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Is EQN too ambitious?
donpopuki
Member Posts: 591
Your general run of mill MMO template is pretty well establish. You got quest hubs, 40 button hotbar UIs, levels, pvp battlegrounds and raiding end game. The world is static and easy to control from a devs point of view. Then you have EQN. First lets talk about voxels. As others have pointed out in this forum there are potential challenges in designing a fully destructible world. There can be griefing but game breaking shortcuts to dungeons can also be exploited. Traditional dungeon design won't work in EQN if players can just dig a hole right to the boss. What about all the problems with collision detection and people getting stuck?
Quests will be different and not repeatable by other players. They claim to rely on the emergent ai to generate quests. However emergent phenomena is by it's very nature unpredictable. SOE may have a rudimentary understanding on how it might play out by play testing the ai with handfuls of internal testers but when the whole system goes live with possibly millions the emergent ai may behave in a manner that could make the game unplayable.
SOE doesn't have a well established template to work with. Whenever trying something new there's always a great risk involved but sometimes it has the biggest pay out.
Comments
They surely are very ambitious but i hope they can deliver.
The more freedom players are given the more ways they wil find to exploit/grief etc. I just hope that SOE will find a way to deal with all those tricks in time.
[mod edit]these are the guys behind on of the biggest and longest lasting MMO's EQ1. Which for its time was full of new ideas.
I for one and glad to see them reaching so high and hope it all comes together
But if you like the standard mmo theres tons and ton and tons of those. Why not add something alittle different to the mix.
I've played Vindictus and it's not fully destructible.
Not even close to being the same thing.
EQ Next is going to provide endless adventure just by digging a hole in the ground and seeing what is in there.
I don't mind ambitious, but the problem is that too many MMO enthusiasts mis-interpret developer ambitions as 'promises'. You often hear the cry of "you promised X, but didn't deliver, so your entire game sucks!"
For me, I'd rather see a 'shoot for the stars, land on the moon' approach as long as the devs are honest, and simply not hyping their features. Even though I've not played it, I think GW2 did a pretty good job of implementing their vision and being earnest. SWTOR (which I did play) had the opposite approach, hyping unrealistically, and then pissing a bunch of people off when the vision couldn't be achieved.
Just my 2 cents.
I think the reason why SOE is doing something new is that they noticed that the old WoW-formula does not work anymore. At this point everyone who ever was remotely interested in WoW has played as much of it as he wanted. WoW still has many subscribers but is not drawing in many new players anymore. The lifecycle of WoW is coming to its end.
And to be honest doing a classical themepark mmo aka WoW-clone has never really worked. Name one AAA mmo that was released after 2004 and did not either hardly make its money back or horribly crashed and burned. It was a tough learning process for the industry that you can not beat WoW by copying it.
GW2 already was somewhat successful in braking the mould, but it fell flat in many points and most of its concept where watered down.
EQN is much more ambitious and with Voxel-graphics and Storybricks they have two very powerful tools at their hands. Of course, they could still mess it up. But they are aiming high and that is a good thing.
If SOE is able to execute these new systems the MMOs as we know them will be changed forever. Totally new gameplay mechanics will emerge. I potentially see a major shift as big as EQ brought to the genre 14 years ago.
A lot of people say they want a reskinned EQ1 but what the genre needs is not the same old rehashed game but something new to move the genre forward. Technology has advanced and not just in the graphics department. With every technological advancement new genres are created. Maybe EQN will be so different that it might not be an MMO as we know but something entirely different. I find that very exciting!
If by ambitious you mean talk about their game non stop without actually showing any of it working in game, then yeah.
I think SOE is making lofty attempts. In my opinion the only way EQN will have as big of an impact shift as 14 years ago is if they go back to their roots of a group centric, difficult game. A game with consequences for actions. A game with great diversity and immersion. As much as I would like this to happen I don't think it will. Game companies are to focused on appealing to the masses for the biggest pay days rather then build a game for a targeted player base. In doing so games have been simplified, fast food instant gratification got to have it now games.
Its one thing to expand on a genre versus changing it all together. As we have seen with losts of games these days they are going heavily single player online rpg where you bump into other players but don't have to play with them. New AI and changing the environment are all fine and dandy but lets hope they don't ruin group centricity that EQ1 was responsible for making great.
Taking a risk would be going back to the roots of EQ1 since the mmo genre has drifted so far away from its core.
I doubt there is going to be as much freedom for just digging holes are you think. It will most likely be designated areas or even instances with limitations. Being able to just dig anywhere anytime can and would be used as a form of griefing by people just to be asses. Plus they have said that your characters tier,level,strength or what ever will also dictate when and how you will be able to dig and the limits of how deep you can go. It will have its parameters it wont be just a free for all.