EQNext Must Read: Massively Talks to Dave Georgeson at PAX East

 EQNext  Comments Off
Mar 272013
 


Artist’s mockup of EQNext’s logo

On Monday, Karen Bryan of Massively has published a great interview with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, Director of Development for the EverQuest Franchise about the future of online gaming, and specifically EQNext. The big reveal of the 3rd 4th 5th 6th game in the EverQuest franchise will take place on August 1st at this year’s SOE Live 2013 event in Las Vegas.

Below, we include some excerpts from the interview.

We began with a discussion about what the future looks like and how EQ Next plays into that future. Georgeson said he feels that SOE is already tipping its hand somewhat with what it’s added to EQ andEverQuest II. What the studio is essentially doing is making the game more open to players, with features like Player Studio and multiple free-to-play revisions. When the players can participate along with the developers in creating the game, the developers can continue making professional content, like the upcoming blueprint feature* in EQII. There are many ideas being pushed along the way, and those ideas are “seriously on steroids with EQ Next,” as he put it, but that won’t be revealed until August at SOE Live.

[After joining the EQ2 team] he focused his efforts on getting the game into the press more, partially through increased marketing but also by releasing things like Dungeon Maker and SOEmote. While some watchers questioned whether these were things the game needed, his answer was yes because it gave the game global press and kept the game became “alive” in people’s minds. As a result, the game’s numbers are stronger than they have been in years.


The Road Not Taken

Shifting gears to EQ Next, Georgeson still wouldn’t reveal what it was that caused SOE to scrap its original plans and start over, but he did say that what the studio was originally making was basically “EverQuest 2.5,” and that wasn’t going to make anyone excited. When he took over the project, he brought in new people to sit down to make big lists of “Holy Grails” for MMOs and lists of things they hated in MMOs. They didn’t allow themselves to stop retooling what the game was until they satisfied those things. The end result is “an MMO you’ve never played before,” he told me. “It’s a completely different critter.”

The Level Cap Problem

SOE is trying to make the game more intuitive. The longer a game’s out, the harder it is for new players to jump into the game easily. With EQ Next, SOE is making sure to take care of accessibility now, not later.

Crafters are the Heart of MMOs

Georgeson argued that it’s really the people who are the glue that makes an MMO work….He also has a pet theory that the players who select themselves to be crafters are the glue of MMOs. They’re the ones who tend to organize guilds, run in-game events, placate tempers in a guild, and be social. “So you can pretty much assume that there will be a strong backbone inEQ Next for those players. If players have good reasons to interact with the crafting community, then everything works better.”

Mobile Gaming?

Georgeson said that players want to be involved with MMOs when they’re not at their PCs, so it’s a big part of the design philosophy with all games in the studio’s development. He added that SOE is already doing it with PS2, but that’s mainly a stat aggregator that shows leaderboards. He wants to let players be involved in the world through their phones and mobile devices.

Georgeson is optimistic about the future of online gaming. He points to opportunities to experiment with new technology like armbands and glasses. He added that there are lots of ways that players will be able to interact with games in the future, and will “remove the ability to be harnessed to the PC even though it’s a PC game.”

Read PAX East 2013: SOE’s Dave Georgeson on EQ Next and the future of online gaming @ Massively

Advanced Solo Loot Madness to End Soon

 Game Updates & Maintenance, Itemization  Comments Off
Feb 272013
 

The Advanced Solo zones in Chains of Eternity drop some amazing loot, including a full set of jewelry upgrades as well as (somewhat controversially), the basic raid gear that drops in Chains of Eternity raid zones.

This has been nice for players who are either tackling them with a mercenary or a second player. However due to the way the loot in these Advanced Solo zones drop (in one or three mystery crates), most players end up with an item they cannot use. Worse, the items cannot be traded with group members. And more maddening still, the loot table includes the rather useless Dungeon Maker rewards such as [eq2u]Demonicus Steaks[/eq2u], temporary adornments, etc.

Fortunately, it looks like some changes are coming to how the loot will be granted from these zones. From Kander on the EQ2 Forums:

We are going to change the way advanced solo zones drop loot. Very soon.

January 15, 2013 Update Notes – Dungeon Maker, Guild Depot Permissions

 Art, Appearance, Housing, Game Updates & Maintenance, Itemization, Tradeskill  Comments Off
Jan 152013
 

From the EQ2 Forums:

GUILD HALL AMENITIES
Depots

  • You can now set tradeskill access separate from withdrawal and deposit access on each Depot’s UI.
  • Transmuting components are now labeled properly and can be added into the harvest depot by selecting the appropriate choice in the deposit dropdown.
    • Treasured – Fragments and Powders
    • Legendary – Infusions
    • Fabled – Manas

ITEMS

  • Augmented Blessing and Augmented Smite no longer stack proc chance. They now increase in effectiveness for each similar effect you wear.
  • Augmented Blessing and Augmented Smite no longer proc in PVP combat.
  • Augmented Blessing and Augmented Smite’s “On Damage Received” effect can now only trigger once every 15 seconds.

DUNGEON MAKER

  • XP for weaker creatures has been reduced in dungeon maker dungeons.

The Blessings (and Smites) of Dungeon Maker

 Commentary, Game Updates & Maintenance, Grouping  Comments Off
Jan 132013
 

Due to some family health issues, things have been slow at the Wire the past couple of weeks short of Update Notes. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a slow resurgence in news on the EQ2 forums as the devs come back from winter break….

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

Ever since the first Massively Multiplayer Online game arrived on the market, players have been seeking the shortest route to fortune, glory, and player experience (XP).

In EverQuest II, Pet classes (Beastlords, Summoners, and Enchanters) have always had an advantage with the TOS-bending concept of unattended gameplay. Druids’ Thorncoat spell is just one of many example abilities that can allow hardy characters to automatically engage and fight enemies without the player being near their keyboard. Now, it’s the much-maligned Dungeon Maker in concert with Chains of Eternity’s Experimentation feature which seem to have set up a perfect storm of shortcuts.

Dungeon Maker & Experimentation

For those who haven’t tried out the feature, Dungeon Maker allows players who own the Age of Discovery expansion to decorate a Dungeon (a handful of rooms from Crushbone Keep, Mistmoore Castle, etc.) as if it were a house, populate it with enemies, and then publish it so that other players can zone in and do battle for XP and tokens. At first, only simplistic Avatars could engage these creations, but after much player feedback, and Herculean development effort, the ability to “Play as Yourself” was added to Dungeon Maker.

For the Chains of Eternity expansion, the designers eschewed the usual Tradeskill writs and story quests in favor of powerful new Tradeskill recipes and abilities that potential customers would find valuable. One of these new abilities, Experimentation, allows crafters to boost the stats of, and even add certain effects to, crafted items.

What has everyone’s knickers in a twist is two specific effects — Augmented Smite and Augmented Blessing. The first does a small amount of damage to the enemy whenever the player takes damage. The second provides a small heal to the player under the same circumstance. These effects by themselves aren’t that impressive, until you realize that each effect can stack and multiply as the number of triggers is increased by like pieces of armor, jewelry, or weapons.

Level Agnostic

When I first heard that Experimented items were being used within Dungeon Maker to power level characters, I didn’t really grasp how this worked. It is with many thanks to helpful players that I learned how a low level character could gain so much XP for groupmates of diverse levels without lifting a finger. The “aha” moment was when I realized that the rules of Experience (XP) don’t really apply because Dungeon Maker is Level Agnostic. You can immediately see this when zoning into any Dungeon Maker zone as none of the enemies have level indicators.

Imagine a level 30 fighter grouped with a level 50 mage and level 80 healer in a Dungeon Maker layout. During combat, the fighter’s taunts and damage are scaled up so that he can keep up with the damage output of the mage. Meanwhile, the healer’s heals and cures are scaled down to match the levels of whichever player he or she has targeted. The damage of the enemies is scaled so that when damaging the mage, the fighter isn’t flattened, and it does more than tickle the healer. It’s a complex choreography that is surprisingly good in its implementation.

Although I have been personally unable to reproduce the “320 AAs and level 20-90 in 10-20 minutes” XP shower mentioned again and again on the EQ2 forums, I have done my own tests which support the use of Dungeon Maker and Experimentation in concert as an effective method to gain levels and AAs, although my results were not head-and-shoulders better than other options such as mass killing in low level dungeons.

The oft-quoted case study has been level 22 Shadowknights wearing a 50-50 mix of the Smite/Blessing gear simply walking through dungeons with hundreds if not thousands of enemies without any additional input. While the “XP machine” is proccing hundreds of heals and damage effects, high level characters can leisurely hang out at the dungeon entrance, racking up mountains of XP.

The Curtain Drops

It looks like these issues have caught someone’s attention judging by these tweets from Holly “Windstalker” Longdale, Senior Producer of EverQuest II:

When prompted for details by a player…

…Holly made it clear that the “DM exploit” is now in SOE’s crosshairs:

We’ve heard rumors that SOE intends to limit these Experimentation effects to only triggering once every 15 seconds, and to not affect the proc chances of other equipped items. While this will not totally eliminate Dungeon Maker as a power leveling tool, it will likely send players scrambling for the next Chelsith or other means of acquiring XP by the wagonload.

Commentary

My personal viewpoint is, if players have already experienced the game on one or two characters and have naturally leveled to 92 or 95, what is the harm in allowing them to speedily level other characters?

Due to numerous gear revamps, stat inflation, and nerfs to the difficulty of earlier game content, nearly every enemy in EQ2 from level 1-80 dies in one or two clicks. This does not teach the player how to master their specific class — only how to arrange their spells or combat arts to kill enemies as quickly as possible. The ship has probably sailed on rebalancing the early game and player power to make this content a challenging learning tool once again, so why not allow players to “play your way” and get to the top at whatever pace they desire?

The Level Agnostic code is an ingenious bit of programming, which is quite frankly going to waste in such an underdeveloped feature as Dungeon Maker. SOE has flirted with scaling dungeons in the past with mixed results due to incredible differences in player power even at the same level. Leveraging Agnostic technology could allow the team to tune dungeons throughout the level range (levels 20-92) to allow players of all levels, and further, allow players to acquire top level gear and equipment.

As I am leveling an alt character, I have always been disuaded from spending any significant amount of time on older quest lines and dungeon romps for the simple reason that any armor or weapons I acquire will be invalidated within an hour or so of gameplay. If adornments, armor, weapons, or jewelry could be acquired throughout the level range that were effective at the top-end of the game, then instead of just 6 months of relevant content, the entire back-catalog of content designed from 2004-2012 becomes relevant once more for players.

Right now, players wanting to gear up their top level characters have just 11 dungeons to choose from (Skyshrine, Underdepths, and the Chains of Eternity zones). Eliminating the Group XP Penalty was a great first step at encouraging players to play the entire game, but we could go so much further.

Further Reading