Meeting Everquest Next and its creators

At Gamescom 2013, we had the pleasure to witness a BCD (behind closed doors) presentation of Everquest Next, unveiled for the first time during SOE Live last month in Las Vegas. Hosting the presentation were none other than Dave Georgeson, Director of Development for the Everquest franchise and the very man who pulled the curtain on Everquest Next at SOE Live, and Terry Michaels, Senior Producer for the game.

If you have followed the reveal @ SOE Live, you must surely remember the sheer enthusiasm of the team on stage. One might think that it was particularly derived from the special occasion, the venue, etc.; but in truth, we can testify that they kept the same amount of energy and excitement during the presentation we participated in. While most developers are passionate about their games, few show it with this level of genuine eagerness, and this can only be beneficial for the game itself.

Most of the presentation was a recap on what was already talked about, but we did learn a few tidbits about Everquest Next Landmark, the companion game that will debut this year; more on that later. For those few Everquest fans who have been hiding under the rocks or passing the summer on Mars, it’s worthy to remind that lore has been effectively rebooted: while a few locations may be familiar, for all intents and purposes this is a parallel world and one that has taken a path of its own; this means that specific relationships and events may significantly differ from what you may remember from the storylines of either Everquest or Everquest II.

There are four main pillars, described by Georgeson as Holy Grails, in Everquest Next. The first one is multiclassing (which I managed to guess from my pre-show speculation article): while all characters will start with the one class of their choosing(each one has four abilities and a couple of class weapons, which have abilities of their own as well), the game will offer many chances to acquire new classes  while playing - 40 have been already announced by Sony Online Entertainment, and what’s even more interesting is that users can then mix&match them how they see fit in order to create the class they really want to play.

Personally I’m very excited about this, as more often than not I don’t feel like any of the predefined classes in games really fit my playstyle; it’s also a smart way to increase longevity since some players will try to collect all classes and mix them in every possible combination to find the “most powerful” one. Of course, balancing all these classes and combinations will be tough, but extremely important.

The second grail will be familiar to Battlefield fans - in fact, it’s called destructibility. The EQNext world is made of tiny blocks technically called voxels, thanks to a specific toolset called Voxel Farm engine. What this means in practice is that basically everything is susceptible to be destroyed - for examples, they showed us the Wizard class collapsing a bridge with the skill “Upheaval” and the Warrior destroying quite a bit of a ruins’ wall with his “Whirlwind”; of course, this opens up significant new possibilities for both developers and players, and while destructibility is fairly common nowadays in single and multiplayer games, nothing like this scale promised by SOE has ever been done in a MMO.

There’s more, though, because the engine also allows for “constructibility” - an example has been that, again, a Wizard can erect a “Crystal wall” to temporarily block off enemies, which will need to destroy the newly built obstacle in order to get to the Wizard.  Naturally, the destruction won’t be permanent, otherwise the world would be completely annihilated in a matter of days - instead, it heals over time, and Georgeson explained that the more people in the area, the faster the world heals, repairing the wreck caused by players and NPCs alike. But perhaps one of the more interesting ramifications is that players could actually venture in a newly created “hole” in the ground, since SOE isn’t just building a surface world - there will be even lost cities to discover in the depths of Norrath, which are procedurally generated and present players with unique “dynamic questing” opportunities.

 

The permanent change will be guaranteed, according to SOE, by the third pillar or Holy Grail - Emergent AI, brought by the Storybricks tool. In other words, AI in Everquest Next will be directly impacted by players actions and dynamically react to them; for example, repeatedly defeating a certain group of orcs in a certain zone will cause them to move in order to find a more suitable place to live. NPC migration has long been one of the promises in the genre; if SOE can nail it, it can be a pretty big thing, since I’m sure I’m not the only one completely annoyed to find mobs in the same spot year after year, regardless of how many times I killed them.

The fourth and last pillar is called “Rallying Calls“. In short, it’s a public quest lasting a lot longer than what players are used to in games like Guild Wars 2 or RIFT, with Georgeson estimating the average Rallying Call to be around 2-3 months long. Everyone in a server will have the public quest in their log, but apparently each server will unlock the various steps in different ways; the main goal with this system seems to be that of generating stories that will be unique to those who have participated in a specific Rallying Call, so when a new player enters the game (or an old player comes back), there will be all sorts of tales awaiting them. It’s bold in that it inherently means that some content won’t be experienced by all players, which seems to be a taboo in most MMORPGs nowadays, but I fully agree that it’s much more engaging this way - if content just sits there waiting for the player, then after a while it becomes just grind.

 

Everquest Next is still under development and chances are we won’t be able to play it before the end of 2014. That said, SOE surprised everyone by announcing Everquest Next Landmark, which is essentially a cross between EQNext itself and Minecraft in that players will be given the same tools used by developers in order to build and create whatever they want (unless it’s inappropriate). Landmark will have countless worlds and each one of them is procedurally generated, as it was confirmed at Gamescom; they also assured us that players will be able to move freely between the different worlds (by the way, they confirmed mounts for in-world travelling).

Exploration will be a major factor here, since building obviously requires gathering and different resources will be available in different environments; these resources will then be exchanged at specific player market stalls, which we are told will be placed at the starting location.

Landmark is also supposed to be social oriented: some already confirmed features include VOIP, Guilds, Friends list (shared across all SOE games), leaderboards and something they called “Co-op buildouts“, which are meant to be a less permanent way than guilds for players to band together, complete a task and then split up again. When questioned about player housing, they dodged by saying that players will have to earn their coveted place to build a Guild Hall; however, they mentioned that there is more to player housing related to Everquest Next that simply cannot be revealed at this time, so my hope is that player housing will be an important feature of Everquest Next, not only Landmark, and hopefully it will happen in the persistent world instead of instanced areas.

Unsurprisingly, SOEMote (the technology that allows your character to mimic the same expressions you are having in the real world, provided that you have a webcam active) will be in as well, and so is the ability to record footage and upload it directly on YouTube; moreover, in Landmark it’ll be possible to create a time-lapse video just by pressing a button. This feature was shown to us in the presentation, and it is certainly helpful in that it concentrates hours of work in just a few seconds or minutes - it was very impressive to see just how much two players were able to change the landscape in just a little over an hour.

I’m looking forward to witness the recreation of Westeros and other popular fictional worlds, especially since the possibilities go a lot beyond what we’ve seen to date in a block-building type of game - players will have a smoothing tool at their disposal, meaning that surfaces can actually be smooth and look realistic enough, instead of blocky.

If you’re not a fan of block-building games, you might be asking yourself why would you want to play Landmark. Well, there are certainly a few good reasons: for instance, your character will carry over to Everquest Next, and as all characters in Landmark start with the Adventurer class, those who have played Landmark will be able to multi-class with the Adventurer from the beginning in Everquest Next. That’s not all, however, as Landmark ties heavily into the Player Studio program that Sony Online Entertainment is pushing in all of its games - blueprints of player creations can be sold for real money, so the most creative users will be rewarded in a very tangible way.

Also, there will be contests run by SOE with the winners able to see their buildings actually brought into Everquest Next, standing side by side with those created by the developers. Landmark is expected to launch later this year and you can already sign up for Everquest Next’s beta right here (if you are in North America) or here (if you are in Europe).

I’ll leave you with a couple more tidbits and my personal impressions: dyeing has been already added to the game and SOE is looking into making roleplaying more important in the game mechanics. For example, a player might want to try and become a Paladin, but he/she will need to actually behave in a good way in order to remain a Paladin.

As for my take, obviously we’re looking at a very ambitious MMORPG in the making. Everything that has been talked of until now points in the direction of a different kind of MMORPG, and I can’t be happier that even bigger studios like SOE are choosing this route over the tried-and-true style. That said, there is personally one thing missing - player-to-player interaction. Specifically, everything seems to indicate that while PvP will be in the game (it’s been briefly mentioned already), it is going to be quite separate from the main game and world, perhaps similarly to Guild Wars 2.

However, earlier comments by John Smedley (SOE’s President) about EVE Online as an example of sandbox MMO and emergent gameplay done right made me otherwise hopeful; in truth, even though the destructibility, emergent AI and dynamic questing all contribute towards a less static world, all of them cannot quite match the sheer unpredictability of a free-for-all environment where players can freely decide to be friends or foes. If they could provide a separate FFA PvP server ruleset, though, then chances are I might just lose myself in such a world.