AS A WRITER, I always enjoy talking to writers in game development. The requirements to succeed as a wordsmith in an industry predicated on audiovisuals have changed so much since the days of text-only adventure games. Now, you must boast a diverse skill set: familiarity with design tools, the ability to communicate with engineers and artists, and a firm understanding of what’s possible within your game’s engine.

Holly Longdale is a pro. She’s been writing for EQ since the early 2000s as the team’s resident “lore lady,” and she brings to her present role as the game’s executive producer a deep comprehension of the strengths and limitations of the game’s narrative.

For over an hour, Holly and I discussed her first brush with EverQuest, the biggest challenge in her time writing and designing for the game, and where she sees the franchise going after 20 years.

David L. Craddock: Part of this feature details the origins of EverQuest, and one thing I like to do with these long reads is also share the "origin story" of each developer's career in games. Yours is two-pronged, though, because you're a writer as well as a game designer. How'd you get your start in both of those fields, and how they'd intersect?

Holly Longdale: During high school and for a while after, I fancied myself an artist. Then I thought, Well, that's a road to poverty. I liked writing, so I went to journalism school. Plus, my parents said, "You have to get an education of some description." I lived in Canada and grew up there, so I went to university and when I came out, I did some freelancing.

I'm talking to someone who surely knows this: It turns out if you're not constantly [hustling], you can be poor as a writer. I ended up going into internal communications. During that, I started to play games a little bit more. My mother introduced me to, of all things, introduced me to Wolfenstein 3D. My brother, who was a techie, introduced her to Leisure Suit Larry, which was horrifying, but she loved it and got into games.

So, there'd been a number of jobs in internal communications after I moved from eastern Canada back to western Canada, back to Vancouver. I was getting bored, so I started scripting and learning how to set up database systems to do internal communications sites at companies. I was growing more technically [savvy] because I'd been interested in gaming.

My husband at the time worked at Microsoft as an engineer. I started playing Dungeon Keeper and Ultima Online. In UO, I spent most of my time as a ghost drifting across the landscape because I died constantly. PVP was not my friend, and neither was my dial-up modem because my connection was not great. Then we upgraded everything when we heard about this game called EverQuest coming out. It took me three-and-a-half hours to get out of Neriak by running around walls trying to find the door, which anyone who knows Neriak knows that's not how you get out.

At first, I didn't realize the other characters were other people. My husband at the time said, "Yeah, those are other players from all over the world." I was completely fascinated that they were in Neriak Forest and speaking in Drizzt terms, [the character by] R.A. Salvatore, using those greetings. I wasn't on a roleplaying server, but it had been established that dark elves didn't talk to other races, so I thought I'd get into trouble or kicked off the server [for interacting].

Over time, we tried traveling. I think we died a few times in Ocean of Tears, getting bonked by a cyclops several times. We eventually made it to North Karana, and that's where I had my first experience with other players. From there, I joined a guild, and ended up in a higher-end guild because I got into that chase of looking up to people in bigger guilds who are doing all the uber-stuff, fighting these big bosses. The guild I joined was Mythic Legion, on my server.

I think I spent two years with them. I became an officer, and we were planning a raid. We were on our ninth hour recovering from a wipe—as often happens—and we were all hanging out. This friend in the guild, who was a female high-elf magician, I was telling her, "I wish I could work on a game. I kind of want to move on. I'm a little bored at my job." Microsoft was amazing. I loved in there, but it was another internal communications job, and I was so invested in gaming at the time. I'd missed three days of work because I'd been camping out the last weekend jboots [Journeyman Boots] drops from Drelzna. I maintained a list of 85 people, I think, over that weekend as we camped the entire dungeon and tried to get our jboots.

So this female high-elf said, "Well, funny secret: I work on the dev team." He was an apprentice [designer] then. His name was Akil Hooper, and he said, "I know you write. We don't have a lot of writers on our team, and I know you can do some scripting. Are you cool to come in for an interview if I can set that up?" That's what happened. I was living in Seattle, came down for an interview, and got the job.

Craddock: How typical was it, based on what you know as a player and a developer, for EQ devs to reveal that sort of info?

Longdale: They kept everything secret, mostly. There was always the fear of favoritism, like if a guild was filled with devs, it was assumed they were all cheating. They kept things quiet. It turned out the chief counsel of our company, Andy Zaffron, was in the guild as well. So we had a few devs in our guild as well.

The majority of people here today started in other departments where they could get a foothold in the industry, like customer service and quality assurance, because there was no path on how to get an education in how to do those jobs. We pulled from an incredible number of fans who had those qualifications. I was sort of a rare breed in that I was in a different profession. So often in this industry, it's who you know. While there are schools—we've got a guy on the team who came out of a game development program—it's fans first, skills... well, not skills second. [laughs] But especially for a game like EverQuest, it's easier if they come to us through the game because they already have a grounding in what all the history is about.

Talk about right place, right time, right situation. I believe I'd just divorced, so I thought, Now I can go anywhere. Let's see if I can do this gaming thing. It was such a strange and amazing, magical time.

Craddock: Do you think it was the social aspect of MMOs that made you even more of a gamer compared to the earlier, solo experience you mentioned, such as Wolfenstein 3D?

Longdale: Honestly, I think it's a society of gratitude and need. Even my early experience in a newbie area, this giant, square piece of geometry, and newbies would stand around when they were getting chased by giant fire beetles. There'd usually be someone there to help, whether they were healing or [helping to attack]. Time and again, every time I played, someone would help me. They'd give me a piece of loot. They'd give me money to go get all the weird stuff you needed just to survive in lower levels. That just carried on.

Another thing EverQuest does, and what we're still committed to, is we don't tell you everything. This is a game of exploration and adventure in the sense that people are in chat asking questions constantly. We don't tell you that if you pick up a giant's toe, you can do something with it. Players will say, "Hey, I found a giant's toe. What do I do with it," and others will say, "You can sell it," or "It's a quest item." That is so binding for the community, and people even build reputations around it. Server by server, there were celebrities who were like masters full of wisdom. You could ask them questions.

That, to me, has always been the driving force. At the time, it was such a friendly, open community. That's another thing for me. When I think about the EQ franchise, it's a world of hope and adventure. There's definitely bad stuff, but there's so much humor in EQ. When you see our key art of these epic characters like dragons, you forget that halflings are being ridiculous, and we've got gnomes that are hilarious.

That's the beauty of it. EverQuest is a nice place to live. Even in a roleplaying situation, like when I felt that as a dark elf, I felt I wasn't supposed to talk to other people playing different races, that's when you realize you're one big family fighting against the world. There's basic stuff that drives you. Every piece of loot at the time was so incrementally better. You're chasing an increase of one or two points in a stat.

But it felt epic to you when you got something that had a cool appearance. And I won't lie, there was a time when I wasn't in an uber-guild, and I bought a mug, a stein for $300 off eBay. I did it. [laughs] Because that was the first time in my life I had a hobby I was fully invested in. I've tried so many things and nothing stuck except gaming. It's the game and the people I love. As a kid, I loved fantasies. The original Clash of the Titans was one of my favorite movies. I used to sketch Pegasus creatures all the time as a kid. I read the Dark Elf trilogy by Bob Salvatore, so when I started, I said, "I'm going to be a dark elf because Drizzt is amazing. Hopefully someday I'll see a Pegasus."

It was during that time in North Korona when a Pegasus appeared. Somebody killed it. I was really mad.

But! Those were moments. When you think about how gaming has evolved, how things look in games now, at the time—and EQ still does this—you really felt like you were part of something special [because it was all so new]. The people make it that way. I was always amazed at how selfless people were, even strangers. There's a really strong sense of community that I do believe exists today.

We're in an era now where there are trolls everywhere [online]. My goal has been to get in a game and talk to people one on one. That's where people who still love the game live, and I like to check in with them to make sure we're still keeping the essence of EverQuest alive, and that it's still special to them.

Craddock: Did you and your guilds prefer to roleplay, or was that fluid?

Longdale: It was really cool because some people had personas, and other people were just themselves. Nobody really knew how this was supposed to work or who they were supposed to be. Our guild leader was a mage, and every day he had some kind of story. That was his thing: Every day he had a tale to tell. Most of the time he was just a dude, often crude, but always hilarious.

We had these two other characters, a shadow knight and a cleric, played by the same person. He didn't talk to anyone, ever, except the leaders of the guild. He would go to Plane of Fear, by himself, and clear it for us. I had a suspicion he was an engineer because engineers are the ones who can reverse-engineer how something works, but he wasn't [an EQ] dev. He was just an incredibly talented player who was always online. We knew nothing about him. He was just excellence and silence.

Then there were people who were totally doubling down on being a halfling. There was a dwarf who would type in a Scottish accent. All kinds of crazy stuff. There was no judgment.

Craddock: So, you get this interview, and you land the job. What were your initial impressions of EverQuest from the inside?

Longdale: The two sides were basically indistinguishable. I was the oldest at the time, and I was 33. We were all a bunch of super-fan kids. The optimism, the openness—it was awesome. I came in thinking, Well, I guess I can start out editing some stuff. It wasn't that at all. They said, "We're working on Lost Dungeons of Norrath." The expansion was in the early stages as they figured out how to do, with their tech, EQ's versions of instances.

We hadn't started any content. They knew the expansion's themes, so the team said, "Let's explore those areas that have been part of our legends since the beginning of EQ. We think players would really like to explore them." When I came in, they said, "What do you think of this?" I remember sitting with a bunch of the designers during the first month, whiteboarding what we should do. I wanted to have this system where you would interact with this faction, and through doing that, you were getting a library's worth of lore about what happened there. You're experiencing this story as you're progressing through the content.

They said, "Sweet. Let's do that." I was like, oh my god, I had an idea and somebody listened.

Playing in the instances, I said, "This is really awesome, but I worry about these areas feeling dry and a bit slow." I was talking to some of the designers, and said, "Could we have a system where you break open to crates and get health from it?" That was from playing Diablo where you'd find health wells or a mana well. I wanted to replicate that. They said, "Sweet, let's do that."

It was just amazing to come in and have so much respect shown. We were all pals working ridiculous hours, not because we had to, but because we always wanted to do more. Provided the lead designer was on board, there was nothing stopping us from doing anything.

Craddock: Is that how you'd come up with things like new characters, new quests, new themes?

Longdale: It wasn't the Wild West, but it was so open creatively. As players, we had a point of view on where the game should be going, and the important things we should include.

It was a magical, open time. I'd never had an experience like that. That's something that even the team today [carries on]. We're all about being open; that's how we advance. Players don't often know what they want until they play it. Some of it's instinct, and then, obviously, a huge percentage of our job is listening to the audience. Are we lacking some element in the downtime side of the game, like crafting? We've always done that, and part of that is being a player.

Everyone didn't always agree, but we'd always reach a point where we knew we were doing the right thing for the game without alienating core fans. It's sad to see games losing fans by not doubling down on their special sauce. Don't go too far off that track, because it will alienate the people who love you the most. That's something we watch on a month-to-month basis.

Craddock: How would you describe the culture when you arrived?

Longdale: Engineers and producers were upstairs, and artists were downstairs. We were all in cubicles, and every day we'd go to Wings N Things and get lunch. We'd go to lunch every day, and every day, lunch was talking about gaming. After lunch, we'd go to GameStop. It was, for lack of a better term, camaraderie. Designers might be going out to lunch to talk about design things. Engineers would go out to talk about engineering. Artists, too. It would cross over.

It's all passion. It's all about creating opportunities, especially back then. Nobody knew what game development really was. It wasn't formalized. There were no answers to questions. We felt like we were on the bleeding edge, trying to figure it all out. It was a delightful time. It wasn't oppressive. The issue of constant crush wasn't... We had lives. We had time to ourselves. Socially we'd get together and have parties. It was an amazing, fun time when you felt like you were on the forefront of something special.

Craddock: Earlier, you mentioned pitching ideas not being completely "Wild West." Even so, would you say those meetings and casual conversations were how content ideas for expansions came together?

Longdale: Oh, yeah. Rich Waters was our lead designer, along with another designer named Shawn Lord. I really respected them and looked up to them. They were super-smart and had been doing this for a while. It was less about pitching, and more about being in a room. We'd have creative meetings, and they'd do their due diligence and ask questions. As a team, lots of smart people would just talk things through: "Here are some developments we might find with that process."

Everything was solution-based. At the end of the day, those two would make final decisions on the design side, which was where all decisions got made. We had a technical director, Scott, and a producer, Robert. They'd all come to agreement and work out issues, and then come to us with the result.

It was formal to the degree that somebody had to make the final call, but I don't remember a time when the team was told "No, you can't do that." The only thing I remember, oddly, is that one of the producers, Robert Pfister, didn't want us to use the color purple. No idea why. [laughs] It was just one of those rules. His goal was to never explain himself on that front. He would yell about a lot of things, but he was hilarious.

Craddock: What was some of the earliest material you wrote?

Longdale: I came in as a designer. I was told, "You're going to have to do everything, and learn." I started with designing the content system, the "lore delivery" system. I designed and implemented it, wrote all the text for five dungeons, and storylines for all five dungeons, dialogue for characters in all camps.

When the content was deep into development, that's when the system designers would start to make items and get everything together. I think I started in June, which meant we had roughly four months of development time to go. It was pretty compressed. Tech for the dungeons was just coming in when I started, so all the pieces, including NPCs, were coming together. I remember recording voice for some of the female NPCs. I went to the audio team and was recording some NPC reactions and idle audio.

I scripted some stuff, and then I remember being delirious. Alan VanCouvering, who's still on the team, was naming a thousand items. That's just for the sake of this discussion; it could have been more. All the recipe components for all the crafting. That needed to be edited because he'd reached the point of delirium. They all came with lore text, so you had to look over their descriptions, too. After maybe 500 items, it was around 10:00 at night, and I hit delirium. I remember being in tears from laughing at what he'd named some of this stuff. To this day, he defers responsibility for some of them. I think some of those names made it in, like Wayfarer's Nut Loaf.

You get to that point where everything's hilarious. You had to do some amount of research when you're naming hundreds of items, and you also need somebody to check your work, because some of those names are just bad. You'd get these moments where everybody was laughing, and you're running around the office showing people what someone had named something.

Everybody pitched in. Engineers were often helping or play-testing, because they were players too. Everybody wanted to understand the content we were making. It was all hands on deck, all the time. When [Lost Dungeons of Norrath] shipped, that was one of the proudest moments of my life. Two of my ideas got implemented in this amazing game that I'd loved for so many years.

Craddock: I'd like to delve into the lore delivery system. Around the time you joined, how would you describe the importance of lore in EverQuest? How'd you identify that system as something the game needed?

Longdale: I did feel some responsibility around being a writer, and having that voice. When I came in, I thought, I'm going to push lore and content. That was not necessary, because everyone knew [the game's story] inside and out. Some members of the dev team were working on EverQuest II, so I could go down the hallway and find out the intent of what some of the early lore had been. In some cases, there wasn't any, which left us room to develop it as we wanted.

Over time, they coined me "lore lady" and "keeper of the lore." I was starting to formalize things. I think we all did an amazing job. At the pace we were working, you never knew what was going to come out the other side. It was my job to not defend it, and to own up to it. That was around when we started doing expansions every six months. There was definitely some amount of insanity. But the lore, at that point, I was starting to build a bible for the game. We're still refining and continuing to add to that today.

Craddock: The development cycles for expansions sound... intense. How far ahead were expansions planned, on average?

Longdale: We tried so many different variations of making production work, like splitting into a live team and an expansion team. There were people to handle live content without impacting future products. That said, it was fluid. Even now, work has already started for this year's expansion. Art takes so long, so you have to start really early. I'd say late summer of the year prior is when designers figure everything out so they can plan for art assets, mapping, NPC descriptions, lore. It's a good year, year and a half prior, while working on the current expansion.

Before we'd finish a current expansion, a group was working on the next one. Before we'd ship, there was a period of supporting the current expansion: fixing bugs, finding typos, et cetera, and then everybody moved on. When we were doing them every six months, we'd have a smaller live team to manage ongoing issues; everyone else was on the expansion.

I can't even remember the order expansions were done in, because they bled into each other. Design docs, lore, dialogue, descriptions, all this stuff for the next expansion while you're implementing for the existing expansion. There were these characters called the Wayfarers Brotherhood. I invented them, and we used them as a mechanic to deliver lore for the locations we were building. I may have used them for three or four expansions, and then players were like, "Man, we hate those guys. They get to explore everything before we do. Can we kill them all?"

That became a lesson for me: Players are the explorers. Players come first. Players and their experience in the world take priority over characters who experience things before the players. You don't want to do that.

Craddock: When you want to create a character, name a region, or do anything related to lore, how'd you vet that? Or as the "lore lady," could you sort of set things in stone?

Longdale: My leads would review my stuff. It comes up now: "women in gaming." But I have to say that even back then, I never felt singled out or diminished. There was so much respect on that team, including from my managers and leads. They'd eyeball stuff and say, "Yeah, it looks good." I'd send things out to the entire team, even the weird pronunciation bible on a per-expansion basis, and people would actually read it. [laughs]

I suppose what I'm trying to get to is [making EverQuest] is a very unique type of collaboration. As a designer then, and now as a producer, as far as responsibilities, I have the last word [on lore]. But during this entire time, it's the best collaboration I've had. That collaboration results in "better together." It's about sharing ideas: someone comes up with something; someone else refines it and makes it better; and engineer jumps in and says, "We could make it even better by doing this."

That collaboration has been happening since I started here. You have these insanely passionate and creative people who are solution-finders. I never dictate anything because I know that won't get the best results. It's about constant talking and constant collaboration.

I think that's why we've been successful: Egos are in check. You've been around this industry long enough to know there are people out there with enormous egos. I'm sure that works well in some studios, but here, there's so many years of specialized knowledge that you'll always find ways to make things better just by asking around.

Craddock: That seems like it would be important for developers new to the team to learn as early as possible. MMOs are living entities, so decisions can't realistically come down to one person's verdict.

Longdale: Right. Also, it's not my personality. That's not to say we haven't had some of those personalities. You need to find people capable of making the big sell for your project. I wish I was better at that. [laughs]

I can honestly say that compared to what we used to be like, we're very professional and efficient. Still creative, excessively so, but after so many years of experience, we know our limits. It's very important to me that these folks have lives outside of work. Half the time back then, you didn't know what you were getting into. I never ask these folks to do over-time, but it's the same mindset: People often work crazy hours not because I ask them to, not because it's mandated, but because they want to give the players more.

I do yell at them about it. "Go home! Take a nap! Hang out with other human beings!" They still show up, like, "I was sitting there thinking about doing this, so..." As long as people are happy... I find it unique about how happy they are for players to play the game. You'd think we're on a treadmill, but we 100 percent are not.

I'm insanely lucky, and I love these people. they're amazing. We're a little family. EQ's revenue has grown since I returned to the game in 2015, which is not to my credit. I just sat down and listened to the team, and the team was saying, "The players are all about nostalgia. They want to relive the early game as much as they can, but without the horrible stuff." We put out new servers, a progression server, to have as much of that experience as possible; that led to our progression servers in 2015.

The game's been growing ever since. When you have a group of passionate people, it's not about dollar signs or squeezing blood out of stones. It's about nurturing this social phenomenon, this amazing community. All we have to do is give them tools to support each other, and the game will continue to grow.

Craddock: Could you put me in your head on the day Lost Dungeons of Norrath, your first EQ product, shipped?

Longdale: Oh, my god. Butterflies the week prior, because you're fixing everything. We've always been a group of A-type personality perfectionists, and I think that describes a good portion of the EverQuest audience: You can't succeed in that game unless you're aware of all the things. There's this panic—and this still happens now—about perfection. Fix everything, make sure everything is golden. Then something is terrible, and you try to make a decision to handle the shame and guilt.

It was this amazing roller coaster. I'd think, I'll have my first game credit. But the pivotal moment was, we have commands to enter the game at launch, and we're hiding out just to see what people do. Seeing people rushing into your content, shouting a billion questions in chat, and to witness all the little surprises they share—getting the credit was an amazing achievement, but it's also like being a chef. When you see the enjoyment people get from your food, this is a similar experience. It's like, "I wrote that, and somebody thought it was awesome, and they posted about it."

You see your work on all the fan sites, the review sites. That's another thing about EQ: The fact that we don't give you every detail about the game. All these community websites pop up with information about how to do things. It's like community sourcing. I was in so much wonder, seeing it from the other side. I was also exhausted, but there was so much magic, especially as a kid who was a fantasy fan: read a lot of books, liked Clash of the Titans, was drawing Pegasus. And now people are excited about sand devils I made? It's really hard to describe.

Every single expansion has been the same: Complete elation. You have to admit your failures at the same time, but back in 2003, it was still such an early time in games and especially in MMOs. Everybody was rallying around us and in our corner. EQ was amazing. You felt incredibly lucky. I don't know how many hundreds of hours we worked, but then it was like, "Okay, cool. What are we working on now?" [laughs]