Everquest Next: Rumor Mill

Source, a guy on reddit talking to a dev at SOELive Pool Party. So these aren't confimed features but still a very interesting find:

WORLD

• Seamless world - no zones
• The land mass shown was not Antonica, it was just a land mass. I asked if Kelethin existed and he shrugged as if he could not answer. BUT IF THEY HAVE CRUSHBONE (concept art) THEY MUST HAVE KELETHIN RIGHT?!
• I asked about the limitations I had read about with the Light Forge engine in regards to water (rivers) and square-ish maps, his response was that it was a heavily modified version so there will be fluids in the game.
• No oceans, 'yet'.
• There will not be 2 factions (ie alliance/horde), or 2 sides (evil/good).

CHARACTERS

• There will be 8 starting classes, the one you pick you basically get for free. The other classes you will be able collect. I am assuming these 8 will be a part of the 40 planned classes (more of which will be shown tomorrow in the classes panel). Their plan is to release new classes as the years progress. It was also mentioned that some classes will be extremely hard to obtain.
• No levels - referred to as `tiers', the 'zones' will be tiered with certain level mobs and usually will be higher tiered the deeper you go in that specific area. In order to tier up you will have to complete certain objectives; one example given is say completing a specific set of armor would tier you up.
• 8 max total abilities at any given time. 4 per weapon, and 4 per class. He mentioned something about all 8 being from weapons if you were say duel wielding, but I may have misunderstood him here.
• There is NO XP from mob killing, no grinding, etc etc. Essentially what we're looking at is a set of objectives and how we go about completing those objectives will be up to us. It was said that one may be able to tier up without even having to fight.
• RANGERS ARE A CONFIRMED CLASS
• Cannot progress both a paladin and a shadow knight at the same time. Basically you have to do bad things to get friendly with the SK people so you can up the SK skills, but you have to do good things to get in nice with the paladin folks to get trained in paladin things. You can however, do bad things and get the SK class, then redeem yourself and get the paladin class, but in doing so you may no longer be able to talk to the SK people and continue your progression with that class.
• I asked about death; they cannot talk about death. All he said was "it's cool and we think you'll like it".

ITEMS

• All items will be bind on equip (or pickup, not sure). He said that he loved the idea of non-bind weapons but they ruin the economy.
• the game will be heavily based on gear, he loves gear and loves the hunt for gear. One example he gave us is say you were a Rogue that wanted to get the wizard's teleport spell - well once you obtain the teleport spell and use it, you most likely would not have enough stamina/mana/whatever to do your backstab, so you would want to gear that class specifically for this task by obtaining a weapon that returned stamina/mana/whatever on teleport.
• Crafted items and dropped items (say from raids) will be of equal value many times. This is all dependent on the class, spec, etc though. He basically said there is a big emphasis on crafting and they want their goods to be competitive.

COMBAT

• NO AUTO ATTACK, I asked if was similar to NW's combat system and he said it was similar, but more advanced.
• The demo shown was more of a `tech demo' for the destructible environment. None of the NPCs were even pathing (the small ones were not even attacking back).
• BOWS are in the game (more on that tomorrow apparently).

MISC

• I asked if there was a large majority of the game that they were not showing us (maybe due to lack of polish etc etc) and he said yes.
• Crafting was compared to SWG, but better
• There are currently 70-90 devs (don't remember the exact number) on the dev team for EQN.