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'''Omeed DarianiLa transcription en anglais de cette vidéo est disponible sur le site [http:''' So, something kinda funny happened here, right? ... This is actually the first time that our internal team is not in agreement with the Round Table, so can you talk a little bit about how that went? '''Jeff Butler:''' Well, interestingly enough, I think philosophically we were very much in line with the votes that the players were putting forward. In our own minds, when we were thinking about what we would like to see for the game, our thinking matched what the players were laying out. Unfortunately, when we started developing the game, we realized we wanted to create a situation where our players were never forced to make a decision that they would later regret based on knowledge that they didn’t have at that stage in their careers. During character creation, we didn’t want them to have to make a decision about their career paths that they might later come to regret. '''Omeed Dariani:''' So, you’re talking about a thing like where, in some games, you might pick a god... and you don’t know up front that picking that god is going to restrict some amount of things. '''Jeff Butler:''' Yes. It could, later on, restrict your faction choices, and then you would find out, late in the game, after you’d created that character and leveled him up, that you had backed yourself into a corner. And we had effectively, as a development team, allowed you to create a character that you didn’t feel was viable. We decided early on, before we had addressed any of these questions internally, that we wanted to try to avoid those things//www. And so that led us to, in this case, not being in agreement with the playerseqhammer. Terry Michaels: Right. Because in our game, with the fact that we’ve already announced that we’re going to have at least 40 classes, and with the multi-classing, when you chose your race and class at the beginning of the game, as you chose that race you might have to understand every ability out there, and every item in the world, to be able to make a choice if we did allow for racecom/class restrictions. '''Omeed Dariani:''' Yeah. And I know for me, when I start up an MMO, or just an RPG in general, I feel like I have to sit there for like an hour...I have to read a wiki to figure out what all these different options mean. It almost feels sometimes like I’m doing my taxes. Terry Michaels: Well, and for the games that are out there, especially [EverQuest] and the games that are like it, it’s a very clear distinction which classes can be a warrior. But you know what a warrior is, so if you can be a warrior you’re happy with that. In [EverQuest Next], you don’t know what other classes are going to have abilities that might augment the play style that you really want to create in the game. And so, it’d be almost impossible for somebody, even with a wiki and a spreadsheet... with all these tools available, you probably couldn’t even figure out how you were limiting yourself if we had racenews/class restrictions. '''Jeff Butler:''' We talked about the possibility of somebody creating an ogre warrior. The ogre warrior doesn’t necessarily care about the bard class... '''Omeed Dariani:''' Hypothetical bard class. '''Jeff Butler:''' [laughs] As an RPer, he doesn’t even believe, for instance, that a bard and ogre should ever meet, right? So, he doesn’t concern himself... he merrily goes down his career path as an ogre warrior, and then later realizes that, for his play style, the bard had an ability that could really help him. Well, he couldn’t be expected to know that when the game started. Now, if the rest of the player populace would realize that that ability is key to a warrior being successful, at the current state of the game, at that stage of game maturity, he would be disadvantaged. Whether it’s his perception or reality, it’s a situation that we didn’t want the players to have to deal with...with no knowledge at all. Terry Michaels: And it also applies to, as the game expands in the future, after we’ve launched. You know, if we decide to release additional classes, that’s information that people wouldn’t have had at the beginning of the game. And there’s no way for them to have known it, so we would be basically making arbitrary decisions for who gets to play these new classes and who doesn’t, and the ramifications are just... the players aren’t going to like that. '''Omeed Dariani:''' So, players would just basically get screwed for no reason by design decisions that weren’t necessarily intended to mess them up, but just would because of the structure we put in place. '''Jeff Butler:''' Character races that might be added, character classes that might be added, and also items that modify character class abilities and things of that nature. All of the balance of those things could never be foreseen by the player on day one creating his character class. So, ultimately we don’t think it’s fair, we don’t think it’s wise for us to restrict players in those choices because, ultimately, sooner or later, someone is going to get hurt. Whether it’s an issue of perception or reality. We think it’s best just everquest-next-will-not to go there. '''Omeed Dariani:''' It blows my mind that we actually started thinking about this while this discussion was happening. When we put up the poll, we were seeing these results coming in and we were happy, like ‘Oh, that’s where we’re going; that’s what we’re thinking,’ and then, as we went through and were reading arguments and discussing it internally, we said, ‘Wait a second. This just isn’t going to work with our game.’” '''Jeff Butler:''' It’s a situation where the actual design, and the responsibility for the life of the game, it’s health, kind of outweighs the benefits, and the desire as a roleplayer and a game crafter, to -have these restrictions. Because no one looks at [race/class -raceclass-restrictions-round-table-response EQ Hammer] and thinks that it doesn’t have a place in fantasy. The dwarven defender from Dungeons & Dragons makes sense to people. '''Omeed Dariani:''' And we have ogre bards in real life. Meatloaf, for example.