EverQuest Retrospective

These days when playing an MMO, you can look up pretty much anything. Quests, skills, game mechanics, it’s all just a quick search away. But back in the day, you had to figure all that stuff out for yourself. And on the other end of this, developers had to be constantly vigilant of players figuring something out too well and breaking their game.

Which brings us to this PC Gamer retrospective documenting a certain game of cat and mouse between EverQuest’s designer Geoffrey Zatkin and one David Fay. Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

“Our dev tools at the time were prehistoric!” laughs Zatkin today. EverQuest was the first 3D MMO ever. Resources were tight, the team was small, and they were sailing into uncharted waters without a map. With a custom-built game engine and no development time anywhere in sight to build reporting tools, if Zatkin wanted to observe players and see how his systems were working, he had to load into a GM character, cast a super invisibility spell on himself, teleport to the zone and stand around while they fought monsters.

EverQuest was an experimental game in every sense of the word, and everyone on the small team working on it wore many hats. One of the hats GZ wore was designing the magic system top to bottom. “Brad [McQuaid, producer] came by at one point and was like ‘hey Geoff how many spells are we up to?’ I said 450 and he just stopped. He’d been expecting like 50.” So in looking for a way to observe players, using the magic system came naturally. Most of Everquest’s GM powers ended up being spells that Zatkin designed.