TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Doing that in that environment, where real-life people were experiencing - to the minute - the content that you put in was a really powerful experience. I wasn't one of those people who played a single player game and said "I need to do that!" No, right from the get go I was a multiplayer gaming guy.

I did that for about a year or so, then I went to work on the original Gemstone that was released. After that I worked on Gemstone 2 and 3, until I decided I should take a break and go to school for a little bit to make sure I had something to fall back on if - as my dad put it - "That whole gaming thing doesn't work out."

Fortunately, that "whole gaming thing" seems to have worked out just fine. Really it's been all about multiplayer gaming even from the very beginning of it all.

It's funny because people ask me, "How'd you get your start as Technical Director when you only had three years experience to start with?" The way gaming credits work, I just had never been a part of a game that had a printed box where I could be credited. So the 10-12 years that I was doing my work with text games just aren't listed on any credit site due to the lack of boxes.

Ten Ton Hammer: What kind of schooling have you recieved? What was your educational focus and how has it helped you with the development of MMOGs?

Scott: Honestly, I wasn't the greatest student in the world and my education experience can be called spotty at best. I have my own rant on my blog about this, but I think the educational industry is ripe for its own sort of revamp right now.

Extensive experience has helped Scott develop a holistic approach to development.

But I was really sort of the "Average Joe" sort of student at my college. My background was engineering and I was programming before I went to college, so I decided to go for a degree other than that because I was already doing programming. I tried being a business major, an electrical engineer, and a few other majors for about a year and a half until I went into electrical engineering in computer systems with a programming orientation also. I really liked it a lot, and it was really all about starting with the absolute building blocks and it built up from there until we were learning about microchips, computers, and operating systems.

All of my experience prior to going to college was all about top-down, high-end software systems. This was approaching the entire act of computing from the bottom up - volts, currents, and resistors. By the time my knowledge met up with the stuff I learned in school, it was really neat having a complete picture of how the entire process comes together. It really gave me an appreciation for looking at all the systems holistically.        

The same sort of systems really exist when you're looking at a team of developers. You have to look at all the people working together as a whole and understand how they function individually while also getting them to work together as a complete system.

Ten Ton Hammer: Has your gaming history influenced your work on Everquest 2? How has it helped?

Scott: Having worked with various different gaming systems is actually fairly fantastic. I was actually just contacted by the folks at the IMGDC to give a talk on this very subject. There was a fairly heated argument on the blogosphere a few weeks ago concerning scripting and whether its right or wrong.

Once you've seen this implemented nine or ten times in the past, you learn that things aren't necessarily right or wrong. It's all about really pulling out the strengths and weaknesses that you're looking for and finding the infinite number of solutions that are going to work for your individual case.

Ten Ton Hammer: As a player, what's your favorite aspect of Everquest 2?

Scott: I'm a big fan of the fact that I can log in and I have a choice of what I'm going to do that day. There are some days where I log in and I only have a few minutes and I play the broker game and shop for particular items that I may not have lying around.

I actually play on the same server as our tradeskill dev, and she introduced me to the joys of house decoration, so there are some days where I do just that. There are yet other days when I just want to go hunting and there are other days where I group up and raid. I like the fact that I have those choices in front of my when I log into the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Conversely, as a developer what's your favorite aspect of the game?

Scott: This is a rough question, because I really don't see those things as two different things. Personally, I think developers are at their best when they see their games as players. Although I do think there are times that devs need to separate themselves, but more often than not I think it's important that dev can at least relate to their player base and what they're going through. Only then can you really make something that is going to be entertaining for the player.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think you've created a game where it's easy to see things as a player while still remaining a developer of the game?

Scott: Yes and no. There are things about the game that are ridiculously easy to make, yet there are portions of the game that are incredibly complex. We've taken this game and really made it do things that it might not have been originally intended to do all that well. I think that says more about the team than about the software itself. It's good software, but I think it's more about the individual will needed to get the job done.

I think some people could have been content just making things in this engine, but other have taken it as a way to really excel at their particular area. A couple of engineers come to mind that have wrestled our massive data set and come up with really cool ways for our designers to work with it in the last year. They even created ways to speed up our content placement - sometimes at twice the speed - that really sped things up. Some of it really made Rise of Kunark possible in this last year.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why should a gamer play Everquest 2? How would you recommend the title to someone who hasn't played it before? How about someone who left the world awhile ago?

Everquest 2's diversity, depth, and breadth should bring players into the world.

Scott: That one's easy. The big reason is to be online, in a world, where some of the people are interested in what you want to do, while other players are simply interested in what suits them. To me I view that as a big positive. It's really all about that diversity, depth, and breadth of the game.

I love that interaction between crafters and adventurers. I love the intra-adventuring as people tackled new content. I love the sense of communities that build around individual servers, and that includes those that are built around their individual guilds. I love that we've fostered these sort of connections through things like our guild tools and our guild banks. We were the first of a kind in a lot of areas there.

I think that anyone who's interested in a world where there's a lot of things to see and hear and do and is regarded as one of the best in any MMO that's out there should definitely have a compelling reason to come and play.

Ten Ton Hammer: Finally,  what's the best part about being in the MMOG industry and what advice would you give to anyone else wanting to break into the field?

Scott: It's really neat being in an industry that's just figuring out how to BE and industry. Everything is changing, everything is fluid. The movie industry analogy that gets thrown around is we're in the time period where movies were having to get new cameras and new lighting and new effects every time they had to shoot a new movie.

Eventually we'll evolve to the point where we're just working solely on content and not so much on the tools or the business models. I think it's going to be a really interesting road to get there.

Pieces of advice: No matter what part of the industry you want to get into, personality and drive mean SO much. I cannot emphasize how much. Having a compulsive need to take ownership of things, and the need to take control of things and do them immediately is how things get done and get done right. If you can foster a way to feel bad when things don't go well and then understanding how you can help things go better in the future, that's a way people become great.

As weird as this one might sound, lots of people are spending a lot of time on the Internet these days using correct spelling and punctuation. It's that need to communicate clearly with your audience. So much of our jobs are written down that invariably the people who write like that also alter the way they think. And it's noticeable. So training yourself to have quality, reflexive typing habits is a good thing.

Finally, I cannot recommend enough that you understand basic algebra. We use a ton of it in game development. There's so much of production level game development that takes place in Excel. As a guy who went to engineering school, I can pretty much vouch for the fact that I didn't need a whole lot of calculus once I got out of there, but the basics of advanced math and basic algebra is something that will serve you for the rest of your life.

There's my list of things people can do to try to get into the business.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks again, Scott, for letting us have the opportunity to chat with you, and we look forward to our next conversation!

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