EverQuest’s core appeal lies in the real-life relationships and off-the-cuff moments—what contemporary developers refer to as emergent gameplay—that have elevated it from a PC game to a living, breathing world for over two decades.
In this chapter, developers past and present recount the influences and experiences that defined communication and collaboration in Norrath.
Playing in the MUD
In 1999, the idea of a real-time, online RPG in which human-controller characters controlled the game’s ebb and flow was almost science fiction. It had been done, but not to the extent of EverQuest—a fully realized, 3D-powered world. The game’s foundation was firmly built on MUDs: multi-user dungeons that consisted nothing of text-based descriptions and interactions. As EverQuest took shape, those influences—and, later, the interactions between adventurers who only knew each other by online handles—took on three-dimensional forms as well.
BRAD McQUAID [designer/producer]
All the stuff you see in MMOs today, people were already poking around and figuring it out in MUDs in the '90s.
ANDREW “ANDY” SITES [designer/producer]
Brad [McQuaid] and Bill Trost were the two visionaries behind the original design. They played MUDs. They wanted to turn a text-based MUD into a 3D world.
BRAD McQUAID
I played a ridiculous amount of time. I was married by then. I'd come home, and my wife wouldn't see me until three in the morning because I was MUD-ding like crazy. We had this background in creating single-player RPGs, but I was learning all about what makes communities and the online experience.
Even though they were just text, playing was like reading a book: You see it all in your head. I was learning about the mechanics, the [psychology of player] retention mechanics, why shared experiences are so important, grouping and guilds, people being allowed to make social constructs, the joy of exploration.
JOHN SMEDLEY [president]
I was never into MUDs like Brad was, but CyberStrike made me realize that online gaming was the future.
BRAD McQUAID
Understanding MUDs is understanding a certain type of gamer's psychology. Even though I've never wanted to be a psychologist, I wanted to know how they worked, why they worked, why this guy in college risked blowing his four-year degree to play these games 12 to 16 hours a day. I said, “Man, that's powerful stuff. I've been playing video games a long time, but I've never sat down and played Defender for 16 hours.”
Part of [my interest in] that study was making friends with other people, but part of it was also about me: Why do I want to log in? When Richard Bartle was involved in MUDs, he [came up with a classification]. He said there were achievers, socializers, explorers, and killers—PVPers. It's still out there: There's this questionnaire where you answer around 20 questions, and it tells you who you are. It's interesting. It's a good way to look at things. I think it's a little oversimplified, but that's fine.
JOHN SMEDLEY
As time went on—I'm talking months instead of years—it was very obvious that the design was more MUD-based than not. That all came from Brad's experience playing MUDs.
BRAD McQUAID
For me, playing RPGs, playing D&D—it was about the exploration. The fun of finding out what's around that next corner. I definitely have that adventurer-explorer in me. But when you play a MUD or MMO, you add a social component because you're playing with others. I found that to be as important as adventuring.
JONATHAN CARAKER [designer]
My friends said, "Hey, you've gotta check this out. It's amazing. We're going to the university campus, and we're going to sneak in and play this game." We went up there, ducking the profs and trying not to be seen. My friends learned how to log into a couple different MUDs, and they were just incredible.
It never seemed like being text-only ever held them back. A lot of them had ways to make the [adventure] more flavorful, such as by adding color, well-written room descriptions—just interesting text that allowed you to really seem rooms in your mind, and some puzzles that you really couldn't do in action games.
BILL COYLE [producer/designer]
I think the stereotype of meeting people online is right: You're going to be playing with this hot, wood-elf babe, and then you meet, and it's some 400-pound, 40-year-old creepy guy. That's the stereotype, but weirdly enough, the people I met in game, when I met them in real life, they were them.
BRAD McQUAID
What I wanted to accomplish with EQ and every game I've worked on was, every person in my online circle of friends became real friends. Most of these people, I've never met in real life. But if they called me and said, “Hey, I'm in trouble. I need help,” I'd get on a plane.
I was able to hire people like Ryan Palacio [programmer]; a little bit later, Bill Fisher [game designer]; Roger Uzen. They were people I'd MUD-ed with before. I was able to help them get a foot into the industry and act as a mentor. I was able to work with them, spend time with the actual person, where I see them in front of me rather than just a bunch of text.
BILL COYLE
Now it's even more apparent, because most people communicate [in games] with voice chat. You're hearing them, but we had just been text-chatting. It's almost like what they look like, what they sound like, none of those things mattered. I already knew who they were.
BRAD McQUAID
It was weird at first. These guys had just worked at Burger King and played MUDs. I didn't want to take anyone out of school. I don't think I could have lived with myself if I'd have convinced a guy to drop out of college. But the ones who weren't in school, I tried to bring on board.
These guys didn't know how to dress. One would come in wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Another one would wear a suit with a bow tie. They didn't know what to do or say. There was this initial awkwardness. After a minute or two, what I did to break the ice was I brought up a shared experience. And boom—we started talking, laughing, remembering. It was like I'd already known them forever. They were real friends.
Back then, there were people who said this was a disorder: “You're hanging out with virtual people, and you're never going to meet them, and they're never going to have any real impact on your life. That's not healthy.” We all know now that's a bunch of bologna. So many people have met spouses in EverQuest, and that definitely affected real life.
Corpsing
Having identified MUDs as a wellspring to draw from, McQuaid and the rest of the design team began feeling out ways to facilitate shared experiences in EverQuest. It was a process that began as far back as the first talks for what “the online RPG” could be in 1996, and continues to this day. One of the first, and most relatable, was helping players retrieve their corpses after dying.
ANDY SITES
We could never make a game like EQ nowadays. It was so punitive.
BRAD McQUAID
We looked at RPGs: computer games, console, paper-and-pencil, and especially MUDs. It was mostly me writing it. Steve was getting into the coding part, working on getting a very, very simple version of the game running. I tried to identify—and I do this to this day when my teams talk about systems—"Okay, this system is a cool idea, but why is it in the game? What is it trying to achieve?”
BILL COYLE
EverQuest was by no means solo-friendly, at any point. If you tried to solo that game, you were in for a bad time. We had an experience system where, if you died, you lost XP. And when you died, you dropped all your stuff, and you'd have to do a corpse run all the way back there. That kind of hardship forged a community.
JOHN SMEDLEY
My first time in Blackburrow, I fell through the tree right away. Some of the developers were standing over my shoulder and started laughing. Watching myself die, and trying to get people to come help me recover my corpse and all the gear I had, was pretty fun.
BILL COYLE
If I'm running by myself into a dungeon, like Blackburrow, and I go too deep, get lost, and get killed, now I've got my body in there, and I have no idea where it is because I'm lost. There's no way I can possibly get it back. What do I do?
Well, I sit at the beginning of the dungeon, I watch as other people come by, and I say, “Please, sirs, take pity on a poor stranger. I lost my corpse in there. Can you help me?”
LINDA CARLSON [director of global community relations]
I was a fairly young dwarf in the game. I'd lost my corpse, and this was after spending a week patching together a bunch of rusty armor I could wear, and I was so happy with my rusty armor and my crappy weapons. And then, out of nowhere, I wandered into a place I wasn't familiar with, and I got killed.
It was traumatic for me. It hit me personally: I remember sitting at my desk crying because I was going to lose my corpse.
BILL COYLE
And these people, maybe slightly more experienced, said, “Of course we'll help you. We needed help, too, in the beginning.”
Then they would guide and protect this naked stranger through this dungeon until they got their corpse back. Because you were forced to do that from so early on, it became ingrained in the player base.
JOHN SMEDLEY
I was much more involved in the production aspect, not specific content going into it, so it all was a very fresh adventure to me. Even though I would sit in on group meetings so I knew what the planned encounters would be, experiencing them for the first time was magical.
I thought we'd made a difficult game and didn't want to compromise our vision, and that's hubris talking. I think that was a mistake. Corpse recovery, as an example, became a hot-button topic.
LINDA CARLSON
People started responding: ‘What's the last thing you remember before you died?’ and ‘Do you remember where you died?’ I said, ‘I don't know. Some stupid gore named Corflunk was hitting me for way more hit points than I had.’ One of the people in the channel said, ‘I know where that is. Let's set up a party.’ They gathered people to help find the corpse.
I was disoriented, because I was so new to the game, that I didn't know how to get to where Corflunk lived out in the Butcher Block mountains. So they sent another party to pick me up, and they put me in their group, took me to where I died, and I recovered my corpse, rusty armor and handful of coppers intact.
JOHN SMEDLEY
Every single EverQuest user I know has an awesome corpse-recovery story, but we got too infatuated at looking at those stories and how awesome they were, instead of listening to the stories themselves. If you did that, they actually sounded like miserable experiences. The average user might not have been thrilled waiting eight hours for someone to come rescue them at the bottom of a dungeon. For every person who loved that, maybe twenty hated it.
That was something we didn't learn fast enough, I would say. We were listening to a vocal minority, maybe to the exclusion of a wider user base we could have had. But if we'd [dialed down the difficulty], then EverQuest wouldn't have been EverQuest.
I don't have any regrets about that, but thinking rationally, the right move would have been to listen closely and make some changes. Instead we doubled down, and we got beat.
BILL COYLE
If you were an asshole, or a troll, people wouldn't help you. If you didn't get help, you wouldn't make it very far in the game. If you didn't make it very far, you'd get frustrated and stop playing.
The people who kept playing were the people who forged these friendships and became part of the community.
LINDA CARLSON
It really showed me that this is the future of humanity, potentially. This is a way that we can get together, and it doesn't matter what you look like, what you do for a living, what your socioeconomic status is, what education you have, your gender, your religion, anything. This is a world where people can work together despite any differences we might have. EverQuest was a world where I could live.
We've always wanted these worlds. I've played a lot of D&D, and that's fun, too, but here was a world that surrounds you and immerses you, and it's full of real people.
Tough Love
Corpse retrieval became a rite of passage in EverQuest. So, too, did other cooperative-focused activities, from tackling gigantic bosses to the concept of the raid, a multi-group effort that grew out of organic efforts made by the community.
JOHN SMEDLEY
Brad's and my only real point of contention was, I wanted player-versus-player in EverQuest. I pushed that hard. A lot of that was a reaction to Ultima Online, but that desire was there quite a bit before that. The idea of having different races, some of which are antagonistic to each other—it felt natural to me that there should be some sort of PVP.
Brad, to his credit, saw the importance of co-op, and that's really what made EverQuest.
ANDY SITES
You'd leave Qeynos going into the Qeynos Hills, and we had these guard towers, and we'd spaced them out in such a way that you could use them as safe havens. If you aggroed too many enemies, you could get to one of the outposts and the guards would attack the enemies.
We had so many meetings where there were passionate arguments about, "We need to add more of these towers. This is too hard." People were getting caught between these safe havens and getting destroyed. We were saying, "We're going to frustrate people." But we chose to keep it hardcore.
BRAD McQUAID
You can say the game is really hard, but if you group up, and you have different people playing different classes, there's this interdependence. Suddenly you're much more powerful and can handle different situations. You've got a warrior out there tanking, and the cleric is healing him.
But why do we do that? We approached it from a very high level. We wanted interdependence so people would form a community and even make real friends. That was a retention mechanism. We approached each of the features that way.
HOLLY LONGDALE [writer, designer, and producer]
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.
ALAN VANCOUVERING [community relations, designer]
I've been an RPG player, pen-and-paper style, since I was 16 or 17. I still do that with the same group of people, which is a little hard to schedule these days. I was super-interested in the whole idea of a visual representation of storytelling in the game. It seemed like it'd be hard to tell a computer to respond the same way a GM [game master] might respond to something that happens.
I was into Ultima [Online], but I was a little bit late, so I said, "I'll just wait for EQ to come out." That worked out in my favor, obviously.
JOHN SMEDLEY
The first time I saw Nagafen, I was in a pretty decent-sized group. By that time, it had been killed hundreds of times, but the first time I died to Nagafen was memorable. It was kind of a badge of honor, dying to this dragon that had this mythical status early in the game, a tough encounter that we had to keep tuning.
ANDY SITES
Maybe that was part of the game's success. It wasn't just a simple thing that everyone could traipse through. It required real commitment, and you needed to play strategically. You couldn't be foolish, because if you did, you were going to get hurt.
BRAD McQUAID
A lot of MMOs like to do instancing, kind of break people up. I know what they're doing. They're trying to address overcrowding and people competing for resources. I get that, although there are other ways to work around that. But consider shared experiences.
ANDY SITES
Losing all your gear was one thing. Losing XP? Losing levels? Oh my gosh. There's nothing worse than losing your gear, losing XP, and losing a level, and then trying to go back and recover your stuff only to get killed again. But we did that to promote the social aspect of it. We didn't want you to just solo everything. We wanted you to play with others.
ALAN VANCOUVERING
I got really invested in the game, playing it with my friends. At first, it was just, "is this even possible? Can a game really do what they're saying it can do?" Turns out it was possible. It wasn't the same type of storytelling. A video game can't respond the same way a GM could. I played with a couple of my friends from work, and what it did is gave us the opportunity to tell us our own stories.
HOLLY LONGDALE
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].
BILL COYLE
What you have to do as a designer is find that spark that gets people together. Once they've made those bonds, they'll take it from there. You don't have to worry after that point. They'll have barbecues together. They'll be online doing their own thing.
It's the same with school: You can put a bunch of kids in the same class, and none of them like being there, maybe because math is stupid, or one kid gets picked on. Students will come together and form friendships. That's how you got friends as a kid. The same kind of thing happens in a game world. It's hard to replicate that.
BRAD McQUAID
You and your group almost die. You're down to just a few hit points, and one of your buddies finally plunges a dagger into the NPC and kills it. Now we're sharing the loot and laughing about how so-and-so screwed up, and that's why so-and-so almost died.
JOHN SMEDLEY
I remember that when I was fighting Nagafen the first time, the difficulty level was an order of magnitude harder than what we'd planned. I died very quickly. It's almost a rite of passage, these shared experiences: ‘Oh, have you done X?’ and a bunch of people online say yes. Now it's your turn.
It's one of the aspects of these games that I think makes them really unique. Nagafen had been killed hundreds of times before I got to it. Well, imagine being the first person to kill it. The first person to enter that room. There were a lot of times in EverQuest where people got to be the first at something, and that became a big deal.
ALAN VANCOUVERING
My guild, we would do dumb things like scavenger hunts, hide-and-go-seek, whatever we felt like doing. EverQuest’s world gave us a way to do that with people I couldn't meet in-person because they lived across the country, worked different hours, lived different lives. It was fun to bring our own storytelling into the world, and to engage with how it told stories.
HOLLY LONGDALE
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.
BRAD McQUAID
I just think there's something hardwired into the human brain that, when you experience something intensely good, bad, emotional, what-have-you, and there are other people around, it has more of an impact. It resonates. The memory lasts longer.
“Big” became the operative word. While playing EverQuest and its first few expansions, player group began to grow, joining into a gigantic force to tackle challenges that proved too daunting for a single party to conquer alone.
JONATHAN CARAKER
Looking back on it now, EQ was the industry leader in things like giant-scale raids. No one had done that before because it hadn't been possible technically.
JOHN SMEDLEY
We designed for fairly small parties because we thought of it exactly as you would a Dungeons & Dragons campaign at home: You and four or five of your buddies. What happened was, players would bring in much larger groups. We didn't have a full-on guild system, just a rudimentary one, but it enabled players to form these larger organizations.
JONATHAN CARAKER
It started with a group construct. You could have six people together, and that was it. But there were big challenges in the world, such as big dragons that took 30, 60, even 90 people to defeat. Then we put in the concept of a raid, allowing you to have up to 72 people in the same group of groups. It was a shared experience: share raids, share loot, share communication.
JOHN SMEDLEY
Even before that, they were bringing four or five groups at a time to encounters that was never designed for that, so they were just slaughtering these powerful characters like Nagafen that we thought would be a super-high goal to aspire to as you reached higher levels.
BRAD McQUAID
I think people would rather be on a team with everyone working toward the same goal, different people using different skill sets, making that team dynamic work. I think it's human nature.
HOLLY LONGDALE
My experience in UO wasn't really organized. I wasn't part of any social group at the time. But I still remember little things. Chat wasn't a thing. People weren't texting on phones then, so BRB and all of those acronyms and terms, like cybering—which is inappropriate, but it was a thing—started then.
We had a list of these things where we tried to trace where they started, and shorthand like noob was on there. Also lots of not-so-great things, which we'll skip.
JOHN SMEDLEY
It turned out that mid-level players could just as easily accomplish that by bringing in a whole bunch of other players. That was the origin of raids, starting with Nagafen, and it stemmed from our learning that players don't do anything the way we think they would.
JONATHAN CARAKER
It became clear that the open-air raid concept wasn't working very well. We couldn't scale the amount of content in the world to the number of players in the world, and there was no prevent one raid construct from taking all the content.
Then we made instanced versions of raids. I think the first time we did that was in Lost Dungeons of Norrath: Actual, instanced content. That was probably 2002-ish. But it wasn't a perfect system yet. You couldn't add or remove people from the raid while it was in progress. Whoever you started with, that was a snapshot of who you'd be raiding with. It also gave you a lockout on request instead of on success, so if you blew it, if something went wrong, you couldn't try [that raid] again for a week.
BRAD McQUAID
There were PVP-only MUDs back in the day. As always, 10 to 20 percent of your player base will like to PVP. That gets more and more granular until you're talking, ‘What kind of PVP? Unrestricted? In an arena?’ So, there were these PVP MUDs, and they weren't as popular as the PVE MUDs, Steve and I logged in, and within a few days, I was just done getting ganked. I was done being crushed.
PVP was interfering with how I wanted to play the game. I wanted to explore areas and learn about them. But if you walk into a new area, and there are a bunch of players guarding it because it's their territory, and they just mow you down, it's no fun. Steve and I just looked at each other and said, ‘We are not making a PVP game. This is a PVE game.’ Some PVP things may have been optional, but from day one, EverQuest was [centered on] PVE.
HOLLY LONGDALE
This social atmosphere where conversations with up to 100 people on a raid was happening in real-time—it was a really strange, sort of live-entertainment show.
BRAD McQUAID
As soon as I found out that Ultima Online offered pretty much unrestricted PVP, I started writing on our website, and saying in interviews, ‘This is one of the perfect differentiators between us and them. If you would prefer a player-versus-environment game, you want to play EverQuest.’
That was one of several elements that came into play in terms of EverQuest being so successful—not just after launch, but of people being excited for it before launch.
JONATHAN CARAKER
It was very iterative. We developed systems to grant lockout at the end, and to do partial lockouts for different steps of the raid. We fiddled with numbers: What should our raid size be? We tried 72 for a while, but that seemed to be too large. In fact, with the technology available, that lagged the zones when you had that many people doing a raid at the same time.
We shrank that down. We did 36-person raids, but that didn't work for us because raids should be much bigger than that. We settled on 54 people. At some point along the way, it would have been healthier for EverQuest if we lowered that. If we'd lowered the bar for entry, you'd have been able to do more raids. But it's also difficult because there are guilds that design their roster around doing 54-person raids. It would be a big shock to their system to suddenly change that.
HOLLY LONGDALE
There used to be... not hazing, but a recruitment process. [laughs] We applied to Mythic Legion through their website, and then we'd go on runs with them. Even during that period, during the recruitment phase, they'd gear us up for raids. That's how it happened back then. All these guilds had websites with applications, guild charts, rules.
That still happens now, but this was the very early days of community organizing and what was coined as a "high-end" guild at the time.
JONATHAN CARAKER
In the past—and we still do this—we had a schedule where we'd invite guilds to come test with us. It was open to anybody who was interested, really. They just expressed interest and would be invited. We were bottlenecked by how many guilds we could accommodate, and how many tests we could do. We'd set up a time for developers to be there for certain guilds. If it was a Euro-based guild, that might be early in the morning [our time]. If it was a guild on the east or west coast, sometimes that meant working super-late.
Raids take a few hours, and then it took a few more hours to either document everything we wanted to change, or make some of those changes right there. A lot of the best iteration for raids came from testing things with the guilds. Initially, it was difficult because none of us knew what we were doing. Players didn't know what was expected of them, and we didn't know what we were trying to do to get the best results. We didn't have the best tools in place.
Now it's a well-oiled machine. Players know what they're doing, and understand how the process works, and we know what we're looking for. It's a fun part of the development process.
HOLLY LONGDALE
That was another thing that really drew me to EQ, especially to guilds: There were no rules except that you help each other, and you respect each other, and you help the guild get better. Do raids, get geared up, working toward the future.
JONATHAN CARAKER
For every hour spent raid-testing, there were roughly two hours of changes we have to make. We'd test something, and players would say, "This isn't working out for these reasons," and I'd say, "All right, I can fix that, but it'll take me three hours to do. I'll do that tomorrow, and then we'll test again in three days."
Some of it was more freeform. We'd be on a server with a thousand people and say, "We need to test this raid. Who wants to help?" You'd get a thousand messages from interested and people, and just go check it out. We've been doing that for a while.
JOHN SMEDLEY
PVP was very much an afterthought in EQ, and never really became a major focus. It was, “Okay, we know some of you may want to do PVP,” although back then it was PK'ing.
JONATHAN CARAKER
The game wouldn't be what it is without the players' help. We're constantly keeping an eye on forums, and any private messaging we get from players about things that are broken, we try to address as quickly as we can.
HOLLY LONGDALE
People who want to spend their time doing other things—crafting, the solo experience—we call all that "downtime." There's so much time spent in active play with other players, so that even when you're in "downtime," when you're crafting or healing up, there's conversation happening.
In EQ, now and forever, when we talk about what are the pillars of EverQuest: "better together," and dependency on your friends—that's the EverQuest story. In all of our design efforts, we focus on groups first.
ANDY SITES
Looking back, the team was working toward redefining what [online gaming] was, but at the time, we were just thinking, "Let's make a fun game we all want to play." It turned out to be something a lot of other people really wanted to play. Maybe tough love was the right avenue to take.
