The announcement didn’t come as a surprise, but that didn’t mean we weren’t still sad to hear it. Daybreak finally told us what we all had in the back of our minds, that EverQuest Next was not going to be a thing:
To Our Daybreak Community,
I’m writing today to let you know that, after much review and consideration, Daybreak is discontinuing development of EverQuest Next.
For the past 20 years EverQuest has been a labor of love. What started as a deep passion of ours, as game creators, grew into a much larger passion shared by you, millions of players and Daybreakers alike. Watching EverQuest’s ability to entertain and bring people together has inspired and humbled us. It’s shaped our culture and has emboldened us to take aggressive risks with our game ideas and products. When we decided to create the next chapter in the EverQuest journey, we didn’t aim low. We set out to make something revolutionary.
For those familiar with the internals of game development, you know that cancellations are a reality we must face from time to time. Inherent to the creative process are dreaming big, pushing hard and being brutally honest with where you land. In the case of EverQuest Next, we accomplished incredible feats that astonished industry insiders. Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun. We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too. In final review, we had to face the fact that EverQuest Nextwould not meet the expectations we – and all of you – have for the worlds of Norrath.
The future of the EverQuest franchise as a whole is important to us here at Daybreak.EverQuest in all its forms is near and dear to our hearts. EverQuest and EverQuest II are going strong. Rest assured that our passion to grow the world of EverQuest remains undiminished.
Yours truly,
Russell Shanks
President, Daybreak Games
I’ve been a huge fan of the EverQuest franchise for years now. EQ1 was my first MMO. EQ2 quickly followed, and I ‘met’ some folks who would become my absolute best friends. I played steadily for many years before finally throwing in the towel, but that didn’t come easily for me. There are still days when I find myself missing both EQ and EQ2 and so I wander around remembering “the way things were”. Of course everyone is quick to remind us that you can never go back, and that times have changed and games have changed with those times (as have we, the gamers), but I still wander the old dungeons, reminiscing.
What comes next? Well, Landmark is apparently launching this spring, though what the final version will look like I have no idea. It feels like the end of an era but lets be honest here that era faded long before this announcement came out.
Over all I’m just saddened by the announcement. What more can we do except play the games we love, for as long as we are able to love them, and take our precious memories with us when we leave.
I think that game must be complete if they can release EverQuest Next. EverQuest Next and everqwest landmark are essentially the same game. EverQuest Next was paid for by its pre-release backers and so I believe Daybreak games has an obligation to release EverQuest Next. Doesn’t seem right at their games can decide that EverQuest Next isn’t Fun before they begin building the game. It would be a better idea was put into Hiatus rather than being cancelled. That’s Everquest Landmark can be given a competitive server that could be similar to what EverQuest Next was being designed to be. If EverQuest Next is to remain cancelled then I believe that Daybreak games as all their backers the many thousands of dollars that were donated to produce the game.?
You may not be playing EQ and EQ2 right now, but you haven’t left. You never really leave those games, you just take pauses that may be short or may be very long.
I’ve never bought into that whole “you can never go back” thing, not for gaming or for any other aspect of life. You can always go back so long as there’s a “you” to go and a “back” to go to. I much prefer “home is that place that when you have to go there they have to take you in” and the EQ games will be home for as long as the servers stay up – and long after that if there’s still a community that wills it, as the much smaller Vanguard community is proving right now.
I’ve returned to both EQ and EQ2 many times after long layoffs and always had another great run. I’d expect both games to have a good few years left in them yet and probably a better future than EQNext would have had, should it ever have limped out of the door a decade late. Both games have been better-managed under DBG than they were for years under latter-day Sony and with luck the dismantlement of the EQN project will see the older games getting some additional resources to keep on doing what they are already doing so well.
I 1st came ot your blog to read about EQ2 since I was playing it, so my interest in blogs was mostly those that focused on that game. Later on you opened up Nomadic Gamers and asked for guest authors, so while I had my own small blog, I joined the Nomads and pretty much only blog there about anything anymore. So indirectly, I am a “blogger” becuz of EQ2. I’ve not played it in a long while and any time I’ve tried I just couldn’t get back into it, but it still holds a dear place in my heart, and I was looking forward to playing in Norrath again in EQN, but… I’m in the “can’t really say I’m surprised, but still disappointed” camp.
I’m not surprised. I don’t play EQ2 at all (any more). But the Mrs is heavily into it. From what I understand they keep churning out stuff to it and EQ and many people seem happy with that. And from what I read about EQN it did seem like a gamble, an attempt to break the mold. These things are risky and probably hard to do right.
SG: What do you think of the in effect very short statement about the reason “putting pieces together showed it was no fun” to paraphrase? It probably is a lot more to it than that, but it makes me wander *what* it was that lacked fun. The combat? The … everything?