Kyle Vallée: [It’s] not the original Island of Refuge, the launch one. That got retrofitted when we took out sub classes and all that other stuff.
Carlos Mora: This is the second iteration. But it’s nostalgic enough.
Vallée: The original one is gone because we overwrote everything.
Holly Longdale: Because we changed the game.
Mora: There are a few subtle differences. There’s one quest that we couldn’t get working, so I had to basically disable that quest.
Players have been posting on the forums, “Where’s this quest that I remember?” and I’ve been saying, [assumes dramatic voice] “I tried really hard! I swear!”
I couldn’t get that one quest. I have failed players. [It was] Ebik’s quest — one of the ones where you just had to go around finding items all around the island. For some reason, it was really heavily scripted, and the script just didn’t work anymore.
I tried to get it working several times. It got down to the point where I was spending a lot of time just on that one quest when I needed to be focusing on experience balancing.
The developers’ favorite quests in the zones
GamesBeat: Having played through it as a gamer, were there any parts that you were especially happy to see come back to life?
Mora: The first time I ran through it after I got the zone actually working, I was doing that probably every 30 seconds, remembering all the little things.
I got through the entire island and I was like yes, I got it done, I got it all working except for the one quest. And I’m running through and I’m killing things to make sure everything is working, and I got a dropped quest that I had forgotten about. I’m like, oh man, I had totally forgot about this quest.
I had a whole nuther thing to test, because I had forgotten that one quest and where it came from.
Longdale: Mine was the naked halfling in the tree. That was a great one.
I totally forgot about it. You come around a corner and there are a bunch of dogs barking in a tree. As you approach it, you get a tutorial message that says something like, [in a facetious voice] “Sometimes weird stuff happens in EverQuest II. Look around!” And so you kill the dogs. I had forgotten, and was walking around like, what’s going on, and there is a naked halfling halfway up a tree. OK he had underwear.
Mora: He has newbie island pants on.
Longdale: But he’s naked.
Mora: Wishful thinking, I think.
Longdale: Halflings are hot. [She laughs.]
You click on him and he comes down and says, “Ahhh! Help! I’m naked.” I can’t remember what he says. There’s so much fine detail that’s crazy.
I played evil and good and they’re significantly different. Just the weird goblins being nice to you. It’s craziness. It’s an absolutely joy to play through. We were all tickled and giddy. As dev teams go, being giddy is not something that happens every day. [They laugh.] Every other day, maybe … So it’s been an absolute joy. It’s been awesome.
Vallée: Mine was totally the boat, because I have been doing Captain Drake Varlos [impressions] for eight years, and I haven’t heard it in so long. It was awesome. I had to play it over and over again.
A tough secret to keep
Longdale: It was really tough for us reading on the forums [before the reveal], “You guys totally screwed the pooch, because if you had Isle of Refuge, I would have come and played.” It was really hard to keep it under wraps, because that hurts our feelings. We’re always excited about what we do. But the value internally, and being able to deliver … even not telling press.
It’s a big deal, from the player community sentiment standpoint. But we felt they were the ones that had been so desperately asking for this thing for years. We thought if they were allowed to discover it, they would have more joy. And that’s exactly what we saw. Just a lot of people saying they had tears in their eyes and were weeping.
Vallée: On launch day, it was so worth it. It was a huge payoff, on both ends. For the players and for us.
Mora: We got some really rage-filled email about, I can’t believe you’re not bringing it back. We had to bite our lip and be like, oh my god.
Vallée: I’d get private messages every day on the boards saying, “Why are you not bringing it back? It’s so ridiculous. Do some work, you lazy [beeps]!”
Longdale: “You must have some floppy disks backups of that.” They’re like, someone surely has a floppy or a USB drive with the Isle of Refuge on it. A lot of people just hated us. They’re like, you’re missing the boat, as it were.
No, we’re not missing the boat. [Laughs.] That was really hard. We got criticized a lot.
Vallée: We even had nasty negative posts on Reddit and had players go in and defend us to the teeth.
Longdale: Now it’s nice to see those haters do an about-face and have some joy, because they’re so passionate about it.
Yesterday was a joy, and I’m so glad, for these guys. They guys have worked so hard, and these two new servers weren’t in our schedule. This was something the team wanted to do for players for some time and we thought, let’s take a bit of time and see what happens.
