SOE Live: Final Day

Wow. What an incredible trip. Our final day of coverage begins as I think back at everything we have done and saw here at SOE Live.

We have breakfast with the director of the SOE game Dragon's Prophet, and got to give him feedback on the game. It is a fun game, worthy of holding us over until EQNext comes out, and looks to be a fun experience. He has been with SOE for about 12 years, and worked on everything from Clone Wars to Everquest Online Adventures, so he had a great pedigree of titles. It was fun just being able to sit down with him, share ideas, talk about games, and different ideas we had about MMOs and gameplay. I will keep what we talked about with him a secret, since it is a very cool thing, and we would love for him to run with the ball and get it implemented. Regardless to say, the gameplay idea we shared with him would change the game with MMOs forever, and truly bring these games to the next level.

We share because we're cool guys, and who knows, maybe SOE wants to work with cool guys like us someday. Yeah, we're like that.

EQNext is just 50 Shades of Awesome. It won't be out for another year or two, but the creator toolset portion will be out this winter. This is a smart strategy, the days of building gigabytes of pre-chewed content and stories and delivering them at launch died with the Star Wars Old Republic MMO, and Sony recognizes that. You can never build enough story and one-shot content to satisfy your players, they will burn through it in a couple months, and leave. That model does not work anymore. Instead, they are going the route of player-generated content, both before the game launches (with the toolset), and after launch with a changing, dynamic world.

It's a sound strategy, and exciting to support. There will always be games now to play and experience, plenty of stuff to do in Planetside 2, Dragon's Prophet, and the Everquest franchise. I support this because the focus here is clearly on the players, and not the company's story lines and canned experiences. The players here will be the ones creating the cool places in the world, creating the history together, and changing the game to be what they want it to be. George and I have always been about 'rolling your own experiences' in pen-and-paper games, and really, it is a great-great thing to see a company embrace player-created content, and be open to totally changing the history of the world based on what happens on the game's servers (yesterday, discussion panel). For this openness and welcoming of player-content, EQNext is our game.

There's a ton of other things happening here as well, and games from Everquest, EQ2, Planetside 2, and DC Heroes Online are getting small ways to incorporate player content. It's a sea change over here, and a welcome one to see. There's tons of expansion packs, new stuff to do, and cool little changes they are making in each game to improve things. Keep in mind, making changes in these games is a big project, and the company does the best with what it has to keep stuff cool and fun, even in games coming on 15 years old. We appreciate the support, and it is a great thing to support a company that doesn't abandon its games. Yeah, I know, SOE had some it shut down too, but for the ones still played by many people, it is a cool thing.

Nothing changes on the pen-and-paper front, and in fact, as we see more and more games move towards virtual dungeon masters and player-created content, PnP games are going to increasingly become obsolete. Think of the benefits of pen-and-paper games as being a series of goals that MMOs need to reach, and there still are a number of them out there that have not been reached yet, such as a referee, user-created adventures, user-created worlds, referee-controlled NPCs, referee-spawned monsters, adventures that can change mid-stream based on party actions, and a bunch of others. EQNext is knocking some of these milestones down, and I expect MMOs in general to start seeing these technical challenges as features to implement.

Think of that. We are now moving in a direction with MMOs that is towards replacing the human-referee entirely. I know there will still be things a human referee can do, but with advancement after advancement, the human referee will become obsolete, and in fact indistinguishable from a computer AI. This isn't far-fetched, it is just a normal progression of artificial intelligence, and in fact, expected. EQNext's user-generated content may start with structures, terrains, and props - but what's next? Monsters? World factions? Adventures? AI referees? There will be a time when the computer does a better job than a human referee, and that day is coming quicker than we think.

There are cool opportunities in here as well for the human referees, and SOE sees that too. We are getting tools for human referees to generate adventures in these games, and that is only the beginning. Someday, it may be possible for a player to 'jump out of body' and become a temporary referee in the game world for a group of players, spawning monsters, creating goals, and speaking as the NPCs We are heading towards that world too, with even more chances for creative people that want to tell stories to be able to do so through the game's tools. The combination of AI referees and human-created and managed MMO content is coming, and again, probably faster than we think.

Exciting stuff, and I do feel SOE Live this year was a glimpse into the future of gaming, both pen-and-paper and MMO. It was a special honor to attend, and also give the developers and execs here a taste of the SBRPG magic. What a fun, cool couple days this has been; I hope we could share with you a little look into this, and give you a glimpse into the crystal ball as well.