Everquest Next: The Hope of the West
Everquest Next is the only Western title in this category since Blizzard threw in the towel with Titan. And one must say: Two weeks ago, things looked significantly better for Everquest Next.
EQN is an ambitious project from a studio that created the first “modern” MMORPG with Everquest over 15 years ago, the spiritual predecessor of World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, WoW then became the downfall of the Everquest franchise, its own father. The second part of the series sank against WoW, and the studio behind it, SOE, has not really recovered since. In the last 10 years, they brought several MMOs to market and had some success, but the big hit has yet to come.
In 2013, they presented “Everquest Next” at their own SOE Live event. It was meant to be not just a third Everquest, but to reinvent the genre. With a voxel world, a revolutionary Storybrick AI, and a massive class system, they aimed to solve the problems of the stagnant genre on a large scale.
However: Since the presentation in 2013, we have heard very little about EQN. In 2014, it barely appeared at SOE Live. At the beginning of 2015, it became known that the studio SOE was likely in serious financial trouble; it was sold, and under the new management, several key Everquest personnel were let go.
The project now carries even more question marks than in 2014. And even then, there were already some, including the biggest one: “Can they really pull this off?”
Even if SOE keeps insisting that everything is going great, that they are on track, and that everything is fantastic: when the person who has been saying such things all the time is no longer with the company and is now a private citizen, that does not exactly place an exclamation mark behind their statements.
Conclusion: Everquest Next currently needs demonstrable, clear progress more than anything else. Signals. Videos. Dates. Right now, all we have are “concepts” and “ideas,” and what can be seen in Landmark. For the major hope, that is quite little. A release in 2015 can no longer be expected. And whether the game will really be as big and ambitious in 2016 as envisioned back in 2013 is now to be doubted.
Update March 19, 2016: The worst fears have now come true. Everquest Next will not be further developed. The project is officially over, as announced on March 11, 2016. This buries the last hope for an “AAA-MMORPG” from the West for now. It indeed seems that WildStar should have been the last major MMORPG from the West for the foreseeable future.
