EQII's New Producer Brings 20 Years Experience

ZAM:  Have you yet gone and thrown out any of the plans that were on the table as of last Wednesday?

Dave:  No.  I will go so far as to say that any of the short term plans are not going to be changed a bit.  The farther it gets from today the more impact I'll have on what's actually happening.  But I would expect it to be a month or two before any kind of shifts the I'm making will have any kind of difference in what we're doing on the game.

I need to learn, and they need to teach me and then at the same time some of the stuff is already almost done, so it would be stupid to stop it. 

ZAM:  I noticed in the last Halas Reborn preview that most of what was most recently discussed is still slated for GU56. 

Dave:  Yup .  That won't change.  It's dumb to go into a project like this and just start moving stuff to move stuff.  Granted there are people who will do that but I'm not one of 'em.  We will make shifts, like, I don't know exactly what got told publicly, as far as long range plans go, but long range plans, I wouldn't hold your breath.  Some of that will stay and some of it won't.  I know we'll probably shift some stuff around.  Short term?  Yeah, it's all gold.

ZAM:  I think the longest term plans we've heard is of course the next expansion.  And they committed to at least one raid per Game Update for the next fiscal year. 

Dave:  Well long term plans, like I said, what I'm going to be doing is asking people a lot of questions about why. That's probably the most annoying question I ask on a regular basis to a dev team.  “Okay, that's great, you want to do a raid every quarter.  Why?  Tell me the reasons.  What does that do, who does that feed, how many people is it?”  You know, that kind of questions.  And if those are all good answers?  Absolutely we'll keep doing that. 

ZAM:  So, do you play EverQuest II?

Dave:  This is where I'm going to get spanked a little bit I think.  When I was doing Planetside of course they were developing EverQuest II so I played it a bunch pre-launch then I played it a little bit after launch.  When I left SOE I got really busy with my own projects so I ended up fallin' off of that.  You know you only have time for usually one or maybe if you're really dedicated two MMOs at a time, and I kept sampling the different flavors.  So I didn't get back to EverQuest until I came back to SOE. 

However, yes, I did spend my entire weekend playing a Troll Shadowknight up.

ZAM:  What server are you on?

Dave:  I wanted to be around people so I was on AB.  Part of why I play the game when I'm on it is so that I can see how the people interact with each other and exactly what the social dynamics are, that sort of thing.  So I went to the most populated server to try that out.  I played a troll Shadowknight mostly 'cause that's what I played in EverQuest, which I played a lot.  It was fun, I had a good time.  Crushbone's a blast.