The fantasy MMORPG Everquest Next is now really supposed to fulfill all the promises that have been made to us in the MMORPG genre for years.
A truly dynamic world has been the holy grail of MMORPGs for years
Anyone who is a fan of the MMORPG genre has heard it often in recent years: quest hubs are a thing of the past. The times when you would come to a village and there were three people with a question mark above their heads should already be over. No MMO in recent years has promised us anything but a living world where we have an impact on everything. An MMORPG where the stories take center stage, where the world will be vibrant, exciting, and eternally young. So far, no MMO has managed to tackle this Herculean task.
Everquest Next has made this its mission and wants to inspire fans with just that. In addition to a changeable world, this shift away from rigid quests towards a true fantasy world, where mobs and NPCs pursue their own lives and ambitions, is the most important point of Everquest Next.
And what is already known about the game is indeed impressive. In a video that we would like to show you at the end of the article in a brief summary, two developers go into more details of the dynamic quests.
This time it should work: Storybrick AI should provide real stories
In a nutshell: The events or event chains, as we know them from Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2, are being thought out even further. The goblin gang has always served as an example of this new way of telling stories in MMORPGs and replacing quests with “real” stories, which is dynamic and reacts to player actions, expands its influence, and grows stronger when it succeeds.
In another example that goes even further, the faction of dark elves wants to exploit the natural energy of the neighboring dryads for themselves. Players now have the choice of which side they want to intervene in this conflict. Every decision in Everquest Next is supposed to have consequences. If the dark elves win the conflict, it triggers massive events that lead to a server-wide reputation: an event that can change the history of the entire server forever. This way, over the years, differences between individual worlds are supposed to exist: on one side, players chose the blue pill, while on the other side, they chose the red pill.
The player’s story and therefore also their world are supposed to be recorded in a book called “Rohsong”. This serves as a bestiary, glossary, encyclopedia, logbook, and diary.
Skepticism is warranted, but the goal is too tempting to dismiss
Mein MMO says: We are still skeptical, but the idea of a dynamic world sounds simply too tempting and is too enticing not to keep trying again and again. As a fan of the genre, you just have to believe that the dynamic world is coming, that the game will become freer, that the way stories are told in MMORPGs will change. Because these things – and not slightly better graphics and a few more costumes in the cash shop – will shape the future of the genre.
With the Storybrick AI that EQ Next uses, a milestone could really be achieved. Anyone who follows MMORPGs will know that at such an early stage, a healthy skepticism is warranted. Previous “dynamic events” have turned out more or less to be multi-part scripted quests that quickly lost their appeal over time. And for sure, for ten years, developers have promised us before every game that their world is alive because the blacksmith only stands at the anvil during the day and lies in his bed at night. That alone has long been insufficient for us. One can only hope that EQ Next will be as complex and interesting as it currently seems.
It is certain that Everquest Next is one of the top MMORPGs for the future. Whether it will make it with a release in 2015 still remains to be seen with such an ambitious project.
