One Hobby Dev + EQ + Unreal Engine 5.2 =

One person. Not one studio. One person did this.

Zoneless Classic Everquest Antonica Run... now in Unreal!

With all the problems upgrading to DirectX 11 I am sure that this wouldn't go as smoothly as you hope. Not to mention I don't think they are looking to pay a 5% (or more) royalty on the profits of Everquest in order to license the graphics engine.

There's a lot more to developing an MMO client than just using some community developed tools to convert old zones into a modern format then importing them into Unreal and writing a script to add grass. The initial investment of porting the entire game over to a new engine would be huge and I doubt they could convince management to go along with it when they have an existing, "functional" game engine already.

lol @ what's possible with no enemies, no fellow players, no combat engine, no character data

yeah, man. no zone lines. lotta grass & rocks. super.

would you like to see a *painting* of the International Space Station? it'll be a super high fidelity painting! can't, like, fall around the Earth in it for 30 years, or conduct science in free fall on the painting, but whatever. same thing!

Pretty sure it's just kind of a neat video, not a suggestion of something to implement in actual EQ. Some of you are incapable of forum communication without finding some combative stance to take about everything.

Tough crowd.

Sheesh

It's the "hobby dev" thing in the title, for me. It's a neat art project, I bet it took a lot of time to put together.

How many times do we need a video posted of someone converting EQ zones to one of the Unreal engine versions with suggestions of how easy it would be to do because a single person made this video?

It was neat the first couple of times but gets old quickly.

To be honest, just convert Classic and you've got your new USP for the next TLP to draw people in. Then make the expansion release schedule to match the conversion rate.

EQ are recruiting... why not hire an Unreal engine expert to do the job professionally. I think it's great that people are stepping forward to show what can be done. Might give Darkpaw the kick up the pants required to do something like this.

EQ2 had much better graphics and look at all the people that still play EQ1. Better graphics dont make a game better!

How about start over with the original game remade in unreal but fix all the old broken stuff in the game. We can call it EQ3 and with the improved graphics maybe new people will start to play it like a progression server but think it is a new game.

Give any current EQ1 player the ability to create a new character in this EQ3 mode (no alts leave it all persona based so 1 toon 1 name per account) and those who do the conversion don't lose their EQ1 account but get 1-3 month free trial and something special that new people playing the game don't get. If they were to go back all classic like just giving an all/all usable special fungi tunic would be all the bonus anyone would need as a bonus in EQ3!

They can't just convert part of the game or do a TLP server on it as they all use the same codebase and you need to use a single graphics engine for everything. Not to mention the fact that they have to pay at least 5% of their revenue for the ability to use the Unreal engine and that would be expensive.

Unreal dev here. Looks cool. Would be interesting if someone created a playable and multiplayer Unreal Engine 5 port of EQ with VERY minimal scope. Like, just implemented North Ro with no quests and a playable warrior / cleric / wizard of level 10 with a limited number of mob spawns. And once that was successful, built something that ingests whatever data is already available in P99 et all would be cool.



Getting an EQ running that's locked to Vanilla is feasible with the data from P99 (or internally at DPG ofc), especially if you cut corners. But every system introduced to EQ after that from AAs to Personas would likely require a total rewrite in order to make it work, especially if the developer chose to do a "deep integration" with Unreal and use Unreal as its core system instead of carrying over all the garbage and having an interface layer.

The only way DPG could accomplish that is through a massive open-source initiative that is implausible and likely unprofitable.

Just give me everything Black Desert has in Everquest theme

I think you have a good point, if it really was that easy you think someone would have done it as an server by now.

converting is just a huge waste of money for content thats only gonna get touched when the TLP is in that era. i like the look and the feel of the old zones. they feel more massive than anything in the new era. TBH i would like to see all the money pouring in from the year of darkpaw to address alot of the bugs and long standing issues in game

As many as it takes.

No matter how many times it is posted it won't change the facts that it will be a complicated upgrade as seen from the switch to DirectX 11 with a large expense not only to do the work but to pay the licensing fee which is based on revenue and not profits. If it really was that simple wouldn't it have been put into some sort of server by now to show how "easy" it is? There is a difference between making a bunch of zones that a single player can run through and porting the entire game.

Those two facts make in very unlikely that it will ever be considered.

Ahh, this is the star citizen approach to game development.

Well TLP is what is keeping EQ alive today. So if you made an improved graphics version of TLP you could maybe increase the population of players for EQ. I know one of my friends has made fun of advertisements he has seen for EQ because for graphics are so bad and he would never play it.

However I know some of the other games I have played with him and if they had a really good classic EQ with graphics as good as say fortnite he would join me and play that without question. I would never try to get him to play the current version of the game because I know he would not and I wouldn't really recommend anyone to play it. Playing the current version of EQ is like trying to talk someone into playing a text based RPG during PoP era of EQ. Sure alot of classic EQ is based around text based RPG quest but not really anymore with quest system etc and only rarely does it require text based RPG puzzles to solve to figure out where to go next.