EQ Next: #1 Next gen MMO
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Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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No, the new owners appointed Jens Andersen and it was a great choice as he made the only game that was actually making money in that company (DCUO). Part of it was luck because when the PS4 launched there were few AAA F2P titles and part it was because DCUO was developed in Austin away from Smed
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Itlan
Blackwing Lair Raider
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Tauro
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Was there anyone at SOE with any real plan at all regarding EQ3/Next? From Mughals description it sounds like total chaos. Smed seems to be completely incompetent at doing his job, no wonder Heros Song was cancelled. Please Smed, dont try to "manage" another gaming related company, ever.
I'm largely in agreement with you in that, by all accounts I've seen/read, Smed is just plain bad at managing good game development. He just seems blinded by the lure of the almighty dollar.
Not that there is anything wrong with trying to make money. Hardly. The real crime is in the lost opportunity cost every time he decides to push something out too early to capture those precious box sales. Back in prime EQ days, expansions were pretty much on a 6 month release. Every time one came out, it was riddled with broken, unbalanced content. That continued to push more and more players away and of course meant, lost subs. Had they held on for another few months to address all that stuff and release polished, well-designed expansions, who knows how things might've turned out for EQ (and for him).
Tauro
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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They should had finished & released the EQ3 Version that was before EQN. A traditional MMO with the EQ-IP using a relatively modern engine (the PlanetSide2 engine). No "WOW killer", but would make them good money right now. But Smed wanted to get in on the Minecraft-craze (voxels/fully destructible environment) and the sandbox-craze (storybricks stuff on top of voxel-stuff), so they had to start EQN... I wonder why they did their zombie-game as a seperate thing, should have added it to EQN features, they would have surely fit it within the lore somehow
kegkilla
The Big Mod
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We don't know how far in development they got or if it was even any good. But I agree that trying to cash in on the sandbox shit was a terrible direction for an MMO with established lore like EverQuest.They should had finished & released the EQ3 Version that was before EQN. A traditional MMO with the EQ-IP using a relatively modern engine (the PlanetSide2 engine). No "WOW killer", but would make them good money right now. But Smed wanted to get in on the Minecraft-craze (voxels/fully destructible environment) and the sandbox-craze (storybricks stuff on top of voxel-stuff), so they had to start EQN... I wonder why they did their zombie-game as a seperate thing, should have added it to EQN features, they would have surely fit it within the lore somehow
Randin
Trakanon Raider
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I'm more inclined to say that, if they wanted to go innovative, then they should've either aimed for a voxel-based MMO, or a Storybricks-based MMO, and simply not tried to do both at the same time. Trying to essentially invent both kinds of MMOs, and make both systems work together, was going to be too much for just about anyone.
Still think a decent Storybricks-based MMO could be something great.
Still think a decent Storybricks-based MMO could be something great.
Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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It never existed except for some concept art and some models, the "EQ3" that was scrapped was just ideas they had for design. Probably it was just the internal pitch that they created to greenlight the game (and it was rejected, so they proposed EQN)
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Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Which goes back to my previous post. These were untested systems still under development. They should have prototyped them before going into full production (was very weird to have rooms full of concept artists working, writers hired, without having finalized the game design and engineering side of things). I think part of the problem was that Sony was getting impatient with SOE and wanted new games out, cut costs and sell the company. This was a bigger issue and the Landmark/EQN split was caused by it.
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Conefed
Blackwing Lair Raider
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I keep going back to Minecraft.
MMO with a randomized reformable (limited is ok) world
the "storybricks" would simply be an invisible Minecraft brick with event/ai trigger coding
The Best fucking way they could do this is have an EQ MMO based on the intro cutscene to EQ1
You're in that basic world.
Then more content gets patched in under the theme of a god spreading its influence.
You see the trees burn to sand.
you see the oceans form
You mother fucking see Veeshan cut deep ravines.
You see Ogres in their prime and conquering everything, and then you seem them deformed.
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Hey guys, ex-Storybricks person here. Thought I'd add my own perspectives on all this (while trying to remain diplomatic).
Creating interesting AI in a game largely manifests to the player in 3 ways:
(Pathfinding isn't a tough problem generally - the voxels and destructible environment changed all that, however.)
Storybricks didn't have the resources to build a full MMO, so the idea was that SOE would provide that stuff, given their past expertise, and we'd add our AI into it. Unfortunately they didn't provide the resources we needed for that to be possible. But they didn't have the resources to make much of the rest of the game possible either, apparently.
(As an aside, it's a bit sad when people come here and call us 'frauds' or say we 'tricked' SOE. The fact is, we weren't offering drop-in middleware - we signed up to port some of our existing systems over to their codebase and to develop future systems together. That's what we were doing.)
This is exactly it. Ironically, we'd provided a 2D combat prototype in order to secure the SOE contract, showing how our utility system would control groups of NPCs in an interesting way. It sounds like our features were among the only ones to have ever been prototyped, if what you say is true. Sadly we couldn't take that prototype to completion for the reasons above, i.e. requiring SOE functionality and assets to be in place for it to work.
Creating interesting AI in a game largely manifests to the player in 3 ways:
- NPC choice of actions (skills, attacks)
- NPC choice of communication (shouts, headtracking, emotes)
- NPC choice of movement (patrols, positioning, fight/flight)
(Pathfinding isn't a tough problem generally - the voxels and destructible environment changed all that, however.)
Storybricks didn't have the resources to build a full MMO, so the idea was that SOE would provide that stuff, given their past expertise, and we'd add our AI into it. Unfortunately they didn't provide the resources we needed for that to be possible. But they didn't have the resources to make much of the rest of the game possible either, apparently.
(As an aside, it's a bit sad when people come here and call us 'frauds' or say we 'tricked' SOE. The fact is, we weren't offering drop-in middleware - we signed up to port some of our existing systems over to their codebase and to develop future systems together. That's what we were doing.)
This is exactly it. Ironically, we'd provided a 2D combat prototype in order to secure the SOE contract, showing how our utility system would control groups of NPCs in an interesting way. It sounds like our features were among the only ones to have ever been prototyped, if what you say is true. Sadly we couldn't take that prototype to completion for the reasons above, i.e. requiring SOE functionality and assets to be in place for it to work.
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Tauro
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Thanks for posting Kylotan. So I wonder, back in autum 2015 there was a big internal playtest, how far along was the game then? Did anything really work or was it just bare bones and all the people playing that version realized EQN was never going to release?
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They should had finished & released the EQ3 Version that was before EQN. A traditional MMO with the EQ-IP using a relatively modern engine (the PlanetSide2 engine). No "WOW killer", but would make them good money right now. But Smed wanted to get in on the Minecraft-craze (voxels/fully destructible environment) and the sandbox-craze (storybricks stuff on top of voxel-stuff), so they had to start EQN... I wonder why they did their zombie-game as a seperate thing, should have added it to EQN features, they would have surely fit it within the lore somehow
I agree, Make new EQ just with less shit like the old EQ, kind of like 80% EQ and 20% wow. I bet many would of settled with 90% old EQ, with a new graphics facelift, better quest system, and maybe adding in a sprinkling of instancing for some of the end game shit. And they would of made cash. Instead they were trying to reinvent the entire genre with stupid shit that would never happen realistically. They had the lore, they had the die hard fans that never left plus the eq emu crowds, they had the people that left for WoW, they did not need to shoot for a wow killer, just an honest true EQ successor.
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kegkilla
The Big Mod
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Can you go into a bit more detail about how the Storybricks AI system functioned? It sounds like a great concept in theory, maybe a bit ahead of its time.
Siliconemelons
Avatar of War Slayer
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I honestly wonder how much they would sell the "classic - POP" IP of EQ1 for? Like if legit another studio came by and was like "We wanna remake EQ1 form classic to POP, how much to license the IP" names, lore, world, visual similarities are all that's needed to "buy" the rest would be newly created for the game.
Malakriss
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I can just imagine Bioware buying it and then struggling with server lag due to all of the spell effects with only 20 people in an instance. The technology just isn't there yet.