Game:

EverQuest (1999)

Duration: 6:02

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We caught up with David Georgeson, director of development on Everquest Next, to find out what the journey with the next chapter of the once biggest player in the MMORPG space has been like:

"When Sony Online started building Everquest Next it was actually, I don't know, 4 or 5 years ago, they were building a game that was kind of a derivate of what we had done before. Effectively they were building Everquest III. The more that we worked on it, the more we realised that it kind of been done before. I mean prettier graphics on the same old game was just the same old game and we already have Everquest and Everquest II. If we were going to spend that kind of time and money on something like that we wanted to bring a new experience to players."

"So we talked about it a lot and when formed a new team of industry veterans. We pulled them all together and we kind of put them in thinktank, what we called a black box. Most of the company didn't even know what we were working on. We had it all screened off with security card readers. It was all secret, cause what we wanted to do was to come up with a combination of ideas that nobody else was dealing with. We figured if we made something that was really unique and cool than players might flock to our banner like they did the original Everquest."

Allowing players to change and effect the world around is a key concept in Everquest Next, but it's not just about destruction, Georgeson explains:

"Destruction wasn't actually the first thing. We actually wanted to find a new way to tell stories to players. To be able to bring the worlds to life in different ways. Normal MMOs including Everquest I and II have a ton of lore in them. There's a lot of depth in story and characterisation in there, but it's not always really easy for players to notice or find. What we wanted to do was to try and figure out a way that they could participate in those stories and actually feel like they were making an impact on the world. So we started thinking about the permanent change stuff, the rallying calls, and figuring out how we could players involved in large groups to be able to affect change and dramatically accelerate the storylines and have them told at the pacing that the players decided would happen."

Everquest Next is set to arrive on PC next year.


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