Interview: Ken Ralston is living, breathing, RPG royalty, having worked on some seminal pen and paper games, and the new Kingdoms of Amalur. And he's awesome...
Not so long ago, I had the chance to sit down with several developers at the EA Spring Showcase in London, which is basically the European equivalent of GDC. Considering I’d already been to GDC and had already seen much of what was on offer, I was keen to chat to as many different people as possible, and they don’t get any more exciting than RPG legend, Ken Rolston, who's currently working on Kingdoms of Amalur. Sure, I may have only got to ask a few questions in my brief interview window, but Ken’s energy, humour and fascinating tangents made for some great material. Read on to see why.
Atomic: Oh, incidentally, if I ask the same questions as everyone else and get boring, just answer however you want. Just change the answer-
PR Person: -He does that anyway.
Atomic: Good! Great!
Ken: Either way, if I spew and your eyes start to glaze over, be polite enough to tell me, “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about!” Please-
Atomic: -Honestly, I’m just gonna leave if that happens.
Ken: *Laughs*
Atomic: Alright. Can you tell me something that nobody else knows about your game?
Ken: Sure I can. Whether I would or not depends on whether the PR person is in the room. Something that nobody else knows... why don’t you leave that to gestate, and if I can think of something on the fly-
Atomic: -Okay. So at midpoint you’ll be just, like, “Dah! First question!” Alright. What was the first absolute must-do thing you had to do when you started developing this game?
Ken: There has to be a marketing impulse; because it’s stupid to do something that’s terrible and expensive without having a market for it. And it’s also cool to get away with the impossible; to take the impossible task. So I was hoping that we would do a better job on that. And it turns out that once you start to do that, you get into all kinds of sacks of shit. Number one, you have to have better animations because action/combat, which was kind of our inspiration, it’s all based on animations and frame timing and stuff like that, which I knew nothing about. So it turns out if you’re going to have a good game design, good system design, that we had to add—because role-playing games don’t have that stuff—if you add that stuff, they have to have good animation.
And what a convenient thing, since role-playing games have not-very-good animation, as I was so kindly informed by Todd McFarlane. That’s one of the great things about a visionary, and it turns out if you do have a good action/combat system, it’s gonna have good animations and that’s good for the combat system; but it’s good for everything else! It’s good for presentation, it’s good for that sense of the world, it’s good for the whole experience of moving. Oh my God! See, I say I want combat, but what I really wanted to do was to move better in the world. And one of the great things that happened as the game was slowly coming to play, that I could physically move behind my enemy because the controller would let me move behind the enemy. In a role-playing game, there’s always been this idea of flanking, but it was always abstracted because that’s the way that... you couldn’t possibly physically move in a Dungeons & Dragons game; you’d count the number of hexes.
Here, I can move, I can roll around behind the guy and whack him in the back. And I spent all my time, the moment I could play, just moving and trying to use the tactical positioning to exploit it; being smarter than the enemy could possibly be to move.
And one of the other great things that comes with that, once you can do all that moving, then we are starting to let the enemies be smart and get behind you. And there’s nothing more immersive than the terror of being hit from behind! So, the whole theatre of combat becomes more and more satisfying. So, it turns out, by having this dumb impulse that I want better combat, means that the whole experience is going to be different to start with. It could be different in a good or bad way, but because we’re able to polish it and work it up as part of our presentation, it was like we had a whole new paint pallette for experience. And the paint pallette was a tactile one; it wasn’t just in your head. And that’s what Todd McFarlane is all about. Partway as great creature design or distinctive silhouettes, or a face that’s recognisable, but it’s also about [starts clapping] visceral-ness And even though he’s not a gamer, that’s a very good thing to understand: that you need the nine-year old joy button. I’m frothing, see! Not fully steerable.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012