It's Official - End of EQNext

"It's dead, Jim."

Dr. "Bones" McCoy

Yup. After trying several over the years, I am not really into the Paid Betas. I'd tried all the big ones, but always came back to EQ2.

T

The true successor to EQ is being built and we know who is building it.....they should just hire him back if they care about the true lore and old school feel, but if it is all about huge money, than move daybreak to Korea and pay to win cash shop it with WoW graphics......just my opinion.

Smed is gone, so bring back the true Da vinci of Norrath.

Free to play isn't a successful model for high-end games. Even in EQ and EQII, you have to wonder how many of the freebies are actually being supported by people with paying accounts. Works great for simplistic, repetitive games like Minecraft or Candy Crush, not so great for those that require extensive development, testing, and maintenance.

The real ground breaker for EQN was trying to build a persistent, player-constructed world. The biggest hang up I can recall was the inherit destructiveness of a significant percentage of players, coupled with an inability for the in-game society to provide enough negative consequences to hold their destructiveness in check. It's hard to impossible to build a shining city on the hill when too many people have the capability of turning it into a glowing lake of nuclear fire.

Shadowbane tried this, it didn't work.

I actually kinda hope DBG will pick up one of the new generation game engines (one that makes appropriate use of dual core and high-powered graphics cores) and basically rebuild EQ2 on it as EQ3. The two biggest problems we have today are the fact that the EQ2 game engine uses CPU for everything, and that player model skeletons don't have enough bones.

I hated the cartoony look of what they were doing with EQNext. Some of the new mercenaries (which have better skeletons than player models) show what the game could be. I like the more realistic style. I like the beautiful landscapes. I love the literally thousands of quests. I want all those things in EQ3, plus a modern game engine!

Shadowbane really didn't have a chance. An unstable client, unstable servers and rampant hacking / cheating killed that game in its crib. The coders and designers just didn't have the chops to pull it off.

Except Landmark is actually launching this year, so anyone who paid for Landmark, still gets Landmark, which is all they were promised (to my knowledge). Landmark and EQNext have been listed as fully separate games for as long as we could pay for access to Landmark.

People who paid for Landmark thinking they were doing something special for EQNext, I'm sorry for them, but for me the writing has been on the wall in regards to EQNext for a long time now. I figured we'd see the announcement for it being scrapped shortly after Smokejumper was let go, he seemed to be the most excited about it of anyone and surely after Smed was gone but they didn't (which did surprise me).

Name in next credits was a landmark selling point

Time to learn the Cryengine and start over.

I hope they move from CPU intensive to more GPU intensive, if they make the game too dependant on hardware they'll shoot themselves in the foot. the game should be B2P to act as a protection against hackers, F2P games cheaters can defeat their bans by making new accounts routed though VPNs or using dynamic IPs.

I hope they learned from this though, if they make a sequel to EQ2 they have to decide which demographic they want and then stick to it regardless of how the popularity changes of various demographics and spend their resources to keep the majority of their demographic focus happy.

PS2 is going to get a construction type system where players can mine cortium with a harvester vehicle and build structures on the map an EQ2 sequel could use -part- of this system to let people design places like a true editor and the devs can look through submissions that people vote on after previewing (like housing leaderboards). players then have something more they can do to affect the game world that isn't trigger based and the developers can set some conditions and rules to submissions.

I'd like an SWG housing system too where in certain regions you can place your houses and make some towns with a player mayor. some places you shouldn't be able to place houses etc to prevent what happened in SWG with a block of houses taknig up tons of space. houses in dev built cities should still be an option.

i don't miss the player cities cluttering the landscape, but man being able to drop a bag on the floor and fill it with junk that anyone else could dig thru was super handy!

You can't possibly mean Brad McQuaid, who became the laughingstock of the MMO industry when he ran off with Pantheon's kickstarter money, then conned a group of volunteer fans to make his vaporware of a "game" for him afterward....

Out of curiosity, why does the official EQN forums only have 3 pages of 59 replies to this announcement? Am I looking in the wrong place? It seems like more would be upset about it. There's more replies about it here.

he's golden again after last night's twitch stream apparently!

aw, snap!

Carvell Fenton ‏@Lysrin Mar 11
@DaveGeorgeson Now that #EQN is officially dead, had the sale never happened and team stayed intact could you have delivered #EQN to vision?

David Georgeson ‏@DaveGeorgeson Mar 11
@Lysrin Yup. Absolutely.

Yarnila (WFB) ‏@YarnilaGraumond 2h2 hours ago
@DaveGeorgeson @Lysrin powerful response

David Georgeson ‏@DaveGeorgeson 1h1 hour ago
@YarnilaGraumond @Lysrin it's based on a 27-year track record of never failing. All products shipped. All made money. Until now, I suppose.

Those....are some hyooge blissfully ignorant stones.

unfortunate

Good. Now follow up and cancel Landmark instead of "launching" it. Combined with cutting loose PVP, we can get back to concentrating on what matters -- EQ1 and EQ2 development and improvement.

Truth be told, EQ1 and EQ2 should probably just start planning for a sunset too at this point. DBG doesn't have the resources to support them properly and the current state of both games is pretty embarrassing to their legacy.