Lets give a little love to Lucky Saint on youtube who put together this quick summery of some of the great features to look forward to in EverQuest: Next.
I will go into more detail in later posts, but for now let me introduce you to the 4 Holy Grail of EQ:N that back up what Lucky Saint has said here. If you want to see it directly, most of what I present below can be seen in the second half of the Debut footage from last years SOE Live, but other interviews and presentations have cleared up several details as well. This might get rather long, but it is a lot shorter than hunting down all those interviews to get every detail (I've spent the last few weeks doing just that).
Grail 1: Changing the Core Game
A vast and robust system of Multi-Classing with over 40 classes at launch to explore and find in the world (starting with one of 8 when you make your character). The more classes you find the more you can customize your character to choose how you want to play. This is quite cool, though... multi-classing has been done before with many different methods. Other aspects explored below really drive home this Grail for me. Though, I would also point out here, a major change is getting rid of Levels.
There will be 5 Tiers that represent a players skill with their class's abilities and mechanics, not just 'how much xp you farmed' on that class. There will be several different measures for determining when you have mastered an aspect of a class and you will then be rewarded with different tools to learn and experiment with, but these tools won't be more powerful. Seeing a Tier 5 warrior fight a Tier 1 warrior won't mean the T1 just dies at a single swing. If the T1 is a better player and knows their opponent well they will win, the T5 just has more options available to them for how they want to build their character. If they planned the fight ahead of time the T5 will have an advantage in already knowing what build the T1 will have (same as any T1 warrior) and can specialize their design to face that using the wider variety of tools available to them.
By having all content be relevant to even max characters the designers don't have to split their focus between 'leveling content' and 'end game content' like they currently do. That will mean more content for everyone.
Grail 2: Destructibility
"We wanted to be able to blow up anything, anytime, anywhere." By building the entire world out of voxels (think of 3d pixels) which means that this world can be easily built and destroyed. The possibilities here are just.... so awesome. The world is not going to be limited to the surface either, several layers of chasms below, earth quacks will change the subterranean landscape, you will be able to dig down into the world to find different content, you can actually tear down the enemies walls or destroy a bridge as they cross it. With the ability to destroy and build and shift the world this also means never ending exploration potential. Complete destructibility opens up so much possible game play we have never seen before.
Grail 3: A Life of Consequence
Everything you do in game the game will remember, and the new Emergent AI will have everything respond to your history. Instead of programming monsters (mobs) to always show up at one place and attack you forever they will be programmed with likes, dislikes, desires, wants, physical needs, "and then release them into the world." The mobs and other Non-Player Characters (NPCs) will all have their own little lives continuing even when you aren't around. "Merchants don't like the dark, so they go home." And shady merchants don't like being seen by guards, so the dark of night is their friend. If you fight the goblins hard enough they might leave the forest, or their king might decide to rally an army to attack your city.
With your actions each NPC and mob will like what you do or dislike what you do and will react accordingly. You can even establish relationships with NPCs. Perhaps you visit Angy the baker every day and smile. Angy likes that you bring her a smile every day and eventually asks if you will help her get things she needs for better baking in exchange for free pastries. This is a deal that not everyone has and not everyone can get. It's not unbalancing, but it is personal, and everyone can establish different relationships with different NPCs. Angy's husband, the blacksmith, might not like 'your flirting' with her and decides to charge you more for his services, and unless you ask about his surly attitude toward you, you probably won't ever know why.
The Emergent AI is being programmed by an awesome company called Storybricks which makes dynamic scripting much easier. No longer will you need to be a programmer to be able to design an NPC or mob, you can just take the various 'bricks' and assemble them for a given NPC or mob and those bricks will automatically reference all relevant code and tags in the world and on the players. Even more awesome is that if the NPC encounters a situation that its current bricks can't handle then the system will compare the current bricks with the bricks available and the situation and will then select a new brick to add to the NPC, forever making that a part of the NPC for future interactions. SELF LEARNING NPCs! This is the part which has some people claiming that 'Storybricks is programming the system that will become Skynet and start sending Terminator robots to kill us all.'
Suffice it to say, this totally changes the face of MMO's forever. Mobs and NPCs will learn and adapt to your strategies. The old Tank & Spank and the Trinity of MMOs just won't work anymore.
Grail 4: Permanent Change
Another application of the Storybricks Emergent AI will be major events called Rallying Calls which will cause large scale permanent change. This could be the building or destruction of a city, a major war, huge natural disasters, all kinds of huge events. How players handle these on each server, or how/when they accidentally trigger a Rallying Call's progression steps will make every server a unique world. Cities on one server might not exist on another. If you were to play for a few years then roll up a new character it will literally be impossible to have the same gaming experience, the entire world would have changed.
Players will have so much personal history and stories to tell of how, "I was here, on the front lines when this city was built. That was before the goblin invasion, and before the red dragon attack, and that was before the civil war. Yeah, this city has grown a lot in the years I've been defending it. A lot of NPCs here I really care about. Though, I wasn't able to save Angy the baker, the dragon.... I couldn't save her." It is these types of personal stories and experiences that really help a game feel vibrant and personal for years to come. EQ:N is being designed to last for decades, not just to grab your money and run.
But That's Not All!
These are the Four Holy Grails of EverQuest: Next. While developing the tools to build this they decided to create Landmark. Landmark is a separate game in which they will give us all of the tools needed to make EQ:N and let us a) build any type of game we want (unless it is 'obscene') and b) help build EQ:N with the devs. Already we have been designing the architecture of the Dark Elves and are currently working on the Kerran architecture. Right now we can only build structures, but eventually we will have Storybricks as well so we can program NPCs and mobs the way we want to. But I'm now getting a lot deeper than I should for this post. More on that stuff another time.
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