I’ll never forget being in beta 1 medding in s.ro on the beach and Aradune being played by Brad came up to my group and chatted us up for 15 minutes asked us how we liked the game and how things where going, didn’t know at the time how cool that was . I was mesmerized by his flaming sword

WOW, as a 20 year player who absolutely loves EQ, I can honestly say this is one of the best interviews I've seen in years regarding EQ. I knew very little of Jeff Butler mainly as one of the Key-Men of Vanguard days, I had no idea of his involvement in EQ at the level he presented, this closed many of the questions I've had about EQ over the years. You made my day, thank you! Well done!!

Great talk. I worked at a restaurant in Mira Mesa, CA running into EQ employees. I started playing, eventually became a EQ guide, and played end game in PoP and GoD. Loved my years in EQ.

I miss Vanguard so much. So much.

"The Archives" as a gaming company that kept old games running for small player bases, would be the coolest place to work in gaming, I think. Like a museum to start/end your career in.

Very cool interview love it. When jeff speaks about not having a minimap, having to know how to get from one area to another, and having to rely or ask/pay another person in the world to guide you. Having the world feel like oh man that is on the other continent its a tough journey to get there, I could die and lose all my gear on my corpse. That is a giant part of what made Everquest really magical to me especially compared to mmos nowadays! Also finding a druid or a shaman to sow you on journey, or finding a wizard to teleport you or a cleric to rez you. Really encouraged a lot of social interaction that is almost completely missing from modern mmos.

I loved Vanguard, the big space, the sense of exploration, the music, the places, Khal

I was in the first rush of players, and there was never anything like it before or after. Thank you for helping deliver this experience. I can't tell you how much it means to me.

This content should hold me over until another quality high-fantasy/DnD-like mmorpg releases.

Thank you so much for this interview! Been a EQ player for 20 years on and off.

That folder of 10,000 screenshots of the content/armor from Vanguard that Jeff was most proud of that he mentioned....I would really love to see those. Or even just a selection.

When my guild started moving through PoP and we were keying up for Time, I had to F9 and go top down, no spell effects to do the content. I never saw anything but the tops of our heads for 5-7 hours a night. It got so crazy I'd run with my box open and box fan blowing on the card. Crazy times in tech!

I wish they had built and launched Vanguard with half the content they did and built on it slowly. Nurse it through it's birth and look towards the long term. I had, for the time, a bleeding edge computer and it could barely run it. You could build and run your own boat. I've never seen that again.

I'm not sure how much of a stretch this would be to pull off, but it would be awesome if you could get Tigole on here. It would be super cool to hear about the high end raiding experience as well as the transition to blizzard and working on wow. Just feels like there's so much content for discussion. Also now that he's left blizzard he may be more open to talking about cool shit.

I spent 2500$ on a PC with a voodoo 2 video card and had to take a loan out on my truck to get it , when i discovered EQ back in 99' ;)

I’ve spent my whole life trying to get back to those magic moments connecting to a BBS as a teenager and discovering MUD’s. I’ve had many moments that were close. But never that level of magic.

I actually really liked Vanguard. I felt it had a lot of promise and sort of seemed like it got abandoned when all it needed was just a bit more love. I was very sad to see EQN not make it. There were so many interesting ideas there. I have a feeling that Blizzard stumbling and WoW having a lot of core issues would have given EQN a ready audience.

I’m really excited for this! Great interviews!

We need an eq1 remake It doesn’t need that much Better combat, new models that look like the old ones but like 50x more poly count It would be amazing

I absolutely love this series of interviews. Thank you

Just opened this up to see its 3 hours long. I've never been happier in my life.

Ive now watched all of your Everquest history videos and I happened to save the most interesting interview til the very end without even knowing it haha! I am so glad to finally understand the history of Everquest and MMOs from the Developer side, having been a player all of my life. (EQ 21 years) I did help out with bugs on p2002 and beta test some things, but it wasnt until I decided to build my own photography Gallery in Decentraland and work on portable experiences through wearable clothing that I really started to get a feel of being a/the builder, creator, & Developer. Jeff's insights in this interview were so deep. I watch most videos at 2x speed and I had to listen to this one on normal speed and go back over and over to re-listen to what he was saying because of how profound it was. Keep the interviews coming, they are Legendary!

As on of the EQ beta testers, I absolutely loved this very informative interview, thank you

Brad's dream of graphical MUDs was probably best realized by EverQuest. Of course I'd like to think it could still be done better-and evidently so did he, given Vanguard and Pantheon-but in all the existing MMOs to date, I think it's the one that still orbits nearest that goal. As long as you're in P99, that is. :p Don't think I ever played TorilMUD, but whenever lately I hear about Brad's ambitions and tastes, it sounds like they're talking about me and my playstyle, as well as the hopes and dreams I had for the genre, to which it has seemed to move so perpendicular. Jeff talking about how he doesn't want "a throwback" I understand in terms of wanting to push envelopes and innovate and refine, especially since he's had to fight against suits and VCs who wanted to dumb things down for consoles all the time. But I think too often that fear of rolling some elements back sets a trend in a prescribed direction that is The Way Forward, cutting off possibilities for other futures as it barrels on.

All of these interviews are great! Thank you 🤙🏻

As someone who considers EQ one of my favorite games of all time. I have nothing but respect for a lot of these guys that had a big part in creating it and making it what it is. I will say it does seem like a difference in philosophy between someone like Brad and someone like Jeff boils down a big part of my issue with modern MMO's. Jeff appears to see a lot of mechanics as more of a "kick in the nuts". Things like corpse recoveries and losing your items and so on. All the more punishing aspects of EQ. He's not necessarily wrong but I think what Brad saw and a lot of people fail to see is those things are ESSENTIAL to the entire risk/reward premise. There NEEDS to be mechanics that kick you in the nuts for making mistakes. Otherwise you end up with the watered down bland generic MMO's we see today. Where you have virtually no penalty for misplay and you mindlessly drone your way through the game not really caring too much about your choices and never really feeling much of a sense of danger. I'm probably in the minority here since all the popular MMO's of todays age have largely gotten rid of a lot of these things. But I long for the days when you were scared out of your mind diving deeper and deeper into a difficult unknown dungeon on a character full of awesome items knowing full well there's a possibility you die and it'll be a very difficult endeavor to get your stuff back and maybe in some rare cases you can't get it back and its just gone. In 23 years of playing EQ (beta phase 3) I can say I never actually lost a corpse that mattered. A few times on an alt with gear that wasn't important sure. But I never lost my main characters corpse once. COUNTLESS times I was worried that I might though and that results in a feeling unlike any other game in recent memory. It's a big part of what made EQ magical and I wish more developers in modern times realized that.

This was a great interview. Really enjoyed it!

Bring vanguard back! Fantastic game for reboot

I've never wanted to win the mega millions so bad in my life. Just hire the best people to create the game everyone has been waiting for since eq

Luclin in my heart made EverQuest whole. When I looked up and seen that the moon had a moon, and then running around the world finding the lore about it. It was kind of a spiritual journey

Really interesting discussion, thanks for sharing

Excellent interview! I didn't realize how hard it was to implement mounts. I do, however, remember a thread on the old EQ forums around that time that went into great depth about the "new" horse models. It was memorable because the dev appeared to be really interested in the community feedback based off the extensive back and forth posting. There were pictures of real horses, skeletal structure, videos of their gate, and other items comparing real world to the in game models. I believe the dev also posted design iterations based off that discussion, but I may be wrong since that was a while ago. 😀 Thank you for the trip down memory lane, and I look forward to your next interview.

I really just want eq1 in its entirety with new graphics but just as complicated and hard

That was a brilliant episode, it's so good to get these little insights and glimpses into the thoughts and processes and tech used in making mmo's. Nice once.

Awesome conversation from some REAL old school EQ'ers - nice job, Loving Robot! :)

I wish one of these EQ devs would explain the presence of an actual mob hidden in many zones named "pain and suffering" and if early on in the game that is what they used for "pain and suffering strikes YOU for xx damage" when you were dying. Because I used to camp a pain and suffering mob in like the Toxx forest area that was clearly meant to be hidden away, had an instant respawn rate, was level 50, gave level 50 exp, and only hit for like 1-7 damage per hit, had the "shadowed man" model as well, but with no weapons, so it was invisible, but targetable. Power leveled very quickly on this mob and was NEVER approached by a GM/guide at all, and I did this for months.

Back in the days of playing Everquest and World of Warcraft was just about to come out. I remember reading about things that were going to be in WoW and being like these are VERY cool concepts, and then look at how big it ended up being. As someone who had put money into Everquest Next (to have it turn into you've invested in landmark) I was saying the same things about features that were going to be in Next. I was hooked (more so then I had ever been for any game) I read all the little lore books that they had made for the story. When they news feed came out that they were canceling the project for "tests are proving that it's just not that fun to play" I was baffled and heartbroken.

I've really enjoying binge streaming these tonight. I have a solid, breezy IP that I would like to release to Jeff Butler, and I'm ready at this very second to pitch it drunkenly.

Great interview!

I love Vanguard! I really loved that game.

Crazy to hear the Conquest story from your side of it. I played on Lanys and it was such a big deal at the time. I never thought it would live in infamy to this day :D

A "cyberpunk" type mmo reminds me of Anarchy Online, that game was awesome back in the day, one of the only games I played other than original EQ and EQ2 back in the day for any significant amount of time.

Vanguard Saga of heroes emulator is up, if you loved vanguard and still wanna play, hop on!

//gm listen right? OG EQ GMs could listen in on player conversations. I am in game dev and one of the guys I work with is an ex Everquest GM. The story came up because he was telling me about how he was running around on his GM character and opened a random Kelethin hut and saw two players sitting a little to close. Curious, he used the command and found some crazy cyber-sex roleplay going on. Lots of funny stories. Also lots of crazy stories about your old parties when shit was really kicking off. Jeff seems like a great producer and someone who really cared about his community and the product itself. You don't really see that too much anymore. You see a lot of studios just trashing their products and brands for money. You really need people like Jeff who understand and stand up for the game. I was reading some histories about American comics and one of the publishing executives wanted to take Batman and turn him into a gun toting, machine gun wielding hero because Batman was selling less on the shelves then these newer action heroes. And if they didn't adapt to the changing times then Batman would be cut from their character roster. Even threatening them that if that happened that everyone in the studio would lose their jobs. But they were adamant that the only gun Batman will touch will be when hes grabbing it out of a Villain's hands. Batman survived and came back. Then from there the leaders would comb over every frame and every page from all the new artists they had to hire to ensure that Batman was always Batman. Now, 1939 to 2022, almost a 100 years of Batmans life, he is one of the most recognizable brands worldwide, in the likes of Coca-Cola. You really do need people like that. From Software has done the same. They stuck to their guns even though people thought Demon's Souls was too hard and wasn't going to compare to, hold on let me look it up. Ok the God of War out sold Demon's Souls by literally orders of magnitude. They stuck to their guns and have defined an entire genre of hardcore, western style RPGs. Players and developers literally refer to this style of game as Souls-Like, SoulsBorne-Like. Akin to Rogue-Like. You guys had that before them. When FromSoftware was making Kings Field games, you had EverQuest. If you had different management and a different vision people would be saying EQ-Like, or EverQuest-Like today.

yuss, Thank you for this. Just subscribed.

Jeff Butler: One of my favorite EQ producers at SOE

Another great interview. It's sad to hear of the office difficulties that impacted EQ and the staff. Sadly, it seems this is common place in workplace environments, even today.

really wish you would ask the question of : why cant we just reskin eq and re release it

Vanguard is the only game I miss.

I absolutely would have DIED if Luclin gnomes had a Naruto run animation oh my god.

R.i.P. Master Baiter Feelsgood the resident Fishing Monk of the Plane of Knowledge on Brell Serillis. Sad day when that poor awesome guy had to change his name.

That was fantastic

Great interview. I was on the first FV kill. I jokingly said in chat when we started the raid "I bet she drops a necro robe", when we finally killed her, she dropped 2 necro robes with the same stats as the quest robes. (Still think it is in the bank on my necro).

Need these on Spotify, so i can enjoy my commutes to work!

I seriously wish I had a chance to try eq next. That game looked so awesome.

Love the mug , its huge ! I dig it tho , need something to hold enough java for a 3hr interview! These interviews are really explaining alot of things that players only see the surface of. Thank you!!!

Would love to hear you guys talk about Pantheon and Ashes of creation sometime. I start EQ in May of 99 and am still playing but it seems the enthusiasm from the Devs has waned.

My buddy got to beta in oct in 1998 I never got to play the beta but I remember the feeling I had when seeing Everquest for the 1st time. Truly mind blowing moment made UO complete trash overnight.

best game i have ever played and probably ever will.

I remember the night grobb was raided by the frogloks and taken over. Fires of Heaven members were physically barricading the entrance while their guildies were inside take all the spoils of the event to themselves. In 1999 my mom moved my family to TN to be with a guy she met on that server, the veeshan server. Which I picked when the game booted up for the first time. I still live in TN. such an inconsequential decision ended up shaping my life in a way i never could have anticipated, and that's just one of a few ways haha. When he said Fires of Heaven i couldn't help but get triggered they were so selfish that night lmao

Brad man, we sure miss you

1:47 almost sounds like he has seen my minecraft norrath project. after eq next died and didnt respawn I began making it because the fully destructible and more importantly constructible world really grabbed me. so im making my own version of eq next for myself instead with all the cites and dungeons. sure it wont be super detailed, but to be honest I think minecraft has more polygons in it than the original zones in the first few expansions do. it was fun figuring out how to render the disjoined collection of zones into something resembling a real world terrain map. im about to add luclin soon too which you worked on, ive always loved the space cats on the moon expansion. looking forward to hearing the rest of this later tonight when I have time! 😅👍 edit: this is my most recent world tour vid if you want to click through it and see: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n7WmlZypxtndgoE.html

"Lineage 2" the way he pronounces 'Lineage' makes go into a berzerker frenzy.

Nice interview. I feel where he is coming from, but I also think that in a newer voxel-sandbox-eq he doesn't need as much pre-assembled work as he thinks. The thing about old EQ was that people themselves were the content. (especially on Rallos Zek where i played) If you give the players the tools to innovate, and police it properly, it will take on a life of it's own. It doesn't need as many preplanned theme park elements in it, and more can be added once the foundation is established. I'd like to see what's left of the original EQ team partner with something like Rockstar games to push out that kind of an MMO.

Long time player of EQ here. So glad it's still live. I like the PeeWee Herman reference in your gnome.

I would like to be able to form concise explanations like Jeff.

there's a SUPER interesting blog post by JamesVZ on the old Elitist Jerks forums about the Conquest Sleeper controversy gotta look it up on the wayback machine, but it's there! Posted 10/05/10 if you wanna look it up-don't want to post links.

You mentioned GM's in the game...Nocnivin was our GM on Tribunal...she left right before SOL...then while raiding...we see NOCNIVIN'S book of LOGIC! pretty cool to name that item after her! She also made me name change from DRLove...but got me back the FBSS that somehow was lost in EC tunnel purchase!

I was a pre-order on EQ Next

Wow, I like Jeff Butler a lot. I would move closer to him just to play D&D with him.

Royalties to employees?! That's so crazy to even think about. How did that work? P.S. I loved having to memorize where I was going in EQ, Brad had the right idea when it came to that.

Could you please reduce the bass on your microphone or on the equalizer output? The general audio levels are very low and I have to increase the volume to compensate which then boosts the bass in your microphone. Thanks.

So Enjoyable listening to this, so many great times, Loved both games. Nkat Burglar (EQ) Anvil Oathbreaker Vanguard. I still say Vanguard had the best Crafting in any game. The " Firsts" were Great. I even had made a BP that should not have been in the game. Had the Lead GM sit and watch me make it, twice. He said Good Job it is now in the game.

Watching this solo'ing in unrest makes me keep looking for Sean's character XD

I sometimes just login into Vanguard emulator to remember the fun I had.

Everquest Next seemed like it had such incredible potential, then someone decided they would turn it into a Minecraft clone. So disappointing. There was technology being displayed that could have altered the MMO RPG genre, destructive environment, and crafting potential, but the best was the tech that would make your character's expressions mirror your own. I haven't seen any other game offer that since, and it would be incredible for immersive roleplaying. As a person who participated as a founder, I was sad to see the game disappear.

My mate created a character called Sonysuckcock and he got into the game for 10s at most before dropping out and when he logged back in his name had changed

were the new player models to allow the mounts to work then?

I miss Landmark SOOO MUCH!

What makes me wonder is why Jeff Butler partnered up with Brad again after Brad overruled the team on Tigole and Furor's issues.

Aw you have a Keeshond! Hope he's calmer than mine.

Me starting everquest was delayed by 6 months after launch due to not having a 3d graphics card. I first heard about the game during beta as one of my coworkers was a beta tester.

I loved this discussion. I've moved onto other games but EQ will always be #1 for nostalgia. Currently playing and enjoying New World although it needs about 3x more content than it currently has, but taking the gamble Amazon will stick by it and keeps adding to it and pull a "no man's sky" At around 2 hr 50 min mark there's some comment about a pixel art mmo or crypto MMO currency... These are two things that really turn me off. I have a hard time playing stardew valley even though it's the best of its genre because of the graphics. And with the currency thing, there's no way to make features like crypto mmo currency possible without crossing the P2W line.

Jeff Butler should be running Daybreak Games.

What about the Swimming Exploit that would send you to the "safe spot" in a zone if you attempted to zone while swimming? I used this to traverse the Karana's in minutes.

I always thought Brad got too much credit for EQ but the more of these videos I watch, the more it feels like he was surrounded by absolute fools. He has his Vanguard cofounder telling him the EQ1 successor should be more like WoW and minecraft?? Jeff then moves on to EQ Next and crashes harder than Vanguard, which shouldn't even be possible. Brad was the consistent voice promoting immersive, D&Desque gameplay. Though he stepped on every possible rake during Vanguard, at least he understood why Everquest was so good. Most of his coworkers did not.

haha I like at 14:50 how he glances at his monitor "oh crap!" and casually casts FD

EQ NEXT WAS AHEAD OF ITS TIME! IF IT CAME OUT IN 2019 IT WOUOD BLOW PEOPLE OUT OF THE WATER. I SAID WHAT I SAID.

I played EQ for a long time - then EQ 2. I remember the hopes for Vanguard, and the massive hype (at least for EQ players). I remember really liking the game because how they did the cleric was really cool and unique to play. I always thought it was a shame how that game fizzled out, and EQ next fizzled out. Honestly at the time it seemed like EQ2 was the start of the death of EQ... because if you wanted to do it right you would just have a reboot of EQ with maybe a new engine. I think the new players were confused on which game to go with so they just went with WoW after it dropped. EQ ate up a few years of my life at the time. Amazing gaming when it was new, and I lasted until just after Gates of Discord... then went casual EQ2 off and on for probably 10 years. Now I might log on once a year just to see what the vibe of the game is.

Never had a chance to play vanguard. I think my bro did since he had a box. I wish I had. Bring it back !! LOL

I just want to know why all the raid content we tested before release in Vanguard disappeared and never came back.

The worst CS sin happened to me during the debacle over claim flags in EQ Landmark. The initial selling price angered so many players that the President of the company quickly wrote a letter of apology to the community and lowered the price by 60%. But they didn't refund the difference to my account, and CS just said that 'all sales are final'. To add insult to injury, I had purchased lots of flags and more store credits from DBG specifically to support the new owners, even though I already had several hundred bucks lying around on various accounts. But I'm now grateful for that ripoff because it cured me of being a gaming Whale, then they lost lots more money rather than me when they killed the game.

Original Super Mario Brothers with modern Final Fantasy cutscenes. Perfectly acceptable.

so what is Jeff working on now? did i miss it or was it not mentioned?

The sebilite golem models were the origin of the Naruto run.

Commiserating about Stabuass, Tigole Bitties and Punk against the backdrop of Imaloner Dottie, Neehigh, and Painiscoming is still funny after the fact.

It's too bad they couldn't Reboot Vanguard SOH that wouuld be super epic.

from a true everquest fan boy with massive love for the game the idea of voxels was stupid and the downfall. we didnt need to make a break through. i wish it would have just updated graphics and redone the good parts of the game play from project 1999 up to the last point where it worked but updated with focus on lore story and collectability. It would have been fun and everyone would have been playing it right now. i really hope someone gets that ip and does right by it.

Still don't know where that 280m went with SWTOR. Good voice acting =).

I had my minstrels random generated name in DOAC changed from Annyss to Annemmy made a scout named Annyss. Still have it and rvred with her at 50. The misntrels name was changed before she hit 20