EQ Next - the curtain is about to fall...
 

See you in LV !

/nerd

SOE has done good things with PS2. They seem to really listen to the community.

I don't think it'll be the second coming of Veeshan, but I do hope they hit a home run with it.

the leaked animation video was a huge fail imo, but then again, they said they wiped it all and started from scratch again...there is no way we can tell until the 2nd

Only thing I didn't like about the video was the shiny armour, and that could easily be fixed with proper lighting.

I didn't like the style - it's very Warhammer/WoW influenced. And that, to me, is telling.

Can you provide the leaked video?

it had been online for barely over 2 weeks, as soon as I posted it on P99 it got removed.

Either the SOE Staff reads RnF (tinfoil) or the author of the video noticed the views and freaked out. Either way it's nowhere to be found anymore :/

I'm definitely hoping for the best. Either way, I'm sure I'll check it out.

I really hope they don't go with the cartoon models....So sick of those.

What's horrible is that MMO Studios are really "low" budget, besides SOE and Blizzard.

Blizzard has way too much cash right now (goodbye vivendi)

SOE is #2 , their staff is very qualified and the financial health of SOE is satisfying. However monthly (sometimes weekly) board meetings constantly check the "yielding" capacity of a title. You all know SOE is massively F2P (if not 100% of the entire catalogue ?). So their revenues has to be triggered by in game mechanisms, you can expect that in a way this makes it impossible for a game to be "hard" in the vintage meaning, simply because revenues came from monthly fees, and that in game mechanics were purely to challenge players, not to generate cash.

What is to be feared is that so far what has been disclosed about EQN is that they want to make it hard again. But we all know the more WoW became popular the easier it got. SOE remains a company, and CFOs rule the world...that's what I'm afraid of. :(

Look at DayZ, it's interesting to see this game (mod) became extremely popular because it's hard as hell and that there is barely any tutorial in game. People loved it and within 2 months they had 1 million active players...with 0 marketing budget.

If there is one last company that can take a shot at the Hxc core of the MMO community, it's SOE. The rest are positioned on a theme park casual segmentation that will never interest you EQ1 player...(Purely speaking of Heroic Fantasy - on another thematic, even though I don't play, EVE Online seems to be a perfect example of how MMOs should be ran, 4000 people alliances fight ? holy shit).