In honor of the tenth MMOG Nation Broadcast featuring Paul Barnett, I thought it would be worthwhile to link back to my first discussion with Mr. Barnett. In one of my first ‘Face the Nation’ interviews last year, Paul and I chat very obliquely about Warhammer but - moreover - talk about almost everything else.

Part One focuses on Paul’s background and the inspiration for making games:

MN: The next more serious question I have is, moving the game back out until next year: that seems like an obvious, intelligent thing to do. But, can you give us some insight into what the decision-making process was there?

Paul: Yes, it’s about FARTs.

In Part Two the bulk of our time is spent talking about the role of designers in the games industry, and the wankery of both:

Paul: Let’s stop talking about C++, let’s stop talking about our new clever way of doing a design, and let’s start talking about the fact that we earn quite a lot of money, that we pay the bills, that we’re interesting people, that we’ve got a career, that you can do it, that we can all do it. And if we all work together, we can have a bloody good laugh. And! Mom will be impressed.

Part Three caps off with some discussion of class balance:

Paul: Ninety percent of the people playing Class A have no idea that they were unbalanced. They had no idea that they were cheating. They had no idea that they were having an easy run of it. All of a sudden they log in and find that their character’s crap. Their character is crap, and yet they did nothing to justify that. They were just paying you money, and playing the game. But because some la-di-da clever designer went and read the message boards, and found out that four people playing Class A were able to kill the dragon “Sparklers” while walking backwards waving fish, these people suddenly have their characters crippled.

To listen to the whole thing as audio, check out the (somewhat poor-quality) recording.

1. I have a new theme on the site, because we were thinking for a while that the K2 theme may have been partially responsible for the security vulnerabilities.
2. The site’s podcast will no longer be known as ‘Face the Nation’. It’s a reality in today’s podcasting sphere that you pretty much have to be on iTunes, and they just didn’t want to play ball when the podcast had anything like that name. The cast is now known as ‘The MMOG Nation Broadcast’.
3. The spam continues to be added to the site, much to my embarassment. You’ve probably noticed if you read via rss, and I heartily apologize. Please don’t remove the site from your reader - we’re working really hard to get it squared away. At this point we’ve ruled out plugins, the theme - Wordpress has been deleted and repatched a couple of times now … if anyone has any pointers about cutting edge SQL insert vulnerabilities, I’d be glad to hear about them.

I had the utmost pleasure last week to speak with Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer for EverQuest 2, about the process of making their upcoming expansion Rise of Kunark. We gabbed for quite a bit, and managed to cover quite a bit of ground, including:

• Highlights for tradeskillers and soloists
• The seamless zone tech that didn’t make it into Faydwer
• What the team did with those extra four months of production
• The design considerations behind Veeshan’s Peak
• A discussion of the original uber-ambitious content schedule for EQ2 and
• The zone that didn’t quite make it into the expansion.

I particularly enjoyed his commentary on the process of ’selling a relationship’ to players:

My dad the professional sales guy, for his entire career, he was one of the good guys where he would always describe the bad salesguys as the ‘used car salesmen’ trying to get you on the one sale. The good salesguys are the ones who understand you’re selling a relationship. I’ve always thought about MMOs the same way: they are all about the relationship. If you are not selling the relationship, as in you want to provide a service over a long period of time, you need to get out of the business. There’s no room for people who don’t want to play that way, and there’s no room for people who can’t afford to play that way.

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While Eye of the North was the primary topic of discussion last week, it was interesting to see how elements of Guild Wars 2 information was seeded in and around the game. It’s largely still a mystery as to what we’ll be doing and seeing in the next game, as it is still very much under construction. That said, I had the chance to speak with two of the Arena.net co-founders about their philosophy behind the upcoming game.

Jeff Strain and Mike O’Brien were on-hand and generous with their time; we discussed the reason for the sequel in the first place, the future of Guild Wars PvP, and how they make the game look so dang good.

Jeff Strain: We often call Eye of the North the spiritual successor to Guild Wars, to the original Guild Wars that we released in April of 2005. In all of the campaigns there were a lot of threads that were left open, intentionally, for future exploration. We want to give people a sense of coming home, and returning to the beginning. Feeling like they are seeing some resolution to a lot of these open things. One of the things that will happen with Eye of the North; when you finish playing it you will see clearly what your future is going to be in Guild Wars 2. I think it will be very clear to you where we’re going. This is something we haven’t revealed yet, it’s going to be the big surprise in the game. Coming home is kind of the spirit driving it.

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On Tuesday I had the chance to speak with Ben Miller, game designer and expansion lead for Eye of the North. We talked about his game, his background getting into the games industry, and some of the philosophy that went into creating the spiritual successor to Guild Wars: Prophecies. 

MMOG Nation: What do you think, coming from a game design perspective, is something that a veteran massively multiplayer gamer will really dig their teeth into when playing Eye of the North? 

Ben Miller: One of the biggest things as far as Massively Multiplayer games go, is sharing the experience with your friends. Whatever that experience is. I think Guild Wars in general has been really great about allowing friends and groups of people to share this really epic narrative experience together. Eye of the North has that in droves. The other thing that is going to be really cool is the openness that Eye of the North has; you can experience the different storylines at your own pace, at your group’s pace. You can pick them up and drop them whenever you really feel like it. It’s not necessarily this big long windy road. It’s a lot more open, it’s a lot more free and I think that a lot of players are going to enjoy exploring the expansion together in groups. As well as experiencing the story and narrative.

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Earlier this week I emailed John Smedley at SOE about the announcement this week. Even though I hold this site to no journalistic standards whatsoever, I am nosey as all hell. Just ask my wife.

Discussion was had, email was exchanged. In the end, Mr. Smedley kindly consented to talk with me about their just-announced in-game card game, Legends of Norrath:Oathbound. He’s probably going to cover pretty much all of this stuff in his address to the Fan Faire community tonight, but I had a couple of nerdy specifics that I thought you folks might find interesting.

Here then, is Mr. Smedley’s ‘50,000 foot view’ of the game, and a discussion of the whys and wherefores of SOE’s newest ventures.

Update: Plenty of features on other sites on this topic. The San Jose Merc has the official press release and some commentary from Dean Takahashi. Crecente got to go play the damn thing last month in Denver, and the result is a longish hands-on with the game. To see it firsthand, there’s a trailer up on GameTrailers for the graphics-inclined. The official site has some great stuff on it, including a list of the in-game loot you can get from the first set of cards.

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