EverQuest 3 - What, This Again?!

I'm just going to put this down as a marker. I kind of feel I have to, for some reason, although God knows why.

MassivelyOP has a concise, if somewhat snarky, run-through of such facts as exist. If you're interested, as I'm unfortunately aware a lot of people will be, I suggest taking the thirty seconds or so it'll take to read it. (TAGN also put up an excellent post about it as I was typing this.)

The gist, for those who can't be bothered - and who could blame them after the EQNext debacle? - is that EG7 qua Daybreak Games has finally confirmed, unequivocally, that there is an intent to create a sequel to EverQuest and EverQuest II.

The project is in what they uncharmingly describe as the "ideation phase", which means they're still thinking about it. They haven't done anything yet. They don't even plan to start spending any money on it until next year, at which point they're in for around $30m, maybe more.

That doesn't sound much to make an AAA MMORPG but it does happen to be the same amount FromSoftware spent developing Elden Ring. At least, that's what CEO Ji Ham says in the presentation, although where he's getting that figure from beats me. Some sources suggest it cost more like $200m. Even the low end estimate is $50-$70m.

In any event, he's big on FromSoftware: "Those guys? Love 'em - in terms of their model." He believes their success proves that hardcore gameplay can be both mainstream and highly profitable. And he wants the proposed EQ3 to be all of those things. Especially the hardcore part.

I haven't watched the whole of the near three-hour presentation but I have skimmed a fair bit of it and it's surprisingly entertaining. Ji Ham is an even more surprisingly engaging presenter and a lot younger than I imagined. He's also very clearly a gamer, something I definitely did not expect. At one point he speaks rather wistfully about the hours he spent trying and failing to beat one of the bosses in Elden Ring.

If nothing else, I recommend listening to a few minutes from 2:18:00 onwards, when Ji Ham buys heavily into the narrative that EverQuest back in the day was a very tough game and that that's nothing to be afraid of, commercially. I don't personally go along with all of it but he's not saying anything out of line with the generally accepted view of either the franchise or the genre.

He even goes as far as to suggest that the time and effort spent trying to make the EverQuest IP (And by implication MMORPGs as a whole.) more accessible was a mistake, even if that interpretation does somewhat fly in the face of the success of World of Warcraft (For which he correctly names EverQuest as an ancestor and prime influence.) much of which can be put down to its design brief, which was in great part to be an easier and more accessible take on the successful EQ formula.

That's all in the past. Now, the future for the IP is uphill in the snow both ways. Again.

And he seems genuinely enthused by it, that's the strange part. It's like listening to a gamer as much as a businessman. Forget the uncomfortable fact that Elden Ring is a finite, single-player experience and the proposed EQ3 an open-ended, massively multiple live service title. Forget that the FromSoftware ethos, far from being any kind of universal gaming paradigm shift, is instead deeply divisive and the subject of endless, often acrimonious debate.

Even leaving Elden Ring out of it, it has to be acknowledged that the mass market credentials of self-styled "hardcore" MMORPGs are seriously tarnished following the failure of high-profile titles like WildStar and the consistent crash-and-burn meta surrounding just about every indie attempt to turn back time to the self-styled Golden Age of MMOs. But hey, props for trying!

A few years ago something like this might have given me heartburn but I just can't summon up the indignation any more. I've seen all this so many times I can barely be bothered to raise a skeptical eyebrow. This proposed game hasn't even begun development yet. Whatever anyone says about it now will be utterly irrelevant by the time it becomes publicly available, if indeed it ever does.

The timescales quoted in the presentation seem radically optimistic. Apparently the plan is to begin development in 2025 for a 2028 release. I'd be interested to know what the last AAA MMORPG to go from concept to launch in three years was. Even more interested to hear about the last one that did it successfully. 

I suppose if you start the clock running from now, you can stretch it to five years, which does sound more reasonable. Maybe the 2025 "Start of Investment" has some financial implication rather than meaning literally what it says. Maybe there are people working on the project already.

Even then, if the putative EQ3 were to hit some kind of Early Access in 2028, by then I'll be seventy years old. I will not be playing a "hardcore" MMORPG in my seventies. Even if you considered me to belong to one of the older cadres of EQ fans, I'd guess by 2028 the majority of EQ vets will be in their 40s and 50s. This game better not rely on the same kind of reaction times as Elden Ring.

It seems to me that, as I've said before, if EG7/DBG really want to publish a third iteration of EverQuest (A count, by the way, that ignores a whole bunch of titles that have used the IP, not least the PlayStation 2 exclusive MMORPG, EverQuest Online Adventures.) they really ought to think about buying Visionary Realms and having Pantheon rebadged as an EverQuest sequel, which it patently is anyway.

And that's about as much as I want to say about EverQuest 3 for now. In fact, I'd as soon forget about the whole thing altogether, at least until there's some kind of alpha or beta or Early Access that I can sign up for or buy into (Because, obviously, no matter how unsuitable it is or how far outside the target demographic I am, I'll have to at least give it a try...)

As Ji Ham rather gleefully suggests and MOP glumly acknowledges, this is a hype train no-one's going to be able to ignore. For reasons I really don't begin to understand, given that the original EverQuest was by absolutely no reasonable measure any kind of global brand, just the biggest fish in a very small pool that most people at the time didn't even know existed, the mere mention of any resurrection of the IP now seems to incite a frenzied response from gamers, most of whom surely can never have played any iteration of the IP at all, far less been there in 1999, when it all began.

At this point, the whole EverQuest phenomenon reminds me of the infamous Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig of 4 June 1976, which was attended by fewer than a hundred people but claimed as a seminal life experience by thousands. I look forward to years of listening to people droning on and on about what they imagine the new EQ will be like and throwing toddler-like tantrums when reality intrudes on their pipe dreams. Just like happened with EQNext and Landmark. Joy!

As for the plans for H1Z1... don't get me started!

EQ3 Eh? Eh? Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink, Say No More!

Wilhelm sent me a link to an EverQuest site he'd discovered, called The EverQuest Show. I think it was intended primarily as a YouTube channel, which debuted in February this year, but so far there have only been three episodes, while the website has been considerably more active. There was a new post there just today.

I've added The EverQuest Show to the blog roll but it wasn't the site itself that drew me to make this post. As I was flipping through the articles I spotted a link to an AMA with Holly "Windstalker" Longdale and three other Daybreak devs, hosted by Fires of Heaven.

It looks as though the AMA happened in May or June so it's very current. It's also very long. I read the whole thing and it took me a couple of hours. There's plenty of waffle and nonsense but also plenty of tidbits that would interest any EQ fan.

One question that crops up over and over again in different forms is whether Daybreak are working on a new EverQuest game. Holly attempts to keep a poker face on this for a while but as her answers pile up the winks and smiles give the game away, literally. Ok, metaphorically.

I've severely trimmed these but here's some of the "evidence":

Q. Since there have been some rumors going around it, Is there another EQ game in development (other than the Nantworks stuff) by DBG?

Alan VanCouvering (Lead Content Designer): Wouldn't you like to know!

Holly: ….. 

Q. Being the 20th Anniversary, what is the future of the EQ Franchise? Be specific please. Is there another game in developed or at least in the talks of being developed or are we to expect that EQ will just receive expansions and new servers each year? 

Holly: There is a future and I don’t have specifics for you. The specifics will come when we have meaningful news. 

Q. So in 2019 if I’m an old school EQ guy who loves the world (nostalgia is a hell of a drug) but I also don’t want to play 20 year old games, is there a reason to care about the franchise? Are y’all going to surprise launch an early access EQ3 or am I stuck with ignoring a mobile game?

Holly: We have spent a lot of time looking into the future and how we build this franchise up even better than we have in the past. We did some research over a year ago with all ages of gamers. It’s amazing how many young people know the name “EverQuest” because of family and other gamers. We are still relevant and considered an original. Someday soon we hope to take advantage of that global recognition and release something new. Can’t say when. Have no details. 

Q. Will daybreak ever do anything worthwhile with this IP? Specifically getting a green light to do some real development work and create an Everquest remake with the same mechanics as the original plus 2 expansions updated graphically and from an audio perspective with consoles included and cross platform play?

Holly: We will definitely do something with the IP. A strict remake? Probably not. Will it embody the EQ spirit, most likely yes.

Q. With such an iconic IP will we ever see EQ3?

Holly: 😄

Q. Now that Blizzard is showing cracks in the armor, and the MMO space is super-dry, how about you announce right here that EQ3 is in production?

Holly: Another EQ game? 😊

 In an answer to a question on EQNext, Ed Hardin III (Lead Systems Designer) said 

One of the hardest lessons we learned from Landmark/Next was to not start publicity until we are certain the promise of the game can be realized. 

From that I think we can take it we won't be hearing anything about whatever Daybreak has cooking until they're almost ready to take it out of the oven. But something is definitely cooking!

Elsewhere in the AMA there's confirmation that the mobile project NantWorks was supposedly working on, using the EverQuest IP, is still ongoing. The EQ team has some involvement, presumably advisory, but no control over what the game turns out to be.

Q. Can you give us any details at all on EQ Mobile?

Alan VanCouvering :  I don't know if anyone here knows anything about it, but it's outside our control. 

Ed Hardin III: While we (as a company) will have input into what anyone else does with EverQuest on mobile devices, we (as individuals) aren’t going to be designing it.

Holly: They are in their early days and will tell you when they are ready and confident. We are definitely involved though.

Going back to EQNext and Landmark, the team's answers confirm what I've thought for a very long time were the reasons the game never got anywhere: it was beyond the technical capacity of the company to produce, at least within the budget they had to work with.

Q. Landmark seems like a huge setback (time & financially). I spent a good chunk of time "building" in that world, but once I realized it was overtaking EQ3 production completely, I abandoned it. My drive at the time was the hope of watching EQ3 be built. Is there any regret/animosity toward going the Landmark/Voxel direction?

Alan VanCouvering: Yes, Landmark/Next cost us, but if you don't try you never know what can be done. I don't think we really regret trying, just that it didn't work out.

Q. How much of EQ: Next was real and how much of it was smoke and mirrors?

Holly: EQ Next was real, but a long way from completion when we had to walk away from it. Very tough, but the right decision at the time. There’s mountains of great work that went into that game that won’t go to waste. We aren’t done with this franchise. Not by a long bowshot.

One thing that was asked repeatedly and was shot down in flames every time was the possibility of a "Remastered" version of EverQuest. Too expensive and the resources would be better spent on a new game. Couldn't agree more.

Other topics of note (to me, at least) were:

Reverting the notorious Freeport revamp for the TLE servers (they'd like to but too time-consuming).

What happened to the Quarm special event server? (Not as popular as expected and took more dev resources than the limited interest justified).

Why isn't there a PvP server? (there is and no-one plays on it (as Wilhelm always suspected)).

Why do they keep making expansions for EQ and EQ2 that no-one plays? (Lots of people buy them).

Did the then-team know what a disaster they had on their hands with the Gates of Discord expansion (oh, yes...).

Was Brad McQuaid actually any good as a designer? (He was and remains "a driving force", "an unstoppable force").

And to finish, a couple of short ones that deserve re-quoting in full:

Q. Any thoughts on Legends style TLP servers? Premium fee on top of regular sub, DBG gets additional funding, we get real GMs and regular events? (For those who missed it, Legends was a Premium server with a much higher subscription charge than the regular game)

Alan VanCouvering: Legends was a disaster in all possible ways. I highly doubt that enough people would actually want to pay as much as we would need to ask for to run a server like that.

Holly: What Alan said. Entitlement breeds demands that no dev team could realistically meet. Doesn’t mean we won’t offer premium-type stuff, but that server was super painful as a business model and play experience for a bunch of reasons.

And my favorite of all:

Q. Why does my Clockwork Rhino mount eat all my food?

Alan: There might be a gnome living inside it. 

Ed: I can’t say there isn’t a gnome.

There's a lot more in the full thing. I recommend reading it thoroughly if you have an interest in EQ or, indeed, in how Daybreak operates these days. And thanks again to Wilhelm for steering me in the general direction of this little goldmine. If it was reported or referenced anywhere else I didn't see it.

Atlas Obscura

A couple of unrelated news items caught my attention at MassivelyOP yesterday. One was a report that Daybreak had laid off another sixty or seventy people. The other was the announcement of a major new MMO, launching before Christmas.

News of layoffs at any MMO studio isn't generally much of a surprise - worrying, maybe, but hardly unusual. I'm tempted to say the most surprising thing about this one was finding out Daybreak still had seventy people left to let go.

John Smedley flared up on Twitter with some choice quotes that look likely to come back to haunt him one day. I imagine he thought so too when he'd calmed down because they've both disappeared from his timeline, although you can read them in the linked M:OP post.

It's one thing to criticize the running of a studio and the care it takes of its employees but that criticism takes on an entirely different tone when it comes from the person directly responsible for arranging the transfer of said studio to its current owners in the first place.

The background to the story seems murky, as is usually the case in affairs of this kind. My dog in the fight is really the health and future fortunes of the current stable of games but as a longtime fan of SOE/DBG's style of MMORPG I'm also interested in what Daybreak might do next.

The good news, in so far as we know anything, is that the existing games seem to be unaffected by the latest round of redundancies. M:OP clarified the original report with some qualified reassurance: "It sounds as if the core MMORPGs are safe".

This opinion appears to have been derived by MassivelyOP directly from sources among the DBG staffers actually laid off, although the linked article from Variety does include a boilerplate quote from a DBG spokesperson: "we remain focused on supporting our existing games and development of our future titles.”.

Conversely, one of the most striking elements in the M:OP edit, the reference to "a secret game with a top IP", doesn't appear at all in the Variety story.  Indeed, on a first reading, the Variety piece appears to contradict M:OP's precis, with Variety reporting the DBG spokesperson as confirming

"“Our Austin office is not closing.""

while Massively:OP reframes that as:

"those laid off may have been working on a secret game with a top IP (at the Austin studio – now confirmed publicly by Variety)."

I guess both could be correct, if the layoffs are at Austin but Austin stays open with whoever's left still working on...whatever it is they do there... but it's a confusing picture to say the least.

What really struck me - other than the fact that Variety even knows DBG exists - is how little we know about anything major studios are up to behind the scenes. Given that MMOs take years to produce, and especially given the recent trends towards turning their development into some kind of reality show, I find it genuinely surprising to learn that there are still so many secret projects out there.

The other news story I mentioned is a case in point. ARK developers Wildcard are launching a brand-new MMO next week. Yes, next week!

If you get your MMO news from Massively:OP, as I do, you'd be forgiven for thinking the first anyone knew about this was when the trailer was shown at the Twitch Game Awards a couple of days ago. (I didn't even hear about the Twitch Game Awards until they were over, despite having a Twitch account, but leaving that aside...)

Checking YouTube, however, I see that there are several videos up for Atlas, which is what the pirate-themed survival MMO is called, going back at least four months. As my own channel has often demonstrated, if you want to hide something from the general public, you can't do better than post it on YouTube.

The Steam page for Atlas also contradicts the M:OP piece, which describes the game as "first person MMO", while the actual description on the page linked by M:OP clearly states that Atlas is

 "a massively multiplayer first-and-third-person fantasy pirate adventure" (my emphasis).

All sources agree that the game will offer a vast open world capable of holding up to forty thousand players at once, which is Massively Multiple by anyone's criteria, I'd say. Wildcard describe it as an MMO "on the grandest scale" and with claims like this, who can argue?

"Physically sail in real-time across the vast oceans with the proprietary server network technology. Explorers will voyage to over 700 unique landmasses across 45,000 square kilometers, with thousands of Discovery Zones, and ten distinct world regions..."

I'm not sure whether the part about sailing in real-time is a threat or a promise. I don't see much future in a game that requires two weeks of your life just to get from one landmass to another. I'm guessing they just mean no instant travel.

Although the game is described as a "a survival MMO", as you might expect from the makers of ARK, the Steam page makes it sound far more like a full-on sandbox. It will even have some theme-park content featuring "challenging main questlines".

If it all sounds too good to be true - and it does - then temper your excitement in the knowledge that next week's "launch" is in fact the start of a proposed two year period of Early Access. How much of the mind-boggling feature set will be in place by Christmas 2020 I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Wildcard does have an impressive record with ARK, though. I've never played it but I've read a ton about it and for all the teething troubles and complaints, most of what I read was people enjoying themselves. ARK's overall rating on Steam is "mixed" but its recent rating, from almost seven thousand votes, is "very positive", which to me suggests an Early Access project that produced a solid, successful game.

The official early-access release trailer is impressive even though you can see it's very much a work in progress. This article at PCGamer fleshes out a lot of detail about how the game might play. I'm not particularly a fan of pirate settings and I positively dislike ship-to-ship combat, but even so I'm very tempted. 

The 100GB download and the fact that my GPU might not quite meet the minimum spec is about all that's putting me off. Certainly the $30 price tag sounds reasonable and the option of playing on either PvE or PvP servers is perfect.

What I'm really left wondering, though, is what else might be out there? Who knows which studio is working on what project? We base our expectations for the genre on what we can see but so much is hidden.

We don't even know what that "top IP" Daybreak were working on was, let alone whether the layoffs mean it's been cancelled or just changed development phase. Was it an internal or an external IP? Did the last hope for EQ3 just die, or was that the rumored Planetside 3 that crashed and burned? Or was it an IP on license that we'd never even imagined DBG might be working on and so will never miss?

All we can say for sure is is there's a lot more going on than we ever know about. Until we do. And I like it that way. Long may it continue!
 

Maybe Someday : Daybreak Games, EQ2, EverQuest

Earlier this year, Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob, following on from a report on MassivelyOP, examined a Reddit post by someone who claimed to be an employee of Daybreak Games. The supposed ex-DBGer laid out a series of fairly specific predictions for several Daybreak titles, including both EverQuests. 

The provenance of the leaked information was heavily disputed at the time. The substance of the original post was quickly deleted, although it can still be read in full in a comment further down the thread, which itself is now archived and unavailable for further discussion.

Since the post went up some of the events predicted have come to pass. Both H1Z1 and Planetside2 received new maps. Just Survive closed down. While that's quite a convincing tally, the two new maps were both announced fairly soon after the leak and the death of Just Survive was widely seen as inevitable.

Still, it gives pause for thought. The predictions for EverQuest and EverQuest2 were something of a mixed blessing. The suggestion that 2018 would see the final expansions for both is particularly depressing in the light of the very high quality of Chaos Descending, which I have been playing the heck out of since it launched earlier this month and thoroughly enjoying.

On the other hand, the imagined plans for next year, EQ's 20th Anniversary, which include "a series of nostalgic raids that tie into complex quests [that] grant alternate characters powerful scaling weapons" for both games suggests not only an intent to continue supporting and servicing the two existing EverQuest titles but also a framework by which to do so.

Add to that the prospect of "Everquest 3... back in development... rebuilt from the ground up" and aiming "to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen" and the future for the franchise looks fairly rosy. Or at least a lot rosier than it could have been, given the roller-coaster ride of the last few years.

If Chaos Descending does turn out to be the last expansion EQ2 gets, at least it will be going out on a high. Well, I think it will... I'm loving it, anyway.

As a regular but somewhat casual player, I find it surprisingly hard to judge where the game is at most the of the time because much of the activity at end game is hidden in instances. Even the Public Quests, which used to bring hordes of players together in lower-level open zones, have of late been siphoned off to specific areas accessed from endgame hubs.

It's not much easier to tell how busy the game is by looking at those hubs themselves. People pass through but they tend not to hang around. Neither is there much to indicate activity at the traditional gathering places in cities; the banks, brokers and crafting stations. Those stopped mattering to most players long ago.

For most of its fourteen years, EQ2 has had a guild culture centered on extremely well-appointed Guild Halls, offering every imaginable convenience and acting as the meeting place and social center of the game for many players. Over time the options available to individuals have grown to rival those of guilds, so even players in smaller guilds or those too independent of spirit to join a guild at all can easily furnish their own instanced housing with every facility required.

Consequently there are no obvious gathering places in EQ2 where a curious observer can take a rough census of the population. EQ has Guild Halls and instanced housing but it also has the Plane of Knowledge, the Guild Lobby and The Bazaar, three non-combat zones which offer essential facilities available nowhere else in the game. You can do a headcount in those three and get a rough sense of the health of the server you're on and of the game in general.

Chaos Descending brings a small part of the Plane of Knowledge to EQ2 for the first time. Myrist, The Great Library is all that's left of PoK. It's a beautiful place and a great nostalgia trip but it makes no attempt to replicate the original's essential importance as the beating heart of the game. These last two weeks I've seen many players flitting about the halls and stacks but no-one stops to hang out and just be there the way we did al those years ago.

No, these days about the only way to judge the health of the game is by the number of iterations each new zone spins up to deal with demand and by the ratings on the Daybreak Server Status page. I'm somewhat handicapped by being fast asleep all through U.S. Primetime, so I never see the figures at their peak, but late on Saturday night on a holiday weekend yesterday there were multiple instances of every zone I ran and all the regular Live servers were at Medium or High.

These days, many MMORPG players seem almost obsessed with population figures and what they say about the supposed health of the games they play. With the genre no longer of great interest to the wider gaming public and sunsets seeming more common than launches, it's not surprising people are wary of any sign their particular favorites might be struggling.

I wonder, though, whether, we're looking at all this in quite the right light. As committed devotees of the MMORPG format, is continual growth really what we seek? And are MMORPGs really the sharks of gaming? Do they have to keep moving or die?

Take expansions. I love expansions. I love huge content drops that fundamentally alter the boundaries and baselines of the game. I'm more than happy to take a reset once a year. Heck, I cut my teeth on SOE's cycle of a genuine full expansion every six months - twelve months often seems like a long time to wait.

But is it really the best thing for the long-term health of the game itself? Expansion do have the huge benefit of attracting coverage in the gaming press for games that go ignored the rest of the time and they do create marketing opportunities to bring back ex-players. They also allow for the milking of the wallets of the people already in and playing.

Commercially, expansions make a lot of sense but to put out the puff pieces and bring in the pre-orders they have to include significant upgrades either to power or convenience: more levels, better gear, bigger numbers, faster access. Expansion that just offer "more of the same" don't get headlines and they give current players an easy out to skip a year until something more substantial comes along.

The result is creep; two flavors of it: feature and power. The former is what leads to players no longer needing to interact with each other in public spaces, as facilities that were once held in common are parcelled up and handed out as perks to individuals or guilds. The latter is why huge tracts of the world become player wastelands as the entire population crams itself into the handful of newest zones.

Over time, this in turn leads to all the increasingly half-baked solutions we've seen introduced to aging games: mentoring, mercenaries, stat-crunches, catch-up gear, welfare epics, instant Max-Level boosts and all the rest. In order to convince new players that other people really do play this game and to get returning ex-veterans into the real action with their erstwhile friends before they give up in disgust and unsubscribe, means have to be created to allow latecomers to join the critical mass of regulars at the top as fast as humanly possible.

None of which was the original vision for EverQuest or, probably, EverQuest 2. The first was certainly intended to be some kind of Virtual World, where players could live out a vicarious fantasy life in a realm of magic and mayhem. The younger game built on those foundations, offering not just an exterior landscape to explore but interior life of substance: an actual home for your surrogate to call their own, free to expand and decorate and enjoy in peace and tranquility, alone or with friends. Both of those are visions of sustainability as much as of growth.

Were Chaos Descending to prove, as predicted, to be EQ2's final expansion I'd be disappointed. I'd miss next year's. A lot. Moreover, it would be very hard, if not impossible, to see the end of expansions as anything other than the beginning of the end for the game as a commercially viable product. At some point, surely, attrition caused by lack of new content would lead to a drift down to population numbers that would no longer generate an income stream adequate to justify the maintenance costs.

But that point could be a long way off, even then. With a thoughtful approach and a well-implemented plan, the older EverQuest titles could transition gracefully into a lengthy, secure and settled retirement. If the Reddit leaks turn out to be accurate then it does seem that Daybreak at least have preparations for such an outcome well in hand.

We'll find out soon enough. The EverQuest 20th Anniversary is in March 2019. If there are announcements in the New Year telling us about nostalgic raids, complex quests and scaling weapons then we can call it a done deal. If that does happen - roll on EQ3!

Otherwise I guess it will be business as usual for another year. Everyone meet back here next  November for another ten levels.

Either way, on we go.

Blue Sky Thinking : EQ2, GW2

I was hoping that the latest GW2 update would drop early today. I wanted to take a quick look and put together some sort of "first impressions" before it was time to go to bed. Well, it did arrive at a reasonable time for me - 5pm in fact - but  unfortunately it also came with a bug that causes disconnection from the server every few seconds

As I write this, nearly two and a half hours later, there's no fix in sight and the increasingly angry thread on the forum has reached six pages. First impressions are on hold until tomorrow. If I get in tonight I'm doing my dailies.

While I wait for my fix, I thought I might pop up a quick post featuring some screenshots I took last night in EQ2's Plane of Magic. Like pretty much every zone added to the game in the last five years or so it's very pretty.

It's no wonder Daybreak are so keen to shepherd newcomers into the newer zones at the earliest possible opportunity. Everything before Chains of Eternity, which arrived in 2012, looks dated but from that point on someone worked out how to use a combination of deep, rich colors and monumental scale to give zone design a facelift.

You still wouldn't mistake the results for modern-day graphics but there's a deliciously overblown, decadent feel to them, layered as they are with fin de siecle filigree and flounce. Everything tends to drip with lace or drift in haze, like a fever-dream or an opium-eater's vision.

That approach works especially well for somewhere like the Plane of Magic. It's a little more out of place, perhaps, in Brokenskull Bay, the byzantine, baroque lair of that drunken ne'er-do-well gang, the Brokenskull Pirates, but I'm prepared to make allowances for the sake of an aesthetic I enjoy.

I recently took my Sage through the crafting line to get him maxed so he can start making spell upgrades for himself, my Inquisitor (already at the cap) and my new Wizard. I was expecting to hit 110 well before the end of the questline but I was surprised when it happened even before the halfway mark. 

As a result, he's benched for now, although he needs to finish the full tradeskill sequence for the excellent rewards. I thought about having him put his pointy Warlock hat on and taking him through the adventure line (and eventually I will) but I was curious to see how well the Wizard performed using only the gear and spells gifted her by the latest free level 100 boost.

Very well indeed is the answer. Especially considering I have no better idea how to play a Wizard in EQ2 than to hit everything that isn't on cooldown until the mob dies or I do. Under the circumstances  it's going exceptionally well although I imagine I'll need to work out what my spells do eventually.

I always thought cloth casters were supposed to be fragile at high levels but apparently that's your grandma's gameplay. I started off using roots and snares or sending the Mercenary to tank (she's an Inquisitor so I didn't expect her to do a great job holding aggro) but it became apparent pretty quickly that such a cautious approach was entirely unnecessary. 

At level 100, every mob in Plane of Magic cons yellow and is at least six levels higher than the Wiz, but with a snare on, most of them die before they even get into melee range. Even so, I don't even bother snaring them any more. Even if they do hit her, she doesn't seem to take any damage.

What with her seemingly inexhaustible mana pool and her 11 million hitpoints, not to mention her own personal healer on tap, it seems she's perfectly capable of face-tanking any solo mob needed for the outdoor quests. To put that in perspective, when when my Berserker did Level 100 on the same mobs, wearing the free starting gear given out with the expansion itself, I believe he had somewhere around 2.5m hit points. He had a much slower time of it until he hit 101.

The Wizard is working on the third of the Plane of Magic factions so most of the content I'm seeing is new to me. It's very similar - kill ten of these, gather ten of those, oh my friend got lost down a hole can you get her out? and so on but at least the dialog is different. 

I need to max all three factions anyway. There's a very good reward for doing so plus an Achievement which flags your account to allow you to spend a currency at vendors who sell gear that's a direct upgrade to the stuff you get from the solo questline and dungeons.

It's all very well thought out. If I was playing EQ2 as my main MMORPG, as I did for a long time, this structure would give me things to do that I would consider worthwhile for a good part of the year. Comparing it to the soul-crushing "end game" of GW2, it's hugely more acessible, manageable and relatable. I'm not a great fan of incremental upgrade mechanics but you have to have some sort of progression to take you from one expansion to the next and EQ2's is sound.

As I play less and less GW2 - or rather as I play GW2 for fewer and fewer hours each week - I'm dotting around between a number of other games. I haven't settled on anything as a "primary secondary" but EQ2 gets a good deal of the available attention.


I already have two max level adventurers and two max level crafters. Given the likely arrival of the next (final?) expansion in November it seems not unlikely that by then I will have four adventure classes at the cap - Bereserker, Inquisitor, Wizard and Warlock. I don't believe that has happened since Guild Wars 2 launched six years ago.

There are three very specific reasons why this is happening now. Firstly, the free Level 100 boosts have jumped several characters directly into starting position. Secondly the ten extra levels that come with the current expansion are much, much easier - and faster - to complete than the previous decile from 90 to 100. Thirdly, the Plane of Magic content has more variety, and therefore replayability for second or third characters, than any expansion for a long time.

Returning to that second point, DBG seems quietly to have dropped SOE's utterly ridiculous practice of splitting levels into fifths by the use of  "Prestige Points". That nasty little ruse effectively turned every 20% into something that took at least as long as a full level to complete. If thay'd used levels in the normal fashion through that period we'd all probably be Level 150 by now.

The takeaway is that EQ2 feels to me to be in a very good place right now when it comes to balance and progression. Plenty of players would disagree I'm sure (it wouldn't be EQ2 if they didn't) but both in game and on the forums the general vibe in this expansion cycle has been noticeably less harsh and hostile than in other years.

It's ironic that the team seems at last to have found some solid ground on which to build at precisely the time the game is most likely entering its final stage. At least it will make maintenance mode as solid and replayable as it can be, if and when it comes.

Along with the similarly robust state of current EverQuest, it also bodes well for whatever new version of Norrath they're working on under wraps. If any. The Smed-led outfit may have had more strut and bluster but this bunch might just actually be able to come up with a finished product that works.

We'll see. Or we won't. If there really is an EQ3 in the works I just hope to live long enough to play it.

Off The Record : Daybreak Games

MassivelyOP has news of a rumor of a leak from an unnamed source about things Daybreak may or may not be working on, which might happen sometime... or never. I wasn't going to respond but then Wilhelm wrote a neat, coherent summary with commentary and when I began replying in his comment thread I quickly realized I was going to end up writing the equivalent of a full-length post.

So I thought I might as well write a full-length post.

The leak

The history of this kind of insider leak is pretty good, I think. Most of the ones I can remember ended up having  quite a grounding in fact. Still doesn't mean all - or any - of it will happen, of course. Even if 100% accurate, it's just a snapshot of the current situation and, as we have seen countless times, these things often change a lot before anything ever gets as far as a public release.

Everquest and EQ2 will have one last expansion each. 

I would guess that whether this year's EQ and EQ2 expansions really are the last will depend on how well they sell and how much money they make. I suspect the well is about drained dry by now and DBG are looking at this as one last trip, but if either of them were to do significantly better business than expected, who knows? It will be a great shame not to get any more EQ2 expansions because the quality has been high and I have enjoyed all of them.  I haven't bought an EQ expansion for a good few years though.

What happens after the last expansions is the more important question. There's a wide range of options, from complete maintenance mode a la GW1 to a full, continuing program of ongoing live content, new holiday stuff and special events. Again, I'm sure that will depend on how many people keep playing and how much money they spend.

Eventually the games will close but I hope and believe that's still a few years off.

Everquest 3 has been back in development for a year and is being rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and to be the first fantasy MMORPG to put an emphasis on team battle royal PvP.

This is the most bizarre item on the list and the hardest to take at face value. What does make some kind of sense is that it would be fairly crazy to try and run three Everquest-themed MMOs in full development simultaneously so if there's an intent to build a new one it might be a good idea to scale down one or both of the old games.

On the other hand, where's the market? EQNext got traction outside of the core playerbase (and not much within it) because it was a wish-fulfilment fantasy full of impossible dreams, promising far more than it ever had a hope of delivering. Which is why it also got cancelled.

The reference to Pantheon is instructive, though. Brad McQuaid's project does seem to have gone from something of an industry joke to a potentially serious contender. It's a good while since I've seen any pieces poking fun at either the game or Brad himself and the word of mouth on it seems to be holding up rather well.

It's entirely conceivable that DBG do genuinely see Pantheon as a serious competitor, likely to leech a significant amount of their market share if and when it launches. It's quite easy to imagine a successful launch for Pantheon drawing players in numbers from both EQ titles, particularly EverQuest.
 

That would make the winding-down of the two older versions of Norrath in favor of consolidating effort and interest in one new EQ game- EQ3 - seem almost logical. One of the many problems EQ2 had at launch was its failure to migrate existing customers from EQ. This plan could mitigate that issue to some degree.

It doesn't explain the surreal reference to "battle royal PvP", though. What that has to do with competing with Pantheon or the EQ franchise boggles the mind. Of course, MMOs can contain multitudes and it's totally believable that EQ3, were it to happen, could include a battle royale zone or mode.

So long as it was kept to one side, in the manner of PvP Battlegrounds or Arenas in other MMOs, that shouldn't be a problem. The idea that EQ3 would "put an emphasis" on it, however, suggests a lot more than an instanced PvP zone in a PvE game. You'd like to think there were lessons to be drawn from H1Z1 here about over-extending your resources and diluting your core offer but when did MMO devs ever learn from experience?

My takeaway from this is that I'm more than ever becoming committed to betting on Pantheon becoming my last-ever long-term diku-MUD style home. As for EQ3, if it happens, as I said about EQNext, I'll play it because it's Norrath but I don't expect to like it. I don't believe they're making it for me.

It looks like a sunset is most likely for Just Survive.

Still haven't gotten around to playing H1Z1 in any of its formats and I don't imagine I'm likely to now. I'm never happy to see an MMO close down but I can't say this has any resonance for me personally.

Planetside 3 is in early development. This will be a team based battle royal game.

And yet Planetside 2 is continuing, apparently, with new character models and animations coming this month and a new map later in the year. Perhaps the theory is that, unlike the EQ games, the two PS2's will either appeal to different market segments or that they will be complementary and capable of being played by the same people at the same time (not literally, I'm guessing, although you never know...).

I have played PS2, briefly, but it's not my sort of thing. It's slightly concerning to read that "other teams will be siphoned into this project next year" because, given the announcement about the end of expansions for the Norrath games, that could well mean devs currently working on EQ and EQ2.

The focus on Battle Royale modes in general seems misplaced. Development cadences for MMOs are so long that it seems like a very bad idea to tie this type of game to what may - most likely will - turn out to be a cultural moment that will have passed well before any likely launch date. Battle Royale is a pretty robust game mode that will be around forever but it's not going to hold the zeitgeist indefinitely - nothing does.

If nothing else I've found this last week a useful exercise in managing expectations. I have long held the belief that, at 60 as I will be this year, the Everquest games will probably see me out. I may have to learn to do without that particular comfort blanket.

We do have to face the fact that no MMO will last forever, although I am willing to bet that some form of EQ server - official or otherwise - will be publicly available longer than I'm around to play on it. EQ2, probably not., which is a shame for me because of the two I'd probably miss EQ2 the most.

Still, no need to panic just yet, I think. Even if everything in the reddit post turns out to be true I would guess we have a few more years to go before the final curtain comes down. Unless you're planning on playing Just Survive of course, in which case I'd get a move on if I were you.