The EverQuest Designers : EQ1 EverQuest 1 News

From www.egamefo.com

http://eqvault.ign.com/fullstory.php?id=21179

You can enjoy a painting, or a book, or a movie without knowing anything about the author or the artist that created it. In the same way, you can enjoy playing a video game without knowing anything about its designers or the way it’s put together. But if you really want to appreciate EverQuest the game, and the zones you adventure in, then you want to know something about the designers and the zones they create for you.

EverQuest appears to be a seamless game for players, and it is easy to overlook that each zone has been designed by a creative individual who merges game ideas with artwork and programming skills. Each person on the development team works to bring something fun, creative, and engaging to the player base for each zone and instance. They each imagine a zone: what it might look like, how the non-player characters might act in such an adventure, what items could drop there, the storyline behind the zone, and how the playerbase will react to the encounter.

In fact, the each person on the design team is like an artist creating a work that we get to play in. And just like you might appreciate the work of an artist, or film maker, or songwriter, so you probably appreciate each zone for what the designers bring to each one.

The Producer orchestrates the game, of course, and makes sure all the zones in an expansion fit together in a cohesive whole. Without that person, the game wouldn’t work.

The artists make it all happen from the designer’s vision. The itemization designer and the spell designer make the game’s mechanics work. The coders actually make the game playable on your pc.

But it’s the imagination and personality of the designers that make the game of EverQuest the world in which we like to spend our time. The work they do is so tangible in the virtual sense that we come to know a zone in all its complexity – the landmarks, the inhabitants, its structures and features. The designers make it possible to learn how to manage to survive in a zone so we come to know it, like a hummable tune. And just like good art, we take their ideas and make them our own, finding new creative ways to make the game work for us.

I imagine a world in which each designer on the team is recognized as an individual creative force, where we appreciate each person for what they bring to the game. Just like any artist, we could get to know what kinds of adventures each lead designer creates on an individual level, as well as the effort the whole team puts in to make a seamless game that all works together. Just like an author that writes a favorite book series or a song writer that puts out multiple albums, the EQ designers work on zones each expansion that reflect their own personal visions of what is a great place to adventure in.

This series will feature one-on-one interviews with designers on the EverQuest team, with an emphasis on the zones they have designed. Like the director’s cut on a movie DVD, The EverQuest Designers series is an alternative view of the game, highlighting how each developer contributes to the virtual world of Norrath through their unique creative ideas.