1. Crafting varies from mmo to mmo taking on many different forms. One unique crafting system was that in Star Wars Galaxies, which let players experiment on the items, they were making. Could we see this type of system in the future of EverQuest II or would it be too difficult to implement?

Domino&Team: SWG and EQII were designed from the beginning to handle crafting, and itemization, in very different ways. SWG's system of very variable item stats from experimentation is something that EQII's items were not designed to accommodate. While in theory "anything is possible", to do this in EQII would require such a drastic change of the fundamental mechanics that we would essentially have to rewrite a large portion of the game's back end from the bottom up. So no, I do not anticipate that this is a change we are likely to see.

2. Randomness is a hard aspect to implement into any mmo and especially hard to implement into models. Having a random model generator in a game allows for dynamically changing content giving players something new to experience. Is it possible to put a random model generator into crafted house items like the idea* mentioned on the EQ2 Forums?

Domino&Team: Again, I wouldn’t want to say anything is absolutely impossible, but the amount of time and change that would be required to implement something like this makes it fairly unlikely that it would be the best use of our code team’s time.

3. Many players have talked about grand house items, special weapons and unique armor designs they would like to see put into EverQuest 2. It would be great to see richly detailed models displayed in homes or brandished in the battlefield. How long does it take to create a new item be it house, armor or weapon? Also does the amount of detail put into the item prolong its completion?

Domino&Team: This depends a lot on the item, and how unique it is. The largest amount of time required is generally on the side of the art team, who create the new appearance that we actually see in game. I spoke to our Art Director, and he estimates that creating a new weapon or house item would generally be one to several days’ work for an artist, depending on the complexity of it.

For a house item, once the art is created, it doesn’t take a lot longer for the design team to complete. Perhaps a couple of hours at most to create a few more files, a recipe, decide where it will be obtained from, test the scaling and placement etc.

For weapons, it will probably take about an additional day of work from a design team member, since the weapon will need stats, maybe special effects. The nicer the item is, the longer this will take, since not only do we need to take more care to put balanced, desirable, and appropriate effects on it, while ensuring it’s not overpowered. Then we need to determine where it will drop and how often, or if it’s crafted, make a recipe and decide what’s used to make it, which book it will go into, etc.

Armor is the most time-intensive for the art team. Just taking an existing “shape” of a set of armor and putting a new texture on it will take an artist maybe 2-3 weeks of solid work. Creating an entirely new “shape” of armor takes several solid months, and that’s assuming the artist does nothing else at all but work on the armor. The design team will then take a couple of days to itemize the armor and determine how it’s dropped or crafted in the world, but that’s a relatively small amount of work compared to what’s needed from the art team.

Given the amount of time and effort that it takes to do these things, it’s great the number of new items that our art team does manage to produce for us, and we definitely appreciate it!