I never pay attention to all the hype a game creates.

Regardless of the eventual success or failure of a game - I do pay attention to the hype that gets created around it and so should anyone who wants to sell their games. Successful marketing can make shite smell good...until that is people have bought and played with it.

I saw both Miguel Cepero's work and this other guy's work on voxels a year ago, and subscribed to their RSS feeds, but dismissed their software as nothing more than hobby projects that would never go mainstream. With SOE using Cepero's engine, it is pretty incredible how much I was wrong.

The stuff that had me interested, if they pull if off right, is more meaningful exploration (the idea of going out to explore to unlock classes/abilities), exploration of underground areas that will occasionally be rebuild, procedurally, from what I understood, and the long term quests (or whatever they called them) that can be participated by everyone, and take months to complete.

If their AI is actually able to study the world on a large scale (i.e. pick different locations to camp to ambush people), and isn't just following a pre-scripted 'go to point A. If its 'bad' then go to point B' stuff, then it could lead to totally different worlds on different servers, which would be cool. I mean, in a recent example, GW2 was supposed to have a similar system, but the AI was just running one pre-scripted (Even if branching on occasion) path, and most events cycled fairly quickly, from 10min to a couple of hours. It was an improvement, but still felt static after a while. Hopefully the EQN AI isn't just an elaborate version of that, but is actually capable of analyzing the world, not just pre-scripted conditions.

It's just a matter if they execute all their promises correctly, if at all. I hope they will, but we'll see.

I never pay attention to all the hype a game creates.

A good example of a game that fell flat on it's butt would be Guildwars 2 . Huge amount of hype about "revolutionary game style" - and it turned out to be a boring grinder, that tries to force the player to buy EXP boosts.

As far as this new EverQuest ? I'll have to wait almost a year before reading unbiased reviews.

Do you still play GW2? It's not that grindy, and you literally never have to buy an EXP boost. They're also pushing monthly story content. Honestly GW2 is probably the MMO to beat atm. No monthly fee, monthly content that actually expands the world for free, multiple pvp modes, etc.

@way2lazy2care

1: I dare you to start a new character, and ** NEVER ** repeat any of the quests or events.

2: I dare you to find a race who has a unique "personal story line" after level 25.

3: I dare you to find 5 "heart quests" in the same zone that have you do something unique.

4: I dare you to level up ( with out grinding ) in your own race's area - with out leaving to a different race's area.

@way2lazy2care
1: I dare you to start a new character, and ** NEVER ** repeat any of the quests or events.
2: I dare you to find a race who has a unique "personal story line" after level 25.
3: I dare you to find 5 "heart quests" in the same zone that have you do something unique.

4: I dare you to level up ( with out grinding ) in your own race's area - with out leaving to a different race's area.

Hey, everybody, keep on topic. This topic is about EverQuest Next. This topic is not about GW2, no matter how shitty or uhmahzinng it is.

If you just do zone completion you can easily do 3 characters without even repeating zones except maybe the one with arah. I wouldn't consider zone completion grinding. You're doing a ton of stuff. Compare that with world of warcraft where you literally stand in a maybe square kilometer for hours on end; that's grinding. You can even get 30 levels from crafting, and it's by far the least grindy crafting system I've used. If you have all the materials you can craft to max in under 2 hours.

Eh, what?? Since when is World of Warcraft grindy? I agree that Guild Wars 2 isn't very grindy either, but compared to World of Warcraft it looks like an old-school Korean MMO. Just think of how annoying it is to get laurels in GW2 versus badges of valor in WoW. In Mists of Pandaria there are so many ways to get valor badges that it's almost a sin to grind the same content over and over. If I feel like playing solo, I can think of about 5 daily quest hubs that I have unlocked (there are way more than that in Mists of Pandaria but I haven't unlocked them) all with varying quests so it's always a little different. Or I can go to the Barrens to support the rebellion against Garrosh and do the dynamic events with other players. (Yes! I said dynamic events in WoW.) If my friends are online I can do very quick mini-dungeons called "scenarios" that take 15 minutes and don't even require a healer and a tank. (But unlike Guild Wars 2's... questionnable dungeon design, if you actually *want* to tank or to heal, you can and you will be very helpful.) Or you can do heroic dungeons, LFR, world bosses, etc. And best of all, if I can't play one day, I can still get my rewards the day after because valor badges are a weekly deal rather than a daily one.

By the way, I don't hate Guild Wars 2, and in fact I think it's a much better MMO than even World of Warcraft for everything except dungeons and raids. Personally I'm a group PvE player so I prefer World of Warcraft by a long shot despite Guild Wars 2's strength, but for casual players I think that Guild Wars 2 is a much better value because they don't usually care about raids and hardcore PvE/PvP.

To try and steer this interesting discussion towards the topic, here's a different perspective:

I don't play games for the pve or for the dungeons/raids whatever. I play mostly to explore and see new and interesting stuff. I played the shit out of GW2 until I had been in every area, done almost every dungeon (they all have more than one path, and I didn't do all the paths), and explored the WvWvW till I was reasonably satisfied. Most of the time I ran around trying to get to places that weren't special, except that they seemed hard to get to. I also played WoW for a bit, and I kind of enjoyed the immersive things you could do. The relatively new archaeology profession was one of my favorites.

Both worlds were huge, but sadly, both offer little mystery in terms of exploration. Sure the decor was cool to see, as were new mobs (occasionally killing them). But both worlds were made to feel small - in GW2 thanks to the instant-teleport, and in WoW thanks to the flying mounts. I mean, there was little challenge to explore when you could just teleport around or fly over all the areas. Not to mention neither game had that much besides killing stuff.

That's one thing I'm hoping they do in EQN - exploration. Fully destructible terrain could add new ideas - like say treasure maps that point to places you must dig. The deep cave system they showed in their video would also be something interesting to explore, especially since they say it will procedurally regenerate on occasion. So, the caves could hold something new for me to run around in, and see what cool new things spawned (treasures, or unique mobs or something). Maybe I'm hoping for too much, but there's a ton of things they can do with it.

There's gotta be a nice comfy middle ground between the total roller-coaster standard mmo experience, and the completely free, yet having little uniqueness game (like minecraft). Something that gives you freedom, but can have a sense of mystery and uniqueness to it. I'm hoping that EQN hits that spot, because I've been running out of things to explore lately :) Of course it's going to be a while, and they may not do anything like that - well, I've still got some hope (and other games still to see, like Wildstar)

That's one thing I'm hoping they do in EQN - exploration. Fully destructible terrain could add new ideas - like say treasure maps that point to places you must dig. The deep cave system they showed in their video would also be something interesting to explore, especially since they say it will procedurally regenerate on occasion. So, the caves could hold something new for me to run around in, and see what cool new things spawned (treasures, or unique mobs or something). Maybe I'm hoping for too much, but there's a ton of things they can do with it.

Having seen what Miguel has created by himself with Voxel Farm (voxel engine powering EQN), I -know- the devs havent shown the coolest parts yet. EQN should be able to procedurally generate not only caves and terrain, but entire cities and each with unique architecture according to their construction rules. Miguel has shown some very interesting demo's on his site showing the core tech off. He's even hinted at some tech that the EQN devs have built off from his engine that is more impressive than that... But we'll see in time I guess ;)