Just decided to put this here in case some people like MMORPG Sandbox style games.
So far what I have seen on paper and some technical demos, this is going to be an amazing game. Here is a list of things this game has, in no particular order (as I remember them).
A separate server independent of the "gameworld", where people can "build" the world, the same way you can in minecraft. You have the full development tool of the game available to you, and you are left to your own devices in a full living breathing world to make things. Houses, dungeons, catacombs, farms, ... pretty much anything you can imagine you can do with the tools, you can make. If you make something that catches someone's interest, and they implement it in the server worlds, you get paid! ... Did I mention that this part of the game is FREE! ... so, pretty much for this part, you get Paid to Play.
In the playable servers, you have no "levels", and the progression is all horizontal. All skills and abilities are learned by interacting with the game, doing quests and dungeons, that are randomly generated throught the world. So every single time you play... even if its to make a brand new character, you will have a different experience.
The entire world is one big AI that will learn from player interactions. If there is a Gnoll camp that likes to attack an area, and enough players are just killing them off, no longer will that "camp" just stay there... the game evolves and will no longer remake the camp, and instead there might now be roaving bands of gnolls. Just a small example anyways... the game will do much more than just this.
The world is destructible... everything in the world is destructible... from the trees, the to houses, to the castles... you can blow up the ground near a river, and divert it. You can cause a cave in to prevent mobs from following you. You can get a few friends and blow up a ditch where the mobs can fall and then you can pick off with your archers... if you can imagine it, you can do it.
The game doesn't have "balance"... meaning, if you can find the skills, and apply them, they will not stop you from using it. Found great Plate armor and know how to use it, then get a super cure, and on top of that found a huge fire nuke... become a walking fortress of destruction! Want to give your rogue the ability to mind-control enemies to then backstab them? Have at it!, but you have to be lucky enough to find the quests or actions that lead to that reward.
None of the NPCs have indicators that they have quests... nor will you get progression markers. There will be no "kill 50 rats"... instead, your actions are kept track by the server, and the NPCs will react accordingly to your actions. If you helped a farmer with a mole infestation he had... he might just give you a reward... or instead, it could trigger a boss mole to come seek revenge. Saw a stranded passer by and decided to rob him of all his belongings... you might become much more notorious in the towns and now the leaders of the thieves guild want you to join them... Your actions will have consequenses, and the world will change accordingly.
The ENTIRE world changes according to the actions of the players... to the point that only at launch will all the worlds be exactly the same. After that, every server will diverge. The devs have said the first server wide event that will happen, is "castle/city" building. Meaning, the whole servers get together to decide where they will want the city, what materials, how big, ect ect... You will get to build Qeynos, Halas, Neriak, ... the mayor cities... and it will be a server wide effort that they have "conservatively" said will probably take from 2-3 months to fully complete. All the meanwhile, the guilds can build their own guild halls, even within the city itself... or in a far off land, if they so choose. But they will have to clear the area.. not only of the shrubs, and terrain, but also of the monster camps, roaving bands, and what-not... and KEEP it that way. If, lets say, the guild disbands, then as the server progresses, the constant attacks and the overgrowth will take over, and you will have a husk of what was once a glorious guild hall... until eventually, a few months on, the area will be changed... Yet, there will still be signs of what was once there... a wall that maybe never got knocked down, covered in vines and so on.
Players have "active Action"... which means, you will no longer have to press the space bar to jump a half meter wall... your guy will just naturally move over it... with enough dexterity/athletics, your character will be able to partially run up walls and jump off, from one wall to another even... alla-parkour. The facial features of your characters can be (if you activate your camera with your game), reflect your own features... your own speech patterns and many other things (as you can already see within EQ2).
The world is not a one dimensional flat terrain... what I mean is... if you are fighting, and one of your actions causes a collapse or the ground, or your somehow blow it up, you can end up in a completely new dungeon beneath you. They also stated that dungeons are very much nested, and you can have several dungeons beneath a single dungeon... each progressively harder obviously. There will also be expansions going up... so if you are able to eventually get mounts or abilities to fly up... or teleport up through druid portals or what-not, you can also reach those heights.
It has been a very long time since I have felt giddy about a game (being a grown man and all), but this is in my opinion so revolutionary... that if they can effectively pull this off, I can see SOE finally becoming once again the dominant force if MMOs, and the future of MMOs will have changed... for the better.
