The Glade 4.0

#3 A Life of Consequence: Emergent AI. As you play, your decisions will have consequences. The game will remember everything you do, and NPCs, quest availability, etc. will all change based on what you've done.

Crushbone concept, Orc concept. Big tusks, hulking arms and shoulders. Orcs don't like cities, because cities have guards. They love lonely stretches of roads, because they can ambush people that come by and take their stuff. In a normal MMO, there would be a static spawn camp along the road, and whether it's launch day or 10 years down the road, it spews orcs out every 15 minutes. In EQN, they tag everything in the world, and then just release orcs into the world. Talk about adventurers who might stop going down the road, leaving orcs unhappy that there isn't any gold coming to them. Adventurers might alert the guards, who would come down and patrol the road, forcing the orcs to leave. And so on.

Talk about unexpected consequences. You might think you're making the woods safe by clearing it of goblins. But you might instead just be pissing off the Goblin King, who will send out warbands into the forest.

Jelena (sorry, got the name wrong earlier) and Keeshar fighting an earth elemental. Craters, and players fell through a hole the elemental made into tunnels below. Showing a cross-section with 3 layers of cave systems. Procedurally create content that's everywhere in the world. They know where all the Lost Temples are and stuff, lots of dynamic quest opportunities. "You can just pick up a pick and make a tunnel." And you can explore through the world, and constantly find new content.

Jelena and Keeshar can't find a way out, so they blow a hole through the world and find a magma chamber, where they find a Void Goliath. And fight it. "One thing's for sure -- you'll always know where a battle was." But the world will heal back after a lot of destruction.

#4 Permanent Change: A mechanism called Rallying Calls. A way to set up a story that takes a long time for players to work through, but permanently and constantly change the world. As an example, the city of Halas starts out as a little tent city. Then, something kind of like a public quest that takes 2-3 months, real-time, to accomplish occurs, but players don't know the exact stages and goals of the public quest. So you go to the tent city, and look for ways to participate in it. You could gather resources to help build a palisade wall, or form a group and strike out into the woods to pacify dangers. You won't know why the next stage might trigger, but you trigger the next stage, and the goblins start showing up and burning the outlying buildings. You can then try to find where they're coming from, and pacify them there. Or you could help rebuild the city, or create quarries to build those stone walls... and so on. The final stage of the Rallying Call is the Siege of Halas...

Rallying Calls can have different results on different servers, apparently...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Tree-sized golem walking through trees, breaking them down, and just obliterated a stone house.

They want to give the players the same tools the devs have, so we can help build EverQuest Next.

This winter, they will release EverQuest Next Landmark, which apparently was in one of the articles Lenas posted that I haven't read through yet.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Dark elves have horns? What kind of retarded **** is that?

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Pretty incredible presentation. Classes obviously have a lot of work as they were only playing warrior/wizard, but their vision seems really strong. Overall he said there are 40 classes and you can mix/match abilities to make the character you want to be.

World building tools look great and I think EQNL just put Minecraft out of business.

One thing I honestly hope is that they keep server populations small enough.

In this type of sandboxed world, you want enough people to be able to do things and make a difference, but too many would just be annoying, imo.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Re: Gameplay. Emphasis mine.

There was one big red flag that I do have some trepidation about, though -- Rift and Guild Wars 1 both really lacked an attachment to and identity with my character, for me, because of their very loose association with or loosely defined idea of a class. I really hope the multiclassing doesn't just turn into "gotta catch 'em all" where everybody has access to everything on their characters, and they're just all kind of a muddled vanilla where you switch out to an ideal spec for what you're doing on an hourly basis.

Edit since Lenas snuck in ahead of me:

Yeah, that. I don't mind (and in fact really like) the notion of 8 abilities at a time, and the fact that some are weapon-dependent. That's something I think Guild Wars 2 did okay with, and since weapons are linked both to availability and quality of equipment as well as class, I'm okay with carrying around 3 or 4 weapons that I can alter my abilities by switching between.

But I'd really be less worried about character identity if the multiclassing were described differently. 40 sounds like a balancing nightmare, for one, and for two, I really like having some limits that create situations where I'm weak and have to overcome (or rely on friends with different weaknesses) obstacles based on those weaknesses. I really get tired of being able to do everything, or worse, being expected to do everything.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Have they given a race/class breakdown yet?

wait what

In-game screens... looks great

(Very large)


Races shown were: Human, [High] Elf, Dark Elf, Ogre, Kerran. Classes total over 40 and you have to find them as you adventure throughout the world.

As Lenas said, they showed in-game models for a Human female and a Kerran male, and concept art for those races as well as [High] Elves, Dark Elves, Dwarves, and Ogres. So those are basically confirmed.

They only showed Wizards and Warriors for classes, but there's going to be a buttload of them, apparently, and they're not going to be character defining due to multiclassing -- it's implied to be all but expected that at any given time, you'll be picking and choosing your available abilities from many out of the 40 classes available.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I was with this until I saw the gameplay and...it's just Neverwinter. Like, seriously. Right down to the limited number of skills and the stay out of the red avoidance mechanics. Also no levels means I won't be playing. *sigh* I had such high hopes.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I'm glad there are no levels. What a stupid mechanic. My character should grow in power as I develop more skills and learn new things by exploring. Not by grinding ****. Hope you have a grand time farming quest hubs in Titan, Raltar.

I'm not going to play Titan, either. ESO is my last hope for a good MMO. It is looking good, at least.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

ESO combat live stream today looked so boring that thought I was watching someone play Oblivion.

Hmm. That character model looks very EQ2-y. Environments look great, mostly.

Beta signup: https://www.everquestnext.com/?cid=1064517

As to attachment to character, I think the way the character interacts with the game world is key. The "memory" of your characters actions by events seems like a very cool way to differentiate individuals and gain attachment, especially as with a changing game world alts won't be able to experience the same things.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

The limiting of players to 8 abilities at any given time is, to me, a confirmation that this game will be on PS4 and completely playable with a controller. Probably also why they didn't show a UI. I used to hate the idea of something like that, but I'd love to play this game from my couch or bed. Bring on Norrath.

QFT. If you can make it work well on a console, rock on. 141" screen, here I come.

I really disliked a lot of the bloat in "newer" games.

Original EQ had very few abilities- and was quite fun to play, because it wasn't the mashing of abilities that made it what it was.

Spellcasters had ~6 spells, Hybrids had those and a couple of abilities. Melee had only a very few.

As the game got older, and they added more and more activatable AAs, more spell slots, etc.... It got a bit more bloaty feeling to me. 15 different hotbars (exaggerating) makes me lose some of the sense of immersion.

IMO, if done right, choosing a weapon set and skills for the task at hand, and switching as necessary, is a pretty cool way to make it work.

And it encourages focussing play on developing a main character, rather than playing alts to access different roles.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Meh. Rift.

Though, if I like using SOEmote, maybe not. I doubt that'll really shine from across the room, though, either.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Ooh. On the official site, in the concept art section...

Farskeee should look at #16 (and it also shows Dark Elves' horns.. gives 'em kind of a Tiefling vibe... I wouldn't say I like it, but I'm okay with it, so long as it gets explained historically since they're supposed to be related to other elves), but I'm looking at the concept work on dragons in #18... 4-winged concepts!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

The director did say that Dark Elves have a pretty deep lore that explains their differences from normal elves.

I am a little bit concerned that he referenced what was obviously High Elves as just... Elves. If they get rid of Wood Elves I'm gonna break some ****.

Edit - Unless I can start as a normal elf and become forest-attuned after some finding some advanced ranger type classes. That'd be cool.

Well... let's be real, here. What are the differences? Class restrictions (not an issue), home city/society structure (Humans have two very different ones, as well), stats, and skin tone/hair color.

If I were going to chuck a few races under the bus, they're up there with Erudites (because, let's be honest, here, having Erudites just means that you can't have dark skin toned Humans, right?)...

*ducks*

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades