Ken Rolston Talks Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning And The State of The RPG GenreCurt Schilling's company 38 Studios is getting ready to ship, with EA's help, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in a few months, and the studio is leaning on the efforts of RPG designer heavyweight Ken Rolston, who's famous for leading design on both Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Oblivion. IndustryGamers picked Rolston's brain on the challenge of doing a new RPG, how the RPG market has evolved, and much more.
IndustryGamers: From what I understand, you were set to retire, but decided to take a job with Big Huge to work on this new RPG. What about it was so appealing?
Ken Rolston: Initially, it was a purely personal thing. I had a number of friends here. I had retired and was really happy to be retired. I think I had just burned out at that point. It was great, what I was doing, and the products were great but I wasn’t feeling as excited and certainly was feeling more excited about goofing off. And then a bunch of friends got in touch with me, and Big Huge had been doing a pretty amazing strategy games but they wanted to move into RPGs and they thought I might know something about it - in that kind of charming way that your friends will talk to you. I just came down and said, “Sure, I’ll be happy to help in any way I can,” in that kind of innocent way, and then I got tar babied eventually because I liked the people, I turned out to like Big Huge. I walked up and down the halls and everybody had a scooter in their room and a guitar and I said, “Well, this wouldn’t be a bad place to live,” and then the thing that they wanted to do was exciting and I said, “Yeah. Guess what? I’ve got a whole bunch of ideas like that.” And then, as they continued moving towards the edges of the room to avoid the spit spray from my spewing enthusiasm... we probably bonded, and that’s what made it exciting, I guess.
IG: So what are you trying to do with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that hasn't been done before in RPGs?
KR: Well, on a product level, I wanted a game that had combat that was as much fun to play and to explore and to discover as the worlds are to discover in open world games. I thought the basic idea of a computer role playing game is narrative and exploration and advancement and combat. That was always the weak sister. It was always necessary to your role and to progress, but exciting? Not so much. And was it well animated and with great special effects? Not so much. So that was the opportunity - that was the dream that I had. But also, I liked the challenge of a new IP, because I had worked in IP that were already established. I understood that there was something personally challenging about that and I think I was intrigued; I’ve wanted to start a new IP, not because it would make more money or because I felt there weren’t enough IPs in the world, but just because I said, “Wow, that’s really hard,” and I find that if I’m trying to do something really hard, I do something better.
IG: You, of course, have been intimately involved in previous Elder Scrolls games, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on Skyrim if you've had a chance to check it out.
KR: I’m far too graceful and dignified to have begged my friends to give me an early release of that [Note: we interviewed him before Skyrim's launch - Ed.] and I probably won’t have time to play Skyrim for months because you shouldn’t be playing an Elder Scrolls game unless you’re going to sit down and lose a lot of time. So I’m excited by it, but right now I don’t need any other games, because I’m playing Reckoning. I don’t have any genuine emotional lust. I have the abstract lust, which I know it’s going to be an experience and it’s going to be really cool. But at the same time, for the same reason I stopped working for Elder Scrolls, it wasn’t new, wouldn’t be new to me, not in the same way that I like what I’m doing now because it’s new.
IG: Are you at all concerned about the impact Skyrim could have on Reckoning? You won't ship yours for a few months, but Skyrim may keep your audience engrossed for quite some time. Or perhaps you feel it will raise awareness of the genre and perhaps help Reckoning?
KR: I suspect that they won’t know that they want something else. That’s always the challenge when you make something that hasn’t been made before, and usually it’s opinion leaders who will stray outside or color outside the lines and say, “Hey! This is cool. You should be playing this.” I think that’s the way, very often, revolutionary products work and we’re intending to be revolutionary in that sense. But I think anybody who works in the industry and who is concerned about releasing a product into the current bloodbath of blockbuster releases, it would be disingenuous to say that I didn’t notice, but at the same time it’s absolutely true that I don’t feel uncomfortable at all.
I know our game is wonderful, because I play it and actually I feel a lot more emotional concern for the younger people working here who haven’t been everywhere and done everything, who might really care about that stuff and really - this is their first game, so this is a big deal for them. From my point of view, a really good game always finds its audience, and role playing games more so than others because they have long shelf lives, because when you start playing them, you’re going to end up playing them forever unless they’re terrible. So I think I probably just have a far too adult and mature attitude about the whole thing.
IG: Curt Schilling seems to be extremely passionate about games and RPGs in particular. What's it been like working for him?
KR: Well, I have two big resentments of Curt. Number one, he’s too tall. I find that very [unnerving] and lots of times it makes me wish he were farther away from me when he’s close to me. And I also think it’s unfair that he’s got missile attacks, basically. He throws a ball at me, it doesn’t matter that I’m faster than him off the ground, I’m going to die. Those things given, I think he is a person I was really lucky to get to know. He is, as you say, very passionate about winning and all that stuff too, but he’s also passionate about building a team, about a franchise, and that - I don’t think I would be able to trust a corporate and polished manager, but he is accidentally the perfect kind of leader... it’s like the fighter in a Dungeons & Dragons group, or a paladin who has a perfect moral compass, and he totally cares about the team and it’s great to work with people like that. The idea of trust, which often for me is a serious issue if I'm working with people who don’t make games - like the people who own the company who don’t make games, I just don’t know that I can ever trust them, because we don’t share the same experiences. He and I share a little bit the same experiences. I think his World Series rings, admittedly, are cooler...but I get over that, because I’m a big man in my own way. Actually, yeah, that’s the third thing that I resent. That he has three big rings.
IG: Do you feel some pressure in terms of 38 Studios really making its mark in the industry with this game?
KR: If I were a lot less self-assured, mature, experienced person, I might feel pressure. But tragically, I am so ego-centric and self-assured that I often don’t feel anxious and in this particular case, I think there is some substance for it. I’ve made games before. I know when I’m making a good game. I know when I’m working with good people. And perhaps by accident, I’ve never been in a situation like that where the game wasn’t good and didn’t do well, so again, it would be a lot different if I were more aware of what degree I was bluffing. I think everyone who makes something, you’re never sure of how successful it’ll be. You’re never sure if it’ll find its audience. You’re never sure if you’ll create those fans who, 10 years later, goob out when they meet you on the subway. But my experiences have all been good. I’ve always had positive reinforcement when I’ve worked with good people and had a good idea and make a good product. At the end of the day, it’s going to be fine. And I greatly appreciate Curt and all the risks he’s taken, and I think the degree to which I feel pressure is he has my absolute loyalty. I think that may be the angle - that is, if you’re going to do this, you have to be committed. And I am grateful for that and he has got my total support.
IG: What are your thoughts on the state of RPG gaming? It seems like RPG elements are finding their way into games that aren't really RPGs, and there's more blending happening. How do you see RPGs evolving?
KR: Well, because I’m probably a Marxist at heart, I’m thinking we’re probably reaching one of the [boon] periods. There are so many different products and they’re all so good, that I have a feeling that sometime in the not too distant future people will be able to look back and say, that was the time when we realized we needed some revolutions and we needed some changes and then maybe the genre will reconceive itself again. But right now, you cannot complain about the variety and quality of stuff. Even in the second and third tier stuff - which I will not be foolish enough to try to characterize things by first, second, and third tier - I’m seeing a lot of quality in things that would’ve been considered B movies in another world. And I don’t know that there are that many RPG fans who are suffering daily because they’re not getting enough games released. I think there are still plenty of fans who would buy a lot more games if they could. They would like us to make more and make them faster than on a 3 year cycle, but I think nonetheless, that they’re getting good quality games on a pretty regular basis.
IG: The industry is pushing for everything to be online. Do you think the “massively single player” games will survive?
KR: I’m grinning like the cheshire cat, because massively single player... one of the jokes that I always made about these open world games is that they’re massively multiplayer online role playing games without all these annoying other players. I think what a single player game is, it is a tailored experience for the single player, and there may be publishers who are rightly aware that if you had more multiplayer stuff in it, they would have some virtues, but I know, because I’m wise and I’ve spent a long time in this industry, that the single player game experience is the one that we can best tailor to the player right now and that there are technical and asset reasons why we can’t gracefully make them all go co-op player or multiplayer. So for the short term, I believe the single player game has an unambiguously solid market. There are people who prophesie that they’re going to make their MMOs better narrative experiences. I’m sure that they’re right and I’m sure that they will only make them, say, 5% better. And that’s still not like 100% it’s all about you, Mr. Player. I’m pretty confident single player still has a real big market.
IG: What do you think of the genre's over reliance on high fantasy or medieval settings? Do people want to see other kinds of RPGs, besides the typical dragons, wizards, orcs and elves?
KR: I think they’re not tired of it and there are structural reasons for it. It’s because one of the conventions of fantasy, high fantasy, is that you can heal and that you have a very durable character. And that makes for good software and a good software experience.
And it turns out that the narrative wrappers that you put around science fiction games or shooter games are less forgiving in that sense. So it turns out that epic fantasy just is the right narrative wrapper for the kind of experience that we have. And there's the fact that Tolkien's party, that Fellowship of The Ring model, we’re all comfortable with that. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think you’re right to say that a lot of the treatments can be shop worn and generic and tiresome, but I think at times, like the Western genre, it tended to wear out its welcome by lacking novelty. There would be a period of time when the genre of the Western would turn out something that had some variety. [The animated movie] Rango, for example - a great Western. A profoundly gifted homage to Westerns. So you may see mashups. I still think they have real power. I think it’s partly because the archetypes have great power. So I have not personally felt any pressure to abandon high fantasy as a open world role playing game narrative and I don’t foresee one in the future and I certainly am not seeing any outside the genre that I found likely to create new genres of the same scale as fantasy genre. And I think there's plenty of room for what we call boutique games, boutique role playing games, but they will not have the same kind of mass market.
IG: Have you been paying attention to Japanese RPGs lately? There's been a lot of talk about that market being in decline, and how designers there have trouble making RPGs to attract Western gamers. What's your thinking on this?
KR: Well, I like to compliment a journalist when he catches me with my pants down. That is such a good question and it shows that I’m a shallow jerk because I really haven’t played Japanese games except it just happened to be this weekend that I was just looking back at some of the things that were great about Japanese RPGs back in the dawn of time - things that I found compelling about them. Their stories and characters were really great and I admit I’ve been bored to tears by all the most recent Final Fantasy games... but I think it’s time for me to go back and look at those experiences that I had a decade ago in the Japanese games and in the JRPG and try to find out what it was I found compelling and why I found it compelling and one guess is - just an intuition I had this week - is there’s a lot of other things missing in those games. There’s less to distract you, there’s a lot of white space around the characters, so maybe they can show more - they get more love, they get more assets, whatever it is. So I think it may be time to go back and look at those things for their precious ore so that I can mine that ore and exploit it in some morally reprehensible way.
IG: Do you have interest in developing on these new, emerging platforms – smartphones or tablets? What do you think of that market?
KR: I suspect that I’m crippled because I’m so used to huge scope and stuff like that that I would fail in those mediums on the point of the inability to appreciate their intimacy. And the deliciousness of their simplicity. For example, Angry Birds - though I don’t personally like it, I totally appreciate what that does. I think, at this point, given my vast wisdom and experience, I’m probably right in saying that the great thing about these smartphones and stuff like that is the chance to return to games which strip a lot of the features of genres away and only have the fun atoms and then can recombine them in interesting ways. But they have to, I think, be small and intimate. And it turns out I don’t have entry level skills at small and intimate.
IG: Well, maybe some of that precious ore you're looking to mine from Japanese RPGs could be useful in that regard.
KR: When I was playing a demo of Bastion and I was saying, “You know, that was a very simple action introduction, but it reminded me really a lot more of the kind of interactivity and discovery on a small scale. So, yeah, you may have something there smarter than I could have thought up. Sorry.
IG: Ken, thanks for your time.
