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| [EQ2] 4 Part Interview with the Producer, Andy Sites (Finished)
Hola... There's some fairly interesting info in this interview, and it's going to be 4 parts. Questions are in fontsize 3 and red.
Apparently there are only 4 parts, but anyhow.. Updated. Quote: How many people are currently in the beta right now?
Sites: Right now, including all the people at the company and their friends and family, we've got about six hundred in the beta test.
What would you say you've learnt most from it so far?
Sites: Aside from all the bugs we've been fixing you mean? We've found that a lot of the things that people had been complaining about - the encounters, the reduction on raiding sizes, for example... People had been saying that because something didn't work that way in EverQuest, it was therefore going to be bad.
We've found that once people actually started playing the game and see the changes they complained about before trying them, they find they actually really like them. We'd found that just with the game in general there had been a lot of people that didn't really expect that they'd even want to play the game.
We found that if we could just get them to sit down and try it even for an hour it completely changed their perspective.
How hard has it been to get them to try it?
Sites: Back at the EQ Fan Faire in April there were so many people that were saying they had no interest in EQII because they didn't feel we could create a game that would be any different to EQ. We sat them down, they tried it and were like, 'Oh my god! This isn't what I was expecting at all!'
The big thing is that change isn't necessarily bad. Just because players have been used to doing things a certain way for five years in EverQuest, it doesn't mean that changing it will be a bad thing. Just getting them to try it out though, that's the key. That's the biggest thing we've had to figure out.
How much are you expecting the overall game to change from your initial designs once the beta test runs its course?
Sites: Based on what we as a company have seen in the past, we're expecting it to change significantly. There are a lot of the systems and areas, such as the tutorial and the introductory part of the game on the Isle Of Refuge, that we feel we've now refined to a point where it's not likely to change a whole lot. But the big areas that probably will change are things like the encounter systems, the population sizes of the dungeons.
All the things that require lots of sets of eyes to go through and look at and experience before we can say definitively say something needs to change. The worst thing a development team can do is get used to something and then just change it for the sake of it. One of the problems any team has is when they create something phenomenal, see it every day and become jaded towards it and then feel it needs changing as a result when that's not necessarily the right thing.
So by letting people into the beta it's been really nice just to see their reactions to things. You get completely unbiased opinions at that point.
Where do you draw the line between changing something because lots of people ask for it and you as the developer saying, 'no, we really think it's best if it stays as it is'?
Sites: First and foremost, as much as we're making a game that we love, we need to make a game that the public are going to love more. We love the game with a passion, but if we're the only ones that like a system and 90 percent of the public don't understand or like it, then it's going to change.
A lot of it comes from going through the feedback. If lots and lots of people are complaining about something then we'll try to improve it. It's a subjective process but that is what the beta is for, to get all that information.
There aren't many people in the world with more subjective views than gamers, most of them different...
Sites: One thing we have found out is that it doesn't matter what we do, we'll never please everyone. We found that out in EverQuest. You can give people a million dollars each and someone will complain they have to pay tax on it.
When, for you guys, is 'finished'?
Sites: When the game is fun, which again is a subjective part of the process. We have in-game polling forms that come up asking you about your experience, ratings on a scale of one to ten. When we start getting those back with consistently high numbers that's when we'll consider ourselves close to being able to ship the game. But it is subjective.
We're not going to be forcing this game out the door though just for the sake of meeting fiscal needs. We've been stating that all along. This is going to be the game that's the sequel to the game that made the company what it is today. So we want the game to be a worthy successor to EverQuest.
That feeling of independence, not beholden to shareholders and publishers, must be invigorating?
Sites: Yeah. I have quite a few friends who work for companies at EA and Microsoft and they're all beholden to shareholders for the most part. We feel very lucky that we can work on a game that's not going to go out until it's ready to do so. That said, we do want to get the game done!
We've been working on it for four years now and we definitely can't wait for the moment people can start playing it. That's the most rewarding part. EverQuest for instance now has hundreds of thousands of people playing the game and that's great, especially seeing them at Fan Faires and so on.
When you see that sheer devotion that people have to your products, how much does that become a burden of responsibility when you design future games?
Sites: Oh it's huge. When we were making EverQuest we couldn't even comprehend the level of dedication the players would have. It was just a $3 million project and we were really only making a game that we liked. Then it launched and we were like 'Oh my god! People REALLY love this game!' and our development process definitely changed as a result.
One of the problems a lot of MMOGs have is having these great big worlds with nothing happening in them...
Sites: Right. Actually, when we first started making the game we had planned on this grand world, this great expanse of space. We started planning this giant dungeon but discovered that you know what, it's not fun running for fifteen minutes and not finding anything. So we ended up pulling the size and scope in and focussing on the content in the different areas.
That's where we're at right now, players are walking through the city and having characters calling out to them, based on what they've done and what quests they can do, instead of having to run for ten or fifteen minutes at a time just to try and find something to do.
What sort of things?
Sites: There are simple things like a little girl chasing her cat around the city knocking stuff over, or big things like the Freeport militia marching through the city, giving speeches to the citizens. It's all things that will help make the world seem more alive.
How much work does that entail?
Sites: We actually have 34 designers on the project, so we have groups of these guys that are just dedicated to adding events like these to the cities.
Do events like that happen outside the cities as well?
Sites: They will do, but the way that we're designing the content is from character creation on outwards. So we're putting all our focus on the cities right now, then slowly working our way outwards so that when the beta testers come in, they're not finding they have nothing to do because, say, we decided to design all the high-level dungeons before we worked on the starting cities.
Are you able to keep tabs on how far the testers have explored into the game and how far ahead you need to be designing?
Sites: Oh yeah. The way the beta test is being run right now means that we basically 'rope off' the areas that we want people to be testing in. Right now players can create their characters, go to both Qeynos and Freeport, the outer lands in the common areas outside in Antonica and access two of the dungeons in each of those areas. This way we get very focussed testing and feedback and can get those areas refined. Then, once those are ready for 'prime time', we start opening up the next zones further and further away.
The zones are all planned in advance and then left to the players. How possible is it for you on the server side to jump into zones when players enter them and direct the NPC's actions on the fly, in a sort of 'dungeon master' role?
Sites: We can do that, although mostly the zones are scripted in such a way as to be completely self-contained and capable of handling things. Once everything has been tested and refined, very rarely will we need to have people go in and watch the players and change things on the fly. Still, we have that option at our disposal if we need it.
How big are the cities in total?
Sites: Each of the cities are made of eighteen zones, each consisting of the town centre, the villages or neighbourhoods which is where you start out and where each player has his or her own apartment.
The houses are given out automatically to each new player?
Sites: Right. When you create a character you're given a little one or two room apartment within which you can place furniture, hang stuff on the walls and customise the interior. When you get into a larger guild or group and start pooling your money you can then buy larger structures within the actual city, decorated with your guild's emblems. When people walk by they'll be able to see who the badass guilds are.
In terms of overall size, how does EQ 2 compare to EQ?
Sites: It's slightly smaller in size than EQ, but the first game has had five years of development work adding to it. The only reason they have a larger physical size is because they have loads of really huge zones left over from the earlier expansions. Like Kunark. That has huge, empty zones simply because we didn't then have the ability to populate them completely. So, we have slightly smaller areas, but lots, lots more content in them.
What sort of mass transit systems are there?
Sites: We have boats for travelling between the shattered islands that make up the world. We'll also have player mounts that are racially specific. So the humans and the mid-size races will have horses, the gnomes and halflings and dwarves will ride wolves, and we haven't decided on what to have the larger races riding, although we're thinking about things like rhinos or elephants. Very large creatures.
I remember seeing the letterbox effect at the Fan Faire and thinking how it was such a small thing but had such a big impact on giving a real cinematic effect to the game...
Sites: It not only adds a cinematic effect but also has its benefits for speeding up rendering times. But everything else in the game was already so cinematic - the voices and so on - that I just wanted to add that in. A lot of people really liked it when we got it up and running.
How is the voice acting working out so far?
Sites: Really well. We just started a two month-long recording session last week, two sessions going on simultaneously for two months straight. We have 117 actors and that's filling the majority of our v/o needs right now.
How much focus is there on the audio side of the game?
Sites: One thing that's nice is that on EQ we had three people on our audio team. Now we have an entire audio department. Which means full audio, 5.1 surround sound support.
How on top of the hardware and peripheral world are you guys? Are you constantly looking for new gadgets to utilise?
Sites: We're working really closely with nVidia, you'll see their logos in our games already. They provide us with all the latest hardware before it becomes available on the market and we work closely with their engineers to request special modifications for our game. We're very on top of the technology. We're also working closely with ATi. We like to make sure that the two hardware kings are both in our corner.
How about other advances such as voice comms?
Sites: We're going to be allowing voice comms although we haven't fully integrated it yet. The only problem we see with it is obviously with the players. With real voices you'll interact with a female wood elf and quickly realise it's a forty-five year old guy. It's kind of immersion breaking.
What about the genre as a whole? What do you see as being the next major innovation to hit MMOGs?
Sites: Hardware is definitely the biggest limitation right now. Once we reach a level where the majority of people can afford to purchase the high-end types, that's when we'll get a lot of extra players coming in. The US has a really high-end hardware market, but there are still a lot of countries out there that operate at a year or two behind that in technology terms. Once we get everybody's specs up to par then the games will become that much more accessible.
One of the things we're doing to get the international community more involved and interested with EQII is full voice translations. We're doing a simultaneous launch in North America, UK, France and Germany, then shortly after that we'll have Japanese, Korean and Chinese releases.
How is the interest in Japan?
Sites: Actually we worked out a deal with Square Enix, in theory one of our big competitors with Final Fantasy XI Online, to be our publisher in Japan. So we're working really closely with them on ways to localise it not only with language but also visually.
That hasn't been ironed out completely yet, but there's a reason why EQ is really popular in the US and Europe, but not so in China and Korea where games like Lineage are. So we're trying to figure out exactly what those differences are.
Just lately we've seen a number of big-name projects being cancelled. When news of another one going under breaks, how does that affect you guys?
Sites: Initially it's very frustrating because we still believe at this point that the more quality MMOs that come out, the better. Every time a new game comes out, we maintain our subscriber base, but they gain a new one and that just helps to grow the market, it gets more people interested in MMOs. So the more quality games that come out the better, although there is something to be said about there being something like over a hundred MMOs currently being in development.
At this point we're going to start seeing the weak ones weeded out. The players will benefit from having the really high quality high-end games sticking around. Games like City Of Heroes and World Of Warcraft have helped to draw a lot of people into the genre, people that wouldn't necessarily have wanted to play these games if it wasn't specifically for that game being there.
It seems to me that the MMOG genre works to a very different dynamic to others. Nobody really complains about there being 'too many' first-person shooters for instance, and almost every FPS in development gets a release regardless of quality. MMOs seem to work to an entirely different set of criteria...
Sites: I think the big difference is just the financial cost. You can take a ten-person team, throw in a million or two million dollars and in theory end up with a really good looking FPS. Our development team on the other hand is 96 people strong, we licensed a professional composer to write the soundtracks, we have all the voice actors. The amount of money required to go into something like this is really frightening for most publishers. By the time we launch we'll already be into $20 million.
But the reward is that once the game launches, you can get something like EverQuest where we're almost into its sixth year and we have over 400,000 subscribers still in there. I remember reading about Warhammer and that the main reason behind the cancellation was that, based on the current situation with the development team and how much money they'd spent to date, they couldn't justify spending the additional money needed to finish it off and get it out.
And yeah, that hurts a lot of developers who are trying to get their games done, but at the end of the day the players are only going to be left with a lot of high quality list of games to choose from.
You say weeding out the weakest members of the herd, but when you look at the MMOG genre there is definitely a strata system at work. At one end are the EverQuests that are massive in scope and depth and totally involving. Then at the other are games like City Of Heroes that are good, fun games but if you look into them with any depth, there's not a great deal to them. You have to ask which is better for the industry, something deep and long-term or a game that keeps churning through a large but fluid audience?
Sites: As a company we prefer getting a long, steady subscriber base. In fiscal terms it's great getting tens of thousands of people constantly coming through the door just for a month or two, but we've found that retaining a steady stream of a 100,000 or so subscribers over five and a half years if definitely a more preferable model. Which is what we're trying to do with EQII. We're not expecting to sell hundreds of thousands of copies on day one - we're expecting to sell a lot! - but our goal is to maintain a subscriber base.
Do you see EQII as having the same type of goals for SOE as EQ, following the same type of future development?
Sites: The big focus for EverQuest II is obviously to expand the market as well as get back some of the ex-EQ players. We've had over two million people come through our doors with EQ and either maintain a subscription or cancel. Quite a few of them have cancelled for a number of reasons - the game required to much time dedication or the initial experience was too confusing or frustrating for people. So we really want to get those people back in with EQII, get them interested in the game again.
So the way we set up character creation and the tutorials and how we educate the players when they have to make major decisions. We no longer just throw them into the deep end. We help them wade in slowly.
Studies of EQ have shown that the most popular race/class combo is a dark elf fighter, while the ogres and trolls were almost bereft of players. How do player trends such as this affect the way you develop expansions?
Sites: Whenever we decide to include a race in the game, we make sure that it has all the options available to the other races - the same number of quests, the same amount of content. We do look at the numbers though and ask ourselves whether if we pulled a race, would people really miss it? And usually they would.
So once it's in the game we're dedicated to making sure a race is viable and that there's just as much content for it as there is for a human or a dark elf. If you look at any given server, 29 percent of the people on there play as dark elves and only 2 percent play as trolls so you look at those numbers and you ask why you would want to keep that race in. But 2 percent of 400,000 people is still a lot of people.
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Last edited by JerleMinara : 07-29-2004 at 07:53 AM.
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07-28-2004, 05:49 PM
![[EQ2] 5 Part Interview with the Producer, Andy Sites](http://www.fohguild.org/forums/iconimages/mmorpg-general-discussion/eq2-5-part-interview-producer-andy-sites.gif)
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