I always knew there’d come a time when I would have a reason to dig up my old EverQuest Iksar Shaman action figure from the box I stuffed it into when I sold my house in California, lo, these twenty-five years ago.
That news: an indie game development house comprised of developers from the Darkpaw and EQ emulation communities has the official blessing, and the official source code and assets to reimagine the original EverQuest as a solo-friendly, instanced dungeon and raids, casual experience.
And, as hinted at by our friendly lizzy on the left, every EverQuest Legends character can have three character classes — two at character creation, and the third coming at level 10.
So before I have my two cents, I’m going to link to what others have written, because why repeat someone else’s words? I have some different words. And naturally, some of these will appear in tomorrow’s Daily Blogroll.
- The Ancient Gaming Noob
- A Pixel Nomad
- Inventory Full
- Massively Overpowered
- The actual EverQuest Legends home page
- The unofficial EverQuest Legends FAQ page
I mentioned up above that developers Game Jawn have the original EverQuest source code, but… they are only using it as a starting point. They are making an entirely new client (and, most likely, an entirely new server), and they can do… whatever they like. And some of the stuff people have been asking them to do is pretty wild. Like, completely overhaul the spell system so that you can combine wizard, shaman and druid spells into entirely new spells. That probably won’t be happening.
Other people have been making the weird assumption that, since Darkpaw shut down the The Heroes Journey fan server, which also allowed multi-classed characters, that EQL is just a continuation of THJ, and that EQL is just taking and extending that fan server code. I could see that being somewhat more likely, given the team’s involvement in the EQ emu community, but as far as I know, THJ still ran on some version of the official client.
EverQuest Legends will have its own launcher, its own subscription, and won’t be able to trade currency with your EverQuest characters. I don’t know if being an All Access member will get you into EQLegends.
To try and answer some of these questions, I spent the day on the EQL Discord saving the messages from the studio founder and lead, Eda “Secrets” Spause.
So here’s some of her own words. I didn’t save all of the questions, so I’ll paraphrase those.
Is Game Jawn owned by Daybreak Games?
Game Jawn is my own company. Daybreak is the publisher. We’re fully remote, we do not have cofounders.
Will gear wear out and force you to upgrade?
We’ve mentioned on one of the interviews that we dislike that style of progression. Failing to upgrade / breaking an upgrade feels anti-player, and it isn’t something we are considering.
How will the content be balanced between solo and group players?
It’s challenging, but games should be fun. Obviously, there’s a fine line between blatantly overpowered and still being fun to play. Our goal is to give people the tools to make their favorite way to play the game. Less concerned about meta; that’s inevitable in online gaming, but obviously if something is ahead of the curve, it needs to be adjusted.
If everyone can solo everything, will it be possible to form a community?
Sort of. We know that people will want to socialize in our community, but they should also have the choice to isolate themselves from others. It’s literally adventuring your way
How will instancing work with solo vs group?
If you want to bring four people to a dungeon, you’re going to get a group version of that dungeon and the solo player should still be able to solo it in their solo version. It’s going to be a different type of challenge, but it’s still letting the player have the agency to choose which type of game mode they play.
Can raids be soloed?
The game is still sufficiently challenging while respecting your time. There was a mention in one of the articles that Lord Nagafen was done by 7, then by 3. While we were saying that, our lead designer pokes me and said, “Actually, someone just soloed him.”
So it’s possible to improve your character over time to solo the base difficulty of the game, and it’s also possible to do the solo versions of the raid instances which are tuned in a way that this is possible from the get-go.
I noticed a bunch of new tool tips in the trailer. Are you targeting current EQ players or new players?
It’s actually intended to be a gateway for new folks if anything! A lot of our UI / User Experience work was aimed at making the game significantly more understandable for new players to EQ games and MMOs.
The game has been designed to have a level of natural progression that you can complete the game with or without friends. It’s solo / casual approachable and a number of changes and systems have been made to support this. Looking forward to working with our community team teasing them over the next few months!
Will death still be punishing?
There were a few articles in the media that have that info: It’s possible to recover quickly after a death and we’ve made a number of systems to support this feature without breaking the game entirely.
Will we be able to use our current EverQuest client to play EQL?
This game will utilize an entirely new 64-bit client. The game will be available on the EQ Legends website. While the game was built using the official EverQuest code base as the starting point, it is an entirely new game with no legacy client.
Why a subscription instead of free-to-play?
The subscription will support the game’s active development. That’s what we are hoping for. We want people to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. And then on top of that, we aren’t selling power, so if you want a bit more out of your experience, there will be ways to do that.
I logged in after re-installing and digging up my account info earlier, it has been quite a while. What really hits me the most is that the camera control system needs modernized, which I really hope you are doing. 1st person in an mmo is not my thing as I’ve became more of a fan of 3rd person view in these games. Anyway, the real useable options are 1st person or if you zoom out, being stuck looking at the back of your character all the time, which kinda sucks also. F9ing around otherwise doesn’t give you free movement of the camera either, i.e. stuck at one angle. I have to say that being able to freely move your camera around in 3rd person as you do in today’s mmo games is absolutely priceless and a feature you should absolutely have in the remake. Also hope that you guys are looking at all the little things like text size/resolution issues due to OG EQ being designed for monitors at the time. (I actually saved this question).
You will be very happy to know that this is part of the UI / UX pass we’ve done.
Will EQ Legends have the old, pre-Prophecy of Ro map with the original Freeport?
Everything is the OG, classic game world geometry.
When does EQL take place in the timeline, given that Iksar, Frogloks and Kerrans are playable races that were not playable at launch?
Lore-wise, our game takes place at the beginning of the original timeline. But events did happen to have this occur. Heck, we need a lore channel… Lore rationale is definitely a reason, but our game also has its own concurrent timeline. You’ll be able to explore and find out why that is.
Do you use AI?
We don’t use AI.
That is a very cool figure!
The one aspect of this that seems potentially most interesting to me is the mix and match class system. That could be a lot of fun to play around with. Though I have to admit there are some classes I am having a bit of trouble imagining you would want to slot in to most builds. Like what would a Warrior bring that a Shadowkight or Paladin wouldn’t also bring, along with a raft of spells? Of course balance is clearly not the goal with it, so maybe I am nitpicking a non-issue.
I also like the idea of mashing items together to make better items. That seems like it could also be a lot of fun. However, I am pretty skeptical that enough peaple will want to sub to it for that to be a viable model for them. Sub only and graphics that are intentionally archaic seems like it could be a tough sell for most players.
In order to support ongoing development, I assume they need at least enough in sub fees to cover the salary of 4-10 developers (wild guess). Even if we assume extremely low end salary, like four peaple getting paid 40K a year (which would be criminally low but Google says some starting game developers really do get paid that little), that still means they need somewhere around 1000 players (40000*4/12/15= 888) that are happy to sub for a year or more. It seems like they are hoping a few whales will push them over the top, since they say straight up they will be selling power.
All that said, it’s a new MMO, so of course I wish them all the best. I will definitely be rooting for them.
There’s a lot of theorycrafting over what the best class combo will be. Most people are working from The Hero’s Journey templates, but there’s no reason to believe EQL will work that same way.
The item bashing is something new. I remember hearing at one time that all the items were taken from a huge spreadsheet which would imply all items of the same type were identical. Having each item be unique is something you just couldn’t do in the old days. I know how you would do it from a coding standpoint, but it makes things slower overall, server side.
As for their financials, well, EverQuest itself was able to sustain SOE with a pure subscription model for some time, although they have moved to largely F2P+cosmetics model now. Palias has always been F2P, and DCUO gives powerful incentives to maintain a subscription, but also can be played F2P. I never played THJ, but I know money was involved. Don’t know if sub or cosmetics. But anyway, THJ was making bank. Game Jawn has 15 employees now.
I had not heard they were selling power, though. Disturbing if true, as that would make “someone soloed Naggy” instantly become “someone paid enough money to be able to solo Naggy”, and then the achievement would be cheapened for everyone.
+1 for the title! That’s going to get you some views! On the substantive issue of EQ3, the EQII community rep, Angeliana, went to some trouble to explain on the forums that EQLegends is not the unannounced new EQ game but also that no-one from the current EQ or EQII teams is working on that game, whatever it is, although she does implicitly confirm that such a game is still in the planning stages. So make of that what you will. Whatever it is, though, and if we ever get to see it, I’d bet plenty it won’t be “EQ3”.
Also, kudos for getting something valuable out of the Discord. When I was there it was nothing but trolling and people demonstrating a total inability to read a press release. Did anyone ask if Legends is going to be on Steam? I guess with the sub it would only be a re-direct but it would be nice to be able to launch it that way.
If the modern Daybreak makes an EQ title, it would be a mobile Heroes of EverQuest thing with strong gacha and autobattling quests with plenty of cosmetics and daily loot boxes and a chance to summon The Sleeper (5 star platinum pull) to your side. I’m actually kind of surprised they haven’t done something like that already. I think you can just buy the basic code and slap your IP on top of it, judging by the various IPs (DC Comics, Star Trek, and many others) that have mobile slop that works just that way.
The problem with any new official EQ is continuity. Long time players will not give up their years or decades of hard work on their character. When EQ2 came out, players responded by moving to World of Warcraft. EverQuest, DCUO and Palia are the current big cash cows at Daybreak and they are not going to kill one of their golden geese by making a THIRD EQ MMO after the failure of EQ2.
I spent many a long night in Neverwinter Online building EverQuest dungeons, complete with quests, in that game’s Foundry. I made myself a Befallen clone with a few EQ quests and one quest of my own design and I loved working through that solo. It’s this that convinces me that this could be a winner in a live game.