EverQuest: The Buried Sea Wrap Report

Development Timeline Holly Longdale: The first discussions on The Burning Sea began during beta of the previous expansion, The Serpent's Spine. In order to keep this crazy, but unstoppable machine known as the EQ team running at its usual efficiency, we keep its wheels turning. Often, that means switching gears when the pressure is on. It's very difficult to do, but this team is so flexible that they've nailed that part of the job.

While other designers added content to each other's zones, there was always one person overseeing its development and keeping track of the content, while the leads ensured consistency from zone to zone. It worked really well.

As far as our schedules go, we are in a fairly unique position compared to a lot of other studios. We're ALWAYS on time. When we start slipping, we work harder or divvy up the work. One way or another, we manage to stick to the target dates without working 90-hour weeks. We're pretty lucky! Changes and Enhancements Travis McGeathy: The Buried Sea was done on a pretty tight timeline, with five months from the launch of the previous product to this one's. In those circumstances, it's important that the initial design is robust, and the EverQuest team has done this enough times now that we've got it down to a science, so there weren't many changes from the initial design to what we launched with.

The one major exception is that we changed the focus of the raid content halfway through. The initial design called for a series of high-end raids targeted at the difficulty level of the raid content in our last product, The Serpent's Spine. As we started to get into it though, we decided that we wanted to do something different. The previous expansion had a lot of raid content already, and the only players who were really exhausting it in the five months between the launch of that expansion and this one were the top-most guilds in the game who were looking for more challenge. This led us to change the focus of the zone from standard raid content to what we termed a "challenge zone". The raid content was specifically built to challenge, and likely best, the top guilds in the game with the idea that if they were able to defeat it, they'd not only gain access to incredible loot, but bragging rights as well.

This change has ended up being very successful. The majority of players are still busy with the raid content in The Serpent's Spine, and our top-most guilds are in neck and neck races to see who can defeat the new content first. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from them that the challenges have really brought the game to a new level of enjoyment.

Major Challenges Travis McGeathy: The biggest challenge with a product like The Buried Sea is the timeline. The development cycle is short, so you have to make sure everything is right the first time around. Fortunately, the EverQuest team is experienced working in this style, and we have developed very efficient development processes.

Another challenge we ran into was that the size of the zones we needed to support the desired content was beyond anything that had been in the game before. The sheer size of the zones and the NPC population they had to support were causing server performance problems. To solve this, we ended up making some code optimizations, which not only allowed these zones to run beautifully, but also enhanced server performance throughout the game.

The features we wanted for the expansion were likewise problematic. Our main goal with the two core features, guild banners and fellowships, was to facilitate grouping and raiding by allowing players to use these features to travel quickly to each other. This is pretty simple on the surface, but finding a way to allow this in a game with nearly eight years of content without opening up large exploits was difficult. We ended up creating zone-specific requirements that could allow or disallow the teleportation effect depending on whether the player should have access to the zone, and retrofitting this into all the zones in the game. It was quite the undertaking, but worked out well, and we managed to retain the group enhancing benefits while sidestepping the potential problems opened up by the system.

Best Decisions Holly Longdale: There were a few critical decisions made during the production of The Burning Sea that really helped us to deliver an expansion in a relatively short time. We decided early on that designers would start implementing content without completed zones. This allowed us to develop our content in tandem with art, and to make relevant changes to the artwork based on the content we were coming up with. It worked really well in many cases. For example, the Buried Sea was a massive zone. If designers had waited until it was 100 percent complete to start doing any work on it, we couldn't have finished it on time. So instead, we started drafting up all the dialogues and quests in advance while the zone was in development. Like I said earlier, because we were getting our content churned out early, we could see where we might want to add unique objects and points of interests in the zone, and could talk to the artists about it as they built it.

Another great decision was to give designers ownership of their own areas of the expansion. There were some concerns that having one designer in charge of each zone might create some inconsistencies among them and have all the content feel "different". Normally, we'd have several designers working on a zone. In The Burning Sea, a designer "owned" a zone, and was in charge of how it looked, what went in it, and how it played. While other designers added content to each other's zones, there was always one person overseeing its development and keeping track of the content, while the leads ensured consistency from zone to zone. It worked really well.