I thought this was an eary April fools joke, but I went straight to Daybreaks website to get the scoop...
EQN News: A Letter from Daybreak's President
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/11/11206518/everquest-next-canceled
To Our Daybreak Community,
I’m writing today to let you know that, after much review and consideration, Daybreak is discontinuing development of EverQuest Next.
For the past 20 years EverQuest has been a labor of love. What started as a deep passion of ours, as game creators, grew into a much larger passion shared by you, millions of players and Daybreakers alike. Watching EverQuest’s ability to entertain and bring people together has inspired and humbled us. It’s shaped our culture and has emboldened us to take aggressive risks with our game ideas and products. When we decided to create the next chapter in the EverQuest journey, we didn’t aim low. We set out to make something revolutionary.
For those familiar with the internals of game development, you know that cancellations are a reality we must face from time to time. Inherent to the creative process are dreaming big, pushing hard and being brutally honest with where you land. In the case of EverQuest Next, we accomplished incredible feats that astonished industry insiders. Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun. We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too. In final review, we had to face the fact that EverQuest Next would not meet the expectations we – and all of you – have for the worlds of Norrath.
The future of the EverQuest franchise as a whole is important to us here at Daybreak. EverQuest in all its forms is near and dear to our hearts. EverQuest and EverQuest II are going strong. Rest assured that our passion to grow the world of EverQuest remains undiminished.
Yours truly,
Russell Shanks
President, Daybreak Games
So, without any bashing, just pure honesty:
Are we shocked by this? All the features by themselves sounded nice. But anyone that has been playing MMOs for 10+ years should have thought: "Do they make sense if they are combined? Can this be fun?".
I mean,.. my first impression of EQN after hearing the features was: "Uhm, ok. How do they put THOSE in order?!"
The first impression after seeing Landmark and the combat system was: "This is not going to be any fun whatsoever. Things just don't match at all."
So again, honest question: Who did actually think this could be fun? All the planned features just never added up to something. And definitly never sounded like a game that has "Everquest" in its name. By themselves most features made sense, but just never fittet in the great picture. So not shocked at all, just shocked that they actually admit this.
Seriously, hats off to that new chief guy over there at DBG. Honestly saying your game is not fun AND stopping it needs some crazy balls. More companys should do this.
Given that their website hadn't been updated in months, the writing was on the wall.
Going with Rattenmann here. The combat they put in Lankmark, which was supposed to be "EQN built built in front of you", was The single worst combat I have ever tried.
It was more of a GW2+1st Person shooter than an mmo that deserved the name EverQuest.
I see it hurting EQ1 and EQ2 numbers. Those players were hoping for something new that really deserved the EverQuest name.
Brad beat them to it. DBG needs to go into a 49% partnership with Pantheon VR ( Brad should ALWAYS have full control of Pantheon. )
Pantheon will bring 95% of the EQ1 EQ2 crowd and those games will shut down completely if Brad delivers a good, Finished game.
Medjai said:Brad beat them to it. DBG needs to go into a 49% partnership with Pantheon VR ( Brad should ALWAYS have full control of Pantheon. )
NO, never accepting what not only the EQN did and what the slew of class nerfs did to the community, it ruined EQ for many of us. Even though the game was going downhill before that.
Many of us quit shortly after that to never return, then we noticed they still are class nerfing. Its horrible to the paying customers that after 14 years they start fixing the game?
Hiring that mentality is not only bad for pantheon, but it will split this community up too. If that class dev comes here in any form.... i am out of here, and i wont turn back.
He did this after i invested a lot of cash upgrading family owned accounts.
so i have bad tastes about any dbg ideas coming to a fresh new game.
Game studios cancel games for not being fun more than people think. It's a tough solution as usually a bit of money has already been invested, and moreover it usually means bad news for those that were working on the project.
The game(entertainment) industry can be a tough one if job security is your thing.
Crazzie said:Medjai said:Brad beat them to it. DBG needs to go into a 49% partnership with Pantheon VR ( Brad should ALWAYS have full control of Pantheon. )
NO, never accepting what not only the EQN did and what the slew of class nerfs did to the community, it ruined EQ for many of us. Even though the game was going downhill before that.
Many of us quit shortly after that to never return, then we noticed they still are class nerfing. Its horrible to the paying customers that after 14 years they start fixing the game?
Hiring that mentality is not only bad for pantheon, but it will split this community up too. If that class dev comes here in any form.... i am out of here, and i wont turn back.
He did this after i invested a lot of cash upgrading family owned accounts.
so i have bad tastes about any dbg ideas coming to a fresh new game.
Yeah, I don't want DBG having anything to do with this game, they're doing just fine without them.
I remember when the first stream of EQN was done. I was so hyped, friends were, and we sat there and watched it.
At the end I was severely disappointed. It looked like it played as a Final Fight MMO -- remember that Capcom game? Or Streets of Rage.
MMO's shouldn't be about button mashing which is exactly what it looked like ... it's not an arcade game. I think they're right in that it wasn't going to be fun.
Too bad. Great for Pantheon, though.
Personally I feel it could have been really really fun, if they'd done it the right way. Let's face it.. they wanted a WoW Clone within Minecraft.. both pretty much self-centric games with no interdependance. Not really a good idea when their fans are group-centric and the current market is saturated with self-centric mmos. Bad call in my opinion... they could have turned it around I reckon but chose not too. *shrugs*
Medjai said:Brad beat them to it. DBG needs to go into a 49% partnership with Pantheon VR ( Brad should ALWAYS have full control of Pantheon. )Pantheon will bring 95% of the EQ1 EQ2 crowd and those games will shut down completely if Brad delivers a good, Finished game.
That's really funny because I had a dream last night in which DBG's gave Brad the rights to EverQuest..
Any involvement with DBG in Pantheon would be a huge disappointment to me. I'm just over them. At this point, I don't think they have anything to bring to the table, including money.
Dullahan said:Any involvement with DBG in Pantheon would be a huge disappointment to me. I'm just over them. At this point, I don't think they have anything to bring to the table, including money.
I agree with you, without trying to not slander them. I felt the whole "Nerf" thing and semi finished expansions, was a true testing of how the devs felt like, after that many years. If they get hired, you can count the game going to crap years later. Which would totally throw me off from ever playing another mmo again. Brad knows what we are saying, i remember when EQ was first being introduced it actually ment something to play. I want to see the same from pantheon a fresh start with no DBG devs. :)
My only thought is that it's lame for them to take credit for 20 years of EQ simply because they now own the rights to the brand.
EQN was a failure of management and marketing.
They announced EQN 3 years ago. After 6 months they forked it in a pre-alpha state to create Landmark and then monetized Landmark, all the while claiming that EQN "proper" was still in development behind the scenes. The company was then sold and the CEO and lead producer fired. The company then abandoned Landmark to refocus on EQN. Now today, 9 months after refocusing on EQN they are cancelling EQN and instead shipping Landmark as a consumer product within the next few months.
Basically they drank their own coolaid. EQN never existed. There was only ever one game and one build. The rest is mismanagement and mismarketing to an extreme. Whatever EQN was going to be, Landmark is not it. For over 2 years now Landmark has been nothing but a distraction with an ever-sprawling scope that has nothing to do with EQN's original holy grails, and it has survived only by virtue of it being a systems test for EQN "proper" which is now cancelled.
Landmark is like a person trying to ride the coattails of their imaginary alter ego. The entire situation is very dysfunctional and odd. I have never seen anything like it in the game industry.
Said simply, EQN is the epitome of everything that is wrong with new skool game development. Release early. Monetize early.
During Landmark beta I posted a very lengthy and technically detailed topic about the Forgelight engine.
SOE developed Forgelight as their own game engine and EQN was to use this. It was the same engine used in Landmark.
Forgelight was so terrible that it broke any sense of immersion immediately....or, rather, you never gained a sense of immersion.
In landmark the depth perception, distance perspective, size of geometry, etcetera wera all fundamentally "wrong".
No one got into playing EQN yet so they can't say it was not fun, yet. I suspect they did realize the foundation was totally flawed.
I also was very vocally opposed to calling it "Everquest" - anything. The story was different, the characters we loved (and hated) were different, the lore was totally different. Basically, it wasn't Everquest at all, so they were just whoring out the Everquest name and I complained about that.
This announcement is bittersweet - I so deeply long to "live" in another world again, like we all did in Norrath. I've been holding out hope for EQN for so long. But when I saw the live stream of Pantheon, it immediately felt like HOME.
Medjai said:Given that their website hadn't been updated in months, the writing was on the wall.
Going with Rattenmann here. The combat they put in Lankmark, which was supposed to be "EQN built built in front of you", was The single worst combat I have ever tried.
It was more of a GW2+1st Person shooter than an mmo that deserved the name EverQuest.
I see it hurting EQ1 and EQ2 numbers. Those players were hoping for something new that really deserved the EverQuest name.
Brad beat them to it. DBG needs to go into a 49% partnership with Pantheon VR ( Brad should ALWAYS have full control of Pantheon. )
Pantheon will bring 95% of the EQ1 EQ2 crowd and those games will shut down completely if Brad delivers a good, Finished game.
Hell to the NO. Why would anyone want DBG to have *anything* to do with Pantheon? The opposite is true. We want Pantheon to get as far away from them as possible.
As far as EQN..that game looked like a failure to me from the start. I was so excited to hear there would be a new EQ and was even excited when I heard it was a "re-imagining" of EQ1. I *thought* that meant more of a remake with an updated engine and more modern features but what it ended up meaning was a re-imaginging of EQ but as a different game entirely..one that didn't resemble EQ in ANY way. No roles? Button mashing spamfest like GW2? Cartoony graphics? Sorry, but that looked nothing like EQ to me. Innovation is nice but you shouldn't forget the foundation of what the namesake was. A huge disappointment and not a surprising end IMO.
I actually went to the SoE EQNext reveal in Vegas I was so excited about the whole idea... Honestly though, as soon as I saw their plan for the cartoon style characters, it was a major turn off. David did a good job at selling it though, and I got super pumped about the concept.
I played Landmark for a good bit but remember that the game was never really optimized. Rendering distance was horrible and you had to literally walk up to something before it really detailed in. I built some really cool EQ1 memorabilia and enjoyed some of the game for awhile.
What finally did it for me was everything took forever to materialize. The communication from the development team was horrible and it seemed it was all about Landmark and no word at all about Next. I knew with the amount of people turned off by Landmark that EQ was going to fail with the current engine they planned on using. With the takeover and layoffs, it was only a matter of time. No suprise to me at all...
We already have a thread on this guys, please check before posting, the other thread was barely allowed to stay active, so this one will be closed and moved to off topic as it does not relate to Pantheon, please continue the discussion in the other thread found here: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2780/development-of-ever-quest-next-discontinued