Sony Online Entertainment today revealed, for the first time, details of its future vision in the MMO sphere with EverQuest Next.
John Smedley, SOE president said that a reason some MMO games fail is that the army of players consume content faster than the battalion of developers can create it. One of SOE’s answers to this challenge: build EverQuest Next as a living world where players can create content along with the developers. Players will use SOE’s custom EverQuest Next editing tool “Landmark” to create content for inclusion in the game. Landmark will be available as a free downloadable program this coming winter, although SOE has not given a release date for EverQuest Next.
Also of note, Smedley promises a game that, while respecting influences that previous iterations of EverQuest have had, will be a much different gaming experience, including a fully destructible environments, a level-less multi-class occupation system, and emergent AI.
In development since 2009, here is some game play footage released recently.