Richard Garriott de Cayeux On Game Design And His New GameIndustryGamers interviewed Richard Garriott de Cayeux (also known as 'Lord British'), creator of the Ultima series, Ultima Online, Tabula Rasa and other games, as part of our new 'Game Industry Legends' series. It was a lengthy conversation, and part of it concerned game design and the new game that Garriott de Cayeux is working on. There's some interesting points made about what's right and what's wrong with game design these days, and what will be in Garriott de Cayeux's next design.
IndustryGamers: Do you think we are going to see some advances in game design in the next few years?
Richard Garriott de Cayeux: I sure hope so; I hope I'm working on one myself. It's interesting you talked about going to see someone else's roleplaying game and you went OK, well it's sort of the same as lots of other roleplaying games, maybe actually a few years behind in its presentation style - it might be taking advantage of a few things like asynchronous play, and you're going yeah, but it's not great literature, it's not an art form that 20 years from now we'll look back on and go, "wow, that was one of the most pivotal moments in the growth of our art form." I'm a big believer in there's no excuse for not at least attempting to grow the art form. In fact I think it's not only essential to my personal well-being and happiness to try to make these, it's also the most assured way to make a success. There are tons of free-to-play, beautiful looking MMOs that are feature-complete and challengers in theory to World of Warcraft, they come across from Asia every day. They're all beautiful, they're all full-featured - if you try to go why is this game not as good as World of Warcraft, you'd have a hard time picking individual features as to why, but with all of them you go, "look, it's free to play, free to download, I'll try it!" You go, "OK, kind of looks the same, here's my town, here's my shop, here's my level one monsters I have to fight," and you spend an hour or two going through the play cycle and finishing a quest and leveling up, and you go... well "OK, it works, but why do I care?"
The vast majority of people are making these me-too games, they're quality, there's nothing wrong with them, there's just nothing compelling about them. And I'm hoping that if I look back on my career down through the years, I'm very proud of the fact that with some periodicity, I have truly advanced the art form in some meaningful way.
IG: So you're trying to do that again.
RGC: Absolutely.
IG: What kind of time frame are we talking about?
RGC: Commercially, maybe not for a year or two. But to see something that shows that promise, probably by next summer.
IG: I look forward to that. It's kind of sad when you look at games and you can't even see a balanced weapons list - it should be fundamental. You see games go into public beta that users quickly figure out aren't balanced and aren't fun.
RGC: I would even argue with a lot of these free-to-play MMOs that have come out, you spend about an hour making your character because you're in fear you won't get a chance to make it look like me later. I waste my first hour doing nothing but fine-tuning where my eyebrows are, then I sit down in the game and go through the standard prep cycle of outfitting my guy with armor, and getting my first mission, getting the first-level feel, then getting back from my first mission and buy my level one and a half armor and get my second set of quests, and then I've spent two or three hours to even determine if this game is the same as everything else! I'm not interested.
If you think about going to the movies, you go to see a great action movie for example. A great action movie does not start in character development. A great modern action movie starts in an action sequence, that sort of tells you where the movie will end up, and then they slow down and go through character development. Once you've already been told “By the way, this is an action movie, don't worry we're gonna get back to the action,” you're gonna appreciate the action even more as you understand the characters. Most MMO-like games or most roleplaying games in general absolutely fail on that front. They all start you in the boring treadmill right from the get-go and you have to spend two or three hours before you even get to know if you're gonna like it and the answer's usually no. I for one am not going to be willing to sit through it for three hours, I'm going to pass it over because as soon as I see that I'm going to spend an hour in character creation and two hours in a mission, I won't even give you the chance to try. The only games that will sell to me are roleplaying games that in the first 5 minutes will show me why I should care.
IG: Mark Pincus at Zynga said his company wants to get people interested in the first three clicks, because they figure that's about how long they have.
RGC: I agree, it's very, very short. That's true for anything. By the way, some people might go "oh, people are so shallow, isn't this a terrible idea," but no it's not! I'm a pretty hardcore player myself, and I agree! I can't tell you how many of these free-to-play MMOs or roleplaying games I've attempted to play only to invest hours in them and to then walk away going “what a total waste of time this was!” This was in spite of the fact that the graphics were beautiful, it was full-featured, there was nothing “wrong” with it, but it didn't do anything fresh or interesting and there was no way to know without having me invest hours.
IG: Isn't this a reflection of the fact that so many of these games are copying the tropes from other games, they don't fundamentally rethink why they have hit points, or why they are doing something a specific way?
RGC: I agree with that entirely. I always find it really funny when pen-and-paper games always had 8 or 10 or 12 attributes for your character; STR, DEX , INT and Constitution and Charisma and Health and like 15 other attributes, and even in paper and pencil days those were basically never referenced. In the pen-and-paper era, at least hypothetically, someone in the future might someday reference those rarely used attributes. In the case of a computer game, unless the code references that attribute you know for a fact it will never actually be referenced. And yet I still constantly see people develop games that include all the standard pantheon of numbers in spite of the fact that none of them really make any fundamental or relevant difference to gameplay -in which case, I'm going, "why did you include it?"
IG: What a waste of development time.
RGC: And a waste of my mind share, because you've now made it confusing for me; I've had to think about it and ponder over it and if I put some of my hard-earned points into it and then it turns out it really is not referenced relevantly in the game I'm gonna be pissed off! I'm a true minimalist when it comes to the data that should be included in a game. There's no reason you should do what's been done in the past. You only add a new piece to a game if there's a compelling reason to need it.
IG: The design should start by saying “I want the player to interact with NPCs so I need something to reflect that, maybe an attribute or a skill,” but it's because there's something I need to track in the game.
RGC: It ought to be something that's used a lot. Because if all you want to do is say, look, here's a high jump and until I can jump over six feet you can't get over this high jump, and so you have to slowly invest in your high jump ability until finally you can jump that hurdle. Well if that is a single hurdle in the game that is used exactly once, there's no reason for it to be an attribute. Just go make me do the high jump quest, and when I'm done with the high jump quest I can jump the high jump and move on to my next quest. The only reason to track an attribute is if that attribute will be used regularly, over and over and over again in the game. Most games include tons of them that aren't.
IG: Most of them approach it from the other direction, saying “Well, I'm doing a roleplaying game, so I have to have a list of attributes.”
RGC: Right. It's me, right? I'm the one driving! So if you want to use intelligence, use mine! I'm behind the keyboard. Use how smart I am to solve the problem. Give me the problem, I'll see if I can solve it.
IG: If you look at paper and pencil RPGs there's been a lot more inventiveness in the designs. I often thought partly it's because you could always see the algorithms in a paper and pencil game, so the users could quickly tell you if it doesn't work. In a computer game you can hide things and cheat outrageously and the problem is that leads to bad design because people can't help you fix it because they'll never see it.
RGC: Exactly.
IG: Turning to newer designs, you're excited about this new project that you're working on?
RGC: Of course. You know, it's really funny, as we got into the MMO era, it's a lot harder to tell stories like you can in the solo player era, to which I responded, “Look, I still love solo player games.” I'd love to tell solo player stories, but I've already made 20 of them, and by the way the market is ten times bigger over in the MMO space so that for me both the creative challenge as well as the economic opportunity is to try to reinvent roleplaying in an MMO era.
For now, the same thing is true for this casual and social gaming era. I believe this ten times bigger market are all people that will enjoy the kinds of games that I developed with Ultima Online. Think of the games that are currently popular in social media: Farming, pets, and shops. If you look at Ultima Online, that was a game where a third of the people did nothing but farming and pets and shops. The currently popular games are sort of a dissection of what I've already proved to be popular with Ultima Online. So I believe I'm uniquely qualified to bring in even these new consumers who would be very fearful of being dropped into the middle of a big virtual world where people are running around with armor and swords and where orcs were invading, and so really don't necessarily want or know if they want that kind of experience.
What I think they will like is this: If they like farming and their next door neighbor has a cafe, they can sell their produce to the guy with the cafe and guess what, a guy wearing armor comes in and needs a bottle of grog and he might bring me back a dragon to have in your pet shop and suddenly you have this big interwoven reality again, but where everyone has their comfortable role in a world where no one has been run off by having to play for three hours to find the kind of gameplay they like.
IG: So you could be running the shop and I could be the guy going out adventuring because that's the stuff I like, and I come back and say, “Richard, fix up my armor because it's all busted, and can I sell you this dragon tooth that I found?”
RGC: That's right. You got it.
IG: That's a compelling situation where you're giving people an emphasis on what they like.
RGC: That's right. And allowing it to be asynchronous interaction as well as synchronous interaction. So if you're the farmer, and you're playing your FarmVille style of gameplay, and that's what you like, that's fine, and you can either sell it on your produce stand or come over to my cafe and sell it to me directly, but either way, if you're offline, me or my chef can come over to your farm stand or to you personally if you're online, and buy the produce we need, and in either case we're gonna sell meals to the adventurer that just came through and might be bringing back the special dragon egg to make the greatest omelet that's ever been made in the history of the world! I can now make it in my cafe based on the stuff the adventurer brought back.
IG: Everybody can be satisfied getting the kind of gameplay that they want to focus on.
RGC: And in a continuous reality that has fictional depth and quality and yet also protects the style of gameplay so that the person who's the farmer doesn't have to deal with either the orcs coming through and tearing up the weeds or obnoxious players coming through burning down their house.
IG: I could hire my friend over here who likes to fight to help guard my shop. You create a more complex series of interrelationships.
RGC: You got it exactly.
_ _
Stay tuned for much more with Garriott next week!
