Cyanbane wrote:Theodoric wrote:Looks like highly stylized graphics - I hope not :(
The days of companies betting their MMO dev time on high performance graphics cards is long gone.
I don't think so myself, my feeling is that Smedley and co learnt the lesson for what worked best the last 5 years (WoW) and are just blindly applying that to the future. Now most people have powerful multicore processors, and even the lowest end graphics card is pretty good, so getting pleasing results from a realistic graphics engine are possible, with the big dollars invested in DX10/DX11 I'd expect this to feature in the big games of the future.
Things I picked up from the EQ Next panel
EQ Next is a re-imagining of EQ 1, in the same way the recent Star Trek movie is a reimagining.
EQ Next though is definitely stylized, from the panel there most of it was concept art (it looks WoW-ish with big shoulders, muscled characters and cartoon proportions on the Ogre), the wood though was apparently an in game screenshot which indicates work is quite advanced, it looked a bit Free Realms to me :P
One of the devs there spoke about how she wanted the characters to feel heroic and powerful in the world, but fighting even more powerful creatures.
Another dev talked about how they wanted the quests and storyline to be told in other ways then just reading text.
Smedley came across as not liking EQ2 and a lot of the direction that was taken there, he talked about too many classes (one example he asked the audience what a Dirge really was), he commented on the game engine not scaling well too. From his comments it was clear he wanted to go back to EQ1 in terms of game and make repeated references to the spirit of EQ1 etc. He also though talked about wanting to give some sort of way to take your character across to EQ Next (I'm assuming he includes EQ2 here).
Smedley in both the address and seminars mentioned that his one big input to the game was to ensure that there was PVP there from day one.
I spoke to the producer there and asked if there would be Frogloks, his answer was that they had not decided on the final races available. My feeling is a no, looking at the most popular races in EQ2 which were Dark Elf, Wood Elf, Half Elf, Human, High Elf from memory then I'd guess they will just implement the most popular 8-10 or so although I guess we'll see.
My thoughts
The only positive thing there was that Smedley confirmed that they planned to keep EQ1 and EQ2 alive for a long time to come, as personally while EQ Next looked ok I just prefer the realistic look of EQ2.
Maybe it will offer something fantastic in the gameplay department, but comparing the reaction in the main hall to the screenshots/concept art to the shader 3.0 unveiling the year before and I'd say the EQ Next response was muted.
