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Interview with J. E. Sawyer
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- Creado en Lunes, 22 Junio 2009 17:58
- Escrito por Santiago Lamelo
Joshua Eric Sawyer or J. E. Sawyer started his professional career as a web designer at Black Isle and continued it a bit later working as a videogames designer (Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate Alliance for Interplay, or Neverwinter Nights 2 for Obsidian). It is in fact Obisidian the company chosen to develop the recently announced Fallout New Vegas, being J.E.Sawyer the main project manager. He was responsible too of two promising titles which unfortunately never saw the green light: The Black Hound and Project Van Buren, the supposed Fallout 3 game before Bethesda got the license. Also he did a little work in Torn. He's been really kind and will answer to our questions, and that is a REAL privilege for us. But be warned, no single word about Fallout New Vegas at the moment.
- You have worked for one of most respected companies among all computer RPG games fans, Black Isle. Would you share with us some of your best moments from that time?
Easily the best personal moment was reading an e-mail from Brian Fargo to Feargus about Icewind Dale. Brian really was a gamer. I know people think the whole "By Gamers, For Gamers" thing was a load of crap, but the man liked playing games. He was competitive and would get just as worked up over a hard level or a challenging multiplayer match as the most passionate among us.
He sent Feargus an e-mail to let him know that Icewind Dale was the first game he had finished in years and that he really enjoyed it. I was just one designer on Icewind Dale, but that meant a lot to me. Bard's Tale was a milestone in my youth. Because of that game, I met a good friend who introduced me to AD&D, Phantasie, and dozens of other tabletop games and CRPGs. His name was Tony Uñate, and he wanted to be a game programmer. He committed suicide a few years after he graduated from high school. I didn't become a game developer because of Tony, but I couldn't help but think about him when I read that letter. It really was like a dream coming true.
- Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment... Great games were developed at Black Isle, kind of games not easy to see today on the shelves. Some of them sold great, as Baldur's Gate. Do you believe would it be still possible to develop similar games to those today?
I guess it depends on how similar they need to be. In terms of mechanics, I think a lot of gamers wouldn't accept the controls or conventions of those old games. In terms of content, I believe it's still possible to do, but it's harder now.
- Those were really long games, offering multiple secondary quests and ingame texts, as in Planescape Torment for example. J. Kaplan from Blizzard has recently remarked videogame developers are not any Shakespeare so they should stop writing whole books for videogames, because nobody is going to read them. Do you share his point of view?
I don't think we should be writing books, no. Any text we write should engage the player in the game. That said, I don't think developers should shy away from trying to create high quality writing for players. Just be sure that the player is involved in the process, not being vomited on by the game authors.
That said, if you're not a good writer, the solution to the problem is not to stop writing. That is the exact opposite of the solution. I've never met an artist who's the equivalent of Bouguereau, but that doesn't stop them from trying to improve their skills every day. Learn from others, be realistic, be humble, and work hard.
- It seems a common tendency today to develop increasingly simpler and more accesible games, publishers completely avoiding any potential complex or too difficult idea, assuming it will not sell well for sure. On the other side are us, players, thinking in videogames as an artistic expression full of possibilities, but limited due to that strong commercial orientation they have. The shocking fact is that old games are still selling really well, anyone can check Gog.com results for the last months. Would you say publishers are taking players as immature and lazy?
The market that publishers want to sell to grows larger and larger with each project. More money is invested and thus more units need to be sold to find a return (unless someone comes up with some new monetization scheme) on that SKU. A wider target market will typically skew away from hardcore players and toward more mainstream gamers.
The threshold of simplicity that a hardcore gamer will accept is a lot lower than the threshold of difficulty that a mainstream gamer will accept.
A hardcore gamer may accept an automapping tool but scoff that in "the old days", he or she had to write things out on graph paper. A mainstream gamer will probably not accept the absence of an automapping tool. He or she will stop playing the game and tell everyone they know that it is terrible.
I think it's important for developers and publishers to start recognizing the differences between hardcore and mainstream gamers and include different gameplay elements for the two groups. Having a difficulty slider that shifts numbers around doesn't really solve the problem. Hardcore gamers want an additional level of engagement that mainstream gamers absolutely do not. And just to be clear, I don't think this is because hardcore gamers are a sophisticated elite group of super geniuses and mainstream gamers are drooling morons. Hardcore gamers devote an enormous amount of time to the games they play and are incredibly well-versed in the conventions of the genres they enjoy. What presents a challenge to a bright but ignorant new player simply does not stimulate most "veterans".
- Some people say videogames cannot be taken seriously as developers are the first ones not doing it. Not talking about their jobs really, but to the fact of considering videogames as a real artistic expression medium instead. Could that be true?
Game developers often take their jobs very seriously and pour their hearts into their work, but I believe developers and publishers often do not use games as a medium for exploring serious themes or issues. And when games are used to explore themes, such exploration is normally done through proxies (e.g. elves vs. dwarves as an exploration of racism). Because these proxies are alien to us, the emotional impact of their struggle is often diminished. I think that designers should attempt to ground their themes in issues that will really resonate and raise questions with the audience. It's difficult but important.
- Games are not taken as art as they are not supposed to communicate strong emotions, the way films can do for example. A film can make you cry or laugh, but it is really difficult to find games making players feel comedy or drama so closely. May be this shortage could be related to plain narrative or just this teen-commercial focus inherent to many games. Would you say videogames can be compared, emotionally speaking, to cinema or literature at this level?
I dislike labeling things as art/not art. Ultimately, I believe the most important goal is to communicate what you want to communicate. I think game developers should be less concerned with how people label their work and more concerned with what they want to say and how they want to say it. If people think the final result has artistic merit, they will let you know.
- When looking for a film or a book, I usually try something according to my adult condition, intellectually speaking I mean. It is really hard to find real adult games beyond this A rating just because of plain violence or just a rebel nipple displayed on screen. Why do you think there are so few real adult games available when most users have already grown up?
The current gaming market doesn't typically support big budget games that deal with intellectually mature issues. Mature content is equated with sex and violence. Video games have not often been used as a theme-based or didactic medium, but that's not entirely the publisher's or developer's fault. As with films and books, most gaming audiences simply don't care as much about issues and themes as they do about visceral feedback.
I believe small-budget games have the potential to tackle more serious themes, but I don't think that's happening yet. I also have always hoped that our industry could find a way to elegantly work themes into games that are also very appealing on a basic level. I hope for that, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon. I don't believe there's any push for it from audiences or publishers, so it would really be up to the developer to sell it along with a well-executed core gameplay experience.
- May be a more adult specialized press would help here?
I think developers have to lead the way: we need to make games that are enjoyable as games and also have mature themes to explore that complement the gameplay.
- Are you able to say you have full creative freedom available for your actual projects?
I've never had full creative freedom on any project, but I don't think that's necessary (or even good) for a game. I have a great deal of freedom and authority in what I do, but game development is a collaborative endeavor. Sometimes my ideas are outright bad, and there's no shortage of creative people around me to suggest things I haven't thought of. Any good I do at my job has less to do with being creative and more to do with making decisions that are for the good of the team and the project.
- You have faced last days in Interplay as this company has been known for all of us. Could you please explain to us how is it possible such a million selling company is closing doors now?
When I came to Interplay in 1999, it was a fairly big company. And although the company did have some tremendous hits, it also hemorrhaged a lot of money on other projects. Simply put, Interplay had a lot of shipped projects that sold poorly and expensive projects that were cancelled before they could be released.
- Project Van Buren was originally aimed to be the next Fallout third installment, leaving apart Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel. A brief glimpse of the tech demo showed it quite similar to previous titles and frankly did rise many fans hopes. You worked for that project. Could you give us any clue about why was it cancelled?
Interplay simply didn't have the money to keep Black Isle together for the time it would have taken to make the project.
- Would you have enjoyed Fallout following the targets aimed with Van Buren?
I would have. I think that Fallout fans would have enjoyed it as well, but you never know for sure until a game's out.
- Same question goes for Torn, as it was cancelled just a few months after being unveiled.
I didn't do a lot of work on Torn, but the project just wasn't at the point in development that it needed to be. At that time, Interplay was already suffering under a money crunch. I think the cancellation of Torn marked the point where people in Black Isle started to feel the trouble that our parent company was in.
- After being part of Icewind Dale team you also worked in Baldur's Gate Alliance, a game targeted onto a very different audience. What do you think about this crucial course change?
I only did a bit of design work on the Dark Alliance games, but I think it was good for Interplay and Black Isle to work with Snowblind on those projects. Black Isle consisted almost entirely of PC RPG developers and it gave us a narrow focus. I think working on console titles helped open up some of the developers (myself included) to look at other input systems and gameplay styles.
Financially, the Dark Alliance games were definitely helpful for Interplay.
- Neverwinter Nights was a real risky and finally sucessful stake from Bioware. This game managed to reduce the gap between traditional role games and computers in a more advanced way than Nihilistic did with Vampire Redemption, getting a huge commercial hit and creating a vast community around it. Didn't it made you dizzy facing the sequel of such a successful game?
I think the major issue during development was that vastness of the project was overwhelming for a small (at the time) developer like Obsidian. I believe that we should have planned more carefully from the beginning what we wanted to change and what we should have left alone.
- Second title displayed a fantastic effort in graphics department and single player mode, but multiplayer was not so well received instead: no dedicated server for Linux version, smaller areas, more memory requisites, etc. Because of that its online community is smaller today than NWN 1 one, not to mention user's content. Would you say it could have been a good idea to have worked harder on the aspect that made Neverwinter Nights so unique originally?
Yes, it would have been better for us to focus on refactoring the renderer instead of rewriting it, optimizing data instead of bloating it, and making our pipelines simpler and more error-proof instead of harder and more error-prone. Changes of this nature would not only have limited our own risk, but it would have kept the game more accessible to a larger audience of players, builders, and modders.
- Role playing games were developed to be enjoyed by several players at the same time, so it is unnatural to check how few of them are actually offering a cooperative option. Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale are three exceptions. Options in fact vary from repetitive MMORPGs to single player role games, no middle way at all. Why is it so hard to develop games able to allow a group of players sharing the same adventure?
Two of the hallmarks of RPGs (some would say, anyway) are the ability to do what you want and the ability to do things how you want to. That kind of freedom creates challenges for a multiplayer game that don't often exist in single-player games. They aren't insurmountable challenges, but they do complicate things significantly.
- Alpha Protocol will be a multiplatform game. PC players are used to think multiplatform games for both PC and consoles makes the first (PC) a clear looser, as it needs a different design. Average user is different for this platform, the same goes for hardware and control system. Anything true about this matter?
It's true that multiplatform games are typically designed for the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware. In almost every case of PC vs. consoles, that's going to be the consoles. The consoles effectively "stand still" while PCs continue to develop. But at least in the United States and most of Europe, consoles are far too large of a market for most projects to ignore. Sins of a Solar Empire and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are two notable exceptions, but even a heavily PC-oriented project like The Witcher took a run at a console port.
- PC is constantly questioned by mainstream media: it's dead, it's not profitable because of piracy, it has too much tech issues... but PC Gaming Alliance is broadcasting on the contrary very positive numbers that clearly put it as a very healthy platform. What's your oppinion about this polemic issue, from the point of view of a developer who formerly worked exclusively for this platform, and is doing it now for consoles?
I don't think PC gaming is dead, and I think it can be profitable, but piracy is a serious problem. I don't think most DRM schemes are that effective, but I'm just a developer. If I wanted to deal with publisher problems, I'd work for one.
- PC is being hit strongly by piracy, no doubt, but it was the same for PSP, PS2 or Nintendo DS, Xbox and PS1 before, only difference these cases were not so "popular". Exaggeration could we say?
Most console piracy in the past was rampant only in a few geographical areas. Specifically, some Asian countries had 90%+ piracy rates for popular console games. PC gaming piracy seems to be much more global of a phenomenon, making console titles a safer bet in many markets.
- DRM is one of the most polemic anti-piracy current measures. Critics talk about its inefficiency, about the troubles caused to many legal users, while illegal users are only worried about downloading working copies from P2P or Torrent networks. Honestly, would you say DRM is really useful?
Not to any significant extent, no. That said, I don't do a lot of research on DRM.
- Publishers usually take first or second selling weeks since shipping date to measure a possible commercial failure or success. This may work for consoles but we've seen many times many games still selling years after they were launched. A clear example of that is Unreal Tournament 3, whose numbers raised to a whooping 3000% after last update. Brian Mitsoda talks about a narrow-minded industry when recalling Vampire Bloodlines is still being sold through digital platforms. Should publishers be more patient regarding this tendency?
RPG developers (myself included) tend to be a bit cynical about these things because some PC RPGs can have incredibly long lifespans. But the truth is that most titles sell the vast majority of their units in the first month. And while some do have great success at reduced prices on a long timeline, publishers typically aren't into long-term investment
Publicly-traded publishers really aren't patient, because stockholders lose their minds if an investment doesn't have a quick and strong return.
- Very few game developers are placing their bets on GNU/Linux or other operative systems. Is it so difficult games programming for Linux or this is just an economic issue?
I think it's purely an economic issue. Some might say that a general developer reliance on DirectX also interferes with potential Linux games, but if there were good money it, publishers would pursue the platform.
- Thanks a lot for your time and answers Mr. Sawyer. It's been a real pleasure for us to talk to you.
My pleasure.