Heroes never die

by Rodolfo Rosini

So,

Was digging through some old folders and found a couple of documents that might be of interest. These are very early documents of our work on EverQuest Next. At the time we wanted to do AI storytelling but Sony was clear that they were only interested in combat AI and that we should stick to it. These were our proposals and we did other work, with a much bigger scope after that.

The first document is the initial pitch after we were told the scope of the game that is now public (at this point we hadn’t seen anything about the game) and it wasn’t clear how many features we would have to develop for the final product. As you can see Magic (the card game) was a huge influence on the prototyping stage.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jxzgb52360v04dl/EQN%20AI%20Proposal%20-%20RR.pdf?dl=0

 

The second document was our proposal for a demo of the AI combat system, and that was what helped us advance the discussion for our involvement in EQN. It’s pretty dry but page 2 gives you an idea of how we felt about the problem, and that adding AI combat for us was just a small step in a grander vision of an AI-driven game.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9kb03hot2552osx/Storybricks%20Combat%20AI%20Proposal.docx?dl=0

 

Have some more documents but the earliest NDA with SOE I have found was signed after these documents were produced. I have done my due diligence and if there is a disagreement please produce the documents that show otherwise.

A lot of people contributed to this, mostly Stéphane Bura, Dave Mark, Sam Baker, and Brian Green.

I have several non-EQN related documents about Storybricks but re-reading them I get really embarrassed by the naïveté I had at the time related to game design (the AI was surprisingly spot-on) so not really keen to share. Others were game pitches of stuff that I or Stéphane might do one day (we built a lot of concepts) so no dice.

The design for the slides was shamelessly ripped off from Tim Cain.

Again want to stress how great is to use Magic to prototype game ideas. Try it.