We had a chance to sit down and interview Jenn Chan and Kyle Valle for an in-depth look at their latest expansion and what EQ2 has been up to lately with Darkpaw Studios. It may have ended up as all gamer talk does, with plenty of side quests and random asides, but I’ve trimmed it down here for your reading enjoyment.
I hope everyone had a lovely holiday this year, despite the real-life issues that are going around, I, personally had some lovely days and took advantage of the opportunity to chat with Jenn Chan (Head of DarkPaw Studios) and Kyle Valle (Creative Director) about the most recent expansion for EQII- Visions of Vetrovia. I’ll admit it went a bit overlong, so I hope you won’t excuse me for not including everything, but I did try to keep all the info you might be interested in (and chopped out the parts of me being an early EQ widow and my poor first trash-puter). This is our EQII Visions of Vetrovia Interview.
D’konen: Do you do anything special when you do your launches, something to celebrate?
Kyle: laughs On Launch Day, honestly, it’s pretty much business as usual. What we’re doing is, we’re all up early we’re all on the servers. Smoke testing things, making sure everything’s ready to go.
We pretty much spend the entire day and probably two or three days after launch on the servers, talking to players, being there to answer questions, see if there are any issues that we need to identify quickly, stuff like that.
I have been known to mess with people, do emotes across the world, make people think they’re bound somewhere else. Just fun stuff to try and interact and be there for part of the launch. That’s kind of become our ritual.
D’konen: I guess I can understand that, I mean, EQ2 has been around for years now, I expect the launch of expansions are a bit old hat for you now.
Jen: They definitely still have a bit of nail-biting, at the end there, though. It’s that nervousness, like: “Will they like it? Will they like this expansion? Will they have fun or will it just kind of..fall flat on its face?” It’s still those opening-day nerves.
D’konen: So no matter how many times you bring your own piece or expansion or put some new code, there’s always going to be some bug chasing, there’s always going to be some work, and there’s always going to be some worrying about whether the players are going to actually interact with things or if they’re just going to rage across the forums.
Jen: Right, right, you never know laughs
Kyle laughs We try to catch that stuff in beta if there ends up being something the players really dislike. We want people to have fun, that’s the bottom line.
D’konen: What was your favorite zone design for Visions of Vetrovia?
Kyle: I had the most fun with the “spooky” zones, so, Mahngavi wastes and Forlorn Gist, We had a lot of fun stuff with that, trying to do spooky stuff.
Jen: I’m not typically involved with the designing of the zones, I just get to play them, but I would definitely say the Castle (Castle Valcrul). Being able to see that castle silhouette off in the distance, I’m like “Hmmmmm….what’s going on over there? That’s where I want to be” laughs
D’konen: So..creepy gothic castle and want to do the Scooby Gang thing?
Jen: Yeah, because, generally, we tend to be pretty upbeat and silly, so this one’s kind of a shift towards the creepier end for EQ2, and I like to get some fresh things in.
D’konen: It’s always nice to have a little variety in content, that way your players, depending on what they’re feeling like, that’s what they can get involved with.
Jen: Yeah, for sure.
Kyle: We definitely went dark for this expansion. Once you get past Karuupa Jungle it gets really dark.
D’konen: Were there any zones that caused more of a challenge for you? Trying to get them to work or convey the right atmosphere?
Kyle: Yeah, Karuupa Jungles was a real challenge, we were really shooting for it to feel like a jungle and we wanted it to be large enough that dinosaurs could be everywhere, and it wouldn’t feel weird or out of place, so there was a lot of scaling and stuff we played with back and forth with the art. We did a lot of work to make it feel right.
D’konen: Were there any mechanics or changes to mechanics that existed that were brought intoVoV that you would like to talk about?
Kyle: Well, as far as new stuff, the only new mechanic we introduced was tradeskill blueprints, which are something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
It’s a system where, once you’ve completed a pristine version of something, then you can go in and click a box and you can use the blueprint and you just make the item. It does consume like 20% more fuel and some components so…it’s just a cool system where you can make stuff quickly.
D’konen: Now I’m about to ask about something near and dear to my heart, being a returning player- is there anything you’ve done for returning players like me, coming back after a hiatus, or for new players looking to get started in EQII?
Kyle: That’s part of what we’ve been doing with Tishan’s Lockbox, if you haven’t played for five years or so, your gear’s obviously going to be outdated, so you hit a bit of a roadblock. You’re just not going to do well, you’re not going to feel like you’re progressing, so, we’ve started giving them a full set gear that’s a tier below quest gear. You can just go to the lockbox, grab the gear, put it on, and go play.
Jen: Certainly, if it’s been more than three years since you last played, I recommend using your character 120 boost that comes with all versions of the expansion, and dive right in. It’s like “Hey come in, use your level boost and you can immediately start playing the new expansion.”
Kyle: …and you can always start again fresh at the beginning, we do have seventeen years of content, including tens of thousands of quests.
Jen: A few years ago, we even brought back our tutorial zones, so if you want to create a fresh character and refresh yourself on the basics, it’s right there.
D’konen: So, Is VoV purely focused on end game content, an add on to preexisting content, or is there content players might run into a bit earlier?
Kyle: VoV is definitely an endgame expansion. While we have done it in the past with expansions, we haven’t really been adding in lower content since Kunark.
D’konen: Did you find that your community, other than beta testers, did you find any of your design choices were directly influenced by the community?
Kyle: We obviously get a lot of feedback, we do read it all, But this time it was kind of a passion project for us. There was a lot of stuff that people on the team had been wanting to do, so we found the right story and the right place to go in and do a bunch of stuff we’d all been wanting to do for quite a while.
Honestly, it was kind of a succession of passion projects for us.
And there you have it, folks! Both Jenn Chan and Kyle Valle were lovely people to talk to, I was happy to be able to chat with them, even if I did get them off-topic (which you won’t have to read here) and I am currently diving into the expansion as we get through the holiday season.
We’ll see how that turns out in a couple of weeks (or more-since recovery from the holidays is definitely a thing). Happy New Year and we hope you all had a lovely holiday season!
