Everquest II Could Face Its Own Cataclysm

Tom Goldman

Crying on the inside.
Aug 17, 2009
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Everquest II Could Face Its Own Cataclysm



Deathwing's powers of destruction are so strong that Everquest II might also see its world completely changed.

Blizzard's ballsy move to completely change the landscape of the Everquest [http://www.amazon.com/World-Warcraft-Battle-Chest-Mac/dp/B000H96C9M/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1291476614&sr=8-2] series. President of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley told Kotaku that the company is considering a world reboot of its own for Everquest II.

Smedley says that SOE has been looking at the idea of a similar change to Everquest II "closely ... for a number of years now." He doesn't think a cataclysm will come to the MMO in its next expansion or anything, but he admits that the idea is "interesting."

One of the more compelling aspects of Blizzard's change to World of Warcraft is that the world will apparently never go back to what it once was. Content that gamers have played through for years will no longer exist, ever. Smedley compares this to the use of a "reset button."

He feels that resetting an MMO's world is risky, but says Blizzard is lucky in that it has the "goods" to take a chance on a concept like Cataclysm. It could potentially bring even more gamers into World of Warcraft, but Sony hopes to bring some of those new gamers over to Everquest II as well. One particular way to do this might be by destroying Everquest's world just like Blizzard recently did.

Smedley adds that Sony has been "reluctant" to take a risk as big as Blizzard's Cataclysm, because it could presumably alienate Everquest II's loyal user base. Sony has found that Everquest II players typically don't play World of Warcraft, with past Blizzard expansions only causing a "tiny drop" in Sony's numbers for a while. Destroying everything those players know might cause a much bigger drop, or it could bring even more players in. Both titles came out in November 2004, so a Cataclysm might be just what Everquest needs too.

Source: Kotaku [http://kotaku.com/5704830/everquest-2-may-be-getting-its-own-cataclysm-soon]

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dagens24

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Mar 20, 2004
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I remember debating on the WoW general forums before both games came out about how WoW was going to dominate EQ2. Of course there were the contrarians that cried 'WoW's graphics are terrible, it's going to fail' etc. Yep, WoW sure did fail alright...
 

LavaLampBamboo

King of Okay
Jun 27, 2008
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I'd say don't risk it. It seems like they've got a pretty good thing going but trying to copy WoW won't win you any followers. I would say try something different. Like, I dunno, everything time travels into the future.

Or something. I don't know.
 

Delusibeta

Reachin' out...
Mar 7, 2010
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A "world reboot" wouldn't be required, just go back to the early level areas and polish them up with what you learned in the later expansions/updates. Like what Blizzard did.
 

Loonerinoes

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Apr 9, 2009
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You know why Cataclysm works or rather will work? Because they've reformed the world with genuine polish to their new areas. It's not horribly inventive or new, heck the new talent trees might looks shiny and different at first, but by the endgame it has a pretty similar feel to it all (only that now there are fewer options for different specs).

But the areas of old have been reforged into much more streamlined and polished ones that genuinely feel better than the old ones were. So if EQII can't offer at least this much too, if it decides upon something like this, it best not do it at all.
 

Dirty Apple

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Apr 24, 2008
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I've only ever played one MMO for any length of time, and I quit it almost 7 years ago, so I'll admit that I'm not up to date on most MMO news. What surprises me, however, is that EQ2 is still going. Does it still have an active, decent sized fanbase? I just assumed that it was gone, or, at least has been circling the drain for awhile.
 

Guy32

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Jan 4, 2009
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He gave very obvious answers; He probably won't do it.

Regardless, I think making a sequel would be more effective than completely resetting the environment in pretty much every mmo other than WoW.
 

Denamic

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Aug 19, 2009
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Loonerinoes said:
(only that now there are fewer options for different specs).
There weren't many options to begin with.
Well, sure, you could spec completely randomly, but for end-game content, there were always only two or possibly three 'optimal' specs.
And if you didn't use those specific specs, you were doing it wrong and dragging everyone else down.

There were also the problem of hybrid specs.
One particular spec that I'm very familiar with was the felguard/ember warlock spec.
It was unbelievably easy and boring to play, but it was simply too powerful to not use in raids.
By eliminating the possibility to hybridizing specs, blizz can strike a much better balance of power in both PvE and PvP due to fewer variables.
Plus, they can make each spec more interesting by adding mechanics they couldn't before, due to the hybrid balance issue.
And you still get as many or more 'options' in how you spec.
 

Yvl9921

Our Sweet Prince
Apr 4, 2009
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Wait... What? The whole point of EQ2 was that the EQ world had been destroyed by a cataclysm! YOU CAN'T DOUBLE DIP CATACLYSMS LIKE THAT.
 

Therumancer

Citation Needed
Nov 28, 2007
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This trend was a bad idea when Paper and Pencil RPGs were doing it (I'm looking at you Forgotten Realms setting), and it's a bad idea now. It's not surprising that people are looking to emulate what seems to be working, at least in the short term though.

Truthfully though people need to remember that "World Of Warcraft" is a computer generated world, not a real place. Nothing is irreversible, and truthfully if Cataclysm tanked horribly the original game/zone data is probably being stored digitally somewhere. With some work, restoring the zones to the way they were would not be difficult. Being a fantasy world it's also easy to justify as divine intervention of some sort. I could say a lot about it, but in short Gary Gygax threw a tantrum when he was outed from TSR, he destroyed Greyhawk at the end of the last "Gord The Rogue" book. After that we arguably saw two "future" versions of Greyhawk appear, one of these was "Dark Sun" as some ancient game nerds will point out, if you take some of the world maps from Dark Sun and compared them to old Greyhawk maps you'll find that a lot of the settlements and the layouts are very similar. Urik and Ulek being rough analogies to each other and so on. While TSR never admitted it officially, Dark Sun was sort of "Post Apocolypse Greyhawk". Ravenloft when expanded into a full setting was the other setting people made a case for, and could sort of prove. The thing being that when Gygax destroyed Greyhawk he pretty much left the Essence Of Chaos, and the Essence Of Evil duking it out there for eternity. The suspician being that the world split due to the two of them calling a truce, with Dark sun being the world run by primal chaos, and Ravenloft being the world of primal evil. The nature of them being sealed into Greyhawk being why both dimensions were more or less closed to travel. At any rate, none of this prevented them from simply rebooting a "classic Greyhawk" setting when they wanted to. It all comes down to money and fan demand, if people rebelled against Cataclysm nothing prevents Blizzard from just simply modifying the old world to allow for new levels and items (via some new zones) and putting it back out there. I suspect Cataclysm only has 5 levels to make it easier to fix in case of failure.

I'll also say that with the demand for private servers out there it wouldn't surprise me if Blizzard releases "classic World Of Warcraft" as a kit for people to run their own server with the outdated/retired world information. The old Sierra online game "Shadows Of Ysebrius" and it's sequel saw a release similar to this.
 

WarpCode

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Mar 18, 2010
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Is this going to be the new trend? Instead of coming out with WoW 2, EQ 3, etc., they will just destroy the current world and make everything new again. You will still have your high level characters but now you can play the game all over again and get a new experience.
 

Daemascus

WAAAAAAAAAGHHH!!!!
Mar 6, 2010
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Aylaine said:
I actually thought EQ2 would beat WoW, but again I underestimated Blizzards E-Crack. xD

I hope the EQII players see some radical changes someday! :)
EQ did kinda shoot them selves in the foot when they reset everything from EQ to EQ2
 

Xersues

DRM-free or give me death!
Dec 11, 2009
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Yvl9921 said:
Wait... What? The whole point of EQ2 was that the EQ world had been destroyed by a cataclysm! YOU CAN'T DOUBLE DIP CATACLYSMS LIKE THAT.
Definitely this! WoW was not the first to do a cataclysm, EQ2's world reboot was a severe fragmentation of EQ1s original world.

I only ever played Eq2, but you could tell, and from what I've been told, most of Eq2 is a shadow of its former self.

If they did EQ3, I would hope they'd just take it in a completely different direction. But its sony, and they've manage to ruin EQ quite nicely.

Here's to hoping DCUO has many hands from the DC universe that would keep Sony from making another stupid mistake.
 

shial

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Jan 5, 2009
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What I've always wondered about is why don't they try just starting people out at like level 50 then they can do all kinds of nasty storyline things to the old areas, like cities could fall and wars break out, imagine if the area outside Qeynos suddenly is changed into a mid level warzone. The Ralosian armies march again on both cities, A sudden outbreak of a massive undead army building temples, etc. Just reform and rework what is already there, no need to destroy it and it would retain the feel and for long time players seeing the storyline affect the game world would be amazing. EQ has done things like this before like the froglocks throwing the trolls out of their city and they had to go refugee in Neriak or the fall of the port Firona Vie to the dark elves.