few attacks so early then its 75 levels with the same 4 attacks.

[koro]

So how do you discover new classes in the world? Read a tome?

McPherson: In any number of ways. It could be that you need to go and help a hermit, who happens to be a high level wizard. He has issues, you need to help him, and he may have a storyline we have created for him, but the emergent AI in the surrounding area influences the majority of that, so it’s never the same content you have to go through.

Butler: There could be a class that’s unlocked by unlocking a combination of classes.

McPherson: Right, the assassin trainer won’t give you the class until you’re a really high level rogue and you’ve done a whole bunch of things. And the paladin for example, [Dave Georgeson, Director of Development] mentioned a life of consequence—if you haven’t been making the good choices and being an upright and justice influenced person, you can’t be a paladin. They won’t let you, because the game knows what you’re doing. So you have to live—in some of these classes, we restrict it to how you’ve been acting in the game.

http://spark.tentonhammer.com/everquest-next-interview-no-grinding-no-leveling-and-maybe-frogloks

[Bzalthek]

From what people reporting from interviews there are no levels, just class upgrades.  You don't get to be all classes, just mix and match abilities from found classes.  Apparently you can switch them out when you are not in combat, but it is quite possible to make bad decisions which will get your ass handed to you.  A dev has mentioned that the mob AI is a bitch, and what we saw in the tech demo was 0 mob AI.

Again, this is all secondhand from drunk people (and Tad10 who was tapped for eqnjunkies by Draegen)  Also, he's drunk.

[Abelian75]

OK, this is probably going to be the only time I ever actually speak favorably about DCUO, but all this talk about GW2 being the influence here is kind of forcing me to defend our work on DCUO a bit.  The 8 abilities thing is from DCUO.  The "parkour" stuff is from DCUO.  The action combat is from DCUO.  This game very strongly resembles a direct evolution of DCUO, mixed with Minecraft and more public-questy stuff from other games, in an attempt to address the part of DCUO that was terrible, which was the actual MMO aspect of it.  Well, that and the fact that the client was generally pretty shitty.  God, the fucking credits screen was blank, for god's sake.  But!  Aside from all that shit, there was some actual technically cool, fairly cutting edge stuff in that game, and a lot of that seems to be carrying over here.  It's just not fair to say this is coming from GW2.  Our player movement in DCUO was waaay more fun than GW2.  It may have broken the actual GAME part of the game, sure (and may well do so again, here), but it WAS technically cool.

[Surlyboi]

So how do you discover new classes in the world? Read a tome?

McPherson: In any number of ways. It could be that you need to go and help a hermit, who happens to be a high level wizard. He has issues, you need to help him, and he may have a storyline we have created for him, but the emergent AI in the surrounding area influences the majority of that, so it’s never the same content you have to go through.

Butler: There could be a class that’s unlocked by unlocking a combination of classes.

McPherson: Right, the assassin trainer won’t give you the class until you’re a really high level rogue and you’ve done a whole bunch of things. And the paladin for example, [Dave Georgeson, Director of Development] mentioned a life of consequence—if you haven’t been making the good choices and being an upright and justice influenced person, you can’t be a paladin. They won’t let you, because the game knows what you’re doing. So you have to live—in some of these classes, we restrict it to how you’ve been acting in the game.

http://spark.tentonhammer.com/everquest-next-interview-no-grinding-no-leveling-and-maybe-frogloks

Shades of SWG's jedi grind.

[Stormwaltz]

Yeah, but they sort of did, I think.

I get why you say that, but when I look at GW2, I see iteration rather than the revolution they were constantly yelling about. It's just more-polished features from many other games - combat from DDO and Fallen Earth, dodging from STO and Champions, public quests and events from Warhammer and Rift. They went where everyone else was already going, but were louder about it.

[Mrbloodworth]

[Furiously]

All I saw was a lion that looked like Logan Thackeray..

[koro]

So how do you discover new classes in the world? Read a tome?

McPherson: In any number of ways. It could be that you need to go and help a hermit, who happens to be a high level wizard. He has issues, you need to help him, and he may have a storyline we have created for him, but the emergent AI in the surrounding area influences the majority of that, so it’s never the same content you have to go through.

Butler: There could be a class that’s unlocked by unlocking a combination of classes.

McPherson: Right, the assassin trainer won’t give you the class until you’re a really high level rogue and you’ve done a whole bunch of things. And the paladin for example, [Dave Georgeson, Director of Development] mentioned a life of consequence—if you haven’t been making the good choices and being an upright and justice influenced person, you can’t be a paladin. They won’t let you, because the game knows what you’re doing. So you have to live—in some of these classes, we restrict it to how you’ve been acting in the game.

http://spark.tentonhammer.com/everquest-next-interview-no-grinding-no-leveling-and-maybe-frogloks

Shades of SWG's jedi grind.

I personally don't foresee such a system lasting even a year in the wild, if it even goes live in the first place.

I imagine MMO players have pretty low tolerance for this particular brand of permanent consequence, especially if it's foisted on them potentially dozens of hours into their characters' careers.

[schild]

Fact: Anyone who is excited about this is wrong.

Fact: If anyone goes fanboy on this, I may start banning people purely on principle. Think before you talk.

[Margalis]

I personally don't foresee such a system lasting even a year in the wild, if it even goes live in the first place.

I imagine MMO players have pretty low tolerance for this particular brand of permanent consequence, especially if it's foisted on them potentially dozens of hours into their characters' careers.

It will either be changed within a month or you'll be able to quickly grind for honor to unlock Paladin. There's zero chance of this lasting long term the way the describe it.

[Soln]

I'm still confused how in an MMO anyone is going to "tunnel" anywhere's.  I'm not talking about the editor game, but the actual MMO.  What's going to stop people tunneling out whole mountains or etching last night's lotto numbers on the landscape?  I don't get how there will be anything fully procedural in this when there's 500+ people probably per shard.  I didn't finish the whole preso, so maybe this was covered? 

[Kageru]

In early alpha anything is possible.

[Kitsune]

Everything that's been shown is hinting at great potential... but then so does pretty much every PR release for every game ever that has a competent advertising team.  So far they've been vague enough to make people think of grand possibilities, but the likelihood of those possibilities coming to fruition is slim at best.  Like EQ's planes, back when it was in beta they were giving interviews and mentioning the elemental planes and how awesome characters could get to them and find these amazing places.  They basically made it sound like Planescape.  What got delivered was not Planescape.  The planes were just dungeons.

So now they're all 'Oh we have this world with lots of layers and you can dig and explore and everything.'  But it's still vague and entirely unfinished.  And one has to wonder, once the hype slows down, if all of these layers are being hand-designed or if they're just churning out miles and miles of random procedural content.  If this 'emergent AI' is handling monster placement as well as a human GM or just randomly poops out orcs in random places on maps.  They of course say that it's smart, but is it really?  Remember, the AI in Sim City was really swell too, if one was listening to EA's stories.  There's certainly a place for AI and procedural content in games, but the end result can feel random and soulless compared to hand-placed content if it's not done well.

[Simond]

A line from here:

Crafting was compared to SWG, but better

[Shatter]

A line from here:

Crafting was compared to SWG, but better

That would be hard for me, I loved crafting in SWG, half or more of my game time was as a crafter and farmer and that was a stand alone game in itself. 

[palmer_eldritch]

Beta applications are open:

https://www.everquestnext.com/beta-registration

[Numtini]

Plunging me into the hell that is the SOE account system which seems to require me to reset my password each and every time I ever log into a game and never use the same password twice.

And yes that is where I was born ffs.

Locked out for 24 hours.

[Falconeer]

This is probably two years away or more though, so speculating on certain features (not the building/Landmark part, which is coming out in a few months) is pure wishful thinking. I'd bet we will be nearing Open Beta by August 2015.