EverQuest Next Interviews
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So, the teams have just seen Everquest Next for the first time. How did that go down?
You know, I was really nervous about that. We showed it to them on Monday, and I couldn't sleep on Sunday night because I was scared. We've thrown out two previous designs of the game to go with something pretty crazy and. well, it's awesome. When the team saw it I could barely breath when they were watching it. But when I'd finished they were clapping and cheering and these guys are gamers, so they're not afraid to call bullshit when they see us make a mistake. It's happened before. We've made mistakes, and the guys internally will call us on it every time. But they loved this, and we really felt vindicated that the way we're going with Everquest Next is the right way. I feel good about it. We're not trying to make WOW2 or Everquest 2.5 we're making something that we think will define the next generation of MMOs.
The genre Everquest has occupied is pretty full now, so it must be very difficult to come up with something genuinely new.
Well, that's the trouble. Everybody has been making the same game since Everquest, really. If you look back, Ultima Online was out before us and really, all the current crop of MMOs are a lot like Everquest they're in that style. They're great because the quality level has really improved, but nobody has really changed the game. Now, you saw it with League of Legends Riot took DOTA and made it mainstream, so now everyone is playing that. You saw the same kind of thing in the Online RPG space. So, the previous designs we had for the next Everquest were cookie-cutter, they were '˜me too'. We had some great, innovative things in there and they'd have been great games in themselves, but they wouldn't have been enough to keep an audience. We've had people playing Everquest for 13 years and we kept that in our mind as the main goal when making Everquest Next.
And a snip from Polygon's article-style approach:
Smedley also has a second prediction for the future of the online games industry: Emergent gameplay, he says, will soon be as ubiquitous as the free-to-play business model. That change will be more reactionary than anything else, driven by consumer's exasperation with the current MMO development philosophy.
"Our opinion is that today's MMOs, and I'd include ours in that mix, are stagnant and stuck in this model that we frankly helped create with EverQuest, where we put new content in the game, and they go through it at an incredibly fast rate because of sites like Thottbot and that kind of stuff," Smedley said.
"We need to change the way we do this," Smedley said. "We're building a sandbox and giving players the tools to help shape the world that they're in. That's the direction we're going we're going in with EverQuest Next; trying to make a world that players create while being a living, breathing world around them. It's not just a prop for them to walk around in, which is really what all of today's MMOs are. Their worlds are nothing more than a movie set."
Though EverQuest Next, the studio's upcoming attempt to reinvent the 13-year-old MMO franchise, will be built around the kind of emergent interactions Smedley envisions, Planetside 2 has already incorporated those elements into its army-on-army battles.
"That wasn't a direction for development," Smedley said, "that was the direction. It's a great case-in-point; we gave players the weapons, the fight's all up to them. We give them some basic goals, but we want them playing that game in ways we never thought of. And that happens a lot."
With how fondly I look back on the original EverQuest, I'd actually consider returning to Norrath if they don't shoot for a cookie cutter MMO experience.
