GameSpy: EverQuest II is being designed to boast state-of-the-art graphics technology, but a game as large as this takes several years to develop. Wasn't that like chasing a moving target? How did the technical team cope?

Scott Hartsman: Very early on, the team knew that EverQuest II was going to take quite some time to develop, and that the goal was to present highly detailed, photorealistic characters and environments. With that goal in mind, aiming for the current "bleeding-edge" and making predictions about increases in computing power over time are really what the team needed to do.

By and large, these predictions have come true with very little need for re-planning or backing off of original assumptions. If there's one place that we got a bit too ambitious, it was in our polygon counts, which we've been fortunate enough to be able to tweak over time, as new assets get placed in the engine, and older assets are optimized to perform well.