EQ Never

not going to bother to read the previous 80 something pages since i realized the site came back up after the reveal.

and fuck it not going to retype my thoughts, i'm just gonna cut and paste something I posted on another forum about this game:

Of all the things they've been hyping about the game, emergent gameplay, sandbox, next level shit, etc. the only "new" or innovative things are the voxel stuff (Minecraft) and the tools for it being released in landmark.

After several reboots they decided to do something different but kept a lot of the art/animation assets, so combat is probably still going to be (it certainly looks like it from the videos) standard Action MMO combat with WoWish cartoonish exaggerated animations. So they spend the last year building the voxel stuff.

So minecraft in an MMO is neat, sure. But Landmark? After 4 years in development and nothing to show for it but that, they decided they'd follow a lot of other MMOs (including several of their own) and let players build their own content as well. but they one up'd themselves and created their own AA farm team by making minecraft servers people can build shit on and cherry picking the best shit to complete their game that they're now 3 years behind schedule on. Holy shit we're sooo far behind on EQN is being spun as "emergent sandbox!" and people are lapping it up.

I can't be the only one who sees this?

edit for more context: Seriously. I wasn't expecting much knowing that they've only been working on it's current iteration for <1 year. So they built the tools and started building the world. They outsourced the AI (Storybricks) and now they're basically outsourcing the content (Landmark). Relying heavily on procedurally generated content for "hidden dungeons/ruins/etc" and "dynamic" quests. It seems the only content their actually going to be making is the Rallying cries (public quests) which are just a handful of triggers that have to be programmed to apply when X occurs, and they only have to create those every 2-3 months. The procedurally generated dynamic quests pop up to guide players towards making X occur. Seems like only 1-2 developers would be enough to man that team.

This is an entirely different "sandbox" than expected.

edit2: If it has open world PVP or at least an open world PVP server then the sandbox they're creating may have meaning. With no levels and horizontal progression (play time = more class options available, like the only "eve" ish thing that I've seen in EQN) meaning everyone can gain access to every class so there's no reason not to at the very least, have open world pvp servers. none of this hard coded faction based shit, or instanced bg shit, but pure open world pvp. there's no balancing concerns regarding classes or levels. Really there's no reason that all servers aren't pvp other than carebears don't want it, but whatev, give me a pvp server and i'll play in this sandbox.

Otherwise, I don't see the long lasting appeal of this title. Everything new is "Hey we're busy doing lines of coke off hookers asses, would you mind making the game for us?" Like every game, in a month or 2 everything that was new and shiny will be faded, the ai will be reverse engineered to absolute predictability, and people will be playing LoL while sitting around waiting on content.