Show Some Class! : EQ2Next

Watching the EQNext reveal, the one aspect that struck a warning note for me was the class system. Forty classes to collect sounds the death-knell for character play, at least in the short term. Others have been very concerned about the abandonment of the Trinity leaving us nothing but a desolation of endless DPS, which is by a very wide margin the most boring, tedious, unfun activity in MMOs (that's my opinion, others are available. They're wrong, but they're available).

It was with some trepidation, then, that I sat down to watch the EQNext Class Panel. An hour later almost all my fears had been allayed. It might not be the way I'd prefer things to have gone, but it will fly.

Part 1

Part 2

The panel itself was interesting. It begins with five people on stage plus a roaming moderator. Of those six, three never speak at all. After a few minutes Jeff Butler sidles up with his own chair, installs himself uninvited on the end and commences to dominate proceedings. For the quiet man of the original Everquest creative team he certainly has a lot to say, almost all of which makes an enormous amount of sense. What's he been doing all these years?

Right from the start we're back to Show Don't Tell. This time it's comic books rather than novels that provide the model but the intent is the same: it's all about evoking emotion. Classes have a visual language; the way you stand, the way you hold your sword, let's everyone know what you are. NPCs work the same way. Combat moves, particle effects, animations, everything you see is intended to stand as both information and entertainment. 

This is sweet music to my ears. All the way back to the beginning, from when I first played Everquest, I couldn't understand why we needed to be told everything, why we couldn't be allowed to infer. It's taken a very long time coming but finally we might be able to look at a screen uncluttered by words and numbers and still know what's going on.

Another "innovation" that should have been there from the start is armor that covers your character effectively and convincingly. Regardless of gender or role you can go adventuring with the necessary protective gear covering your delicate flesh. Oh, if you really want to distract the orc army with a skin show apparently that's still an option, but that's all it is: an option. And about time too.

So much for appearances. What about gameplay? What about those forty classes, for a start? Well, forty is just the beginning. There will be more. Lots more. "We hope for great longevity in this product" said Jeff at one point and adding more and more classes to collect appears to be one of the mechanisms designed to hold our attention. Another is a continual evolution of strategy and tactics driven by itemization. Min-maxing is encouraged. Both Magic the Gathering and League of Legends were referenced as models for the kind drip-feed of desire to which EQNext aspires. Not having played either of them, that means little to me, but if you're going to steal, steal from the best.

There's a great question right at the very end of the Q&A, where a young kid asks how we'll collect the classes and then answers his own question. The panel were very happy and so was I. Lots of different ways is the answer. I was a lot less happy with the earlier observation that "...you don't have to roll an alt. You just have to go collect that class". That's kind of what I was afraid of, but later we learn that multi-classing is very definitely not compulsory.

Eight of the forty classes are right there at character creation and you can do all the content in the game with any one of them. Character play is safe. If you want to play all forty classes on forty separate characters, you can. That's longevity right there.

So you have your character, you're collecting your classes, how do you roll? You get eight ability slots, permed from an as-yet undefined but potentially huge selection. The audience seemed somewhat non-plussed by this, suggesting they must be EQ2 players because that's nothing more than the original Everquest system with a shiny new coat of paint. I played for years with my choice of eight from a book full of spells and it's a system that's never to my mind been bettered.

Someone asked a very pertinent question about targeting, which hadn't been mentioned. That's because there isn't any. Or not much. Most attacks aren't targeted, instead following a visual logic. If you swing a six-foot long sword with all your might at a bunch of orcs in front of you it's going to hit all of them. If you set the ground on fire under a gang of kobolds they're all going to get burned. 

The whole thrust is away from having you watch your icons for refreshes and hit your keyboard for targets, towards watching center-screen and living in the moment. If EQNext was only about combat I'd be a tad wary that could feel thin, become enervating. It's not, so it shouldn't. Combat's just one element among many and in that context fast and furious should be just fine.

Not everyone in the audience felt that way, it's fair to say, and of those who asked questions, almost no-one did. We'd been told repeatedly and forcefully that tanks and healers aren't required to do any content in EQNext, which riled up what sometimes appeared to be an entire crowd of life-long tanks. Repeated questioning brought some considerable and reassuring nuance.

We were told that all roles would be supported. We were assured that "we won't be abandoning roles". The game will both allow and reward defensive play. To the suggestion that an absence of dedicated tanks and healers would lead to the kind of chaotic scrum so familiar from GW2 we were assured that there would be personal, strategic and tactical responsibilities for everyone.

It all comes back to the Emergent AI. NPCs will be able "to figure out how you are hurting them and stop you...You will have to work together to get things done". This, combined with the assertion that NPCs powers and abilities are congruent with those of players leads me to hope that we might finally see my own holy grail of MMO combat: non-scripted fights with monsters that act like you'd imagine they would. Probably not going to happen, but we can dream.

There were a few little squibs that caught my attention. One of the class abilities mentioned was "Unsummon", which allows you to dismiss summoned pets. I've always wanted to be able to do that. Magicians in Everquest get a limited ability along those lines and it used to be one of my favorite toys. Speaking of pets, they also use the emergent AI. That opens up some delicious possibilities that will sadly never happen, like commanding your pet to attack and finding him cowering under a table with his tail between his legs. 

I came away from the panel very much re-assured that this is a class and combat system I can more than live with. Would I have preferred something closer to the original Everquest Trinity of Tank, Healer and Crowd Control? Probably. It's not 1999 any more, though and time moves on. This has the potential to be more engaging than anything I'm playing right now. Can't ask for more than that.