The Tattered Notebook: An Interview with Dave "SmokeJumper" Georgeson

This past autumn has been a busy one for EverQuest II, with the unveiling of EverQuest II Extended and upcoming server mergers. In contrast, players haven't heard much about Destiny of Velious, the upcoming expansion due to release on February 8th, 2011. But even though news of the expansion has been quiet of late, the team has been hard at work getting things ready for beta and launch.

This week, I had a chance to talk to Senior Producer Dave "SmokeJumper" Georgeson about EverQuest II's upcoming expansion, Destiny of Velious, as well as a progress report on EverQuest II Extended. Curious about what role factions will play in Velious or what Georgeson's favorite instance might be? Read on to find out!

Massively: Thank you for taking the time to talk a bit about EverQuest II. News of the upcoming expansion, Destiny of Velious, has been fairly quiet since the video shown at Fan Faire. Can you give us a little update on how the expansion is coming along?

Dave Georgeson: We've been doing our first rounds of internal playtesting and giving mounds of feedback to the individual designers. Revamps and refinements are going on at a rapid pace, and we'll be moving into a formal testing phase soon. The code is all coming along well, including the flying mount feature, and we're approaching code and art lock in just a couple weeks. We're looking forward to a really good testing and iteration month in January before release.

EverQuest's Velious expansion carries a lot of nostalgia -- the Sleeper, the 10th Ring War, and snow bunnies, to name a few examples. How did you incorporate content and themes from the original Scars of Velious into the upcoming expansion?

We pick and choose the things that we think work together to make a great storyline, as well as things that are particularly visible and memorable (like the Tower of Frozen Shadows). We're telling a new story here, of course, and it has been a very long time in the Norrathian timeline since the original Velious was released, so there are many changes. But fans of the original will definitely recognize many places, themes and characters.

At Fan Faire, there was a question about whether factions would be as prominent as they were in EverQuest, and the response was that the team was discussing it. Can you give the readers an update on whether to expect this or not?

Factions do play a role in some of the content, but not to the same extent that they did in the original Velious. You will need to befriend a race or two in order to progress in the epic storyline, and faction is important for that, but we're concentrating on making one epic story thread rather than forcing people to kill their former allies in order to experience the other faction's stories.

Can you give the readers a sneak peek of your favorite instance?

The Ascent is phenomenal. I really don't want to spill the beans on why it's cool, but suffice it to say that I have never seen an MMO do this particular thing before in dungeon-ish experience.

Now that the druid rings have been reconstructed, can you give us a hint of other possible in game events that will lead up to the release of Destiny of Velious?

That info will come out at a later date. I'll leave that one for Community to build up.

Flying mounts -- how are they working out so far in testing? What's the most unusual spot the team's been able to fly to? From the Fan Faire panel, it was confirmed that you could get a flying mount from a quest, but will there be other ways to get one?

Well, all the zones are flyable now. (OK, all the outdoor non-city zones anyway.) So you can really find some interesting viewpoints you'd never have seen before. Nek Forest is cool when you can fly through the trees. Zek is (finally) easily short-cut because you can fly over the hills and valleys. The Kingdom of Sky is rockin' when you can free-form fly between the islands. It all adds a new perspective and makes everything seem fresh again.

Currently, the only way to unlock the flying mounts is via the quest chain in the Velious expansion.

Shifting gears a bit, can you give the readers a progress report on how things are going with EQII Extended? Are things meeting your expectations so far?

Extended is still happily humming along. The players there are still thriving and the population is denser than on any other server, resulting in easy grouping and socialization. The only thing we haven't done yet is to start spending marketing money to advertise its existence. Considering that everyone that's there now arrived via either word-of-mouth or from the single press release we issued back in August, the service is doing great! We're very pleased with it.

Has the Extended server affected player populations on the live servers at all?

Nope. Not a bit. Population on the Live servers is moving exactly along the predicted lines that we projected last year, before EQ2X was even a gleam in anyone's eyes. We're going to do server merges soon, but that was planned a long time ago also and is not a result of any mass migration to EQ2X. Extended's population is currently composed of returning EQII players that had left the fold a while ago, and completely new players. About half of each. The percentage of migrating players from the EQII Live servers is very low.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with Massively, and good luck on Destiny of Velious!

From the snow-capped mountains of New Halas to the mysterious waters of the Vasty Deep, Karen Bryan explores the lands of Norrath to share her tales of adventure. Armed with just a scimitar, a quill, and a dented iron stein, she reports on all the latest news from EverQuest II in her weekly column, The Tattered Notebook. You can send feedback or elven spirits to karen@massively.com.