EverQuest Next Q&A Session, Part 1

Embedded below is Part 1 of the EverQuest Next Q&A panel from SOELive. But I watched so you won’t have to; the breakdown of answers of everything significant that was said is also below. Part 2 soon.

• Smokejumper will not commit to whether there will be one or many starting areas at this time.
• Users in the EU will be able to participate in the betas.
• The decision to use the title EverQuest Next Landmark was a business decision to clearly link EQNL to EQN.
• Lots of lore will be trickling about on the website. The Q&A panel didn’t want to get into this.
• There will be transparency regarding numbers and mechanics. Folks can of course ignore this if they wish, but there won’t be any effort to obfuscate the way things work to try to cull min-maxing.
• Expect to see inventory items show up as actual 3D items in the world. Maybe this will just be inside housing. SWG specifically is a target they’re shooting for.
• By “tiers”, the devs are predominantly talking about the levels above or under ground. How this ties into advancement is unclear; I’m getting the impression of some backing away from Smokejumper’s earlier statement that progression would be predominantly horizontal rather than vertical. There is talk of advancing classes once you unlock them.
• There will not be true darkness in the classic EQ sense, but lighting will be a major factor and there will be deep darkness possibly extending to total darkness in some areas. Characters will sometimes need or want light sources. Butler specifically says that going underground without a light source should be scary. NPCs will also react intelligently to the day/night cycle.
• EU players may or may not be able to play on US servers. Notable is that Smokejumper did not commit to saying that EU players would be forced onto ProSiebenSat-run servers.
• Mob AI is good enough that they can learn from what’s happening within a combat and react accordingly. This probably isn’t something that we’ll see in every encounter, but encounters intended to me more difficult will be characterized by smarter AI.
• No launch date has been announced for EQN in part so that player reaction to some game elements can be measured in EQNL. No doubt a certain amount of testing of the procedural generation will happen there as well.
• No comment on death penalties just yet. This seems like a softball question, so I wonder if the quick “no comment” conceals a wrinkle that folks might not expect. Maybe a permadeath server?
• World-affecting changes re: Rallying Cries will happen in real time when the server is up, not just on patch days. When new events are rolled in the plan is that they’ll trigger in the future.
• The devs want environmental damage to be in the game, for example from a destroyed bridge falling on someone.
• No comment on loot mechanics yet, re: how classes can be mixed and matched. Also no comment on group and/or raid sizes and configurations, but Smokejumper says we’ll like the answers when they’re revealed.
• The six announced races (dark elf, ogre, human, dwarf, kerra, and whatever kind of elf Firiona Vie is) are not the full list of planned character races.
• Players will be able to disrupt a Rallying Cry via various means, but the intention is not to allow it to the point of serious griefing.
• Feldon is approximately 13 feet tall.
• No comment on whether EQN will be included in the All Acces Pass… but that’s really a business question rather than a design question, and Smokejumper says he’ll be surprised if EQN isn’t part of All Access somehow.
• The game’s ‘faction’ standings, for lack of a better term, will be locak rather than global. The example given is that if you steal a muffin, but no one seens you do it, your standings with NPCs are not affected, but the baker may react to his muffins being stolen in some way.