EverQuest Next Interviews

We have rounded up a few more interviews for Sony Online Entertainment’s upcoming EverQuest Next, which, at least on paper, promises to shake up some MMO fundamentals and bring some fresh air to a stale genre. Of course, that promise has been made before, but for now we’ll have to be satisfied with what the developers have to say about it.

Without further ado, let’s start with Penny Arcade Report’s chat with director of development Dave Georgeson:

The game will also offer a world that’s much more dynamic than its competitors. Georgeson described a highly atypical artificial intelligence system that Sony Online Entertainment hopes will help enliven the world of Norrath.

As an example, Georgeson told me about a hypothetical situation where a group of players decides to venture out and clear a party of orcs from their campsite along a lonely road.

(If the players decide to go up there and make that road safe the orcs would take off and try to find some place that’s better for them,) said Georgeson. (But what they might find is a nearby village that wasn’t at all like a lonely road situation, and they may start attacking the village. And then there’s all sorts of quest opportunities that arise from that. And the players didn’t know it was going to happen when they were making the road safe, it just happened after that. This kind of non-predictability creates a lot of dynamacism in the world and allows us to focus on the big stories and story archs. There’s a ton of stuff happening in the moment to moment play that we can lean on because of the AI.)

Whether or not players will actually be able to notice these changes resulting from their actions remains to be seen, but Georgeson said it was time for the old style of MMO to die. New changes had to be made.

Forbes has some news on EverQuest Next’s companion Landmark, which will also feature combat and dynamic AI:

(We’ve always intended to have combat in Landmark. We weren’t announcing it because we weren’t certain whether we could get it in right away. We’ve done some homework and determined we can get in it soon maybe not right at launch, but pretty close afterwards,) says Georgeson. (Landmark will have a wide range of combat experiences, and it’s going to use the same emergent AI system found in EverQuest Next but possibly not in the exact same way. As far as actual combat AI goes, it will be the same model.)

How deep will the combat be? We’re not looking at the simple hack-and-slash mechanics you’d expect to find in a game with a creation/building theme They are the same style as the combat in EverQuest Next, and will include group encounters and experiences designed for more than one player.

(As far as you actually play in the game in combat, we want to embrace a bunch of different gameplay styles. If you want to be able to be ranged, you’ll be able to. Spells and melee, you’ll be able to. The same mechanisms that will be found in EverQuest Next. You’ll be able to swap out different tools or weapons to mix and match character abilities.)

Finally, Gamasutra has another chat with Georgeson:

Says Georgeson, “Let’s say you’re in combat, and you use a fireball followed by a cold spell, and it happens to kill the monsters really well. You think ‘Well, that seems like a really good idea, I’m going to do that a lot!’ Then you go in and start using it against different types of monsters, and you realize that they start reacting to you in different ways, depending upon how smart the monster is.”

Enemies have different levels of brain power, and the smarter they are, the less likely the same tactics can simply be used over and over again.

“They start using different dynamic situational modifiers,” Georgeson adds. “It’s not like an aggro bar, where you’re basically just trying to keep a monster’s attention by going ‘nee-ner nee-ner’ at him. They are assessing the threat constantly. So as you move around on the battlefield, your physical location in relation to all the other monsters is being assessed by all the monsters. The tactics you were, which defensive abilities you have up – all these things affect the monster’s decision making.”

The hope is that this will mean every combat situation is different, no matter where you are and who you are battling against. Of course, when you bring another of EverQuest Next’s big selling points into the situation — the voxel-based world destruction — things can that little bit more interesting.

“When you start using destructability on top of that, to be able to use the environment around you in a tactical kind of situation so that you’re blowing a tree down to block a doorway to keep monsters from coming in, or building a pit under some monsters so they fall in temporarily,” says Georgeson. “All of these things are different ways to interact with the game.”