john-smedley-interview
Latest
Smedley clarifies PlanetSide 2's long-term plans: 'NPCs aren't on the table'
Yesterday a bunch of game news sites reported on PlanetSide 2's ambitious long-term plans as quoted from a lengthy post by SOE CEO John Smedley. It was pretty exciting stuff even though the information has been live on Smedley's blog since August of 2012. His treatise mentioned player-owned bases, harvestables, seamless bodies of water between continents (and water-based vehicles), dynamic weather, e-sports support, and NPCs. This last bit led to some hand-wringing by PS2's hardcore PvP faithful, so we reached out to Smedley in order to set the record straight and determine whether or not the features mentioned five months ago are still in the works. "A lot of it is still being considered," he said. "We are going to tell the community about our longer term plan and let them have a very big say in where we go." What about NPCs and PvE, though? "NPCs aren't on the table for a long time, if ever," Smedley told us.
SOE Live 2012: Dragon's Prophet invigorates sandbox hopes
While I can't exactly say that the best report was saved for last (there was so much awesome at SOE Live 2012), I will say the Dragon's Prophet announcement was the most unexpected exciting news of the weekend. A new sandbox game, with dragons! I'll admit -- I should have seen the writing on the breakfast table. When I sat down for the meal that first day, my table-mate John Smedley, CEO of Sony Online Entertainment, mentioned that the others seated with us were making a dragon game. He then introduced them as developers of Runes of Magic. It was only later when the press learned a new game would be introduced that evening that the connection clicked! After the official announcement, I looked forward to learning even more about the new dragon-laced world. I was pleased to sit down with Smedley and those members of the Runewaker team again -- namely, CEO John Tang and VP of Business Development Tony Tang -- this time to discuss the new partnership and the upcoming free-to-play game.%Gallery-169367%
Smedley: 'People who don't play games have no business in this business'
Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley is a die-hard gamer. This isn't news if you've followed SOE for more than a few minutes, as Smed has always been outspoken about what he's playing and why. He's also renowned among game journos for being a fun interview, usually to the consternation of his PR handlers. Case in point is a new sit-down with Edge, ostensibly to promote SOE's upcoming PlanetSide 2 MMOFPS (we say ostensibly because the actual content of the interview is being parceled out in future installments). For part one, Smed rips into clueless industry executives, saying that "people [who] don't play games have no business in this business. It should be the gamers-only club, I think. I can't stand people [who] don't know what they're talking about when it comes to playing these things."
