At this year’s GDC, William Saw and I had the chance to interview Jonathan Caraker, the lead game designer on the massive MMORPG EverQuest. We wanted to really dive into what it’s like to work on a game that’s been running for 20 years, and we learned quite a lot from Jonathan about working with such a legacy on your shoulders.
So let’s start out with the basics. Your name, your title, and how you feel about EverQuest’s 20th anniversary.
I’m Jonathan Caraker, I’m the lead game designer on EverQuest at Daybreak. I’ve been working at the company since April 1st, 2002, so I’m really close to my 17th anniversary at the company. And who knew 20 years ago that EverQuest would still be around, and it would still be a relevant game and that it would be updated and maintained in such a way that people could play it as a modern game?
I think pretty much everything else from that era isn’t around anymore. They’re making sequels or reboots, but like, no one’s playing that exact name.
So what is it like to work on a game with such a long and iconic legacy as EverQuest? Is it ever daunting, or is it inspiring?
It’s such a big responsibility, you know? We’ve got the future of a twenty year-old multi-multi million dollar franchise on our shoulder, trying not to make any mistakes [laughs].
Trying to honor the original game and the original design of the game, I think that we’ve worked on it enough now that we have a pretty good idea of what makes EverQuest. What’s in theme, what fits the game’s feel and lore and history, kind of what players would want to see if they wanted us to do something nostalgic, so our expansions will go back and focus on familiar faces, familiar places, with a twist. So they get some things that they’re familiar with to tap into that nostalgia, and some new stuff to experience and explore.
So the 20th year seems to be a reunion of sorts for a lot of EverQuest players, past and new, so what was the general community feel then?
I think people are really excited to see all the stuff that we did for the 20th anniversary. We introduced a whole new zone with a bunch of brand new content in it, including several raids. We launched multiple servers with different rulesets, there’s also other in-game events going on as well. It’s like every previous anniversary even that we’ve ever done all runs as well. The modern stuff started on 3/16, and the older stuff starts on 4/10, I think?
Was there ever a feature you guys really wanted to add that just didn’t work out?
Yeah, I feel like one of the things that we would do differently now is the monster missions. At the time, it seemed like a great way for us to make interesting content that was always perfectly balanced, by letting people choose characters that were not their own. They would inhabit a monster, and we would give it different stats and abilities, and pit them against content that was perfectly designed for that.
But as it turned out, players don’t like to play something that they’re not. And the setup wasn’t super fun, having to go in there and create all-new hotkeys for this new character that you had to play, and it was a lot more work than we expected. Each one of those is like creating its own little game [laughs], and it’s a lot of work from a design and a tuning perspective.
In terms of your whole experience working on EverQuest, was there a point where you faced a major challenge while working on the game itself? What was that like?
Anything? As a developer, I think managing stress and anxiety is one of the things that you wouldn’t expect if you weren’t in the industry working on games like this. And the deadlines are often pretty intense. There’s a lot to do, there’s a lot of feedback from a lot of people and everybody wants the product to succeed, so there’s a lot of pressure there, and you have to kind of manage that anxiety so it’s not occupying your thoughts, so you can focus on making the game without worrying about “if this is good enough”, you know?
So where do you see EverQuest in 20 more years? A 40th anniversary?
I hope we get to do it! I’d love to come back. I was here for the 10th anniversary and we did a similar kind of panel, and I’m here for the 20th, so I hope we get to do a 30th and a 40th, that would be cool. I would love to see EverQuest around for another 10, 20, however many years. I think that as long as we can keep our players happy- we’ve got a strong, stable, consistent invested playerbase, so we want to keep them playing and keep them happy.
Any final thoughts to the community playing EverQuest, or looking at playing it for the first time?
I would definitely say try progression server stuff, I think it’s a good way to get your feet wet. It’s a smaller world, there’s not as much to learn, fewer hotkeys. It’s a much simpler experience than jumping in the deep end, where there’s a whole bunch of abilities, a ton of AAs, a lot of systems that were added over the years that add additional complexity to the experience. For someone that’s just coming back after a long hiatus or just starting new, I would jump into a progression server like the ones we just launched on March 16th.
We want to thank Jonathan for taking the time to talk to us at GDC. For more information on EverQuest, check out the official site.
