Yeah, I'm on the fence about putting in actual barriers to power leveling VS just making content fun at all levels. Ideally, if the game appealed to both types you could have different servers for different types of players, or possibly the option to "graduate" to a different shard populated by like minded players.

As for the AI angle, I've been programming for over 20 years and I dove into AI last year, and you would be surprised what you can already do with it. Our focus as programmers will be more on the game engine itself and features that make the game very fun, dynamic and interesting. The graphical parts are less important because you can pretty much use an MMO template with modern game engines like Unreal. I don't think players that would gravitate to this game would be overly concerned about the latest cutting edge graphics (people are still playing EQ and the graphics are objectively horrible).

I watched a youtube video the other day where someone had recreated antonica on a new engine (unreal 5 maybe?) and made it all a seemless/zoneless world using the original printed maps of the world to reconnect all of the zones.

It was cool and fun to watch

I'm going to see if i can contact this guy and work with him. It looks amazing! What do you guys think of realtime action combat?

He's doing it totally for the artistic value. He's got zero plans to make a game with it because of the assets involved.


He could do it without EQ assets. But it can't resemble antonica in layout. And since he's done this project he'd be liable, or a liability to a company if the new game came too close.

That sad you could make a "crater lake zone" where said dieties felll... or The Dark Forest zone (kithicor) if you change enough. They just shouldn't be connected in the order they are.

I think the northwest should be more mountainous and connected by Forest. More claustrophobic. So like... everfrost, EK, kithicor, nektulous, lavastorm, jagged pine STYLE mashup. With lots of cave areas. Highpass and gorge style map too. It could be done with some decent originality.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure that's quite right.

Images, like the textures used on everything in the game, are copyrightable. Text, like every line an NPC speaks (and every NPC name) is copyrightable. But the layout?

Again, IANAL, but I that sounds more like "ideas, systems, or methods of operation" than "poetry, novels, movies" to me.

BTW, in general games are not copyrightable at all. You can copyright the picture on your monopoly box, and the board and the pieces and such, but you can't copyright the gameplay (which is why there are a million knockoff monopoly games).

The layout is artistic in nature. It's "the world".

I get what you are saying though. You can't copyright the flow of a dungeon or the progression of newbie zone to raids.

I'm talking about a path like this Qeynos > WK > NK > SK > Lake > RMnts and on to FP.

You could probably mostly replicate this changing names. And assets. But then we are hitting a grey area. If you just want to clone your own and make it Free for arts sake it's probably less grey and more "fanart".

I think DBG deserves some respect though. I wouldn't ever try to make a 1:1 copy of antonica and sell it in any format.

Agreed. I'd much rather see someone make "EverQuest 2.0" (by which I do not mean EverQuest 2) than try to fight Daybreak's legal team to remake EQ.

But that being said, we can still dream that Daybreak will sell the rights to someone who wants to make a (real) EQ 2.0. Heck, in a sense they already "sold them" to the P99 team (for free).

One of us just needs to get Uber rich and buy the rights of the eq ip from daybreak already and make a real eq2 happen. Or if any of you are secret millionares you know what you gotta do!
It's funny because I think most of us agree that it's pretty niche to recreate everquest...but tbh, considering how dogshit most modern games have been, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually appealed to the masses on a broad scale if done right. Eq was a bit ahead of its time. I bet it'd easily become a mainstream success if done correctly and in the right hands.

We could all pool resources and start a company that could obtain the IP rights and then hire ppl (most of the og devs) to come and try to make lightning strike twice