Ken Rolston interview pt2 – Morrowind’s open-world elevator music

Ken Rolston is back and as passionate as ever as he talks about the challenges of game design... part two of two.

Here’s the second part of my entertaining interview with Ken Rolston, lead game designer at Big Huge Games. In this half of the interview, Ken talks openly about more issues he has with past titles he’s created, creating a cohesive vision with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and technological limitations of game design.

Atomic: There are so many elements in Reckoning. I played a bit before and you’ve got the awesome animation stuff done by Todd McFarlane, the music was amazing-

Ken: -Oh my God, Grant Kirkhope, oh my God. Okay, great soundtrack, but the thing that’s most important is that he doesn’t. Play it. All. The time. When I played Morrowind and Oblivion, I turned the music off because it was nice the first time I heard it-

Atomic: Open-world elevator music.

Ken: -Oh my God, it was awful, I hate it. But it did what it needed to do, marketing wise, so what Grant has done is say, ‘You need the silence in order to appreciate the other stuff.’ Oh my God, do I love it. Again, that’ll be a soundtrack that I listen to in the car.

Atomic: That's what I was thinking when I was listening to it, this is Hollywood-grade epic-

Ken: *Clapping* It’s inspired by the 1930s and great film composers.

Atomic: Yeah, absolutely, but you’ve got all of those elements with the animation, you’ve got the music, you’ve got Salvatore’s input, your input, how do you marry all of these element and make the cohesive vision?

Ken: I think it comes down to that communication routine that I’m good at. It’s knowing that the premise is the good thing and if everybody is excited about the premise it’s a good thing. And they forget about the fact that they don’t know where the story goes from there, y’know. And then what you do is say, ‘I’m giving you a list of all the factions and where they work.’ And then they get this illusion that I kinda know what’s going on. I’ve got no idea at all. But they need to have that confidence or the other way to say it is that you can’t create the whole document from the beginning. But if you have an outline that you know isn’t stupid because a guy you can trust wrote it and would smell the shit if there was shit on it, I think that’s how I can contribute.

Atomic: Okay. One of the questions I wanted to ask this morning at the round table before we ran out of time. There’s a lot of talk about technology and how technology has moved gaming forward and how the RPG has evolved. George Lucas very infamously said that he had to wait to make the prequels because technology wasn’t up to date-

Ken: -Yeah, and look what crap he made. I’m just sayin’.

Atomic: Oh, I totally agree. Are there any ideas that you have that are held back by the technology that we have today?

Ken: How about if I give you an example of a technological limitation that I thought was engraved in stone and I was just stupid and just didn’t know. Reckoning has a lot of lights and it turns out that we didn’t have a lot of lights in Morrowind and Oblivion and I always bemoaned it because I was told, ‘You can’t do that.’ And now we’ve got 'em. I’m not gonna say they were cheap, but we got ass-loads of lights. So I am not technically minded enough to know what all that stuff is about, but if I had a technical hobby horse to ride, it would be on tools. That, for me, the most important thing is being able to make content in ass-loads, quickly and then, more importantly, to iterate them. So I don’t care about what the user sees. I think the user is getting to see some pretty great shit. I want to be able to make the content as quickly revisable as text, that’s horseshit, couldn’t be done; or maybe, at least, like a film. And films are pretty hard to reshoot and stuff like that, but I want to get to that entry-level thing. But in games, the logic is so brittle. I think I heard something about Dragon Age, like some of the Dwarven tunnels and they knew that they were too long, and then what they’d do is to shorten them. But all the stripping would have taken too much time to undo and then test. So what I’m very conscious of is the limitations of our production and I would love to find some way to improve that; don’t know how. And, again, that’s the thing, I’m a visionary, all I need to say is, ‘We need to do better, please, somebody help me.’