Brian Crecente with a rather interesting interview piece with SOE’s John Smedley (among others):

EverQuest Next Landmark, free-to-play like all of Sony Online Entertainment’s games, hits this winter and uses the same building tools used by developers to create Next, but gamifies the process so players need to mine for material and craft, while building in the varied terrain.

That sounds familiar; not sure where I have heard about something like that before…

The solution is to create a game that uses multi-classing. There are no levels in Next, but there will be more than 40 distinct “professions” to choose from at launch. Each of those professions will have their own multi-tiered abilities and specialized weapon skills to collect and master.

Yup. Definitely getting some déjà vu.

Players can sell their creations to one another for real money for use, if appropriate, in either or both games. Players can also sell particularly good creations to Sony Online Entertainment for an “appropriate” fee.

“If we get one million people playing Landmark,” Georgeson said, “and ten percent start making things, and ten percent of those finish and ten percent of that isn’t crap, that’s still a thousand people making cool stuff. And we don’t have 1,000 people on the development team.”

I’ve got it! At some point, maybe they should take a look at the balance sheets for Star Wars: Galaxies and see how that went.