One of the most difficult jobs that I’ve had while working on EverQuest II has been the “revamping” of zones or areas. Some of these revamps have ranged from entire population replacements with quests being modified to fit, to just minor adjustments of mob difficulty in heavily trafficked areas.
Generally, the work in and of itself isn’t that hard, but the planning can be quite labor intensive. Just about everything you click, every mob you kill, and every object you see in our game is somehow connected to a quest, a story, or a character in some way. It is quite nerve wracking when you want to make something better, but risk breaking a hundred things to get to that point.
The best revamps (to me, of course!) are the ones where I get to scrap everything without worrying about what was in there before, and make an entirely new zone out of it. I was given a choice of zones to do this with a few months ago, and eventually settled on making a level 80 instance of Runnyeye.
Runnyeye itself has presented some challenges, but I think it’s coming together nicely after some much needed housecleaning. When I first went into the zone completely empty, I couldn’t help but think that the goblins really need to clean up this dump, so the first thing I did was start deleting all of the trash piles and modifying the zone art to fit my needs.
The goblins were expecting some guests after all, and it wouldn’t do to invite dignitaries into a hovel.
Steve “Saavedra” Kramer
