The Everquest Next team no longer collaborates with the AI team from Storybricks. They want to bring the work “in-house”.
The team of artificial intelligence specialists from “Storybricks” is rumored to perform wonders. Their work was supposed to bring more dynamic opponents and changing events; generally, it was meant to usher in a golden age for MMOs. The story has often been told: A gang of goblins spawns and, unlike normal “MMOs”, thanks to Storybricks, first asks what their goals actually are and then pursues them: to conquer a village, become stronger, respond to opposition. No day would be the same as another; everything would always be in motion: a self-varying story.
Such hopes have experienced a rude awakening: In a livestream, the developers of Everquest Next have now explained that their collaboration with the Storybricks team has come to an end. They believe it is better to handle AI development “in-house”. However, they will continue to utilize what has been developed with Storybricks.
How this exactly affects Everquest Next is not known at this time. Allegedly, Storybricks works in a way that they make themselves redundant and impart their know-how to the other company. Whether this has already succeeded at such an early stage in development is highly questionable.
Mein MMO means: Oh man. The “Storybricks” thing was actually the most interesting part of Everquest Next and what gave the most hope that DGC could really achieve its ambitious goals. One can only hope that another development team continues the path taken with Storybricks and that we find out in the near future if all these wonderful things are really true. They sounded, as so often, too good to be true. That the dream of a dynamic, “real”, different quest and monster AI is dying before one can really believe in it is truly a shame.
The naysayers who claimed that Everquest Next would not be as ambitious and grand as announced two years ago now seem to be right.
The presentation of the collaboration between Storybricks and EQNExt at SOE Live 2014 in Vegas … “not the same-old mmo” was advertised back then and a cow was placed on a racetrack:
