Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Whew!

LU #24 for EverQuest 2 released and a collective sigh is heard throughout the building. Big patch days, especially AP or Expansion days are hectic in general. It's probably a little known fact, but several designers form a strike team of sorts on days such as this, and run through checklists of areas in expansions and adventure packs to make sure that functionality is still there after all of the data is pushed to the live servers. They get here at 6am and it's a race against the clock to try and get it rolling again before the players get too antsy. The real scary part is when something important breaks and there is a scramble of fixing and testing to get things into place.

The Commonlands appears to have survived my changes without a mass of players trying to bang down my office door. I guess I did alright! I'm already entrenched in a new task, but it's for the forthcoming expansion, so it's nothing I can talk about at this juncture.

If any of you are on the fence about getting The Fallen Dynasty adventure pack, I think you should take the plunge. It probably costs less than it does to go to Mcdonalds these days, and it is well done.

I personally worked on the prior 2 adventure packs, and I was hoping the adventure packs would continue to be successful. After participating in a couple internal playtests and playtests on the live test server, I have to say I was pleased with the zones that we have there.

It's interesting to look at these places from both a player and dev perspective. As a player, I love finding new places to go as my character experiences them. From her perspective, this isn't just newly discovered country, it's just a region that she has yet to investigate herself. From a dev perspective it was interesting to see the interaction between our office and SOGA to make this all come together. Both studios were very involved in the creation of this adventure pack, and it was interesting to see the results of that collaboration.

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