Dayset alerted me to EverQuest Next® by Sony Entertainment. Polygon has an article up with comments from Sony Entertainment’s president  John Smedley. There are some interesting comments about games in general that will probably interest you and my Myst friends.

Most festinating is the idea Sony is going to pay fans to make content for EverQuest Next. Pay?

There video is from a Sony Entertainment Online event at which EverQuest Next debuts. It runs 38 minutes in part 1 and 42 minutes in part 2. Whew! Read the index of the video before you start watching it. Beta sign up link is last thing on my second page.

Index

Glurge alert! The first 10 minutes is user experiences and stories of people’s experiences in the original EverQuest.

From 10:00 to 12:00 John Smedley is talking about how great EverQuset and its fans are…

At 12:00 an artist does a sand drawing telling about the creation Qeynos. Boring…

At 18:00 the artist starts another drawing about the Ring of Scale Attacks… OMG, doubling down on boring… someone in management thought this was a good idea? I guess there are hints to something about the game in the drawings… but 14 minutes?

At 26:30 the sand drawing is over… I am so glad there is a way to skip ahead in YouTube video.

At 26:45 we get to some interesting stuff. The concepts guiding what the Sony team is doing with EverQuest Next is in this area. It includes concept art. Then they get into characters they are adding. 

About 37:00 they get into the emoting system they have added. The team has added in SEO Emote from EQ2 where the web cam is used to sense you RL facial expression.

Video cuts off and starts in part 2 (42 min). The index continues after the video.

At 00:00 we see the dynamic clothes they have in EQ Next. We are hoping for something like this in SL, but I expect that is not something we will see anything soon.

07:02 we get to see in action game play and features.

08:20 Blow up anything anytime. World is made from voxels.

10:45 Information on ‘Life of Consequence’ and how it remembers your choices and adjusts the games AI. This leads into new behaviors for NPC’s. Some describe this as their being guided by motivation in place of the usual basic scripting. How EQ Next is like Minecraft gets explained in this section too. You can dig a tunnel through the world if you want. It is a procedural world, so I assume mountains are not hollow and there is always something below the surface of the EQ Next world.

18:30 Dynamic nature of EQ Next and permanent change, Rally Calls.

24:00 Gets into what else is coming, Iron Golem scene. They get into the EQ Next building tools. At 27:00 they announce EQ Next Landmark.

OK, that is pretty neat. The character running away in Yikes-mode is kinda funny.

At 29:00 you get to see some of the building tools.

30:40 they talk about Player Studio, the sort of equivalent of SL’s market place. A novel feature of Sony’s market place is derivative works. You could build a tower. I could buy it and use it in a castle I build. When I sell the castle you will get a proportional percent of my sales based on what percent of my castle is made of your towers.

33:30 Sony is going to release their concept art to the fans so they can build parts of EQ Next via Landmark. They have web site just for that.

34:00 introduction of the development team.

Ends at 42:25.