Happy 12th anniversary, EverQuest! To mark the occasion, we were invited to participate in a roundtable interview with SOE President John Smedley and members of the game's team.

EverQuest II and EverQuest Next

How do you feel EverQuest and EverQuest II are currently coexisting?

Smedley: The politically correct answer to that is they're doing great. The actual answer is we probably made a mistake calling it EverQuest II. That was clearly a mistake. We didn't realize the lifespan. We're sitting here talking about the 12th anniversary of an online game. That's amazing in and of itself. Our original plan was that it was going to be like ever other kind of retail game; after a few years, it would go away and the next one would come out. That hasn't happened. If we could have one thing to do over again on that front, it would be to rename EverQuest II. The game's actually very different. They're set in different times and they appeal to different audiences. It's been an interesting ride trying to convince retailers that it's a good idea to have both EverQuest I and II on the shelf at the same time. I wish we could have a do-over there.

How much more content do you have for EverQuest II before you'll feel the need to bring out EverQuest Next?

Smedley: I would say we're not bringing EverQuest Next out until it's done. We assume both EverQuest I and II are going to have lives independent of EverQuest Next. There's no shortage of fresh and great ideas. I'm not terribly worried about our ability to keep players entertained. It's what we do for a living. As far as EverQuest Next, it will come out when it' ready and not before. I think it's going to surprise a lot of people because of the direction that we're choosing. We're hoping to bring both our past players and a whole bunch of people who have never seen the world of Norrath into it.

Do you see the MMO genre ever going back to the goal of making an online world as opposed to a game?

Smedley: I would say, without giving away to much, EverQuest Next is much truer to that vision. We feel really strongly about that. Players are going to be pretty surprised. They're not going to see us do EverQuest 2.5 or make a World of Warcraft clone or anything like that. We have an entirely new direction and we believe very strongly that the concept of it being a world is the way to go.

What will EverQuest Next have that no other game has?

Smedley: That would be telling! I will say that we're not trying to recreate the wheel. We're trying to do something revolutionary, not evolutionary. That's how we approached it form the day we started development on it. The game looks visually unbelievable. It has its own style. We're not trying to be super realistic with it. We have our own very unique style that I think people are really going to like. The features are going to be shrouded in secrecy for quite awhile.

Progression Servers

How are the progression servers going? Have you learned lessons from the wave of players that have been enjoying them?

Burgess: Basically what we wanted to do this time around was learn from the past server. We've done the progression server before. Last time we didn't enable all of the the same experiences people had before as far as the slower experience and the corpse runs. We decided not to do corpse runs this time. There's actually a poll going on right now where the players can actually see other people voting for and against doing corpse runs. Currently we've been focusing on the forums, seeing what players have liked and what they haven't liked and we went the extra mile to make sure that we incorporated all of those things with this progression server this time around.

VanCouvering: We spent quite a bit of time making sure this was much closer to the original than the first time we did it. Over the years we put a lot of stuff into the old world zones. We spent a lot of time removing that stuff so it would only show up once that expansion had launched. It seems to be going really well.

Are time-locked progression servers popular enough right now that you can imagine adding more?

Burgess: It's definitely an idea we've tossed around. We just need to make sure that the players want it and we have the ability to support fully and as functional as we have with Fippy Darkpaw and Vulak'Aerr right now. It will also be interesting to see how both servers play out against each other since Fippy did get a six-hour head start.

Do you feel you've tapped into the full potential of the time-locked progression servers?

VanCouvering: From a design perspective, there are things we could have caught that we missed and they'll be caught the next time we do this, if there is a next time. Design-wise, when you're talking about bringing it back to the basics there's only so far you can go.

Community

How has the evolving community changed your approach to the design of the games?

VanCouvering: I can speak for EverQuest specifically. There's a trap you can fall into when you listen to the vocal minority. As experienced designers, we understand that you have to listen to more than just the vocal minority. For example, we let the polling system help us get a better feel for the majority's opinion rather than the minority's opinion. Other than that, having a community that has been with us for so long that it makes it more interesting work on a game like this. There's a sense that people enjoy the game, which you might not get on a new game. We know that these people enjoy what we've been doing for the past 12 years, and hopefully they'll keep enjoying it.

Burgess: As we continue to grow and gain more experience with it, we've just gone down different avenues of talking to players. It's either via the forums or the community leaders that we have internally from the players that help us, and we are able to ping feedback off of them with ideas that we have moving forward. There are a lot of avenues we've started exploring over the years to give the best content and features that we can to the players.

How have you seen the community itself change? Have you seen a lot of new players come in, or has it been mainly the same players that have stuck with the game throughout the years?

Smedley: It's been a combination of both. One aspect of this game that you don't think about at first, but we do now, is literally life cycles. We have a lot of players who, for example, may have started out when they were 20 and are now 30-32 with kids. You really start to think about the social groups that these people have formed and the guilds they've formed. They have personal friends that they've known for as long as anybody has known their friends. It's a pretty amazing sight to see.

VanCouvering: We definitely have a lot of people who have been with us for a long time. As a designer, it's hard not to listen to those players primarily, but we have to be very aware that there are new players who want to play our game. You see them speaking on the forums or in-game as well, and it's actually refreshing to hear their voices.

Burgess: On the new player aspect, I'd be lying if I didn't say I finally got one of my brother who's totally a sports jock to actually play EQ because he'd been hearing how the MMO industry had been growing. He finally listened to me one day and started playing EQ and now he's a diehard fan. We definitely get new people coming into the game as well.

Does a new player have a chance to catch up to older players? What advice do you have for a new player?

Burgess: That's something that I believe we're definitely trying to look at on the EQ team. With 12 years of content and features and mechanics, it can be a little overwhelming to a new player, but we do have methods in place to help those players along. A fellowship allows you to group with more than just the typical six people and helps you coordinate getting people out to you. We also have NPCs in the Plane of Knowledge that explain a lot of the newer mechanics, as well as telling players where they can go get their spells for X, Y and Z levels. As we continue on throughout the game, we definitely want to make sure we don't lose focus that with new players we need to have some kind of bridge to teach players what they may have missed throughout the 12 years.

VanCouvering: We focused a lot on moving a lot of the introductory content to the Plane of Knowledge so there's a central location where they can get all of that stuff.

How would you profile the modern EverQuest I player?

Smedley: It's evolved. I would say it's about 80% male. It is average age of about 38. It is somebody that's well educated and spends a lot of time in the game. The average play time right now is over 20 hours per week. It's definitely somebody that's very committed.

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