Interview with bill trost – 2000
Interview with Bill Trost by Everlore EQ Event II -Saint Louis Saturday – March 4 2000
Notice: There may be a few things outdated in this interview such kunark yet to be released, Fiery Avenger yet to be descovered, recent changes in game, etc…
Bryan Reynolds: Hi my name is Bryan Reynolds and I’m with Everlore. I’m here with Bill Trost. He’s going to go ahead and answer some of the questions that some of the viewers of the web site have. He’s going to go ahead and give us a little history with how he started with Verant, and then we’ll go ahead and start with the questions. Thanks for being here Bill.
Bill Trost: My name is Bill Trost. I was one of the first people brought on to the Everquest team. My overall responsibility was content creation on the macro level, starting with designing Norrath; the overall architecture. I have a pretty extensive background with D&D [Dungeons and Dragons] and computer games, and art. Lots of DMing [Dungeon Mastering] background. I started with the history. Like where magic comes from, you know, that kind of stuff. Drew all the maps of the world, named all the geographical places and zones. It was a lot of fun, the first half of my involvement. I was lucky enough to get that job. I’ve known Brad for about 6 years now. I met him through a flyer that was up in a community college I was going to. He was at the time working on a game, an Ultima 6 clone, and I came in and helped him with the art. So anyways, that little game was seen and we all got in the team. I was seen as an artist at first, but later on became the lead designer, and helped bring in additional designers.
Bryan Reynolds: I have a question about being a game designer. If you had to take some of the standard things you do in a day when you were building the game, what would they be?
Bill Trost: It was mostly just sitting with blank paper, and saying ‘this would be cool.’ Luckily we had creative writers who would write the history. Our primary quest designer, Tony Garcia, really did an awesome job, Tony is another guy I played D&D with ever since I was 10 years old. So a lot of the guys from Norrath are part D&D characters.
Bryan Reynolds: Oh, that’s good to know! That’s cool!
Bill Trost: Yeah. Sir Lucan De`vir was actually Tony’s character. So it was really cool. Yeah.
Bryan Reynolds: Oh! So lets go ahead and ask the first question. Does Verant ever intend on implementing some kind of form of decay, like decaying of items or weapons. The longer a server is up the more there will be, so is there ever gonna be a chance that our weapons decay?
Bill Trost: Uh, the short answer to that is, no. The long answer is, we’d like to have some other method of getting items out of the economy rather than just having them wear out. So you’ll see more and more quests designed to bring more items to give people an incentive to get people to get rid of their old items.
//{5.49}
Bryan Reynolds: Yeah.
Bill Trost: It’s a philosophical debate that we go through a lot. Because personally, I am a hard ass DM, or at least I was. My philosophy was ‘break it.’ If I felt they had something they shouldn’t have, I break it. But that doesn’t go over to well with the majority of players. It’s a constant debate we go through on the Everquest team and there are valid arguments on all sides. So we’re trying to come up with some kind of compromise to help alleviate that situation and not ruin someone else’s sense of pride they get when they get an item, knowing it won’t go away the next time they log out.
Bryan Reynolds: Yeah. If someone spends 32 hours camping that item and it decays, then, they’d be pretty upset.
Bill Trost: Yeah, that would suck. We want to keep the players optimists.
Bryan Reynolds: But there would be some kind of incentive I’m sure.
Bill Trost: Right.
Bryan Reynolds: Do you plan on doing any art overall, like better art for weapons?
Bill Trost: That’s a yes and no question. Yes we are with the kunark expansion. There will be lots and lots of new items and weapons. There will be new icons and textures for them. A majority of them might be Iksar only , but yes we will have new items and weapons through the expansion. As for adding them as part of a patch, that is also a possibility.
Bryan Reynolds: Is Iksar on the dark race team for the PVP team or are they their own team on the PVP teams server.
Bill Trost: Um, that would probably be determined through the play testing. My initial reaction would be yeah, they would probably be their own team. Because they are kind of separatists. They have a wide enough range of classes that they could support their own team. That would be my guess, but I’m not solid.
Bryan Reynolds: Will Verant make any changes to the class specific armor quests, especially those for the Paladin ‘Armor of Ro’.
Bill Trost: Basically yes. We are constantly updating quests and changing them. Trying to upgrade the ones that aren’t rewarding as much as they should, and fixing them.
Bryan Reynolds: Yeah I remember talking to him the last EQ event and he was working on them.
Bill Trost: They’re constantly working on them, and they are updated most of the time. That’s Tony’s job, 24 hours a day.
Bill Trost: (chuckles)
// {8.57}
Bryan Reynolds: Okay, the next question would be, I’d like to see an NPC in a certain location in cities that would buff PCs for money… Will you ever have NPCs that will buff PCs?
Bill Trost: This is another thing that was debated off and on. We will see a limited version of that. But the problem is with putting lots of NPCs like that in, is that it would make the PC classes that do those buffs less meaningful.
Bryan Reynolds: Like an NPC in every zone that casts SOW [spirit of wolf].
Bryan Reynolds and BT: (laugh)
Bryan Reynolds: Does Verant have any intention of placing a cap on the population of any of its servers?
Bill Trost: No. No we have no intention of adding a cap. But yes we have every intention of adding more servers.
Bryan Reynolds: Could you elaborate on what currently the hardware is….I don’t want to get in details, but is it difficult to add a new server, or not?
Bill Trost: It’s not extremely difficult to add a new server, but it’s …I’m not the one who says ‘lets put up a new server’, there are a lot of politics it must go through.
Bryan Reynolds: Would you ever start taking checks, money orders, or other forms of payment other than just credit cards?
Bill Trost: That would be cool. I think we should. It’s not necessarily my area of expertise, but I think that would definitely be good.
Bryan Reynolds: Could you ever add more visual graphics , like having flames come out of fire elementals, or water drip from water elementals?
Bill Trost: I thought that was a cool question. That would be something I’d like to see, and I don’t see any reason why we possibly couldn’t add stuff like that. The one problem with altering characters, with what we call the ‘Global Characters’ like elementals is right now that would require a pretty hefty patch that we could probably do as an optional patch, maybe. Its like a 10 meg download, hehe.
Bryan Reynolds: Let’s move on. There is currently a bug that allows monsters to hit through walls. When is the date of this bug being fixed.
Bryan Reynolds: I assume they’re talking about certain outdoor zones where the NPCs will ignore objects.
Bryan Reynolds: From my understanding, the reason that happens is because people would exploit objects.
Bill Trost: Right, the reason why its there is because if we did as elaborate a texture on the outdoor zones like some of the indoor zones, basically , we’d have much fewer NPCs because the CPU couldn’t handle it. We’re basically maxing the CPU at where it is. And we’d much rather use the CPU to have more monsters than having the monsters be incrementally smarter.
Bryan Reynolds: That makes sense, makes sense. Are there plans for Everquest to go beyond Kunark. I know there was Velious
Bill Trost: Right, Velious was the other continent that was on our original maps. Beyond Kunark, we really don’t know. I imagine if I’m sitting with you at a similar event next year, I’m sure we’d be talking about Velious. Because if Everquest continues to be as successful as it is now, I can’t imagine us not doing that. Now, am I the one who has any input on that decision, no.
Bryan Reynolds: Did you guys ever dream Everquest would be this big?
Bill Trost: No.
Bryan Reynolds: So you’re extremely happy about this?
Bill Trost: Yah! Happy and scared!
Bryan Reynolds and BT: (both laugh)
Bill Trost: No, nobody ever imagined it would be as successful as it is.
Bryan Reynolds: All right. Here is a really good one about rogues that really needs to be answered. Lot of people are upset about it. Why can’t rogues pick the locks in Befallen. This has been a mystery since the first time I went to Befallen.
Bill Trost: That’s a situation where it just wasn’t intended for you to be able to pick those locks. It’s by design. You’re supposed to get the keys in that method. We didn’t want anyone to take another route, we wanted that particular zone to be linear in that way.
Bryan Reynolds: Another question is, how rogues disarm traps. Where are they ?
Bill Trost: That was just a fault in the development originally in Everquest. Traps just weren’t fully realized the way we originally intended them. Ideally we should really relieve those, but because rogues have been enhanced in other ways. We have more concentrated on making rogues a more assassin type class. They are more combat oriented than we originally envisioned them to be.
// {14.56}
Bryan Reynolds: I know I’ve seen a lot of comments about it. When they take out the disarm and arm, don’t think about it as something you should have, it hasn’t really been implemented, but rogues have been buffed up in other ways.
Bryan Reynolds: I often run out of assignable hotkeys after making pet, guild and corpse commands. Is there a chance of getting more assignable hotkeys?
Bill Trost: I would think that there is, I mean I’m not a programmer. But that sounds like a good suggestion. I’m not …
Bryan Reynolds: Is there a gameplay issue behind it? Like you only have 8 spells?
Bill Trost: I really don’t think so, you’re still limited to displaying the 6 slots, so adding the additional banks of those wouldn’t have a significant gameplay issue. The whole purpose for those slots is to make it convenient. So adding more would make it more convenient, and it is possible. We should do it. I don’t know where the data is stored. I assume its stored client side so it shouldn’t matter, but I don’t know.
Bryan Reynolds: Are there any changes being planned for trade skills like smithing, and adding new items to be made with them. The whole trade skill question really.
Bill Trost: This is something really that is going to be addressed short term. Post-Kunark, trade skills are top priority.
Bryan Reynolds: Little background this, I know you were talking about trade skills overall, but I know trade skills weren’t the primary factor when you started Everquest. It was more role-play, and taking RPGs, like D&D games, and have as close to that type of feeling as possible. Maybe you can further elaborate on that, but the reason trade skills aren’t so elaborate are because you really would want to do a trade skill for a majority of your time, or even half your time.
Bill Trost: Right, the initial design for Everquest was to capture the pen and paper feel of Dungeons and Dragons. So we went ahead in designing it like it was that type of game. Its just we didn’t worry about making our armor, we went out and found our armor. And it was that kind of thing when we first made Everquest. But later on we found out that people really enjoyed something like that, even though it wasn’t part of the limited game experience, the hack and slash feel. So trade skills were picked up and implemented in our game, and I think overall, they’ve added quite a bit. Could they have been more meaningful to the game? Yes.
// {18.23)
Bryan Reynolds: What I’m possibly thinking is that, UO [Ultima Online] had trade skills and lots of them. And in UO, trade skills are mainly used to make mass amounts of money and when they come over to Everquest, they don’t have the ability to make mass amounts of money so they can’t go out and buy as much. There are a lot of people on Ultima Online who like to just make clothing for example, they wanted to see themselves in all different sorts of clothes. But many people’s goal is to make a whole lot of money.
Bill Trost: Yea, that was never our intention. Everquest was always more of an adventure game. The characters are adventurers, they’re not merchants. At the core, that’s what it was, but we added the ability to be pseudo-merchants as the game progresses. But it was never the focus of the game, and its pretty obvious that wasn’t the focus of the game. I think we underestimated the value of those.
Bryan Reynolds: I guess the only way to balance it is to…lets say you have a group of 5 adventurers and they’re going out they were 10th level. And after 5 hours of work they produced 100 platinum. A group of 5 tradesman on the other hand who sat around and did their trade skill, they should also produce 100 platinum. But even at that I don’t think they would be satisfied with that, because that’s not a whole lot of plat.
Bill Trost: Yeah, that doesn’t enable a guild to have their merchant guys who are their money factories.
Bryan Reynolds: Okay, how much of the game is yet to be discovered. Are there any secrets, areas, NPCs, or quests, that have not been found yet? Are there any weapons that have not been found at all by anyone except the Fiery Avenger.
Bill Trost: The answer to all of them is, yes. Has most of the game been discovered, yes probably. I mean in areas to explore, about 90% of it has been found.
Bryan Reynolds: Oh, I have a question. Is there a creature….a wandering serpent in Lake Rathe? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.
Bryan Reynolds and BT: (both laugh)
Bill Trost: Is there a serpent there? Maybe!
Bryan Reynolds: Awww, ok. So basically you’re saying that most of the land has been discovered. But many secrets, areas, and quests, have not been discovered.
Bill Trost: Right! And the key to that is that there is more stuff going in every day.
// { 21.36}
Bryan Reynolds: Is there anything that has been in there since the very very beginning that hasn’t been found yet?
Bill Trost: : From the very beginning….? (pauses) I don’t think so.
Bryan Reynolds: Really?
Bill Trost: : Well, as far as have all the quests been done? No, no they haven’t. But have those quests been in there from the beginning, I don’t know. It’s a difficult question, but I’m not sure. Its possible, but I don’t think so.
Bryan Reynolds: What about the Fiery Avenger quest? Was there ever a point in the game that it wasn’t in there?
Bill Trost: (pauses) Well, it was redone in a way to make it more obvious. It’s still pretty hidden. (chuckles)
Bryan Reynolds: Yeah, lots of people have completed parts of the fiery avenger quest and they didn’t even know it.
Bill Trost: That’s absolutely true.
Bryan Reynolds: Are you able to give us any hints on the fiery avenger?
Bill Trost: Hehe, no. Gotta keep my job.
23.22
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Bryan Reynolds, CEO RPGLore Networks
Transcribed by Payman T, Editor