Living Legend
This year, one of the most influential MMORPGs ever turns 20. The people behind EverQuest explain how, and why, the crusade continues
EverQuest turns 20 this year: the people behind the influential MMORPG explain how and why
There was a time, not so long ago, before the Internet. In 1999, the world wide web was about to take off properly. A couple of Stanford students had just founded a plucky little company called Google, Wikipedia didn’t exist and Facebook was but a malevolent twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. But a new kind of videogame had already begun to appear: the MMORPG, which used this nascent technology to allow players from all over the world to play together in a persistent online universe.
EverQuest was one such genre pioneer. Released in 1999, it became the first-ever commercially successful MMORPG built in a 3D game engine, and was an almost immediate hit. Inspired by text-based multi-user dungeon games, EverQuest not only drew players’ curiosity but managed to keep it burning for the next 20 years. In an age where the closure of MMOs is an alltoo-common occurrence, EverQuest is still very much alive – and growing. After talking to the people responsible for carrying on the legacy of one of the most influential videogames ever, we’re beginning to see why.
Not that Andy Sites – or indeed, anyone at 989 Studios and Verant Interactive – ever dared to imagine
this kind of longevity. Indeed, Sites’ first look at EverQuest left him underwhelmed. “Honestly, when I first saw it, I was like, ‘This looks kind of rough around the edges’. I wasn’t super-impressed by it.” Ultima Online had just launched to great fanfare and, despite being a bit of a mess technically, had an undeniable edge. “Visually it was way more polished, because it was a more completed product than EverQuest at the time. So I thought, ‘This looks kind of cool – but my god, it has a long way to go’.”
About a year before launch, Sites came onto the project as a designer and associate producer, getting stuck into design work and quest writing “as well as managing the mundane crap like ordering dinners and exporting all the world environments.” Lacking the technology or any kind of model for creating a game of this scope and ambition, everyone on the team tended to pitch in everywhere, creating their own solutions to grand problems on the fly. The improvisation would carry on through EverQuest’s multiple beta phases. Sites and his QA lead would personally duplicate, package, handlabel and post the CDs out to participants. “During the beta phase, the inkling I had that we might have
something special was when I started getting all of these industry people wanting to be my friend,” Sites laughs, recalling requests for beta access from people at Blizzard and Atari Games. “It wasn’t until we got to, I think it was the fourth or fifth – and final – phase of beta, where the numbers were so high that we were sending out tens of thousands of discs, that we ended up using a fulfilment house that we typically use for duplicating gold masters for PlayStation games.”
Still, the mood among the team of 20-or-so people in the run-up to launch was far from relaxed. Expectations were established by Ultima Online, which had sold tens of thousands of units. Every two weeks, head of games John Smedley would gather everyone around a whiteboard in the conference room. “We’d start writing numbers on the board,” Sites says, “going, ‘If we hit 70,000 units sold lifetime, we’ll all have our jobs. 110,000 we’ll be sitting really nicely. If we hit 130,000 plus, that’s just unheard of, that’ll be unbelievable.’” These conversations were largely because of the studio being part of the PlayStation group at the time. “We were literally the black sheep, because not only were we not a console game, we were PC-only, 3D-only, online-only and subscription required. So it was like, four strikes against us.”
In March of 1999, EverQuest launched in North America. Almost immediately, it was chaos. Queues of people spilled out of shopfronts; when they got home with their copy of the game, things got even more hectic.
EverQuest’s login system was crudely put together, and based on one of the studio’s previous games: after installing the game, players would have to connect to a login server, which was a simple text chatroom with a list of selectable servers and worlds. “There was an admin command that we could use that would allow you to refresh the number of new players,” Sites says. The entire team would sit and refresh: 8,000 players. Another five minutes would go by, and another refresh: 11,000. “A minute later, we have another couple hundred and we’re going, ‘Holy shit…’
“Everyone in the team had that command. And we kept refreshing, and the servers kept crashing, and we’re going ‘Oh god, what’s going on?’” Finally, one of the network programmers pointed out that the combination of a large number of people logging in and the database query running was overloading the server. In their excitement, Sites’ team were DDoSing their own game.
Naturally, they dialed back the database voyeurism. But the players kept coming for many days and weeks after, and the wobbly architecture of the login server continued to be a problem. “The way that we had the server set up, we had to have the login server physically
next to all the world servers in our data centre,” Sites says. “And we ended up taking three of our customer service reps, putting these poor souls in parkas inside the data centre” – whose temperature sat at around 11 degrees Celsius – “three eight-hour shifts, 24/7, because we didn’t want to have to lose the time when the server would drop. It required a physical restart of the executable, and we didn’t have any sort of remote administration at the time.”
Suffice it to say, then, that EverQuest’s creators weren’t prepared for what was about to happen – certainly not on the technical side, as they hurriedly laid down tracks in front of the cultural freight train they found themselves riding, tracks that would go on to define the future of MMORPGs for years to come. But it wasn’t possible to be mentally prepared for this kind of success, either. With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, however, Sites has had the opportunity to dissect why
EverQuest proved such an attractive prospect to so many.
Piquing interest with the beta phase was crucial, he believes, as well as being in the right place at the right time, and offering a vast 3D world to explore. But it was mainly EverQuest’s uncompromising approach to difficulty that infuriated, intrigued and ultimately hooked players. ”We would have these really passionate arguments – and by passionate, I mean lots of swearing and yelling, and people storming out of conference rooms – where we were talking about whether we needed to make death in the game
harsher, or certain aspects of it easier,” he says. “But the one thing that we wanted to do was ensure that to really experience the game in its entirety, you needed to group up.” He pauses, and laughs. “My dad was in the Marines, and he talks about all these awful things that happened in boot camp, but he laughs about it. And I hear these same kinds of stories from EverQuest players.”
Originally, EverQuest required players to undertake ‘corpse runs’ after death, in which they’d try to return to the spot where they fell to retrieve the items and experience they’d lost. It was often next to impossible without the help of strangers on the Internet. “It provided this opportunity to forge these friendships,” Sites says. “At the time, it might have felt a little harsh, and we were really kind of winging it. But we knew we wanted to make sure that people were playing together. That’s what really set us apart. And that’s the reason why people are still playing – because of those experiences that allowed them to meet people in the game and forge these real relationships that were lasting and unbreakable.”
One of those people just happened to be EverQuest’s current executive producer, Holly Longdale, who these days is in charge of ensuring EverQuest stays true to what has always made it special, and setting a course for how the studio – renamed from Sony Online Entertainment to Daybreak Game Company in 2015 – envisions its future. Back in the ’90s, she’d heard that
EverQuest was the next Ultima Online and spent around £2,000 building a PC capable of running it. “When I first started playing, it took me three hours to get out of the city,” she recalls. “For those three hours, I was just figuring out my way around, because the designers were clever enough to not be obvious.” EverQuest’s global text-chat system proved invaluable in an era where information was far less readily available. Longdale and other players would crowdsource hints and tips via the chat, as well as organise groups and form relationships. “When I finally made it out of the city, I was immediately attacked by things – and someone showed up and saved me. Time after time, players will tell you that everything in the game became so much fun because the players themselves intervene and support each other.”
Longdale graduated from player to guild officer and then to designer, three years after EverQuest’s launch. She was armed with firsthand knowledge of what made
EverQuest so compelling: the sense of discovery afforded by the developer’s confidence in players to work out things for themselves, and the social dependency fostered by the difficulty of the game and complexity of its systems. “The simplest statement is ‘Nothing comes easily in EverQuest’, from the beginning to the end,” she says. “We’ve built all of our systems around that social dependency, even now, and we never divert from its core. And when we have, we’ve seen the pain of it –
“WE KNEW WE WANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT PEOPLE WERE PLAYING TOGETHER. THAT’ S THE REASON WHY PEOPLE ARE STILL PLAYING”
“I THINK EVER QUEST’ S RAIDING SYSTEM REALLY SET THE STANDARD FOR WHAT RAIDING LOOKS LIKE IN A MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAME”
it doesn’t work. It’s not a solo game. While we do want people to be able to do things on their downtime if they’re not in groups or guilds, or raids, we don’t overinvest, because that’s not what keeps people playing and embedded in the community – it’s the fact that they need each other to accomplish great things.”
Current lead game designer Jonathan Caraker agrees. “I think EverQuest’s raiding system really set the standard for what raiding looks like in a massively multiplayer online game,” he says, recalling how the first raids – a dragon with a breath weapon in a big room, that would drop loot when killed – evolved into sequences of events chained together with lockouts and varied mechanics, and even personal, custom-made dungeons. “We were the first to market with that, the first to iterate on it, and other games have copied. And we still do that – we create handcrafted, puzzle-like challenges for people who really want to take 54 people into a room and solve a complex problem using their abilities and their coordination.” Raids have always been the ultimate manifestation of
EverQuest’s core values. However, as time has moved on and players have become more informed and advanced, Caraker and team’s approach to designing raids has had to evolve. The original raids took a day or two to create; nowadays, it’s closer to two weeks. Once a year,
EverQuest’s top guilds are now invited to test upcoming raids, and provide ongoing feedback. “These guys have been doing it for years,” Caraker laughs, “and we’ve been doing it for years, so with a little grain of salt, we can usually trust what they’re saying. And they know how to communicate with us.”
The march of time and technology has made it challenging to preserve the mystique so fundamental to
EverQuest’s appeal. “The original game was a lot about like, exploration and danger and limited resources,”
Caraker says. “And I think we’ve shaved off a lot of the edges on that.” Most of EverQuest’s later expansions (of which there are currently 25) end up launching with a full suite of player-made maps before they’re made open to anybody. “I kind of miss the exploration. But that ship has sailed, and it’s hard to bring that back. People are more connected, we have the Internet, resources are out there. But the original game was a real frontier, and you didn’t know what you were going to get. There were a lot of rumours – some true, some not, some intentionally misleading – that really sent players on some interesting wild goose chases.”
But it’s people like Longdale and Caraker, people who have two decades of insight into what makes
EverQuest special, who are best placed to ensure its survival. Caraker, for all his longing for the good old days of ignorance, immediately calls to mind an example of how they’ve managed to preserve that same spirit in the present-day version of the game with the Epic 2.0 weapon quests. “We were really secretive about how those worked, what you had to do to complete them,” he says. “There were a lot of puzzles and hidden things involved. And it was really fun for us.”
Longdale, meanwhile, was the key player in Daybreak’s formal recognition of Project 1999, a fanmade, not-for-profit emulated server that offers the classic
EverQuest experience. “The team was like, ‘Project 99 is coming out, they’re going to be unlocking an expansion that’s going to compete with our progression servers, and it sucks, and you should go shut them down,” Longdale says. This, of course, is usually the course of action for an IP owner with a business to run. But Longdale decided to talk to its makers and listen to what they had to say. “When you get the human side of it, they are literally just our biggest fans. They’ve given up months, if not years of their time to get the game working so people can play it. And we want that experience preserved, because this is a game about community, it’s about our fans, it’s about the players. And as long as they’re not materially affecting our business, I couldn’t see a reason to not let it happen.”
These things are done on a case-by-case basis, Longdale says, but in this situation, the studio was happy to buck the trend. “We’ve done a lot of weird things,” she admits. “EverQuest has always been experimental, and you could argue that the industry itself is still an ongoing social experiment. We’re a company built on players of the game – so at some point, you need to take a step back from what is logical business sense. We learned this as players: this is a really emotional business. Sure, it’s entertainment. But the game delivers emotion, the players feel emotion, they bond with each other – this is a grand social experiment, and we should take care with it, and nurture it in positive ways.”
Clearly, the unconventional, more holistic approach has been working. And it’s largely due to the retention of people such as Longdale and Caraker, who have a deeply ingrained understanding of what
EverQuest is and should be, and how to make it work in a business context. Incredibly, the average developer at Daybreak has spent more than a decade on the team. “I don’t know if it was coincidence, or serendipity,” Caraker says, “But I think that’s one of the factors for
EverQuest’s success: having a core group of people that love the game and have been working on it with each other for a very long time. I think we have a lot of the same nostalgia for the game that our players do.” We posit the possibility an element of overprotectiveness might prevent certain people from leaving the team. “Yeah! It’s like, I wasn’t here when the baby was born, but I was here when it was three, so I feel like an adoptive parent.”
Indeed, passing the torch is necessary on a project as singular and as successful as this. It doesn’t make the process any less emotionally difficult, however, as
Sites knows only too well. When he left the team after the Ruins Of Kunark expansion back in 2000 to begin work on EverQuest II, he couldn’t help but worry about how the game might develop in different hands. “After Kunark came Shadows Of Luclin, which was a superambitious and aggressive expansion where they were going to do way more than they should have probably set out to do,” he recalls. “We were all looking at it going, ‘Wow, they’re not going to be able to get this done. This is a mess.’” It was the subject of plenty of jokes (and an unflattering nickname that we shan’t repeat here) among his team. “It ended up launching and it was one of the highest-rated expansion packs that released,” he says. “And we all ate crow. They pulled it off. There have been so many times that if the team would have listened to the naysayers then they wouldn’t have done the amazing things that they ended up doing.”
Daybreak’s talent for knowing when, and what, to change or preserve is at the heart of EverQuest’s continued success. While its contemporaries fall over themselves to reinvent themselves and attract new eyes, this team understands and respects the power of nostalgia. A revamp of the game’s visuals was quickly abandoned, for instance, when the team realised that so much of EverQuest’s soul was in its stylised, blocky, blurry art style. And attracting new players is curiously far from the top of the priority list. “We’ve learned over time not to bother trying to get new people,” Longdale laughs. “Our goal is to reacquire people who have played. Around the time I joined the team, nostalgia really became a driving force in the community discussion. So for us, from a business standpoint, we doubled down on that – and our player base is bigger now than it was prior to 2015.”
It’s been growing ever since, with the team focusing on providing the ‘vanilla’ feel of the original game with all the quality-of-life tweaks and additions that modern players expect. “There are people all the time, younger people, saying ‘I used to watch my dad playing
EverQuest, 15, 20 years ago’,” Longdale says, “and one of our efforts is to make sure people know that it’s still alive, it’s still a functioning business – it’s active development, constant live. For us, the term ‘games as service’ did not used to be a term!” she laughs. “But we’ve been doing this for so long, and are experts at churning out content at a pretty rapid pace with a really smart, efficient team.”
Is it any wonder, then, that EverQuest is still going? These are (still) the people who best understand not only the singular nature of EverQuest, but also the MMORPG and games as service. They built the very foundations of them by hand. “When we launched EverQuest, it was such a far cry from what online gaming and live services are nowadays,” Sites says. “The servers were all physical desktop PCs in metal racks stacked on top of one another. You would pay by the rack in the data centre. So the moment we realised that if we took all the little
rubber feet off of each of the boxes, we could shove at least one more row of PCs into the very top of it, and save money, and basically add capacity to each of the game worlds? That was groundbreaking.”
With no automatic data backup, it had to be done manually: a hard drive failure meant swapping it out by hand – sometimes multiple drives – to save the data. Sometimes players would lose multiple days of progress, and still they came back. The studio was constantly maxing out its bandwidth, to the point where the game would bring down the whole network (including delivery service UPS’ global tracking system) and they’d have to expedite an increase. And server updates involved being physically escorted into the data centre by security to run scripts that would push all of the files from a drive to the machines. “Everything was done by hand,” Sites says. “starting with the poor bastards that were stuck in the data centre in the parkas – every couple days we would check the Internet browsing history and be appalled at what they were browsing during the middle of the night – to server updates and managing any sort of hardware failures.”
Sites is convinced that everyone who’s ever been involved in the project has “an ability or a desire to not just give up. First-handedly we managed to figure it all out. Some ways were really innovative and cool, and other ways were popsicle sticks and duct tape – or ripping the rubber boots off the bottoms of each PC to physically jam another rack of servers in. And to this day, the people that I keep in touch with on the team, they don’t just look at a problem and go, ‘Well, shit, we’re screwed’. We don’t have this inspiration, like ‘Oh, back in the day on EverQuest we did this’. But it’s kind of ingrained in us that we shouldn’t have been able to do it then, and we managed to – so why not do it now?”
“IT’ S KIND OF INGRAINED IN US THAT WE SHOULDN’ T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DO IT THEN, AND WE MANAGED TO– SO WHY NOT DO IT NOW ?”