EverQuest Next Looks Pretty Damn Impressive

@meauntienora: he'll get all hunked off and stab a bitch, fo sho

if they make an MMO that plays like a MOBA, i'd give it a shot.

dude...wtf.

WoW 2 looks pretty neat!!

oh wait..this is an EverQuest game?? wth.....

why does everyone have to fucking try and copy WoW..now EQ:N's artstyle looks like hi-res Azeroth? Can't tell much about the gameplay from that..is it your typical cooldowns/skills mechanic or is it more action oriented like AoC or something?

This really killed my interest in it. I'm not saying the artstyle is bad.....it looks pretty cool. But it's not fitting for an EverQuest game....why must everything go the WoW route?

Uh, that's not "more" destruction, that's seen at the end of the video up top. Do people really skip the videos to comment on this stuff?

SOE has never been anywhere near a Triple-A developer, so I imagine this'll have a dedicated following and them just drop off. The video presentation just highlights their lack of showmanship. That logo? So awful. I don't care if it's tentative, it's terrrriiiibbbbllleee.

Yay Videogames !! and we've advanced whats possible in games once again....well done game developers !

this looks awesome

Fully destructible means ground too!

I could make tunnels through the map in Red Faction, that was fully destructible (mostly).

I think Everquest Next and Landmark (the Minecraft player-creation side of this game) look promising so far. The environments are voxel-based which allows for the destructibility, but GPUs are not built to render voxels so they are either software rendering them or using something like a marching cubes algorithm to covert to polygons (I'm guessing the later). Either way there is a higher CPU cost for the rendering then other MMOs.

The Polygon article talks about some cool emergent AI stuff that can trigger procedural quests. It does feel like keeping everyone in sync wilh all the destructible terrain, AI and whatnot is going to be a pretty complicated networking challenge. It is good to see someone shooting for the moon instead of trying to figure out the couple of features they can add to the WoW formula.

The combat also looks shape and directional based, which is similar to what Wildstar is doing. From what I've seen I don't know if this will actually be an interesting game and not just a cool tech demo but with Blizzard rebooting Titan it feels like the gate is wide open for someone to make a big play in the MMO space and see if someone other than the MMO faithful will respond to something different.

Do people really make broad statements about a company's "tier" of development without actually playing said company's games?

Have you played DC Universe Online? PlanetSide 2?

If those games don't qualify SOE into Triple-AAA Developer status then I would like to brought up to date with what is Triple-A these days...

this looked boring as F. what is up with that headline?

looks terrible.

Far too many particles hiding the fact that nothing interesting is actually happening.

Nothing in the demo indicates Massively Multiplayer.

But they do show your typical cloth mage channeling spells that appear less effective than the safer melee characters AoE. So good to see SOE is holding the line on their shitty gameplay designs.

Great now if it just doesn't have tab targetting. Has a focus on PvP, death penalties in pvp (more than just having to wait a little bit) territory control, World PvP (pretty much everywhere) then I'll definitely be interested! But I doubt it will!

not really sure how i feel about this, but if it works with a gamepad ill consider it.

@cirdain:

VOXELS???

The fuck?!?

I guess that explains why the graphics look uncannily... different in some hard to pin down way-- but seriously, voxels???

I... I might actually be interested in this.

MMO players are a hard lot to please. General comments around the internet seems to be like this.

"Ugh, looks like another WoW clone."

"OMG how can you betray the holy trinity! It's MMO law!"

"Great, a button mashy action MMO instead of one that requires brains and tactics."

Looks interesting... makes me want to try a MMO for the first time.

That was interesting. I'm still not into MMO's but that game seems to be shaping into something interesting.

Props to them for trying something different at least. Destructible world MMO could be very cool if they pull it off well.

@angrighandi: Yeah, I've never seen voxel tech that advanced. Smoothing, irregular angles angles different size voxel brushes! It's nearly as crazy as thinking about how Fez was made on a technical level. It also uses the the same lighting techniques as Planetside 2.

If you had told me that the Everquest Next announcement would have involved the word "voxel" I would not believe you - It seems like SOE is doing "X but more MINECRAFTY" and for some reason my gag reflex didn't trigger.

I guess this is what a next-gen MMO looks like. Sign me up.

Hey guys, epic battles.

you wouldnt punch shit

I think he meant "new" compared to the old Everquest art style.

I watched a Twitch stream last weekend where Carmack was talking about a lot of things, one thing he mentioned was how cool voxels were, but how they were just too processor intensive at the time.

Anyway... this is Forgelight 2, which is the Planetside 2 engine, and Planetside 2 cranked up looks amazing.

I watched the reveal or whatever from SOE Live, and gritted my teeth more than a few times when the director said things like 'the players will have direct input into how the game is developed'. If Star Wars Galaxy taught us anything, it's that the players don't know shit about how to make a popular MMO.

All of that just makes me shrug. Not one thing I saw in that video made me exited about the future of gaming. I guess I just don't see the appeal of MMOs like that when RPGs like Deep Down are being conceived.

it was more like watching a WoW spinoff or something honestly. the overly big Kerran (cat dude..I think that's right) and art style screams World of WarCraft..not EverQuest.

I much prefer EQ's more realistic approach as opposed to this WoW-ish cartoon crap (even if a lot of the player models were ugly)

Hey. Heeeeey. Hey, guys. Guild Wars 2 is a pretty great video game.

Steady that hype folks, it will and has killed otherwise healthy MMO dead with its poison.

SoE's attempt at a new MMO with EQN is probably the LEAST accurate target of this comment short of EvE.

I don't think Everquest is defined by an art style, though the one displayed here definitely doesn't match what I recognize. Everquest is defined by exploration. That's hard to do nowadays (and was when EQ2 came out too, to a degree) but EQ was always at its best when you were wandering around with hardly any clue of what you were doing, using every trick at your disposal to try and solo past this next encounter which was clearly meant for at least three people. But hey, let's pour one out for past, the old days are never coming back.

I'd suggest watching the lore panel they had at SOE Live. You'll see there's a ton of the nostalgic EQ stuff layered in there, although some of it is slightly altered from previous games.

@veektarius: Man...I love those old midi's. Kelethin is clearly the best, though I have a soft spot for the weird, polka-like music from Rivervale.

@norusdog: If you watch the full-length videos from SOE Live (or at the very least, read the wiki page on the site here), you would see that there's not very much that's WoW-like about EQN.

Yep. The world is hundreds of feet deep below the surface. So you can dig below and discover hidden caverns and whatnot that are procedurally generated.

Old times in MMOs might never come back indeed, but games like this are an actual step forward new and firm instead of wild bemoaning of "holy trinity" and "tab targetting" that obscures the future.

Nothing about that looks damn impressive, or even impressive, and this is coming from a huge EQ nerd.

ooooooooooooookay. Did the wrong video get posted?

Based on what I heard, it seems like something I would like to play.

...Then I would punch you back, Patrick

Meh

Unless that destruction is permanent and all players can see it, I don't find it the least bit interesting.

Free to play. Looks amazing. I'm in.

@christaran: That would be stupid if it were to be permanent. The landscape would be flattened in about 5 minutes after launch...

@christaran: Everyone can see the destruction and it will be required to reach some areas, however, ove time the world will 'heal' so that the game isn't one giant crater after 1 week of launch.

Now that's what I'd be interested in - procedurally generated dungeons would be a step in the right direction for EQ - preferably areas bigger than dungeons, too.

I had the good fortune to make my first char in EQ a Wood Elf, so I got Kelethin right off the bat. I sat around, lost for a minute, then ran around lost for many minutes, then finally got to my class trainer, typed "h-a-" which turned on autoattack and I died immediately. I think I was too young to have a sense of humor about it at the time.

I´ll believe it when I play it. I will leave here my expert opinion: I think we are still about 10 years away from the mmo experience all of us who enjoy this kind of game are looking for, but we are getting closer!

Im no expert.

@dacnomaniac: @mysteriousfawx: I get the world would be a crater part, but what I would find cool is if not only was the world destructible but also constructable. That way you can have that permanence and allow for the world to be healed and destroyed by the players.

That would be really cool.

I run Guild Wars 2 maxed out and it is incredibly scalable since it runs on my cousins dual core HP with no issues at medium soooo not really sure what you mean.

Players will build the world in some aspect. You can design landmarks, monuments, houses, castles etc. If they gain enough attention they may be added into the world as a cross server structure by the devs (something everyone playing in every 'world' will see), otherwise they can be used by yourself or other players to decorate your own home/land.

Players can also use parts of others designs in their own and sell designs for real money. If someone uses your design in their own work and goes on to make money from it, you get royalty based on the % of work he included that was your own. This is also real money, like in Second Life. Skilled builders and people with creative flair will be able to get paid to play this game.

It looks interesting, but not enough to get me to play an MMO.

When the first Red Faction came out, I thought destructible environments were going to be the hot new thing. It's crazy that more than 10 years later it's still a unique feature, one that has me interested in an MMO no less.

I like MMOs, but I'm super tired of fantasy, I was hoping for that Warhammer 40k MMO, but that got canceled and now Wildstar is the only one that looks semi appealing.

Give me some good sci-fi action and not magic please anyone. I know that EVE and Planetside exist, EVE is a space ship simulator and Planetside is more of a MMO PvP arena, give me sci-fi in the likes of Everquest, WoW, Warhammer.

The Star Trek and Star Wars ones were just plain bad.