EverQuest: The Buried Sea Wrap Report

Also, as a team, we knew we had to address the need for content and raid players. Dividing the content between the Buried Sea theme and the Katta Castrum one turned out to be a great one, in my opinion. At first, we danced around the idea a bit, worrying that we were dividing our players as we divided our content. Turned out that wasn't how it worked. Players are doing all of the content because they are enjoying it. Makes sense to me!

The Buried Sea zone was a different animal, not only because it was huge and not finished until late in the cycle, but also because it was going to be cut into smaller pieces to make the instanced zones.

Key Strengths Travis McGeathy: The experience of the development team is definitely EverQuest's biggest strength. The majority of our developers have been working on it for years now. They know the systems and the workflow like the back of their hand, so we can concentrate on design and implementation. This experience is what allows us to create consistently great content with a small team in a short timeframe.

From the content standpoint, we built the majority of the expansion's content to be supplemental to what was released in the previous expansion. Where The Serpent's Spine had a lot of open zones and very little instanced content, The Buried Sea is a much more structured journey, and most of its content is in the form of handcrafted missions. The goal was to ensure that we had a variety of content available to anyone and that our players have a lot of choices in what they want to do with their play time. I think The Buried Sea has succeeded in that regard.

The core features have likewise been a real strength for the game. The goal of facilitating group and raiding through guild banners and fellowships has worked out nicely. Players can much more quickly log in and be playing the game than in the past.

Areas for Improvement Travis McGeathy: In retrospect, one area I'd like to have improved upon is in communicating the main storyline to non-raid players. There are some fantastic stories that flow through The Buried Sea, the biggest of which tells the tale behind why the Combine city is in such trouble. Over the course of the story, players uncover the source of the problem and set off to deal with it, but the conclusion takes place entirely within raid content. The non-raid players who have followed the story up to this point end up hearing about the final lore from their fellow players instead of actually experiencing it. If I could do it again, I'd intermix single group content with optional raid targets so that everyone could follow the story to its end.

Another area we ran into problems is with itemization for the expansion. We underestimated the amount of work involved in implementing one of the expansion features, Energeian Armor, and it ended up having a larger impact on our itemization schedule than anticipated. This impacted the overall quality of itemization throughout the expansion, and in the end, it just wasn't up to where it should have been when the product launched. We've spent a significant amount of time since launch addressing this.

Lessons Learned Holly Longdale: It's funny how each expansion we create brings up new challenges and issues that we need to wrap our heads around. Most might think that we'd have this expansion thing down pat, but it's never that easy. Every new feature, new art or design element that we want to put in our game can significantly affect our development strategy.

I know this is going to sound like corny, feel-good corporate-speak, but it's true. Constant communication - to the brink of annoyance - was a huge lesson for us during The Burning Sea, and we learned it by actually doing it. We had it in our minds to build two of the biggest zones we've ever made since the new graphics engine was launched a few years ago - the Buried Sea and Katta Castrum. Both zones presented unique challenges.

Programming, design and art all agreed that we would be over each other's shoulders for the whole process because, frankly, we were concerned that these zones might not work as we planned them. And so we did communicate... a lot. It was really taxing, but valuable to have constant input and feedback at all levels and from all teams regarding the performance, functionality, appearance and logistics for these zones. Our constant chatter led to Katta Castrum becoming one of the biggest and best-performing zones we have, even though it's so utterly massive with a lot of geography and objects.

The Buried Sea zone was a different animal, not only because it was huge and not finished until late in the cycle, but also because it was going to be cut into smaller pieces to make the instanced zones. For design, we knew the whole idea of slicing up a massive zone could be a disaster when populating the large sea zone and the instanced ones. Time-wise, we could not afford the time to populate each island twice - once in the large zone and once in the instanced one.

We had a sit-down with our artists to find out if we could slice up the large zone without changing any of the locations in code between the instanced islands in the large zone, so we could essentially share NPC populations between them. They told us we could. That doesn't mean it was easy, but they managed to not move anything from the time the islands were created until the end of the cycle when each individual island was completed and ready for cutting. So all in all, we saved a ton of time and grief by having discussions early and often.