Everquest 2’s Ballads of Zimara is the MMORPG’s 20th expansion since its debut in 2004, and its distinct visual theme and narrative show that the team still has plenty of great ideas to work with almost 20 years after release. Along with new lands to explore, quests to complete, and dungeons to delve into, the expansion includes some new features like Chrono Dungeons and Advanced Research that give players more ways to experience content and gather loot.
In an exclusive interview with Game Rant,Everquest 2Creative Director Kyle Vallee; Art Director Timothy Heydelaar; and Head of Studio and Executive Producer Jennifer Chan went into detail about the behind-the-scenes process for creating Ballaods of Zimara. They also spoke about solo playability in MMORPGs, what makes a good expansion, and how theEverquestandEverquest 2teams coordinate.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What is your approach to developing new PVE content like dungeons and raids? How do you decide on things like encounter design, difficulty, and themes?
Vallee:It’s actually a huge challenge because we’ve been doing this for so long. I personally started doing raids and dungeons around expansion five.
Basically, we try to make sure that there’s content for everyone. Our solo dungeons and the overlands are set up for everyone. You should be able to go in and be successful and get new gear and new loot and have fun and progress. Then what we have been doing is making heroic content in three tiers. We have what we call Heroic Tier One, which is set up so that any five or six players can form a group and PUG it, and they should be successful. There shouldn’t be any mechanics in there that are going to ruin their day and make it so they can’t complete a dungeon.
Then we have Heroic Tier Two, which is where it starts to ramp up and become challenging. Heroic Tier Two is for the more advanced heroic and raid players.
Then we have Tier Three, which is what we call “Challenge” and that is literally for the elite players. Eventually, everyone could get in there, but its content is designed for the players who want a serious challenge. We have pretty much the same tiers for raids. Not to use the term casual – because some people think it’s a bad word – but we do actually have “casual raids.” you may PUG and get a raid together and kill stuff and be successful, and then it ramps up over the tiers. Usually every year, the storyline will end and we’ll have what we call an “expansion boss.” For instance, this expansion is the Djinn Sovereign, and that’s going to be the elite challenge. Last year for our expansion, maybe five guilds throughout the entire game completed the final expansion boss.
Eventually, as players gain levels and powers, they’ll be able to go back and do that content, too. It’s nota system likeWoWhas, but it becomes easier to do as you gain more gear.
As far as mechanics, we put a lot of effort this year into tank mechanics. We’ve had a lot of complaints about how tanks don’t have a tank job, and there’s not enough for tanks to do, so we built an entire suite of tank mechanics that challenge tanks in some of the more difficult heroic and raid content. It’s gonna be really cool this year to see people going up against that kind of stuff, making tanks do their job, but also, there are going to be zones where you have to bring a tank in or you’re just not going to be successful.
Chan:Could you speak a little bit on how we keep tapping that “inspiration well” and where we get our ideas from?
Vallee:It’s a tribal thing. We talk to each other and we allplay a lot of different games, so we’re always talking. We do have kind of a “brain trust” where we sit down and the raid designer and the heroic designer and me and other people talk about what kind of mechanics we can do, and then we discuss that with the mechanics people. We can’t just come up with mechanics willy-nilly – we have to discuss them with the mechanics people so the mechanics people can say, “No, you’re able to’t do that, because they literally have no ability to deal with that.”
We also have a whole bestiary that’s laid out for the entire expansion, so we know we’re getting copper golems and all this crazy stuff. We’re going to go in, we’re going to figure out what bosses are in there, and we always attempt to make bosses look totally different than anything you’re going to encounter in the overland zones or in the solo zones. So when you see a boss, it’s aboss. We work really hard to try to make sure there are new mechanics every expansion. It’s not hundreds of new mechanics, but it’s a good amount. Our designers are incredibly experienced raid designers. The guys on this team had been doing it for over 10 years each.
Q: This isEverquest 2’s 20th expansion, so by now you’re seasoned veterans when it comes to doing expansions. What do you feel makes a good expansion? Are there certain goals you keep in mind?
Vallee: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 areEverquest, so we do attempt to ensure 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, that there’s a lot of stuff that you may earn. One of the big things we did this year is that we came up with a personal research system, which is one of the features of the expansion. We’re trying totake some of the RNG out of the gamewhere people get really frustrated because they want this specific mount, and they can’t get it because it drops in this zone and it’s RNG. So what we’ve tried to do is build a whole system where there’s still RNG, and there’s still stuff that you’re gonna want to get, and there’s still rare drops and all that stuff, but we took some of the pinnacle pillar type stuff that players want like familiars, mounts and, mercenaries, and we put them into this research system.
So now when you play, you’ll get research drops, and they’re like bubbles that give you research time. You can go into an interface and go to these merchants, and you can actually research which means you have X amount of time before you can get the item. So if you want to speed it up, and you want to put all your research into getting the mount that you want, you can do that.
One of our other features is Chrono Dungeons, which is a system where you can go back to older dungeons. What you do is you go into the older dungeon and you use your Chrono Dungeon device, and it buffs it to current content and current difficulty. So you can go back and play in older content. It’s relatively limited at first – we’re only doing around three expansions that you can actually use the bottles in – but the plan is to keep releasing other expansions and other content so you can go back and play older content, but play it at the current difficulty level, current buff package level, and earn rewards for the current tiers.
Q:EverquestandEverquest 2are both releasing expansions soon. Is that something the teams coordinate together? How do both games work together behind the scenes?
Vallee:It’s pretty much coordinated as a team and as a studio. Obviously, we can’t launch them both at the exact same time, because that would just be catastrophic. What we try to do is provide a really cool experience for each launch, so separating them was really the only way to go. There’s a lot of coordination.
Chan:BothEverquestandEverquest 2have fairly separate development teams. So it’s not like “Oh, okay, now all the designers need to go work on this expansion.” All of the design teams, the engineering teams, and the environment and the art teams are all separated. We do have a little bit of sharing with our character art teams and our production teams, but all the rest of the teams are separated. So it’s a bit of coordination in that we should try to give each other space, but they are separate teams. It’s not a shared pool. One designer doesn’t work on both games, right?
We try to support each other in that we give each other enough space to let each expansion have its own time and sit on its own. By having those dedicated teams, it’s like, “Okay, you can focus on this game, you can focus on the expansion, you can focus on the balance, you can focus on the style and making sure that everything seems within-world." I knowEverquestandEverquest 2have the same names, but they do have very distinct styles.
Q: Solo playability is a big issue among MMO players now. How often are you considering solitary players who may not have friends to play with or time to devote to group content?
Vallee:It’s actually become a pretty large focus for us over the years. We’re one of the firstMMOs that started putting in solo contentthat was for solo players years and years ago. We actually started putting it in within the first expansion.
We do have tons of group content and tons of raid content, but we try to make it so that basically a solo player can get in and experience almost everything that any other player is going to experience. So you get to see all the cool models, you get to see all the cool zones. Most of the bosses in the solo zones are from the heroics zones, so they get to see all that stuff. But, it’s a whole separate rail, and we try to make sure that a solo player can jump in, see the entire story, get to experience all the zones, and all the cool new model models and stuff like that, and they have their own really robust itemization path. It’s a big focus for us.
But at the same time, we also attempt to verify that there’s a lot of challenging content. It’s hard to balance, to be honest, because some years it feels like you have a lot more solo players, and they just want to do solo content, and then you have some years where you have heroic and raid players asking for more and more challenging content. So we’re trying to do both, always. And I think we do a pretty good job of it.
Q: Earlier this year there was a quest that hinted at what was going to come in this expansion. How does the team approach these foreshadowing events? Will we maybe get a hint of what’s coming in the next one?
Vallee:Every year, we’ll do a prelude quest, and we’ll also do a conclusion quest line. But the prelude quest we do pretty much every year, and it’ll start before the expansion launches, and it’s something where you can jump in and follow it along and it’s almost always completely solo. There might be a group option for that quest line, but it’s also content we want everyone to be able to experience and go, “Oh, my God, something’s happening!” and “What is happening?” and get you excited for the expansion. In the first game update afterward, we’ll do some stuff to make a conclusion-type quest line for the expansion that sums up everything and gives everybody an idea of what happened, and that stuff is almost always solo content as well.
Q: During the preview, you showed how the zones follow a progression in theme starting with elements like iron and copper and progressing into more exotic gold and platinum. Is this a usual approach to your world design with expansions, or is that just how this one unfolded?
Vallee:This one was a bit different for us. Initially, when we were doing the story planning, we called it “the kaleidoscope” because the idea was that there would be this kaleidoscope-like portal. We have a character called the Muse and she’s playing music into it, and there’s a whole origin for the Djinn and music. For some Djinn, their weakness is knowing their name, and that makes it so that you can defeat them and they can never come back. Whereas with these Djinn, the whole idea was that they didn’t have that weakness.
So the Muse character is playing the music in there, and the Djinn Sovereign is creating these metallic Djinn. The idea is that these didn’t have the weakness of knowing their name, so they’re kind of a new insurmountable baddie.
So kaleidoscope was kind of a thing where it was like, “Well, what can we do that’s kaleidoscope-like?” and obviously it’s colors. We decided we wanted to do metallics and gems, so we matched up pairs like iron and citrine, copper and emerald, silver and amethyst, gold and ruby, and platinum and sapphire. It was one of those things that came through a lot of discussion. It’s also a hierarchy among the Djinn. The lower iron Djinn are like the Stormtroopers and as you go higher, the more powerful Djinn are the more rich metallics. So it was something that fell into place with this expansion for that zone.
Q: Any final thoughts you’d like to share before we head off?
Heydelaar:Every year, whether design or art, we’re always trying to push ourselves harder to create something new for our players to experience, and because a lot of them have been on the journey with us for years and years, we want to make sure that they’re not just hopping into the same zones or the same type of content that they’re used to. You want to experience new things. We don’t sit idly and go, “Alright, well, here’s another pine tree forest. Have fun.”
As you saw at the Aether Wroughtlands, it’s completely different than pretty muchanything we’ve created before. It gives us all an opportunity to explore new ideas, new visuals, and new content that plays off the visuals, and vice versa. We’re always, always, always doing it for the players. They are us. What we do is always with them in mind. Even as we’re all hopping into the zones and checking each other’s content, we are always thinking, “How is the player experiencing this? What are they seeing for the first time?” Even in Aether Wroughtlands, where the player first enters the zone has changed about three times, simply to structure visual approaches to different areas and to hide what they’re in for. They’ll see some videos and things, but it’s quite a bit different than when you jump in there and you come over the ridge like, “What’s going on?” We want to create those moments that are hopefully memorable.
We like it, but really, we’re creating all of this content and art and experiences for our players. We’re nothing without them. We cater to a ton of different playstyles. Our trade skillers are an absolute cornerstone of our community. A lot of stuff becomes furniture, or what we call “house blocks,” where it’s basically LEGOs and they can just freeform. A long time ago that stuff was very structured. We almost told them what to do with the blocks, like, “Hey, it only works this way.” Then we started hearing how no one wanted to do that and they were quite literally breaking our zones. For about a year, we were trying to say, “Stop breaking our zones” and then we just said, “You know what? Their creativity is just going crazy. They’re getting to these areas where they’re literally presented with a blank slate and going nuts.” Instead of fighting it, we decided to adopt it and start providing it. The creations and things that our players come up with, I mean, we’re inspired by them just the same.
Vallee:Every year we ask “How can we raise the bar this time?” We have players that have been playing for 20 years, so how can we raise the bar? How can we give them a new storyline? How can we bring old storyline threads back in that might be exciting for them? Making content for our players is obviously the number one thing but we’re always trying to provide new visuals and new exciting things. We’re not just going to put out something that’s like, “Oh, you went back to here and it’s the same but there’s a new quest,” we’re always trying to make sure that expansions are new and exciting with new visuals and we’re always raising the bar. The zone artists always raise the bar every year. I see a new zone and I’m like, “Man, this is just like the best thing I’ve ever seen.” Aether Wroughtlands raised the bar three rungs this time.
Heydelaar: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.
Vallee: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.
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