Doing it wrong

Yesterday, i read the massively opinion column titled “Maybe it’s time to admit you don’t like MMOs” and it made me think- about the general perception of MMOs, their communities and my interaction with other players in the games themselves.

I came to the conclusion that i’m doing it wrong- i mean, in Final Fantasy 14 i am member in what seems to be a great linkshell/free company. My interactions with the other members have been saying “hi” and “bye” as well as one dungeon run, which was fun. In Firefall, i had fun doing stuff with one or two other players, but when our army grew to be bigger than the squad size of Firefall, i became reluctant to log in.

Finding excuses for solo-play

Now, i know what this blog’s title suggests, so i am aware of how these games are meant to be played, but there always seem to be obstacles to experience these games this way. For me, it comes down to:

• Voice Chat. I don’t like voice chat. Yet, in many guilds using it is de facto mandatory. In my Rift guild, for example, guild chat would always just entail fragments of conversations that happened in voice chat. Yes, i might use voice chat once in a while, but don’t expect me to launch it with the game. I might want to listen to music/podcasts or whatever. Voice chat directly affects my ability to relax and enjoy an evening of leisure.
• Log-In times. We have a toddler in the house. When he screams, i’m afk. When my wife needs assistance, i’m afk. Often, when i log in, i don’t know how long it will be- it could be 2 hours, but it could also be 15 minutes. I don’t want to ruin someone else’s evening by signing up for a dungeon run i can’t finish- or doing something in the party and let them wait for my return in a quest hub.
• My own mood. I play these games to relax. I take my time, i play them slow- my Conjurer in FF14 is level 22 now and will remain there for a time because i want to catch up with my botanist and weaver classes. If i were to group up with my level 22 i could suddenly find myself being at level 30 without progressing in the storyline and my crafting jobs getting far behind. Playing at my own pace in groups becomes running after someone else very quick. I wouldn’t want that.
• Other people’s progress. I’m slow, others aren’t. One reason i haven’t done very much with my linkshell is that many are in their 40s or at max level (they played 1.0) and therefore what they do isn’t available to me.
• Other people’s playtimes. I guess this goes hand-in-hand with my last point, but there’s more than just the progression. I’m always somewhat surprised that even players who call themselves “casual” play 4 hours each day. As i mentioned, i average at about 10-15 hours a week and i consider that playing quite a lot. In Firefall, i saw how others in my army spent every free minute available to them in the game- when i see that, i think to myself how quickly they’re going to burn out and leave the game- and true enough, last week the guild leader played 2 and a half hours Firefall. As i said, right now i think Firefall is a great game, but you have to consume it bite-sized, or you’ll be burnt out when the really cool features come into play.

Resolutions

Good excuses, right? Well, no, maybe not. Maybe, if i don’t want to play with others i should just start up one of my many single player games i didn’t finish (or pretty much didn’t even start them). Sure, MMORPGs nowadays are soloable and especially the gathering and crafting bits of FF14 lend themselves very good to solo-play.

Maybe i should just scrap crafting first and just level my most advanced class to 50 as quick as possible. But then i wouldn’t be able to craft equipment for myself during the levelling process. Also, endgame is usually not what i’m playing these games for. When i reached endgame in Rift in June 2011 i just quit- doing daily quests or repeating the same dungeons over and over again doesn’t appeal to me. Levelling as quick as possible is also not what i’m there for. So that’s not going to work.

I made a resolution, nonetheless. I want to party more, and usually, when i do, i get something out of it. The other day i helped another player in a really dense spawn point- he was going to fill his hunting log, but no matter how he’d do it, he would pull 3-4 enemies to get to his targets. So, as a healer, i asked him what he wanted to do, grouped up and helped him achieve his goal. One more member on my friendslist.

So i want to do that some more- go around with open eyes and help players i see having trouble. I did that before, as well, but it was a case of throwing out one or two heals and going my way. Also, i should ask in linkshell chat if somebody wants to group up- either for my most advanced class or for some of the classes i want to play down the line. I mean, there’s many of them. Just for adventuring classes, i aim to play:

• Conjurer
• Arcanist
• Thaumaturge
• Archer
• Pugilist
• Lancer
• Gladiator

All this to get the jobs of White Mage, Black Mage, Bard, Monk and Scholar- more or less in that order.

Making (and keeping) friends

One problem, of course, is that none of my friends play MMORPGs. Many players just enjoy group content with either real life friends or acquaintances from the game(s) they’re playing- none of the two are available to me, for different reasons, many of them my own fault. If you jump around in games and guilds very much, you’ll have a hard time making “online friends”. And when you do make them and let the connections somehow fall apart (as i did with the guild i co-founded in GW2), that’s your own fault, as well. Maybe i’ll talk more about that last mistake some time.

This blog

Now, there’s a topic for a series of blog posts that fits right into this blog’s title. Party business- how to put the multiplayer part back into MMORPGs from the perspective of a casual player.

I haven’t written for some time, because when commenting around at the last post i realized that the reason i started this blog- or the topics i wanted to cover- aren’t really hot anymore. EQ Next is a thing of the past- i’ll look into it again either when SOE scraps P7S1 or when i cave in and decide that making an account there isn’t the end of the world. With EQN, there’s another thing: i can’t shake the feeling that this will play very GW2-like. ArcheAge seems to become a lot more themeparky than expected and The Repopulation seems still to be far off.

Final Fantasy 14 caught me by surprise- i didn’t expect to enjoy it so much, but as you can see above, i have goals that last for quite some time- for me, at least- and i didn’t even mention crafting. But i’ll have to put some thought into how i’m going to develop this blog further, since it really doesn’t bother anyone what i’m doing in my MMO and so the journal-type i was using isn’t of much interest. That’s not to say i won’t continue like that, but there will be another theme to my blogging, and right now i think it’s going to be somewhat community-focused, which might be an odd thing to do for someone who’s doing it wrong.

The Repopulation: primer

It’s time to check out the second of the three future MMORPGs i laid my eyes on: the Repopulation. Now, the Repopulation is in Alpha 2 right now, so it may be some time before we get to play it, but the general direction the game is going is set and made available for your reading pleasure with great articles and descriptions by the devs.

The Repopulation is set in the quite-distant future and a time when earth as we know it is no longer there. Fortunately, we aren’t on Earth anymore- scientists had sent out some spaceships to habitable planets 200 years ago and we are going to be inhabitants of a planet called Rhyldan.

The Repopulation calls itself a sandbox and it is quite obvious from their design descriptions where this is coming from. You could summarize it by saying “It’s a lot like SWG pre-CU”, but if you are like me, you don’t know what Star Wars Galaxies was like neither pre- nor after CU.

Factions

There are three factions in the Repopulation: the OWON (One World, One Nation) and the FPR (Free people’s republic)- we can summarize these by saying one is the oppressive empire and one are the rebels. Of course, it’s more complicated than that- and there’s a great backstory on the official homepage.

The third faction is no faction at all- all players start as either OWON or FPR characters and are put in a generic nation (tR’s equivalent to guilds) of their faction. Eventually, players can form their own nations and align them to one of the two factions or become a rogue nation. A rogue nation has no allies by default and therefore has to conduct diplomacy by themselves. Nations can start out as being a part of OWON or FPR and become a rogue nation, but they can not revert to being part of one of these two factions.

Now, while it does seem somewhat generic, i still enjoyed reading the Lore to the Repopulation and think that this is a great way of doing things- Sandboxes usually tend to offer free-for-all PvP, additionally with full loot systems (Darkfall and EVE come to mind), but i think it is served better when there is some kind of alignment- i mean, when you enter the game, at least you know there are people out there who do not want to kill you. In my view that’s a big step forward from my panic attacks while picking iron in Darkfall.

PvP

The interesting twist with factions will influence PvP, as well. Now, nations can own cities, outposts and harvestable areas in this game, they can lay sieges on other cities and so on. So there is a massive amount of possibility in the Open PvP realm.

Other than that, tR seems to be somewhat like ArcheAge’s PvP system, at least under what the devs call the “normal ruleset”- in which there are protected areas, no loot system and no heavy death penalty. Furthermore, there’s a distinction between reserve and active soldiers. You start out in reserve status and are protected in non-contested areas controlled by your faction- you can’t attack anyone there and nobody’s able to attack you. When you venture out of your faction’s area into the contested land, though, there’s open PvP between the factions.

Every faction owns around one third of the game world, the last third being contested by all factions and nations. I think there’s only cross-faction PvP, but the article isn’t clear on that.

PvE

PvE in the Repopulations seems to look like standard fare when looked at for a short amount of time- there are Missions (Quests), Engagements (Public Quests), and a general system of delivering those that is similar to something like Rifts or Dynamic Events.

When you read upon the details, however, there are some very interesting twists. One twist is that you don’t have a linear path through the world- missions are tailor made for your character and reach you through the ingame mail system. They take your skill & gear levels (there are no character levels) and previous actions into account and offer branching dialogues and outcomes. In the article, there’s an example of an NPC who changes its mood to “angry” based on your actions- now he might reference you in a bad way to other players, insult you when you walk by and offer varying missions. Engagements don’t have to be combat related, but could, for instance, involve building up a city. Instead of spawn points the game uses Dens. Dens can spawn various amounts of mobs in number, strength and type, but still fitting to the area the dens are in. Oh, and they can spread if players don’t take action.

Crafting and Items

Now, here comes the core. See, everything mentioned above is interesting and all, but this is it- at least for me. If a Sandbox doesn’t offer a complex crafting and trading system, it might just as well be a first person shooter. Fortunately, crafting in tR is complex and rewarding- i’ll start that off with a video.

Crafting will be interdisciplinary, so chances are high that you have to depend on other crafters to focus your own progress. The only bound items? Cosmetic ones from the cash shop. Items degenerate in quality and become useless with time. So there is opportunity in crafting and market, here.

Items you craft will have a quality range from F (bad) to A (good) and a subquality ranging from 0 to 9- so you can craft items with qualities from F0 to A9. Quality is determined by your skill, the quality of the ingredients and some luck and decisions made during the process of crafting itself. From what i saw, i think the crafting system will be similar to those of EQ2 and Vanguard (and FFXIV), but a bit more complicated.

Impressions

I’ll finish this entry, for now. The systems i mentioned are more complicated than i have made them to be, of course. But let’s have a look how the Repopulation measures up with some of the points i made in previous entries.

Virtual World

The worldbuilding seems fine to me- the Lore doesn’t seem like much, but i enjoyed reading it nonetheless. There don’t seem to be fast travel options like teleports, but one can craft vehicles. The world seems to be as open as possible with some sensible restrictions put into place.

I was surprised, however, that after really reading about this game for this post i found there are many systems at work here that EQN is advertising for, as well. But to me, it seems as if players make a bigger impact in this game.

Player-to-player interaction

There seems to be a lot in this regard. From building houses (in-world as well as instanced individual housing), cities, a crafting system that’s complex and involves other players to PvP, PvE encounters, open grouping, item degeneration, a reduction of bound items there are many options to play with, alongside or against others.

While the auction house seems to be global and i’d prefer locally different prizes, a good crafting system can make up for that. We’ll see how that goes.

Conclusion

I’m really looking forward to the Repopulation. What i read is encouraging, this game is developed as an MMORPG at its core. There are many systems in place that will allow for longevity- actually, even if EQN hadn’t disqualified itself for me, right now i’d place the Repopulation higher in regards to expectations. Also, tR might release before EQN, but since it’s still in Alpha2 it’s too early to estimate a release date- although it is slated for 2013.

The Repopulation will be free-to-play, which, at the moment, is my main concern. They’ll have to earn money and with Sandboxes, i think it’s quite difficult to strike a balance in a free-to-play title that’s both good for the devs and the players. Either they’ll offer convenience/fluff items only, and leave me wondering if many people buy those, or they’ll interfere with gameplay- for instance by selling repair kits that should be crafted and traded by players.

Above & Beyond Technologies are an independent dev studio, so there might be some concerns in regard to polish and gameplay feel, but i don’t think this is critical- if it’s playable, it will be alright. Fallen Earth is a good example of a game developed by an independent studio with not-so-polished gameplay that’s still highly enjoyable.

I can see this game being a huge contender for ArcheAge when it comes to my personal “next MMO” decision.

So…is that it, then?

Yesterday John Smedley, president of SOE, tweeted:

Clearing up a few misconceptions about EQN in Europe and UK. All players including ones from Prosieben can play on all servers.

If you are from the Eu or UK you will go through Prosieben but it will be playing on SOE servers.

And there was a disturbance in the force as if thousands of EU players cried out in pain. Now, this could be a misunderstanding based on the nature of the selected medium- 140 characters might have been too short to add “if you have an SOE account you’ll be able to use that”- but given that John Smedley was quite active in conversations on twitter yesterday but didn’t react in any way to the outcries of the european players, this might just confirm EU players will have to go through P7S1 games and corresponding accounts for EQ Next.

This does make sense from the perspective of the publisher- the deal with P7S1 was announced shortly after the first bit of news of EQ Next hit the media- so my guess would be that EQN is the main interest of P7S1 getting the publishing rights for the EU. Now, Planetside 2 might play a role, as well. but my guess is the main bullet point of the deal in some office somewhere in germany was EQ Next. So forcing us to go with them is not unexpected.

Now, there are a lot of reasons why this is a bad idea and, if true, why i’ll choose not to play Everquest Next- some of them are rational, some others not. Let’s start with the irrational ones.

• P7S1 is a media company that owns around half of the private tv stations in germany. And they’re bad- i mean, basically all channels in germany- excluding the public ones- show the same crap. I really, really, don’t like the company- neither this one, nor the other big private tv channel owner. So i don’t want to give them my money.
• Furthermore, i don’t trust german companies in the web very much. I don’t want to go into much details (word count is high, again). To summarize- german companies often think of the internet as a new way of tricking people out of their money and i don’t like that very much, either. I’d also like to point out that “earning money via the web” and “tricking people into spending their money via the web” are two different things.

P7S1 games could be different, of course. But then you’ll have the more rational stuff/stories i read about P7S1 in the past.

• There is a paragraph in their TOS about deleting account information, including characters and paid ingame-store currency after 90 days of inactivity (Paragraph 3.6 – in case you’re wondering: Alaplaya.net is owned by P7S1 games). Now imagine that. You pay for 100$ worth of currency, then go on a vacation, work as an expat or whatever. When you return, your account and your store currency is gone.
• They published real names of players who missed subscription payments in their forums. Apparently they implemented a “more professional” way to track payments in the meantime.
• There was a security issue with Planetside 2 accounts.
• A CM, asked about a triple-station-cash sale suggested (physically) migrating to north america if you aren’t happy in the EU and with the sales of P7S1- but when you’re there, don’t complain if you miss the sales on other continents.
• They messed up the transition of services of DCUO, bad. From what i hear, accounts got lost, DLCs got lost, store currencies got lost. When asked about it, customer service told the person they have the option to register for a new account (losing everything they spent with SOE).
• P7S1 has not much experience in this business. Look at their portfolio and remove the SOE titles, and you have almost nothing in terms of MMORPGs. My guess is many people outside of germany have never heard of them being a publisher of multiplayer games before the SOE deal.
• I have station cash i wouldn’t be able to use with P7S1. Granted, they offered an account transfer, but since i didn’t want to go to P7S1 then, as well, i chose to stay with SOE. And i’ll tell you that: even if they offered the same thing again, i’d still not do it.

So, this all might be hyperbole- it might be somewhat irrational, but these are the reasons i won’t play EQ Next via a P7S1 account. At all.

Fortunately, i’m not alone. It’s refreshing to see that the massively community seems to agree this one time- and i sure hope SOE got the message by now.

What’s in a sandbox?

When i felt i couldn’t yet pin down the sandbox in EQ Next, i came to think about this- what constitutes a sandbox? Then i read Azuriels EQ Next impressions and, while he didn’t mention the term “Sandbox”, it became more clear.

World vs. game

In a world, you have options- and these options include more than choosing which mobs to fight and in what way (Rift does an excellent job in offering multiple gameplay options for mob slaughter). We all know housing as “another thing to do”. Add an involved crafting system, trade, exploration and maybe even world-building to that and you have some options for players with different play styles. The thing about MMORPGs is that they can be many games in one- there could be your economics simulation (this doesn’t seem to be the correct english word, sorry), a strategy game as well as a “city simulator” and of course your RPG in it- at least.

This possible combination of singleplayer-genres alongside the possibility to play these games with many other players (being some kind of social network, as well- which in my opinion is what made WoW so successful) is what makes MMORPGs so compelling.

There needs to be a game attached to the world- most players will want to have some kind of progress with their characters and they want to be adventurous, fight difficult enemies, craft unique items and so on.

When someone says the “G” in the MMORPG part is the least important, i really think nowadays this just means “the ‘G’ is fine as is, please focus on the other parts”- when you take a look at the newer games, i think they nailed the gameplay part- GW2’s combat is fun, then there are the slightly more strategic combat systems of WoW, EQ2, Rift, TSW and so on, which are also fun in their own way. And if you like your combat really very much on the strategic side- EVE has that covered. So the combat (and PvE-) gameplay is just fine.

Systems vs. Scripts

Now, here are two words describing the same sandbox vs. themepark / world vs. game – discussion, at least from my perspective. What we need to move the genre forward, is an implementation of systems that slowly start to replace scripts. Actually, when i think about that, there is a possibility that EQ Next has this covered. When we compare GW2 with EQN in regards to the emergent AI of mobs in EQN and dynamic events in GW2, it’s clear that in EQN, there’s this system of likes & dislikes (i’m assuming it gets implemented well), which can lead to all kinds of situations and the scripted, cyclical dynamic events of GW2 on the other hand.

Both implementations could lead, for instance, to a village being attacked by orcs/centaurs. If these orcs from EQN serve as a faction instead of mobs, you, as a player, can make a decision to help the orcs attack the village- this option is not available to you in GW2, since the centaurs are going to attack you anyway.

Now, i wonder: what will EQN do if a part of the players decide to defend the village and another part is helping the attackers? PvP would be one option- it wouldn’t be FFA-PvP, but could be restricted to this area and to this moment until the attack is either completed successfully or not. But there might be no need for that. When you don’t allow players to attack each other, this might come out as some variation of a MOBA- the only targets being the NPCs. Now, i’m really making this up as i go, since we don’t know if it’s going to work this way in EQN or not- but what was revealed at least allows for that speculation.

You can expand that line of thought, of course. Boss behaviour instead of instanced dungeons- you could let raid bosses lay down a camp somewhere in the open world and let them spread their influence outwards. If the world is big enough, there’ll always be places where these mobs could hide for some time. A trade system instead of an auction house, placing resources in a “realistic” way in the world, making rare resources rare and not just attainable at later levels. Making prizes local, allowing for caravans. Implementing a degradation system for items, so you can’t use what you have for eternity.

Player-to-player vs. Player-to-Environment

The systems in a Sandbox MMORPG should focus on interactions between players. Your equipment degrades with time, so you need a crafter to build new armor or weapons or to repair your stuff. Prizes and resources are local, so you need traders to bring the items to your area. Mobs are free to roam, so you might need experienced adventurers in your area to allow you to farm the resources and enable trade. And so on. These interdependencies need to be build into the core of the game, allowing/encouraging/forcing players to interact with each other. The trend in MMORPGs has been self-sufficiency- and this needs to be stopped.

Do we want a Sandbox MMORPG?

Is “Sandbox” the solution to the problems in the genre? Is there even a problem? The term “sandbox” is a vague one, and everybody’s going to have their own opinion about it. But that’s not really what many of us want- what we’d like to see is an MMORPG that we’ll want to play for years, not months- it’s just that i think at least some of the stuff mentioned above would be helpful in being that game.

As Azuriel put it: “All long-term compelling MMO content is player-based”. Again, i agree. Whether the game providing that is called Sandbox, Themepark, Sandpark or Themebox doesn’t really concern me- but there should be (another) one.

Other bits of EQ Next

There’s a lot to digest and read about EQ Next at the moment. I haven’t read it all and i don’t know everything (obviously), but i wanted to get some of the more detailed information and links to other blogs in here.

Crafting

Thanks to Jewel i stumbled across this interview on PC Gamer, where some of the mechanics of EQ Next are explained a little. The most encouraging sentence for me regarding crafting is this one:

[C]opper is the newbie metal, it’s the metal you find right outside the starting city and eventually you don’t need it anymore. Because of the way our game works, copper is always useful, because copper has specific qualities. Iron is always useful, mithril is always useful. All of these things are always useful to you, depending on what you want to make.

This is one of the main reasons crafting isn’t very compelling for me in most MMOs- every ten levels or so you need completely different materials and the old stuff isn’t important anymore. When you take a look at auction houses in some themepark MMOs, the beginner resources are usually quite expensive- which is odd when they should be the most commonly found resources.

SOE seems to wait with a closer look at crafting for a time when they’ll be able to present it better than when everybody’s still talking about all aspects of the game. They reiterate we’ll like it, though.

Combat and Class system

One other topic discussed out there is the apparent lower focus of roles in group play, the revealed classes and races and a summary of impressions after watching the lore panel. There are great opinion pieces by Belghast and Rowan Blaze. My own opinion is a short one, this time: i don’t quite like the style of dedicated healers and tanks. But i also don’t like GW2’s solution- it’s a tad too chaotic. Maybe they had this vision of another kind of trinity (Support, Control, Damage), but i don’t think it worked out very well. It seems SOE is preparing something to show a comparison of the combat to GW2 is not entirely correct.

Other Opinions

In general, EQ Next was well received.

• Jewel has a great collection of information and opinion.
• Rowan is excited, as well.
• Bhagpuss has some mixed feelings, but updated us frequently and with some interesting additions like videos and commentary regarding the lore and class panel.
• Ardwulf is impressed and has a great summary of a EQN Q&A session (Part 1, Part 2) with some interesting bits of information.

Some others have been more critical.

• The ancient gaming Noob has a nice opinion piece and a collection of links to other bloggers (including me- thank you for that, Wilhelm).
• Keen from Keen and Graevs Gaming Blog has some mixed feelings
• Azuriel of In An Age disects an article on Kotaku & part of the PC Gamer interview and does a great job at highlighting some of the vagueness in what was revealed. He also mentions that “All long-term compelling MMO content is player-based.”, to which i holeheartedly agree.
• SynCaine gives a more abstract summary of the reveal panel, predicts failure and attracts some commenters to his posting.

Roundups

Some bloggers offered roundups of EQ Next related posts. I’d like to thank Syp from Biobreak and Wilhelm from The Ancient Gaming Noob for including me- both inclusions made up a more than significant amount of visitors to my (very new) blog. These numbers are exciting to see and very encouraging. Anyways, here are the roundups i found:

• Everquest Next impressions from the blogosphere by Syp
• Monday Morning Talking Points for Everquest Next by Wilhelm Arcturus
• Everquest Next Blogger Round-Up by Jewel

On a personal note

With all that was revealed and all the excitement as well as criticism, i forgot to mention something. I don’t care about the beta personally (others do, but we already know european players will be able to take part in it), but SOE, don’t expect me to go to ProSiebenSat1 Games for your game. If i can only access it with them, i’ll rather not play. To this day i can’t understand this decision- yes, sure, better localization and customer service, that’s right.

And i have to confess, one thing that came with free-to-play and many americans/english speaking players can’t see is that the german translations are horrible- in all the (f2p) games where i switched back to german for some time (namely: LOTRO and Rift- and both of them had good translations prior to f2p). It’s just a mess that clearly comes from Google Translate (not really, it’s not that bad). But, let me be clear on that front: i’d rather play a game in thai, which i can neither read nor understand, or move to north america, than registering an account over at P7S1 Games.

Everquest Next – after watching the full reveal

Today i watched the full reveal presentation of Everquest, so i am able to share some new opinions. Of course, the professional bloggers i linked to yesterday did a very good job of summarizing what’s been shown to their readers. I’d like to take what Dave Georgeson called the four holy grails of EQ Next.

Changing the core game: In this part, Georgeson talked about the EQ Next Multiclass system where every class has different abilities with each weapon (we know that 4 abilities are determined by the weapon you choose) and choice of class skills (the other 4 abilities in your build). It seems they wanted a change from playing Dungeons and Dragons with levelups, skilltrees and so on to a new, broader way of being able to multiclass and finding classes and skills in the world.

There is really not much new to that- we have that, as Bhagpuss wrote on Inventory Full, we have this weapon/multiclass system in TSW, GW2 and Rift to some extent, the skill collection was a part of Guild Wars 1 many players enjoyed. I mean, sure, why not build up on something not-so-new-but-rare and make it work better? Not saying this is a bad thing, i like it actually.

What i don’t like so much is the low counts of usable abilities right now. Four are used by your weapon, another four are free to build. I assume there’ll be passive abilities, as well, and i sure hope they are designed more alike to TSW than to GW2.

Destructibility: The voxel thing. So battles leave their marks on the environment- and the environment “heals” with time. That’s a nice gimmick which makes its way up to a nice feature when combined with the procedurally generated underworld. I like to sway around while playing- just now i only wanted to kill 10 rats, when i pounded one of them through the floor of the basement they dwell in and happened on a underworldy dungeon. That’s a real nice feature for me. Also, the fights feel very much alive.

A life of consequence: Now, that’s cryptic. Here’s talk about the mob AI- that they’re armed with likes and dislikes and might move around under certain circumstances instead of spawning on the same spot every time.

I think that’s a double-edged sword here. First of all, this could be some kind of hyperbole. Like i wrote yesterday, Guild Wars 2 described a quite similar scenario, although they didn’t hide that these movements and changes are part of a scripted experience aka dynamic event. If every mob has these likes & dislikes and moves around, this could lead to some very dynamic events- and this time for real. If SOE is bold enough to make strong mobs move around, we could see the end of level zones (EQ Next doesn’t seem to have levels, but TSW doesn’t have them, either. Try going to Egypt after the tutorial.) and the return of something nice: danger. It would be nice to be surprised by a mob too strong for me and having to run away. The last time that happened to me and caught me by surprise was with Vanguards free-roaming elite mobs.

Permanent Change: What we have here is the public quest/living story thing. So there are these rallying calls where the players have to do something- for example build up a village. There are crafting tasks as well as fighting tasks to be performed. These rallying calls take up to several months of real time to finish by the playerbase and once a rallying call is finished, its results stay in the world.

I like that idea. Yes, it might be only a crossover of public quests and living story, but at least SOE seems to be willing to make the happening event (living story) have something to do with what’s done (public quest) instead of making people grind minigames.

However, i like the look of EQ Next- the stylized graphics look just fine and work better for me than, say, Vanguard’s and EQ2’s style- especially considering their character models.

Now, there’s just one question- where did they hide the sandbox? I’m sure what they presented could be one, but they didn’t make it clear where to find it. The combat looks nice, the world with its day/night cycle as well, and if they incorporate many choices in their permanent change and consequence- parts and really enable players to go where they want and stick to their preferred play-style it could work out well. But they didn’t make it clear, in my opinion. There’s just this one thing…

Everquest Next Landmark. I’ll just go ahead and summarize it as “Minecraft as a MMO” here, as i’m sure you read about it- if you didn’t, there’s a good article over at Massively.

Now, that’s a sandbox. Players are able to build what they want, there’s an added social layer, even guilds and there seems to be some kind of adventuring. But in essence, it seems to be the game for crafters.

All in all, i’m still looking forward to their intentions in regards to crafting and player-driven economy, and i still hold to the assumption that SOE got their hands on something great- but i still feel what we know is a little hollow. If we define “sandbox”- and we could define this term in one thousand ways- with the words “driven by player-to-player interactions”, then we still don’t know much about EQN being the big new shiny sandbox MMO.

EQ Next reveal

So, voxels. We now know something about Everquest Next. I’ll keep myself short on the reveals itself, there are features for your reading pleasure over at Massively, Rock Paper Shotgun, mmorpg.com and ZAM.

To summarize what i got from the reveals:

• Norrath, the world of Everquest Next, is voxel based. Quite like Minecraft, i hear. The thing is that this leads to destructible environment, caves you can explore/find and a changing world. It seems characters can start to dig anywhere they want and might find something underneath the surface of the world. Also, fights leave their mark in the world.
• Mobs will have some form of AI, they’ll function with a list of likes and dislikes and might for instance reposition themselves when their current spot strikes them as too risky.
• Questing will happen without exclamation marks, you happen to witness stuff in the world and choose to participate. There’ll also be public quests that last for months.
• Skill sets function quite like in Guild Wars 2: you get 4 abilities depending on your weapon and 4 abilities you can choose from a pool of abilities available to your classes.
• You can multiclass, but classes seem to have to be found in the world, as well.
• There are no levels, so you can play with your friends at any time
• Characters will be able to vault over obstacles, slide down inclines, or jump up and grab a ledge to pull up

So, that’s what i got from the reveal. First, let me mention that all these articles i linked above seem to have their roots in a presentation the authors saw at E3 earlier this year and yesterday an embargo was lifted so they could write up their impressions.

As far as the reveals go, i know they sound crazy and like a true innovation in MMORPGs, but i’m still cautious. If you recall my wants and needs for finding a new mmo home, here we have a feature list that concentrates on the world part, and it is done well. Norrath next seems to be a truly changing world and SOE seems to have found the RPG again. With EQ Next Landmark, which seems to be some kind of toolset for players to build stuff that might find its way in EQ Next, SOE seems to have the point of having something to return to, as well.

What’s missing for me, is something about crafting and trade. They didn’t say anything about that yet, and there are some clues one could follow allowing the assumption that crafting will be a solid experience in EQ Next (EQ2’s crafting is viewed as one of the better systems and there is a designer on board in EQN that changed EQ2’s system for the better), so i guess information on crafting and trade is still to come.

Here’s my main gripe, though: when you leave out the voxels, what’s revealed so far could just be Guild Wars 2 again. I’m not saying they are the same, but ArenaNet used almost the same descriptions for their game: changing world (“living story”), random encounters and “obvious” quests (dynamic events), mobs changing their behaviour as well as a living world.

There is something in all the information we got, something underlying everything, that makes me believe SOE. Maybe it’s that i think the message players have been sending for some years by now has reached SOE- MMORPG fans want better worlds instead of better games. Get the MMO-players instead of the “three month crowd” and you have a winner.

It seems to me SOE is aiming high, they seem to know that the time might be right for a new massive hit in the mmorpg space if you try to innovate and succeed in giving MMORPG players what they want- and judging by all we know, they might pull it off. Color me intrigued.

The first bit of Everquest Next from SOE live

…is it’s main theme presented yesterday and composed by Jeremy Soule.

While Belghast is a tad disappointed, i tend to agree with Syp– it sounds “everquesty” enough for me, although i’d have to confess i’ve not really followed the current Everquests and am not really a MMORPG-soundtrack enthusiast.