I had the utmost pleasure last week to speak with Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer for EverQuest 2, about the process of making their upcoming expansion Rise of Kunark. We gabbed for quite a bit, and managed to cover quite a bit of ground, including:

• Highlights for tradeskillers and soloists
• The seamless zone tech that didn’t make it into Faydwer
• What the team did with those extra four months of production
• The design considerations behind Veeshan’s Peak
• A discussion of the original uber-ambitious content schedule for EQ2 and
• The zone that didn’t quite make it into the expansion.

I particularly enjoyed his commentary on the process of ’selling a relationship’ to players:

My dad the professional sales guy, for his entire career, he was one of the good guys where he would always describe the bad salesguys as the ‘used car salesmen’ trying to get you on the one sale. The good salesguys are the ones who understand you’re selling a relationship. I’ve always thought about MMOs the same way: they are all about the relationship. If you are not selling the relationship, as in you want to provide a service over a long period of time, you need to get out of the business. There’s no room for people who don’t want to play that way, and there’s no room for people who can’t afford to play that way.

Lots and lots and lots more below.

MMOG Nation: Thank you for talking with me tonight, sir. The elevator talk seems to be ‘the re-imagining of EQ classic’, and I was wondering if you wanted to start off by talking a little bit about that?

Scott Hartsman: Yeah! The last expansion, Echoes of Faydwer, was our first true hardcore jump into “Lets see what happens if we go hardcore EQ nostalgia.” We really liked the results there a lot, and it did great things for the game. We decided we were going to take a similar tack with this expansion, only take things one step further. With Faydwer what we had done is do a blend of nostaligic stuff in a sort-of-original EQ way, with this one we’re doing full-on Kunark nostalgia … and expanding on what it even means to make an expansion for EverQuest 2.

We’re breaking new ground both from the EQ2 angle, and going deeper into the nostalgia. On the EQ2 side, we wanted to see what we could do with our game engine to make this a better experience than anything else we’ve done. Instead of every zone being a distinct area, and every zone has a single dominant theme, we expanded the engine to include these gigantic overland regions and then embedded anywhere from two-three-four zones into each region. These things are just gigantic places, and you’ve got multiple zones inside each of them. That’s a huge leap for EQ2.

We applied a whole bunch of polish to some of the best parts of the game. We worked on the way that NPCs show up as you’re running around the world so that you can see more NPCs at once. The whole world looks more alive, you don’t get a whole lot of the ‘pop-in’ effect. There are some new settings that you can crank up as far as they can go if your computer can support it, and you can see things forever off into the distance. It gives the world this entire brand-new sense. Between that and the multiple zones inside each region, then when you put all this into the Kunark setting, you end up with some really amesome things.

Like … you land on the dock in what is essentially Dreadlands, walk for a ways, and suddenly Karnor’s Castle is to-scale right there in the open. It looked cool in EQ, don’t get me wrong, it was one of my favorite places to be. But, it just looks much more imposing and massive, the scary structure it’s going to be, because you get to see it at full size instead of the scaled-down exterior. You get a slightly more seamless experience throughout the expansion.

So yeah, it’s tweaking things on two different axis. There’s the nostalgia angle, and then improving what made EQ2 a great game all on its own.

MN: One thing that really impressed in the Beta, when you step into Timorous Deep for the first time, the ocean spray on the rocks? It’s great to kind of tweak the new players and say, “Look at the new shiny thing!”

Scott: I only wish that you folks who took the tour had gotten to see the new build. If you make a new Sarnak with one of the new builds, you get the intro fly-through into Timorous Deep. So now you begin getting the narration, the fly-in, the history of the Sarnak, and the gods-eye view of Timorous Deep. That little area is one of the areas we fly you through in the intro.

MN: I found it very interesting, because it was obvious that you were putting sort of that visual ‘pop’ into the game very early for players, as opposed to pushing it out further into the expansion. Was that based on lessons learned from previous expansions?

Scott: There are two big reasons Timorous Deep turned out the way it did. Number one, we planned the order of zone development smarter this time. We knew that with Timorous it needed to be impressive as hell. Our production pipeline starts with concept artists, and then goes to texture and modeling where it stays for a very long time. After that it goes to effects and game content population. Timorous Deep was the first zone out of production, and the first zone into the hands of the effects artists. They had more time with this zone than any other zone in the expansion. The thing that let us do similar quality stuff in the other zones is that we had the luxury of being able to borrow an effects artist from another team. We were able to do about 30-40% more effects than if we hadn’t been able to borrow Tom from another game team.

The other thing about Timorous Deep is that since the zones are so much bigger, they require more time for population. While they’re in population that’s a great time for the FX guys to be running around in there and iterating over it with the designers. Where on a shorter dev cycle you end up with 6-8 weeks in population, these zones got at least 12 weeks. That’s yet more time that our artists can go back in and see what the population looks like. They go, “The designer had a great idea here and turned this into a new Spirroc camp. So I’m going to add an effect here and something else over here …” A lot of it came down to more time, better pipelining, and having that additional body.

MN: To dovetail on that, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, this is the first EQ2 expansion that’s had the full year for development?

Scott: The last one had about 8 months actual production time, this one between pre-production and production, it ended up just shy of a year.

MN: You were just talking about being able to get zones into the hands of the effects guys earlier … is there anything else that you can see that those four additional months netted you?

Scott: Yeah, we were able to do a lot more intelligent planning. The most obvious way that manifests itself is when people play things for the first time and they go, “Holy crap, this content is laid out really, really well.” It feels like I can run around and explore where I want, but if I want to stay on a quest path and get told the story of a gigantic region I can, and it’s laid out really well. You get a sense of continuity with that. Kylong Plains, one of the regions that contains the Dreadlands, and Karnor’s, and the Firiona Vie outpost, and Burning Wood (which is now called Stonewood). That’s all one contiguous area, with multiple distinct visual themes going through it, and multiple music themes as well.

All of that was in the hands of a single designer, who was able to maintain continuity between all of these zones inside the region. You’re able to see how the stories play out, you’re able to follow the quests all the way through. Multiple people contribute to those areas, of course, but the value of continuity can’t be understated. The idea of one all-seeing eye overlooking the four zones in the region, and then having the up-front time to do the detailed planning, helps tremendously. It allowed us to get a bunch of content into the game and not have to do a lot of re-work because the plan was there. It’s amazing how much better-quality stuff you can turn out when you have a minute to friggin think about it.

MN: It does seem like you folks have pretty much been on the run since the game hit the ground. Is that an off-base observation?

Scott: You’re absolutely right. Our initial launch content plans involved doing multiple adventure packs and multiple adventures every year. Nobody was really happy with the quality … the quality level on those was okay, there was a lot of fun stuff in there. Shoot, there’s still some innovative stuff that gets played in there today. But it just wasn’t up to the level that we wanted it. Getting the ability to do a single expansion, and then filling out the rest of the year with honest-to-god free live content updates has been huge for us. We can get a zone developed when an artist has spare time, put it in the can, and then leave it there until we can get a designer there to populate it and add quests and take their time to do it right.

So we just have the one expansion, but instead of selling people content throughout the year that has to be done on a specific schedule we end up with a lot more flexibility. Adding the zone of Unrest, adding the Shard of Fear, adding any of the other zones we added as free downloads … yeah, the artist finished in June but it doesn’t really matter if it sits around because we don’t have a big revenue event tied to it. It can be just developed and we can release it when it’s damn well ready. One of the first pieces of feedback I saw for Shard of Fear was “yet another polished piece of content released by SOE”, and I had to blink because I couldn’t tell if they were being sarcastic. They were being sincere, and it was cool to see that people are picking up on this now.

MN: Indeed. I still remember being very impressed when you folks dropped an entire playable race and starting zone on folks for free.

Scott: And the deal is, we have sold Adventure Packs that were smaller than that amount of content. We have sold Adventure Packs that were more expensive to produce than that content. We just knew that when we launched Echoes of Faydwer that we were launching an expansion that had a good race, and we also wanted an evil option. When we got the opportunity to do Neriak as live content, we jumped all over that. Having our partners out at Soga was a huge boon. Meanwhile the local team drew up what the zone was supposed to look like, and there was a lot of iteration between them and us. But it was the kind of work that could be done with lots of other stuff going on. Just getting all those assets back allowed us to pick up exactly where we’d left off with it six or seven months earlier.

MN: I always find the rationale behind design and productions really interesting, and you mentioned the ambitious schedule behind additional content at EQ2’s launch. Can you speak to some of the thinking there?

Scott: Everything is multi-faceted, right? There’s no single reason anything happened. The biggest one is … and I’ve said this a couple of times and meant it every time I’ve said it … the advent of World of Warcraft was a quality-bar raiser for the entire industry. Some people rip on WoW, they’re welcome to, I am thrilled because it is now the case where there is no arguing anymore. Everyone understands at all levels of the business what quality is, and what quality needs to be in order to survive. We’re not talking even grow to beat up the 800-lbs gorilla, we’re just talking survival. We’ve all seen now what happens to MMOs when either they launch and don’t meet that quality bar or they think they can’t meet that quality bar: they don’t survive.

And so that is a big scary thought, but in the hands of teams that do have the ability to make things of sufficient quality to survive these days, for people like us we’re thrilled. That’s the kind of quality stuff we want to make. And everybody in the industry gets that now. When I said it was multi-faceted, it’s not just that devs want to make good stuff. The business folks now understand that if you don’t have good stuff you don’t have a business. This became an industry-accepted thing, it’s not just something that developer ride a hobby-horse about: quality content is good for business.

My dad the professional sales guy, for his entire career, he was one of the good guys where he would always describe the bad salesguys as the ‘used car salesmen’ trying to get you on the one sale. The good salesguys are the ones who understand you’re selling a relationship. I’ve always thought about MMOs the same way: they are all about the relationship. If you are not selling the relationship, as in you want to provide a service over a long period of time, you need to get out of the business. There’s no room for people who don’t want to play that way, and there’s no room for people who can’t afford to play that way.

MN: You mentioned Soga studios, and I really enjoy what they’ve added to the game. Did they do any work on Kunark?

Scott: No, they haven’t had a chance to work on anything in Kunark. They are actually working on a game of their own right now. We’ve been talking to them about doing some more free-content style additions for later in in the next couple of cycles. While we were working on EoF, they were working on Neriak and Darklight Wood. We have them working on a side-project right now while we’re working on this expansion.

Essentially they become an additional content house for us. They’re not part of Kunark, but it’s interesting … we’ve had some people as if they were when some folks saw the Sarnak environments. Their building style has sort of an Asian influence to it, and that didn’t come from Soga, that came from the SOE San Diego studios. The primary artist on that is a young guy, just an animal. The rate at which random cool things would show up in that zone, even the designers were surprised at it. It was pretty impressive.

MN: The big technology selling point for the expansion are the seamless zone elements. I was told that Faydwer was somewhat designed with that in mind as well?

Scott: Faydwer was was kind-sorta but not really designed that way. Faydwer was the first time we talked about it, but we didn’t have the technology to do all the cool things that we wanted to do with it. We really wanted to do it for Faydwer, but we pretty much didn’t. Everything there is very much its own zone, they each have a single theme and single environment. For the most part they have similar musical style. In Kunark on the tech, music, and art development sides they all were designed around multiple zones in one region. A place I really like that application of the technology: as you go from the Dreadlands docks up to the mountains, into the snowy area with the village by the gigantic lizard spires, that’s another really striking transition. You’re doing a total environment shift.

MN: We had a chance to take a look at Veeshan’s, and that must have been sort of a daunting challenge. It’s such a big deal for players who went through the first game; how did you folks approach it?

Scott: Veeshan’s was definitely interesting because the folks who were originally involved with the development of Veeshan’s for EverQuest 2 were people who had played through it in EverQuest. The guild that I was in back in the day, that was one of the pinnacles for my experience with them. So our challenge was to get a similar experience in a different way. Because that sort of punitive gameplay isn’t going to work the same way these days, and that sort of linear gameplay where you’re going to be in the same place for multiple days doesn’t necessarily work today either. Our first realization was that we can do this, we can have a ton of bosses in there, but we can can have things in more ‘wings’. Between the winged layout where you have three distinct areas you’re working through, plus the persistent instancing … if your guild wants to go in for an hour a night for ten nights and it saves exactly where you are.

So the challenge was to get that kind of experience without lapsing back into design elements that folks these days wouldn’t see as fun? We took people who really liked the original VP, and the question was simple: “What would make you want to go play there today?” So you have a lot of the really cool dragon fights, there are more bosses in that zone than I think we’ve ever put in a single raid zone before. We’ve got things in a raid-accessible way where raiders of most stripes will be able to progress to that point and try their hand at some of the hardest content in the game. It’s more these days about “can you defeat the battle?” and less about “can you race other guilds?” or “can you spend twelve hours in a row online?”.

It’s removing a lot of the old-school not particularly relevant barriers and making sure the game’s barriers are based on difficulty. In that way we’ve taken VP and a lot of really striking visuals and really made it work. You mentioned the splashing on the rocks in Timorous Deep … Veeshan’s is another zone that has more particle accents than almost any other place. On top of that you take these raids fights and put some really interesting and cool events around them. Again, this was the first of our raid zones that came out of production. We knew we had to get this right so it got the most time out of any of the raid zones. So it was really just a matter of making sure everybody from all the disciplines all had the time, and were asking the right questions, and executing on the plans to get there.

MN: For the more casual folks, for the small group folks, what do you see as like the VP for those kinds of players in the expansion?

Scott: The great thing about solo content is that everyone can use it. Raiders don’t raid 24/7, group people don’t group 24/7 and soloists don’t solo 24/7. Everybody, no matter who you are in MMOs, you have an hour where you want to do something by yourself. That was really the driving thought behind our overland content this time. Even in Echoes of Faydwer towards the high end (like the loping plains) you could go through some of the overland zones and see a 50/50 split between solo and group content and only 15-20 quests. In this expansion you have 100% solo content in the overland zones, so that’s something everyone can enjoy. Since it’s all solo content we were able to baseline its difficulty in a much cleaner way. It’s actually more difficult than solo content was in previous expansions. It’s something doable by yourself, but you get the feeling of “Holy crap this is actually really dangerous!” It’s winnable, and it’s fun, but you don’t feel like you’re running through a cakewalk just because they’re solo critters.

Beyond that, one of the areas we’re talking about for high end content for groups is Sebilis. That’s a big, big, big nostalgia point for EverQuest. Definitely an area we wanted to get right this time, and I think we did a pretty good job. The guy who did the original Sebilis is still on the team, weirdly enough, and he wasn’t working on it directly, but he worked with the girl who did make the zone. They did some fantastic things there. We have a different zone that we’re adding for our version of Kunark called Chelsith that’s going to be pretty high on the scale for groups. There’s actually an area in there that chains off as part of the raid story later on. But everyone is going to get a chance to see some of these zone themes that even the raiders are playing, if that makes sense. You’re going to have Venril’s lair, for example, off of Sebilis. There’s a raid zone that’s high end that’s off of Chelsith, and you’re going to be in these areas seeing people progressing down the raid storyline … we’re trying to bring these two groups together a little bit.

MN: That’s great. In fact, I wrote in my discussion of the expansion tour that I think one of the biggest shames with these games is that you folks work so hard on this raid content and these beautiful zones … and only a small percentage of the player population gets to see it.

Scott: I completely agree. That’s the other nice thing we can do with our kind of instancing tech. There are few places we can do this already, and we’ll keep expanding on it … we can do a zone for a raid and then use that zone later on for a small group instance if we want to tell the same story, or even a slightly different version of that story. You’ll see us do stuff like that more often in the future.

There are two kinds of content that are up there for the number of man-hours required to get right. Raid content is up there, and (oddly) newbie content takes up tons of time. Newbie content, though is some of the cost-efficient content it terms of time. Raid content is some of the least cost-effective content if you look at the amount of resources spent vs. the number of people who see it. The more people we can get to see that content the better off it is for everybody.

MN: For the lore buffs, what is the quest chain in Kunark that you found really excellent? Maybe a chain with a great reward at the end or a great story to tell?

Scott: This is going to sound kind of weird because I’m personally really a high-end kind of player, but I’m going to sound like a hypocrite and say it’s the newbie content. The storyline between the Sarnak and the Spirroc, I was really, really, really, really, really impressed. The fact that the artists were able to take what was going on in the story and then use their iteration time to make sure there was support for all the cool story stuff going on … by the time you’re about level ten you’ve been seeing this evil building up on top of the hill, and you’re making your way up there. By the time you get up there you see these gigantic sticks sticking up out of the ground. There are spikes everwhere, and there are these Spirroc – flying parrot-people – diving at your Sarnak soliders and so you just get it: “If you’re fighting a flying enemy I guess you would put a bunch of stakes into the ground.” You walk on a bit further and there are these steam-powered spike-throwing machines literally knocking Spirrocs out of the sky. Seeing that kind of visceral feedback on the war between these two races, it really gives the story that added bit of oomph.

MN: I know that tradeskills have gotten a lot of love recently, and I was wondering if there was anything in specific in the expansion that tradeskillers will have to look forward to?

Scott: Domino has been doing some crazy stuff. The biggest things she keeps an eye on, as she goes through she keeps an eye on what adventurers think is the coolest stuff, and then she goes out of her way to try to put something in there that’s just as cool for crafters. For instance, in the first higher-level zone of the expansion one of the first things you do is a quest series concerning these flying mounts. The native flying mounts for this expansion are called the Sokakar (M: sp?). The Sokakar is this really cool frog-like bat-winged beast. People think these are the coolest thing ever. There’s a quest where you’re rescuing this outpost’s more reliable flying mount, and you get to ride on a Sokakar, and eventually you get a Sokakar pet. She’s always sensitive to the fact that some players intentionally maintain a very low adventuring level. She asked if she could put in a quest that was tradeskiller based that would allow them to help out in the quest in some way, that would take advantage of their skills and get them a reward that’s just as cool. She always wants to make sure there are things that are just as cool for tradeskillers to get, along the lines of what adventurers get. Little things like that are throughout the expansion, and I think it will let tradeskillers know that we really do care, you really do belong. You are so not being ignored, you have a buddy on the inside and she has been keeping an eye out for you.

We actually have another thing, a tradeskiller benefit that is going to be benefiting everybody. There’s a number of objects that are in the Rise of Kunark environments that have been turned into advanced recipes and will eventually become house items that everyone is going to want. That was another cool thing that multiple folks across art, engineering and design all had to collaborate on, it’s always been a gigantic pain for us to be able to take arbitrary objects and turn them into globally placeale furniture objects. We’ve had tons of tools support for this expansion, and one of those tools is the ability to do that a whole lot faster. Whereas before it was like “Hey, we’d like to turn these five things into furniture”, and the person tasked with doing that was busy for two weeks, it’s now like “We need these twenty items made into furniture”, and twenty minutes later they’re “Done, what else do you need?” We got to the point where we were bouncing up against download limits and we figured we should stop before people were downloading a thousand gigabytes on their first day in the new expansion. We’re no longer limited by dev time on those kinds of things, and instead are thinking more about global patches on launch day.

MN: My last question for you tonight: what was the one piece of content you wanted to get into the expansion that didn’t quite make it?

Scott: When we originally laid out what were going to do for Kunark, was, we cut out a bunch of old maps and glued them on a whiteboard. It was “this is how we could fit together a version of Kunark”. We had the entire original EQ Kunark on the map, plus a few new things like Chelsith that we wanted to add on our own. Since we knew this was going to be a high-end expansion we knew that we couldn’t do all of it, so what we decided to do was the stuff that people would recognize from having played through at the high end … or Lake of Ill Omen, because there would be riots in the streets if you shipped Kunark without that zone.

For me personally, everything that I liked about Kunark is there. There’s no place that I personally spent a whole lot of time in that didn’t make it into the expansion. That said, there was one place that I kind of enjoyed spending time but that I mostly spent time in because I had to, and that was the Dungeon of Dalnir. It’s a tiny little place that some people might not even remember. I remember having to camp The Kly down at the bottom of that dungeon. I spent enough time in there that I feel kind of sad it didn’t make it, but not so sad that I’d be willing to give up anything we will ship in order to put it in.

MN: Nice. Thanks so much for your time, sir.