This is a follow-up to my opening blog entry which mentioned the potential for the “life of consequence” pillar in EverQuest Next – an AAA virtual world coming to PS4 – to really make PVP work and matter. But it will be a bit broader than just that pillar.

I say EverQuest Next, but really this could apply to Landmark or any Landmark-based games. (There will undoubtedly be others over time.)

Last year shortly before the reveal of EverQuest Next at SOE Live I pieced together a number of quotes and clues from Smedley and argued that the game would have open-world PVP – no “PVE” servers. This was always a stretch, and I won’t try to argue it here. Instead I’ll focus on how a PVP server could be implemented in a truly exceptional way.

I’ll start with the ‘holy grail’ described by David Georgeson around ‘a life of consequence’. ‘A life of consequence’ is essentially about the game world keeping track of all of your actions and responding accordingly – particularly emergent AI making decisions in response to your decisions. We’ve seen a less hardcore version of this in a number of games where you kill # of goblins, lose faction standing with their race and gain it with their enemies the elves.

But ‘a life of consequence’ in EverQuest Next will be so much more than that. It could be the solution – or part of it – to the griefing epidemic that plagues MMOs with open-world PVP.

Picture this: A veteran player decides to pick on a group of newbie players. He kills one of them without provocation and instantly becomes an outlaw. Town guards will attack him on sight and he won’t have access to all of services in largely-populated areas.

The more he kills, the more his notoriety as a murder increases. If he goes on killing, local governments send guards/bounty hunters to take him down.

As the kill count increases, his reputation as a murderer is known in more and more places and he is forced to head further out into the frontier to areas where there is less protection/government. And NPCs would tell players when there is a bounty on a truly famous murderer nearby, so there are players on their tail as well. The people in the world would communicate with each other about a serial killer like they do in the real world and the hunt for that griefer would become more and more intense if they keep going down that road until it becomes virtually impossible for them to operate in civilized areas.

So again they head out into the frontier or go underground. At the end of the day the griefer can still have fun playing the game – there will be tonnes of content to experience everywhere – but the world organically pushes them away from innocent people if they persist in killing.

There are other aspects of EQN that point to it having exceptional PVP. A couple of my favourites are progression and combat.

Progression is supposedly horizontal, which means you aren’t grinding away all day doing the same thing to increase some arbitrary character stat that gives you the ability to defeat people who haven’t gone through the same hoops. There will be about 40 character classes with abilities you can mix-and-match and from what I’ve gathered there is a pretty shallow progression capacity for each one.

This ties into the combat system, where your ability to best someone else in a confrontation depends a bit on the abilities you have but also how you choose to load them out and use them. Since the world is voxel-based you can create/destroy things to impede or damage your foes. It seems like there will be a lot more skill involved than in your typical MMO, with a lot more positioning/movement/leveraging the environment to win. I keep looking at the recently-introduced water system in Landmark and thinking it would be great if this could be combined with ice. Imagine if you were fighting someone and they jumped into a pool of water to escape only to be locked in an icy tomb? It could happen.

So from a PVP perspective, it seems like you’ll be able to get into the game and explore and have fun from day one without a huge barrier between you and the the elite. Well, there will be a barrier – player skill – but not a huge gulf reinforced by the economy of grinding for new power levels. MMOs have a bad reputation in that regard and EQN has the potential to get past it.

Now if you look at these features together, we start to see an exceptional PVP system emerge. Griefers get squeezed to the periphery by the world itself, and everyone has a pretty fair chance to defend themselves in the first place.

Griefers could also be isolated in that the player-kill count of groups of murderers is added up and the local NPCs respond accordingly. So if a PK guild had 20 members with 2 kills each, the NPCcs would perceive “40 murder” and send out the big guns. That would force murderers to split up, whereas innocent people could band together.

We could still have PVP carnage through opt-in faction and guild systems. So if you want to be neutral you aren’t completely safe from PK – it’s still a possibility in this boundless sandbox world – but the local NPCs have your back and will be a natural system that keeps griefing at a minimum. Faction/guild members, on the other hand, have higher levels of risk from other factions/guilds they’re at war with.

Another aspect of EQN that is quite promising from a PVP perspective is destructibility. It pretty much speaks for itself. Virtually all of the world can be destroyed – different parts of it in actual practice depending on the ruleset, no doubt. I believe Georgeson made a reference to siege weapons physically destroying parts of enemy fortresses to get inside. This is really cool stuff. I imagine groups of many mages getting together to cast some massive spell of destruction that travels thousands of voxels away and decimates a small village. You could tie in the emergent AI and have NPCs warn the people in the town when something like this is in the works.

But perhaps SOE can sell some protection from the destructibility: Let’s say X resources can buy you a small group of guards to protect your property on the frontier away from the NPC government, and players can benefit from economies of scale to get better protection if they band together.

Last but not least… the unknown. SOE is doing tonnes of innovative stuff with the EQN and Landmark. I can’t help but hope Smedley’s response to my question in his AMA Reddit were more than just talk…

“It won’t be an afterthought. We are going to make PvP matter in an Everquest game or we’re going to die trying.”