EQ Next: #1 Next gen MMO

Seems like they really needed someone to oversee all the differing departments, someone like... Brad McQuaid.

Itlan said:

Seems like they really needed someone to oversee all the differing departments, someone like... Brad McQuaid.

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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

Dandai said:

Brad wasn't the hero they needed; he was the hero they deserved.

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Do we deserve Brad though? I don't think so.

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.

Tauro said:

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.

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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).

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'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.

kegkilla said:

We don't know how far in development they got or if it was even any good.

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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)

Randin said:

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.

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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.

Randin said:

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.

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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.

Hey guys, ex-Storybricks person here. Thought I'd add my own perspectives on all this (while trying to remain diplomatic).

wilkxus said:

How far in their aspirations did they actually get? Was the problem with scaling complexity for the number of AIs required or other fundamental issues related to creating the AI states themselves?

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Creating interesting AI in a game largely manifests to the player in 3 ways:

1. NPC choice of actions (skills, attacks)
   
2. NPC choice of communication (shouts, headtracking, emotes)
3. NPC choice of movement (patrols, positioning, fight/flight)

Our system needed these things to be set up and working in order for us to be able to make meaningful decisions about which ones to use and when. NPC actions were slow in coming (they require time from designers, animators, VFX, etc). NPC communication was not considered important enough to make that a priority. And as for movement, over on EQ2Wire the article said that "NPC Pathing did not work until December 2014". If we assume that's true, that's basically 2 years we were on that project trying to get NPCs to move around effectively without access to pathfinding, and trying to get them to look intelligent when they only had 2 or 3 different things they could possibly do.

(Pathfinding isn't a tough problem generally - the voxels and destructible environment changed all that, however.)

Elidroth said:

Except of course, that Story Bricks simply didn't work. It was a great idea that they could never actually make functional. They presented a great concept, and were trying desperately to get SOE to buy the company based upon a concept. Until they could demonstrate it actually working though, nobody was buying anything, and eventually they left.

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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.)

Mughal said:

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)

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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.

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?

We'd been gone for months by then, sorry!

Thanks for the insight Kylotan.

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.

Xadion said:

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.

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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.