News 

It's the sequel to one of the biggest massively multiplayer online role-playing games of all time after all, so interest is understandable. It catches the eye, pulls it out and rolls it around a bit, promises a shedload of fantasy-fuelled adventure, guarantees the forming of friendships across great divides and will no doubt see that most cringe-worthy thing of all - the MMORPG wedding.

EverQuest II is currently in beta and is expected to launch before the year is out. Which means there's still plenty of time then to corner Sony Online Entertainment for a chat about what's coming. We recently cast a Charm spell on EQ2 producer Andy Sites and got him to blab.

Interview conducted by Paul Presley.

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

ADVERTISEMENT

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.