Quote:
Originally Posted by t0lkien
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I've done a bit of reading and listening about EverQuest Next and... it's going to be another cup of fail I think. The very big problem is that the people making these games no longer understand what made them great in the first place. They are designing them by committee via marketing, and it's a complete cluster of second guessing and ego driven mediocrity in the end.
I say this as someone in the industry who has watched it all happen many times. EQ got it right in all the big wasy (as did UO I hear, though I never played it). WoW, while starting off great, has just destroyed the entire genre for a while. WoW did some very good things, but it's just visually, narratively, mechanically, and thematically a vile and vomitous mass now. I hesitate to say it's a game for people with no taste or experience of much else, but that's probably not true. It just feels like it's true.
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WoW is still AAA in a lot of ways - especially production values. It's just that the 'hold your hand theme park' has grown quite stale.
It's funny how things people want - including myself - ultimately end up sucking the life out of the game. Flying mounts mean everyone is just soaring through the sky. Raid Finder means I log in, do some ridiculously easy pug raid bosses, get bored and quit.
But, as to the rest of your post, I think SOE has proven it can still succeed with PS2.
You're right that EQ3 could just end up being a massive fail, and Smed/Brad egos play a huge factor. Yes, they learned a big lesson when they got their asses kicked by WoW, but that doesn't mean they won't find some other dumb game mechanic to staunchly say "you're in our world now" about