Can SOE Keep the EverQuest Next Excitement Going?

For fate strums a mournful tune
For those those campaigns peak too soon

-Stomper (aka Arrowroot of Arrowshirt), Bored of the Rings

Companies get reputations for reasons.  They aren’t always for good reasons, and sometimes those reputations are far more about perception than reality, but once you get a reputation, it tends to stick.

And Sony Online Entertainment has a… colorful reputation.

They have lots of fans, certainly.  I count myself among them.  And for many, the simple fact that they made EverQuest cuts them some slack on things.  They also saved and fixed… such that they could… Vanguard, kept EverQuest Mac going for free, and anybody who starts talking about player housing in MMOs and doesn’t bring up SOE should… well… stop.  They have also been pretty good about trying new things.  Has any other company tried as many subscription options or come up with anything as enticing as SOE All Access (formerly Station Access)?   Who has anything like Player Studio? They have done many good things.

But a lot of people only remember the bad.

SOE has done its share of that as well, enough so that it sometimes becomes difficult to expect anything beyond the worst.

And it isn’t just “they screwed up my favorite game,” though that is a big one.  SOE owns the industry crown for single change alienation of a gaming population with the NGE in Star Wars Galaxies.  That happened nearly eight years ago, but if you put John Smedley in a room with some gamers, somebody will bring up the NGE and still be angry about it.  Smed did a Reddit AMA last year to talk about PlanetSide 2.  The NGE came up, of course, and that question ended up being the one with the most up votes, because NGE hate is like a living, breathing being at this point.  The NGE is a particularly ugly monkey on Smed’s back, to destroy a metaphor.  I am pretty sure he could arrange world peace, limitless cheap power, and a decent nickel cigar and somebody would still be asking about the NGE.

SOE also has a reputation for acting first, then realizing the implications only after the story has fled from their grasp, leaving damage control as their only option.  There is, as a minor example, the Station Cash for Subscriptions fiasco, that smacks of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is up to.  And for letting the narrative escape, few stories can beat the ProSieben.Sat1 debacle, where the whole affair managed to get summed up pretty quickly by a cartoon showing SOE selling an 8 year old to a shady guy with a van.  Once a child molester is a key metaphor for your plan, you are in trouble.  That took a lot of back peddling and changes to bring the flames down to a merely manageable level.  And this remains an extremely sore spot today with SOE’s European “customers,” coming up again immediately after the EverQuest Next keynote presentation, largely through a failure to convince those players that there is any benefit to them at all from the change.

And then, probably far down the list for most, maybe past “recent UI models all seem to be console oriented,” there is SOE’s hot and cold marketing messages.  And the poster child for this has to be The Agency.  Before it was killed in 2011, The Agency had been the on again, off again darling of SOE.  In 2007, in SOE Podcast #19, Brenlo was talking about builds for the game and nearly slipped and said a ship date.  At SOE Fan Faire, people who saw the game were excited and the vibe seemed to be that it would ship soon.  Then it faded from view and nobody said a thing.  And then it popped up again.  And then it was gone.  And then they made a Facebook game.  And then they killed the Facebook game.  And the web site got updated.  We would hear a bit of news, then nothing.  Finally the whole thing was cancelled and that was that.

An extreme example, sure.  There were clearly problems with the project.  But the external messaging was a mess, and not exactly uncharacteristic.  There have been years where it wasn’t clear if EverQuest or EverQuest II we going to get an expansion until very late in the season.  They announce new projects, like Station Launcher, then let them die on the vine, falling out of date while still up on the web site.  The SOE web sites tend to have out of date items on them on fairly regularly.  And SOE’s ad campaigns have had their questionable moments.

What exactly was the message here?

Even EverQuest Next has gone through an odd cycle.  It was announced, we saw artists sketches, possible parameters were discussed, then we were told to forget all about that.  And while that reflected the realities of the project… and was handled in a tolerable manner… there is still that history, that reputation.

So when I see EverQuest Next building up a huge amount of momentum, being talked about all over the place, and generally able to bask in the rapt attention of the MMO gaming community, I can only wonder to what extent they can keep that going.

While there was a lot to digest after SOE Live, everybody who wants to will be able to review all the panel videos, tease out all the facts, hopes, and dreams, read and/or write opinions about what they have seen, and generally come up to speed on what has been released to the public.

And then what?

Well, we have the so-called EverQuest Next Round Table over on the official site.  So far that seems to be a series of polls where the answers are pretty much foregone conclusions and links to a special forum where people can argue about their choices.  However, the forum dev tracker either isn’t working or the devs are busy elsewhere.  So there are nearly 60 pages and more than four thousands forum posts around whether races should have class restrictions, all based on “I want” and assumptions with sand castle strength foundations, and featuring the same small cast of characters battling over the same ground endlessly.  I think you have as much chance influencing the game by going to a bar near SOE headquarters after hours and expressing your opinions at anybody who looks like a programmer.

There is the EverQuest Worlds mobile app, which seems to be built around SOE’s slightly-behind-the-curve obsession with Facebook.  The reviews are predictable.

Not really what people wanted

And then there is some activity on Twitter.  A few key people saying things now and again, while supporting player StoryBricks is out there driving a whole emergent AI discussion that carefully says it is not necessarily EverQuest Next focused, pointing people towards relevant threads on Reddit, and retweeting things on the topic.

But otherwise, things are starting to slow down.  The initial buzz of excitement has faded a bit.  A whole bunch of stuff is out there and those interested have run through it.  Now we’re waiting for SOE to build on that foundation.

Which brings me back up to the title of this, can SOE keep the excitement around EverQuest Next going?  What should they be doing?

And what shouldn’t they be doing?

And, finally, should they even worry about it?