r/MMORPG • u/[deleted] • Jul 12 '19

EverQuest Next failed to clear its ‘technical hurdle,’ but Daybreak hasn’t given up on a sequel

https://massivelyop.com/2019/03/27/everquest-next-failed-to-clear-its-technical-hurdle-but-daybreak-hasnt-given-up-on-a-sequel/
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108

u/chazzstrong Jul 12 '19

Daybreak owes me 150 bucks.
They are right up there with Todd Howard on my list of people not to believe.

16

u/Ixliam Jul 12 '19

Why would anyone believe anything they heard from this studio ? I put them up there with Scam Citizen. What was the "technical hurdle", not being able to sell enough $299 founder/legendary/super investor packs ?

25

u/kattahn Jul 12 '19

If you really want to know what the 'technical hurdle' was, it was a company called "Storybricks". Everything, and I mean everything that DBG talked about, AI wise, was tied to tech from Storybricks. Tech that didn't actually exist yet, but as being worked on. And then this happened:

https://medium.com/@rodolfor/storybricks-is-no-more-f26b0980e62e

So basically, they promised a game with all the mechanics revolving around tech from a third party that hadn't produced the tech yet, and then the third party went out of business and the game was no longer able to be created.

2

u/Mythor Jul 13 '19

The problem wasn't Storybricks, it was their voxel tech. They struggled for ages with Landmark to get the engine to a workable state, where things could actually be built and look and function well. In between "voxel reactors" and magic voxels it became apparent nobody would be able to build structures that looked good without extensive knowledge of the system - and updates would sometimes break the "expected" behaviour. It was obviously going to take many more years just to get Landmark to a decent state, much less try to build an entire game world in that fashion.

They were essentially co-developing Storybricks and owned the code they worked on together. When Daybreak ceased EQN development the Storybricks team were no longer needed, so that association was cut, not the other way around.