What is the current planned future of Everquest

Actually, some places have evolved and changed over the years. Grobb is the Troll city, but was taken over by the frogs when they were introduced and the Trolls displaced to other cities. Then the trolls regained Grobb and the Frogs were displaced to their new home in Rathe Mountains. The docks in Firiona Vie used to be controlled by the High Elves and allies. As I recall, there were player events with one side attacking Overthere and another attacking Firiona Vie. Eventually, the docks were taken over by the dark elves and the High Elves displaced to the mountains. Changes have occurred to zones and cities over the years, though not often. I don't know if more would be better or not .

lol... yes the deadsayers... many always talk about how EQ is dying. Nevertheless everybody comes back from time to time to play it despite the fact that the graphics is ugly compared to todays' games, the playflow is bad (ever thought why a MMO needs a command like /rewind?), the GUI is a Linux catastrophy (no real good presets for different solutions, no easy configuration of more than one character or a group in a flash) and the bugs in new expansions are without any comparison.

BUT: Did any other game really bind you for 17 years? Even if it is only from time to time.. perhaps some weeks or some months a year or coming back years after playing seeing again new things? Yes the world is big. But THAT is what makes it interesting. If you want to group you find always people as long as you are not somebody who needs to get invited (as long as you play actual content). If you want to solo, there is plenty stuff and areas, if you have a cheat artery then you take your lvl 105 and quest some lower things which you missed out when it was to difficult or simply get old raid areas which you could never do and mostly you don't collide with many people (which in my opinion would be really annoying if lower levels need the stuff). Or if you like real difficulties then you box and try to figure out how to get group or raid events running with every combination of character. If you are bored do different things. Be a tradeskiller and sell things. Be a butcher and only kill things. Be a roleplayer and make your own rules how your character should behave in this world. Be a "I will be always the best Hero"-Guy and get the latest raid stuff with the latest expansion and the latest things you can buy instead of buying your stuff over third party like people did many years before.

NEVER CHANGE A RUNNING SYSTEM - ever heard that?
Everquest 2 was boring, like Warcraft, a thing you play in beta but I don't believe it lasts more than al the "free to play MMOs" out there - nice graphics, beginning story like EQ1 but what was missing? The flair of EQ1, your very own characters you build up for 1-2 decades, the difficulties which gives you the feeling to have accomplished something, the personal configuration of so many things in EQ.If I want to play a new game because my old setups/chars are gone, I don't need EQ2 or EQ lala, I can change to every other game and there are plenty out there with better graphics and game play.

HOW CAN YOU CHANGE WITHOUT CHANGING?
Redo all but be compatible with the character and data. So the engine and graphics and abilities could be all the same but new mechanics would enhance it all.
- old players have their game in a new view but can play it as they are used to
- players who want new things can have a complete new experience

How would that be possible?
- Redo the clientside completely. Yes it is more work than do it completely new. But that makes the difference. Who wants to play a new game which has nothing to do with the old EQ1? New graphics, Physics, support for Groupplaying (boxing), Buildingdesigning your own stuff with fixed coded rules to not kill the balance, make the catastrophical collision system completely new (no rewind anymore, no stops under water...), add flying possibilites (not only Levitation), add living systems (no fixed spawn points but a living system with own logic perhaps clock dependent), add seasons for graphics (and in the seasons the mobs and plants change - like the events in different seasons, only zone dependent), change the gui so presets can be copied, automatisms can get installed (like the programming system with macros, but more advanced which will bind people who love to program and automate), advance the tradeskill system (destroy any item to have resources to build new stuff, like in other MMOs - difficult to do with old items) - many things possible but let old quests and the trains and the accidents still be in. To have no control in parts of the game makes the game an adventure. Trains, surprise mobs, routines to find out how to sneak into areas (living environment instead of static spawns would be exactly that), more different races and characters with more real life graphics (no warcraft comic features, no stupid japanese comic graphics - real looking stuff) and and and...

But making a "new game", regardless how much it is Everquest Next, Everquest 2, Everquest Minecraft or else is called and you don't have your old EQ1-Feeling or better your EQ1-Account and the 17 year old characters with all the options of EQ1 never makes a new game which will have the success of EQ1.

Take the reason why people are playing or coming even back after many years. Make the things better or change which is lightyears behind technology but don't change the complexity.

So here somebody who loves Everquest and say "THANK YOU" for the last 17 years (even I was not always online, with some breaks in between). But now I am back for some months and I would love to see this Everquest 1 and my old characters running around even some years later

tl;dr

I would personally love for them to update the graphics / models. And agree with Greenhorn!

Playing EQ with everything on / max view... still doesn't even turn on my gtx 1070 fan. ;-\

haha so right. Love EQ but it reminds me of my PS2 games.

They still had news stories in each city when that happened with the Frogloks. The Vah Shir one mentioned Shar Vahl giving a large donation to the Frogloks to help make a new city. I guess corruption squandered the funds and they are still stuck in tents. While Shar Vahl is technically neutral it is much more akin to the good-aligned cities and necromancy is something that actually bothers/sickens Kerra (which the Vah Shir are a faction of) due to all of them having at least some small innate ability to sense spirits, if I recall.

I may be mistaken but wasn't the FV thing per server, like there was an event and which side won could be different from server to server? You're making me wonder if I remember wrong and it was a game wide event that determined the victors.

A lot of loose ends have been tied up, such as where FV/Lanys went when they disappeared being the biggest one I remember going on for a while. Has Nedaria's story ever been finished or did GoD end with her still comatose (or whatever the lore is if I remember that wrong)?

To sum up everything about the future of EQ and what Daybreak plans to do - I will lay it out for everyone...

I wouldn't call what it's been since going F2P alive. More like a butchered animal that is having every last bit carved up and sold for maximum profit. If you look at the frequency, quality and amount of content being made it's not really what I would call proper content updates or expansions, at least compared to the MMO's like WoW and FFXIV.

You have to admit they've made a (in my opinion) surprising number of fixes and tweaks to long-standing issues though, some that were around when the game had more funding. Now if they could just nail that memory-related zone crash issue that started increasing in frequency around the end of House of Thule and has only gotten worse over time. It must be quite a difficult issue to be known about and not fixed this long.

That's comparing apples to oranges. The development staff for those games compared to Everquest is enormous. At this point Everquest 1 maybe has less than 30,000 active subscribers compared to WoW which their subscriptions are in the millions still.

As a business you cannot afford to keep people working for your company if the company is not turning enough profit in order to pay for those developers. So we have what we have here for Everquest 1. Like I said, I've seen more work come out of the EQ1 team in the last 6 months than I have seen in a while. That's because we now have more developers working on EQ1 than we had last year.

I knew some one at universiy who kept getting a far pointer error in Turbo C. He got it down to it was somewhere in around 300 lines of code... he wound up deleting it and retyping it. Turns out he had somehow embeded a control code into a variable name. Not something that shows up visually. This was under Win95, and C# and C++ wasn't available.

If there was a something over the horizon for EQ with Daybreak, they would have thrown us a bone by now. Maybe nothing else apart from updated code and expansions is ok for this demographic, I mean people here play 17 year old games so do they really need to do anything big or fancy for us to keep paying them? In reality, probably not.

If you have to have anything over the horizon, it's probably going to be from the original EQ dev(s) who are working on another game right now called Pantheon, which may or may not be successful. It does promise to be the first true continuation of Everquest 1 in spirit and game style, as all other MMO's that followed EQ really went a whole different direction then were EQ1 was going in the first 3 expansions until SoE bought them.

If you want a new EverQuest you need look no further than Pantheon:Rise of the Fallen. Brad McQuaid the person that created EQ is coming out with a new MMO. Best I have seen yet! Check it out. It's what EQ would be if it were created today!

You're remembering it wrong, and it was planned from the start of the event that the evils would take over FV. We were holding the line - and actually winning the fight - on Firiona Vie when a GM zoned in and started spawning cliff golems until the zone crashed. When it came back up, it was in the present state. I lost my computer that I was using then in a fire, I had a screen shot with one golem in the zone on track, then it being filled seconds later with red conning cliff golems.

Thanks for the clarification.

The fact that people have 17 year old characters that they are attached to (bonded/ welding/ emotionally dependent on - attached is not strong enough!) is what keeps the money coming in, at the end of the day.

It is also EQ's biggest problem, by far.

Think of D&D. Imagine how constrained their campaign desingers would have been, if each new setting had to allow players to bring their max level characters from the last campaign.

So why don't D&D players have a problem re-rolling new characters with each new campaign? How do they keep having fun with low-level characters? Perhaps because the journey is fun, and the content is engrossing.

I think this is a massive failing of MMO players (and designers). We keep expecting that we can play for years with the same character, always getting stronger, always adding more levels, bigger numbers. But why? What use is doing a million damage vs doing 15 damage? There is no intrinsic benefit. If the high-level content is boring as watching paint dry, I'd rather re-roll and do 15 damage in content that was engaging.

EQ and its top-heavy population has shown that this model is wrong. It doesn't work. EQ has been in decline ("dying" is such an emotive word) for years. It can't have any kind of radical overhaul. Instead, they created EQ2 and EQ:Next (almost) because EQ *cannot* change in the way it needs to. Because of this player-driven expectation that we must keep evolving the characters we created 17 years ago.

I've been playing this game off and on since 2004. I've tried around 15 or 20 other MMOs. Some paid and some free.

None of them measure up to this one. None of them.

Ultima Online (1997) is still running and had a new expansion last year.

Asheron's Call (1999) is nominally still active but is on "life support". The devs do not intent to ever release any new content, but they keep the server open and provide minimum routine maintenance for as long as anybody is playing.

UO, EQ and AO were the Holy Trinity of MMOs before WoW came out, so we should probably look at what those other games are doing for clues on what might happen to EQ.

I've told it to the devs and many others. If I had millions, I would do it myself. EQ could have a complete makeover. Same world same quests just updated graphics and engine. I am sure a few other modifications are needed too, but the secret to success, is to allow character import to the new game. If people know they will not lose all the time they have invested, it makes the transition much easier. The additional benefit is to allow the formulation of an algorithm that allows character import from other games. EQ2 WOW ect. Now you are revamping the game and also gaining market share. The first MMO that does this will be the next big success. I have over 500 days played on my character. That is a lot of time to say hey lets start over.

"ever thought why a MMO needs a command like /rewind?"

Please, I've gotten stuck in terrain in Fallout 4, CS GO, and Dishonored, it's not that big a problem in EQ nowadays.