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.

• 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.

Lots and lots and lots more below.

MMOG Nation: Thank you for talking with me tonight, sir. The elevator talk seems to be ‘the re-imagining of EQ classic’, and I was wondering if you wanted to start off by talking a little bit about that?

Scott Hartsman: Yeah! The last expansion, Echoes of Faydwer, was our first true hardcore jump into “Lets see what happens if we go hardcore EQ nostalgia.” We really liked the results there a lot, and it did great things for the game. We decided we were going to take a similar tack with this expansion, only take things one step further. With Faydwer what we had done is do a blend of nostaligic stuff in a sort-of-original EQ way, with this one we’re doing full-on Kunark nostalgia … and expanding on what it even means to make an expansion for EverQuest 2.

We’re breaking new ground both from the EQ2 angle, and going deeper into the nostalgia. On the EQ2 side, we wanted to see what we could do with our game engine to make this a better experience than anything else we’ve done. Instead of every zone being a distinct area, and every zone has a single dominant theme, we expanded the engine to include these gigantic overland regions and then embedded anywhere from two-three-four zones into each region. These things are just gigantic places, and you’ve got multiple zones inside each of them. That’s a huge leap for EQ2.

We applied a whole bunch of polish to some of the best parts of the game. We worked on the way that NPCs show up as you’re running around the world so that you can see more NPCs at once. The whole world looks more alive, you don’t get a whole lot of the ‘pop-in’ effect. There are some new settings that you can crank up as far as they can go if your computer can support it, and you can see things forever off into the distance. It gives the world this entire brand-new sense. Between that and the multiple zones inside each region, then when you put all this into the Kunark setting, you end up with some really amesome things.

Like … you land on the dock in what is essentially Dreadlands, walk for a ways, and suddenly Karnor’s Castle is to-scale right there in the open. It looked cool in EQ, don’t get me wrong, it was one of my favorite places to be. But, it just looks much more imposing and massive, the scary structure it’s going to be, because you get to see it at full size instead of the scaled-down exterior. You get a slightly more seamless experience throughout the expansion.

So yeah, it’s tweaking things on two different axis. There’s the nostalgia angle, and then improving what made EQ2 a great game all on its own.

MN: One thing that really impressed in the Beta, when you step into Timorous Deep for the first time, the ocean spray on the rocks? It’s great to kind of tweak the new players and say, “Look at the new shiny thing!”

Scott: I only wish that you folks who took the tour had gotten to see the new build. If you make a new Sarnak with one of the new builds, you get the intro fly-through into Timorous Deep. So now you begin getting the narration, the fly-in, the history of the Sarnak, and the gods-eye view of Timorous Deep. That little area is one of the areas we fly you through in the intro.

MN: I found it very interesting, because it was obvious that you were putting sort of that visual ‘pop’ into the game very early for players, as opposed to pushing it out further into the expansion. Was that based on lessons learned from previous expansions?

Scott: There are two big reasons Timorous Deep turned out the way it did. Number one, we planned the order of zone development smarter this time. We knew that with Timorous it needed to be impressive as hell. Our production pipeline starts with concept artists, and then goes to texture and modeling where it stays for a very long time. After that it goes to effects and game content population. Timorous Deep was the first zone out of production, and the first zone into the hands of the effects artists. They had more time with this zone than any other zone in the expansion. The thing that let us do similar quality stuff in the other zones is that we had the luxury of being able to borrow an effects artist from another team. We were able to do about 30-40% more effects than if we hadn’t been able to borrow Tom from another game team.

The other thing about Timorous Deep is that since the zones are so much bigger, they require more time for population. While they’re in population that’s a great time for the FX guys to be running around in there and iterating over it with the designers. Where on a shorter dev cycle you end up with 6-8 weeks in population, these zones got at least 12 weeks. That’s yet more time that our artists can go back in and see what the population looks like. They go, “The designer had a great idea here and turned this into a new Spirroc camp. So I’m going to add an effect here and something else over here …” A lot of it came down to more time, better pipelining, and having that additional body.

MN: To dovetail on that, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, this is the first EQ2 expansion that’s had the full year for development?

Scott: The last one had about 8 months actual production time, this one between pre-production and production, it ended up just shy of a year.

MN: You were just talking about being able to get zones into the hands of the effects guys earlier … is there anything else that you can see that those four additional months netted you?

Scott: Yeah, we were able to do a lot more intelligent planning. The most obvious way that manifests itself is when people play things for the first time and they go, “Holy crap, this content is laid out really, really well.” It feels like I can run around and explore where I want, but if I want to stay on a quest path and get told the story of a gigantic region I can, and it’s laid out really well. You get a sense of continuity with that. Kylong Plains, one of the regions that contains the Dreadlands, and Karnor’s, and the Firiona Vie outpost, and Burning Wood (which is now called Stonewood). That’s all one contiguous area, with multiple distinct visual themes going through it, and multiple music themes as well.

All of that was in the hands of a single designer, who was able to maintain continuity between all of these zones inside the region. You’re able to see how the stories play out, you’re able to follow the quests all the way through. Multiple people contribute to those areas, of course, but the value of continuity can’t be understated. The idea of one all-seeing eye overlooking the four zones in the region, and then having the up-front time to do the detailed planning, helps tremendously. It allowed us to get a bunch of content into the game and not have to do a lot of re-work because the plan was there. It’s amazing how much better-quality stuff you can turn out when you have a minute to friggin think about it.

MN: It does seem like you folks have pretty much been on the run since the game hit the ground. Is that an off-base observation?

Scott: You’re absolutely right. Our initial launch content plans involved doing multiple adventure packs and multiple adventures every year. Nobody was really happy with the quality … the quality level on those was okay, there was a lot of fun stuff in there. Shoot, there’s still some innovative stuff that gets played in there today. But it just wasn’t up to the level that we wanted it. Getting the ability to do a single expansion, and then filling out the rest of the year with honest-to-god free live content updates has been huge for us. We can get a zone developed when an artist has spare time, put it in the can, and then leave it there until we can get a designer there to populate it and add quests and take their time to do it right.

So we just have the one expansion, but instead of selling people content throughout the year that has to be done on a specific schedule we end up with a lot more flexibility. Adding the zone of Unrest, adding the Shard of Fear, adding any of the other zones we added as free downloads … yeah, the artist finished in June but it doesn’t really matter if it sits around because we don’t have a big revenue event tied to it. It can be just developed and we can release it when it’s damn well ready. One of the first pieces of feedback I saw for Shard of Fear was “yet another polished piece of content released by SOE”, and I had to blink because I couldn’t tell if they were being sarcastic. They were being sincere, and it was cool to see that people are picking up on this now.

MN: Indeed. I still remember being very impressed when you folks dropped an entire playable race and starting zone on folks for free.

Scott: And the deal is, we have sold Adventure Packs that were smaller than that amount of content. We have sold Adventure Packs that were more expensive to produce than that content. We just knew that when we launched Echoes of Faydwer that we were launching an expansion that had a good race, and we also wanted an evil option. When we got the opportunity to do Neriak as live content, we jumped all over that. Having our partners out at Soga was a huge boon. Meanwhile the local team drew up what the zone was supposed to look like, and there was a lot of iteration between them and us. But it was the kind of work that could be done with lots of other stuff going on. Just getting all those assets back allowed us to pick up exactly where we’d left off with it six or seven months earlier.

MN: I always find the rationale behind design and productions really interesting, and you mentioned the ambitious schedule behind additional content at EQ2’s launch. Can you speak to some of the thinking there?

Scott: Everything is multi-faceted, right? There’s no single reason anything happened. The biggest one is … and I’ve said this a couple of times and meant it every time I’ve said it … the advent of World of Warcraft was a quality-bar raiser for the entire industry. Some people rip on WoW, they’re welcome to, I am thrilled because it is now the case where there is no arguing anymore. Everyone understands at all levels of the business what quality is, and what quality needs to be in order to survive. We’re not talking even grow to beat up the 800-lbs gorilla, we’re just talking survival. We’ve all seen now what happens to MMOs when either they launch and don’t meet that quality bar or they think they can’t meet that quality bar: they don’t survive.

And so that is a big scary thought, but in the hands of teams that do have the ability to make things of sufficient quality to survive these days, for people like us we’re thrilled. That’s the kind of quality stuff we want to make. And everybody in the industry gets that now. When I said it was multi-faceted, it’s not just that devs want to make good stuff. The business folks now understand that if you don’t have good stuff you don’t have a business. This became an industry-accepted thing, it’s not just something that developer ride a hobby-horse about: quality content is good for business.

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.

MN: You mentioned Soga studios, and I really enjoy what they’ve added to the game. Did they do any work on Kunark?

Scott: No, they haven’t had a chance to work on anything in Kunark. They are actually working on a game of their own right now. We’ve been talking to them about doing some more free-content style additions for later in in the next couple of cycles. While we were working on EoF, they were working on Neriak and Darklight Wood. We have them working on a side-project right now while we’re working on this expansion.

Essentially they become an additional content house for us. They’re not part of Kunark, but it’s interesting … we’ve had some people as if they were when some folks saw the Sarnak environments. Their building style has sort of an Asian influence to it, and that didn’t come from Soga, that came from the SOE San Diego studios. The primary artist on that is a young guy, just an animal. The rate at which random cool things would show up in that zone, even the designers were surprised at it. It was pretty impressive.

MN: The big technology selling point for the expansion are the seamless zone elements. I was told that Faydwer was somewhat designed with that in mind as well?

Scott: Faydwer was was kind-sorta but not really designed that way. Faydwer was the first time we talked about it, but we didn’t have the technology to do all the cool things that we wanted to do with it. We really wanted to do it for Faydwer, but we pretty much didn’t. Everything there is very much its own zone, they each have a single theme and single environment. For the most part they have similar musical style. In Kunark on the tech, music, and art development sides they all were designed around multiple zones in one region. A place I really like that application of the technology: as you go from the Dreadlands docks up to the mountains, into the snowy area with the village by the gigantic lizard spires, that’s another really striking transition. You’re doing a total environment shift.

MN: We had a chance to take a look at Veeshan’s, and that must have been sort of a daunting challenge. It’s such a big deal for players who went through the first game; how did you folks approach it?

Scott: Veeshan’s was definitely interesting because the folks who were originally involved with the development of Veeshan’s for EverQuest 2 were people who had played through it in EverQuest. The guild that I was in back in the day, that was one of the pinnacles for my experience with them. So our challenge was to get a similar experience in a different way. Because that sort of punitive gameplay isn’t going to work the same way these days, and that sort of linear gameplay where you’re going to be in the same place for multiple days doesn’t necessarily work today either. Our first realization was that we can do this, we can have a ton of bosses in there, but we can can have things in more ‘wings’. Between the winged layout where you have three distinct areas you’re working through, plus the persistent instancing … if your guild wants to go in for an hour a night for ten nights and it saves exactly where you are.

So the challenge was to get that kind of experience without lapsing back into design elements that folks these days wouldn’t see as fun? We took people who really liked the original VP, and the question was simple: “What would make you want to go play there today?” So you have a lot of the really cool dragon fights, there are more bosses in that zone than I think we’ve ever put in a single raid zone before. We’ve got things in a raid-accessible way where raiders of most stripes will be able to progress to that point and try their hand at some of the hardest content in the game. It’s more these days about “can you defeat the battle?” and less about “can you race other guilds?” or “can you spend twelve hours in a row online?”.

It’s removing a lot of the old-school not particularly relevant barriers and making sure the game’s barriers are based on difficulty. In that way we’ve taken VP and a lot of really striking visuals and really made it work. You mentioned the splashing on the rocks in Timorous Deep … Veeshan’s is another zone that has more particle accents than almost any other place. On top of that you take these raids fights and put some really interesting and cool events around them. Again, this was the first of our raid zones that came out of production. We knew we had to get this right so it got the most time out of any of the raid zones. So it was really just a matter of making sure everybody from all the disciplines all had the time, and were asking the right questions, and executing on the plans to get there.

MN: For the more casual folks, for the small group folks, what do you see as like the VP for those kinds of players in the expansion?

Scott: The great thing about solo content is that everyone can use it. Raiders don’t raid 24/7, group people don’t group 24/7 and soloists don’t solo 24/7. Everybody, no matter who you are in MMOs, you have an hour where you want to do something by yourself. That was really the driving thought behind our overland content this time. Even in Echoes of Faydwer towards the high end (like the loping plains) you could go through some of the overland zones and see a 50/50 split between solo and group content and only 15-20 quests. In this expansion you have 100% solo content in the overland zones, so that’s something everyone can enjoy. Since it’s all solo content we were able to baseline its difficulty in a much cleaner way. It’s actually more difficult than solo content was in previous expansions. It’s something doable by yourself, but you get the feeling of “Holy crap this is actually really dangerous!” It’s winnable, and it’s fun, but you don’t feel like you’re running through a cakewalk just because they’re solo critters.

Beyond that, one of the areas we’re talking about for high end content for groups is Sebilis. That’s a big, big, big nostalgia point for EverQuest. Definitely an area we wanted to get right this time, and I think we did a pretty good job. The guy who did the original Sebilis is still on the team, weirdly enough, and he wasn’t working on it directly, but he worked with the girl who did make the zone. They did some fantastic things there. We have a different zone that we’re adding for our version of Kunark called Chelsith that’s going to be pretty high on the scale for groups. There’s actually an area in there that chains off as part of the raid story later on. But everyone is going to get a chance to see some of these zone themes that even the raiders are playing, if that makes sense. You’re going to have Venril’s lair, for example, off of Sebilis. There’s a raid zone that’s high end that’s off of Chelsith, and you’re going to be in these areas seeing people progressing down the raid storyline … we’re trying to bring these two groups together a little bit.

MN: That’s great. In fact, I wrote in my discussion of the expansion tour that I think one of the biggest shames with these games is that you folks work so hard on this raid content and these beautiful zones … and only a small percentage of the player population gets to see it.

Scott: I completely agree. That’s the other nice thing we can do with our kind of instancing tech. There are few places we can do this already, and we’ll keep expanding on it … we can do a zone for a raid and then use that zone later on for a small group instance if we want to tell the same story, or even a slightly different version of that story. You’ll see us do stuff like that more often in the future.

There are two kinds of content that are up there for the number of man-hours required to get right. Raid content is up there, and (oddly) newbie content takes up tons of time. Newbie content, though is some of the cost-efficient content it terms of time. Raid content is some of the least cost-effective content if you look at the amount of resources spent vs. the number of people who see it. The more people we can get to see that content the better off it is for everybody.

MN: For the lore buffs, what is the quest chain in Kunark that you found really excellent? Maybe a chain with a great reward at the end or a great story to tell?

Scott: This is going to sound kind of weird because I’m personally really a high-end kind of player, but I’m going to sound like a hypocrite and say it’s the newbie content. The storyline between the Sarnak and the Spirroc, I was really, really, really, really, really impressed. The fact that the artists were able to take what was going on in the story and then use their iteration time to make sure there was support for all the cool story stuff going on … by the time you’re about level ten you’ve been seeing this evil building up on top of the hill, and you’re making your way up there. By the time you get up there you see these gigantic sticks sticking up out of the ground. There are spikes everwhere, and there are these Spirroc – flying parrot-people – diving at your Sarnak soliders and so you just get it: “If you’re fighting a flying enemy I guess you would put a bunch of stakes into the ground.” You walk on a bit further and there are these steam-powered spike-throwing machines literally knocking Spirrocs out of the sky. Seeing that kind of visceral feedback on the war between these two races, it really gives the story that added bit of oomph.

MN: I know that tradeskills have gotten a lot of love recently, and I was wondering if there was anything in specific in the expansion that tradeskillers will have to look forward to?

Scott: Domino has been doing some crazy stuff. The biggest things she keeps an eye on, as she goes through she keeps an eye on what adventurers think is the coolest stuff, and then she goes out of her way to try to put something in there that’s just as cool for crafters. For instance, in the first higher-level zone of the expansion one of the first things you do is a quest series concerning these flying mounts. The native flying mounts for this expansion are called the Sokakar (M: sp?). The Sokakar is this really cool frog-like bat-winged beast. People think these are the coolest thing ever. There’s a quest where you’re rescuing this outpost’s more reliable flying mount, and you get to ride on a Sokakar, and eventually you get a Sokakar pet. She’s always sensitive to the fact that some players intentionally maintain a very low adventuring level. She asked if she could put in a quest that was tradeskiller based that would allow them to help out in the quest in some way, that would take advantage of their skills and get them a reward that’s just as cool. She always wants to make sure there are things that are just as cool for tradeskillers to get, along the lines of what adventurers get. Little things like that are throughout the expansion, and I think it will let tradeskillers know that we really do care, you really do belong. You are so not being ignored, you have a buddy on the inside and she has been keeping an eye out for you.

We actually have another thing, a tradeskiller benefit that is going to be benefiting everybody. There’s a number of objects that are in the Rise of Kunark environments that have been turned into advanced recipes and will eventually become house items that everyone is going to want. That was another cool thing that multiple folks across art, engineering and design all had to collaborate on, it’s always been a gigantic pain for us to be able to take arbitrary objects and turn them into globally placeale furniture objects. We’ve had tons of tools support for this expansion, and one of those tools is the ability to do that a whole lot faster. Whereas before it was like “Hey, we’d like to turn these five things into furniture”, and the person tasked with doing that was busy for two weeks, it’s now like “We need these twenty items made into furniture”, and twenty minutes later they’re “Done, what else do you need?” We got to the point where we were bouncing up against download limits and we figured we should stop before people were downloading a thousand gigabytes on their first day in the new expansion. We’re no longer limited by dev time on those kinds of things, and instead are thinking more about global patches on launch day.

MN: My last question for you tonight: what was the one piece of content you wanted to get into the expansion that didn’t quite make it?

Scott: When we originally laid out what were going to do for Kunark, was, we cut out a bunch of old maps and glued them on a whiteboard. It was “this is how we could fit together a version of Kunark”. We had the entire original EQ Kunark on the map, plus a few new things like Chelsith that we wanted to add on our own. Since we knew this was going to be a high-end expansion we knew that we couldn’t do all of it, so what we decided to do was the stuff that people would recognize from having played through at the high end … or Lake of Ill Omen, because there would be riots in the streets if you shipped Kunark without that zone.

For me personally, everything that I liked about Kunark is there. There’s no place that I personally spent a whole lot of time in that didn’t make it into the expansion. That said, there was one place that I kind of enjoyed spending time but that I mostly spent time in because I had to, and that was the Dungeon of Dalnir. It’s a tiny little place that some people might not even remember. I remember having to camp The Kly down at the bottom of that dungeon. I spent enough time in there that I feel kind of sad it didn’t make it, but not so sad that I’d be willing to give up anything we will ship in order to put it in.

MN: Nice. Thanks so much for your time, sir.

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.

MMOG Nation: Why do you think that Guild Wars needs a true sequel?

Mike O’Brien: We’ve been working on Guild Wars for a long time, and have an opportunity to really understand our fans. A lot of this comes from us thinking internally about what people would like to see in Guild Wars. There are a lot things we can do in a campaign or expansion, and a lot of things we can’t do in a campaign or expansion. We’re kind of ambitious people. We want to make Guild Wars the best game it can be. We don’t want to be in a position where there are fantastic things we want to do, but we can’t because they have to interact with design decisions we made many years ago.

So when we start to think about a certain level of high-level changes, such as adding a persistent world or redoing the movement mechanics so that it’s much more ‘joy of movement based’, jumping and running and that sort of thing, we start to see that that is a difficult change to make in a backwards compatible way. Why should we be constrained to do it in a backwards compatible way. Why shouldn’t we make the best Guild Wars game we can make?

MN: The traditional fantasy game elements that you’ve announced for Guild Wars II such as multiple races, many levels, why are you moving more in the direction of a more traditional game when I think part of the charm of Guild Wars is that you don’t use a lot of the standard fantasy tropes?

Mike O’Brien: You know, when you talk about traditional directions, I think you’re talking about things that not even just MMOs but just roleplaying games in general use. So I just have to clarify, Guild Wars is I think unique and innovative in ways that are deeper than just the issues you’re talking about here. Are you playing a human, etc. First of all, Guild Wars is kind of a hybrid between two genres. It combines strategy with roleplaying elements. Guild Wars is, I think, the most story-based online roleplaying experience that players have had. I think so many MMOs just try to put you in a world, and not tell a story. Guild Wars, because of the type of game it is, can really tell a story. What we wanted to do is we wanted to take the things that really separate Guild Wars, that makes it unique, and push those as far as we possibly can. Make Guild Wars the best Guild Wars it can be.

I’ve seen the same reaction on the forums that you’ve probably seen; ‘Why add races to the game? Everybody else has races’ Well, because we’re trying to make Guild Wars the best Guild Wars it can be. We want to tell the best story we can, and races are great for storytelling. We want to make characters with as much freedom of expression, freedom of appearance as we can. Races are a great way to have freedom in your character choice.

I think players worry about something that is not our intent. When players look at decisions like that, what they worry about is ‘Guild Wars is trying not to be Guild Wars. Guild Wars is trying to be some other game.’ We’re absolutely not trying to be some other game. What we are trying to do is say that we are defined by the fundamental intent of the game, not by minor implementation decisions that we’ve made in the past. Races or no races, that’s not what makes Guild Wars Guild Wars. What makes the game the way it is, is the way we tell a story. We want to push that as hard as we can, and do everything we can in order to make the best Guild Wars game we can.

MN: To that end, with Eye of the North you’re breaking from the campaign paradigm you’ve previously used. With the goal of making a game that will please fans, be the best it can be. There were some folks who really liked the campaign model, though, and I was wondering if you could talk about one thing that did work with that system?

Jeff Strain: I’ll give you a couple of reasons. I think that one was that any time you ship a game that you’ve been pouring your heart and soul into for a number of years, there’s always a big list of things you wish you could have done. I think that across the first three Guild Wars campaigns, it was an opportunity for us as a development team to go add fun new things that we wanted to add to the game. Heroes, which we introduced in Nightfall, is a perfect example of that. I think we now see Heroes as a staple of the Guild Wars play experience, even though it wasn’t there in Prophecies. I think with every new campaign, we had an opportunity to sit down and say ‘What would we like to add to the game to fundamentally define the Guild Wars play experience that isn’t there yet?’ I think that was one big advantage for us, there was always an opportunity to do new stuff.

Artistically it allowed us to branch out and explore a lot of different styles and different visual representations. The campaign model was great for those reasons, and I think as with our discussion of Guild Wars II just a moment ago, I think that over time we started to feel like the game was ‘big enough.’ It had enough features, it had enough content, it had enough skills, enough playable professions … I think what we really wanted to do at that point was turn our focus inward and start filling in the details of this world that we’d already made, and focusing on giving players more stuff for their existing characters, instead of asking them to start a new play experience from the beginning.

MN: In previous interview you gave, Mr. Strain, you talked about the ‘battle against complexity’, and the problems that entails. Can you point to some areas in Guild Wars right now where think you folks didn’t succeed as much as you might have wanted to for keeping things simple for players?

Jeff Strain: So if I said that in a previous interview I was definitely just reflecting what I’m hearing around me every day, from this entire design team. I think Mike would be better placed to answer this question.

Mike O’Brien: Complexity in Guild Wars? It has ten professions in the game. It has 1150 skills, soon to be 1300 skills …

Jeff Strain: And do you know all of them by heart?

MN: Ahh, not at all.

Mike O’Brien: … it has three continents of content. It’s interesting, because Guild Wars has different audiences. I think some of the things we’ve added to Guild Wars are really compelling for current players. New professions, for example. A lot of people tell us that the biggest reason they bought a new campaign is because I wanted to play X specific profession. They get really excited about it. Conversely, we have to look at what it adds to the game over time, coming into the game and having to understand ten different professions and especially if you start to play the PvP aspect of it. Understanding what all of them can do against you, and if you’re forming a party what do you need in the party and all of that.

It’s just part of a growing knowledge base that a player needs to get into Guild Wars. And I think that’s something we were acutely aware of developing campaigns; some of the very things that make campaigns so exciting are the things that increase their complexity over time. You don’t want to just keep doing that forever. You don’t want to be in a place where you have twenty professions and 2500 skills, or something like that. Some of that is why we made the decision to do Eye of the North as an expansion and not a campaign.

Doing Eye of the North as an expansion really gets more into supporting what our existing customers really want from the game. People who are already playing Guild Wars, what do they really want from the game? They want new content to play, new things to explore, new things to do with the existing characters they already have, and with the existing mechanics and balance they already love. That’s what Eye of the North is giving them. I think Jeff was talking a minute ago about turning inward. I think that’s an important focus going forward for us. When we talk about Eye of the North and Guild Wars 1, and beyond to what we’ll be doing in Guild Wars 2, we really want to take the fundamental game that people really love, and giving them more and more things to do in the game they love … but not change the game out from under them. Not introduce quite as many new things for people to learn, over and over again.

I think that’s a valuable process we went through with Guild Wars 1. It’s a great game, with a fan following, but we ran the risk with Guild Wars 1 if we just kept doing campaigns, of over-complicating the game too much for our customers. That’s what we’ve learned recently, and I think we’ll be making the same kinds of decisions on Guild Wars 2.

MN: With Eye of the North, was one of the goals to not only keep things mechanically familiar, but to use this as an opportunity to resolve some of the stories you’ve started over the years? At the moment you’ve got a lot of balls in the air.

Jeff Strain: Absolutely. 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.

MN: Where did the dungeons come in? This is sort of a newish element to the game, a change up to the way you’ve had content in the game previously.

Jeff Strain: When we started looking at all the environments we’ve previously explored in Guild Wars campaigns … in the original Guild Wars there were a couple of underground settings, and then we released a sort of mini-expansion called Sorrow’s Furnace in September of 2005. It was very popular with our players, and took place largely underground. It was something that we never really got into as much as we wanted to, and so when we started thinking about coming back to Tyria, coming back to this part of the world, we started kicking around the idea of really exploring the underground part of the world.

I think what’s fun for me as a gamer is that we didn’t just use it as a backdrop, use it as a setting, we’ve also added mechanics to the game to support this notion of a kind of traditional fantasy dungeon crawl. Where you can see key locations for stairs to different levels, or where the bosses are lurking. You can discover dungeon maps and there are some classic traps to work around. More of a free-form exploration kind of play style. There’s not just one way to get through these dungeons. Really it was driven by the idea that ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to go back to this popular part of the world and do another full-fledged experience.’

MN: Along the line of technologies in the game, a lot of people I’ve talked to about Guild Wars have remarked on the fact that the game is beautiful. And yet, it’s not a very system-demanding title. What do you guys attribute the beauty and low graphical requirements to?

Jeff Strain: The key difference is understanding that there is a difference between graphics and art. I think that a lot of times companies get obsessed with graphics, with the latest specular this, that, or the other. Bump mapping, shading … all these kinds of technical terms that sound really good. As Guild Wars has evolved we’ve certainly added new graphics technologies, but at its heart what has always made our game stand apart is the supreme quality of our art. It’s a very artistic game. You don’t see us taking human models and trying to morph a picture of a person onto their face.

We’ve always striven to provide a very artistic world. I think that in some ways if you are successful in doing that then the graphics technology is almost secondary. Fortunately for us, we also happen to have a very high-quality scalable graphics engine. Over time we’ve been able to take greater and greater advantage of it. One of the reason that every campaign looks better than the previous campaign is that our art team really knows how to use our engine and development tools. The core answer is that we have a very strong focus on art first and then we use the graphics as a tool to represent that.

MN: Looking ahead to Guild Wars 2 again, is that also going to be the focus? Are you going to be moving to a DX10/Vista setup, or is there going to be an effort to make sure as many people can run the game as possible?

Mike O’Brien: There’s definitely going to be an effort to make sure as many people can run the game as possible. That’s something we’re very proud of with Guild Wars 1. Guild Wars 1 works on five year old systems at this point. We take that very seriously. We’re not trying to make a game that’s a showcase that only a couple of people can play. We’re trying to make a game that looks beautiful no matter what hardware you throw at it. Certainly Guild Wars 2 will have higher requirements than Guild Wars 1 because, hey, time has passed. But we’re going to maintain true to our philosophy: any reasonable system should run the game. We’re not going to say only the latest graphics card and only the latest operating system.

Jeff Strain: We just shake our heads sometimes. So many high profile games come out … and they’re beautiful, you know? They have all kinds of great lighting effects, but if you don’t have a high end machine purchased in the last six months you just can’t really run it well. We just shake our heads and think no matter how beautiful it is, people still need to be able to play your game. I think that’s one of the reasons Guild Wars has really done well. On a world-wide basis, people can run it and it looks great on average hardware. So, you can bet that will continue to be a key focus for Guild Wars 2.

Mike O’Brien: You know, the programming team here takes a lot of pride in that fact, and I think they’re right to do that. [Jeff was] talking about the artist’s tools, and how we’ve encouraged them not to be defined by the graphical capabilities of the engine, but to be defined by their art. I think that’s absolutely true. Our artists have the tools they need and then have the freedom and creativity to take this engine and turn it into so much more than the sum of its parts.

We’re always blown away by what they can do. We make the engine, and then we go to the art room and they say ‘Check this out’, and it’s amazing what they’ve managed to pull off. I think it’s the same thing with the programmers. This is what you get when you hire a team that are passionate about the game. The programmers should be given the props for what they’ve done too. The fact that the game runs on the systems that it runs on, and that it runs well. How little memory it uses, and how stable it is. The programmers, also, kind of are half-artists themselves. They take an artistic pride in the creation of this game. And so I just want to say I’m proud of the job the team has done. Making an engine on the art and technology side that can run with so little hardware behind it is a great accomplishment.

MN: On a more technical note: the level cap in Guild Wars 2 is going to be much higher than the one in Guild Wars right now. It seems like there’s the possibility that the higher level of granularity there would be a downside for PvP. Is PvP going to be as strong a focus in the next game as this one, or is going to emphasize the PvE game more?

Mike O’Brien: Actually, I think the PvP game will be stronger in the next game than in the current one. I’ll take a second and talk about our PvP plans for Guild Wars 2. In Guild Wars 1 we built the game to be the game it is: a hybrid between two genres. Because of the kind of experience you get in online games where you put so much effort into your character, you spend so many hours building up your character, and then you want to see ‘how did I do’? You want to see how you stack up, you want to duel your friends and see who built the better character. If I win you’re like ‘aw darn it, I can’t believe you beat me that way. I’m going to improve my character and we’ll have another showdown.’ Guild Wars had us doing things very differently from a traditional game to support that. I think Guild Wars set a lot of firsts in competitive roleplaying. It is the first e-sport competitive roleplaying game, it was the first roleplaying game to have world championships where we’re giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash prizes, flying people around the globe, televising matches. You didn’t see anything like that until the first Guild Wars.

I think we’ve succeeded with that, but I also don’t think we’ve gone far enough. I think that one thing that’s the downside to that in Guild Wars is that the game can be so competitive; somebody who is just a roleplayer and not a competitive gamer, you can get into the competitive aspect of the game and get on a team and just get worked. Worse than that is your teammates saying ‘It’s your fault that we got worked.’ The game is so fair sometimes that if a team loses, ‘Well it’s because we had somebody not pulling his weight and we should get somebody who can do better on our team.’ That’s something we can do a much better job with in Guild Wars 2.

In Guild Wars 2 we’re actually planning on having two really fundamentally different types of competition. One is the same balance/structured e-sport kind of competition we have today. Another on is just the ‘get out there and fight’ kind of game. Everybody doesn’t have to be balanced, everybody doesn’t have to be the same level, it doesn’t have to have the same number of players on each side. If you want to fight, go fight. And I think there is a lot of Guild Wars would like that kind of thing. They build up their characters in Guild Wars and just want to jump into a match, go kick some butt. They don’t want to have to become an expert at PvP, and get into a great PvP guild, and have that be a bunch of pressure. They just want to go out there and kick some butt.

I think that’s going to be a really positive thing for Guild Wars 2. In Guild Wars 1 they often define themselves by what they do. ‘I mostly roleplay’ or ‘I mostly PvP’. In Guild Wars 2 I think we have the opportunity of building the kind of game where everybody participates in all the parts of the game. I mostly roleplay, but sometimes my friends aren’t on and I want to go kick some butt. Sometimes my friends are on and I want to go kick some butt with my friends. It should be much more of a community. I think that a great thing about having a ‘kick butt’ casual type of PvP is that we can make the e-sport style of PvP into even more of an e-sport. In Guild Wars 1 the e-sport side of PvP has to satisfy many different audiences, not just the e-sport people. It has to satisfy the first-timers, and want to try it out but want to get rewarded as they’re playing. By splitting it into two pieces you can really say ‘If you’re casual about PvP this is for you’ and ‘If you want to be one of the top guilds and compete worldwide, then this is for you.’ Either way, you can see who’s the best. Given that, I’m really excited about the PvP aspect of Guild Wars 2.

I know what you’re asking, because I know that some players worry. ‘Oh, isn’t changing the level cap going to make Guild Wars less of a PvP game than it was before?’ I think no. You have to understand that we’ve been making Guild Wars for a long time and we’ve been thinking for a long time how to make the perfect Guild Wars. Guild Wars was so new and different when it came out that we didn’t know what would happen with the game. I think we succeeded in some places and failed in others, but we have years now of experience in learning how to build the best Guild Wars game possible. I’m really excited about Guild Wars 2, I think it’s going to be a better game all around: a better roleplaying experience for the roleplayers and a better PvP experience for the PvPers.

MN: One last easy question. In Guild Wars Eye of the North, what’s an element that really speaks to you personally?

Mike O’Brien: For me, it’s the Heroes you get to play with. I know its different for everyone, but I love having the variety in the Heroes this time around. The way that playing with all those Heroes gives you a little bit of a look into the future of the Guild Wars series.

Jeff Strain: For me it is revisiting lands that are like Ascalon before it was scorched in the original game. The homeland of the Charr will be very familiar to those folks who played the first few levels of the Prophecies game. Again, it will be like coming home and it’s a big part of the story here. It just gives you a tingling sensation … yeah, this is how it was before it all got burned up. It’s great.

MN: Thank you both so much for your time.

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.

MN: Is that where the mini-games come in too, giving people different ways to play? 

Ben Miller: Definitely. One of the things we’ve really tried to do with this expansion is look at how people actually play the game. Even how we play the game. We wanted there to always be something to do. These mini-games (Polymock, Norn Arena, and Dwarven Boxing), really allow you to further your character’s own personal progress while doing something fun and exciting regardless of who is online. A round of Boxing or Polymock takes something like five minutes; it’s the perfect thing to do while waiting for one of your friends to get online. 

MN: Experiencing storytelling together, with you friends, is that one of the goals with introducing the new races and their tales? 

Ben Miller: With Eye of the North we had the chance to build a very strong foundation for what Guild Wars II is going to be. Not only do we have these three expansive campaigns to build off of, and the cultures we’d already created, but with GWEN we had the unprecedented chance to take some of the new things that Guild Wars II is going to introduce, some of the new races, and lay the foundation for the future. Allow players to experience the new cultures, the new characters, that are going to carry into Guild Wars II. The Norn, the Asura, and especially the Charr … who in the original game were this ruthless, single-minded menace. They were pretty one-dimensional; you see Charr, you kill Charr. Charr killed humans. In Eye of the North we really wanted to explore who the Charr are, what they are all about, what’s going on in Charr society in this period of history. All those sort of juicy lore-bits, dig deep into them. There’s no group hugs at the very end, but that’s where those races come from. 

MN: There are a lot of Massive games coming out this year into next; how do you feel like Guild Wars players are going to deal with the choice of Eye of the North vs. a new game? Do you think there’s anything in particular that makes GWEN stand out vs. a completely new title? 

Ben Miller: Well the coolest thing about Eye of the North, and Guild Wars in general, is that it’s not the kind of game that makes players make that choice. You buy the game and you can play it when you want, with who you want. It’s not like you have to choose between this subscription game and that subscription game, and if I’m not playing this subscription game then essentially I’m wasting money. If you do have a subscription game, you can play Eye of the North without feeling like you’re losing any of your investment into that other game. It stands out in that aspect; you never have to make that choice. 

MN: What’s your favorite mini-game? 

Ben Miller: They’re all really good. I used to play a lot of Street Fighter 2 Turbo a lot for the SNES; probably the Norn Fighting Tournament has to be my favorite. There’s so many omages and little in-jokes to not only Street Fighter, but Mortal Kombat, Samurai Showdown … if you’re a fighting game geek then the Tournament has a bunch of hidden easter eggs that people will really get into. 

MN: It’s really interesting seeing your enthusiasm for this product. You’re still having fun with it, obviously, after working on it for so long. Do you think that’s an important thing in general, for designers to be playing the games that they’re making? 

Ben Miller: Oh yeah, definitely. I don’t think that there’s a good way to make a game that you don’t play. Whatever is in your head, whatever game you think you’re making, you need to actually be playing the end product to get any sort of sense of the actual product that you’re making. So it’s kind of an imperative that you play your own game. Hopefully you’re making a game that gets you excited, that you not only enjoy playing but enjoy the creation process. Also, finding inspiration is probably the biggest thing through books, movies, other games. You can find inspiration anywhere. That’s probably the biggest thing. Besides playing the game, that’s what keeps it exciting: incorporating all of this other cool stuff that you’re experiencing into the system that is the game in a way that other people can get a sense of what inspired you.

MN: You talked about inspiration; what are some of the things that inspired you for this expansion in general? Any movies or books that you had in mind? 

Ben Miller: The Norn fighting tournament has a bunch of omages to fighting games, as I said. With individual quests we have a lot of strong influences. We have this dungeon called Arachne’s Haunt that we showed off at E3. All of the characters are named after characters from Aliens; Hicks, Hud, Vasqa. You’re basically going on a bug hunt against a bunch of spiders. It comes from all over the place as far as inspiration goes. Little chunks of content from everywhere. I wouldn’t say there are any particular influences on the game as a whole … it’s kind of a collaborative, organic process among the team.

MN: One thing I have noticed as I’ve been playing today is that you folks aren’t afraid of being funny. Having fun in your game …

Ben Miller: Yeah yeah yeah. Out of all the games we’ve done, Eye of the North is sort of the game that we’ve embraced the most with that. It’s been really fun making because it’s sort of more like ‘we just want fun, cool stuff’. That leads to having lighter moments that allow the serious moments to be more serious. I think it lends a lot of range in emotional tones throughout the quests and missions that makes the experience more well rounded, and also more fun to work on.

MN: Do you think that that’s something more folks are deciding in general? That games should be something that can be funny, have humor? Not always doom and gloom, death and destruction.

Ben Miller:  I guess it depends on the kind of stuff you’re into. Some people are really into that, and some people really like funny, lighthearted stuff. It all depends on why you’re playing games and what you’re attracted to. I don’t think that it’s a trend per se, but I think it’s really cool that something as big as Guild Wars is content-wise, it’s a really great canvas to get those emotional tones. Whereas a game that is more of a funny/silly game doesn’t have the space to do something more serious. It’s much more of an open canvas with Guild Wars; you can have those grey moments of funny/serious/sad and it ends up being really well rounded.

MN: If I can go off on a tangent, what do you think of folks who take game design courses?

Ben Miller: (laughs heartily) 

MN: Why do you laugh, if you don’t mind my asking?

Ben Miller: I was like a junior in high school, and at least in my school that was the year that the teachers brought down the ‘people’s elbow’ and were like “Alright, it’s time to start applying for schools cuz this is going to dictate the rest of your life.” And so I was like … what do I want to do? And so I was just thinking back to all the cool gaming experiences that I had and one stands out very very vividly. It’s literally Christmas morning, I’m sitting in my front room with my family, the Christmas tree is all sparkly and I’m sitting there on our TV playing Legacy of Kain. The intro cinematic opens up, it has that knight running down the hallway, and that evil vampire guy owning him up really hard, and for some reason as a junior in high school I was like “That’s so cool.” There was something in me that clicked, that made me want to give people experiences like that, to tell stories an whatnot.

So anyways, I decided I wanted to make videogames, so that’s why I laughed. I got myself stupidly in debt with the Art Institute, and got my bachelor’s degree in game art and design. I was one of those people taking game design classes …

MN: Sorry, I didn’t want to sound negative about it …

Ben Miller: Oh, no. There are definitely great things about it, and there’s a downside as well. It’s definitely a viable way to get into the industry, though (he laughs as he says this). At the end of the day there’s a catch-22 in any kind of industry you want to get into. You need experience to get a job … and you need a job to get experience. But, depending on the kind of program you’re in and the classes that you’re taking you might luck out. At the Art Institute I was fortunate enough to have not only art production classes but game design classes as well. I ended up learning the technical skills of how to make models and textures, as well as how to implement them with different engines. So by the time I graduated I had a weird sort of portfolio of level art, level design, and game design along with my formal education. Along with that were all the art assets I built for all of that stuff. If you are taking design classes make sure that those classes are enabling you to actually create games; being able to go to an employer and say ‘here’s my work’ is incredibly powerful.

You know, hopefully if you’re coming out of a school like that you’re going somewhere that you’ve done mods for. There’s no reason that if you went to, say Relic (who made Company of Heroes), and said “Guess what, I just made a bunch of these awesome maps. I made my own models, and scripted out a scenario: it’s the night before Normandy and there’s a French resistance. I made my own units; it’s not really about this, it’s a cool workable thing.” If you were hiring, you’d go “Hey, that guy already knows how to use our tools! And he understands our pipeline.” As far as classes go, make sure where you’re headed is somewhere that will appreciate what you have to show for it.

MN: Great. I’ve found it really interesting to talk to designers about this issue; everybody has an opinion one way or another. Thanks so much for your time, sir. It’s been a pleasure talking to you today.

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.

“Here’s the 50,000 foot view:

It’s called Legends of Norrath. It’s an MMO Card/Strategy game built directly into both EverQuest and EverQuest 2. It will allow EQ and EQ 2 players to challenge each other, or allow people to play from outside of either game and challenge people who are playing inside. The game itself is literally a part of both clients, and it’s incredibly fun to play. The first set (called Oathbound) has 375 cards. In addition, we have loot cards for each game that have some awesome in-game items, some of which are extremely rare (new mounts for example).

We’ve made it extremely easy to redeem stuff in-game and I have to hand it to the teams.. it’s very well integrated into both EQ and EQ2. We have a full tournament system and card store built right in. The cool thing is that you don’t have to buy things if you don’t want to. We’re putting card packs into both games as drops, so if a person doesn’t want to purchase anything.. they don’t have to. We’re also giving away starter decks to people day 1.

The game has been playable for many months now, and we’ve had the whole company involved in the game. It was developed out of our Denver office by the ex Worlds Apart team that’s now SOE-Denver. At Fan Faire we’re announcing we are allowing all FF attendees to be part of the closed beta test (frankly the game is ready to launch now.. but we want to let the community have time to give us suggestions) which begins right after Fan Faire.”

MMOG Nation: Just from a broad perspective, where did the inspiration for this come from?

John Smedley: Strangely enough, maybe three years ago we had wanted to do this and we bandied about internally, we kicked around the idea of doing this online trading card game. The problem we had was that we were too busy with creating expansion packs, and we didn’t have the expertise. When fate brought Worlds Apart Productions into SOE, it was just perfect. Immediately this was the first big project that we wanted them to do. They did Pirates!, and Stargate, but that stuff was background. This was ‘the thing that we bought the company for’, was to bring online strategy and card games into our MMOs, and make it a really integral part of it.

MN: So they’ve been working on this for how long?

Smedley: They’ve been working on this on and off for about eight months now, and really heavily within the last five. This game has been in-development and fully playable from nearly day one. It was designed by the team out in Denver, working with both the EQ and EQ2 teams. They provided all kinds of lore and feedback; we’ve got a bunch of Magic geeks here at SOE anyway, so it was kind of a natural fit. We have a [trading card game] design list inside the company, and people are playing the game all day giving feedback. It’s been a good experience.

MN: Obviously, the first thing you think when you think TCG is cost, so do you guys have plans right now for how much these things are going to cost?

Smedley: It’ll be $9.99 for a starter pack, although we’re going to give everybody one to start with. And then it’ll be $2.99 for a booster.

MN: How many cards are we looking at for starters and boosters?

Smedley: The starter set is a 50 draw deck, with 5 quests and an avatar on top of that, and then the boosters have 15 cards.

MN: Sounds like you have a pretty good price point for the cards. You mentioned there will be a client for playing the game outside of EverQuest and EverQuest 2; is that going to cost anything?

Smedley: Nope, totally free. We’re going to have that available about a week to two weeks after the game goes live for the players.

MN: Can you give us a sense of what the gameplay is like?

Smedley: Sure. The basic concept is that you’re going up against an opponent and there are multiple ways to win. You play an avatar, and your opponent plays an avatar, and the idea is you can either win by killing your opponent’s avatar or by completing quests. You can put certain quests into your deck, and you can use abilities to actually go after these quests. If you have a particular quest in mind you can use your ability cards to solve each quest. Your opponent, though, can also put down monsters and use abilities to block you from completing that quest. So you can take two paths: you can either try to kill the other person’s avatar directly, or you can try to complete things by solving quests. The idea is that you have strategic options in the fight.

MN: Will there be resources involved, is it more about getting cards from your hand directly?

Smedley: No, there are resources. It’s not quite like mana. You have a certain amount of power points you can spend each turn, and some cards can alter that. At its core there isn’t the same sort of resource usage that there is in a game like Magic: The Gathering. It isn’t quite the same. Cards have power costs to get them down on the table, and each turn you get a certain amount of power to spend. That is the limiting resource. We didn’t want there to be multiple resources, we thought that would be too confusing. One of our goals is to try to get new people involved. I’m constantly surprised by the number of MMO players who have never tried a TCG before.

MN: You mentioned that there will be rare loot cards with in-game items. Are those going to be more cosmetic, or will they have stats attached to them?

Smedley: They have some minor stats, but they’re primarily cosmetic. That’s the intent, for them to be cosmetic. We have some minor potions and stuff in there, but otherwise no. Our aim is to give a lot more loot with these things, let me give you some examples. In EverQuest, we’ve got a Shadow Panther, or a Snow Leopard, or a Mystical Kirin, or maybe a Seething Chimera, and then there’s some potion packs. These are simple potions, they’re not meant to be a big game advantage, nothing like that. There’s a lot of different things, like different coloured baubles that are available in the rest of the game. We want to give stuff, similar to the way that World of Warcraft is doing it, that’s cool looking but not very ‘game enhancing’.

One other thing to note is that we’re doing loot drops in the game, of cards. If you don’t want to you don’t have to buy a darn thing if you don’t want to. If you want, you can just go out there and kill monsters, and actually get cards that you can use to play in the game. They’re just booster packs, just drops of a booster pack, so you don’t have to buy a thing. You’re going to have to work for it, but the reality is that if you don’t want to spend the money you don’t have to.

MN: Is that going to be a fairly common drop?

Smedley: It’s definitely not going to be common, but the idea is that if a person doesn’t have a lot of money but still wants to play, he can spend time in-game to get cards rather than buying them.

MN: Are the booster packs going to be sellable via the in-game economy?

Smedley: Actually no. One of the things we’re doing is making it so that you can’t sell any of these cards. That would be problematic for us. There would be some legal issues around that.

MN: Will players be able to trade?

Smedley: No. Otherwise we’ll get into a situation where the gold sellers will get into this, and we’re going to stop that cold.

One other thing I did want to mention is how this ties into our plans for chatting across all of our games. Players who are playing the card game outside of EverQuest and EverQuest 2 will be able to chat with folks in-game too. If you know the name of a character on the server, you can challenge them directly. There’s a lobby system, and a tournament system; it’s pretty spiffy.

At Fan Faire we’re going to let everyone play it full-on, and everyone at Fan Faire is going to be let into the Beta for it. It’ll launch ‘when it’s ready, but it’s basically ready now. We’ve been going through internal QA for a while now, and it’s pretty solid.

MN: I’ve been wondering about the tournament system. Is that something you guys are going to be doing regularly, or a yearly thing?

Smedley: Oh no, this is more like daily/weekly. It’s an automated system and it’s really quite good. This is why we bought the Denver guys. They have a very sophisticated set of technologies. Frankly they’ve got a client that’s even better than the stuff they use for Magic: the Gathering Online, which I happen to really like.

It’s great tech, the game is fun. That’s what I really like about this. The game is fun in and of itself. To me, MMOs eventually get boring just grinding and killing stuff all the time. This is a nice option You can just go into a town and challenge somebody. You can challenge someone anywhere; if you just want to play a quick 15 minute game while you’re waiting for a group to get together you can do that.

MN: You have the automated tournaments; are you planning on doing anything more elaborate? Like ‘best in the world’ types of events?

Smedley: Yes we are. Organized play is going to be a very important part of Legends of Norrath. Our whole strategy is to do it all online, though. We want this accessible to all of our players. One of the downsides of having a physical game is the amount of work required to hold a tournament. With our game, it’s just going to be automatically downloaded to them. They can play completely online for free. If they want to pay they can, if they don’t that’s cool too.

MN: I found the EQ and EQ2 players playing together a great concept. Do you forsee anything else in the future having the chance to unite the playerbases of the two games?

Smedley: We’re going to see how this plays out. I’m kind of hoping that we can. Early on when we were developing EverQuest 2 we actually had a very cool linkage system. We were going to use that basic concept you’ve seen in movies before, where something in the past affects the far future. We wanted to have zones that were tied together through both games. This is kind of reinvigorating some of that discussion. It remains to be seen, though. If we see some good usage between the two games I think that’s something we might pursue. It’s kind of a cool idea.

MN: And the launch date is “when it’s done”, but that’s likely pretty soon?

Smedley: Likely towards the end of August, because we’re going to have a Beta. The Beta is really more to introduce it to people, really. Frankly we’ve given it endless internal testing here in the company. The final sequence is to let outside users play it, get feedback on it, and go from there.

We’ll just turn it on for them, it’ll already be on their system, and things will be ready to go from day one. They can play it for free with the starter deck we’re giving them. If they like it, great, if they don’t like it there’s no requirement to play at all. If they want to pay, great, if they don’t okay. Maybe they just want to collect cards in-game. I think it’s fun enough that I think there will be a pretty good take-up on it.

MN: Since I’m a blogger I have to ask the annoying question: What is your response going to be to the folks who are disappointed that this announcement isn’t a new, more traditional Massive game?

Smedley: Well, it’s not like we’re not announcing anything else at the event. People will have a chance to really see FreeRealms for the first time, and Agency. We haven’t really done that before for the fans. We’re releasing and broadening the knowledge of folks on these games, out beyond what’s already been in the media. I really want Fan Faire to become the place where we do this sort of thing. I don’t want to do “Gamer Days” or whatever. I want to focus on announcing games at Fan Faire in the future. Next year DC is going to be announced at some point, for example. I really want our fans to spread the message more.

I think EverQuest and EverQuest 2 players are going to get excited about this. Is this EverQuest 3? Of course not, but this game is going to have a real impact on the day-to-day lives of EverQuest players. It’s fun, it’s strategic, and in the long run I’d like to put gameplay ties into the cards as well. I’d like to build a meta-game, an overarching strategy. We’ll eventually do expansions, just as with the other TCG games from SOE-Denver.

I have a long-term vision of MMOs moving away from subscriptions, and I think one of those ways is to offer different ways to play. Imagine that someone got a drop of a card in-game that allowed them to play for free. That gave them a month of subscription time for free. That’s on our to-do list, it’s not in the game at launch, but it is something we want to put out there. Now that we have these tools in our arsenal, we want to start putting some really different things out there. Really use them.

For example, in the Agency the idea is that you collect ‘living loot’. You collect operatives. The mechanism for that is a card system, but this will open up other avenues for us to let people buy new things and also let us give people new things. I personally look forward to seeing things change with this over time.

MN: Thanks so much for your time, sir.