First of all, I want put out a hope that whatever Daybreak and EG7 does with this plan for their next EverQuest title, that they don’t call it EverQuest III.
I mean, that would still, in hindsight, be better than EverQuest Next… never give something a name that will eventually be wrong, like “next” or “latest” or “state of the art”… but I am really hoping for a solid name that makes for a recognizable acronym. I’ll take EQ3 if I have to, but I’m holding out for something better.
That aside, I have had a chance to digest the announcement from last week from EG7 that they are in the investigation phase for a potential new EverQuest title. I’ll bring up the relevant chart once more.
First party game plans
They aren’t even planning to start working on it until 2025, the 2028 release target is probably laughably unrealistic, and there is the obvious question about what they have been doing up until this point… it isn’t like we haven’t had rumors and false alarms about some EverQuest based title being in the works since the death of EverQuest Next… I’ve even predicted a new title announcement being imminent in a couple of my annual predictions since then… so there isn’t a lot to chew on. We’re probably a long way away from anything and ANY assumptions about what we’ll get, aside from the setting being Norrath are likely quite wrong.
That is part of why I dislike the sudden use of EQ3 by every single gaming publication covering this bit of news as shorthand for it. That puts the idea very much inside a box of pre-formed expectations for many people… this is the danger of a soon to be 25 year old IP… and those expectations are bound to be wrong in many ways. Ji Ham didn’t say “EverQuest III” so we should knock that off for now.
What Ji Ham did say, on the other hand, was by turns interesting and disturbing. The whole idea that Elden Ring‘s success has unlocked the hardcore concept, that a Norrath based title where you bash your head into the game repeatedly in trying to succeed, I am not sure I am down with that either. His words from the video transcript (cleaned up a bit):
…there was this big push in in game development to make it everything super user friendly maybe make it easier make it more accessible and then FromSoftware did something very different which is that it’s the type of thing… and I personally have 200 hours in it because literally one night I tried to beat one boss all night long ultimately couldn’t beat it… but the point is that they built this like where you bang your head against the wall type of gameplay but it’s just the phenomenal experience, hardcore as they get and people thought that’s not really commercial well 20 million people bought the game so it’s clearly commercial.
But what they did is change how gamer’s perceive gameplay and I think what that means is EverQuest original was a hardcore game, so for many years we thought about how do you make it more accessible where we’re not you know our viewers you know what thank you FromSoftware you said hardcore is okay it could be Mass Market.
If we want to try to bring back that original experience much as we can for EverQuest, that’s where we’re starting. But it’s not a remaster. It would be a brand new game.
You can find that at around the 2:18:00 mark in the video if you want to hear him say it, which I think helps you focus on his emphasis. (The video, one more time.)
Leaving aside the whole idea that Elden Ring cost $30 million to make or the idea that Daybreak could make anything like an MMORPG EverQuest title for that amount of money, what bothers me about that whole line of thought it how many assumptions are riding on the word “hardcore” and how that word means different things to different people but he uses it as though it has a single, generally agreed upon meaning… and that meaning is exemplified by Elden Ring.
I have no problem with Elden Ring. Not a title for me, but as the man said, it sold a lot of copies. And I agree that early EverQuest was seen as a hardcore experience, and all the more so in post-WoW era.
But those two are not at all the same thing in my mind. Saying one is like the other displays at least an utter lack of nuance.
1999 EverQuest was difficult and often unforgiving. People usually bring up corpse retrievals and the punitive xp loss on death, where a whole evening’s progress could be wiped out by a bad pull. But until you get to level cap raiding I am not sure I would characterize it as “bang your head against the wall” game play.
In fact, a lot of it was very manageable, if you took the time to learn the mechanics. Assessing mobs, learning how to pull, having situational awareness, using crowd control, and knowing when it was time to run for the zone line shouting “train!” were things you had to pick up. But they were not terribly painful to overcome.
Meanwhile, if what I have heard is true, Elden Ring kills you in the tutorial if you do what it says. It is, as a game, deliberately trying to mess with you. Meanwhile, some of the things that made EQ what it was back in the day, things like an immense world with slow and often hazardous travel sound like things that Elden Ring avoided.
Basically, I don’t think the hardcore Ji Ham spoke of is necessarily an honest reflection of what hardcore means when you speak of early EQ.
We’ve been down that path before. Part of the assumptions the team who made WildStar ran with was the idea of a hardcore experience, seeing difficulty alone as a virtue.
And it is no mystery where they may have gotten that idea. Even if that wasn’t the game play the devs themselves enjoyed… and games tend to be shaped around what the devs enjoy… there is a sub-set of players out there who are asking for an experience that is simply more difficult, the same way there is a subset of players out there always asking for open world, no safe spaces, full loot PvP.
That hardcore group always wants content that is insurmountable by most players. They want the sword that nobody else could get, to defeat the boss that otherwise took down 95% of the groups who assaulted it, to cull out the casuals and stand alone with the worthy.
Which is a legit position to take. You know which side they were on in the Elden Ring discussions about whether the game should have difficulty settings. And there is Elden Ring for them to play. But a live service, open world title that will no doubt depend on long term commitment by a player base that enjoys the social and progression and exploration aspects… it feels like that has been tried and failed already.
But, again, it really depends on how Daybreak ends up defining hardcore. There is a pretty wide range of possibilities to use that word and end up with something that isn’t Elden Ring.
In the end, if feels like the success of a new EverQuest title is going to depend heavily on the franchises installed base. Millions of people have played EverQuest in the past, and that is who will feel the call most firmly if a new title is announced. Are they going to want an Elden Ring sort of hardcore? Is Elden Ring so influential on the video game market that it is a viable pattern for an MMORPG?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 