Another Link from Cody

While cruising my old stomping grounds (EQ, EQ2) I came across a link to the Sony Online Entertainment artists' blog, the 'SOE Art Portal'.

They've got some great articles and art. There's a few 'how we make game characters' type articles that are a good read.

For those of you unfamiliar with SOE or Everquest, they basically set the stage for what we know as the modern MMO. While UO popped up first, it was 2D and very much a role playing game with little structure. Everquest came several years later (1999) with full 3D, an oldschool leveling treadmill, and the earliest real form of Raiding. It took the oldest fantasy archetypes (Paladin, Wizard, Rogue, Monk, Warrior, Ranger, and plenty more) and placed them into a quite large world that was very unforgiving. We're talking experience and sometimes level loss for death, and a very punishing experience curve which included 'hell levels' that required significantly more experience to get through than previous regular levels, at arbitrary points in your characters life. Hey, you're 35 now? It's a hell level, enjoy!

While much of the archaic designs are just that, it's good to know where something like World of Warcraft came from. In WoW, the traditional rigid archetypal structure of Everquest, and the things before it live on. Imagine if you will for a moment, that Ultima Online was the progenitor of the modern MMO; a game that had no classes, no levels, only skills much like EVE Online that let you build your character how you wanted within certain limits, and those skills raised only by actually using them. Shoot an arrow, get better at archery, you get the idea. It was also an early version of the Sandbox MMO, the model that EVE, Darkfall and Shadowbane use.

Well, anyways, check out the link here or on the sidebar.

SOE Art Portal

They're on my list of places to apply to.