SOE considering a "Cataclysm " of its own for EverQuest II

John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, has said the developers of EverQuest II have been considering a a game-wide reset for the game for quite some time now.

Speaking in and interview with Kotaku, Smedley said what Blizzard is doing with WoW and Cataclysm is like hitting a "reset button".

"We are looking at it closely, we have been for a number of years now," he said. "Is it something we would do within the next expansion cycle? Probably not. But I think it's interesting.

"I think World of Warcraft is looking great. I think it's going to bring a lot of people back into the game; they hit the reset button. We have five years of World of Warcraft experience behind us to know that people that play EverQuest II don't play World of Warcraft. We don't see big dips in concurrency. We see a tiny drop for awhile.

"The reason I respect Blizzard so much is that they don't make massive mistakes. They have the goods and they know it. So why not take a risk like that?

"We've been reluctant to do that in the past but the size of their user base means that more risk could make their game potentially larger."

EverQuest II was released in November 2004.