EverQuest II’s Producer and Designer talks about the game’s Player vs. Player Combat

Scott Hartsman and Chris Junior, EverQuest’s Senior Producer and designer respectively shared the process they had to go through to develop their game’s much-talked about PvP features.

Hartsman, talking about the importance of PvP in their game, said that “we wanted to make sure that we had the ability to invest the proper amount of effort in it, in order to make something that was really a lot of fun, on the first try.” According to him, the initial rough system concept was written up by one person. The said system was presented to others who collaborated to put additional details and fix logical holes in the initial rough plan. After that, it was in an iterative process of implementation/testing by the PvP designers and engineers.

“The most difficult thing for us at this stage was keeping track of this system as it evolved daily, ensuring that nothing we were changing along the way detracted from anything that we felt would be the fun parts”. he said, adding that he was satisfied that the final system kept the original things that made the experience fun.

Junior on the other hand, in referance to the game’s spell modifications, said that “In one way or another, just about every spell in the game has been modified to have differing effects when used in PvP combat”.

He added that varying modifiers were created to set level of damage of Melees, Combat Arts and Spells. Some peak damage abilities like Ice Comet require additional tempering to ensure that battles are fun for everyone, and donÂ’t become completely one-sided due to a single overpowering ability.

“It was our goal when implementing the system to ensure that all abilities available to a player were represented for PvP.” he concluded. Knowing the effort put into those modifiactions was comforting, we don’t want another one of those Marvel versus X-men PvP types with absurd attack modes (geessh, remember Cyclop’s optic rays?!).

Scott Hartsman and Chris Junior, EverQuest’s Senior Producer and designer respectively shared the process they had to go through to develop their game’s much-talked about PvP features.

Hartsman, talking about the importance of PvP in their game, said that “we wanted to make sure that we had the ability to invest the proper amount of effort in it, in order to make something that was really a lot of fun, on the first try.” According to him, the initial rough system concept was written up by one person. The said system was presented to others who collaborated to put additional details and fix logical holes in the initial rough plan. After that, it was in an iterative process of implementation/testing by the PvP designers and engineers.

“The most difficult thing for us at this stage was keeping track of this system as it evolved daily, ensuring that nothing we were changing along the way detracted from anything that we felt would be the fun parts”. he said, adding that he was satisfied that the final system kept the original things that made the experience fun.

Junior on the other hand, in referance to the game’s spell modifications, said that “In one way or another, just about every spell in the game has been modified to have differing effects when used in PvP combat”.

He added that varying modifiers were created to set level of damage of Melees, Combat Arts and Spells. Some peak damage abilities like Ice Comet require additional tempering to ensure that battles are fun for everyone, and donÂ’t become completely one-sided due to a single overpowering ability.

“It was our goal when implementing the system to ensure that all abilities available to a player were represented for PvP.” he concluded. Knowing the effort put into those modifiactions was comforting, we don’t want another one of those Marvel versus X-men PvP types with absurd attack modes (geessh, remember Cyclop’s optic rays?!).