EverQuest II Preview & Interview

GameSpy has conducted an interview with Sony’s Chris Cao, asking the EverQuest II lead designer three pages of questions about the upcoming sequel. An excerpt to follow:

Q: Here’s a touchy subject: Player death. A good role-playing game has enough of a penalty to make dying scary (so that dangerous areas feel genuinely frightening), but not so terrible that the player gets discouraged. What’s your solution, and how’s it been working in the internal beta so far?

A: The death penalty in EverQuest II is designed to do three things: create a sense of danger in combat, engender respect of the environment, and maintain a penalty for death regardless of level. The current system accomplishes these goals through a combination of spirit loss and item wear.

Every time a player dies, all of his equipped items take wear and he loses part of his spirit (in the form of a corpse-like shard). Items can be repaired indefinitely for a price, but spirit must be regained through earning experience. Furthermore, a player can only regain spirit once he has recovered his shard. This means that players will have to be cautious about where they die.

The loss of spirit translates into a loss of bonuses for a player. These bonuses take the form of increased experience gain, larger health totals and other tangible benefits. Every time a player dies, he will lose a percentage of these benefits and basic game play will become more challenging. These benefits can change based on character level so that death always has meaning at every phase of the game.

To go along with the interview, they’ve also posted a hands-on preview of the game that goes something like this:

Once a guild builds up a solid reputation, that’s when the perks start coming. NPCs will treat you differently. You’ll have access to new cool furniture, new mounts, and new rare items to show off your status (what the designers affectionately call “bling bling.”) Guilds can start off with a small instanced building off the map as their headquarters, but can eventually earn the right to buy larger buildings within the city proper where everyone can see just how influential they are.

A guild’s status with a city can degrade over time if the guild isn’t actively helping the city, and that’s how guild sizes are balanced. Larger guilds lose their status faster — so, while it’s possible to have a guild with 100 members, it’ll be really difficult to keep it in high standing. Sony hopes that this will allow smaller, well organized guilds to still be relevant — again, making the game experience more intimate, and giving more people the chance to feel what it’s like to lead powerful guilds.