MMOs aren’t fun anymore: EQ Next wants to bring gamers back

[Talolan]

MMOs aren’t fun anymore: EverQuest Next wants to bring online gamers back by changing the rules

“I think it was almost a guaranteed recipe for failure,” said Dave Georgeson, Director of Development on EverQuest Next. The previous version of Everquest Next, which had been in development for at least three years at Sony Online Entertainment, was to be scrapped and restarted from scratch.

The writing was on the wall. The old MMO template was a trap. Companies were lured in by the billions of dollars generated by World of Warcraft, and one-by-one they learned the hard way that Blizzard is not easily toppled once they've reached the peak of a genre.

Star Wars: The Old Republic had recently become the latest victim of the spike-and-fail phenomenon, an all-devouring curse of the MMO genre, which caused a huge surge of purchasers to subscribe at launch before ultimately moving on when they figured out that the game was nothing new.

If even Star Wars couldn't succeed with the standard model, then what hope did the aging EverQuest brand have? Sony seems to have agreed that the chances were slim and knew they needed drastic reinvention to make an impact again.

For Georgeson, a talking stick may have actually shown him the true direction for the future of EverQuest.

The Talking Stick

“Way back in Ultima Online the very first thing that happened to me in that game was the thing that hooked me onto MMOs forever,” said Georgeson. “I was walking down a road and there was this stick laying in the road and it started talking to me. It said, 'Hi, I'm a magical stick, I fell out of a tree and I need to get back to the forest. Can you help me?'”

Georgeson's voice jumps up a few octaves when he's taking on the persona of the talking stick, as though mimicking a forest pixie. You can tell he enjoys telling this tale, and has told it more than a few times before.

“So I picked up the little log and carried it to the forest, and then a thief, who was hidden with a stealth skill, de-cloaked and went laughing his ass off into the trees,” said Georgeson. “He was standing cloaked right next to the log so it'd look like the log was talking to me. And that's when I realized that user-generated content is way better than anything a designer could ever come up with.”

It's a fun anecdote, but user-generated content doesn't just hinge on players screwing with one another.

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