EQNext has been quietly in development for years now. Expect to see more very soon.Published on Apr 15, 2013
Sony Online Entertainment has been working on EverQuest Next for quite some time, with very little information on the upcoming MMO available.
In an interview with
MMORPG.com during PAX East, EverQuest director of development Dave Georgeson dropped a few details on EQNext.
"EQNext has a lot of I think of completely original ideas," said Georgeson. "That's why we're not really tipping off our competitors to what we're doing right now.
"We want to have a nice big comfortable lead before we tell people what we're doing. That's why we're in a black box right now."
Georgeson then went on to tease a reveal of some kind at this year's annual SOE Live event. "SOE Live is coming up. It's our annual event where the fans come and they support our games.
"It's our hardcorest of our hardcore fans. The people who are really willing to go to Vegas and spend money to be around us and know what's coming next."
Georgeson added, "So that's why we want to reveal it at SOE Live, so that we're planning on the first night of SOE Live on 1 August to reveal this game to our world."
Georgeson then went on to discuss the future of MMOs, suggesting that EQNext could utilise Bungie's Destiny style mobile integration with crossover from the game to a smartphone app.
"Everybody and their brother is thinking about how mobile devices are going to integrate in with these big virtual worlds that we build, and that's an obvious thing.
"Players really want to stay connected to their worlds, otherwise there wouldn't be all these fan sites and news sites, we wouldn't have all these wikis if people didn't care about it.
"It's an obvious thing for us to be able to connect in and participate in the game in different ways. That's inevitable, that's going to happen."
Going back specifically to EverQuest Next, however, Georgeson talks about how it won't just be another MMO, since that won't be enough to appeal to a saturated market.
"With EverQuest Next we can't just do that, we have to have something substantially different that attracts people with brand new ideas that they've never seen before, in combination with things that they've never seen before.
"That's what we intend to do with EQNext."
With the PS4 looking powerful enough to handle MMOs - and teases from SOE's John Smedley suggesting the developer is looking at bringing an MMO of some form to the next-gen console - we could well see EverQuest Next on Sony's PS4 too.
Let's hope so, anyway.