EverQuest III: The Return of the King

Ten Ton Hammer speculates on whether or not SOE will pursue an EverQuest III, and, if so, what would or should be included in the MMORPG sequel.

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.