Almost three years after its announcement, development has stopped on the next iteration of the long-lived MMO franchise.

Daybreak Studios’ president Russ Shanks announced the news on the game’s official site:

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.

EverQuest Next was an ambitious attempt to evolve the franchise. The first phase of that evolution was EverQuest Next Landmark, which was released as a beta in 2013. Landmark was focused on player creation, letting users craft huge structures and then sell the blueprints to each other.

EverQuest Next began development at Sony Online Entertainment, a corporate cousin to the PlayStation brand that was sold off last year to investment firm Columbus Nova and rebranded as Daybreak Studios.

In an interview with MMORPG, Shanks says that EverQuest and EverQuest II are still in active development. He also says that Daybreak will continue to explore ways to modernize EverQuest and notes the company’s current priorities:

The future of the EverQuest franchise is important to our company and you have not seen the last of Norrath by any means. It’s just as engrained in our hearts as it is for our players. We helped usher in the era of MMOs because we loved the idea of bringing gamers together within the game worlds in massive numbers, and we’ve continued to build on that over our 20-year history. The adventures within the worlds of EQ and EQII continue unabated today, and there is plenty of room for more.

 

Right now, we are focused on launching Landmark, advancing H1Z1: Just Survive, bringing DC Universe Online to Xbox One players, and launching H1Z1: King of the Kill on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Don’t you just love it when big sites and companies make little slip-ups?

Earlier an ad campaign for Overwatch went up on IGN before being taken down again quickly. The reason? It contained the release date for the game, as well as mention of a beta that would be starting a few weeks earlier. Whoops.

Spotted by Reddit user DeadpooltheGreat, they managed to capture some screencaps before IGN took down the adverts:

Since the news was already out, Blizzard have since come out to confirm that the release date is indeed May 24th, and there will be a beta weekend for pre-orderers starting from May 3rd before the rest of the beta period from the 5th to the 9th will be a totally open, free for all beta before the game is taken offline again for the final few tweaks. The open beta will be on both PC and consoles and will feature everything that we’ve been shown – all 21 heroes, all the maps, full progression system. Also if you pre-ordered you’ll get an extra key to give to a friend to give them access to the first two days that are otherwise closed off.

There’s even been some videos put out to give all the information out:

Again, don’t you just love it when little slip-ups like this happen? Somehow it makes big reveals like this even better.

After declaring that they were going to tackle the issue of rage-quitters in Street Fighter V last week, Capcom asked for the community’s help in identifying people who were doing it through submitting video evidence for them to look at. Now it seems that they’ve gotten enough evidence because they’ve posted about how they plan to punish people caught at it.

The punishments will be handed out to those people who have a high win ratio, but also a high disconnection rate (around 80-90%) – hopefully missing out those people who genuinely are having connection issues to their games. As for the nature of the punishments, Capcom will be docking League Points from those they deem guilty of this, which has a negative effect on online rankings – a punishment that’s already been handed out to around 30 players. Those who log in to find that they’ve been hit with this can consider this “a warning” say Capcom.

Speaking on the issue Capcom wrote: “Ever since last week, we’ve received a ton of videos both here on Unity and our social channels which we’ve been able to cross reference with our data and put together a clear picture as to which players are abusing the system. Though we were pretty confident that players in our system who had high disconnect rates were indeed those who were attempting to avoid a loss at all costs, we didn’t want to start dishing out any punishments without clear proof. We’ve been working hard with the SFV server team to put together a process to pinpoint users who are clearly abusing the system and we’re happy to announce that we can now do this without any proof of video.”

While Capcom will now be carefully monitoring accounts with high disconnect rates, they do say they’re wanting to find a more permanent solution for the rage-quitting problem though. They’ll be keeping the community up to date on their progress towards this goal.

With The Division coming out soon, Digmbot and  Artemiss join up to offer their opinions on what they’ve experienced so far with the game.

Digmbot

Tom Clancy’s Division is coming out in just a few days, and I’m remembering my own time spent with the beta. There was one extremely frustrating stream, and about 4 hours of off stream play. Perhaps the one thing I could say about The Division is that the shooting mechanics aren’t awful. They aren’t particularly good either, but they aren’t terrible. The game is competent. It aims to put you into an open world New York rife with waist high cover for you to crouch behind while you shoot at enemies and then loot them, and it does so. It aims to include RPG elements, and it does so.

The glaring issue I have with this is that it is not fun. The game controls fine. It isn’t particularly satisfying feeling to slowly dodge roll into cover, or clamber precariously over a car hood, but it does it when I press the button. It just feels chunky and slow. The cover mechanics such as switching between cover or vaulting over are as tried and true as the come. So is blind firing from behind cover. New York is certainly nice to look at, though not on the level they promised us in the original trailer. But all graphical complaints aside, The Division is uninspired. It takes all of the checklist boxes of an open world game, a cover based shooter, and a loot based game and doggedly ticks them off. The setting, which is admittedly intriguing can’t – for me- save gameplay that is utterly dull as dishwater. Even the loot is uninspired. In most loot based games (Diablo and Borderlands come to mind), there is an immediacy to the loot. Shiny new toys! That do crazy things! Destiny pulls this off especially well from a visual standpoint. Guns look awesome in Destiny. And in Borderlands they do insane things like shoot lightning. In The Division the guns…make slightly larger numbers pop up above enemies head’s when you shoot them. They might reduce recoil slightly. They might up your ammo count by 5 rounds in a magazine.This isn’t compelling loot. When I play Borderlands, as soon as I grab a new gun I immediately open my menu to stare at it and see if I should equip it. When I was playing The Division, I usually remembered I had new loot after 20 minutes or so when I opened the inventory for some reason and saw the little tag. It’s just not compelling, which to me is a huge problem in a loot based game.

Let’s move on to the other thing that I find most egregious about Tom Clancy’s: The Division- bullet sponge enemies. Over the years Tom Clancy games have conditioned us to expect realism. Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell and the like have made it clear that these are games grounded in reality. If you shoot someone in the head with an AK-47 in Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six, they will die. In The Division, they will continue walking straight towards you as if nothing happened. Common thugs wearing nothing but hoodies can take 10 to 15 rounds to the face. This is a subjective thing, I get that. But the name Tom Clancy and bullet sponge enemies do not belong in the same game. And even beyond the idea that this is  Tom Clancy game, video games in general have conditioned me to the idea that if I shoot a baddie in the head with a real gun, he’s going to go down. If I shoot him with a hyper powered badger gun in Borderlands, ok he might not go down. Because he has shields and is a mutated psycho on the moon of a distant world. But not an AK-47 in a real looking game. Get the idea? It’s a dissonance that I can’t reconcile and it ruins a core mechanic of the game for me.

The last thing to touch on is The Dark Zone. This is the PvP area of the game, and is probably the only bit of credit I would give the game in terms of new ideas or originality. Once in the Dark Zone you and other players can team up or duke it out over loot that you can scavenge from NPCs and objectives in the zone. All of this loot is contaminated though and must be airlifted out via helicopter. Once this is done, it will be decontaminated and you can then equip it. This is a cool idea that is utterly ruined by the asinine restriction that you can only place four packs on the helicopter’s line at a time. Of course, it drives emergent stories by having players turn on one another in order to make sure their loot get out at all costs. But the other thing it does is punish you for someone else being an asshole, which is not good game design. Of course killing too many other players will mark you on the zone map and incentivize other players to take you down, something very similar to DayZ’s bandit system. I find the idea of these emergent stories to be probably the most interesting part of The Division, and especially of the Dark Zone.

I’m sure there are plenty of elements of The Division that will be discovered after launch that I didn’t get to experience yet. The problem is that what I did experience was bland enough, dull enough, cookie cutter enough and just plain not fun enough that I don’t care to experience those other moments. For me, The Division is a generic military third person shooter with some RPG elements shoehorned in that doesn’t really do anything new. I’ll pass. Maybe one day they’ll put Destiny on PC. At least it has Star Wars style speeder bikes..

ArtemissBow (aka Ranger)

Admit it, everyone saw the recent open beta for The Division, and at least considered downloading it. I was the one refreshing the page awaiting the open access. When I first saw the announcement trailers and teasers for the game, I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement. Having interactable objects in the world you don’t just glitch around, even some of the mobile aspects had be interested. I’m sure I was one of many who were mostly disappointed after seeing a much more recent E3 example of the game and gameplay, sporting a not-so-beautiful looking New York landscape and strange shooter mechanics.

My experience with the beta refreshed my view significantly. I was able to quickly forgive any graphical broken promises when I was immersed in the semi-apocalyptic Manhattan landscape. There was nothing glaringly terrible about the game graphically, and despite the fact the game presented was in beta, I encountered very few glitches. Granted, usually games that are released on console as a ‘beta’ are mostly finished so it was pretty unlikely that I would have seen too many.

The gameplay is solid, as long as you like 3rd person, cover based shooters. I do think that the game was rather standard as far as the in-game play, but I was thrilled with how the RPG elements were incorporated. It was a little disappointing to see, while my character was low level, enemies eat half a clip of damage from my assault rifle. That feeling was short-lived though, as progression was fast and I started to feel up to pace after only an hour or so of play. I am excited to see what they do with the game as far as the story is concerned, as the setup that we were exposed to, my inner science nerd is drooling. The story we were exposed to did also hint at some base building and crafting elements. These are things I was not expecting, but was happy to see! I had friends that hated the fact games like Fallout 4 had base building, and I have to believe that if you are one of those people, you might not like this aspect of The Division as well.

Another major element definitely worth mentioning is the Dark Zone. I will need to address the Dark Zone separately as the meta develops after the game releases, but aside from the dissertation I could write of speculation regarding the mechanics, I’ll use a single word: potential. The Dark Zone is absolutely brimming over with potential. Let me preface this by saying, I am generally NOT a PvP player. I have several hours into games like Destiny, DayZ, Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2; but it is a rare occurrence that I venture/engage in the PvP zones of these games. I am just the type of player that enjoys PvE elements more. I have never been so happy to be wrong. I love that the zone is persistent, you do not end the PvP experience until you decide to walk back out of the door. Gamers that are sick of games like Destiny where the load screens between matches is a huge time sink for your gaming hours will love this. All you do is walk in the door, and it’s all PvP all the time.

That being said, there is little to NO motivation for aggressive players to camp the doors. When you have sweet DZ loot, you get the fashionable, gigantic yellow butt-pack that indicates you have gear that might be worth stealing. People who just walked in the door have no butt-pack and so aggressive players have no motivation just to kill you, as they won’t get anything from it other than being tagged as ‘Rogue’ which is not necessarily favorable as the whole server can then see your exact position on the map. Speaking of being announced to the server, I even liked the extraction setup for the DZ loot. It’s exciting and thrilling to try and get your precious loot out when the extraction location and time is announced to the whole server. Extraction is where you will be finding the aggressive players, so it’s treacherous. Extraction is why I really want to wait for a full impression until the meta develops, as I saw something incredible while I was playing the beta. There were high ranked/level/DPS players….actually protecting the extraction zones from aggressive players so that normal scrubs like me could get my sweet loot out of the DZ.
Long story short, The Division is an absolute yes from me. I don’t know if it will be able to replace the more flashy titles like Destiny, but it’s going to be a real contender. I will absolutely be playing this one on release.

So there you have it. What do you think about The Division so far?

Street Fighter 5’s launch hasn’t been wonderful. With issues ranging from online connectivity not working, to modes missing from the game that people have come to expect from this genre of game it’s fair to say that Capcom has ticked a lot of gamers off. However they seem to be working on trying to solve problems, and one such problem they’re targeting is the issue of rage quitters.

Basically what happens is that if a rage-quitter sees that they might lose a match and break their winning streak they leave the game, which takes the win away from their opponent and understandably is not a popular move. Capcom are now looking for evidence and aim to punish the worst offenders in coming weeks.

“This punishment will be severe for the worst offenders, but we will need the community’s help with this. We will follow up with more details next week, but over the weekend, please record every instance of rage quitting you encounter.”

Although there’s no set date for whatever they’re planning to do, the steps will be taken from next week and punishments handed down to the players who have been abusing the loophole in the system. Any recording should be fine enough, whether a local recording or one taken from Twitch archives.

Other improvements are also being made, especially to matchmaking in “Europe, the Middle East and various other regions”.

“Several improvements were made this past week that should have decreased the wait time for many users in those territories,” Capcom conclude, “but we will continue to monitor the situation and will provide updates when additional improvements are made.”