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.

The MMO Market

What is your take on the current state of the MMO market? Who are your main competitors?

Smedley: Clearly, Blizzard has a pretty healthy lead over the rest of the industry. However, our main competitors from our perspective is the MMO industry in general. It's really blossomed and become this vibrant industry. We're trying to innovate and do new things. For example, with DC Universe Online we made an action MMO that's on both the PC and PlayStation 3. We're seeing real big success on the PS3. We started with EverQuest and keeping innovative is sort of the way we compete.

When it launched, EverQuest set expectations for traditional MMOs. Then World of Warcraft came along. How does EverQuest fit into the MMO space now? Are you trying to adapt the game?

VanCouvering: I would say it would be sort of a mistake for us to try to follow what WoW's doing. It's a brilliant game, no doubt, and we've definitely learned things from them. But EverQuest is pretty much its own little entity and has its own feel, way of playing and lifespan. To try to change that to follow a game that came afterward would probably be a mistake. We try to make EverQuest even more EverQuest-y if at all possible. Changing the feel of the game would be a bit of a mistake.

Personal Questions

As developers, what are some of your favorite moments from the past 12 years of EverQuest?

VanCouvering: Probably my favorite was meeting my guild at a Fan Faire in Vegas. The people that I had grown to be friends with for a year and a half before I actually met them. It was a weird experience. The weirdest and best part to me was that I actually liked them in person. I had just assumed they were being nice to me. When I met them in person, they were all exactly like they seemed to be online. That was probably my favorite experience as a player and maybe even as a designer.

Burgess: A popular topic is epics in EverQuest. Mine would have to be creating some of those and seeing player reactions as they were going through and trying to figure out exactly where they were, coordinating with other players on finding clues, and then completing them and seeing the players' excitement. It made me happy. It made me feel like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, which is providing that kind of excitement for players. It was a good feeling.

Smedley: For me, it was was seeing it launch. It was very exciting. We didn't quite know what we had on our hands at that point. We knew it was going to be popular, we just didn't know how popular. I was there when we launched this thing and it was a really happy time. It was really fun to be a part of it.

What race and class did you pick for your main characters? Why did you choose them?

VanCouvering: I started out playing a bard and gravitated toward an enchanter. I like the panic factor, frankly. If you're party's going to fail, it's going to be because your enchanter failed. Or if you're going to succeed, it's going to be because your enchanter succeeded. I like the difficult, complicated and even at times frustrating classes to play, so I tend to stay away from the warriors and rogues. I enjoy figuring out how to make that work.

Burgess: I am still a human monk agnostic. But that wasn't my very first character. My first character was a necro that couldn't see in the dark, so I couldn't go that route.

Smedley: For me, it's the halfing rogue for sure. Good times. Very good times.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief