EQ3 Eh? Eh? Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink, Say No More!

Wilhelm sent me a link to an EverQuest site he'd discovered, called The EverQuest Show. I think it was intended primarily as a YouTube channel, which debuted in February this year, but so far there have only been three episodes, while the website has been considerably more active. There was a new post there just today.

I've added The EverQuest Show to the blog roll but it wasn't the site itself that drew me to make this post. As I was flipping through the articles I spotted a link to an AMA with Holly "Windstalker" Longdale and three other Daybreak devs, hosted by Fires of Heaven.

It looks as though the AMA happened in May or June so it's very current. It's also very long. I read the whole thing and it took me a couple of hours. There's plenty of waffle and nonsense but also plenty of tidbits that would interest any EQ fan.

One question that crops up over and over again in different forms is whether Daybreak are working on a new EverQuest game. Holly attempts to keep a poker face on this for a while but as her answers pile up the winks and smiles give the game away, literally. Ok, metaphorically.

I've severely trimmed these but here's some of the "evidence":

Q. Since there have been some rumors going around it, Is there another EQ game in development (other than the Nantworks stuff) by DBG?

Alan VanCouvering (Lead Content Designer): Wouldn't you like to know!

Holly: ….. 

Q. Being the 20th Anniversary, what is the future of the EQ Franchise? Be specific please. Is there another game in developed or at least in the talks of being developed or are we to expect that EQ will just receive expansions and new servers each year? 

Holly: There is a future and I don’t have specifics for you. The specifics will come when we have meaningful news. 

Q. So in 2019 if I’m an old school EQ guy who loves the world (nostalgia is a hell of a drug) but I also don’t want to play 20 year old games, is there a reason to care about the franchise? Are y’all going to surprise launch an early access EQ3 or am I stuck with ignoring a mobile game?

Holly: We have spent a lot of time looking into the future and how we build this franchise up even better than we have in the past. We did some research over a year ago with all ages of gamers. It’s amazing how many young people know the name “EverQuest” because of family and other gamers. We are still relevant and considered an original. Someday soon we hope to take advantage of that global recognition and release something new. Can’t say when. Have no details. 

Q. Will daybreak ever do anything worthwhile with this IP? Specifically getting a green light to do some real development work and create an Everquest remake with the same mechanics as the original plus 2 expansions updated graphically and from an audio perspective with consoles included and cross platform play?

Holly: We will definitely do something with the IP. A strict remake? Probably not. Will it embody the EQ spirit, most likely yes.

Q. With such an iconic IP will we ever see EQ3?

Holly: 😄

Q. Now that Blizzard is showing cracks in the armor, and the MMO space is super-dry, how about you announce right here that EQ3 is in production?

Holly: Another EQ game? 😊

 In an answer to a question on EQNext, Ed Hardin III (Lead Systems Designer) said 

One of the hardest lessons we learned from Landmark/Next was to not start publicity until we are certain the promise of the game can be realized. 

From that I think we can take it we won't be hearing anything about whatever Daybreak has cooking until they're almost ready to take it out of the oven. But something is definitely cooking!

Elsewhere in the AMA there's confirmation that the mobile project NantWorks was supposedly working on, using the EverQuest IP, is still ongoing. The EQ team has some involvement, presumably advisory, but no control over what the game turns out to be.

Q. Can you give us any details at all on EQ Mobile?

Alan VanCouvering :  I don't know if anyone here knows anything about it, but it's outside our control. 

Ed Hardin III: While we (as a company) will have input into what anyone else does with EverQuest on mobile devices, we (as individuals) aren’t going to be designing it.

Holly: They are in their early days and will tell you when they are ready and confident. We are definitely involved though.

Going back to EQNext and Landmark, the team's answers confirm what I've thought for a very long time were the reasons the game never got anywhere: it was beyond the technical capacity of the company to produce, at least within the budget they had to work with.

Q. Landmark seems like a huge setback (time & financially). I spent a good chunk of time "building" in that world, but once I realized it was overtaking EQ3 production completely, I abandoned it. My drive at the time was the hope of watching EQ3 be built. Is there any regret/animosity toward going the Landmark/Voxel direction?

Alan VanCouvering: Yes, Landmark/Next cost us, but if you don't try you never know what can be done. I don't think we really regret trying, just that it didn't work out.

Q. How much of EQ: Next was real and how much of it was smoke and mirrors?

Holly: EQ Next was real, but a long way from completion when we had to walk away from it. Very tough, but the right decision at the time. There’s mountains of great work that went into that game that won’t go to waste. We aren’t done with this franchise. Not by a long bowshot.

One thing that was asked repeatedly and was shot down in flames every time was the possibility of a "Remastered" version of EverQuest. Too expensive and the resources would be better spent on a new game. Couldn't agree more.

Other topics of note (to me, at least) were:

Reverting the notorious Freeport revamp for the TLE servers (they'd like to but too time-consuming).

What happened to the Quarm special event server? (Not as popular as expected and took more dev resources than the limited interest justified).

Why isn't there a PvP server? (there is and no-one plays on it (as Wilhelm always suspected)).

Why do they keep making expansions for EQ and EQ2 that no-one plays? (Lots of people buy them).

Did the then-team know what a disaster they had on their hands with the Gates of Discord expansion (oh, yes...).

Was Brad McQuaid actually any good as a designer? (He was and remains "a driving force", "an unstoppable force").

And to finish, a couple of short ones that deserve re-quoting in full:

Q. Any thoughts on Legends style TLP servers? Premium fee on top of regular sub, DBG gets additional funding, we get real GMs and regular events? (For those who missed it, Legends was a Premium server with a much higher subscription charge than the regular game)

Alan VanCouvering: Legends was a disaster in all possible ways. I highly doubt that enough people would actually want to pay as much as we would need to ask for to run a server like that.

Holly: What Alan said. Entitlement breeds demands that no dev team could realistically meet. Doesn’t mean we won’t offer premium-type stuff, but that server was super painful as a business model and play experience for a bunch of reasons.

And my favorite of all:

Q. Why does my Clockwork Rhino mount eat all my food?

Alan: There might be a gnome living inside it. 

Ed: I can’t say there isn’t a gnome.

There's a lot more in the full thing. I recommend reading it thoroughly if you have an interest in EQ or, indeed, in how Daybreak operates these days. And thanks again to Wilhelm for steering me in the general direction of this little goldmine. If it was reported or referenced anywhere else I didn't see it.

The Mask Slips

J3w3l posted some thoughts on the mortality of MMOs prompted by an AMA on Reddit given by Daybreak's new "Executive Creative Director", Jens "Spytle" Andersen. Until his recent promotion, Jens was Senior Creative Director for DCUO, by most accounts one of DBG's more successful properties.

Since the AMA takes place in the Planetside2 subreddit, most of the questions naturally focus on that game, so a lot of it may not be all that interesting or relevant to anyone who isn't currently playing PS2. If the headline quote pulled by MassivelyOP and echoed by Healing The Masses is to be believed, that means almost everyone.

While it's extremely unusual to hear a senior executive comment so freely and frankly on the poor health of an MMO under his authority, it was another of Jens' open, honest and revealing replies that really caught my attention. In answer to a question asking whether one response to the dearth of PS2 players might be to improve Membership benefits, Jens had this to say:

You know what is funny? No matter how many things we heap into membership on all of our games, it makes no difference in the appeal of membership to non members. This is something we saw on DCUO for sure. The amount of benefits to DCUO membership is staggering, but people don't take advantage of it. It's just not a really good strategy for us to keep trying to lead horses to water that do not want to drink. And the fact is, current members already get huge benefits from the monthly fee they already pay.

That really gets to the nub of the F2P versus Subscription issue in my opinion. There is a fundamental divide between those players who are willing to pay a regular, ongoing fee to access an online video game and those who aren't. Whether it's down to age or disposable income or available leisure time is unclear but somewhere along the line there is a clear split between the committed and the uncommitted that is not directly influenced by value alone.

Tobold was speculating yesterday about an old idea: the premium subscription. He found himself paying $10 a day to play League of Angels, a game I'd never heard of and which, from a quick glance at the website, appears to be the kind of competetive PvP affair I'd have expected Tobold to avoid like the plague. The experience led him to wonder whether there might be a market for "luxury niche MMORPGs with a $300 a month subscription fee".

Jens Andersen's insight suggests not, as does a much older experiment from the company formerly known as SOE. Way back in 2002, when EverQuest was the big dog of western MMOs, John "Smed" Smedly imagined a Velvet Rope experience might bring in even more cash. He was wrong.

The Legends server was launched with a flurry of hype that makes for hubristic reading more than a decade on. As far as I recall Smed's ambitious claims that Legends would provide "a tabletop RPG experience" in which players would "feel like they are part of a world that's changing at a much more rapid pace" came to nothing. If anyone on Legends ever did get a sword named after them that went on to become a drop on regular EQ servers then they kept pretty quiet about it, even if, as this thread suggests, it happened all the time on the Stormhammer server itself.

Although plenty of nostalgists in that thread confirm the $40 a month was money well spent, they also tell a tale of ever-declining numbers. There never was a second Legends server and by 2006 there weren't enough high-rollers left to keep the lights on any more. The experiment has not been repeated.

Here's the problem: an online game has to provide a minimum level of content and service to function at all. Getting that up and running and keeping it that way is the baseline without which you just don't have a game that anyone much is going to play, even for free. But simply by reaching that level of competence you have already satisfied the needs of most of your potential audience. If you're lucky you might sell them a few trinkets and toys before they wander off to the next game down the line.

Tobold (yes, him again) opined today that rather than being addicted to MMOs most of us are merely fascinated by them, and that it's a fascination that can easily be broken or redirected elsewhere. I don't wholly go along with the premise but it certainly applies to the wider mass market for online entertainment. When so much is available for free, and mostly at a relatively high level of quality, who would pay just to have access to one particular example among many and how much better than the competition would that example need to be?

As the world adjusts to the unending tsunami of free entertainment let loose by the transition to digital media and the growth of uninterrupted, immediate global online accessibility, "content providers" have to learn how to swim in these treacherous waters. Some are managing to keep their heads above the water; some are drowning. 

This, very clearly, is where current marketing strategies like those being developed by DBG and ArenaNet come into play. DBG, unlike SOE in the years before the sell-off, have finally noted the disproportionate importance of the comparatively small audience that has already chosen to play and to keep playing DBG's MMOs rather than someone else's. Instead of casting their net as far and wide as possible they are increasingly choosing to bait a hook with flavors many already playing find almost impossible to resist - nostalgia and character progression.

ANet, on the other hand, have sidestepped in the other direction. In a neat body-swerve they've opened the doors to let the F2P world inside, only to jink back, moving almost the entirety of the company's onward development focus to the commercial higher ground, locked behind the paywall of a Heart of Thorns purchase. You can play a GW2 for free; just not the GW2.

I logged into WildStar:Reloaded for the first time last night and spent an hour sorting out the perks and freebies from my single month of membership that came with the box. Then I spent a while browsing the cash shop on which the game's future in great part rests. I couldn't find anything to buy and I couldn't find much enthusiasm to play either. Whether Carbine will sink or swim is too early to tell but they must be eyeing FunCom's predicament with grim foreboding.

Sadly, while in this new, digital world nothing is ever truly gone, plenty falls out of reach. MMORPGs, with their infrastructure and population density requirements, are especially vulnerable. J3w3l, fearing for the future of Tera, wonders about the wisdom of putting "time and effort into and mmo that won’t last too long. Or that my friends won’t play much either". It's a conundrum alright.

As Telwyn from GamingSF observes, this is a problem almost unique to online entertainment. Stick to the offline world or better yet the printed word and your sense of security increases a hundredfold. Wilhelm just received his fresh Kickstarted copy of Tunnels and Trolls. Now he can "read through it and imagine all the great campaigns one could run without ever actually playing" just like I could do with my favorite forgotten system, Swordbearer, whose three Denis Loubet illustrated volumes sit on a shelf behind me as I write.

In the end though, unlike those free to play hordes who can't be led to the subscription waters they have no interest in drinking, we come to online entertainment willingly, because the range of choice is vast, the ease of access unparalleled. If the price is impermanence then it's a price we will just have to go on paying. As the Legends experiment proved, we only rent our time in these worlds. Open your wallet wide as you will, more money won't buy security of tenure.
 

I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday

Like going to the pictures, do you? The movies, eh, wot? Great stuff! What payment model do you prefer then? Pay each time do you? Hand in pocket, bring out the wedge? Feeling of control that gives you, I bet, doesn't it? Or is it those cards? Buy 'em in foyer is it? The supermarket? Fifty notes, what's that last you? Couple of months? Three?. No, no, of course! You're a real fan, I can tell. You'll be a member, course you will. Monthly is it, your subscription? Annual! You really do like your movies, don't you?

Say, whatever did happen to that Everquest movie?

Can you imagine sitting in the pub chewing over the pros and cons of how to pay to watch films? Can you imagine having that conversation over and over and over again? Who bloody cares? What film did you see? Who was in it? Was it any good? That's what we want to know.

Yes, but how you pay for your movie habit doesn't affect what films get made, does it? Doesn't affect the content. Or does it? You know what? I don't know and I don't very much care. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. A million things affect what movies get made and where they get shown but regardless there are always more films being made than I am ever going to see and there always will be. Out of those miles and miles of celluloid (let's not quantify digitally) I am not likely to run out of stuff that appeals to me but I am likely, nay, certain, to run out of time to watch it all.

Pick me! Pick me!

From where I sit there also seems to be no prospect whatsoever of running out of MMOs. There are hundreds of them and they just keep coming. It takes a couple of hours to watch a movie but a middling MMO takes a month or two even for a tourist and a good one might eat up most of a year and that's just on the first go round.

One of the advantages usually quoted for the Subscription model is that you have a fixed price point and once you've paid each month you're done paying til next month. Fine. Dandy, even, but that also works in reverse. When there are too many MMOs to choose from it's very handy for some to rule themselves out by charging an upfront fee. Really, that's great. You guys keep doing that. Makes for one less MMO that I have to think about. Get back to me when you go F2P. I might take a look then.

Make the most of it, it's all you'll ever see

Oh look, here I am talking about payment models and didn't I just say how dull that was? How did I get onto the topic anyway? Everquest going F2P, that was it. I was going to write something about it but Wilhelm beat me to it and covered most of what I might have said.


I did make a character on Vox, the new server. I had to, it's a tradition. I've made a character on every new EQ server that's launched since 2000. Well, except Stormhammer. Now there's a payment model!. Apparently some people really would pay $40 a month just to have a server to themselves. Not being one of them I never did see Marauder's Mire.

First catch your gnoll.

 At the moment the main effect of Everquest going F2P has been to rekindle my interest in leveling up my necromancer on Fippy Darkpaw, one of the two Progression servers both of which remain subscription only. It seems the net result of Everquest going F2P for me is that I've started logging in to do something I could have done at any time anyway. Figures.