EverQuest II: Age of Discovery Interviews

It’s been a full ten days since Sony Online Entertainment revealed their EverQuest II: Age of Discovery expansion pack, but we still have yet to see any formal announcement. Despite that small hiccup, executive producer David Georgeson has taken no issue with answering questions about the add-on, as demonstrated by a five-minute video interview with him on GameTrailers and a four-page Q&A on Ten Ton Hammer. From the latter:

TTH: Tell us about the player created dungeons.

David: I think I’d like to come up with a better name than Design Your Own Dungeon, but I don’t know what it is yet. DYOD?

We call them Builders right now. We have builders and players, and we wanted to make sure that both ways to interact with the dungeons are fun. So with the collectable mentality, everything you need to build a dungeon is out there in the world. It can be crafted, it can be gained as loot in special quests, maybe there is some high-end raid stuff to collect… But basically to get a map layout to customize you have to go and defeat that area. So if you want the Crushbone Keep map, go beat Crushbone Keep. That sort of thing, but we’re still working out the mechanics on that.

You go out and collect the map layouts, the spawners, the traps, the different kinds of decorations and things that you want for the dungeon, and then when you have all the pieces that you want, you push a button and.bam! You’re inside the dungeon and now you’re basically at the level of laying stuff out like in your house. We’re vastly improving the housing interface, too.

Lots of things that we’re building for that are helping the rest of the game. We’re getting dungeon finder, improved housing interface, better leader boards. There are all these features coming out in GU 61 in August that are useful for the game already that are being constructed so we can do Design Your Own Dungeon.

You build your dungeon. If you want to test it ahead of time, you can run a party of invaders through your dungeon and watch them get slaughtered. For bonus points, I want you to be able to name them will all of your friends’ names so you can watch your friends get murdered.

So you run through those tests and when you’re ready, you just publish it. Once you publish it, you take a screen shot and it asks you for a little blurb, and all that goes automatically into these dungeon leaderboards. Your dungeon will show up on the most recently created list. Once people start playing it, they can actually rate your dungeon after they’ve played it. When you go to the leader board pages as a player, you can sort by the different ways that people can rate and find a dungeon that’s cool for you. You click it and you’re in! If you’re with a group, then you double-click it and you’re in right away. If you really want to wait for a pick-up group, then you can register for a queue, and bam! When the dungeon finder fills your group, you go into that dungeon.

TTH: That’s cool. How do you limit that, though? Don’t you think that inevitably there’ll be a billion crappy dungeons and just a few good ones?

David: The rating boards do that for us. As the players rate them, they basically self-police that. The highest rated ones are obviously going to be the most visited ones. The leader boards ages out votes after 24 hours, so your vote only counts on the leaderboard for 24 hours, and then it falls off. The leaderboards are a great indicator of what’s hot right now. If you stay on the leaderboard, at midnight we parse it and everybody who’s on the leader board gets a gold star, or some other kind of mark. It’s an award. When you accumulate enough gold stars, it turns into a loving cup kind of thing. When you have enough loving cups, your dungeon automatically goes to the Hall of Fame, and it’s there forever. So your name can be up in lights and there’s perpetual ratings and things like that, so eventually we’ll accumulate this list of just kick-ass dungeons that players are making.

When you play in one of these dungeons, you don’t play as yourself. You play as what we call an adventurer. The adventurers are, again, collectables out there in the world. They can range anywhere from a gnome to a dragon and any kind of monster in-between. What we do is isolate those different adventurers and we give them three or four skills that they can use. Each adventurer has a unique personality; they don’t play the same.