EQ Never

slippery_sl said:

I mean when your company promotes things like this, it's no wonder it's in the toilet.

Military Strategy and Community Management. : EQNext

If I did community management for a company and did something like that I'd expect to be fired on the spot. No second chances, no explanations, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

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Just sounds like a rehash of some of the stuff Koster used to peddle.

Well they have done likely zero final art with their voxels, they've just been building the engine all this time.

All their combat models, enemies, class mechanics, prop models, etc. would still work in a non-voxel world. The only thing they are throwing out is the destructibility and random dungeons.. which doesn't seem like a huge loss given how much world is required to make it look good anyways.

They could keep all the sandboxy elements and not have destructibility and it would still work.

Any contacts at DBG would be stupid to reveal info.. If it came out somehow, they'd be fired.

There's no way DBG will cancel EQN.. It's too important to them. It's going to have to be the cornerstone game once H1Z1 starts to wane. Frankly, the longer they take, the better. The longer it takes, the less chance they're shoving something out the door unfinished.

The real issue with the destructible world is pathing. You can do it in a single-player game, but it's just not possible when you have to send out that constantly regenerated pathing data to every client in a zone. It becomes a gigantic bandwidth and latency nightmare.

Now I'm imagining enemies being trapped in pits and the inevitable "You have been summoned" on every enemy patch.

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zzeris_sl said:

From what I've been reading...this is the level of Pantheon in many people's eyes and that's not far above vaporware.

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Okay, except they have professionals, a studio with a lot of hardware and staff that can get shit done, a lot of assets and design docs, etc. Pantheon has nothing of all these things.
Now, don't get me wrong, it may be vaporware, but I think DBG gave a thought or two about purchasing SoE before paying cash for vapor, I believe they had a good idea about what was usable and what was shit in a can. They cleared up up the house, including the same prominent figures that were always considered by this community "useless" or something close to that definition.

As I said, I think they went completely silent and people left in the office received orders and are forced to shut the fuck up about every little thing involving their games, unless they want to look for a new job (at the very least). They'll probably abandon voxels, but maybe not, I'm not sure how many tech gurus and engineers they are left with from those who originally worked on this project that have a chance of pulling it off.

I played EQ from late 1999 to early 2004, so let's say 3 and a half years, then I played EQ2 on and off for a total of 1 year, give or take a month or two, meanwhile I played WoW for its whole existance, which is now 11 years (in Europe it was released February 11th, 2005). I feel a lot more connected to Azeroth than I was to Norrath, but I'd still buy an EQ game if it was even just half decent. They literally need to make good classes, ala Vanguard and original Norrath, possibly seamless (because immersion dictates that!) and I'd play the fuck out of it. Tank, healer, dps and suppor, so pretty much copy the old classes and give them a faster gameplay if they can't come up with anything different.

Voxels or not, if the game is decent lots of people will play it. EQN is the only "AAA"-MMO in development i can think of. Sell it as buy-to-play with the usual ingame-shop and they can make a lot of money. Will it have staying power? Probably not, but they will make their money back for sure...

Convo_sl said:

I don't get the silence and all the people leaving the project. If they reappear with a different version than promised, people are going to complain. It really is a no win situation with this now but it's largely in part to the lack of transparency they've had with the support base.

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How do you know people are leaving the project unless they've left the company completely? There's a lot of conjecture here that's been repeated as though it was fact. One of the things that was a big part of the plan before I left was to try and make teams completely fluid and flexible. If a need arose on team A, people would be shuffled to resolve that need, and then moved around once the need no longer existed. The idea of a set in stone dedicated team was being changed. With the reduced number of people at DBG, it became necessary to be more flexible in staffing.

zzeris_sl said:

Convo,

The new reality is that the AI people are gone

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This nonsense seriously needs to die. The "AI" people are gone because it was a lot of smoke and mirrors. It never worked and was nothing more than theorycrafting. Time and time again, they were asked to demonstrate their ideas in a working fashion, and couldn't deliver. What they really wanted was someone to buy the company and ideas. This is why they company folded shortly after SOE/DBG stopped working with them. They had nothing to actually show.