EverQuest Next Won't Cause EverQuest 1 and 2 to End

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Quote :: The EverQuest franchise's development director has promised SOE has no plans to shut down EverQuest and EverQuest II once EverQuest Next launches, and also revealed he'd bring back City of Heroes if he could.

Speaking to IGN, David Georgeson offered some insight into why MMOs are closed down, or "sunsetted", and offered a candid insight into when such an event had majorly affected him.

"Sunsetting an MMO depends upon the individual game," he said. "EverQuest and EverQuest II? We hope they never die. We have no intention of ever shutting those games down. But sometimes business is business, sometimes you lose a franchise, or it’s just not the right decision to keep it going. In general, though, we’ve had really good success with keeping games running for long periods of time. I mean EverQuest is 15 years old now. That’s a long run for any game.

"I had a game that I liked to play a lot, as a gamer. From a gamer perspective, I really enjoyed City of Heroes. It was a lot of fun and I thought they could have gone a lot farther with it; I’d have liked to see that game stick around. But you know, again they ran into business issues and they had to cancel the game, that’s totally understandable.

"Everybody who plays any MMO never wants it to die. You invest a little bit of your soul in an MMO, you spend a lot of time in it and so on and so forth, so of course you never want one of them to die."

Georgeson also expressed a serious interest in using Sony's recently-announced VR project with EverQuest Next on PS4.

EverQuest Next, with its various classes and races, is expected to launch on PC and PS4 at some stage in the future. Before it does, however, we'll see EverQuest Next: Landmark, a Minecraft-esque experience that acts as a precursor to the full-fledged MMO, which entered beta last week.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/02/everquest-next-dev-reveals-future-for-everquest-1-and-2