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Lots of details + great interview w/ Lead Designer McPherson and Creative Director Butler
ziggot
Member Posts: 7
Forget about smashing voxel castles for a second—that’s crazy, but EverQuest Next is also kicking down the pillars of its own D&D foundation. SOE is changing fantasy MMO tropes it helped define and which its fans are used to—we’re talking getting rid of traditional leveling and introducing a multiclassing system, as well as handling expansions with Rallying Calls, which are grand scale, multistage storylines that permanently change a server’s world. These aren’t totally new RPG ideas, but they sure are for EQ.
It might have been just as risky for SOE not to change anything, but I’m happy that this is such an interesting risk. After the reveal at SOE Live in Las Vegas today, I met with Lead Designer Darrin McPherson and Creative Director Jeff Butler to get some insight on how everything will work.
PC Gamer: A lot of the questions being asked by the community are related to standard MMO stuff. For example, are there levels?
Darrin McPherson, Lead Designer: So our progression system is not based on levels, it’s based on tiers. There’s a shallow tier pool, because one of our focuses is on horizontal gameplay. We definitely have vertical gameplay, where a player increases in power in a particular class, but remember, there’s 40 classes. There’s a lot of classes out there to gain, and each one of these is advanced individually.
It’s based on player accomplishments. It’s not skill based, so you don’t have to use your mace over and over again to level your mace skill up. But your tier three warrior, in order to advance to tier four, has to collect a full suit of tier three armor. You have to have spent enough points in that class. You have to have accomplished a certain amount of things in the game in order to have advanced.
