Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

This week, Sony Online Entertainment celebrated EverQuest’s tenth anniversary. No matter how you slice it, that's one seriously impressive accomplishment. The studio's flagship game may still be going strong, but that hasn't stopped them from moving into different areas or even creating a sequel. Despite being the golden child of a bestselling title, EverQuest II wasn't always so fondly thought of by players around the world. It may have had a rough beginning, but there's no denying it's become a pretty fancy gem in its own right.  With all the knowledge gained from both EQ and EQ2 (not to mention the multitude of others under SOE's Station Access umbrella), do you think SOE would be able to pull off an EverQuest III? If they could, what do you think should be in it?

EverQuest's new mercenaries mean never having to solo again.

To save an ungodly amount of time and drama, we'll accept a few quick premises. First, that SOE would even create the game. Secondly, that it magically won't have any effect on the populations and support of EQ nor EQ2. Finally, we'll assume that money, while not unlimited, isn't a huge issue either. Most of the time, I don't like making these types of assumptions, but if I don't in this case, we could literally spend days doing nothing but arguing about these three points alone. With that out of the way, let’s get down to it, shall we?

First off, any game with "EverQuest" anywhere in the title has to have lore. I'm not talking about the tiny bits you've managed to dig up out of your grandfather's World War II journals. I mean the kind that scholars would die for. The type of lore an ancient traveler may have spent weeks gathering in the ancient Library of Alexandria.

Even in its early years, EverQuest had an impressive amount of history and myth within it. Now, ten years and two time periods later, its lore has grown into an unstoppable juggernaut of past glories. This sense of past would be absolutely mandatory within any future iteration of the EverQuest franchise.

One aspect of EQ2 I think SOE initially had wrong was the lack of open land. It was the openness of the zones and ability to readily get ourselves into far more trouble than we could handle within the original EverQuest that made exploration so much fun. There was no sense of being led down a specific path and though we all may have had more horrific (and thus funny) deaths than we can count because of it, I wouldn't want it any other way. I don't want to feel that I'm blocked off from some part of the world just because I'm not supposed to be there. Let the corpses piling up along the roadside just on the edge of some dark and foreboding forest be my first clue, not some arbitrary barrier.

While I'm on the topics of forests and exploring, there's another item from EverQuest that would have to be in any new sequel. This area was so popular in fact that I find it hard to believe that only a handful of games - the most recent game being Requiem: Bloodymare - have done it since. What am I talking about? Kithicor Forest. See? For those of you that are familiar with the area, the hairs on the back of your neck stood up at the mere mention of it, didn’t they? For those that may not be familiar with this terrifying zone, let me give you a little introduction.

In EverQuest, there was a zone called Kithicor Forest. During the game's daytime cycle there really wasn't anything special about the zone. You'd kill some orcs or whatever else you could find in there and go on about your business like every other zone in the game. When the darkness of night settled across the land though, it became a horrifying death trap. Suddenly, the guttural calls of low level orcs were replaced with the distant cackling of extremely powerful undead creatures wandering through the forest. The inhabitants of the entire zone completely changed in the blink of an eye.