At the beginning, neither John Cutter nor I knew what we were in for. Not really. We had a lot of theories, of course, and a fairly solid case to make for the potential success of our new project. At the time, role-playing and adventure games were in a golden age. Titles like Wizardry, Might & Magic, and the Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box games dominated the shelves of every software store in America. Sierra Online, Dynamix’s parent company, was flush with cash they’d milked from the adventure game market, so they instantly got the appeal of mixing a popular narrative IP with immersive gameplay. Add in the fact that we’d be leveraging Dynamix’s already enormously successful 3-Space game engine, and it seemed like an absolute no-brainer on paper that we’d knock it out of the ballpark. From day one, at least as far I could tell, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for the Riftwar project.
At one level, knowing our employers were fully committed and on board was comforting. It meant we would have access to some of the best people working in the computer gaming industry. Dynamix was like the Bioware or Blizzard of its day, a legendary upstart with a history of solid work, and every wannabe game developer was looking for an in there.
John took the pressure swimmingly. If he ever felt it, he never showed it, which is why he’s always been my role-model not only as a great designer, but also as a superb team leader. For him, it always spurred him to take greater risks and try new things. He was never shy about getting off into the weeds and experimenting. For me, however, the knowledge that the expectations were so high were both a boon and a bane (and something which would later have extreme consequences for me towards the end of the project.)
Before Betrayal at Krondor, nobody had ever heard of me. Although I was writer, and I’d worked on three projects at New World Computing, I wasn’t a name. I didn’t have an extensive list of published short stories, and most of the writing I’d done prior to entering the computer gaming industry had been an aborted novel from my college years called This Realm Alone, along with a fistful of radio dramas from a Twilight Zone-like series called Uncharted Regions I’d co-produced with my good friend Ron Bolinger (a series which I’m in the process of rebooting, but that’s for another blog series.)
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that accepting the writing job on Betrayal at Krondor had terrified me at first. To have come from relative anonymity, and then be elevated to work on such a high-profile game was daunting enough, but to step convincingly and undetectably into the shoes of a New York Times Bestselling Author -- regardless of who that author was -- it smacked of hubris. Who the hell was I? I knew a lot of writers who had worked very long and very hard to accomplish less lofty positions, and I felt like a bit of an impostor. My only way of getting through was to earn it. I had to adjust my thinking that I could be -- that I would be -- the writer that everyone around me seemed to believe I was. I had to reinforce the faith that so many had placed in me, and more than anything else, I wanted not to disappoint my boss.
Our first big deliverable was a summary of the game’s central plot. This, even more than the game design document, was our highest priority because it would determine not only who the player would be controlling, but also the overall scale and scope of the project. There was also the fiddling little matter of getting something off to the person whose universe we were playing in - fantasy author Raymond E. Feist - for feedback. I had no delusions that I was catching everything going on in his books, and I was even more concerned that I might be stepping on the toes of other plots he might have been developing for future works. One dangling thread in particular -- that Murmandamus’ death hadn’t been witnessed by his troops at the end of A Darkness of Sethanon and further, that heavy guards had been left to watch the Lifestone -- seemed like exactly the sort of thing I’d have been leaving as a setup for a later novel. Since that was the central McGuffin on which I was planning to hang our plot, I needed to make sure we weren’t narratively venturing into territory for which Ray had conflicting plans. The trouble was, Ray wasn’t going to be available to do more than answer the occasional list of questions.
Dangling Threads - A major dangling thread left at the end of Raymond E. Feist’s A Darkness At Sethanon provided the grist for Betrayal at Krondor’s plotline.
From the beginning, I’d been informed that Ray was busy writing The Kings’ Buccaneer, and that meant that most of the time that John and I would be left to our own devices. We weren’t even sure Ray’d was interested in what we’d be doing in the digital version of his universe. Before I had been brought aboard the project, Dynamix’s CEO Jeff Tunnell had offered Ray the chance to write the game himself, but Ray had jokingly informed him that Dynamix couldn’t afford him, and what Jeff wanted to do instead was to license the universe. Fortunately for me, that paved the way for the creation of my job and presented our team with a high degree of creative freedom within the Midkemian universe.
In that first few weeks of development, John and I talked a lot about what a game based on a series of novels should be like. We wanted to replicate the feeling of playing through a “page-turner,” the book that you stayed up all night reading because you wanted to finish one more chapter, and then another, and then another. Immediately this suggested to us the idea of narrative cliffhangers and shifts in game chapters, a foundational concept that would influence the design of the entire world.
Unlike other games whose progression mechanic largely revolved around “clearing out” levels and always moving forward, we made a radical decision. Our game world would be persistent. It would exist -- and change -- whether or not the player showed up to see what was going on. In answer to the classic zen koan, our answer was yes, the tree would definitely make a sound when it fell in the forest, but it would be up to the player to decide whether or not they were going to be there to hear it fall. There were a few narrative “choke points”, of course, specific events that would tip the shift from one chapter to the next, but otherwise the player would be free to wander over the majority of the game map at will. Years before Grand Theft Auto would be lauded for “creating” the idea of open world design, we took the idea for a successful road trip in 1993.
As popular as the “wander anywhere” philosophy would ultimately be with players, it was the source of one of the very few design disagreements I ever had with John. I was a fanatic for the idea, largely because it suggested a more complex, “living” world. Having come from a strong background of pen and paper role-playing games where the player was limited only by their imagination, I’d felt severely constrained by the necessary limits of playing and designing computer-moderated RPGs. In spirit John liked the idea as well, but he also had some very reasonable, practical reservations about how we’d realistically implement it.
Firstly, the “cattle chute” approach to game design was the reigning paradigm. Every other CRPG on the planet followed essentially the same model. John worried that after players got their quests, they’d all pretty much just follow what they were told to do in the first place, and they’d never wander off the garden path. That would add up to a waste of resources in the creation of all that extra material that no one ever saw. Even worse, he was concerned that if players did veer away from what they’d been directed to do, they might get lost or confused without constant guidance. My counter argument was that I’m a contrarian. If you tell me to go through door number one, I’m just as likely to do the opposite, just to see if you’ve accounted for what’s behind doors 2, 3, and 4. My gut told me that if the world was made sufficiently interesting, the innate curiosity of most players would drive them to explore as far as they were allowed.
The second reservation of John’s was even more serious. If the entire world was open for every chapter of the game, that meant that every time we changed chapters, we’d be responsible for repopulating the entire world with new quests, dialogues, items -- essentially building out the equivalent of nine RPGs worth of material but for the price (and schedule) of one. Even by restricting some zones as “off limits” or unreachable until specific chapters, it still suggested a staggering amount of content creation that would put us smack dab in the middle of the production problem of every MMO, i.e. the problem of handling “content churn.”
The last issue on John’s list about the open world approach had to do with testing. In a cattle chute model, it’s very easy to design and deploy a consistent testing plan. If players always must do X,Y, Z in a specific order, bugs can be much more readily identified, replicated, and eliminated, even allowing for reasonable variances in equipment or tactics. But given the option to do X, B, O, Z, or Y, M, Q, Z or any other combination of actions would vastly complicate both the scale and scope of our testing. We could create the world’s most complex environment ever devised, but the odds were poor that we’d be able to test them all before the game shipped to the public.
In the end, we steered a middle course. We limited the amount of change that could happen between chapters while also capping the number of zones that would be open at any given time. Even with those restrictions, we’d ultimately have one of the largest RPGs of the early 1990s, and the amount of text in the game would outstrip any of Ray’s novels. Fans would later rave about the breadth and complexity of the world, but in the months and years ahead for our team, the choice to go big would have drastic effects on our schedule, our budget, and our prospects for making a sequel.
With the broadest strokes of the story worked out, and the scale and scope established, we next had to move on to answer the next most critical question for our project. We knew we were making a game, but what kind of game was it actually going to be?
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