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EverQuest Next: It Really is About Influence & Control
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Sony Online Entertainment has been adamant about its desire to give players influence and control in how EverQuest Next plays out. In a new blog post on the EQN forum, Steve "Moogard" Danuser has written about the importance of worshiping Veeshan and the Nor'I as a point of influence in the game world. The blog also gives background as to each deity's history within the larger EverQuest franchise.
The Future is in Your Hands
As we mentioned in our previous blog post, EverQuest Next is a game about influence and control. Your actions in the world determine who controls territory and resources, and one of those key resources is the belief of Norrath’s inhabitants.
How strong will Veeshan’s influence grow after the Combine return to Antonica? Will the Nor’I be protected or exploited? These are questions that you’ll get to decide through the choices you make in game.
Join us again next week when we delve into another of Norrath’s pantheons. Thanks for reading!
Read the full post on the EverQuest Next forum.
Comments
Ah, the laughable concept of Influence and Control in MMOs.
Whatever faction kills 5 billion cave bears first will award everyone from that faction a free bear cape. The other factions can get this bear cape, but must buy from vendor.
And typically that vendor is either tied directly to a real money shop or a sly hidden version, hidden behind a conversion of currency system.
Gotta laugh at the obtuseness of saying
"As you can see, Veeshan looms large in our story. It wouldn’t be an EverQuest game without her!"
when they've been force-feeding the idea that it's Not EverQuest to defend wholesale changes. At the moment, I've come to the conclusion that their story sucks.
And I'll believe the Influence and Control line when I see it working correctly, not before. If SOE does nothing when a server turns into Zion from the Matrix, it's a failure. If SOE resets a server solely because they disapprove of the direction it goes, that's also a failure. I'm not buying that there's a balance between a CF by the players and a CF by Sony. Not until I see it happen.
Avatars are people too
Is it any wonder why we have so many dying MMO's. So many gamers are so fickle, I don't understand when we became so jaded?
All of the comments so far are filled with fiction not fact none of us actually know how the game is going to turn out, so why don't we actually give em a chance?
I mean what other MMO is trying something as different as emergent AI why don't we actually wait to see it in action... I realize we have all been disappointed time and time again with hype but I say let's take a wait and see approach......
Wouldn't be MMORPG.com without jaded gamers...
ooo rename the site www.JadedGamers.com
Well it's nice that they're trying something new but there's no guarantee that the gameplay will actually be fun, especially in the long term.
Let's imagine GW2 had EQN's system instead of its scripted events, would it make a lot of difference? Or would it lead people to make train just to farm the ongoing event of the moment, with no real big difference at any point in time?
Basically I fear that despite all the devs' intent, people end doing in EQN what they're already doing in any other mmo, with no real added value.
Watched the video they released yesterday giving a quick overview of this and it sounds pretty good really.. I liek the idea behind it quite a bit..
Still we will have to wait and see how it works out in a live game, but recently SOE seem to be doing really good things so I can see EQ:N turning out to be a great game.
I guess you got a couple choices here... Do I wanna.....
believe the hype?
notice that big names are leaving SOE like rats from a sinking ship and wonder why?
This will be interesting is nothing else.
Ok, I'm curious as to how many of the above posters have actually played the original EQ? They didn't say they were tossing out the old lore or names, just re-imagining it. Kinda hard to have dragons without having the MOTHER of all dragons in the story.
And if you question the whole idea of influence, then you never, EVER played the original EQ where race, class, religion and actions all influenced who you could talk to, buy from, and NOT get killed by. I never knew the number of factions out there because there was too many to count. I still remember my first trip to Kaladim as a half elf warrior and wondering why I was KOS. Turns out my choice of diety (Rallos Zek) was a bad idea. It sucked, but I was able to fix it. Nothing was ever etched in stone with influence, but it played a HUGE part in the game.
I think what you are predicting is likely to happen on some scale. Rifts sounded Amazing until I played the game and realized it was the public quests from Warhammer with some random placement thrown in. I imagine that you can flip back and forth between the map and try to affect the zone control influence, but it looks like when it is done in real time it is pretty slow, and might take a whole lot of players to accomplish.
That could be a good thing for guilds though.
But if it's too subtle and requires large numbers of player coordinating to work, it will be a zergy feature not worth bothering with in small groups.