Saturday, August 3, 2013

SOE Live: Day 3, part 1

Wow, more incredible stuff today, discussions about the world, classes, lore, fiction, and the world reboot. Yes, Everquest is getting a lore-reboot. It is sort of a reboot-plus, where the designers can use the now-invalid future history to pull the storyline of the world from. They are not beholden to it, but it is there to serve as the backdrop, characters, factions, and content from which the future history will be written.

Of course, the history of each server will depend on what happens within the community, but major world events injected into the world will come from the new line of lore. I like this style of reboot, it doesn't throw too much away, while keeping things open enough that anything could happen. We still have the familiar, but what happens with this material could remain the same, change dramatically, or new stuff could be added to the world and things become fresh again.

We went to a writer's panel today featuring Maxwell Alexander Drake, a writer SOE contracted with to help write the lore and fiction for this new world. What's cool is that he is working directly with this developers and creating the written record of the game as development continues. Very cool stuff, and there will be a new line of novels and fiction to go along with the reboot. Yeah, this is a reboot done right.

This reminds me of the D&D4 '100 years later' relaunch of the Forgotten Realms, and how many gamers just hated it. I have always thought a reboot+ is what the world needed, not an advancement into the bolted-on D&D4 timeline and content. Really, the world of Faerun is defined by its cosmology, to wrench-in Eladrin and Dragonborn as party-crashers, and then rip out the planar cosmology and say "Faewild and Shadowfell are here!" just seems incredibly sloppy to me, and shows a lack of care for the creation. It hurts, since now Faerun seems like the old world with a coat of D&D4 on it, and I feel something needs to be done to fix this, honestly.

There is also more on the feedback SOE is getting from gamers, and a lot of MMO-players used to the old ways of doing things are coming out and saying negative things about the fragments of EQNext that they see. The freedom the game gives you, if they deliver on what they are promising, is immense - I mean really immense. Groups of players can change the world, and also work against each other. Every world, and its history, is different, since this is all a constructable/deconstructable sandbox. A lot of what's being said negatively seems like players wanting to go back to the safety and familiarity of the old ways, or back into the cave, as they say.

I have nothing wrong with the traditional MMO or pen-and-paper game, they are great, there are some that are well-designed and cool, but there seems to be a real desire to walk out of the light and back to the way things were done. I mean, EQNext's classes were talked about today, and they are a combination of class abilities, equipment abilities, and weapon abilties. You can multiclass two out of 40 collectible classes, and furthermore, the weapon you use and the gear you equip gives you further special abilities. You can be a paladin-mage type class, have air waking boots, and a sweep-attack halberd. You pick the abilities you want, get some through gear, and others through weapons. It is an innovative system, very cool, and something I wish we could see more of in pen-and-paper games.


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