Hey folks! We’ll be taking a bit of a detour today from our regularly scheduled updates of Landmark to discuss the future of Everquest Next. It’s not a real future for Everquest Next, but an imagined future where Everquest Next launches with some features thrown in there adapted from other games.
If you’ve had a look at Landmark, or know of Landmark and Everquest Next, then you probably know that you can build like crazy and have fighting and all those normal thingamajigs that make an MMORPG a game to play in this day and age.
The obvious features are not that sort of thing we’ll be discussing today. Instead, I want Everquest Next to interact its systems – whether it’s the building, or the fighting, or even the Storybricks emergent gameplay mechanics – with features that are decidedly from other games to make it a better overall game over time.
In other words, below is the first three features or systems from rival games – MMOs or not – that I think EQNext should adopt, listed in the order of immediacy they should be adopted. Take note folks: these are things specific to other games that I wish SOE would add onto EQNext over time, in the order I feel they should be added into it.
Beta Onwards: Investigation Missions, from The Secret World
The Secret World, as much as I love it and wish it well, isn’t blipping too strongly on the radar of many people these days, which is a shame because Investigation Missions from this MMO are some of the most thought-provoking and rewarding gaming experiences you can have from a story-driven MMO.
Obviously, this wouldn’t completely work with EQNext as Sony’s game is meant to be more sandboxy than TSW, but imagine if EQNext had some hidden quests that could only be gotten by thinking outside the box and using your personal investigative skills (or some Google-Fu) to complete them.
The most basic type of these would include learning hieroglyphics or obscure facts about the game world that can only be gleaned from the pages of the EQNext digital novellas. If you’re making a lore-rich game set in its own universe, and you already have written material, might as well use it inventively, right?
If they really wanted to push this sort of investigative process, they could even tie it into their Everquest Worlds App, and have that be a part of the entire EQNext experience. Just make sure non-smartphone users have a web version of the app to allow them equal access to content, and that’d be awesome.
