Ah, EQNext. Is that even A Thing? When it was first announced back in August 2010 I didn't expect to see it in beta before 2013 at the very, very earliest. As for a final release date, given the development cycles of comparable projects such as GW2 I thought I might be sitting down to create my first permanent EQNext character sometime in 2015.
Since then the entire project has supposedly been stripped down and rebuilt not once but twice and I'd re-calibrated my expectations to somewhere north of 2016. I was a tad surprised, then to find (courtesy of Syl at Raging Monkey's) that PCGamer magazine had EQNext listed in their "Best Games of 2013" MMO section with a release date of "Late 2013".
Where this date comes from I have no idea. It's certainly not at the link provided in the PCGamer article, which goes to a page on the SoE website that doesn't even mention EQNext. As for Smed, the most he's letting on is that there will be news of some description at SoELive, for which a date hasn't even yet been set.
Assuming I'm still alive and in control of my faculties by the time it does finally come out, be it in 2013, 2015 or 2020, there is no doubt whatsoever that I'll be playing Everquest Next. I don't care if it ends up being a sandbox, a theme park, a sandpark or a themebox. I don't care if the payment model is F2P, B2P, Subscription or Blood Ritual. I don't care if it plays on PC, Console, Tablet or Holographic Tabletop. If I have to buy new hardware to play it, new hardware I shall buy.
I don't even care if I have to go through PSS1 to get to it. That's how much I want to play the next installment of the one, true MMO.
What I don't want is to have to suffer through an endless drip-feed of rumor, speculation and hype based on nothing but the odd, gnomic utterance of The Smed. Or, worse still, anything remotely ressembling the unrelenting pipeline of PR puffs Carbine have been force-feeding us every WildStar Wednesday. EQNext Tuesday I do not need.
It'll be done when it's done and that will be soon enough. Leave it in the oven and let it bake.
Posts
