Smedley remembers the whole development process as long, but “amazingly smooth.” He believes EverQuest was closer to the original design document than any other game he’s seen. The development process was further eased by their decision to keep the NPC AI as simple as possible. “With a massively multiplayer game,” says Clover, “you need to be able to handle AI for hundreds of entities at once, so we needed as many shortcuts as possible – much more so than a singleplayer game, which can get away with just processing AI for entities that are close to the player.”
   
EverQuest’s development was originally slated for a year, but at the end of that period all the team had was a working demo. Yet all the elements that made the game (dubbed EverCrack for its addictive qualities) so compulsive, were already in place. “The first time we showed EQ at E3,” Clover remembers, “we had some computers hooked up to our server, which allowed the public to sit down and play for a few minutes – and we had a really hard time getting people to stop playing. We saw more than a few people spend the better part of the day at our booth. That was when we started to see we might have a hit on our hands.”


   
Once they knew the game was going to be fun, the biggest anxieties were about the hardware. Each of the 40 EQ worlds took over 20 high-end dual-processor machines to run. “The server architecture is modular,” says McQuaid, “with zones running on multiple machines. So as we expand the world, we just add more ‘zone servers.’” The client-side technology was more of a worry. “This was back when we were developing a software renderer, and using Pentium 133s to develop the client. We were worried about framerate. What might happen if a bunch of players appeared onscreen at once? But we couldn’t stop an army of players from assembling; nor did we really want to. So we designed the game for a maximum group size of six, made some character optimisations – for example, dynamic level of detail on character models — and hoped for the best. It turned out that we could display many more players than we’d ever hoped.”
   
As Clover remembers, “One of the biggest decisions was whether we should support software rendering, or go hardware only. To put things in perspective, there were absolutely no 3D video cards available at the time, but this company called 3dfx came down to talk to us about the card they were working on, the original Voodoo, and how we needed to support it. Well, we took a chance, and it was one of the best decisions we ever made.”
   
Over time the design of the world shifted from traditional fantasy scenery to something more unique to EQ. “Visually, the tone was set by my predecessor Rosie Cosgrove,” remembers McDaniel. “She took a painterly approach to the game and had the character designers concentrate on tried and true beasties for the players to interact with: orcs, dragons, fairies, and so on. When Rosie left we began introducing our own designs for monsters. Now we have a huge library of creatures that people are familiar with as well as things they have never seen before.”


   
It was the scale of the game that made it stand out. McDaniel calls Norrath ‘Leviathan’, “We shipped with 78 zones. Half of those were outdoors and averaged 3,000 by 3,000 feet across. Then came the Kunark expansion which had zones that averaged 8,000 by 8,000 feet.” At its peak a team of 43 developers, supported by over 100 customer service staff, continued to expand the game – the area more than twice the size it was at launch. At peak times, the EQ servers exceeded 1GB per second of bandwidth and subscribers topped 430,000. “You’re in our world now,” was the game’s tag-line, and they meant it. “None of our games was about playing for an hour and being done,” says McDaniel. The average uptime was over 20 hours per week.

EverQuest is not without its faults. The game’s extensive and sometimes repetitive combat system has been nicknamed “the EQ treadmill,” and every time changes to spell and item stats shifted the balance of the game, outcries would go up across a hundred bulletin boards. Ultimately, though, according to McQuaid, the project team sees such feedback as priceless. “And while some of the criticisms take the form of flames and can be hurtful,” he says, “I think the majority of it is very healthy. Developers need to continue to interact with their player base and to listen.” Trost thinks the experience can only get better. “The more people play these types of games, the more variety we will see in the types of experiences they offer. I really believe that the variety and quality of content offered in MMORPGs will soon rival that currently being offered on cable TV."

While today, World Of Warcraft may long ago have stolen EQ's title of official elf registry office, it's clear that whatever world you're living in, the MMORPG universe is still only going to get bigger.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in E114.
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