John Smedley's Message on the Future of MMOs/EverQuest II

[Dolby]

Sony Online Entertainment Looks Towards the Future

With the launch of EverQuest in 1999, Sony Online Entertainment (back then we were Verant) was on the leading edge of what became a revolution in the video game business... Online Gaming. We certainly didn't invent it...in fact; we stood on the shoulders of some pretty amazing games, including Ultima Online... Meridian 59 and many, many other games including some great text MUDs.

EverQuest had that magic that propelled it to selling over 3 Million units over its six year (well almost) lifespan. We've released 9 expansion packs during that time that have added an absolutely massive amount of content that we're pretty proud of. Certainly some of those expansions were better than others, but I think our goal has always been the same.... to entertain our players.

With the launch of EverQuest II, our goal was to refine EverQuest... to distill the things that made EverQuest great, but also to add its own flavor and gameplay style. I think it's fair to say we also needed to aim for a more casual gamer... and make the game appeal to people that may not have the same amount of time they had when EverQuest first came out. As a company we needed to also appeal to a wider base of people. I think you can see from the universal appeal of the Lord of the Rings books (and oh yeah, the movies too....) fantasy worlds are what we can all call "mass market". I'm really proud of EverQuest II and I honestly believe we delivered on our goals of making an incredibly fun and immersive world that our players want to be a part of and make their own.

Over the years, we've learned a lot. The biggest thing we've learned is that our players care very much about everything we do and the changes we make to their world. I cannot tell you how many thousands of emails I've gotten over the years complaining about class balance, nerfs, and overall changes we've made to the game. While I can absolutely understand and respect where each and every one of the people that took the time to write these passionate emails came from (and I read every single one of them and do my best to respond to them as well), I can also assure you that our game teams really do care about the changes they make. Remember... YOU, our players, write our paychecks.

But it's more than that.

It's also about truly caring about what we do. The vast majority of our development teams come from our player base. That's a fact that I'm incredibly proud of. In fact, it may surprise you to know that EverQuest actually was the catalyst for one of our Executive Team members to meet his wife (he just got married within the last 6 months)... she was in his guild... one thing led to another and... well the rest is as they say history.

We've certainly made our share of mistakes over the years... but overall, we've tried to stay true to our primary goal of entertaining you.

That's our job description.

Now what's been interesting from our perspective is what really serious competition is doing to the online gaming space. World of Warcraft has come on the scene and is doing awesome. Kudos to Blizzard on what I think is a spectacular game. I've played the heck out of it, and I love it (as have many people here at SOE). To a game developer, having another game developer play your game is the ultimate compliment... so to the folks at Blizzard we say "Nicely done".

But don't think for a second that we don't see WoW as both a great game AND Blizzard as serious competition.

Personally... I'm glad they are out there. They keep us honest. They keep us focused and they force us to play with our 'A' game. They've certainly opened some eyes in our company to styles of gameplay that are different than we would have come up with inside SOE. I hope they're also opening up the eyes of other MMO developers that the 'old school'
probably won't cut it any more. I'm glad that we went in the direction we did with EQ II because had we stuck with making an even "harder core"
game, I think bad things would have happened. We need to be about larger scale mass-entertainment... because that's what online gaming is slowly becoming. Our games just need to be fun... and easy to get into.

In the United States there are around 2 Million paying online gamers (this is after WoW btw). That's up from 250,000 back before EverQuest was released... and I'm only counting the MMOs... if you start to add in the Pogo's of the world we're probably talking about 3-4 Million online gamers... and I have no idea what scary numbers some of these online poker places are bringing in.

What this means is that making future online games is a big business that is going to be increasingly competitive. I think that's good for you, and good for us. It's going to ensure great games get made... and I can tell you we're in this for the long haul.

Where are we going? What are we going to be doing to revolutionize this business? Well let me throw out just a few of the things we're thinking about here at SOE.

What if you could have families in MMO's? Virtual Children... What if your characters could have children and pass on the family name.....

What if players could build fantastic dungeons that become part of the worlds we create with tools we give them? How would that work exactly?

Can MMORPGs have skill-based combat?

What if?

I mention these things to be provocative. I want to make sure we're going to take what we do to the next level... and that's going to mean putting some next generation ideas out there and seeing the kinds of things you actually want... but I at least want to start this dialogue and stir the pot a little. We're very interested in your ideas about where things go from here.

John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment

[taco-man]

all i can say is, wow (not WoW) hehe

[UmbraNemo]

Color me impressed with purple pokadots. Just one question dose that mean we'll get suck with mother in laws too, I play to escape RL

[insomniac]

so.. when can we expect this 'soe world builder' to be released?

"virtual children"...? Is that like..a better house pet system.. or a way to make alts? i assume you would have to.. um.. "make" the child with someone...

I think they should stick to having us kill stuff. And adding minigames like a social card game or something. and e-mail..

It makes me glad to hear that they've played wow.

A couple paragraphs in there that contain the words "casual" and "hardcore" make me very glad i'm at these forums and not the official ones.

[Itanius]

/drools at prospect of EQ2 toolset

[Sir Taleisin The Seer]

if EQ2 has a zone creator nearly as advanced as NWN I'll probably never stop playing <img>

[Wolfysins]

I think some of the stuff he talked about would be fun.

I don't think player-made dungeons need to be a bust. They might not be littered everywhere. They might implement portals to them similar to how they do inn rooms, but have those portals scattered around.

As for player skill -- I think EQ1 left more room for player skill, with creative pulling being one of the biggest skills. Bard charm kiting is another, and even enchanter charm killing (very different from how bards do it). Even normal quad-kiting requires skill to do without dragging the mobs over other people. I also for a time was doing mass root-rotting technique with the clicky-DoTs on my druid. I discovered I could keep up all my clicky DoTs on 7 mobs at a time, plus a mana-costing DoT on one of them. So I'd find an appropriate place and snare/root anything that came close. It was interesting XP flow. Or how about various forms of crowd control, mixing in mes's with snare-kiting adds and rooting.

The only skill I'm finding in EQ2 is learning how to run around zones without taking unexpected agro plus how to avoid taking agro off the tank. These aren't new to EQ2, of course.

I think they dummied down these aspects of the game when they made EQ2. Heck, I was frustrated with EQ1 in that the game was entirely about brute force. Subtlety was in there just enough to help you control the order in which you applied the brute force.

But I'd love to be able to advance my characters through subtlety. By NOT killing the mobs. In EQ1, I dual-comped druid and chanter, and the chanter is all about subtlety and guile.

I'd love to be able to get XP or gain skills just by getting somewhere, and to have tricky ways to be able to do it. It shouldn't be all about DPS.

Of course, if I can find a way to push a mob off a cliff, I wouldn't mind the resulting XP.

[Timothi]

I think the dungeon idea is good. But it all depends on where they put it. Like if they would make it accessible through your room at the inn. Like a door in the back of it. That way you could invite some friends to come in and try it. But it would also limit it from crowding the zones with crappy made zones.

As for the family thing. I don’t think this would work well. Leave that crap to the SIMMS. I have a family of my own; don’t want it in my gamming world also.

Just my 2 cp.

[Quib]

A dungeon builder would be disastrous for 2 glaring reasons (in my opinion):
- People suck at design. Even if we were just placing pre-made blocks of dungeon on a grid, you'd still encounter the stupidest things you've ever seen in a game.
- Loot would either be garbage, or only drop off a preset mob difficulty type, so there wouldn't be much variety. Think randomly generated Diablo 2 dungeons, and this is basically what we'd have.

A game called Graal (I think it still exists...) allows for player submitted dungeons and areas, and some are garbage, and some are really creative and neat.

To be fair, some games (old ones) have player-made content that is still amazing, even by today's standards. Jedi Knight (from 1997) had a player-made level editor (well 2, but 1 stunk) and amazingly creative, complex and beautiful levels (geometrically, along with decent textures) are still made today. Level designing for that game has turned into more an artful 3D expression than actual places to fight since the remaining community is so small.

So, if the dungeon making tool is really hard to use, we'd probably see less rough and more diamonds.

As for families, I'm gonna have to agree with Timothi, leave that to the stupid SIM games. Aging really sucks when you want your character to live forever (or to not have to worry about age anyway).

Can MMORPGs have skill-based combat?

That line really confused me. I played (well, still have an active account) EQ1 for 5 years. I saw a massive gap in ability between the skilled and the unskilled. It wasn't twitch reaction skills like in a FPS game, but rather knowing how to juggle agro, how to pull, tactics to use against X enemy, etc. Plenty of raid mobs required a certain tactic to beat, and in GoD I had to rethink my fighting methods (since my pet was tank 99% of the time I fought there and in OoW).

I think that letter was mostly hot air, and nothing said there will get implemented, but they are things that already exist in other games, so it's not like they're impossible.

Quib