IMO if SOE can hit all of their holy-grails, the game will be epic, but only if combat doesn’t turn into either a zerg-fest, or a dodge-fest. Some “get out of the bad stuff” is good in combat, but if it’s used as the only scale for difficulty I know a lot of people who simply won’t play the game. The best part about raiding in traditional Trinity combat are the tactics, and trying to figure them out. If combat is more tactic driven than twitch driven, this game will be one that I will be playing for a VERY long time.

This is another pitfall of horizontal progression; no raiding. QQ

The world is destructable, but will regen on timers for the most part, unless it’s part of a server wide quest called a Rally Point. If the world didn’t regen it would be a wasteland in a matter of days, if not hours. Towns etc will not be destroyable unless the game designers deem that that town needs some pressure to evolve from players, again, in a Rally Point Quest. But you really can climb to the top of a mountain and tear it down to the ground, it’s jut that, in a span of time…minutes…or days…who knows at this point, it will regenerate.

Remember that points 2, 3, and 4 on your list were promised by Guild Wars 2. The company there still claims they delivered on those points. But even the most ardent fans disagree on nearly the entire list.

2: Emergent AI. They claim(ed) their fights were more dynamic and not a ‘deadly boss mods’ timer system. Players just beat on things until they’re dead and don’t notice the difference, if any.

3: Consequence. They claimed we would make real and meaningful choice throughout the game. What we got was the personal story questline that doesn’t even impact itself outside of each sub-arc, and the Hear, Crown, Fist system that is only a bar we can look at on the character panel, not hooked into the engine anywhere players have been able to find.

4: Permanent Change: We got Living Story, and players screamed about temporary content. So we got to vote for a new leader, and yet it appears the results were most likely rigged… But even if they were not… is this meaningful? Perhaps… but even still, it shows just how minor such things can pan out to be… eventually it will result in getting dungeon B instead of dungeon A… does that matter, when both are still dev made dungeons?

– Which is all to show that SOE might be promising us the moon, and we’re seeing stars.

Though I do hope… that we’re seeing the moon, and they’re promising stars.

They’ve been developing this game since 2009 (the first 4ish years consisted of thinking up those pillars and creating them in smaller sizes). All the hard parts, the pillars, are basically done.

I’m an avid fan of the Guild Wars franchise, but despite all the hype GW2 received the game just didn’t deliver for me. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great game, and it truly did bring some valuable ideas to the genre, but in the process it seemed to lose the very things that made GW1 an amazing, sorely under-appreciated game.

If you ask a GW1 player if they enjoy GW2 as much as they did GW1 back when it was a populated game, most will give you an honest ‘No’ in answer. GW2 brought in a bunch of new features, but the way they integrated these features together was not up to the standard the GW1 community had come to expect. The game was smaller, simpler, and overall less interesting. What it did deliver on was it’s fluid combat, innovative idea of questing and events, attitude towards ‘level-grinding’ and it’s sheer beauty.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that EQN really does look amazing, and it seems to be avoiding many of the pitfalls GW2 succumbed to (in my opinion, I know many people love gw2 to bits), but what will truly test the game is the way they integrate all these amazing features to produce a fun, coherent, interesting game (and hopefully somewhat complex – gamers are morons and we don’t need to be spoon-fed every tiny little bit of the game, let us work for it, and in this instance work does not equate to grind).

Analyzing the small portion of the game we’ve been shown in any detail won’t really serve to further my point in any huge way so I won’t do that, but I will make a comment on the class system in respect to GW1 and GW2, seeing as this comparison is probably more relevant than any other in light of this whole “Holy Trinity” debacle. GW1 had the holy trinity, and it had specific classes capable of fulfilling specific niche roles (sometimes more than one per class, but never more than one at the same time in a significant way), whereas GW2 did away with this system, which in my honest opinion was to its detriment. By having specific class roles in GW1, this actually created extra content. You had your core “Holy Trinity” for tackling the game in a broad sense, but the unique way GW1 forced you to take only 8 of the skills available to your dual-profession meant that niche builds arose to tackle niche problems. What this did was it made farming in GW1 interesting. There I said it. I actually enjoyed grinding in GW1. Farming as a 55 monk in UW was a completely different experience to trapping tombs as a ranger, or to keep the comparison in the same profession, playing a DPS RoJ monk in FoW or a VSF, and none of these niche builds were integrated into the “Holy Trinity” in any way ever. We had our core “this is the way you play the game holy trinity style” but then we had our “but this is more effective in certain situations.”

When GW2 got rid of the holy trinity, they also got rid of the strategy behind playing a certain class. Obviously you have different play styles between different classes, but they ultimately all contributed the exact same thing, a stale mix of DPS and utility, which they brought with them where ever they went, no matter the situation, with only slight variability. EQN, on the other hand, seems to allow for the holy trinity, but at the same time you can basically create your own class to fulfill a niche roll for a certain situation, or to tackle the entire game in a conventional or unconventional way. This is something far closer to my GW1 experience, this is what I’m most excited about, and this is why I’m waiting with great anticipation for EQN.

I also might just make a tiny addition to this post – the combat and the way you traverse the EQN world seem like this delightful mix of GW2 and Dragon Nest combat/movement, and I absolutely can’t wait to see if EQN delivers on this, because that would be truly spectacular.

But with all that said, I just think at the end of the day it’s dangerous to put too much hype on EQN. It looks like an amazing game is coming together, but as I experienced with GW2 the features don’t make the game, and too much hype can really damage it on release.

i love the art style personally. looks great

yeah it all depends how they approach it, ill take a look see. Seems its very similar to what firefall has done, experience becomes more of something you spend rather than used to progress through levels, this can have good and bad things. I imagine itll have to depend how much content will be available for us to explore and delv into. Im hoping till pan out, but , sometimes when you try to reinvent the wheel it gets dicey.

Hiya take a look at the class panel videos on youtube sometime 🙂

You will advance your character still from the experience you have earnt. That experience goes into a big pool that can be used to advance any of your classes.

When I saw the panel I was thinking that the system eqnext is going to use sounded a lot like the original swg an empire divided class progression system..

It’s a little to soon to tell if this will redefine the genre, but I think they are making it too complicated. I say go back to the KISS method (Keep it simple stupid).