EverQuest Next Previews
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GameZone:
Permanent change in the environment isn't strictly limited to destruction. Players, creatures, and NPCS can work together to build city walls which, in turn, can also be destroyed. SOE promises large-scale wars and epic stories which will unfold over months and even years -- all of it changing the world around you.
As for gameplay, EQ Next ditches the traditional class system as well as the dreaded leveling system that results in hours and hours of grinding. Instead, the game offers 40 distinct classes or professions (this is at launch, mind you), with multi-tiered abilities and specialized weapon skills. Although 40 classes are available in the game, you only start off with 8 available; you must discover the rest of them. And when you find them, you don't just pick one skill and stick with that. EQ Next is all about the customization, allowing you to mix and match abilities from each class. As someone tired of the traditional class system in MMOs, this is easily my most anticipated feature.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
Providing elegance and variety to movement and combat, making exploring and fighting interesting activities for their own sake, does solve many of my issues with the WOW (and original Everquest) model. Players still select a race and class to begin with, each having access to four abilities and a couple of weapon types, but they can learn the skills of the other classes as they progress, mixing and matching skills and equipment.
In the battle we were shown, the wizard was Daud-like, blinking through the air, materialising behind enemies and destroying them, sending splinters of rock screaming through the air. The Kah Shir warrior (lion-like now, rather than the tiger-person of yesteryear) charged, sending smaller enemies sprawling, then pouncing from point to point, chaining attacks together, and avoiding spells and the hefty blows of larger creatures.
Destructoid:
EverQuest Next is a re-imagining of the original 1999 classic, while Landmark is essentially a free-to-play sandbox with rich voxel modeling tools that will usher some of the community's penis-free creations into the future world of EverQuest Next.
Crafting and digging deep into the earth's crust only scratch the surface of what's new. The new games are a radical departure in three other ways: multi-classed characters can mix and match abilities, there's an "Emergent AI" that does not rely on static spawn points, and permanent changes to the world are dictated by the outcomes of wars. These four pillars prop up what, if my eyes don't deceive me, is an otherwise gorgeous-looking next-gen game that absolutely deserves all the whispers and hype since its E3 stealth debut.
And Inside Gaming Daily:
So now we have this EverQuest Next reveal, which showcases a distinctive graphics style and a game design philosophy built on four core principles.
The first is changing the core game. Georgeson was candid in admitting that we've been playing a form of online D&D now for fourteen years, picking a character and leveling up through slaughtering monsters and looting their corpses. In Next, you choose from one of eight classes to start, armed with two weapons and with four to six abilities. Then, as you interact with the world you learn new classes which you can then mix and match, changing the abilities you have at your disposal; so when you change your weapon you change your abilities. A couple of examples showed a wizard who could use a vortex ability to pull a group of enemies close together, teleport you out of the immediate area, then smash the tight group with a powerful area-of-effect attack. A warrior character had a shield bash, and could roll through entire lines of enemies. All-in-all in a short, out-of-context demo, it looked cool.
