You asked him questions and he answered! Here are the answers to the questions you and your fellow players posted to Designer Chris "Dzarn" Black.

Piestro – People often discuss you as someone who "gets" EQ content. What's your approach to content design and how has this evolved over the last year or so?

Playing EQ for as long as I have has helped a lot in terms of "getting" what EQ is, or at least, "what EQ is to me." There is an interesting transition that occurred for me when I went from "player" to "developer" in the way I understand the content of EQ. From the outside looking in, Norrath is a monolith, a unified world of stories and experiences. From the inside looking out, you begin to understand that Norrath is an amalgamation, the sum of many different creative and unique minds working together (and in some cases apart) to share their experiences and ideas with the players.

This transition has played a large part in shaping my approach to designing content over the last year. I went from believing that there was an ancient tome in the dark recesses of the office that housed the sacred direction and story of Norrath, to wanting to become the author of that tome. (Spoilers: Part of such a document is actually encased in glass on the wall of our meeting room.)


The label reads "In case of emergency, break glass."

My "approach" to designing content comes down to wanting to tell a story. When I create characters, such as the inhabitants of Sunrise Hills, I start by asking myself questions about who the person is: where did they grow up and who are the members of their family, why are they in this part of the world now and what do they hope to accomplish, how do they react to the people around them and what is their general mood? Something that guides a lot of those questions is how I can incorporate parts of Norrath that I have fond memories of. To that extent I've tried to make everyone who lives in Sunrise Hills a relative of someone in classic starting cities of Norrath. Likewise, when I was working on the Pillars of Alra (will elaborate later), my goal was to tell the story of the warring factions through quests and game-play.

Morituus – What are some of your other favorite RPGs? How has playing RPG games influenced your work in EQ? Aerith or Tifa? (Editor's note: I'm not sure Dzarn is old enough for that reference -P)

Without delving into argument over which title in the series is best, my favorite RPGs include the Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, Secret of Evermore and Secret of Mana, Fable, and Earthbound (Mother I-III). Additionally, though not exactly RPGs I've always liked the Megaman series, the Legend of Zelda series, the Katamari Damacy titles, and most recently I've found Dark Souls to be a phenomenal gaming experience.

Playing RPGs (and games in general) has inspired me to both flesh out and hide Easter-eggs in a lot of my content. There are some rather overt references in the Freeport fair event of "an epic request" (more on this later) as well as hidden dialogue trees on most every NPC I make (if you've figured out who H`tathca's friend was in Pillars yet...) I try to sneak in little details that are often overlooked when designing things, like coloring the armor and customizing the facial appearance of my NPCs or putting a dismissive dialogue on individuals who wouldn't normally talk. (Just about every Alaran in Pillars responds to a hail.)

Other games also inspire me in more subtle ways. Often times when I am at a loss for ideas I think back on good game-play experiences I have had and try to analyze what made the moments memorable. Things like intertwining music with an important revelation or experience really helps solidify a moment as "epic". I think back to the first time I engaged Mayong Mistmoore in the Demiplane of Blood and being both shocked and awed when the battle-song started ringing out. I liken that moment to playing Final Fantasy VII and being emotionally struck with Aerith is killed. The ensuing boss fight is played against the backdrop of her melancholy and sad theme song rather than the traditional "boss theme", which really worked to highlight the significance of that moment.

Finally, between the two, Aerith.

Naugrin - What's your favorite quest that you didn't create and why?

That is a very difficult question. I have a few particular memories I hold very dear, all because of who I was with when I was playing. I have two that I have trouble deciding between; the summoning of Bloodspear the Wretched in the Crypt of Nadox and the recovery of Princess Lenya Thex.

The summoning of Bloodspear the Wretched was a quest a friend and I stumbled upon by accident. We were hunting for the drops needed to get his Pureblood spell when the two of us came under attack from a large number of zombie trolls. The two of us battled them off, wave after wave with no break in sight until the massive beast made his appearance. We engaged in combat low on health, nearly out of mana, with all of our supplies depleted. Combat was fierce, each of us nearly dying at several key points until finally the beast fell to the ground and we stood over its body victorious, utterly out of mana with less than 10% health, but still victorious. The memory of that fight is something we still talk about today. The design of the event was simple but it was well balanced and had the right combination of setting, music and theme to really make for an epic memory.

The recovery of Princess Lenya Thex is another quest that I found particularly memorable. A combination of intrigue, fearless story-telling and the depth of the original lore are all something I aspire to be able to recreate. Throughout each step of the quest I felt like I was adventuring in a living-breathing world. The way characters would respond and interact with both the players but also themselves is something I try to mimic in my quest design now. It also helps that I was doing the quest alongside friends.

Naugrin - What gives with the now infamous winter hat?

The ushanka was something I had wanted to get for a long time actually. I have a small but growing hat collection that I am fond of. The first of my collection is the green cap pictured above. I liked it because unlike most hats, it fit well. It's more difficult than I expected to find hats in XL sizes (23.5" circumference.) The ushanka in question was the latest addition to my collection and also the most interesting. The reason I chose to wear it stems from my previous on camera appearance during the launch of House of Thule where I appeared wearing a blue knit-cap my sister made for me. It was only logical that my second on camera appearance would have to have a hat even more noteworthy than the first.

Rorce – How do you feel about how Pillars turned out? Were you able to accomplish most of what you wanted to do?

The Pillars of Alra was an interesting experience for me. It was the first time I've ever worked on a zone and given nearly complete freedom on what I could create in it. If I had it to do over again I would have allocated my time a bit better and probably toned down the difficulty a bit. I am happy with how the story turned out and am still in awe of Allen Bond's amazing work on the art.

The zone has been a good learning experience though. The aura mechanic for each Pillar for example is something most people haven't figured out yet, but made perfect sense to me when I was making it. Each tower has a particular affinity or hatred for an appearance. I won't spoil it yet, but I've learned that clearly messaging how something works without breaking character is certainly a challenge.

Other things I like about the zone are: the sprites that I setup that fly around the arena/meditation areas of each Pillar, the peacekeepers which appear based on the number of inhabitants you have slain on a per floor basis, and that the difficulty of the rares can be mitigated significantly by following the mechanics of their fights.

The one thing I can say that I was not able to accomplish that I wanted to was to customize the dialogues of the inhabitants more. Too much of the time was spent on creating the individual rare fights that I ended up unable to really elaborate on the story you could get from speaking to people.

Shangsung – How many hats do you actually have?

Eight, not included is the 4 ft sombrero my sister got me in Mexico.


The sombrero will not be included in any future videos

Tordail – What were the thoughts behind you wanting to do the as of yet unreleased Epic Ornamentation Quests? What was your approach to starting them?

Their inception is the product of not thinking things through actually... I was asked to create a task where players could speak to an NPC if they had their epic and receive an ornamentation. I asked if creating something a "little more interesting" would be acceptable. Ngreth in his naiveté of who I was at the time allowed it. At our next review meeting each member of the team presented what they had been working on in the last few weeks. I played a video in which a bard travelled to Dreadlands in search of Baldric Slezaf to learn what has become of the reclusive maestro. The event transformed into a cinematic encounter where famous bards from all around Norrath came together to perform the symphony that the bard collected when they obtained their Singing Short Sword.

I believe it was Aristo who said during the movie, "you're never going to finish on time." He was quite right, although the quest was interesting and different, it was radically time intensive. This trend continued with each class I worked on, a significant time investment to develop a new mechanic and present a memorable story.

My approach to the creation of each event is roughly the same. I look at a class and list out everything they are capable of, all unique aspects and spell lines they've developed and I think about how I can utilize a large number of these in puzzle form. For bards that meant incorporating the use of a number of instruments, for rangers it highlighted their tracking skills, for monks it was coming up with a way that they could incorporate all of their unique melee skills into an event, and so on.

After I had decided on what skills I would have the player employ I reacquainted myself with all the details of their first epic quest. I looked at the story-line, the characters, the locations, the themes and tried to find any unanswered questions. Once I was happy with my understanding of the event I would write an outline of what I wanted to accomplish; sometimes this was simple and other times it became very elaborate. From there I would expand the outline and detail every step of the quest and exactly how I wanted to implement it. This made it much easier to create the quests because I could think through all of the possibilities of implementation before delving into it. It was in this step I would write about 90% of the text/dialogue that is seen in each event. From there I simply worked through the outline creating the characters and mechanics for each event and putting the story in the appropriate places.

The project was very fulfilling personally because each time I made an event I tried to learn "how" to do something with the engine. With the bard event I learned simple things like how to get an NPC to move, how to check what a player is doing and what armor or weapons they have. With the wizard event I learned how to replace zone geometry to tear down buildings and use our particle system to add fire and smoke to areas. With the shadow knight event I learned how to link instances together so you can go from one area to another but remain in a play space I can control on a per-person basis.

More on this in a later question.

Crystilla - Now that you've seen your first expansion from the inside out, what thoughts come to mind about the process?

The biggest lesson from the expansion has been how to better allocate my time. The concept of deadlines is something I am far more familiar with now than I was prior to this expansion. The process has also taught me that I need to improve upon my zone designing skills in all regards, from doing a better job on an initial layout to really seeing each step of the zone creation process through with a better initial idea in mind. I look back to older zones and think that, while they are not as graphically impressive as our modern zones, there is a certain charm in which the environment and characters seem to mesh well together. That sense of a "complete" design is something I want to improve upon in my future zones.

The process is also much more segmented than I had originally imaged, which has its ups and downs. It works out as follows:

1. Initial pitches and brainstorming occurs. Once developers have all created a proposal they are discussed at a meeting and a winner is crowned, usually a combination of several ideas.
2. A master document is created where what needs to be made is listed. This includes zones, character models, systems changes, major code requests, etc.
3. Artists begin work on the zones.
4. When art is mostly complete designers begin placing NPCs, creating tasks, creating missions, creating raids.
5. Magic happens.
6. Beta happens.
7. Release happens.
8. Post launch fixes go out.
9. Beta rewards go out.
10. Elidroth breaks something.
11. Brainstorming for next expansion begins.

Crystilla - When trying to do something or fix something for the game, can you give an example of something that has been totally different than your "player side" background would have expected? For example we see the words "code can't support it" float around but rarely get insight into the 'why' or 'how'.

This one is sort of a two part question, so I'll start with how I as a designer have been surprised about fixing something.

It is interesting to see how different people react to something based on their understanding of the situation. For example, I just recently was fixing a task in Blightfire Moors where you have to go click on buckets of Jumjum to harvest items needed for a Drakkin scout. I was reviewing the mechanic where you click the bucket and it gives you an item and noticed that there was a mismatch between the object number in the zone and the expected values on the click "script*". What was happening was that if you clicked bucket number 1, it worked and updated your task, but if you clicked buckets 2 or 3 they disappeared and didn't update your task. It was by blind luck that bucket number 1 wasn't broken as well. I looked online and players had surmised that buckets 2 and 3 were simply decoys and that it was intended.
(*Think of a script as like doing code with a crayon. Designers can write behaviors and attach it to a number of things but the range of tools we have are very different than what coders use.)

The above scenario is just one of many cases where how much information you have about something determines how you react to it. There are plenty of things that are intended to happen but are not messaged to the player well enough that people consider bugs and there are things that work in game that we don't intend and they're considered features.

Another example was when Goru Uldrock, the Reincarnate in Vergalid mines, stopped working. There were a number of theories as to why the event wouldn't function. What had happened was, at some point the script that started the fight just happened to be replaced with another script from the zone by accident.

The second part seems to suggest what fixes can or can't be done. I'll preface the second question's answer with the introduction that the coders we have now are some of the most amazing people I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Imagine if your day to day routine was go into a dark room and spend 9-15 hours a day unraveling tangled Christmas lights, with the caveat that the lights are plugged in, burning hot and if any of them go out you have to start over. That is the level of patience and unceasing tenacity our coders show every day.

What I think a lot of people lack is an understanding of how the disciplines are split and what responsibilities fall under each discipline. On the team there are coders, there are artists and there are designers. Within the company but not on the "EverQuest Team" are the people that maintain the servers, the website, the forums, managers, and whatever it is Piestro does.

When a player sees something wrong it is usually brought to the attention of the developers to fix a bug. Often times we can fix these things: items have wrong stats, an NPC isn't saying the right thing, a quest doesn't update correctly. Other times there are things wrong that are out of our hands: Dark Elves impale themselves with their shield when they ride on a horse, the client crashes because its hit the 2GB memory cap for a 32 bit application, an AA doesn't work because certain spell effects only work on NPCs and not players.

What happens most often when we say that "code doesn't support" something is that, at this time, the amount of time it takes for our coders to do a specific task doesn't outweigh the benefits of them doing something else. It's an answer that most players don't like hearing when it pertains to their particular issue and oftentimes something that we as developers are equally if not more frustrated with.

There are also times where, while it is theoretically possible for something to work, the risks involve outweigh the benefits of a particular solution. While it would be nice to have an NPC with such complex behaviors that it would "outsmart" a player in combat, it is also nice to have servers that don't crash due to over-processing AI behaviors or just upsetting players because the NPC is smart enough to ignore everyone until the healers are all dead.

Crystilla - In the weekly team meetings, who gets the most passionate/vocal when discussing a topic that has dissention?

Elidroth tends to be the most passionate, Ellie tends to be the most vocal (I think I hear her now), Aristo will fight vehemently when the time is right, Absor tends to be the more moderate voice of reason, Ngreth smashes those who get out of line and the rest of us are wildcards depending on the subject.

Crystilla - If the weekly team meetings were made into a movie...
Which Devs/Coders/CMs would be leading stars and which would be supporting cast?

It would be a remake of Grumpy Old Men staring Absor and Elidroth as the leads.

Which actor/actresses would play each person: etc.)

Absor: Walter Matthau
Aristo: Cuba Gooding Jr.
Bembaru: Bruce Willis
Chandrok: Paul Bettany
Dzarn: Weird Al Yankovic
Elegist: Steve Buscemi
Elidroth: Andre the Giant
Ellie: Nicole Kidman
Jansan: Burgess Meredith (Time Enough at Last episode of the Twilight Zone)
JChan: Jennifer Tilly
JGray: Jonathan Goldsmith (The Most Interesting Man in the World)
Ngreth: Brad Pitt
Normando: George Wendt
Phathom: Tim Tebow
Piestro: Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (Ed's note, I would have picked Doug Bradley -P)

Crystilla, Tendalos, etc. - And finally, only because someone has to ask Is there an ETA on the long awaited epic ornamentations?

Soon™? Given the amount of time it takes to write, implement, review, test, and release each quest there has been a noted delay in their release. What I can say for sure is that we as a team want their release to be something extraordinary and enjoyable for everyone to play.

Phathom: These quests are content we definitely want all our players to be able to experience and enjoy. In their current form these quests are designed to be played class specifically and this something we'd like to expand on by allowing other classes to play or participate in. In addition there are other developments (some very exciting stuff!) we are working on that might change slightly how we use this content, more on that later! Finally, before anyone asks, this content will be part of a future free content release, when it's ready. This will not be behind the marketplace.