The engine and tech powering SOE’s EQ Next ”has not changed,” and ”a lot of the guts” remain the same, but they went back to the drawing board on ”all the design elements.”
It was a year and a half ago that Sony decided EverQuest Next needed to be altered if it was going to stand the test of time. Today’s MMOs enjoy a spike of interest that drops off.
”The engine and underlying technology has not changed,” revealed president John Smedley in an interview. ”A lot of the guts and infrastructure are staying the same. What we’re really changing is what the game is all about, all the design elements. We made one fundamental shift to emergent gameplay.”
”Once we made that shift, everything else had to follow. And what we saw was RIFT. We saw the writing on the wall with SWTOR. We saw The Secret World. We saw all these games that we knew were in development and very high-quality, but we saw what was going to happen – this big spike and then it goes down.”
”That’s the truth of what’s been happening with MMOs. The fans need to realize that if you don’t change the nature of what these games are, you’re not going to change that core behavior. We want to make games that last more than 15 years. That’s why we made the decision to change it,” he added.
The game itself won’t betray the roots of EverQuest as it will ”still be very familiar to you, but what I meant by that statement is that we’re changing what an MMO is. MMO means something now, and it means the same thing to everybody because it’s the same game.” Regardless of the IP universe they all boil down to the same thing.
”EverQuest, WoW, SWTOR all use the same core loot gameplay, which is kill stuff, get reward, get loot, level up. Very few games have broken out of that mold,” explained Smedley, although he acknowledges ”one or two have.”
”EVE Online is a great example; it’s not standard level-based gameplay, although I’m not saying we’re going to a big skill-based system. You’re still going to recognize the roleplaying game heritage in it.”
”In EverQuest Next, the world itself is a part of the game. What is the world in these other games? It’s a simple backdrop. It’s nothing. We are changing that greatly. We’re changing what AI is in these games to a degree that we’re going to bring life to the world. That to us is the essence of the change that we’re making.”
Check out the full interview between John Smedley and Massively.
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