I decided not to rush to post thoughts about EverQuest Next right away. First of all, the initial presentation, while full of spectacle, was shy on details. I walked away full of unfocused enthusiasm. So I decided to see if further panels on the game would bring out more.
And I wanted to see if anybody picked up details I missed and to gauge my enthusiasm to see if my own lens on life was distorting anything way out of shape. The blogesphere mostly obliged, so if you want further reading you can look at:
- Keen and Graev
- Bio Break
- The Cesspit (Twice)
- GamingSF
- Avatars of Steel
- Inventory Full (and coverage of the class panel)
- Aardwulf’s Lair (plus a part 1 and part 2 Q&A panel overview)
- ECTMMO
- MMO Symposium
- Nosy Gamer
- Party Business
- Hardcore Casual
- Wolfshead
- Heartless_ Gamer
In that group there is a range of responses from excitement, to “meh, sounds like Guild Wars 2“, to predictions of failure. I cannot honestly say I read every one end-to-end… too much to do over the weekend… but there are opinions in there.
In the end, I am not sure if I learned enough by waiting to focus my own enthusiasm. I was able to fill in a few details, but hard data is still pretty scarce on the ground. There is an official EverQuest Next wiki forming. EQNexus is trying to collect data into an information index. Hopefully we will get something that will stay up to date and pool updates as they come out.
I am cautiously optimistic. A lot of what was said sounded like a pretty big change on the fantasy MMORPG front for SOE. They appear to have stuck to a lot of what I divined in the past as “SOE Lessons Learned” and even managed to include a few items from my wish list.
However, what things will actually look like at launch… we’re still a long way from that. Here is what I managed to cull from the data stream. My list of items is after the cut as they go on for a while.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 