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Interview conducted by Paul Presley.

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

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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.

Check back tomorrow for the fourth and final part of the interview.