EQ Next: Best of show at E3!

[kaleran]

Originally Posted by t0lkien [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Smedley's design style is well known to those who played EQ during the handover from Verant to SOE and beyond. No thanks (I'll be very happy to be wrong about this where EQN is concerned, but I doubt I am).

Smed was the producer of EverQuest from it's inception. The only handover that occurred was McQuaid stepping down as lead developer and then moving on to his own company. EverQuest has always been SOE intellectual property.

The downturn occurred when they tried to match WoW punch for punch. And new producers would join the team along the way. Smed will likely be the lead producer on EQN like he was for Planetside 2, then hand it off to someone else once it's been off the ground for awhile.

I still have high hopes for EQNext. But even if it sucks, I still have p99 to dick around with on my off-time.

[t0lkien]

Originally Posted by kaleran [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Smed was the producer of EverQuest from it's inception. The only handover that occurred was McQuaid stepping down as lead developer and then moving on to his own company. EverQuest has always been SOE intellectual property.

McQuaid and Smedley founded Verant, and then SOE bought it. You may be right that EQ was always SOE IP as part of that deal, it's not really clear:

http://www.silkyvenom.com/pages/devt...ite=1&id=51141

What did happen when McQuaid left/stepped down is that Smedley took a much more active role in the ongoing design. I know this first hand not only from the forum posts he made regarding changes at the time, but the clear change in ethic and tone of the game from then on. Perhaps the classic quote of that time came from Verant CEO Kelly Flock: "Players don't know what they want; we just want to know if they have a valid credit card". No really, he said that in an interview regarding EverQuest. I met the guy years later with that quote still ringing in my ears, and he was pretty much what I expected.

Originally Posted by kaleran [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The downturn occurred when they tried to match WoW punch for punch. And new producers would join the team along the way. Smed will likely be the lead producer on EQN like he was for Planetside 2, then hand it off to someone else once it's been off the ground for awhile.

The "downturn" occurred with Luclin and everything else after the Sony acquisition of Verant (the first expansions done without McQuaid and only Smedley at the helm - you see the theme here). We all left for WoW in droves (me in beta) because Smedley and SOE had already destroyed the game we loved via a war of attrition firstly, and straight out bad design secondly.

Originally Posted by kaleran [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I still have high hopes for EQNext. But even if it sucks, I still have p99 to dick around with on my off-time.

I hope you're right, I really do. But my experience with games and the people who make them is EQN is doomed to be what it will be from the beginning because of the people making it. The proof of this already is that Smedley, in usual form, threw away 18 months of development based upon the awesome idea to recreate and reboot classic EQ, and instead make a "world changing, genre redefining" MMO, yadda yadda.

For anyone who has been around the traps even a few years, that sort of talk is the kiss of death from people who are more adept at hyperbole, spin, and straight out dishonesty (combined with the parsing of player data to find new ways to exploit them) than making great and memorable game experiences.

As I've said though, I want to be wrong about this.