
It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything substantial about Everquest Next, and Sony’s reasons are pretty solid: They’ve blown up the game. At Sony Live 2012, John Smedley took to the stage and talked about how the industry needs to end the current system of launch and decline, and follow strategies laid out by games like League of Legends, who launch and continue to grow. This, Smedley explains, can only be done by adding more emergent gameplay, something the company hopes to do with its current and future MMO titles. As a result of this thinking, Everquest Next has been redesigned as a sandbox MMO:
What we are building is something that we will be very proud to call EverQuest. It will be the largest sandbox-style MMO ever designed. The same exciting content delivered in a new way. Something you’ve never seen before. The MMO world has never seen before. We didn’t want more kill 10 rats quests. We didn’t want more of the same. If you look at the MMOs out there, they’re delivering the same content over and over again. So are we. We need to change that. When we released EverQuest, we changed the world. We want to do that again with a different type of game.
Expect plenty more to come in the future on Everquest Next.
(Source: EQ2 Wire)