EverQuest: You're In Our World Now

Creating Worlds: An EverQuest Panel at the 2001 San Diego Comic Con

Unless you're a deity, creating a world is no small task. At this year's San Diego Comic Con, doing just that was one of the recurring topics of discussion. Whether we're considering books, movies, comics, or games, creators coax the audience into accepting their fiction and forgetting the limits of the real world, at least for a while. For Sony Online Entertainment, this principal holds particular importance in their game designs. Norrath is the unique world of their massively multiplayer online game, EverQuest®, which pulls in players thousands at a time. They call this "pulling-in" effect "immersion," and at the Comic Con, EverQuest's designers gathered to talk about this and the creative process behind it in a panel discussion entitled

Inside EverQuest: A Designers Perspective on the Creation of an Online Fantasy World

. Featuring past and present producers and designers from EverQuest, the panel offered views on world development and how to foster audience immersion.

How do you create an online world in which players can become involved? The answer can be found, in part, within the philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest of EverQuest's Norrath and there are no players around to hear it, does it make a sound?

One of the interesting things about making a world is, we were making a world

," emphasized Geoff Zatkin. From combat and magic systems, to cities and economies, designing a world requires attention to a wide range of details. The systems that govern these details must be as flexible as possible, able to bend and stretch to handle the nearly infinite possibilities that crop up when you host thousands of live players from around the globe at the same time, all in the same world.

Early in EverQuest's development, Bill Trost joined the team to help guide the creation of the world. He admits that much of the original game is based on his own D&D campaign he ran as a kid. "It was largely my creation, at least the initial concepts of the various locales and characters you encounter." He and the team set out to create a new world, but a world players would feel at home in, an extension of traditional pen-and-paper roleplaying games. "This is why we really stuck to the fantasy archetypes and cooperative play, because that's what tabletop gaming is all about."

Walking the line between what's familiar and what's new was a challenge the artists took on directly. "We wanted to make the creatures familiar, but we also wanted them to be unique to our world," said Rick Schmitz, character designer and animator. "We wanted them to have their own specific look, so if you saw an orc from EverQuest, it'd look different from orcs you've seen in other places but you'd still feel like you knew what it was."

There's another line the team walked, though this one was more of a tightrope act. It stretched between the limitations of the real world, and the limitless expanse of the designer's imagination. The EQ team wanted the players to feel they were truly a character in a complete world, but there are constraints in the translation from a concept to a playable zone, for example. It takes a significant amount of time to create an area in the game and generate content for it. Conversely, it takes a comparatively short amount of time for players to run through and experience what has been created. Bill Coyle compared it to novel writing: "Look at how long it takes to write a novel, versus how long it takes to read it."

Limitations of technology played no small role in how the final product appeared. Memory and polygon constraints permitted only so many models in a single zone. The average player's machine was considered. Minimum system specifications were set. But this inspired creative solutions, and allowed for a wide range of encounters despite the narrow parameters. Differences in color, texture, size and even behavior while reusing basic models has produced a true sense that Norrath is stuffed with all manner of beasts. "I don't think you can find anything out there that has the number or variety of creatures EverQuest has," said Rick.

Technology is always advancing, of course. It is through its expansions that EverQuest continues to remain current even two years after its initial release.

The Shadows of Luclin

, due out in December, will keep pushing the envelope. "As we continue to make expansions and are able to push our minimum specs a little bit, we're able to have a better population density in the same area, for example," Bill Coyle, the associate producer on the expansion, explained. Luclin will give EverQuest a major face-lift, with advanced graphics that take advantage of newer, more powerful video cards available. One of the improvements will be for character models, giving them much higher polygon-counts and thus more detail. "We want people to keep their personalities while updating our look with the times. Pen-and-paper worlds obviously don't have that concern, but we do."

Required player interaction significantly boosts the immersion factor of a world, too, and is a feature unique to online games, Geoff pointed out. "If you want to play a single player game and hang out by yourself, there are lots of great games for that. But in a massively multiplayer game, being able to interact with other players, make friendships, group together, and go on raids, that's a really big thing." Getting players to do this is part of the world design process. "It's a pretty classic formula. You throw a bunch of strangers together, expose them to danger, and suddenly they're friends. That's what we're doing."

Ultimately, EverQuest only provides the tools and the arena through which immersion can happen. The players themselves are the ones that bridge the foggy gap between what Sony Online builds and what becomes the actual world for the player. This is referred to as 'player authorship,' where players actively take that final giant step toward making the world believable by creating their own stories based on their adventures and developing their own interpretations of the world's mythos. The fiction takes root in their imaginations and they become a part of the world.

The flexible systems can aid this by reacting to player choices, "remembering" them. Player actions carry persistent consequences within the game, affecting how they interact with the world from session to session. Geoff has lots of stories about EQ. He recalled one about a couple of Dark Elf characters whose players decided they wanted to be able to move freely through the human town of Qeynos, a town in which Dark Elves are normally outcast. After performing a great many tasks in aid of the city, they were finally able to come and go from the town as they liked. "We didn't give them that goal, but it's something the players decided. 'Hey, that's a goal I want to achieve,' and the system was open-ended enough that they could do it." Players aren't restricted to the designer's predetermined place in the world; rather, they are able to carve out their own places.

Geoff had another story, and this one went to the heart of what makes an interactive world. Once during beta, he stood alone in the Plains of Karana, a dauntingly wide expanse of flat land, at what is called a druid ring, a circle of stones similar to those found at Stonehenge. The circle was guarded by a group of non-player character (NPC) druids. There were no other players in the zone at the time. Over a nearby hill came a pair of giants, galumphing along, heading straight for the sacred circle. The giants checked their faction tables. It turned out the druids were a group the giants did not care for, and so attacked them. Druid protection spells and healing went off in defense, but the giants were winning. At this point, another NPC wandered upon the scene, a powerful druid guildmaster. After its own faction check, the guildmaster decided that his assistance was needed. The giants began to burst into flames as the guildmaster attacked them with fire spells. The tide of battle was turned.

I'm watching this and thinking, 'this would have happened if anyone was here or not," admitted Geoff. "The world is going on whether or not anyone is around. It was all set in motion with the different systems, and things were interacting with each other. And then you factor in the players, and that's when you get an interactive world."

So, when those trees fall in the forests, do they make sounds if no one is there to hear them? In EverQuest, you bet they do, and that's the kind of stuff that makes an online world a world

Clayton Kroh is a writer/editor for Sony Online Entertainment/Verant Interactive. His current assignments include providing news, features, and general content for the official Star Wars Galaxies, Sovereign, and EverQuest web sites and Station.com.