EverQuest II Interview, Part One
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Q: What are your favorite games of the past, and what games do you currently play?
A: There are too many games to list, so I'll just cover my all-time favorite and talk a little about massively multiplayer games. The Ninja for the Sega Master System is my all-time favorite game. I'm honestly not sure why, but I love the music and can still have fun playing it today. It's one of those games that brings back memories for me.
As far as MMOGs go, my transitional game to the genre was The Realm. It's not necessarily a massively multiplayer game per se, but it is a persistent fantasy adventure-RPG in a shared world with many other players (so in that sense, it fits the bill). I really enjoyed that game up until "the one" came about.
Ultima Online probably stands as the game I yearn for the most in its old school form. I'm a big fan of PvP, and I would probably be considered a "PK" (scratch probably... I was a PK back in those days, because I liked ganking people). It's still the game that I recall some of the most crazy moments from, because there weren't many restrictions and I enjoyed creatively making the game less fun for others (exploiting to stroke my own ego).
EverQuest is next on the list of my favorite MMOGs. It's the only massively multiplayer game that is primarily PvE other than EQII that I've really been able to get into. The depth, the world, and all of the great moments I had in that game are hard to forget. It's also from back in the day when developers didn't generally bother to save me from my own stupidity, so I could do things like fall off Kelethin to my death, turn a corner in Neriak and find that there's an aggro mob of a much greater level than me showing me to my doom, and various other experiences that may have been frustrating at the time, but I can look back at and smile.
Instead of writing a book on all the other MMOGs I've enjoyed immensely, I'll be very brief. My favorite guild of all time was one I played with in Asheron's Call 2 a game which I enjoyed quite a bit. I followed them to PlanetSide and whooped up on some fools as part of the Terran Republic's Pirate Ninja outfit. We then moved to play some Final Fantasy XI, and pretty much dispersed into various locations thereafter (though I attempted to resurrect the guild in name in Guild Wars, many of the guild members ended up focusing on first-person shooters To this day, I still play on the same server as one of the uber members of the guild, agrajag). I enjoyed Shadowbane quite a bit until my city was destroyed, City of Heroes, and played a whole bunch of other MMOGs along the way.
Finally, we come to EverQuest II. It's the main game I've played since I started working at SOE, and it has made me a much more casual gamer. I've stopped my mentality of grinding for the most part, and primarily focus on questing and running around finding random things to do. To give you an idea of how casual I am, my main character is still not level 60 and I only have about 5 alts above level 20 (for anyone who knows me, they know I'm an altaholic). That in more than a year of playing. It's crazy! I'm currently playing EverQuest II, Morrowind (and the expansions, finally), and Pirates! I played GUN, Call of Duty 2, and Kameo on the Xbox 360 for a while up until a week or so ago, but now I'm off the console kick and back to PC games.
