There's not much info about EQNext yet, but that hasn't stopped MMORPG.com from giving the game "Best of Show" at E3. They had this to say:

Say what? You thought this one wasn’t at E3? Well, really… it wasn’t in any official capacity. But we were treated to an early look at what SOE has planned for the game’s unveiling in August and we were quite simply blown away by every little detail we saw. This is going to sound like a cop-out, but we can't say why we are choosing EQN as our Best of Show because we've been sworn to secrecy until the big debut in August. What we can say is that we saw grand plans for the world's largest sandbox and it was more than enough to stand head and shoulders above any game we saw at E3. When Sony pulls back the curtain later this summer, you will not be disappointed. EverQuest Next is this year's E3 Best of Show, and in just a couple months you'll all understand why. We promise.

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm?loadFeature=7501&val=1&uh=BB8C9DF97F4F2911C53C8E016B0D7BA7

Guess we'll see for ourselves in August.

You play the first EQ about 15 years ago?

Sooooo many sick games on that Best of list

I never did play the first EQ. Played a little bit of the second one, but wasn't impressed. Apparently this is supposed to be the largest sandbox game ever created.

Massively: Let's start with EQ Next. When did you make the call to scrap everything? What was it that made you choose to do so?

John Smedley: A year and a half ago, we made that decision. I didn't get to cover this in the keynote, so I should mention it here. The engine and underlying technology has not changed. A lot of the guts and infrastructure are staying the same. What we're really changing is what the game is all about, all the design elements. We made one fundamental shift to emergent gameplay.

Once we made that shift, everything else had to follow. And what we saw was RIFT. We saw the writing on the wall with SWTOR. We saw The Secret World. We saw all these games that we knew were in development and very high-quality, but we saw what was going to happen – this big spike and then it goes down. That's the truth of what's been happening with MMOs. The fans need to realize that if you don't change the nature of what these games are, you're not going to change that core behavior. We want to make games that last more than 15 years. That's why we made the decision to change it.

You mentioned last night that EQ Next will look like nothing we've ever seen. Will EQ Next still have the familiar feel to it that EQ fans are used to? How do you strike the balance between innovation and still staying true to the franchise?

I also said in there that it will still be very familiar to you, but what I meant by that statement is that we're changing what an MMO is. MMO means something now, and it means the same thing to everybody because it's the same game. EverQuest, WoW, SWTOR all use the same core loot gameplay, which is kill stuff, get reward, get loot, level up. Very few games have broken out of that mold. One or two have. EVE Online is a great example; it's not standard level-based gameplay, although I'm not saying we're going to a big skill-based system. You're still going to recognize the roleplaying game heritage in it. In EverQuest Next, the world itself is a part of the game. What is the world in these other games? It's a simple backdrop. It's nothing. We are changing that greatly. We're changing what AI is in these games to a degree that we're going to bring life to the world. That to us is the essence of the change that we're making.

At GDC last week, you also talked about how quickly traditional MMO content is consumed and how that plays into your decision to adopt a philosophy toward emergent gameplay. The question comes up about how that affects the future of raid content – something that takes a lot of time to design and is usually played by only a portion of the community. What are your thoughts on that?

This is a very interesting question. I think it's at the core of why what we're doing is sustainable. I'll go right to the heart of the matter. You get to the point where we make an expansion, and when I say we, I mean the entire MMO community. You make your expansion, the real hardcore players consume it in a month, and they're doing the raids over and over and over until the next round of live content that we put in. Typically, three or four times a year, we as MMO companies put new endgame in there to keep the raiders happy.

We absolutely need to build that style of content into every game we make because players want that. We're not talking about the end of raids, the end of this incredibly high-level content. We're talking about changing the nature of the world around it so that there's a lot more to do "in between" expansions. A good example, but a very narrow example, is battlegrounds in WoW or EQII, where players get bored doing it over and over again. But imagine the entire world as part of the interaction. Imagine seasons changing. Imagine if you're a Druid and you need to literally seek out reagents for your spells or worship your deity in a glade somewhere off in the wilderness, but you don't know where. Or imagine forests growing back after they're burned to the ground by invading forces. What we want is a dynamic world that gives all those other possibilities and doesn't just say OK, go to raid X with group composition of X, Y, Z, and kill the dragon for the 52nd time to get the tier 800 gear. It's this rinse-and-repeat gameplay that's got to change, and so we're changing it.

I've seen some pic that look great, but I have heard nothing about how it's going to play other than its the biggest sand box mmo to date. The fact that they already want to start hyping it before it's reveal in August is interesting. Hopefully, the reveal will have more facts about game play and not just some video of concept art.

Read the article interesting stuff but still very vague on core battle mechanics, class interaction, solo friendly or group only focus, but the world stuff was intriguing.

Some more quotes:

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=30916
You’ll be able to destroy, massive, massive parts of this world, almost all of it. You can light the forest on fire; we have ambition with this thing. We want it to be something where the world you log into, might not be the world you log into in five days.

What you saw in WoW’s Cataclysm could take place because someone cast a spell that is powerful enough to do something major. We want it to be meaningful. And that’s what we’re building. It’s actually what we’ve built, because we’ve got this now. It just isn’t quite at the level where we’re OK [to reveal it to the public]. We have a story that we want to tell for the announcement of it, we want it that you’re seeing every aspect of the gameplay, we’re one aspect short of that until we’re ready to show, so we’re close now.”

http://www.polygon.com/2012/12/18/3777814/planetside-2-is-just-the-start-of-sony-online-entertainments-free
"Our opinion is that today's MMOs, and I'd include ours in that mix, are stagnant and stuck in this model that we frankly helped create with EverQuest, where we put new content in the game, and they go through it at an incredibly fast rate because of sites like Thottbot and that kind of stuff," Smedley said.
"We need to change the way we do this," Smedley said. "We're building a sandbox and giving players the tools to help shape the world that they're in. That's the direction we're going we're going in with EverQuest Next; trying to make a world that players create while being a living, breathing world around them.
It's not just a prop for them to walk around in, which is really what all of today's MMOs are. Their worlds are nothing more than a movie set."

Destroy massive parts of the world, that pretty fucking ambitious. I wonder if that includes landmass, that hill over there annoys the hell out of me, nuke it. Of course, if they made like minecraft people would be so excited for this game.

Should be getting a bunch of info on this game in a couple of days here. Apparently they will be showing a working version.

Never heard of this yet but definitely sounds like something to keep an eye on. My friend tried to get me to play part 1, then part 2 before he convinced me to play WoW for years. I just asked him a few days ago what he's playing these days and he said he is back to playing eq2, although he's multiboxing it now just for a different feel.

Live stream on now: http://www.twitch.tv/everquestnext