EQ Never

Ok so instead of going around and around the same arguments, using the limited info we have.... Here's what I think EQ Next will be. I may be hoping for too much here but if SOE had some real balls, this is what they would make:

EQ Next, the fantasy EVE/Minecraft hybrid of our dreams:


Crafting will be a massive part of the game, far bigger than it was in early EQ, and taking heavy inspiration from Minecraft. Most of the gear people wear and weapons they wield will be made by the players themselves, with good in game tools to truly make your own item. Even occasionally uber items you loot from boss mobs, will be able to upgraded by crafters. But the game will be more about collecting resources than it is farming Yaks and FBSS's. Like Minecraft, the resources are all out in the world and there are obvious dangers to recover them. There will be rocks and gems to quarry, and there will be various types of trees (Oak, Elm, etc) which are not only part of the game world but can be chopped down and harvested. These can grow back over time. But the tree will take time to chop down and then chopping it up and getting the stuff back to town will be dangerous and will need 'adventurers' to assist. So it will be like EQ in that you get a group together and go to Crushbone or the Derv Camp 1 or whatever. But when you are there, the adventurers get busy fighting the enemies for XP, but they also keep them away from people (either within your group or some others) who will be harvesting materials from the area. They might even pay the group to protect them while they harvest. At the end of the session you all hurry back to town with all your materials, and the crafters will make new swords and shields and whatnot, and sell them to the players for a discount, and sell the remainder to other players for a good profit. The variety of items will be almost infinite and will be totally customizable by the player, similar to Vanguard. So I can make Qwerty's Buckler of Dexterity and then sell it, and someone else could have Bob's Buckler of Agility etc. which is also lighter weight and better for Clerics who maybe don't have the strength a Warrior would have etc. NPC's wont be too useful to the average player, they will be more about selling recipes and moulds to the crafters. Not only will crafters want to make the best items they can, but they will also desperately be looking for designs for flashy looking items. Every player wants to look special, so when all your friends are happy with their new Steel Longsword, you will show up with a sparkling curved Cutlass of Lightning. The adventurers will strongly desire that sword from a crafter, but the crafter will strongly desire the design that can create the sword too.

The second aspect is the Eve influence. Again I suspect it will work similar to Vanguard, but better. In Vanguard you can make your own house and this acts as storage but it's also somewhere you can teleport back to and then conveniently sell your junk or whatever. Guilds can get together and have big guild halls with crafting benches and whatnot in there. I suspect that EQN will work like this but take it further. There will be high costs involved in getting these buildings but the rewards will be greater. A guild hall can vary in size with small ones for little guilds, but all the way to amazing things that act like a town from EQ. In other words, there might be a few main NPC towns on release but many of the towns will actually be player run hubs. It will have a bank, merchants for food and water, merchants for armor etc, and it will have smithy, bag makers and whatever else. Other players can maybe use this 'town' and maybe the guild who created it will take a small cut from each transaction. But building this huge guild hall with be a massive effort, all the stone and all the wood, it's something like building your city in Age of Empires. It could take months of quarrying and tree chopping, and then craftsmen will have to actually build it. There may even be a risk from mobs, and maybe players and/or guards will need to protect it - or maybe lose it.

But there will players who have various roles as well or instead of adventuring. For example if you have a lot of money, you could become a money lender where you provide loans to people, with interest, and maybe once you become really rich you can set up your own bank, maybe in someone elses guild hall/town. Traders will congregate in places similar to EC Tunnel, or will travel around with their stalls and sell things they have bought cheaply somewhere else, for a profit. Blacksmiths can travel around and sell their wares the same way, aswell as tailors, jewelers and whatever else. They may even spend a lot of time on this, again like Vanguard, where you can be a full time crafter if you want, or a full time trader, or a full time adventurer or try to do multiple things as best you can. Like early EQ, NPC merchants wont have much of use, mostly terrible prices for crap gear. Like Eve, the world will mostly be full of real life traders. People who made their own items or are selling something they got a new upgrade for, that will fill the world with trade.

There may be PVP servers, but on the regular servers there will be scope for villainy. Guilds will be more advanced in structure, like Eve, and there will be a CEO equivalent and they will have various officers. Most guilds will be the white knight types, but others wont. Every game has those snooty asshole guilds, and in EQ Next I suspect they might be able to dominate various things, similar to Shadowbane. So perhaps there is one dungeon similar to Unrest which is the main source of bronze to make Bronze Armor. And every new warrior would love some Bronze Armor because it's better than their crappy raw hide and yet cheaper than the high level steel plate. But Douchebag Guild built their guild hall on the doorstep of this dungeon and are poopsocking their way through cornering the market by farming the hell out of the place and selling the materials at a high price because they are the only ones who can spawn nearby etc.

But maybe some other guild will be have found a source somewhere else to make Steel Plate, and maybe the two guilds will have to come to an arrangement to share. Maybe some partnerships or alliances like this will become extremely powerful and profitable. Maybe the immature assholes who can't cope with the concept of sharing will end constantly bickering their way in to obsolescence while everyone else is busy exploring the rest of the world and they find a source of Rubicite instead...

If I am being especially wishful, the majority of the world would be under the rule of law, but perhaps there could be some distant areas which are lawless, and in these areas anything goes. - ie, full PVP amongst rival guilds, with high risks but high rewards too. A place for the griefers and poopsockers of the world to get their lulz by one upping each other and being little bitches to each other, yet basically out of the way of the average player.

There will be quests for newbies like modern EQ has, but I think the game will be light on quests, more like early EQ was. Players will mostly progress by just hunting and going to dungeons and killing mobs and hunting down rare nameds.

If I am being wishful... they may even have some kind of procedural content generation, similar to both Minecraft and Eve and also LDON. But I wont speculate on that now.

Draegan_sl said:

Those aren't features those are small design elements. WOW has armor loss which equates to currency loss. EQ has xp loss which equates to time loss. It also has gear loss which leads to high time loss. WOW's penalty doesn't prevent players from continuing to play, but provides zero incentive to avoid death other than wasting time to get back to where you were. EQ's penalty potentially prevents players from continuing to enjoy playing the game due to either being stuck not having a ress or losing a corpse. This prevents players from logging off and keeping them in game. There is definitely a middle ground though, but people don't like that.

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Who doesn't like it? Vanguard had middle grounds galore. If you die you leave a tombstone with some stuff on, but you also respawn with anything that was bound to you, so fighting your way back is far easier than it was in EQ because you aren't naked. But there is also the altar which not only means that you never have too far to run, but the tombstone is just too hard to get back to, or you just REALLY don't feel like it, you can just summon the tombstone straight to the altar.

If you tinkered with the xp losses etc, I would be happy with this.

Draegan_sl said:

People like just camping one mob over and over. But I think that's boring gameplay and not interesting at all. If you can someone create the slow pace gameplay of camping one spot, but make overall gameplay engaging I'm all for it. I don't see that solution.

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EQ already did exactly what you just said. It's slow paced camping one spot, but the overall gameplay made it engaging because of a few things. Firstly, to maximize your time spent camping that one item, it was generally essential to have the group pulling mobs from nearby to give you a supply of XP, so aren't just there for a chance of an item. But in many dungeons, this wasn't 100% safe. The puller might get jumped on the way back to the group, or the group might be careless and not time things and end up pulling 4 mobs just as your big bad named spawns.

Secondly, the items in EQ were so ZOMFG important, that it was far from boring for most people. Yeah if you are being a grump, you can see it as being sat in a room for 5 hours straight. But from the perspective of the average player, they were sat in an exciting and dangerous dungeon waiting for their amazing Flowing Black Silk Sash.

People complained about the camping mechanic in EQ, so WoW's solution was replace it with dungeon crawls. And then every game ever since, has just gone with the dungeon crawl idea. The problem is that the dungeon crawl seems great the first few times, but after a while it just becomes boring and repetitive. And yet there are only a limited number of dungeons too. Camping an item in EQ was repetitive too but at least there was a massive number of rooms. In Lower Guk alone there was the BR, Ass, Gargs, Sage, Exe, Frenzy, Hand, GL, AM, King, Eye, etc.. Each place had its own feel and challenges and that was just in one dungeon.

To me, EQ's was is the clear winner, it just needs to be jazzed up a bit, and seeing as EQ was old and primitive and low budget, it shouldn't be hard to do that today.