A Decade of EverQuest: 10 Things to Know 10 Years Ago
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2. MMO Zone Size Along with how a zone was laid out, the size of the rooms and passages had to be much larger as well. Nearly every space in the game that would be perfectly fine in a single player game had to be scaled up, from buildings for banks and merchants, to interior dungeon halls and caverns, and even outdoor spaces. Merchants or trainers had to be multiplied and spread out in larger rooms to accommodate more players trying to use them at the same time. Boss and raid areas really needed to be huge to hold multiple groups of players as well.
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5. The widespread variety of habitats in the world of Norrath EverQuest has every type of real and fantasy landscape imaginable. Where most games have a central location and theme, and few have players globetrotting around to different climates, EQ has a whole world of environments from deserts, jungles, forests, mountains, tundra, and the underground, to all the places in between, and even into alternate dimensions and times, and even the planes of the gods. It was a very interesting challenge to create new textures, objects, and architecture of such a wide range when creating zones in EQ and keep it feeling like the same game universe. A world builder would go from creating a forest zone one month to a desert zone the next, and have to essentially start from scratch. As we created more and more zones, we continued to streamline the process and work more cohesively on between similar environments shared by different artists.
