Everquest Next

[Dog Pants]

I'm very jaded about any new MMO which comes out. Even Guild Wars 2, with its semi-next-gen mechanics, has ultimately failed to retain my attention. So I wasn't in the least interested in Ultima Next, until Sony announced that it was going to have voxel based terrain. That's fully modifiable voxel based terrain. An MMO which can be moulded like Minecraft. That's interesting. Add to that a director AI to the monsters, rather than just having them standing about waiting to be farmed, and it gets really interesting. So players decide to build a new settlement in the wilderness, which they can do a-la Wurm, and they attract the local goblins who start raiding the camp. Cue escalation, quests, resource gathering, and a permanently changed world.

Of course the cynicism is still there in my mind. This is only impressive if they can pull it off. It will only work if players can't ruin it or just turn the world into swathes of civilisation. Open Minecraft servers end up looking like hell, Wurm ended up with farmsteads and houses for miles and miles out of the spawn. In Salem you had to walk for literally an hour just to find a resource to collect. But if they can make it work, it will be very exciting. And they have Sony's backing, and Sony made Planetside 2 work. Colour me interested.

[Anery]

I'm an MMO junkie, and I like a LOT of the word things you said...but this will fail. Too many folks and it is too easy, too few and it is too hard it is a delicate balance that MMOs just cannot do. I'd be happy to be wrong but, meh.

[spoodie]

There's a gameplay video out there and it doesn't look particularly revolutionary. In the video there's destructible environments, like Battlefield, but not much more than that. No creative control aspect. However there's also long videos of a man talking about the game, perhaps those give more details like that.

[Anery]

I feel I should quantify my initial drunk reaction to this very underwhelming news.
It's an MMO, with destructible environment right? but it's only the environment THEY want you to destruct, it's not like I can shoot out the ceiling to cause sunlight to burn the fuck out of this vampire boss I'm fighting, or take out the support pillars around a boss encounter causing the ceiling to collapse (unless of course that is the mechanics of the fight in which case it is the ONLY way to do it) and 40 different classes? what? really? I'm bored thinking about it.
Ooh and look you can build settlements thats very nice and cosy.

Actually that last bit is kinda cool but the griefing opportunities are fucking endless.

This guy sums it up quite well for me I think.

[FatherJack]

Doesn't sound exactly revolutionary and article makes some good points.

No classes usually just means I usually have a miserable time as I build a completely non-optimal mish-mash of a character which can't survive on their own and that nobody wants to team up with, either.

Not the Red Faction school of destructible enviroments - (ie: of use to the player), but a mix of the Crysis method of destruction (always falls down on you) or simply not much more than a scripted cut-scene (all better when the next guy comes along)

As he notes, it doesn't matter how clever your AI is at simulating the ebb and flow of migrating gribblies in a scientifically-modelled virtual world which models their migration and/or near-extinction, because you won't notice any of that shit - to you stuck in the world it will just look like some Things spawned in a Place.

[Joose]

I was in a beta test for an mmo ages back (i forget the name. something about living in a tree?) that tried modeling animals more realistically. One of the ways it did that was to make it so that if a certain animal gets hunted a lot in a certain area they would spawn less there and spawn more elsewhere, supposedly representing them having fled the dangerous areas for greener pastures. The result? Everywhere near the noob zone was a barren wasteland, as it was the most heavily populated by players and therefore was also where most of the hunting happened.