/incoming meandering thoughts.
Ok... Ill say it. After being jaded off MMOs I am genuinely intrigued. As for the response. Its typical "hone in on one phrase whilst oblivious to another"and to be expected really.
Example:
SOE's ambitious revamping of the classic MMO world, EverQuest Next, aims to provide a huge voxel-based realm with fully destructible environments, advanced high-level AI, and a hefty emphasis on player agency in shaping and protecting each server's unique landscape.
The "lock" point was obviously Voxel / Fully destructible environments. Secondly would be the AI.So given that has gotten the focus of attention out of the phrase, remove them to see what was deemed not as important.
SOE's ... EverQuest Next, aims to provide a ... realm ... and a hefty emphasis on player agency in shaping and protecting each server's unique landscape.
And there you go. In a "reveal" like this, obviously destructible environments are going to be heavily presented if for no other reason the visual mechanic behind it would be one of the easiest things to draw peoples attention. What you are not seeing is other functional sub and tertiary systems at play that will give players motivation to maintain reasonable and practical levels of alteration. It might be cool to say, turn the center of the Iksar capital into a tadpole spawning pool, but in doing so it will likely yeild no player benefit to do so. No one would be put out. NPCs would simply move to more viable land.
Then there is what I suspect will be a major background system in how this will work. Geological regeneration. Lets say you max a guild worth of wizards and necro's out with the sole purpose of creating your own Hole of Paineel. Awesome. You created a hole that if you fall will kill you almost definitely. However, once you and your guild of mana batteries has gotten bored and moved onto other things, the world continues on. Weather patterns emerge over time. Rain slowly fills the thing until your hole is now just a really deep pool. And with rain it also allows for other geological processes such as erosion. So over time your pool keeps getting muddier and muddier until it moves through stages of swamp, bog, quicksand, mud pit, eventually to the point that within say a RL month the land has settled in and covered the hole over. And that is just if the geology is allowed to run its course and is not impacted by either PCs or NPCs who might instead simply build a structure over it like say a bridge.
Now granted what I just described is most likely an overly ambitious example of how such would work and in its complexity is not really all that likely. Honestly SOE is likely working on something that basically achieves the same with greater simplicity (even if it is counter immersive to the idea) but the point is, the statement even suggests that SOE has that intent to maintain certain levels of playable integrity. So while some things might be scar able those scars will likely fade with time, others might be destructible. Such destruction will lend itself to rebuilding. Others still might be essentially impervious.
What we need to do is not get ahead of ourselves because there may well be what SOE calls X feature Y feature Z feature. We have no idea how they are going to present those based on this nugget. That is for good or ill. No hopes should be raised, but at the same time, no negative assumptions should be made on how these intended mechanics will be presented just yet.
But honestly, Ive been waiting for details on EQN for something like 2-3 years now it seems and honestly I had zero expectation because of being MMO jaded after like 50-100 different MMOs over like a decade and a half worth of experience. However I confess at least from this one tiny glimmer of info it has at least piqued my curiosity at the potential this may indeed have. Ive said many times that right now MMOs are in a failed state. That we need some manner of new advents that can allow the genre to move forward again. Many are trying to do just that. Just like ToR with its emphasis on story, Or GW2 with its more "dynamic" content. This may well be another advent in the making.
And as it was suggested SOE got knocked off its throne by WoW and it was questioned how is taking elements of a bunch of different things and putting them together supposed to help them do anything against WoW? Just remember exactly HOW WoW managed to Unseat Everquest. They copied all the good stuff from EQ, EQII and other MMOs that worked well, and streamlined the package into something low spec'd to make it highly accessible. In other words, taking elements of a bunch of different things and putting them together effectively. So If WoW is in fact the example to follow, then this may be a case of SoE Copying WoW in the right way instead of how others have by simply trying to be clones. It worked for WoW. There is no reason why this cannot work for SoE.
None the less... It piqued my interest enough to actually desire to see more. That in and of itself is a good sign.