What I’ve learned from 15 years of MMOs and development: Why EverQuest Next has the..

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What I’ve learned from 15 years of MMOs and development: Why EverQuest Next has the potential to revolutionize the genre it established. (PART I: INTRO AND RE: INSTANCING)

...There are times that we all take shortcuts to solve immediate problems while losing sight of our goals. To the persistent world business, one of these incidents has been the modern instancing system...

...As the technological shortcomings which validated instancing originally no longer exist, it's time we put in the work and tackle the content problem; and from the sounds of it, SOE is doing exactly that in EverQuest Next. With a massive ever-changing world, the content will perpetually evolve and respond to the player's demands. When you put EverQuest Next's announced features on the table, the entire dilemma suddenly has become so simplified....

I just wrote this for my blog at: http://eqnextpvplobby.tumblr.com/

Figured you ladies and gentlemen would be all over the subject! Lots of throwbacks to original EQ. Thanks for reading.

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INTRODUCTION

In the late 90s, with EverQuest on the front lines, the world of online gaming took a turn in a direction which none of us could have ever dreamed. Amazing and sometimes cruel virtual fantasy lands were suddenly within gamer’s reach. Massively multiplayer online gaming had made the persistent virtual world possible.

As quick as it came, it all stopped. Not the subscribers, or the endless clones, but innovation in the genre seemed to screech to a halt. For 15 years since we have been watering down and polishing the same games. Core MMO gamers have been left jumping title to title, increasingly disappointed. We’ve only gotten scraps, in the form of less-than-crafty redesigns, patchwork fixes, sloppy technical design shortcuts and then no shortage of the teams with short-falling good intentions either... Until now. The world has just gotten a glance at something on the horizon which will change everything we know about MMOs: EverQuest Next.

Stepping back, I think a good place to start would be who I am and my relationship to all of this. In 1999, when I was 12, my father took me to the store to buy a game. I walked out with a copy of EverQuest and as excited as I might have been for a new game, I had no idea that a 15 year love affair (or addiction if you will) had just begun, one which would take me through the best of times and also the darkest times, quite literally. In my youth I found myself in a lot of trouble... with nothing else to turn to than Norrath. EverQuest was one of the only positive things I had going to get me through it and I would be lying if I said I didn’t owe anything to it. It is safe to say and with no exaggeration that I was raised on EverQuest.

My passion for that original EverQuest experience never dwindled. To this day, I still hop on the classic EverQuest emulators (no offense to those of conflicting interest). I try as many MMOs out as I can, always hoping for something to satisfy the void that EverQuest left.

Oh, I should mention, EverQuest also sparked my first career. I became obsessed with game development and design. When I was old enough to do so, I ran away from my troubles to lose myself in the city of Montreal. I didn’t know at the time that Montreal was about to quickly become one of the meccas of the games industry. After walking out of a few dead-end jobs, I responded to an advertisement looking for game testers, without much faith. I blew them away in the interview and in the practicals, mostly from things I had learned playing EverQuest, so they took a chance on this lost 18 year old. Since then I have climbed through the ranks of QA. I even had the privilege of working on some MMOs and other persistent worlds. This year I -- with some hesitation -- left my position at Warner Brothers Games Montreal as a QA software developer to pursue professional tattooing; but I am proud of what I was able to achieve and could not possibly replace those experiences.

I apologize for sidetracking with my story, I would just like to establish that I am writing this with passion and experience, both as a professional and an end-user. It’s not my first time writing about MMOs. Anyone who was on Brad McQuaid’s Vanguard bandwagon may rememberan article about instancing in MMOs that I wrote for the now defunct GamerGod which sparked a debate amongst a few of the big minds of the time, to name a couple: Brad McQuaid (Everquest OG) and Raph Koster (SWG fame). Today I will try again. I can only hope that I can spark that same kind of creative reaction with my blog here.

I find my angle is typical of any PvP gamer from the EverQuest/Ultima Online/Asheron’s Call generation. When I picked up my copy of Everquest in 1999, the manual’s description of the rogue class provided a url to an all rogue guild’s website for class information, The Order of the Black Rose. They inspired me with their stories to try out PvP no matter how nasty it got and soon after they became my family. I still play with some of them and others from the game. I was hooked on the rush of PvP in MMOs and to this day I have not been able to play a game which lacks it. As such I realize I am heavily biased towards the PvP community -- hence the name of my new blog: The EverQuest Next PvP Lobby.

All that we know about PvP in Everquest Next at this time is that it is going to be there and will not simply be an afterthought. This to me is a good first omen, the failure of integrating PvP into games usually comes from trying to patchwork it in after the game’s design has been spoken for. For now the PvP details will remain limited so I will try to address some concerns which may be more readily answerable...

PART I: INSTANCING

“The EQNext PvP Lobby ‏@eqnextPvPlobby 19h
@DaveGeorgeson @terryjmichaels @TaliskerDev @JButlerSOE Dont see how it could fit, but reassure us theres no instancing? Bad trend! #eqnext”

I sent that Tweet not long ago to some of the SOE team which is active within the fan community. There are times that we all take shortcuts to solve immediate problems while losing sight of our goals. To the persistent world business, one of these incidents has been the modern instancing system.

It must have made sense at the time. “How can we controllably allocate resources and provide more players with more interesting encounters simultaneously?” Great in theory, but quite contrary to everything which is beautiful about these virtual persistent worlds. Consequently our mysterious unexplored worlds have turned into grindy tedious mini-games which we must repeat until our eyes bleed from the Deja Vu. The only real competition is raiding harder and more often than the other guys. There is absolutely no prospect of adventure “in the wild” left. Fact is, instancing has always been a patchwork response to lack of content. It is not an easy task to intelligently balance content amongst a population, however it is not impossible and it has the ability to make or break a game. Too much and the world would be empty, too little and people it will be overcrowded.

As the technological shortcomings which validated instancing originally no longer exist, it’s time we put in the work and tackle the content problem; and from the sounds of it, SOE is doing exactly that in EverQuest Next. With a massive ever-changing world, the content will perpetually evolve and respond to the player’s demands. When you put EverQuest Next’s announced features on the table, the entire dilemma suddenly has become so simplified.

Allow me to explain more in detail, though I strongly suggest you YouTube the recent SOE Live EverQuest Next event for information from the source. EverQuest Next has been announced to utilize one of the biggest game worlds to date -- with rich unique content across all three dimensions! That’s right, the world goes on beneath your feet and also above your head. This is made possible by the fact that EverQuest Next will utilize a voxel based engine, which will allow players to destroy and interact with the environment in ways that have not been seen ever in the genre (if you are having trouble imagining, think Minecraft meets EverQuest). This highly interactive EverQuest world supports PERMANENT change, meaning the decisions of the community on your server can forever alter the world... and not just the map, with emergent AI and an elaborate social faction system, the AI in the world will adapt to you in ways you’ve never even considered. The world in EverQuest Next sounds to be nearly organic, much more like an ecosystem than a game that we’ve seen before.

In combination with the strong suspicion that it wouldn’t make any sense to use instanced areas in a voxel engine, I am onto a strong hunch that SOE has come to be in agreement with these ideas on EverQuest Next. Will EverQuest Next be the first game to smash the instancing standard? Let’s wait and see what SOE says...

[Tecmos Deception]

Originally Posted by limit [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

which will change everything we know about MMOs

Highly doubtful.

[eqgmrdbz]

It seems they put in a lot of stuff from some of the successful MMO, and from their experience in EQ. The changing environment and bigger world, is what Eve online does. I think what makes EVE successful, is that the whole economy is player controlled. In EVE you get some sweet drops from encounters, but these items are not game breakers, they may add maybe a 5 or 10% boost. Also players create ships and items, that are close to the best you can get from special events or encounters. SO there is never a rush to get the better item, because the item i can go buy is not that far off. It lets new players join the high tier game within a month of playing.

EQ would be better if it Incorporated some of these ideas or all. Items shouldn't be overpowering. I mean the trade skill part of EQ is a joke, you have to waste hoards amount of money to get your trade skill up, but you are never going to make a Fungi Tunic. If you do Cultural you can make decent armor, but then your customers are limited to race, so players only use it for getting their skill up.

EQ needs to have a balance for whatever you do, if you want to do Tradeskills, then you should be able to make nice pieces, that are almost as good as planar drops. No one is going to care to grind or waste time in a low level zone, if there is nothing of value, example Quillmane is a wanted mob it is always hunted. If the endgame drops are 100% better than what you can get scrounging up yourself, then all you are gonna do is RAID, to get those drops. Also once you do become a successful Raider, what else is there but to collect Plat, so you are going to sell all those raid drops for plat, to peeps that are probably never going to get a chance at them because, the end game is overcrowded.

Then you have peeps who know that they will never see the endgame, so they find something they can exploit, may it be by cheating or camping quest spawn that yield a high reward, like the Ancient Cyclops. So again there has to be a balanced if there is no balance, there is going to be only one direction to go, and everyone is going to head there like lemmings, only to hit a wall, and get discouraged.

[LordSterben]

I will read this when I'm not at work. Back when I wanted to get into game development I wrote my college psych papers on gaming-related topics. One of my papers on MMO gaming addiction helped influence some design changes in a major NCSoft game that is now dead.

Always fun to learn about the way things are coming along.

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Originally Posted by eqgmrdbz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It seems they put in a lot of stuff from some of the successful MMO, and from their experience in EQ. The changing environment and bigger world, is what Eve online does. I think what makes EVE successful, is that the whole economy is player controlled. In EVE you get some sweet drops from encounters, but these items are not game breakers, they may add maybe a 5 or 10% boost. Also players create ships and items, that are close to the best you can get from special events or encounters. SO there is never a rush to get the better item, because the item i can go buy is not that far off. It lets new players join the high tier game within a month of playing.

I would agree, they have definitely learned from what works... I could only describe it as a mashup between the original Everquest, Eve, Tera, Neverwinter and Minecraft. Maybe some Elder Scrolls. All of these games had some great systems, just not enough of them to make the real cut for me.

[Ahldagor]

darkfall with wow graphics sprinkled over eq lore. granted the reward for effort put in will likely be way higher than darkfall's. i don't see how eqnext is going to be innovative, but i might be missing something.

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Originally Posted by Ahldagor [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

darkfall with wow graphics sprinkled over eq lore. granted the reward for effort put in will likely be way higher than darkfall's. i don't see how eqnext is going to be innovative, but i might be missing something.

I have played both Darkfalls and honestly I don't see the parallel you are describing other than they are both sandbox style games. There is the player cities but honestly nothing Darkfall has ever done has even scratched the surface in comparison...

That said, Darkfall was a heartbreak. But we kind of all knew it was coming. Twice.

[Ahldagor]

Originally Posted by limit [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I have played both Darkfalls and honestly I don't see the parallel you are describing other than they are both sandbox style games. There is the player cities but honestly nothing Darkfall has ever done has even scratched the surface in comparison...

That said, Darkfall was a heartbreak. But we kind of all knew it was coming. Twice.

have you played eqnext? i'm trying to understand how you're making the comparisons is all.

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Originally Posted by Ahldagor [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

have you played eqnext? i'm trying to understand how you're making the comparisons is all.

I could ask you the same question, no? Besides that, none of the information which has been publicized about EQN is in line with Darkfall at all. Other than that they are sandbox concept games, like I said. I think if you check out the videos of the SOE Live event you'll come to find we are talking about very different creatures, that's all. I'm doing my best to try to stay on top of the available information.