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EverQuest's Death Knell
OldManFunk
Member Posts: 894
Like many, I was hoping that EQN would be based on EQ's original game play, only updated and modernized. (SPOILER) >> It isn't. <<
EQN has a lot of potential and will likely be fun to play and do well. Destructible everything where players might be allowed to conquer land, gather resources, build cities and go to war with enemies leaves a lot to the imagination. It's more like Guild Wars 3 than Everquest 3! Or, well... Free Realms Next since it's SOE. This game is interesting, exciting, and under any other name would be welcomed without all of the drama. Unfortunately SOE named this game Everquest Next which has some rather dark implications for the Everquest franchise.
Everquest (1), in my opinion, took a serious blow from EQN's announcement. What does the EQN announcement mean for Everquest's future? SOE has decided to move away from [fifteen years of D&D] toward action RPGs.
Everquest has yet another expansion due to release that will no doubt add extra... complexity... to an already ridiculously complex game. Does Everquest really need new zones and AAs? This latest expansion seems more like life support than a serious effort to revitalize the game.
Everquest has one of the worst performing and least stable game clients and, in my humble opinion, some of the worst artwork of all current MMOs. If I were SOE I'd consider adapting a single game client for use in all of my MMOs and reuse skins, models and animations across the various games which would also make it easier to release new variations of existing games. This would of course require a great deal of effort, and perhaps some people at SOE feel that the original Everquest (as well as its other lesser played games) simply aren't worth the effort. I can't say that I blame them, hence my disappointment over the direction that EQN is moving as that means the original EQ will not likely ever see any improvement here.
The Everquest game code is a mess. Everquest has gone through so many rule changes, so many additions and deletions over the years that the game is riddled with artifacts. Given that EQN is not an EQ reboot and EQ's newest expansion promises to add more complexity, this can only get worse. Again, short of releasing an entirely new game, EQ will not likely ever see much improvement here.
The EQ community has devolved into raiders, botters and boxers. This is in my opinion due to years of mismanaging the franchise. In apparent efforts to prevent EQ players from leaving EQ to try other games, or in misguided efforts to recover players from other games, EQ has been twisted into a Frankenstein-like monstrosity where each successive expansion is tailored to appeal to whatever group of players the current management thinks is their base. Without going into great detail about what I think are some of the problems with EQ's community (since I want to be sensitive to the fact that we're talking about people), I'll just say F2P and mercenaries and leave it at that. Again, EQN and EQ's newest expansion mean that we will likely see more of the same.
I'm not trying to hate on EverQuest or Sony. I'm disappointed to know that I probably won't ever get to replay EverQuest's glory days with a modern client. The announcement of EQN has crushed any hope I ever had of seeing the original EQ remade with a stable client and other modernizations that would've made it more enjoyable to play.
EverQuest is dead, long live EverQuest Next!
Comments
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This wasn't a "I want to go home to 1999" post. A death knell is when bells are rang to announce a death. It is my opinion that when Sony announced their action RPG EverQuest Next at SOE Live it was like a death knell for the original EverQuest. I believe that the only way EverQuest can truly be fixed is to completely remake and modernize the game which, after SOE's EQN announcement, seems unlikely at best. So you see, before the SOE Live announcement, like many other people, I had expected EQN to be more like EverQuest than Guild Wars 2. I am sad to know that there will not be another EverQuest game based on the original EverQuest's D&D roots but I am not asking to go back or expecting anything from SOE. I think that the action MMO named EverQuest Next sounds promising and look forward to its release.
I wouldn't give up hope on this. I'm a rock fan and as I looked back on the history of popular music there was for a long time a distinct trend: you have a band come that's a complete trailblazer(like EQ was). Then you have copycats and bands who turn it into a commercial formula and get even bigger.
Then what happens? People get tired of the formula and the next thing you know a new band comes out that's raw and honest and suddenly everybody's buying the new thing and the pop sellouts are toast. I think the same thing will happen with MMOs.
MMO's are still at the sellout point where they're just trying to do anyting to sell copies. As soon as a MMO comes along that's raw but somewhat accessible, all these WoW clones are going to be history.
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we can still hope and pray that they do a reboot of eq1 with voxels and stuff id even take the crappy kerran model and crappy armor if it meant i got eq1 rebooterd with voxels and the gorgeous enviroments
if eqn hadnt butchered the lore AND abandoned camping stuff i could even have accepted multi classing i suppose
I will still give it a try but im not super enthusiastic any more