AVALON MMO Q&A – Ex EverQuest Designer Talks Metaverse Concept, Generative AI Integration, Blockchain & More

wccftech.com:

Earlier this month, a new independent game development team called AVALON announced its highly ambitious namesake debut project. This MMO game seeks to largely deliver on the concept of the Metaverse as it was enunciated in Ernest Cline's seminal science fiction novel Ready Player One while also pushing the user-generated content trend forward and taking advantage of the latest technological advancements, including two different generative AI tools (Didimo's Popul8 and Inworld AI's Character Engine) that we previously covered on Wccftech.

The development team at AVALON is led by Jeffrey Butler, who was a producer on old-school MMORPGs like the original EverQuest and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, as well as a designer on the more recent (canceled) MMO EverQuest Next/Landmark, which also had a strong focus on UGC but never saw the light of day.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Butler in an hour-long Zoom call about everything AVALON, from the project's inception to its more controversial aspect (the inclusion of blockchain technology). Brace for a long but very interesting conversation.

How did you connect with Sean Pinnock to create this new company?

That's a great question. One of my old employees is working on an independent game, and he's also a popular streamer, discussing the state of the games industry and the quality of the games that he's been playing recently,

But he also does interviews with people that he's worked with over the years and he reached out to me. It was like the anniversary of EverQuest, so he wanted to do an EverQuest-themed interview. Our discussion ended up going on for three hours. We were on camera interviewing, and we had this massive, three-hour EverQuest discussion. About a year later, Sean