Evercraft Online - Minecraft meets Everquest

Palum

what Suineg set it to
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Enchanter.

My review is:
Voxel Everquest.

Yea, isn't EQ still live even if Daybreak sucks? I kinda don't get it if you clone rather than are inspired by.

I kinda want an alternate timeline game where MMOs retained their gen 1 charm and game design concepts but acquired some of the UI/UX advancement and resolved some areas that were serious problems for retention, then just print content and let people enjoy it.
 
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GuardianX

Perpetually Pessimistic
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Ok so here's my feedback. I'm ignoring some stuff that is basically just bugs or unfinished.

The good:
Gfx, engine, general concept, world, theming, music

The bad:
Some EQ nostalgia design decisions (Full inv and eqp loot on death, complete lack of tooltips or game engine transparency, ridiculous starting inventory size are personal examples), lack of compass or any direction finding or dead reckoning that I could find, how vertical movement works (Minecraft layer pop, swimming)

The ugly:
UI/UX is really bad and needs a lot of work. It's exhausting trying to play the game.

and of course

"Body Type"

Because it isn't 2023 if you don't know how biology works.

rolling-eyes.gif


Overall, it's enjoyable but I think you can evoke the spirit of an old school MMO with concepts like punishment for death, skills that level on use, no encyclopedia or exclamation points, etc. without making it unapproachably "old". Some of the design decisions here are just copy EQ #nochanges but it's been 25 years. I want a restomod classic car, not an actual classic car.

I also worry about the success of a group focused game that's closely aligned with a core group of older players that don't have the same amount of time to just idle in tunnels or cities or whatever.

A game to watch to see where it goes.

No payment model detail aside I'm impressed. I wanna play more and an updated engine for a stylized EQ is interesting on my end...I dunno how well this will play in the market though.

I wanna see what the people at lantern do with EQ personally. but this is a very strong alternative from the TLP grind, even better if it's not fucked in pricing.
 
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EnigmaFactory

Golden Knight of the Realm
10
25
Ok so here's my feedback. I'm ignoring some stuff that is basically just bugs or unfinished.

The good:
Gfx, engine, general concept, world, theming, music

The bad:
Some EQ nostalgia design decisions (Full inv and eqp loot on death, complete lack of tooltips or game engine transparency, ridiculous starting inventory size are personal examples), lack of compass or any direction finding or dead reckoning that I could find, how vertical movement works (Minecraft layer pop, swimming)

The ugly:
UI/UX is really bad and needs a lot of work. It's exhausting trying to play the game.

and of course

"Body Type"

Because it isn't 2023 if you don't know how biology works.

rolling-eyes.gif


Overall, it's enjoyable but I think you can evoke the spirit of an old school MMO with concepts like punishment for death, skills that level on use, no encyclopedia or exclamation points, etc. without making it unapproachably "old". Some of the design decisions here are just copy EQ #nochanges but it's been 25 years. I want a restomod classic car, not an actual classic car.

I also worry about the success of a group focused game that's closely aligned with a core group of older players that don't have the same amount of time to just idle in tunnels or cities or whatever.

A game to watch to see where it goes.
haha. Fun to see a review. A lot of what you are getting at is very fair and some is assumptions based on where we are at. I think the game belies how truly early we are. Most base systems have been built "EQ" even though the end goal may be our own interpretation or entirely different. We're just starting to bring in our unique flavor with the Collectibles, Crafting, highly scripted Quests and Abilities, Classes, and other elements to the world design. A lot of what you describe as "old" is total fair and will 100% be revamped. Like how does a non-EQ person know to get the Abilities? Or how much sense does medding spells like this make to modern player? We have ideas and will be working on all of that as well. We are also all older and have varying degrees of different responsibilities. We have a focus on finding was to streamline the experience while not eroding the core tenent of a large apathetic world.

That's all to say, thanks for checking it out and the feedback. Hope you'll do so again and see what you think of our vision as it becomes more apparent.

Also to everyone: response has been awesome and server running good. We are are yolo'ing into the night and tomorrow if you want to play, still plenty of time!

discord.gg/evercraftonline
 
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EnigmaFactory

Golden Knight of the Realm
10
25
No payment model detail aside I'm impressed. I wanna play more and an updated engine for a stylized EQ is interesting on my end...I dunno how well this will play in the market though.

I wanna see what the people at lantern do with EQ personally. but this is a very strong alternative from the TLP grind, even better if it's not fucked in pricing.
FYI - If you didn't know, many of us are in or actively contribute (and all have fan projects) to Lantern including sharing the same lead artist :)
 
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Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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Monk ladies have their nipples burned away in a ritual to the plastic god Barbietar
mnk.png


Good fun! I tried a few classes out and punched spiders and died to squeaky rats and such. Wizard had some good stuff at level 1!

Artwise I've never liked minecraft, and only managed to play maybe an hour. The world I think can look really good though. Eco manages to mix block worlds and polygonal characters and vehicles / machines and it looks pretty good. Your town buildings look great, and the forest and such. Very charming.
 
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Palum

what Suineg set it to
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haha. Fun to see a review. A lot of what you are getting at is very fair and some is assumptions based on where we are at. I think the game belies how truly early we are. Most base systems have been built "EQ" even though the end goal may be our own interpretation or entirely different. We're just starting to bring in our unique flavor with the Collectibles, Crafting, highly scripted Quests and Abilities, Classes, and other elements to the world design. A lot of what you describe as "old" is total fair and will 100% be revamped. Like how does a non-EQ person know to get the Abilities? Or how much sense does medding spells like this make to modern player? We have ideas and will be working on all of that as well. We are also all older and have varying degrees of different responsibilities. We have a focus on finding was to streamline the experience while not eroding the core tenent of a large apathetic world.

That's all to say, thanks for checking it out and the feedback. Hope you'll do so again and see what you think of our vision as it becomes more apparent.

Also to everyone: response has been awesome and server running good. We are are yolo'ing into the night and tomorrow if you want to play, still plenty of time!

discord.gg/evercraftonline

Yea that's good to hear. Like one of the things... why can't the settings menu be escape instead of f8. IDK is stuff like that value add? Recently I played AC again via emulator and this is the stuff that drives me nuts, e.g. you can't right click sell at a vendor because they hadn't invented that yet. That type of thing you don't remember until you do...

If you want detailed UI/UX feedback I have probably pages of notes I could make...

All that aside there's a spark of fun here that wasn't in something like Crowfall after years of development with that game for example. I do wonder if the MC aesthetic is enough to get more than just people who know about Minecraft? I don't think MMOs will ever mainstream again but can still have healthy pops I would think.

I could probably do an entire interview worth of questions with you guys just out of curiosity, but maybe if it is this early you truly don't even know what you want to do with everything yet.
 
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EnigmaFactory

Golden Knight of the Realm
10
25
Yea that's good to hear. Like one of the things... why can't the settings menu be escape instead of f8. IDK is stuff like that value add? Recently I played AC again via emulator and this is the stuff that drives me nuts, e.g. you can't right click sell at a vendor because they hadn't invented that yet. That type of thing you don't remember until you do...

If you want detailed UI/UX feedback I have probably pages of notes I could make...

All that aside there's a spark of fun here that wasn't in something like Crowfall after years of development with that game for example. I do wonder if the MC aesthetic is enough to get more than just people who know about Minecraft? I don't think MMOs will ever mainstream again but can still have healthy pops I would think.

I could probably do an entire interview worth of questions with you guys just out of curiosity, but maybe if it is this early you truly don't even know what you want to do with everything yet.

That's awesome. Yeah, might request that one day because I like what I've read and you've been really thorough. To be super candid though, as I was getting at above, the vast majority will likely be redundant. We aren't setting out to make an EQ clone. We've all been designing and redesigning our dream MMO since we were teens. This is the stages of development. We've implemented the core systems we needed and are now just starting to implement, flesh-out, and polish the things that make us different. That interview honestly sounds fun, but likewise, we're not sharing much on our broader design because we want to build out our vision first and foremost. This test was to review performance of our new C# server. The feedback we receive often lacks the context of the overall design and people assume they are interacting with decisions instead of scaffolding. When more of that is apparent, the quality of the feedback (and my willingness to entertain it) will improve undoubtedly.

Monk ladies have their nipples burned away in a ritual to the plastic god Barbietar


Good fun! I tried a few classes out and punched spiders and died to squeaky rats and such. Wizard had some good stuff at level 1!

Artwise I've never liked minecraft, and only managed to play maybe an hour. The world I think can look really good though. Eco manages to mix block worlds and polygonal characters and vehicles / machines and it looks pretty good. Your town buildings look great, and the forest and such. Very charming.

This is hilarious! We'll take a look at that. That's a couple of unfourtante features to be lacking! Glad you gave it a go and enjoyed. Don't tell, but I'm also not much of a voxel fan. Our choice has a lot to do with knowing we will be in a content arms race from the moment this goes live so have some advantages of resolution and mature tooling is a real boon.

It's been super fun. Really appreciate FoH friends checking it out and the awesome experience reviews. We take it all into consideration. Especially the nipples.
 
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Hatorade

A nice asshole.
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It is really fun, a full group would be good times for sure. Once no more progress wipes I can spend a lot of time with this game.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
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Ok so here's my feedback. I'm ignoring some stuff that is basically just bugs or unfinished.

The good:
Gfx, engine, general concept, world, theming, music

The bad:
Some EQ nostalgia design decisions (Full inv and eqp loot on death, complete lack of tooltips or game engine transparency, ridiculous starting inventory size are personal examples), lack of compass or any direction finding or dead reckoning that I could find, how vertical movement works (Minecraft layer pop, swimming)

The ugly:
UI/UX is really bad and needs a lot of work. It's exhausting trying to play the game.

and of course

"Body Type"

Because it isn't 2023 if you don't know how biology works.

rolling-eyes.gif


Overall, it's enjoyable but I think you can evoke the spirit of an old school MMO with concepts like punishment for death, skills that level on use, no encyclopedia or exclamation points, etc. without making it unapproachably "old". Some of the design decisions here are just copy EQ #nochanges but it's been 25 years. I want a restomod classic car, not an actual classic car.

I also worry about the success of a group focused game that's closely aligned with a core group of older players that don't have the same amount of time to just idle in tunnels or cities or whatever.

A game to watch to see where it goes.
Tooltips are for pussies. Kthx.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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That said, I really like the idea of a sprawling Sebilis/Guk type dungeon that instead of being a static thing it uses the features of Minecraft to keep rebuilding itself along a set of algorithmic/procedural constraints. Within a persistent world while keeping the overworld more static.

Not sure how it would work in reality but in my head it sounds really badass. I know its possible just not sure it would work as well as I am thinking.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Let a man be an asshole sometimes ok?
 
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Hatorade

A nice asshole.
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That said, I really like the idea of a sprawling Sebilis/Guk type dungeon that instead of being a static thing it uses the features of Minecraft to keep rebuilding itself along a set of algorithmic/procedural constraints. Within a persistent world while keeping the overworld more static.

Not sure how it would work in reality but in my head it sounds really badass. I know its possible just not sure it would work as well as I am thinking.
Yeah I wonder how mob spawns would work with changing elevations and the like. I can see a bunch getting stuck in walls and spawning underground.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Yeah I wonder how mob spawns would work with changing elevations and the like. I can see a bunch getting stuck in walls and spawning underground.

But they wouldn't if you tie the spawning vector to the room itself. You'd just need to order the application such that X mob spawns in Y room and you build Y room before you spawn it. Pathing beyond a specific leash would be absolute AIDS to deal with no doubt about that.

Programmatically you would just want to tie everything with a set of mobs to a series of rooms which would create its own problems of leashing... kind of a geofencing of sorts but it would make it a lot easier as you are just rearranging the series of rooms that Frenzied Ghouls spawn in.

I mean tons of problems here as the dungeon superstructure would still need to be somewhat coherent and it wouldn't be completely absurdly random but using Guk as an example one day the Live Frog Fort would be where you'd expect the Ghoul Lord to be and the hand room is instead in the Minotaur pit.
 

EnigmaFactory

Golden Knight of the Realm
10
25
Why? Like seriously what does it take away to at least say like "wrap yourself in shadow magic, improving your natural armor"?
Spell Scrolls hover tooltips, Spells in Book, and Abilities window have lore-grounded descriptions like that, but there are certainly some missing or yet-to-be-done so perhaps you encountered one like that. We fully understand people want transparency and information. We also have a desire to present a more intimate experience forcing people to slow down and pay more attention. We totally understand that's not for everyone and we will tweak to the appropriate levels, but we've much rather start too opaque then to start with a WoW tooltips with all the algorithms spelled out. Of course people so inclined might research and share that information and meta-seek, but we also think we can offer a compelling experience to a base that's not interested and would rather approach the world from an exploration lens.

That said, I really like the idea of a sprawling Sebilis/Guk type dungeon that instead of being a static thing it uses the features of Minecraft to keep rebuilding itself along a set of algorithmic/procedural constraints. Within a persistent world while keeping the overworld more static.

Not sure how it would work in reality but in my head it sounds really badass. I know its possible just not sure it would work as well as I am thinking.
Love that so much. Couple of my favorite dungeons. We're really excited to show off our big first dungeon. Currently we have no building dyanmics and don't intend to ever support free-building, but we have lots of ideas for "dynamic pockets" or layers that can be used for gating / horizontal progression, and be enriched by the classes. Many abilities require or are augmented by the presence of certain voxel types. In the future, the voxels themselves may react to the Abilities in turn. Of course, as you touched on in your follow-up very astutely, lots of technical hurdles to consider while getting even to the simplest of "destructible wall" style implementation. Will be a fun (voxel) bridge to work across!
 
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Palum

what Suineg set it to
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Spell Scrolls hover tooltips, Spells in Book, and Abilities window have lore-grounded descriptions like that, but there are certainly some missing or yet-to-be-done so perhaps you encountered one like that. We fully understand people want transparency and information. We also have a desire to present a more intimate experience forcing people to slow down and pay more attention. We totally understand that's not for everyone and we will tweak to the appropriate levels, but we've much rather start too opaque then to start with a WoW tooltips with all the algorithms spelled out. Of course people so inclined might research and share that information and meta-seek, but we also think we can offer a compelling experience to a base that's not interested and would rather approach the world from an exploration lens.


Love that so much. Couple of my favorite dungeons. We're really excited to show off our big first dungeon. Currently we have no building dyanmics and don't intend to ever support free-building, but we have lots of ideas for "dynamic pockets" or layers that can be used for gating / horizontal progression, and be enriched by the classes. Many abilities require or are augmented by the presence of certain voxel types. In the future, the voxels themselves may react to the Abilities in turn. Of course, as you touched on in your follow-up very astutely, lots of technical hurdles to consider while getting even to the simplest of "destructible wall" style implementation. Will be a fun (voxel) bridge to work across!
Yea I agree, I think there is a happy medium where you can be descriptive without doing the ratings or scores nonsense. I do compare it to something like DnD where it's like ok str is how much damage you do and an average human is 8-10, so dang 16 is pretty strong. It doesn't need to say "increases weapon damage by 8.7%".

I am curious to see dungeons and all that. Aside from the low level issues with res and recovery, it seems like sprawling procedural Minecraft style dungeons would be fun.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Love that so much. Couple of my favorite dungeons. We're really excited to show off our big first dungeon. Currently we have no building dyanmics and don't intend to ever support free-building, but we have lots of ideas for "dynamic pockets" or layers that can be used for gating / horizontal progression, and be enriched by the classes. Many abilities require or are augmented by the presence of certain voxel types. In the future, the voxels themselves may react to the Abilities in turn. Of course, as you touched on in your follow-up very astutely, lots of technical hurdles to consider while getting even to the simplest of "destructible wall" style implementation. Will be a fun (voxel) bridge to work across!
Well I am a career developer 10+ years deep in the game now. I would be happy to assist in this in whatever way I could, when I could.

I truly appreciate your contributions to the genre though sir!
 
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Kithani

Blackwing Lair Raider
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That said, I really like the idea of a sprawling Sebilis/Guk type dungeon that instead of being a static thing it uses the features of Minecraft to keep rebuilding itself along a set of algorithmic/procedural constraints. Within a persistent world while keeping the overworld more static.

Not sure how it would work in reality but in my head it sounds really badass. I know its possible just not sure it would work as well as I am thinking.
Did you just reinvent the film "Cube"
 
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