With Holly gone, what do you think the future of EQ and EQ TLP's will be?

If that's true why haven't they launched a new PVP server for you?

EQ is also drawing in new players... just not at the amount/rate that WoW is, and it won't. And WoW was also exponentially larger than EQ ever was, so it's potential player base is a lot larger. EVERYONE has heard of WoW. Very few people under age 30 have heard of EverQuest, because by the time they started playing MMO's, WoW was the biggest game in the world. So, it's much easier for someone to say "oh I've heard of this WoW game, maybe I'll give it a shot," than "wtf is EverQuest."

If you look at SoE/DBG/DPG's history, a lead producer leaving the franchise is usually the signs of something bad happening. Soon after the acquisition of SoE by Columbus Nova and renaming the company to Daybreak Games, David Georgeson left the project and the company. Soon after, the cancellation of EQN was announced. A year or so afterwords, Landmark shelved.

This is why I'm worried about the future of EQ and the EQ Franchise as a whole.

I doubt that it selling would lead to it shutting down immediately at least. There would be no reason to buy it if you had no intention of continuing it's service.

No offense to any developers past or present working on it, but there isn't anything special about the code base that you would want to port to another project due to the age of the code base. So, buying EQ to take the code would be pointless.

The intellectual property is mildly worth something. It has a niche market of people that know about it. For those people, it would be worth something, but it's not worth something like the warcraft franchise where a purchaser would be buying solely to get the intellectual property rights.

The only logical reason that anybody would be a potential buyer for Darkpaw Games would be if they fully intended to continue offering the Everquest service. Whether that included Everquest 2 or not would be debatable because I don't believe it brings in nearly as much profit.

The real question would be, do they continue to make new content for the game? If you was purchasing the company, you're obviously looking to get more profit out of the company over time than what you put in to purchasing it. The game technically makes money as is today. Creating new content cost money, and that would take away from the potential yearly profit margin. It would probably depend on just how much of a profit margin there has been for the past five years of expansions for the game. If it's minimal, then a purchaser would likely not take the risk of making new content. If it's substantial, they likely would.

Either way, this is all just speculation at best.

Which is also why it’s never going to have market penetration to justify trying to “redo” the game. EQ fans themselves can’t even decide what period of EQ is what should exist, the IP is a mostly generic fantasy game that most players.....have no clue wtf the story is. So your target audience of an EQ remake is? The same 200k players is had been for 20 years. Or even less, as EQ2 showed and TLPs show...your not even going to please all the EQ fans. EQ has never had the backing of an IP like Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy (which almost failed), Star Wars (which failed once, maybe twice but let’s assume KoTOR makes some money). And even with the huge IPs only WoW really did what WoW did, no other MMO has come close, and that’s when MMOs where much cheaper to make 15 years ago.

It’s not really a knock to EQ, it’s just not a game that has mass appeal. Which for most it’s players are fine....they seem to think the things that help games have mass appeal make them “easy”.

If you really want to attempt to make the IP relevant in 2020 game market you would try to make a new game to generate interest. But MMOs are too expensive, even for the big studios. So a console action RPG or RPG with cross play between PC would be a good start at a much lower investment.

It all points out to me why in 2020 I still have to say
e m u l a t o r
The company falls under it's own weight at some point. 20+ year old code starts crashing into itself when you add too much functionality. J Chan will do an amazing job of holding the whole ball of wax together. Watch out for flying too close to the sun though.

E M U will be the way at some point with modding and coding being what it is today.

Saying "We'll be here as long as there are players." was a tone deaf statement at the time, to me.

There will be players making their own ruleset servers long after Darkpaw bites the dust. In my small estimation.

I love Everquest and the people that have worked there over the years (most lol), but I have to say that you're not wrong.

The future of Everquest is fan-run servers. It won't be today, or next week, but eventually when the final official server is shut down for the the very last time, that will be the only thing left for fans of the game.

There is a decently large market for retro/oldschool gaming. And a great deal of those people interested in it are not old enough to have actually played those games when they were new. A lot of the people who played on classic wow pservers and eventually the official release did not play it when it was current. They were just attracted to the idea of a "hardcore" game. It's not impossible to get some new people into everquest. They could do a lot better job of advertising their TLPs. I think Mangler/selos had a big advertising push, but it seems like the other TLPs were just announced and a month later came out and the only people who knew about them were people already into EQ.

They could also do a better job of teaching people about the game. Like go to the EQ home page, click on guides, the only one there is a 3 year old explanation about TLP servers, but nothing about how to actually play the game, what the game is actually like. They are clearly spending zero effort trying to attract new people. Some of the recent updates, like cleaning up chat windows and filters, having spells info boxes link their spell effects, etc, make the game easier for people to learn but they could do some really simple stuff to make the game more inviting

A lot of that is true. EQ players have a hard time agreeing on a lot of stuff haha.

However, while the relevance/popularity of an IP is important, it's not required. You could go with a totally new (and I'll say even more-so generic) IP like how Pantheon is doing it. Or take an already established, even if not popular in the year 2020, IP like Everquest.

People like to assume that WoW's success was due to the popularity of the Warcraft series. I grew up playing games, all the way from Tandy's using tape drives. I had just barely even scratched the surface with Warcraft when WoW came out. WoW's 10 million+ players didn't only come from playing Warcraft (which was technically a rip-off of Warhammer) RTS's. It's success came from the popularity it gained over the years. Also, the easiness of being able to run it on basic PC's, and it's more shallow depth which in turn made it easier to play. It also introduced some new gameplay spins on the mmo genre. Each class had different types of resources to consider when using skills. The gameplay was fresh, new, and fun. Then to top it off, it had these, easy-on-the-eyes graphics that aged fairly well. My opinion is that the vast majority of WoW players had very little interest in the Warcraft IP. They just saw this cool game that was super popular, and jumped on the bandwagon.

So no, I don't believe that Everquest IP is worth refreshing and trying to gain popularity in 2020.

Here's an interesting thing, still have yet to see how it pans out, but look at the Top Gun sequel that's coming out soon. The original movie aired in what, 1984? And it's now getting a sequel nearly 30 years later? Do you think the studio said, "nah man, we can't do a sequel. The Top Gun IP is dead, nobody cares. It was cool in it's day, but that's way too long ago."? Well, it's coming now, regardless.

This happens in the gaming industry as well. Millions get spent on refreshing old IP's, as well as creating new ones. It doesn't matter honestly. A good game will succeed period. Everquest IS good.

The point is to "grow" popularity/hype. Advertising Everquest in it's current state, or it's 25th expansion isn't going to do that. The people won't care. It's a 20 year old game that looks like a 20 year old game.

I don't know, maybe I just have this dream ("vision"? haha) of what the game "could" look, sound, play like in my head. I can see the trailers for it in my head. I can read the comments about how people are looking forward to trying it out when it's released - those who never heard/played EQ before. People of all ages and background. I can see the success and popularity that's possible. It would totally destroy Pantheon (a game I'm looking forward to).

A new Everquest is viable as well, but not what I would personally like. I'd much rather see the original brought up to 2020 standards.

Totally agree. Updating the UI is paramount. It literally blocks new players from even trying the game.

Just imagine though, if that new TLP advertisement was on a new, special server. One with a brand new engine, ran more smoothly, had that new UI, along with WAY better graphics, animations, sound, and lighting. Perhaps the trailer for it was run at E3, the server was released that following holiday. Yeah, that would see a huge amount of interest.

But hell, start with the UI and instructions haha.

Yes, the UI needs updating, but might not be possible with the current engine. The pathing is also probably due to old engine.

But you are right, all of those things turn new players off of playing EQ. And if people are being turned off from just those simple-to-see things, how can we assume it had anything at all to do with "gameplay"? They usually haven't even had a change to GET to actual EQ gameplay before exiting the game and uninstalling, saying to themselves, "Pfft, I'm not going to try to battle that crazy UI....can't even read the text or resize it. And those graphics....feels like I'm playing some old PS1 game or something. Crash Bandicoot called, wants it's polygons back. And the sound, we back to using AdLib sound cards?"

I don't think the graphics are as big of a turnoff as you think. There's 9k people at this moment watching people play old school runescape on twitch and that game looks like garbage compared to even classic EQ

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my understanding is that the bolded was not considered "something bad" by a lot of people close to the project. True or not, I'm happy enough with the explanation that EQN failed because terrain changes were just not something that worked in an MMO.

I still share your general concern about the long term health of the franchise, especially in the light of Holly leaving. I just think EQN was it's own failure.

Millions and millions of kids play Roblox. Graphics quality means nothing. Art style is everything.

Haha, that's an entire world I'll never understand. Watching other people play games lol. But hey, I'm an old dude.

My 2 youngest kids play the heck out of some Roblox. Yes, the graphics are horrible IMO. I've tried to figure out what it is about the game that draws them to it. 1st, it's the popularity...their friends play it. 2nd, it's the open-ended gameplay...the sandboxy nature of the game. I believe it's based on server types? And each server has a different type of "game". Some being silly social gatherings where they can act silly and try to be the center of attention. Some being pseudo-RPG's where they kill mobs, level up, etc. (mini mmos). Some being building types, where they construct machines or robots and battle each other.

It's a phenomenon for sure. haha

I think the simplest answer is the most likely, that this all has to do with an acquisition. Breaking up into more or less profitable studios that are delineated by IP/genre. A non-announcement announcement at an expected time, ie when a new tlp is usually announced. The caretaker head of the most marketable studio leaving suddenly. The new caretaker being promoted from the technical side. No news other than the brief leaving post, nothing from the new person.

Its familiar to anyone that's gone through this sort of breakup. Usually its when the profitable parts are sold off to a private equity firm looking to squeeze the last bits of value out of the assets, but that's already happened. So my guess is its being sold off to a buyer specializing in monetizing niche nostalgic gaming ip's (jeez, that sounded weird). There's a surprisingly successful cottage industry of those types of companies that started in the mobile market but have branched out into PC gaming. They usually focus on selling core game power enhancing items to whales.

My guess is its a sale to one of those and we'll see more powerful items gradually added to the store for RMT. It might even lead to more development for the game. I'm not really against it but its certainly a double edged sword. The upside is this isn't a PvP focused game so the downsides won't be as bad as they could be.

The problem with the "breaking up into business units means an acquisition is coming" is that the EQ division is the only one that would have any value whatsoever as there is name recognition over a long time period there. That value is probably not high, but it has to be higher than the other two units, the names and games of which escape my mind at the moment. What I mean is the value of the entire company together or EQ by itself is still pretty much just EQ by itself, in my mind.

However, I do "hope" the EQ unit gets acquired because no one is buying it just to shut it down. Someone would only pay for it if they felt they could resurrect the game by modernizing it or coming out with a real sequel based on the lore and name.

Grab some guild mates, start the talks at 7.5M for just EQ1.

7.5 mil seems like the big lots bargain bin layaway option to me

Said it with a straight face and zero hesitation. Not only did I predict people were gonna come back during SoD, they did, and brought new friends with them. Not sure who isn't enjoying the server... Maybe the impatient clowns that feel the need to accomplish every single aspect of every single expansion with their 3 hour playtime window. They can bail on the server all they want.

I still think TSS+ should be 2 month unlocks and loot/flags need to be doubled, but it'll do for now.