Hello!
Some of you may remember me as Froech, one of the Producers working on this game before we launched. I was away from the team for a couple of years, and have to say that they have done a spectacular job in keeping the game fresh, compelling, and fun to play. We will continue that tradition!
The game has changed substantially in the years I've been away. In fact, if you haven't played it in the last three months, you'd be happily surprised at how much additional great game play has been put into it. This team has spent so much of their efforts in making it more accessible that it's hard to comprehend. There is a ton more fun and exciting single-player content than ever before -- so much so that you can now get to max level just by soloing. Of course, you probably shouldn't, but at least you can get some meaningful play time in when you're not able to get a pickup group, or meet up with your friends and guild mates! There have been so many additional features added that it's hard to figure out where to start. With just this latest expansion alone, the team has added a new minimap system, new racial abilities for each race, a new tradeskill interface...and we're already working on more for the future!
Scott may be leaving us, and we'll certainly miss him, as he's done an outstanding job, but the game itself is made by an incredible team of individuals who are staying on so that they can continue to provide you with the outstanding game play you expect. I'm delighted to be working with such a talented group of people.
It seems odd to be writing this missive...some of you may know me from before, but some of you don't, so I'll do my best to shine the light in on areas you may be curious about.
First off, who am I? That's one of the questions of the ages, but I'll do my best to let you know a little bit of what's inside. You see, it all started way back...oh, you probably don't really care about that aspect. Let's talk about gaming. I played lots of games with my parents as a child. Growing up as an American in Europe who lived in the countryside provided lots of opportunity for the family to be together. It also gave me the opportunity to learn a bit about foreign cultures, but that's a story for another time. We eventually moved back to the states and I started playing coin op video games. Pong. Space Fighter. The earliest coin-op machines out there. But soon enough, as my father was a software engineer, we had an Apple ][+ and I was porting code from the Basic that ran on my High School's HP2000 over to AppleSoft, and from there I was playing lots of the new games made for the Apple like Temple of Apshai and Warp Factor. Intermixed with all of this was the exciting world of local BBSes. Being in the Washington DC area, there were quite a few that weren't a long distance call away, and the 300 baud modem, along with x/y and zModem protocols made life quite entertaining....and if your eyes haven't glazed over yet, you're probably as old as I am!
It wasn't long before we had a Mac, and I found online games on the Genie network, settling in on a particular game called GemStone III. In these primitive times, if we had more than 50 people on the server, everyone would be preparing for a crash...and there was only the one server. Eventually, as I had moved my way through managing several different hotels in my "real" life, and then started working in mortgage banking, I realized that I was having much more fun being "online", as I had become an offsite GM for the game. The company that ran GemStone III was moving off of Genie, AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe, and was setting up to do it's own Customer Service and Billing area on the up and coming new wave of technology, the internet. I joined them, helping to build and manage the billing and customer service infrastructure in 1997. After several years of working there, the siren call of SOE wafted into my consciousness, and I came over to work as community manager and project manager for a game that we never released. However, it got my face recognized, and when we split that team up, I was promoted to Producer and brought on board with the up and coming EverQuest II team, which was still in early production. Scott and I worked quite closely through launch, and then for a little over a year afterwards, when I was pulled off to work on other areas in the company. Eventually, I was reassigned to game development for SOE's newest upcoming game title Free Realms, and now back to my true home, EverQuest II.
I want to thank all of you for your constant support of EverQuest II. You are the reason we keep doing what we do.
Froech
Bruce A. Ferguson
Senior Producer, EverQuest II
