KEVIN LYDY HAD had his share of bloody subway stations and severed heads. He’d started his career in the games industry purely by luck, touring the country with a rock band and striking up a conversation with a manager from Cinematronics during happy hour at a bar. The next thing he knew, he was making arcade games, and found himself in the role of a manager on Midway’s Mortal Kombat 3 coin-op.
After wrapping the blood-soaked project, Lydy planned to take a sabbatical and do a lot of surfing. Before he could set out on his adventure, he got a call from Dok Whitson, a buddy from the arcade biz.
“I'm working on this cool project. Do you want in on it?” Whitson asked.
“Nope,” Lydy replied. “I really want to go surfing.”
Whitson talked him into dropping by the office in San Diego to check out EverQuest, his current labor of love. Lydy got the nickel tour. The team was tiny, the script nascent, the artwork inspired but still gestating. Afterwards, Whitson and a few others treated Lydy to a happy hour at a local tavern. His eyes widened as the team shared their grand vision for EverQuest.
“You guys are out of your minds,” Lydy said, shaking his head. What they were describing would entail a ton of work. Characters, environments, an Internet-friendly infrastructure—much, much more than the upstarts he was talking to could ever hope to maintain, much less build.
Maybe it was his friendship with Whitson, or maybe it was the persuasive power of happy hour, which had led to his job in the arcade business. Whatever the reason, Lydy set aside his surfboard and threw in with Verant. “There was just something about the freshness of it,” he said regarding the game, which was still largely undefined beyond the concept of a huge online world where players could meet up and embark on adventures. “It was this giant thing, an amorphous blob that could be something cool.”
Lydy managed to get a jumpstart before coming on board. He happened to be drawing and animating characters in his free time that would fit in great with EverQuest: wizards, magical staffs, special effects like explosions.
While Lydy did contribute plenty of arcana to EverQuest, one of his biggest charges was the game’s title artwork. “When we talked about it, it was, ‘We want it to have that epic fantasy quality, but with none of the stereotypical clichés.’ I thought, Okay, that's pretty wide-open.”
The logo’s typeset was based on an old rub-on sheet. “Back in the old days before computers, you either had your type set on these big, expensive machines, or you used these robot letters. Through the years, I'd take those letters, photocopy them, and keep this giant folder of them. I was sifting through those and said, ‘There's something about the ‘E’ that feels right.’”
From there Lydy tweaked the lettering, expanding it so it became three-dimensional and putting emphasis on the letter “Q” by capitalizing it. “That debate happened here, too. Even still: ‘You forgot to capitalize the Q!’ It still comes up with the red underline in Microsoft Word as being misspelled.”
Lydy’s first stab at presenting his stylized title went over like a lead balloon—or more appropriately, a soggy one. “The thing I already remember about that is, on the day I was doing the last bit of rendering on it—and there were thousands of logos—it rained. I took all this stuff in the next day, and everyone said, ‘How come it looks like it's wet?’ I said, ‘It's been raining.’”
KEVIN LYDY JOINED EverQuest’s team before John Smedley—and most other managers in the games industry—had formalized the role of designer. “For example, the game designers for EverQuest were level designers and artists at the same time,” Smed explained. “Some of them made textures; some of them placed those textures and used our map-maker to create levels. It was always this combined force of people who were making the game.”
Lydy’s role, as with all of Verant’s designers and artists, remained fluid even after EverQuest’s release in March 1999. “That's one thing about the way EverQuest teams have always operated,” Lydy said. “There was a direction everyone followed, but because of the scope, there's a lot of room for personal interpretation.”
His time on EverQuest was, like the waves he so yearned to ride, fluid. He helped launch the original game, joined EverQuest II in the early aughts, and contributed to sequels through 2011’s Veil of Alaris and, at present, the game’s 20th anniversary content. Even years after EQ’s launch, much of the development process remains the same in 2019 as it did in 1999.
“We didn't always have concepts. Sometimes we had concepts from style guides, but EverQuest production would usually start with documents, a list of functional needs, some lore and backstory, and then you just go to work. Hopefully something comes out that's relatively pleasing. Through the years, we learned how to scope better. I've been on EQ now for 16 years, so we've learned where the bang for the buck is, but the time frames are still roughly the same.”
Despite the team’s freewheeling approach, a rough outline for conceptualizing and implementing an area and its sub-zones takes shape. The first step is to piece together a functional environment in a gray box, a colorless, near-featureless playpen that lets artists and designers answer fundamental questions: Is there enough room for a raid? Will there be NPCs such as vendors or quest-givers?
“We've gotten pretty good at making that first step actually useful so you don't have to toss it out with the bathwater and start over [when new ideas or processes arise].”
The biggest impediment was, and still is, EverQuest’s engine, which had been made for smaller-scale environments like those seen in first-person shooters popular in the 1990s. But, Lydy admitted, that’s par for the course. “Every game engine is restrictive. The one that's being finalized tomorrow will have restrictions. That's just the nature of the beast.”
Having cut his teeth on coin-op games, Lydy had grown to appreciate the creativity that could flourish inside tight spaces. “We couldn't have these massive open spaces without paying a price for it, so we had to develop network technology that would allow us to have hundreds of people in a zone that was really built to handle thirty or forty. We were constantly on the edge of the backroom server with what we could put in content-wise.”
One challenge the team faced early on was a dearth of newbie-friendly quests. Players were complaining, and the irony of their complaint wasn’t lost on the developers. “It’s called EverQuest, but we don’t have enough quests. We needed more content.”
Ideas came from anyone and everyone, from artists, designers, and engineers to the game masters in charge of keeping servers running smoothly. With three months until launch, the team bunkered down and generated quests that would help players get a leg up in EQ’s new world, such as series of trades that would net them weapons and armor.
Coming up with ideas for content was easy. Every game engine demands that content be implemented differently. “Some of those guys were huge mentors to me. Matt Yaney took me under his wing and showed me how the backend of the game worked. Like, ‘You've got cool ideas, but this is how you make them happen. Here's how you put an NPC into the game, here's how you implement a quest,’ stuff like that. I loved it so much and just went to town on it.”
Another trick of the trade was setting an area’s pathing, the spaces that AI-controlled characters such as monsters can or cannot navigate. “I was in a cube with Matt Yaney, who was one of the designers,” recalled Bill Coyle, a fellow designer. “The first job I did, one of the most inane but necessary things, was pathing—P points, they called them.”
Every area had to be navigable so players believed it was a real locale. NPCs that suddenly stopped in a wide-open field would break their suspension of disbelief. Placing P points involved generating and setting cubes so that the AI knew, for instance, it could go from Cube A to Cube B, and from B, to C or D. “You would have to litter a level with these, because AI at that time had no concept of collision or anything else in the level,” Coyle explained. “If there was a pillar sitting in the middle of a room, they'd have no idea they needed to walk around it. If they were on one side, and they wanted to go to a player on the other side, they'd try to go straight there, pillars be damned. You had to put pathing points around the pillars so the AI would know.”
P points are invisible, but can be detected by players who know what to look for. For instance, aggravating—or aggroing—a mob of enemies directly across from players may result in them taking what appears to be a less-than-optimal path to the player’s location—the AI’s way of scanning P points and trying to determine the quickest route to its target.
Wide-open regions were easier to path than, say, narrow corridors and bendy mazes. “You didn't have to worry about pathing around objects. But some of those tight dungeons with corridors and cool things all around...” Coyle paused. “The cooler a place looked, the bigger a pain in the ass it was to path.”
No matter the type of quest, area, or other content, EverQuest’s team has remained laser-focused on one goal for 20 years and counting: Designing a world that reacts to players, one that gives them a boost when needed—such as “newbie quests”—and, more importantly, paves a long runway for players to create their own fun.
“The way we felt about it was that we wanted to create a world where you were a part of it,” Smed recalled. “You could become one of the heroes of the world, but there was already a world with characters. We had the concept of lore in the world, so everything was there to tell the story of the world around you, and you became a part of it.”
“There was a direction everyone followed, but because of the scope, there's a lot of room for personal interpretation,” Lydy added. “There's never enough time. There's always more you want to do. You're always fighting with the engine.”
