EQNext to have Permadeath? Nope!

 Commentary, EQNext  Comments Off
Mar 062013
 

In a “we hope he’s just trolling or talking about one isolated server” tweet, SOE President John Smedley teased this about EQNext:

It’s one thing for a heavily PvP Combat-based game to have Permadeath. It is quite another for a game where characters are developed over years, have houses and guild halls full of collected riches and rewards, epic quests, and raid zones that are designed to kill players through combat mechanics. For such a game, the concept of Permadeath is nothing short of repugnant.

UPDATE from John Smedley:


Followup conversation between Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson and players:

Recent EQ2U Performance

 EQ2 Data & EQ2U  Comments Off
Feb 072013
 

As some of you have no doubt noticed, EQ2U has had some performance issues lately. Usually these outages have been short-lived but last night, EQ2 data updates stopped around 8:15pm last night and only sporadically worked today.

According to a recent tweet from John Smedley, PlanetSide 2 will soon be launching its own twice-delayed API service which will enable player-driven PS2 sites just as the EQ2 Data Feeds have enabled EQ2U and other sites. Hopefully they’re just working out the kinks and things will work themselves out over the next few days.

Just in the last hour we’ve seen data coming in again and starting to catch up. We wish the best of luck to the PlanetSide 2 folks and data team as they launch the second of what will hopefully be a companywide initiative to offer data to the public for all of SOE’s games.

Meanwhile we’ve started looking at some new data which we’re very excited about. Updates as we have it.

SOE Live 2013 @ Planet Hollywood August 1-4

 SOE Live (Fan Faire)  Comments Off
Feb 022013
 

So after we posted Brasse’s tweets about SOE Live news coming next week, some astute readers checked out the SOE Live webpage and discovered the venue and date had already been posted.

I’ve done some quick research reading reviews of Planet Hollywood online and while reviews typically trend towards the negative (most people who have a great experience don’t post about it), I saw the same type of comments enough times to warrant mentioning them.

  • Pro: Centrally located
  • Pro: Has a great view of the Strip
  • Pro: Easily accessible to Paris and Bellagio. Has decent restaurants inside.
  • Con: Rooms have been poorly maintained, while linens and towels are in poor repair.
  • Con: Casino is just average.
  • Con: WiFi is a heart-stopping $13.99 PER DAY PER DEVICE. For a laptop and phone that’s $160 $112 for 4 days.

Of course Bally’s had its problems too which led to SOE seeking greener pastures. The choice of convention dates were very limited, and it was rather uncool for some of the conference rooms to be bumped due to another event. The food at the Banquet was atrocious (ice cold hot dogs, burgers, and fried chicken). The sound quality at the venues was so bad that it led John Smedley to curse them out while on stage. The WiFi was only slightly less expensive — $11.99 per device per day. Thank Bristlebane for LTE.

We’ll have to see what the negotiated pricing is. The full price is $169 for Fri and Saturday nights.

Players Interpret Smedley Quote as 2013 EQNext Launch

 Commentary, EQNext  Comments Off
Jan 252013
 

SOE President John Smedley has been granting interviews to any and every gaming website about Planetside 2, Free-to-Play, and the upcoming EverQuest Next, and today, Gamasutra landed some rather interesting quotes to be sure. First off, the article leads off with a subject line not entirely substantiated by Smed’s comments: “MMO devs will lose the fight against content churn, says SOE’s Smedley”

The article leads with:

“Sometimes you make a decision and you’re like ‘Oh God, let’s buckle in and hope everything goes well.’ That’s how it was with free-to-play,” he says. “Now we look back and wonder ‘How did we ever survive before this?’ Living in a world where retailers control your software was horrible.”

Then the titular quote:

“In my opinion, the days when companies can make content [generation] the number one strategy, in the kinds of games we make, are over, because we can’t win the war. Star Wars [The Old Republic] proved that. Players bought it, loved it and they played the game. Then they left.”

Now we get into EverQuest Next:

“We’re betting the company’s future on this game. … The last EverQuest game launched in 2005. We’ve blown up two design ideas over the last four years because they were too ‘me too.’ It wasn’t enough of a change. We settled on a design that, when we looked at it, everyone in the room thought we were crazy. We gave it a week and came back, and we all said ‘yeah, we’re still crazy, but we can’t get the idea out of our heads. … It’s going to be the world’s largest sandbox game.”

And… here’s the quote that has everyone losing their minds thinking EverQuest Next will be released this year:

Players will have to wait a bit longer to try it themselves, but maybe not as long as you’d expect. “Players will get their hands on an actual release version of what we’re doing late [this] year – and I don’t mean a beta,” says Smedley.

Reality Check

Folks! EverQuest Next’s current form has been in development for just 21 months. At last year’s October SOE Live event in Las Vegas, John Smedley promised us that we’d be able to “see and touch” EverQuest Next at SOE Live 2013. The idea that EverQuest Next could be ready for release in a total of 32 months is pure folly. It would be the fastest development cycle for any MMO of this size in history.

Time will tell, but my money is on a playable demo at SOE Live with the absolute earliest possible “official” release in November 2014.