An unabridged behind-the-scenes transcription of an hour-long roundtable discussion with a group of RPG gurus... part one of six.
During gamescom, I had the privilege of sitting in on what was called the RPG influencer’s breakfast. It involved a few key heavy hitters from the RPG world: Dr Ray Muzyka (BioWare co-founder), Ken Rolston (of Morrowind and Oblivion fame), Dr Greg Zeschuck (BioWare co-founder) and Eugene Evans (BioWare Mythic general manager). Pete Stewart from Edge Magazine in the UK was in the MC seat. Readers of Atomic magazine would have seen choice quotes from this breakfast in a couple of Engine Room articles, but now you can read the full transcription.
In this first chapter of our six-part series, the influencer’s talk about the games that influence them and start to nut out how popular RPG mechanics have become in other genres such as the popular first-person shooter.
Pete: My name’s Pete Stewart. I’m from Edge magazine in the UK. Thank you for coming to the RPG breakfast this morning. We’ve got a very distinguished panel and we’re going to take a look at some of the issues affecting RPG development today and in the future, as well. I’m going to let the panelists introduce themselves and I’m going to ask each of you to tell us your favourite RPG ever and why that is.
Ray: I’m Ray Muzyka. I’m the co-founder of BioWare and general manager of the BioWare label for EA. We have seven studios now without our group. We do the RPGs, we do the MMOs and we do strategy games, as well. So we have Montreal Canada, Virginia, BioMythic and Gene is the general manager there... Great teams all over the place. We’re trying to focus on a whole bunch of different products now. So, I think in today’s discussion we’re gonna talk about the gamut of different platforms and intractability and cross-platform persistence, and things like that. I mean, we’re very passionate about… we try to enable players to play the games where they want to play and how they want to play. And we’re very passionate about the topic of RPGs.
Pete: Okay, Ken.
Ken: Ken Rolston, internationally celebrated game designer. All together now, “internationally celebrated game designer.” Lead designer of the light classics Morrowind and Oblivion, and did Ray forget to tell what my RPG was?
Pete: Oh yes, Ray, you didn’t tell us what your favourite RPG was.
Ray: It depends on the decade, I suppose, because in different decades I have different favourite games. But one of my favourite memories going way, way back—it’s probably one of my favourite memories of all time--was Wizardry. And you can still get it as an Apple II emulator, or kind of, on PC. There was just something about that, y’know, the imagination… that you had to fill in the cracks, you had to imagine a lot of the possibilities and you were just kind of moving through this 3D dungeon and monsters would pop up and it was Dungeons & Dragons brought to life on a PC for the first time really. And it was, like, since then I’ve loved equally as well, but that was probably one of the first ones that inspired me to want to play these for the rest of my life.
Ken: Baldur’s Gate is the game that I’ve played over and over and over and over again. I admit that Planetscape Tournament, I admire as an artist looking from 20,000 feet as the best thing ever. But I have to say my favourite game is Morrowind because it was just such a complete dog’s breakfast and there’s so much going on in that game that I don’t think it’s exhaustible. It’s sorta like Moby Dick to Oblivion’s Titanic, y’know, it’s inaccessible and trashy... it was slick and entertaining. I’d love to play Morrowind again if I could just change the interface.
Greg: Hey, Greg Zeschuck... I work at Austin primarily working on our Star Wars [The Old Republic] game. Also, my favourite game of all time right now--we sorta steal each other’s choices--but I think actually Wizardry is right up there, but for me, actually, I think it was Wasteland, as you may recall from Interplay many, many years ago. The reason I liked it was it was the first actual open-world RPG, so you could actually go anywhere, and if you walked into the Brotherhood of Steel Citadel you’d get shot in one second, so you’d have to play it for 20 more hours and come back again. So it was really the first game that did that with multiple solutions to puzzles such as open the front door, climb a rope... But that was just very formative for me.
Eugene: I’m Eugene Evans. I’m the GM of BioWare Mythic, one of the Mythic studios as Ray pointed out. BioWare Mythic has its origins as one of Mythic Entertainment and we run and created and still operate three MMOs: Ultima Online, which is currently in its 14th year, Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot, which is celebrating its 10th year this year. So sometimes-
Greg: -10?
Eugene: 10! Which in MMO years is-
Greg: -‘Cause it seems like only yesterday…
Eugene: I feel like I run the geriatric home of retiring MMOs. But they’re all great games, still with passionate communities, and I hope that we’re running them forever. And we’ve announced yesterday that we’re doing [Warhammer Online] Wrath of Heroes, which is kind of our take on a free-to-play PvP deliverable around that Warhammer Universe; really kind of taking the best of Warhammer. And that kind of shows the thing we’re doing behind, where this whole market is going; what free-to-play actually looks like. The RPG that influences me most was the MMORPG Meridian 59 because, for me, it was the first game that I’d played that went, “Wow, this online thing, it actually might change the nature of these games.” It was the first one that was visually good enough that you could look at it and go, “I can see how this would scale, I can see where this could go.” Despite the poor graphics, it had a community. People were playing it because they were playing with their friends. People were very committed to it. And it, unlike some of the other MMOs that were emerging at the time, really set what the future could look like. There were, of course, already a few around, but I think the Meridian 59 pushed things in different directions.
Pete: One thing, I think, that would be good to start with is when I was asked to do this, I started writing a list of games that had RPG elements in them and the list just started getting longer and longer. We’ve sort of seen, over the last five years, very much this creep of RPG elements into lots of different games, class example: Modern Warfare and how it’s used RPG elements in its character progression online. So, I was wondering if you all thought the term RPG was still relevant now?
Ken: I think it’s still completely appropriate to use it and also to desperately want to get past it as soon as we can. But, I mean, the four elements I’m always using, mostly as communication devices are: narrative, exploration, combat and advancement. And I think those are at least boxes that I expect to check off in every one of them. And I still think you could make a lot of games that don’t look like RPGs in any way that do all those sorts of things.
Greg: It’s funny, we have exactly the same thing, I think we call it: exploration, yes, combat, yes, things that advance... conflict or combat, it’s not always combat. I think character progression and what’s the other one? Story, character, narrative, yeah. So it’s the same thing for us. It’s funny, we’ve actually sensed that a lot of games are more story driven. Our games tend to be more story, that’s not to say we don’t try to do the other things, we try to make those really strong. But I think it’s a function of depth, like your point earlier. Morrowind has so much complexity, that’s one of the things that reflects RPGs to a certain degree. There’s that depth, that complexity, and these in-player systems, we call them activity chains. It’s a really, really interesting interplay of those things that creates this bizarre and really compelling experience.
Eugene: But I think you just touched on it when you were saying that even something like Modern Warfare has these elements. As more and more games are becoming connected and therefore people have a persona online, that persona has persistence and has to develop. And the way which RPGs classically develop characters within their games is a natural path to go down. Oh, we need this character to grow and to evolve and we need to give them a story, we need to let them level up, which really they didn’t have to think about so much before. But now if it was just static or it if was refreshed every game, that persistent online element, even for a shooter, would be affected.
Ray: Looking at it maybe from a different angle ‘cause we’ve talked a mix of external/internal views, like development focus. Put it on its head and ask, “What does a player want?” Y’know, if they think of the RPG catchphrase and what that signifies to them and what emotion that signifies in them and its development, maybe we should keep using that because it means something to them. But I think that my perspective is that I think it’s evolving for them as well. I think a lot of them play Battlefield today and other shooters which are evoking these elements and would actually say there’s role-playing elements in that and they like it. They just want to be really well attuned. They don’t want it to be forced or tacked on. Like story, integrated story is hard. Integrated customisation and progression in a meaningful way is really hard, unless you embrace it right at the vision stage of the project. But if you’re doing that and thinking about the players and how that actually makes the experience richer and you have a persistent state and growing and evolving the characters, then it’s totally appropriate because it means something to players still and a lot of people are very passionate about it. It doesn’t mean what it meant 20 years ago or 30 years ago; y’know, like Wizardry or 20 years, 10 years ago, it’s evolved. Every decade it’s continued to evolve both in the MMO sense and the RPG sense. But I think it still evokes something really powerful and good.
Ken: You have such a passionate connection to your audience and that vaguely does worry me, if we can identify our audience as RPG people-
Ray: -No I wasn’t saying that. I was saying the players, all players… I think all player embrace this concept. And there’s a segment that considers themselves more core and we love them as well and within the larger community there are people playing with RPG elements and we know what they mean when they say that but they may not identify themselves purely as RPG fans, and that’s fine.
Eugene: As long as it doesn’t get in the way of the core reason they’re playing the game. You come to a first-person shooter to play a first-person shooter. If the RPG elements get in the way of that experience then they’d be frustrated.
Ray: Don’t interfere with the shooting.
Eugene: Yeah.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012