EverQuest Next may have dazzled us with promises of a destructible fantasy world and parkour-trained heroes during the MMORPG’s recent unveiling, but once you ventured beyond the carefully prepared videos and statements, you ran into a near-unassailable wall of evasive answers. Key features such as PvP and group-based combat remain cloaked in secrecy, as does that all-important ingredient to an MMO's well-being: social interaction. Regardless, based on little slips I heard throughout the weekend and in my own chats with the developers, I was able to scrounge up a rudimentary understanding of what awaits those of us who still play MMORPGs to meet and interact with new people.

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“ "Without players, we don't have a game; without social interaction, players don't stick around."

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“ Hints were dropped that traveling about the world may take some effort...

Grouping and chitchat aside, one of the most intriguing examples of how we'll be able to impact the lives of our fellow players dropped in a stray comment during the Q&A panel on the Saturday of the SOE Live event that EQN was revealed at. At one point, a player asked if environmental damage would exist in EverQuest Next, offering the example of destroying a building and using it to cause damage to surrounding monsters. The answer from David Georgeson, EverQuest Next's director of development, was surprisingly direct: "Yes, that is our intent. When something is destroyed or blows up, that might create additional damage for people nearby, like area of effect."In fact, while answering another question a few minutes afterward, Georgeson hinted that such effects may play a significant role in PvP: "I mean, my God, how can we have destructibility without talking about PvP?" If that means what it sounds like, this could be big. MMORPG combat interaction tends to be limited to the spells and abilities players cast on each other, while the world around it plays the part of a passive onlooker. Some MMORPGs, such as Guild Wars 2, the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online, and even World of Warcraft have incorporated destructible siege elements into battlegrounds, but few if any have encouraged the use of the actual surrounding world to harm player avatars. If anything, it'll make the very act of fighting more personal.Above all, Michaels stresses that he wants to make sure "seeing other people is never a negative for you"— in fact, he wants us to be happy to see other human beings. "We know that social interaction is the backbone of an MMO," he said. "Without players, we don't have a game; without social interaction, players don't stick around." Michaels' language here and elsewhere suggest that he's planning an intensely more social experience than we find in many contemporary MMOs (especially in the upcoming games WildStar and The Elder Scrolls Online), which place a much greater focus on single-player gameplay. Unfortunately, EverQuest Next's lack of a trinity bears worrisome of what I call the "faceless" group play of games like Guild Wars 2, in which you play with many people but never have cause to learn their names. "There's group content out there that requires a group," we heard during the Q&A panel. "It doesn't matter how many classes you collect, you're still only one dude."Still, despite all of EverQuest Next's innovations, it's possible the social core may not even be that different. During the Q&A session, Georgeson (with just a hint of exasperation), responded to a question about raids thus: "In all of our panels and in the debut we focused specifically upon what's new and what's different about EverQuest Next and EverQuest Next Landmark. We have not necessarily spent a lot of time talking to you about what is the same." No elaboration there, but elsewhere he suggested that finding out where resources are might require social interaction as in the old days: "We don't want people alt-tabbing out of the game to read a map that shows them where they're trying to find something," said Georgeson.Indeed, much of what we do know about how EverQuest Next will handle social interaction actually springs from EverQuest Next Landmark, the building companion to the upcoming MMO that’s scheduled for launch later this year. That's partly because Landmark will rely so heavily on crafting. "Crafters are the social glue," Michaels told me in a private interview. "It's not because they actually craft," he said. "It's because of the personalities that are attracted to crafting. They're the kinds of people who organize guilds; they set up raids; they solve disputes between players." In Michaels' words, they make social interaction "work."Good stuff, but it's currently unknown if those social systems will easily carry over into the world of combat itself, as are the finer details of grouping. Hints were dropped that traveling about the world may take some effort, and elsewhere comments seems to suggest that instances would be minimal (if they existed at all). At the very least, the preview videos' focus on cooperative play between the human mage and the Kerran warrior by its very nature showed a greater emphasis on social play than we saw in the Elder Scrolls Online gameplay walkthrough at QuakeCon. We can only hope that SOE's on the right path, because MMOs need sociability as much as they need innovative elements such as world destruction. After all, where's the joy of knocking down a building in the forest if no one else is there to see it?

Leif Johnson is a contributing editor to IGN who loves online role-playing games. Follow him on Twitter @LeifJohnson