Daybreak president Russ Shanks announced today that Everquest Next, the follow-up in the franchise that defined MMOs, is no longer in production.
After asserting the passion of the studio and developers, he said, “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 Next would not meet the expectations we – and all of you – have for the worlds of Norrath.”
EverQuest Next was intended to be hugely driven by player-created content, taking cues from Minecraft and other massively popular games to create a system where players could build their own content in the world. Part of that was to be a related title called Landmark, and sandbox where player creations would eventually be folded into the MMO.
But it was also announced today that Landmark would be launching for $9.99 this Spring. So now it’s the only remaining aspect of the would-be MMO. Whether the Landmark release will have full support, or if it’s just an attempt to cut the losses of the MMO’s certainly massive development costs remains to be seen.
