INTRODUCTION





In the late 90s, with EverQuest on the front lines, the world of online gaming took a turn in a direction which none of us could have ever dreamed. Amazing and sometimes cruel virtual fantasy lands were suddenly within gamer’s reach. Massively multiplayer online gaming had made the persistent virtual world possible.





As quick as it came, it all stopped. Not the subscribers, or the endless clones, but innovation in the genre seemed to screech to a halt. For 15 years since we have been watering down and polishing the same games. Core MMO gamers have been left jumping title to title, increasingly disappointed. We’ve only gotten scraps, in the form of less-than-crafty redesigns, patchwork fixes, sloppy technical design shortcuts and then no shortage of the teams with short-falling good intentions either… Until now. The world has just gotten a glance at something on the horizon which will change everything we know about MMOs: EverQuest Next.





Stepping back, I think a good place to start would be who I am and my relationship to all of this. In 1999, when I was 12, my father took me to the store to buy a game. I walked out with a copy of EverQuest and as excited as I might have been for a new game, I had no idea that a 15 year love affair (or addiction if you will) had just begun, one which would take me through the best of times and also the darkest times, quite literally. In my youth I found myself in a lot of trouble… with nothing else to turn to than Norrath. EverQuest was one of the only positive things I had going to get me through it and I would be lying if I said I didn’t owe anything to it. It is safe to say and with no exaggeration that I was raised on EverQuest.





My passion for that original EverQuest experience never dwindled. To this day, I still hop on the classic EverQuest emulators (no offense to those of conflicting interest). I try as many MMOs out as I can, always hoping for something to satisfy the void that EverQuest left.





Oh, I should mention, EverQuest also sparked my first career. I became obsessed with game development and design. When I was old enough to do so, I ran away from my troubles to lose myself in the city of Montreal. I didn’t know at the time that Montreal was about to quickly become one of the meccas of the games industry. After walking out of a few dead-end jobs, I responded to an advertisement looking for game testers, without much faith. I blew them away in the interview and in the practicals, mostly from things I had learned playing EverQuest, so they took a chance on this lost 18 year old. Since then I have climbed through the ranks of QA. I even had the privilege of working on some MMOs and other persistent worlds. This year I – with some hesitation – left my position at Warner Brothers Games Montreal as a QA software developer to pursue professional tattooing; but I am proud of what I was able to achieve and could not possibly replace those experiences.





I apologize for sidetracking with my story, I would just like to establish that I am writing this with passion and experience, both as a professional and an end-user. It’s not my first time writing about MMOs. Anyone who was on Brad McQuaid’s Vanguard bandwagon may rememberan article about instancing in MMOs that I wrote for the now defunct GamerGod which sparked a debate amongst a few of the big minds of the time, to name a couple: Brad McQuaid (Everquest OG) and Raph Koster (SWG fame). Today I will try again. I can only hope that I can spark that same kind of creative reaction with my blog here.





I find my angle is typical of any PvP gamer from the EverQuest/Ultima Online/Asheron’s Call generation. When I picked up my copy of Everquest in 1999, the manual’s description of the rogue class provided a url to an all rogue guild’s website for class information, The Order of the Black Rose. They inspired me with their stories to try out PvP no matter how nasty it got and soon after they became my family. I still play with some of them and others from the game. I was hooked on the rush of PvP in MMOs and to this day I have not been able to play a game which lacks it. As such I realize I am heavily biased towards the PvP community – hence the name of my new blog: The EverQuest Next PvP Lobby.





All that we know about PvP in Everquest Next at this time is that it is going to be there and will not simply be an afterthought. This to me is a good first omen, the failure of integrating PvP into games usually comes from trying to patchwork it in after the game’s design has been spoken for. For now the PvP details will remain limited so I will try to address some concerns which may be more readily answerable…





PART I: INSTANCING

I sent that Tweet not long ago to some of the SOE team which are active within the fan community.

There are times that we all take shortcuts to solve immediate problems while losing sight of our goals. To the persistent world business, one of these incidents has been the modern instancing system.





It must have made sense at the time. “How can we controllably allocate resources and provide more players with more interesting encounters simultaneously?” Great in theory, but quite contrary to everything which is beautiful about these virtual persistent worlds. Consequently our mysterious unexplored worlds have turned into grindy tedious mini-games which we must repeat until our eyes bleed from the Deja Vu. The only real competition is raiding harder and more often than the other guys. There is absolutely no prospect of adventure “in the wild” left. Fact is, instancing has always been a patchwork response to lack of content. It is not an easy task to intelligently balance content amongst a population, however it is not impossible and it has the ability to make or break a game. Too much and the world would be empty, too little and people it will be overcrowded.





As the technological shortcomings which validated instancing originally no longer exist, it’s time we put in the work and tackle the content problem; and from the sounds of it, SOE is doing exactly that in EverQuest Next. With a massive ever-changing world, the content will perpetually evolve and respond to the player’s demands. When you put EverQuest Next’s announced features on the table, the entire dilemma suddenly has become so simplified.





Allow me to explain more in detail, though I strongly suggest you YouTube the recent SOE Live EverQuest Next event for information from the source. EverQuest Next has been announced to utilize one of the biggest game worlds to date – with rich unique content across all three dimensions! That’s right, the world goes on beneath your feet and also above your head. This is made possible by the fact that EverQuest Next will utilize a voxel based engine, which will allow players to destroy and interact with the environment in ways that have not been seen ever in the genre (if you are having trouble imagining, think Minecraft meets EverQuest). This highly interactive EverQuest world supports PERMANENT change, meaning the decisions of the community on your server can forever alter the world… and not just the map, with emergent AI and an elaborate social faction system, the AI in the world will adapt to you in ways you’ve never even considered. The world in EverQuest Next sounds to be nearly organic, much more like an ecosystem than a game that we’ve seen before.



In combination with the strong suspicion that it wouldn’t make any sense to use instanced areas in a voxel engine, I am onto a strong hunch that SOE has come to be in agreement with these ideas on EverQuest Next. Will EverQuest Next be the first game to smash the instancing standard? Let’s wait and see what SOE has to say on the matter…