Yesterday feels like a really odd occurrence, with three different major live streams… that were in no way actually connected. Currently SOE Live is going on right now in Vegas and QuakeCon is going on in Dallas. From those two we had the huge EQ Next reveal and some really sweet live gameplay footage from a dungeon in Elder Scrolls Online. Then adding to that stack we had the normal Friday afternoon live stream from Trion worlds announcing a bunch of nifty things coming up in Rift. As a result I have so many things to say… but it is almost difficult to organize my thoughts around them… I guess for simplicity sake I will just start in chronological order.
Fungal Grove
First up in the stack was some sweet live demo footage of The Elder Scrolls from QuakeCon. Up to this point we had seen a lot of recorded footage of the game but to the best of my knowledge this is the first real live demo of a player just poking around in the game. Instead of just having a guy on stage moving around they took it up a notch and decided to run a live dungeon, in this case apparently one in the Ebonheart faction area called Fungal Grove. All in all the dungeon looked really cool… it seemed to be story driven as they moved through it providing simple objectives that the group followed.
One of the cool things is that at some point one of the players died and Paul Sage the person moderating the game play mentioned that any player can resurrect any other player using a soul gem. This should be handy as it removes the need to have resurrection being a class specific skill. I have to say the first person mode looks exactly like it should… seeing them playing in that and all the animations looking right made me extremely happy. Additionally the bows seem to work like Elder Scrolls bows should. Bow sniping from stealth totally appears to be a thing, and that should make a lot of diehard Elder Scrolls players extremely happy.
Ultimately the game looks exactly like what it is supposed to be… Elder Scrolls but Online with other players. Additionally it does not seem like they are trying to be any of the other MMOs on the market. The problem I had with SWTOR was that it felt and looked like World of Warcraft in space. The storyline was awesome, but ultimately you were left playing a vanilla era WoW experience apart from that. This looks like Skyrim with people… which is all I really wanted while playing the previous Elder Scrolls games. I am definitely looking forward to seeing this in person.
Pixar EQMinecraft
Okay if you did not have a chance to watch this all yesterday… stop what you are doing and watch it right now. This is some seriously amazing stuff and I do not want to be the one that blunts the impact. Watched the above videos? SOE Trolled us… and trolled us hard yesterday. If you watched the videos… there was roughly 20 minutes of filler ahead of the meat of the demonstration. So much frustrating and bad jokes were flying over twitter as we all experienced it in person. A lot of us, myself included started to feel like maybe they were putting up filler because they really did not have that much to show. We all remember the filler content from Blizzcon a few years back that clearly were meant to be Titan presentations.
Once the trolling subsided… Dave Georgeson… quite possibly the happiest man on the planet EVER… came on stage and started easing into the presentation by showing us some concept art. Then like a master showman… he drops the bomb on us by showing us a bunch of screenshots that look almost exactly like the concept art. Just to prove that the game really looks like that, he does a flythrough of the very painterly zone of Ashfang. The world honestly feels like it is made out of clay… has a very claymation appearance to it. I was pretty questionable about how the world would look until later when he got into demos that involved motion and characters.
If you were like me… a year or so ago you were perplexed when all the sudden SOEmote was introduced into Everquest 2. It seemed like an extremely detailed system to build… but made zero sense that they did it when they did it. Apparently EQ2 was a test for what they were planning on doing with EQ Next. The above shot shows a Human Female Caster going through all of the range of emotions. The amount of squash and stretch in the faces gives it a very Pixar quality that I am amped to see in person. Ultimately that was the only real aspect I was interested in about Wildstar, so EQ Next has completely blown that out of the water.
Additionally they went into detail to explain why the world looks like it does. Apparently everything is made out of voxels, and as a result every single object in the world is destructible. That means as you are going through a battle… you can knock out a bridge to keep forces from getting to you… or pound a mob into a column and the column breaks from the motion. They did a few demos to show this off and it looks really cool. The only concern I have is how jarring will it feel when the world heals itself over time (which was mentioned as a footnote in one of the demos). I would hope that the healing occurs over a large expanse of time and gradually instead of everything magically flying back into place.
Additionally I have concerns about how this will lead to greifing. There was a demo of the Kerran Warrior and Human Mage fighting a rock elemental… and it does some kind of giant slamming attack knocking a hole in the ground and dropping all three to a cavern below the main forest floor of Feerott. Will players get pissed at each other and knock them down below eventually into the lava on the bottom level of the world? Fully destructable world is awesome… but I realize there will always be a player willing to grief you, and this seems like an amazing mechanism for doing so.
I could go on and on for hours about the cool features of the game… but like I said at the start you really should just watch the video reveal for yourself. If you believe the marketing spiel… EQ Next seems like it is going to be the game everyone has ever wanted to play. Allowing you to just go adventuring in the world and respond to things as they happen around you. The mobs apparently have storybricks style likes, dislikes and motivations… and the ability to grow a camp to a city over time. So the world should be constantly changing around you based on the influence the players have placed upon it. There are several awesome demos that explain this concept.
The biggest part of the reveal for me is that December of this year we will be getting a taste of Everquest Next with the release of Everquest Next Landmark. It essentially will give the players an ability to adventure through a procedurally generated world and the ability to build structures on their own private plot of land. The details were a bit fuzzy but it sounded like they were essentially planning on crowdsourcing much of EQ Next through a series of contests that let them call out to the EQ Next Landmark builder community to help design various constructs of the game. If they really use EQ Next Landmark as an incubation chamber for new content for EQ Next in general… they might solve the “not enough content” problem that plagues every game.
Essentially over the course of the demonstration I went from annoyed, to interested… to eventually TAKE MY MONEY NOW!!! No matter how hard I threw money at the screen it never actually seemed to work. If you are as intrigued as I am… you too can head over to the EQ Next homepage and sign up for beta. I am really hoping that the fact that I am a long time EQ2 subscriber and a Station Access level member will influence when I get picked in the process. I want to be playing EQ Minecraft now! Ultimately I am not sure if this game will completely replace the Rift like games for me… but having a game like this would definitely replace Minecraft for me.
Rift Livestream
I am lazy and since the editor I use to write my blog posts doesn’t support twitch tv… you will just have to click the link here. Like every Friday, yesterday Trion did their normal live stream, this time about Rift again. As always they are a glorious rambling mess of Rift gameplay and conversation with the folks in game and on the twitch live chat. Additionally like always there are little nuggets of information that slip out about what is coming down the pipe. If you want to see a fully summary, head over to Rift Junkies as they have a pretty good rundown. Be warned the stream is well over 2 hours long.
One of the cool things coming down the pipe is that they plan on revamping all of the level 50 elite dungeons to update them for level 60 players. While I have so many mixed feelings about this, because of the crap that WoW continually did in recycling content… it sounds like they may be doing it the right way. The new dungeons will be treated like completely unique versions, and as a result the old dungeons will still exist in their former state. The first of these will be “Twisted Realm of the Fae”, which is a darker more twisted version of the original dungeon. They were pretty scant on details but I definitely like the direction they are going.
Additionally it sounds like there will be a number of new Chronicles coming out in 2.4, the first of them announced is apparently going to be a 2 man version of Infernal Dawn. I absolutely love the Chronicles concept because one of the frustrating things about no longer being a raider… is that so much of the storyline content in these games is told over the course of a raid. Chronicles allow two players to get in and experience the key storyline of a specific raid instance. Apparently this one will be roughly the same difficulty level as the level 60 Queens Gambit one.
I was kind of disappointed that no more information was mentioned about the Rift 3.0 expansion and when it was slotted to arrive. It was hinted that we might be seeing a level 60 set of Guild Quests and that would be extremely awesome. I just hope these open up another three or so quests available to players instead of making it you do the early ones or you do the late ones. I am still very much in love with Rift again.. and really enjoying the guild and everything it has become over the last few weeks. So many proud feelings about seeing House Stalwart ride again in all its glory.
Wrapping Up
I got a super late start on the morning… didn’t end up waking up until 10 am… so as a result this came out extremely late as well. I need to get on with my day and get up and around. Here is hoping your weekend started a little bit more smoothly than mine. I had a great night doing our first every guild League of Legends Beginner night. While there were not that many people who partook, I am hoping if we do it again we will be able to drag more players in the moba madness. It had been roughly 2 months since I had played, so it was fun breaking back into it.
Oh and I forgot mention here, the AI isn’t just “like” Storybricks, SOE has Storybricks working for them. That alone has me on board. The voxel concept with Minecraft-style creation tools is a super thick layer of icing.
I loved the My EQ Story bit…. the sand painting felt just odd, and I might have enjoyed it were I not rabidly waiting for information about EQ Next. It just felt like they were trolling us, and trying to string us along until they dropped the bomb of awesome on us. I remember someone had licensed storybricks… but I didn’t remember who. The only bad thing is… out of the class discussion today it sounded like they again want to abolish tanks and healers. That did not work well in GW2… and really harms my interest in this game as a result. I LIKE playing tanks, if given a choice I will always play one. So here is hoping that was just marketing spin and that they really do have the ability to make a tank. That is hands down the worst part of GW2 for me… the abolishing of roles.
I’m glad I’m not the only who noticed the Destruction is not permanent. I don’t understand the hate thrown at the sand-art and the MyEQStory. I though they were awesome preludes to the Main Presentation.