EQ3/EQ Next ~ The Ideas Thread

Rlaal@Antonia Bayle wrote:

These are two bad ideas that I feel the need to address because I've mulled them over myself years before when I thought they were good ideas.
First of all, Guild-run villages and towns make no sense. To begin with this means your world has to be huge enough to the point that any number of guilds can make towns. If you did this then you may soon find yourself walking through a ghost town instead of a forest because, face it, no Guild is going to give up dungeon crawling to attend to n00bs around their town.
As for the monsters, if you stop and think about it for a while-- such a system would make quests undoable. For quests, at least in the traditional manner, to be done you need to have a reliable set of monsters that the NPC can send a player to kill. Furthermore, your system could potentially cause all of a particular type of mob to be totally eliminated from the world which would mean the work on the models and animation for it was for nothing-- plus, all references to the more important ones would have to somehow be eliminated from the game.

Rlaal@Antonia Bayle wrote:

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Rlaal@Antonia Bayle wrote:

I like your ideas. It's what I've always wnated...a game MADE by the players. Like the real world but you can attain power, and the featrues actually change due to people movement. This game is perfect...
But this game cannot exist under the title EQ2. It wimply would not work.

Okay, first of all... I don't see why EverQuest still requires Zoning whenever you go anywhere. World of WarCraft is just as busy but you never hit a loading screen until you go into an Instance or change Continents. Even then the loading time is WAY better than that of EverQuest 2. However this system works, try to duplicate it. It will allow for a far more organic world than what we have now.
Next, start the game off with more factions than EverQuest II did. Yes, having every race be in its own excluded city-- especially when there were so many races to begin with, was somewhat bad. It didn't give the designers enough space to make anything beautiful and interesting in many cases (the Ogre and Troll 'cities' is a good example) and in other cases it just led to a big, beautiful but ultimately deserted zone (Gnome city). However, when it came to shrinking everything into 2 cities, there were some problems. First, it was too much pressure to put on two points and these cities had to be made larger than the wilderness zones to accomidate the sheer bulk of content. If one has to ride a boat to get around to different sections of the city in order to stop from having to hit 4 loading screens, the city has been made too large. It has become overly inconvienent.
As such, I think it would be best to break the races down into a number of factions rather than simply 'good' and 'evil'.
So the races could be broken down somewhat like this:
Empire of Freeport
Imperials (No longer called "human")
High Elf
Dwarf
Gnome
Faydewer Refugees/Kelethin
Wood Elf
Fae/Arsai
Kerra
Halfling
Wildlands Tribes/Ruins of Qeynos
Barbarian
Icepaw Gnolls
Froglok
Hobgoblins/Lutin (Mage Goblins)
Alliance of NeriakDark Elf
Crushbone Orcs
Trolls
Ratonga
Forces of Kunark/Timorous Deep
Sarnak
Iksar
Ogre
Erudite
I know that some of these alliances might not make much sense, but the basic idea here is that each group would have a 'warrior', a 'priest', a 'mage' and a 'scout' type race although the entire group may lean more towards scout or warrior and some of those spots are filled with races that might seem more appropriate to a different one. Perhaps this could be mixed up better then, but the idea would be to take all the major races of the world (so tossing in one tribe each of Orcs, Gnolls and Goblins in but ditching the Half Elves and merging the Arasai into the Fey) and aligning them to one of the 5 factions. As one adventures throughout the world instead of fighting forces of 'Chaos', they'd spend most of their adventuring fighting forces from other factions.
For the most part Freeport would fight with Neriak and Qeynos, Kelethin would fight with Kunark and Neriak, Qeynos would fight with Freeport and Kunarkm Neriak would fight with Freeport and Kelethin and Kunark would fight with Qeynos and Kelethin.
However, individual adventurers would be able to become friendly or antagonistic to the 2 other factions as they do quests and fight various groups in the world.
Now, each of these faction names should ellict some sort of image of what the group as a whole would be like. For the most part, all of them would be convinced that they were the 'good' group in the world with the exception of Neriak who can still prattle on about how they enjoy being evil. Also, within each group there would be some sort of racial dynamic.
Examples of this would be for instance Neriak whose Queen would have made an alliance with the new Emporer of the Crushbone Orcs. So there would be sort of a rivalry as to which of them is the true leader of their faction, meanwhile the Ratonga are a slave race that is using that rivalry to get some semblance of power for themselves and the Trolls stay out of the politics and are happy to just be pointed in a direction and told to smash stuff.

Hebitsuikaza wrote:

Um ok. The next Eq should have less zoneing. I totaly agree with you there. Eveyrthing else you said I prety much don't agree with and makes no sence at all from a lore perspective. In eq1 every race had there own city and only certian citys would alow other races in based on there alignment unless they worked up factoin. All of your sugested aliances and factoins dont make sence. i konw your compensateing for eq2 not haveing many starting factions. I do agree that it was a bad idea to only start with two. And they talked about this whole strugle thing between the two citys that hasnt even been worked on much in the story and now we have 3 other citys. If anything. EQ3 would need to be another demention of the eq univers one more like EQ1. Where the contenants are whole much much biger then they are in eq2 and set them up for less zoneing and give EVERY race its home city. Dont inclued all the races we have now at launch because then you have to start pulling crapy races out of your ***. The Asarai what a joke. They same as the fay just more emo with differnt coloration.

Deadrus wrote:

I am not certain exactly how my factions wouldn't make sense, but I am hardly an expert. I just pulled together what I knew from EQ1 and have seen so far in EQ2 (I admittedly haven't played it much yet).
The new races in EverQuest II are rather... "creative" in a problematic way. There are good reasons why 2' tall things with wings were never considered terribly viable as a race to begin with. The compensations they had to make along the way to get them to work coupled with the fact that they felt it was necessary to make a 'good' and an 'evil' version of this race makes it seem not nearly as cool as the advertisers clearly mean for it to be.
And the Sarnak? Lets see, a reptillian race with its own empire on Kunark that is antagonistic to everyone else?...
Uh.. so basically... its just the Iksar Redux. It just doesn't feel as though they stand apart from Iksar enough to make them worth the trouble. It is more like 'this is how we should have remade Iksar at launch, but we couldn't and so here is a new race that takes their old role'.
Moreover, as I have said before, Kobolds, Gnolls, Goblins and Orcs really have a LOT more charisma and appeal than a lot of the half-***** excuses for races we have running around in the game. The whole idea that there are systems in place that prevent ANY version of these races from being played is incredibly troublesome.
Of course, then you hit the problem of what races to eliminate, at least at launch. My initial suggestions here were the Arasai who are pretty much the same thing as Fey and may as well just be the members of the darker classes of that race and the Half-Elves who are well... why exactly does anyone need a Half-Human race to begin with?... It is pointless.
Another one that seems worth thinking about is the Halfling and the Gnome. We have two races here who are pretty much just 'short humans', but at least the Gnome has its whole high technology aspect that can set them distinctly apart. I guess the Halflings are supposed to be both small and a bit more roguish, but they just aren't a seperate enough thing to make them worthwhile in their current form. In the above set up I tried to stick them into the team with the forest-dwellers and that could be used as a springboard to give them some new updated themes that would let them be their own thing, but well... it might not work.
And then there is the problem of having three human races and calling one Human and giving uninspired names to the other two human races. Either call none of them human and set them up to be on different sides of your war or merge them into a single race.
However, you are ultimately right that the world of Norrath has been trashed so much in EverQuest II that it is better to set a new game in an alternate timeline rather than continue the one that been set up. It is just difficult to see Norrath recovering to an explorable state without millions of years passing...
At the same time though, I think you are wrong in stating that every race needs to have its own unique starting city. Somewhere between three to five major cities at launch should be plenty to cover everything. The more cities exist, the less time is going to be spent on crafting each city and the more space in the world those cities are going to take up. The more space in the world that the cities take up, the less space there will be for wilderness to explore and, moreover, the more space is going to be used up for low-level quests so that mid and high level quests will be relegated to much smaller patches of land than the beginning level quests. While this may make sense for the first four or so months when you get that initial rush of tons of low-levels, after a while (assuming your fanbase is loyal) you end up with a lot of high level characters with nothing to do and the low-level zones become deserted.
Anyway, if you can find a way to cut the number of races from 20 to 12 while making sure to include those that have been sadly neglected since the launch of the first game AND you can figure out how to arrange these races into 3-4 nicely themed city factions into a new world that can still include the important copyrighted names like "Qeynos", "Freeport", "Neriak", "Kunark", "Faydewer", "Innorukk", "Rallos Zek", etc... and make sure you aren't creating factions that include all of the super popular races and others that have races that almost no one plays... then by all means propose a plan.

Hebitsuikaza wrote:

Wow, that post was a wall of crap-talk. ou forgot that each race ha sits own creator and therefore you can't just say they are useless. Gnomes and Halflings are not just short Humans. Sarnak= Stupid...yes I agree with you here. 1) They hate the Iksar, yet they're evil and fight laong-side them? 2) Where did they come from? The Lore for them is horrible.
The Fae I grew to like...at first I thought they were stupid because they were never there, and then EQ2 shoved them into the Lore and made it seem they were there forever. I wish Kelethin had more Wood Elves because the Fae ruling is just sooo over-rated in Lore terms....but it was a VERY good race to create int he end. One worth keeping.
Arasai? Torchered Fae to keep the evil people happy. Would anyone have died without them? Dark Elves would much rather live in Neriak with other Dak Elves...even if the Arasai are their servants. -_-
I'm no expert either...but I think you need to read some serious Lore then repost this. Almost everything you said did not make sense to me.

Nail@Venekor wrote:

Clueless Smedley at his best. Yup, big problem was calling it EQ2. It was just the perfect game other wise. We could have called it Wobblequest, it would have sold millions. Smedley got burned plain and simple. After years of having the EQ cash cow that sold no matter how poorly it was supported or developed, he tried to get away with the same thing again and it bit him in the ****.

Qandor wrote:

LOL and on page 2 of that interview...
"It was called a sequel, but in reality it was a different game set in the same world, just in the future."
So does that mean EverQuest fans don't have anything more to expect in the MMO genre? Not at all. Smedley told us that they fully intend to do another EverQuest MMO. "One day in the future, but not sure what point. No one's actually working on it," he said carefully.

I don't think he believes the name alone would have fixed everything. People came into the game with certain expectations based on the name "EverQuest 2". It could have been called "The MMO With No Name" but would the formula still have worked? The devs sounded rather narrow-minded in the beginning on what type of game they wanted. I don't believe they were ready or even wanted to meet the demand of fans interested in a game just because it was called "EverQuest 2". At least until EoF was released. It seems they stopped fighting at this point and finally gave in to what people thought "EverQuest 2" provided. Maybe Smedley thinks they could have gotten away with more if the game had been called something else. I'm still not sure what their vision was pre-EoF. The name just confused everyone apparently, including the devs.

Take the best things about Vanguard, LotRO, WoW, etc. and build a game around that. It's really sad that Vanguard ended up like it did. There are quite a few very awesome concepts there, but the technical implementation was crap.

Banedon@Antonia Bayle wrote:

allow me to just say F no to that idea, last blizzard mp game i played was diablo2, what a pile of trash and in the last update they ruined the game and never updated it again, i have no respect for blizzard, soe is much better, they make many mistakes but if blizzard took over id have to sell my sub and move on, especialy if they took the pvp aspect of the game into their own hands, anyone wanna have their corpse 'expode' again, i sure as hell dont.

i hope you guys do know that sony will never put out an EQ3 right?
as is eq2 was and still is considered a failure of a game along with the buying of the failed game Vanguard...
sony made it clear that there will never be an EQ3.
and sony would never sell the entitlements of Eq to blizzard or anyone else, partially because of us old timers of eq1 eq was already bought from varant. and since both eq1/2 bring success they will never sell their game title or any form of it. they could but why would they?
plus use these ideas for a totally different game idea/concept maybe sony will read em over and start a different game with it.

icebones wrote:

Wow, you have sure shown what an old timer you are. By posting an old myth any actual 'old timer' would laugh at.
Sony bought eq1? hah.

What I took from Smed's quote was that Eq3 wont be called eq3. Since an mmo sequel has never been done before and didnt turn out as well as they'd like. But the next eq game would be called something else. I think since they started with numbers they should continue with numbers. For instance if they dont call the next eq game eq3 they call it something like "Lands of Northath" for instnace. Since its based in norath and it is an MMO its going to be called most likely by every one that plays the game EQ3. Because for all intents and purposes it is eq3.

and yes EQ1 was bought from varant by sony...
anyway what i meant was by there being no eq3 is that there wont be one but if they do work with more content and better systems to make another installment to the lands of norrath sure it could or would be called something else other than eq3.
and shaunfletcher its not a myth sony did buy eq1. i was playing eq1 when was originally owned by varant a year later it was sold to sony.
well the entitlements of it anyway.
and i agree with deadrus

Actually you could make the World in EQ 3 much like the old one in EQ 1. Its easy, the world is made up of small islands because of the lunar pull from the blown up moon. In EQ 3 or even more expansions in EQ 2 the crazy lunar gravitational pull calms down and the sea levels go down too their old levels (Its possible the Poles melted somewhat when the moon blew up and they refreaze again, bringing the water down again). The world will never look the same in EQ but it would resemble the old one but with new lakes, rivers and a new shoreline. When you enter magic and druids into this its possible too move into these lands pretty quickly.

well just a thought.

icebones wrote:

Verant Interactive was a company essentially set up by Sony to develop EverQuest and other properties. Sony later consolidated this company into SOE. EverQuest was, from its first inception by John Smedley of Sony Interactive a Sony invention. Verant was from inception nothing more than a Sony subdivision, so to describe the Sony division which replaces it as 'buying' it and therefore buying everquest is just silly.

EQ2 would have been more of a success if it had actually been advertised. Even now there is hardly a peep about it in games mags.
My Suggestions:
Less Rigid Items.
. As it stands there are clear and unchanging differences between the worst item in any given tier and the best. Thus rendering everything under the best obsolete from the word go. I'd prefer some more random elements thrown in so that its not always obvious what the best items are in each tier.
More mob variety.
Would like to see an end to the "saturation level" mob placement currently in the game. Lets see less mobs that are more cunning, generally tougher and have a much better AI. For instance, in LP there's not the massively overcrowded morass of unrelated mobs wandering around but a seemingly empty plain with zombies ready to leap out of the ground when approached. The Gremlins dont sit there like donkeys but shapeshift into boulders, trees and so on.
Attack styles.
Each with its own distinctive animation. Say based on AP with the final AP bestowing the new animation.
No EQ3 would be a bad mistake imo.

Enlocke@Vox wrote:

Enlocke I wasn't even suggesting any of my ideas would work in EQ2. This thread is about a theoretical EQ3.