Highlights
- Everquest 2 expansions cater to all playstyles, including crafting and decorating, via new content and decorations.
- The developers strive to create engaging quests, avoiding mundane tasks like "kill 10 rats" and focusing on strong narratives.
- The game respects players' time by offering content that can be consumed at different paces, accommodating both casual and dedicated players.
If any team knows its way around making an expansion, it's the developers behind Everquest 2. Since the game's debut in 2004, Everquest 2 has shipped 20 expansions that have introduced countless new features, vast lands to explore, challenging bosses to tackle, and plenty of major reworks to many of the game's systems. The game's 20th expansion, Ballads of Zimara, is no different: it comes with new dungeon and raid content, a lengthy signature quest that takes players through its narrative, and all-new systems like Chrono Dungeons that allow players to revisit scaled-up content from past expansions.
In an exclusive interview with Game ZXC, Everquest 2 Creative Director Kyle Vallee and Art Director Timothy Heydelaar spoke about how the team approaches the development of each expansion and the kinds of things they keep in mind as they prepare to deliver another round of content, especially with longtime players in mind.
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Everquest 2 Expansions Cater To Various Playstyles
Everquest 2 leaves room for a wide range of playstyles, and the team tries to introduce plenty of content players who are crafting-focused or players who love to express their creativity through the game's housing decoration system. In that spirit, Ballads of Zimara includes a signature quest line aimed toward crafters, and players can get their hands on a number of new decorations based on content from the expansion.
We try to make sure there's content for everybody from all playstyles, which includes trade skillers and decorators – we have a very big decorating community that decorates their houses. We also try to make sure that there's a decent amount to do. We strove to make more and more quests. When I say that we try to do good quests, we try to avoid doing “kill 10 rats” quests. We have a signature line that takes you through the entire expansion and through the entire storyline, we have a trade skill signature line which is the same kind of thing but for our crafters, and they intermingle.
Then we have a lot of side quests, we have a lot of drop quests and POI quests and all kinds of stuff. I mean, we are Everquest , so we do try to make sure that there's a lot of quest content, and there's probably more quest content in this expansion than ever. We also try to make sure that there's chewable content, and that there's a lot of stuff that you can earn.
True to its name, Everquest 2 expansions place heavy emphasis on questing, and the team tries to avoid adding low-effort quests like "kill some rats." Although quests in any MMORPG inevitably require players to kill a handful of enemies, Everquest 2's developers try to contextualize these tasks through a strong narrative and a sense of purpose, rather than simple farmers handing off their inane busy work to passing adventurers.
Everquest 2 Wants To Respect Players' Time
Vallee and Heydelaar also noted that many players have stuck by Everquest 2 for nearly 20 years, and it's important for the team to not take this for granted. Long-running MMORPGs are always under pressure to continually raise the bar for committed players, and so the team is continually looking for ways to introduce all-new locations, revisit past plot threads, and come up with new ways to engage with the game.
It’s always about our players and giving them new experiences, new stories, new things to do. We have to respect their time investment, too. A lot of them have put in a lot of time with us, and you have to acknowledge that and we never take it for granted.
We do a lot of thinking about people's time, by the way. We actually don't just throw out like, “Oh, here's a signature quest,” we try to scope out how much the player is going to play. Maybe they might play an hour each night, or they might play three times a week. So we're trying to make sure that things are in sizes that they can consume at their own pace. But at the same time, for the players who want to play, play, play, we put in a lot of chewable content for them as well so that there's always something for them to do or to work on or to strive for.
While the team seeks to respect the time veteran players have spent in the game, they also keep in mind the amount of time that players have available to play. Everquest 2 players' schedules are just as varied as their playstyles, and the team tries to include content that can be worked on periodically in short sessions as well as "chewable" content that prolific players can spend a lot of time with. During a time when live service games seem to demand every spare hour of players' time, it's refreshing to see an MMORPG consider the limited time some players may have to devote to the game.
Everquest 2 is free to play on PC and Ballads of Zimara launches on November 29.
