The Making of EverQuest
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As Bill Trost, senior game designer, remembers, the team's saving grace was that they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. (When I joined the project, EQ was just an idea," he says. "They wanted to create a graphical MUD, and had some idea about how it would look, but not many specifics. We had lofty goals but we were lucky: we were too young and too new to realise how difficult it would be.)
Steve Clover created the original map of Norrath, inventing the city names including the branded capital, Qeynos (SonyEQ spelt backwards) and, with Brad McQuiad, wrote the main design document. They sketched three continents, accessible by boat, where players could fight, loot, barter and even learn a trade. (No one had ever made zones of that scale in a 3D game before,) says Scott McDaniel, EQ's art director. (We didn't know what the impact of open geometry or 10,000 in-frustum polygons would be. The programming and art teams got together, and through sheer trial and error we banged out a system that was robust enough to take dozens of players in a zone, but still allowed the freedom to create very different landscapes.)
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Once they knew the game was going to be fun, the biggest anxieties were about the hardware. Each of the 40 EQ worlds took over 20 high-end dual-processor machines to run. (The server architecture is modular,) says McQuaid, (with zones running on multiple machines. So as we expand the world, we just add more '˜zone servers.') The client-side technology was more of a worry. (This was back when we were developing a software renderer, and using Pentium 133s to develop the client. We were worried about framerate. What might happen if a bunch of players appeared onscreen at once? But we couldn't stop an army of players from assembling; nor did we really want to. So we designed the game for a maximum group size of six, made some character optimisations for example, dynamic level of detail on character models and hoped for the best. It turned out that we could display many more players than we'd ever hoped.)
