John Smedley (head of SOE) Q&A

[Mangala]

On Saturday at Fan Faire 2011 after the major announcements were made we had a chance to sit down with John Smedley and pick his brain on PlanetSide 2 and what it means to him and SOE.


Q. Can you elaborate a little bit on the free aspect that has been mentioned?

A. There will be a cash shop for the game however the goal is not to sell power. For example we would sell things like customization because we would like there to be a massive amount of ways to customize your characters. So people could recognize you or your outfit out of a group. We will not sell a more powerful gun or vehicle.

Q. Tell us more about how you would like to involve the community in PlanetSide 2 Development, and post release.

A. We will have the three year development plan as well as being active on the forums. We want to keep constant discussion open with the community and we plan to do that by directly interacting with the community.

Q. How important is PlanetSide 2 for SOE?

A. It's important to us and it's one of our big tent poles. We feel strongly about PlanetSide 2 and have dedicated a lot of resources to it.

Q. What are you most excited about with PlanetSide 2?

A. I am most excited to be playing it, this is the game that I want to play. I switch games I play every night and this is the game I am looking forward to playing every night.

Q. What was the biggest lesson you learned from PlanetSide when it comes to building the sequel?

A. Number 1 would be to keep the pace faster, things like the sanctuaries have no place in the game and slowed things down too much. Also we need to support the communities deep love for PlanetSide throughout.

Q. What are your plans to keep players involved for the long term. How do skills and training play into that? What are your plans for "End Game" for hard core players.

A. We plan on announcing a 3 year post launch vision for the game to go into detail on this. We will take fan feedback and alter the plan and really listen to the community feedback.

Q. If you could play one Sony game for the rest of your life what would it be?

A. PlanetSide for sure.

Taken from PSU

So there will be some MT to it, and fingers crossed NEVER guns (I learned to not take Smed at his word years ago), but overall he is pretty invested in this personally, so I am going to sit and watch and wait.

[Mangala]

One thing someone said elsewhere about the MT side that I kinda hope will happen:

Quite what this means isn’t clear, although it sounds promising. I am hoping it will mean that we get free reserves to keep the numbers up and a premium option for the more dedicated players.

Maybe an F2P option - with no P2W side to it - will be there so there should be plnety of players around, if anything for folks like me who will pay money to play PS2 have fodder for outfits