EverQuest II Extended Interview

There's a new Q&A with Sony Online's Dave Georgeson on Ten Ton Hammer, during which the EverQuest II producer addresses quite a few questions about the "soft" and "official" launches of the game's new free-to-play business model. A sampling:
Ten Ton Hammer: We know that you can't talk numbers, but can you give us an idea of how many new players you've seen coming in or coming over from Live?

Dave Georgeson: I can give you a percentage. Out of the people who are playing EQ2X, fully half of them are completely new to the game. They've never registered a credit card; they've never made a character before; they have never played EQ2 as far as we can find out. So that's cool. We're getting some fresh blood into the mix. As far as people who are transferring over from EQ2 Live, the numbers have actually been very low. That was expected because people have so many ties to the existing server, with their friend circles and guilds. The numbers have been pretty low. There has been some transferring over, but not a significant percentage.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Let's turn to future content. Are there any plans to update some of the older zones, such as Freeport sewers, where nothing is going on and the population is about zero, to add some spice to them?

Dave Georgeson: Yes, we do. After Velious, we're hoping to, and I don't want us to commit to hard here, but let's just say that we've been talking about Freeport and Qeynos a lot. It's funny that you mention the Freeport sewers because just yesterday, I was talking to one of the designers about the fact that it is such a chore to do the level 20 armor quests because you have to slog all through this gray stuff and navigate through mazes of sewers to get down to the point where you're actually at the place where you do the quest. We were talking about making the manhole covers access points so you can just leap to different levels. There are a lot of different things that we're discussing, but Qeynos and Freeport are very big, much loved iconic things in our game. We would like to make them special places to be, and we're going to be spending serious effort on those.