SOE Podcast #115 Reveals Game Update 61 “War of Zek” Details and Date– August 23rd

For those of you who don’t have 77 minutes to listen to this week’s SOE Podcast, we’ve listened for you and provide details of the “War of Zek-cast”. First, a few bullet points…

• Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is still expecting 2 entirely new content updates this year, in addition to a number of Bug Bash updates to fix long-standing bugs with the game.
• Tiffany “Amnerys” Spence, EQ2 Community Manager, is expecting twins and so will be taking some time off from managing the EQ2 forums. Others will step in to tackle this job.
• The Beastlords Prelude Event launches with Game Update 61 leading up to the expansion.
• Velious Dungeon Rare Encounters — All current Velious group dungeon zones now have a 25% chance to include an all new named encounter.

EQ2Wire Transcript

After the jump, we provide a loose transcript of Linda “Brasse” Carlson interviewing Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson (whom you all either love or loathe as the case may be) and Akil “Lyndro” Hooper (returning as EQ2 Lead Designer after an extended break).

NOTE: This is NOT a complete transcript. If you would like to listen to this interview, download SOE Podcast #115 and listen from time index 31:10 to 48:30.

Akil started out working in Customer Service around the time that Scars of Velious launched in EQ1. He worked his way through the EverQuest Apprentice program. He worked his way up and served as EQ2 Lead Designer until spring of 2008. Recently, Dave Georgeson tracked down Akil and brought him back to the EverQuest universe to pickup where he left off.

SmokeJumper: Most everyone on the team already knows him. He obviously knows the product backwards and forwards.  He’s 2 years out of date, but we’ll get him caught up quick. And of course he’s an accomplished lead designer. Since we had the vacancy, he was a perfect fit. He was even local, so it was a no-brainer. We were really lucky to find him and as soon as we did, we talked him into coming back.

Brasse: And of course he’s a well respected designer within the community as well so he’s familiar with the players. We don’t have to do too much work to reintroduce him. And soon the hate mail will be flowing just like it always did.

Lyndro: I actually haven’t posted hello on the forums yet because I wasn’t quite ready for all the PMs that I’m going to start getting as soon as this goes live.

Brasse: I’d advise you to adopt the philosophy of not responding to Private Messages. Otherwise, they never stop. Do you plan to be active on the forums again?

Lyndro: I do plan to be active on the forums. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot to respond to. It’s hard to pick and choose what you’re going to respond to.

SmokeJumper: Akil can be the good cop, I’ll be the bad cop.

Brasse: Did you find that things have changed in 3 years?

Lyndro: Oh yeah a lot has changed, and stuff is even changing now.

Brasse: For the better? For the worse? Do you feel like a fish out of water?

SmokeJumper: Careful how you answer that one!

*laughter*

Lyndro: I don’t feel like a fish out of water…. I feel like I need to get my footing again. I’m trying to figure out everything that’s going on. I think that things have changed for the better but there have been a decent number of changes to… to catch up with. The game is still the same game at the core. EverQuest 2 still feels like home.

Brasse: It certainly does. What sorts of new ideas or attitudes are you bringing to EverQuest 2? Is there anything specific that you want to bring to the game?

Lyndro: I think I need to get to know where the game is now, before I can put in a direction. The game has a momentum, and it’s not healthy for someone to come in and try to take all that momentum and turn it 90 degrees.

Brasse: You know your team is sitting there right now going “Whew, Thank God for that, now we don’t have to assassinate him in his sleep.”

Lyndro: I’ve actually had a couple conversations where someone said “That’s not what we were going to do” and I say “It’s not going to work that way anymore.” So there are little things that are different, that I see a little differently than the lead before me. But I’m not going to make any major changes for a while. I’ve always focused on content. I’m a big content guy. I love stories, I love storytelling. I love quests. I love making exciting dungeon content. So there’s already that in EverQuest 2. They already do that.

Brasse: There’s always the fear that we’re going to move away from that, so the hiring of yourself is a great reaffirmation that that’s still the core of the game.

(discussion about breaking into the gaming industry)

Brasse: Ok, let’s talk about Game Update 61 which launches Tuesday, August 23rd. Are we still on track for that?

SmokeJumper: As far as you know…

Brasse (big laugh): Actually, you guys are pretty good at hitting deadlines. I’m kind of impressed.

Sacred Cows and Reitemization

Brasse: Now one of the features that’s coming with Game Update 61 is Reitemization and the AA Revamp. Now… are you scared?

SmokeJumper: Are we scared? (chuckle)

Brasse: You’re touching on sacred cows here..

Lyndro: There’s a lot of stuff getting touched. There are lots of files getting changed. And whenever you do that it’s hard to not be scared. You’d be insane to not be scared.

SmokeJumper: I’m insane.

Brasse: That’s why you get to be bad cop.

Lyndro: It’s not that like, oh my God something’s going to go wrong. It’s just that there’s so much stuff changing, it’s impossible to look at it all at the same time. You look at pieces of it and say ok, this looks good, this looks good. I take these 3 pieces together and they look good. That’s how you deal with your fears but, yeah, (to SmokeJumper) you’re insane.

SmokeJumper: Well, I am insane, but (for) Velious, we used the first draft of the tools for the itemization of an area. And although everyone will agree that there were rough issues with that first process, since then, we’ve developed better and better tools to make sure that this stuff works. Velious was kind of a test bed for what we’re doing. Now granted, we’re on a completely different scale of items now. We’re talking somewhere between 40 and 50 thousand items. So there’s a lot of stuff to look at, and clearly we’re not going to hand-check every single one of those items. There’s no way. I don’t care how big our QA department is.

Brasse: It’s impossible.

SmokeJumper: We have to rely on these systems. But spot-checking (indecipherable) things look good. We know that at the worst, itemization is going to be WAY better in a lot of the areas of the world than it was before, because a lot of the itemization was piss poor in a lot of the areas.

Brasse: There you go! An admission right there about how we’re always seeking to improve stuff.

SmokeJumper: The players are not surprised by that.

Brasse: No they’re not.

SmokeJumper: But the beautiful thing about it is, since we are… I don’t want to taunt a dwarf by saying “bearding this particularly issue”.

Brasse: That’s alright, we can take it. I just drink more.

SmokeJumper: Since we’re attacking this issue, what we’re doing is legitimizing all of the content in the game again. So now you’re not stuck just playing the Golden Path. You can now play anything and get good items, which is great for the game.

Brasse: It really opens up the field again if you’re a new player or leveling up alts, that sort of thing.

SmokeJumper: So yeah, it’s hard, but it’s worthwhile. It’s a risk that we feel is really critical and very cool, and will be a foundation piece for everything that we do from now on as we make more and more of the world adventurous content that you can do at any time.

A Wing and a Prayer

Brasse: Now the next thing of course. I’m kind of surprised this is coming in so soon. The ability for those little fae flappy things and the arasai to actually fly. That’s actually going in? Finished? Ready?

Lyndro: I’ve flown as an arasai. I haven’t done it as a fae yet.

SmokeJumper: Yeah it’s really cool.

Lyndro: Yeah they’ve got some pretty slick animations, like nice turns and banks when they fly.

Brasse: Now for those who aren’t familiar, there is a minimum level you have to be to fly?

SmokeJumper: Just like flying mounts, you have to get to 85 and you have to do the quest.

Brasse: Long quest? Difficult quest? Painful quest?

SmokeJumper: It’s reasonably long. it’s like the other flying quests.

Brasse: Alright. I think that’s gonna be a lot of fun, and I think you’ll see a lot of little flappy guys out there, mine included, well mind you I’m not old enough yet. Ok…guess what I’m gonna be doing for the next while is leveling up my little flappy.

SmokeJumper: Tradeskill your way up. That’s an idea to tradeskill.

Brasse: Really…

SmokeJumper: Yeah yeah.

Brasse: I like it.

SmokeJumper: A lot of people may not realize. I surprised myself today. I have a level 66 wizard and logged in and I was like, oh I should buy the Burning Griffon, I don’t have that. So I log in…. or Incandescent Swiftwing, whatever you wanna call it.

Brasse: Yeah it’s a Burning Griffon. (EQ2W: We called it!) It’s awesome!

SmokeJumper: So I bought it and equipped it and started flying with it and I was like, wait a minute, I’m only level 66. Oh right.. I’m a level 90 alchemist.

A Beastlords Quote Comes Back to Haunt

Brasse: Now here’s a change for you.  I bet you never thought you’d see Beastlords coming back to EQ2, right?

Lyndro: I did not.

Brasse: Going back to the Dave is insane thing.

Lyndro: I’m sure that people will find the quote, so I’ll go ahead and quote myself. A few years ago I said that we’ll add Beastlords to the game when all 24 classes are perfectly balanced and happy. Somebody called me out on that in a meeting the other day. I said well clearly we’re adding Beastlords to the game so all classes must be perfectly balanced and happy.

Brasse: Perfect! Ends that argument! There you go guys — it’s all set now.

SmokeJumper: We can edit this out later. (laughter)

Brasse: Yes you can but come on that’s funny stuff there.

Lyndro: People will find that quote.

Brasse: Yeah they will, but the interesting thing is, one thing we’ve learned as an industry is the fact that you can never say never. You can’t predict what will happen 2 or 3 years from now. Technology changes, the community changes, the games themselves change. You never know what you’re going to be doing. The two words we can never use again at SOE are Soon [tm] and Never.

SmokeJumper: Although I can say that EverQuest II will never be a 2D flash game.

Brasse: (laughs) But what if we put it on mobile devices?

SmokeJumper: (I’m talking) EverQuest II.

Brasse: Oh ok ok… Alright so Game Update 61 also includes the first quest involving Beastlords.

Lyndro: That’s right, it’s a Prelude quest. It’s telling the story of where the Beastlords come from and why they’re coming back into the world. It’s building up to the release of the Beastlords.

Brasse: I think we’ve got Kyle and Paul coming in after this to talk about that prelude event.

Fire Dancing

Brasse: I just wanted to pass on a line from Calthine from ZAM. She was very excited to hear that you were back and she says “Lyndro’s back! Yay! Ask him to spin some fire for us!”

Lyndro: I’d love to.

Brasse: So what is she talking about? Do you actually play with fire?

Lyndro: I do.

Brasse: Indoors?

Lyndro: Outside.

Brasse: You’re in building 3, so we’re safe right?

Lyndro: Perfectly safe.

SmokeJumper: I just want to say, I want it on record that this is the guy that called me crazy. (laughs)

Lyndro: So I fire dance with staff, and a tool called poy which are burning balls at the end of chains. I swing them around and dance to music.

SmokeJumper: See what I mean?

Brasse: That is nuts. Do you still do it now, actively?

Lyndro: I did it last night actually, and the night before.

Brasse: We gotta get this on video.

Lyndro: I’ve got video.

Brasse: Really? We’ve got to upload that. Send it over to Tiffany and we’ll make sure that we get that online.

SmokeJumper: We’ll have him wear the Lucan costume.

Lyndro: Is it flammable?

Brasse: Parts of it vary. Especially if we put the wig on. That’ll get ya.

Brasse: Well thank you very much Akil for coming in and reintroducing yourself to the community. And thank you to Dave for coming in to play bad cop. I know you enjoy that role. So now I’ve got to turn you loose to get back to work more on all this stuff that’s coming out with Game Update 61, Game Update 62, and the Expansion.

SmokeJumper: Oh that’s plenty. 61, 62, and the Expac, we’re solid. We’ve got lots to do.

Brasse: And you’re on time for everything?

SmokeJumper: So far.

Lyndro: We are.

Brasse: You guys scare me. What happened to the traditional dev rule of put everything else off until the last minute and then go way overtime?

Lyndro: That didn’t work out very well for us. It’s not a…

SmokeJumper: Actually let’s go ahead and soft pedal this whole thing because I just gotta say we got a lot of work to do before November.

Brasse: Alright well bugger off and get that stuff done then. Thanks very much guys.

That’s the end of the Brasse-SmokeJumper-Lyndro interview. Tomorrow, we’ll pick up the Brasse – Kander – Cronyn interview!