In Case You Missed It: Jethal Silverwing, TenTonHammer Interviews

TenTonHammer Interviews Dave Georgeson

TenTonHammer, like other Press sites covering SOE (EQ2Wire is a designated ‘Fan Site’ so airfare, hotel, etc. is up to us) made the trek to Fan Faire 2011 to cover EQ2 and other SOE games being showcased. Although TTH hasn’t featured EQ2 all that much in the past few years, they did score exclusive screenshots of Destiny of Velious plus a Dave Georgeson interview. The only other premier multi-MMO site still putting EverQuest II news on their front page these days seems to be Joystiq’s Massively.

When TenTonHammer announced their EQ2 Leapers and Gliders Giveaway, with an increased chance of winning for TTH members ($9.95/yr), I scrutinized their website to see how they’ve been covering EQ2. As it turns out, TenTonHammer did an extensive interview with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson at Fan Faire, including a LOT more detail, explanations, and reasoning about the features announced for Game Update 61 and the Age of Discovery expansion than were given during the EQ2 Panels. This is an interview I haven’t seen linked anywhere (including EverQuest2.com or the EQ2 Forums) and it’s worth a read.

Here are two excerpts from EverQuest 2: The Next Generation — A Q&A with David Georgeson @ TenTonHammer:

Beastlords

Your warder has an AA tree and you build those AAs over time. Your warder also has a skill hotbar separate from yours. The Beastlord in EQ2 has fewer skills normally than a regular class would. It’s actually quite a few less, but your warders have their own AA trees and hotbars and there is interactivity between those.

You build “synergy” during combat. It can fill up several times. The more you let it fill up, the more active and powerful abilities become available. So, if you have patience, you can get all the way up to a level 5 synergy ability and you’ll be able to fire those off to have really impressive effects.

We think it will be very fun. It’s very active; it’s not one-button macroable, which is always a plus in my opinion. If people want to play one button macro, then there’s 24 other classes they can use. But the Beastlord is designed to be very active.

Design Your Own Dungeon

What we do is when we’re laying down spawners, people are always like, “Can we script the spawners?” We really don’t want to set up a scripting language. That’s Neverwinter Nights and I don’t want to go there.

What we’re going to do instead is that when you throw down a spawner, it’ll watch around itself for objects that can interact with it. For instance, if you threw down an orc spawner and put down a campfire next to it, when the orcs spawn, they’ll have fire weapons. Or if you put several groups of orcs in several areas, normally, you’d be able to pull each camp separately, but if you put an alarm bell near one of them, when you pull that camp it’ll ring the bell and all of them are going to come. So there’s this object interactivity that the builders can play with. As they collect these different things and put them next to spawners, they’ll be like, “Holy crap! I didn’t expect that!”

Check out the 4 page article: EverQuest 2: The Next Generation — A Q&A with David Georgeson @ TenTonHammer

Jethal Silverwing Interviews John Smedley

When SOE President John Smedley agreed to speak to not just any Fan Site podcast, but the Jethal Silverwing show, I wonder if Jethal felt he’d landed the guest of a lifetime. But if he had any fears that ‘the Smed’ would hold back or turn the session into an extended press release, those fears were completely unfounded. The SOE President let loose with personal anecdotes and his own opinions about MMO design (his list of game design pet peeves surprisingly reads like the feature list for EverQuest II).

As this is an EQ2-specific show, John Smedley took a moment to apologize for the rough operation of the recent Dragon Ring and Wizard Spires Rebuilding event, which was launched post-Fan Faire, withdrawn, redesigned, and then relaunched with mixed results.

If you aren’t a fan of podcasts, fortuitously there is a complete transcription of The Smedley Interview. Despite a few typos, it’s absolutely worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:

I can not stand PvE.. I hate it.. and it bores me to tears.. the only thing I want, is that rush when someone attacks me out of nowhere.. I love cooperative PvE, that’s fun, but that’s the way I like to play personally.. the PvE enjoyment I get, like, playing Portal2 with my kids in Coop mode that was fun, or playing Starcraft 2 cooperatively on a team. that’s still a PvP experiance.. I’m just not wired for PvE.

The game for me, is.. this generation of MMO’s.. and I’m being real specific.. the Mobs arent very smart, there’s agro.. but they dont give you the challenge that another player does. and that’s something we plan on majorly working on for our future products, but for now, it’s not the same as being ambushed by five guys who want nothing more than to, just, trash talk you..

and a bit about EQNext (although there’s more in the podcast):

My kids have the advantage have the advantage and the heavy disadvantage of living with me so they get to see a lot of stuff before every body else.. my son is looking forward to Planetside 2.. my daughters are looking forward to some cool stuff coming up in FreeRealms that we havent told anyone else about.. and, I have not even shown my own children EverQuestNext.. that’s how quiet we’re keeping it.

The Jethal Silverwing Show is a weekly podcast about EverQuest 2.