Monday, August 5, 2013

Just a thought - EverQuest Next

Hello again, random browsers and all five of you rabid followers. Today's a new day for some talk about the MMO industry. I've been pretty giddy all of last week since Sony Online Entertainment revealed details on their upcoming sandbox MMORPG: EverQuest Next, which is set to be (pre-)released by the end of this year. First off, I was instantly taken in by the new visual style of the game, which had a much more cartoon look to it. This is excellent because in all honesty, I really can't stand the "realistic" style that almost every single western fantasy MMORPG goes with these days. With a more cartoon style, the game comes off with a more lively tone. It certainly worked for Wildstar by Carbine Studios, because along with that game, Everquest Next is the second western MMORPG I've ever been interested in play. And personally, I can't wait to play as a Kerran, a lion race that looks suspiciously like Chester Cheetah...



...Umm... yeah.

Oh, and the gameplay features sound pretty cool, too. The whole "world destruction based on voxels" thing is a bit iffy to me, however, because if the entire world can be destroyed, then what's going to keep players from leveling out the world as soon as the servers open up? Because if there's two things that a good handful of gamers love to do in an online game, it's grieving and destroying.

On the OTHER hand, however, while I was discussing EverQuest Next with a few random people, an anonymous user brought up a very interesting possibility with the game's world destruction: With the entire world decimated by the players, no longer will EverQuest Next be about exploring a vast open world, but instead the game will be about surviving in the ruins of a vast open world, which sounded pretty freaking awesome to me. But still, would SOE even allow such events to unfold in their game? I mean sure, it IS supposed to be a sandbox MMO, after all, but the developers still have a general vision in their mind for how the game world should play out, especially with all those AI features they're bringing along, which I'm not so sure would work well with messed up, player made terrain. But who knows? I don't.

As mentioned before, EverQuest Next is being pre-released by the end of the year with the upcoming Landmark creation tools, where players will be able to create their own towns, dungeons and more, just as long as they appropriately fit the environments setting, and most of everything that will get to stay in the final version will be by SOE's discretion, so sadly there will be no dick castles to service as monuments for the glorious nation of Dickstonia. One thing I'd like to mention is that there's some buzz here and there about the whole Landmark problem, where some people suggest the whole process is in place so that SOE doesn't have to waste time making the world of EverQuest Next themselves. "We're too lazy to make the world, so make it for us!" Personally, I think this is actually a grand idea. Judging by Landmark creation tool footage, it will be very similar to how creation works in Minecraft, where players can assemble their creations block by block. However, unlike Minecraft, players will be able to shape and curve out their blocks into any shape. So yes, you'll be able to make dick statues that ACTUALLY look like dicks!

Ok... So dick jokes aside, though, with the players being able to create highly detailed environments, along with the possibly of garnering the more creative bunch of the Minecraft community, mixed in with veteran EverQuest players to give players guidance on how the world of EverQuest should look, I'm certain that the world of EverQuest Next will be shaped into something that will resonate with worlds of old EverQuest 1 & 2. Plus, I'm fairly sure that SOE has their plenty of their own environments that will appear in the final game, so not everything will have to be created by the players.

Overall, EverQuest Next is looking might spiffy. I didn't feel like talking about the combat in this blog post, but it looks like it will be similar to combat in Guild Wars 2 or Wildstar. There wasn't a lot of footage of the combat for me to make a decent analysis, but I liked what I say so far.

For more info on EverQuest Next, you can check out some posts over at Cinderboy's blog: http://www.mmoculture.com/tag/everquest-next/



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