I had the pleasure of visiting the wonderful city of San Francisco for Sony Online Entertainment’s Gamers’ Day 2003. At this event, SOE gave the producers and lead designers of each of their games a chance to talk more in-depth about what we will have to look forward to in the coming months. We had a first glimpse at four such titles at this year's E3 Expo, but SOE introduced us to a fifth and sixth title which were not present at E3, Champions of Norrath and the PlanetSide expansion, Core Combat.


EverQuest: Lost Dungeons of Norrath
Release Date: September 2003
Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)
Platform: PC
Rating: Pending
Developer: Sony Online Entertainment
Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
Price: TBD, Monthly Subscription fee

The Lost Dungeons of Norrath, the sixth expansion pack for SOE’s veteran MMORPG, EverQuest, will not only add more monsters, quests, spells, equipment, and new trade skills to the game, but it will also introduce a completely new style of gameplay that should be well received -- custom tailored dungeon crawls without the interruption of other players. There will be 40 unique dungeons in five new environments in which players will be able to form groups and set forth on their own adventures within these dungeons that have been created with only their needs in mind. Players won’t have to worry about waiting hours or days for their shot at an encounter or fear of a rival guild training angry mobs on top of them. The dungeons you play in are for your group only, and while the physical layout of the dungeon itself won’t change each time, the encounter inside will. Along with these encounters, SOE is also introducing interactive objects, such as locked chests and traps in which skills that were previously lacking in use will be revitalized with new found need (ie. Lock picking and trap detection).

EQOA: Frontiers is the first “expansion” for SOE’s MMORPG, EverQuest Online Adventures, on the PlayStation 2. Player’s that own the original EQOA will have to purchase this new DVD disc in order to experience all the cool new stuff that it has to offer. From what I saw, SOE gave a drastic upgrade to the graphics engine and added a bunch of cool new effects. All in all, everything looks greatly improved, from the character models, to the items, to the environments. Players that purchase EQOA: Frontiers will have quite a few perks: a new player class to play: the ogre, more monsters to fight, redesigned and highly-detailed player character models, hundreds of new items, more quests, the ability to take your characters level up to 60, a new character class: the alchemist, three new cities and 24 giant dungeons. EQOA: Frontiers looks to be a worthy expansion.

PlanetSide - Core Combat was announced at this year’s Gamers’ Day. It’s going to offer players a whole new style of game play as well as addressing a variety of already existing game play issues that players have voiced their opinions about. Core Combat is going to introduce underground urban combat to the PlanetSide Universe. These giant underground caverns hold unique alien complexes contained within a variety of new environments from volcanic to ice. There will be new weapons and new vehicles as well as the ability for players to improve existing surface technology with items found underground. These items will encompass the new gameplay feature by having one faction take a power cube to the center of one of these caverns, powering it up, and then taking the power cube back outside to the surface, all while combating the other two factions who are trying to accomplish the same goal.

Lords of EverQuest is SOE’s first offering to the real-time strategy genre. The player will choose one of the 15 heroes to lead her army and then pick one of the three possible factions to do battle in over 36 missions that boast over 75 hours of gameplay. The three factions have 20 units each for a combined total of 60 unique unit types, all of which have the ability to gain levels via experience, which is acquired by killing enemy units. There are 15 difference races and 15 classes available in LOE. There are also over 125 properties with the spell and ability system, and hundreds of items and magical artifacts, many of which will be familiar to those who have played the online parent EverQuest; Kodiac’s Endless Intellect should ring a bell. Lords of EverQuest will of course have a multiplayer aspect with dozens of maps for you to slaughter your friends on. All of these features are being rendered using a beautiful new graphics engine created solely for Lords of EverQuest, and the player will be able to watch and command the action with a camera that zooms in and out as well as rotates 360 degrees.

Champions of Norrath is a RPG meets hack’n slash combo for the PlayStation 2 that uses an isometric birds-eye view of the player. The player will take part in a “save the world” epic adventure that will provide hundreds of hours of game play either by themselves or with three other players via the multiplayer mode (there is no monthly fee). The player will choose and then customize one of five possible classes and set out on their adventure through Norrath. There are thousands of items -- armor, weapons, artifacts, etc. -- that will be available to the player, and with the ability to upgrade equipment as well as buy, sell, and trade items with other players, no one player will ever have to worry about not being able to be unique enough. Each class also has 13 skills and/or spells that can be upgraded 20 times to increase not just the power, but how each functions as well. The game will have 50 levels to go along with non-linear side quests.

Taking MMORPGs to yet another level of complexity and scale, EverQuest II is going to be an amazing feat of engineering and creative collaboration from the creators of EverQuest. EQII is set 500 years after the original EverQuest MMORPG, during a time of rebuilding after a great cataclysmic occurrence. Players will be making up the survivors of this horrific event, emerging to start life anew and rebuild the greatness that was. The amount of content that is going into EQII is too numerous and detailed for this little preview, but here’s a quick run down of what’s to come: Unparalleled character customization: age, skin tone, eye color, hair color, etc.; thousands of spells and items to wear, wield and cast; player-owned real estate: apartments, homes and guild halls; an amazing new quest system that has to be seen to be believed; player controlled ships; a dedicated trade skill player class; and an amazingly detailed graphics engine that, much like the new quest system, has to be seen in action in order to be fully appreciated (the cloth physics are being used for more than just clothes). There will be 16 races, all of which but one, the rat people, will be familiar, and 48 classes to choose from. Those who have been playing EverQuest will find many familiar places still around as well as whole new areas to explore. Another cool tidbit about EQII is that there are only two starting towns, Qeynos and Freeport, and the farther you venture from these two locations, the more remote and dangerous the lands get. When asked if there are any other towns in the wilderness, I was told it will be up to the players to search out any surviving towns and those that dwell within. There is also word of incentive of those folks already playing EverQuest. What those are still unknown at this time.