Want to know more about Planes of Power? IGN did an interview with Shawn Lord, assistant lead designer. July 10, 2002 - While the EverQuest Invasion Tour is a good excuse to skip out on work, it also afforded us the chance to sit down and talk with some of the guys behind the next games in Verant's premiere massively multiplayer series. One of the guys we got to talk to was Shawn Lord, assistant lead designer on the upcoming EverQuest expansion Planes of Power. As evidence of Sony and Verant's support for the original title, work on Planes of Power is progressing alongside development of a full sequel to EverQuest, EverQuest 2. (We'll be having a lengthy interview with EQ2's lead designer Bill Trost in Unplugged coming out later this month.) While GUY was in town last week for the tour, he was kind enough to answer our questions about the new expansion. IGNPC: Is it weird to be making an expansion and a sequel at the same time? Shawn Lord: Not really, no. It's kind of exciting. As far as the different products in the house, it's kind of like having cool siblings. You borrow each other's clothes and you learn from each other. It makes it a little bit easier on everybody because there's this nice closed area where all this information is brewing about. Being able to see what these other people are doing and take from that, and use it for what you're working on is great. There are limitations, of course, things that we do that are exclusive to other projects. It's like buying a new game where you say, "Wow, this is really cool. I wish we had one of these." That's bound to happen and I think it just makes the product better. It's exciting. I can even see playing both games at the same time. I do that now. Not as much during this development cycle because we're so busy but in the downtime you buy a couple of games and play them. It's weird -- when I go buy a new game from another company, I don't necessarily wonder if my character will transition into their game. It's clear that it won't but it doesn't affect my opinion of that game or the fact that I play EverQuest. IGNPC: You don't think that the success of one game poaches the other? Shawn Lord: No, we've already seen with other titles that have been released since EverQuest has been out, that it just seems to help the industry overall and help our niche expand. We're still getting more players than ever. When you look at other products that are recognized as being good, strong products with a solid player base, it's not affecting us adversely. It's nice to see that we can all co-exist. When we look at the size of the collective player base of all these games and look at the number of people that subscribe to ISP's, the difference is huge. Think about all the different massively multiplayer games compared to the number of people who are online and aren't playing our games. There's a lot of reach there. New products coming out help build awareness and that's good for everybody. IGNPC: But Planes of Power seems more suited to retaining existing players (those who are bumping up against the experience cap) than enlarging the market by bringing in new players. Does it have much significance for low-level players? Shawn Lord: We're focusing on the high-end player, but we're throwing in some things that'll make life easier for low-level players and help them get around and experience content. We're doing that with the portal system that we're adding to the Plane of Knowledge. That first plane will be available to players of all level and they can use it to get around from every newbie city to every other newbie city. It'll help them determine whether or not they like their race-class combination, because they'll be exposed to other areas quicker. One thing that we've done in the past couple of months is to go back and revamp some of that newbie content. There are really good stair steps at all the levels now. We made it easier to advance through the first ten levels too. You don't have to get your corpse because you respawn with your gear, things like that. It helps players transition in and get their feet wet and get to that mid- and high-level content more quickly. The learning curve was pretty harsh when we first started playing. I was amazed that there were zones beyond the one I first logged into. When I zoned over I thought, "My god, this game's humongous." By the time I've zoned into the tenth zone, running for dear life, trying to get to Freeport, I was just zipping along. We want people to get exposed to that quicker. If we've had any real hitch with retention, it's usually within those first ten or twenty levels. That's where a lot of people make up their mind as to whether they're going to be a 60th level character. We want to make sure we can show as much of the game as possible in that time. IGNPC: The context of the Planes of Power is really extreme. How do you move past that? Is there any way EverQuest can top the experience of storming the homes of the gods? Shawn Lord: I'd have to answer that more towards the end of Planes of Power. Right now, wrapping my head around that is a big enough task. Thinking beyond that, we knew that was something we'd have to consider. Right now, we've been so focused I can barely tell what's going on outside this process. We sort of borrowed the idea of Planes of Power from the players themselves. It's just finding what people are already doing and creating more content based on that behavior. Going to a god's home is pretty extreme. IGNPC: Yeah, it's a rush. Shawn Lord: People feel powerful when they're tearing into the lairs of gods. As we watched people get into Planes of Power, they really helped us formulate where to go. IGNPC: Where are you at in terms of development? Shawn Lord We've had a really management structure going on this project. We have a really good schedule. It's hard to say which point of the project we're at because it's all scheduled out. I can show you where we're at on a particular aspect. But it's going along really well. It feels so good that you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's going so great and we're so excited about it, what bad thing is going to happen. Hopefully I won't break my leg tonight. IGNPC: What's the big risk with Planes of Power? Is there something specific that might go wrong? Shawn Lord: A couple of little things we've done in a couple of months, the thing that we're hoping caters to the lower-level players is a risk in a sense. When I think just about some of the things that we've done in the last four or five months -- making certain things a little easier, making that transition period smoother -- that's a risk. It's not the EverQuest I played and fell in love with and moved to California to work on. That was hard, making that change. We have so much respect for the people who made EverQuest, to change something like that. Honestly, with the content and philosophy of Planes of Power, we wanted to avoid a lot of risk. Redoing the graphics engine, a lot of the things we put in Shadows of Luclin, it had repercussions (depending on what part of the expansion you look at). It introduced a lot unknown variables. We're taking everything we've learned from past expansions, especially Shadows of Luclin, and just take the solid things that work and avoid some of the risk. We have so many things that we know work sitting in front of us. I don't see any sense in taking unnecessary risks. IGNPC: Thanks for your time. -- Steve Butts