Black Isle Studios Interview
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GB: What were your responsibilities during the development of Fallout 3 ("Van Buren") and Baldur's Gate III ("Jefferson")? Can you give us a brief background of what each game was going to be about? Sean: Well, Interplay hasn't officially confirmed what each of those code-named games was, so I'll just refer to them by the aliases....
For Jefferson I was assigned some of the game areas or (for the larger areas) pieces of areas. I was responsible for populating those areas with creatures and NPCs, writing their dialogues, and describing their general behavior (the exact details were handled by the scripters). I was nominally in charge of one of the factions/regional groups, so I created a style guide for their attitudes, accent quirks, and manners of speech, which the other designers used when their areas called for a representative of that faction. The crux of the story is that your character ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, becomes associated with a supernatural creature, and because of that association everyone else in the game suspects you of treachery, wants to kill you, or wants to recruit you to their cause, all of which tie to the activities of a determined female criminal.
For Van Buren I started out as a designer but after a time JE Sawyer (who was lead designer) wanted to focus more on the technical design aspects and offered me the story lead position. My duties as story lead were to keep track of continuity not only with the game's story but within the game universe, to revise the story as we added or subtracted areas, and work in overall story changes as we clarified and expanded each of the game areas. The story puts the PC in the role of an escaped prisoner, locked up for an unknown reason and freed by an attack by an unknown military force. The prisoner wanders from community to community trying to survive and figure out what has happened in the past few years as well as the identity of the people who freed him, and why.
Both games would have been really fun; it's too bad Interplay had us stop working on them.
GB: In your opinion, how close to a finished project were either of the previous titles before the decision was made to discontinue development?
Sean: Jefferson had around 6 months of development left (we planned to release it for the holidays that year, though it probably would require some significant crunch time as the deadline approached). Van Buren was supposed to come out for the holidays this year, so we were close to year's worth of development away.
GB: Were you surprised at Interplay's decision to lay off a vast majority of Black Isle Studios? Or did you foresee such a decision?
Sean: I was completely surprised; after the earlier batch of layoffs (which targeted most of Digital Mayhem, I believe) I thought they were done and we were ready to move forward, finish Van Buren, and start making some money again.
GB: What is the atmosphere like around Black Isle Studios with many of the original employees now gone? What sort of projects has BIS been working on over the last couple of months?
Sean: We now have a lot more space and everyone on my side of the building is actually in a proper office rather than a cubicle, so people like that. It does make the place weird and kind of empty, though. They dismantled a bunch of the old cubicles and took the ping-pong table out of storage, so I'm constantly buffeted by ping-pong noise as various employees work their way up and down the ladder. It's keeping them happy, or happier, at least.
I don't know what official word Interplay has given about its current in-production titles, so I'll just say that we have two games in production, and I'm the lead designer on a fantasy console game.
GB: Where do you see both the pen & paper and computer industry going with RPGs in the next 3 years? 10 years?
Sean: Certainly there's more money in the CRPG industry than the PNP industry; your average CPRG sells 10x as many as a PNP RPG. Of course, the up-front costs and development times are more and longer for CRPGs. PNP has a history of losing its people to the software industry, and that'll probably continue.
PNP will probably see 4th edition D&D within the next 5 years. If they change it too much from 3.0 or 3.5 they may alienate a lot of players. Other game companies might be able to move in with their own OGL systems, or just support the existing 3.0/3.5 fanbase. Maybe we'll see another turn away against rulesy systems and something like the Storyteller system will jump in popularity.
In terms of CRPG technology, who knows? I'm still impressed with what the Xbox can do compared to my Genesis, 3DO, or N64 ... the next-generation platforms and the future advances in PC technology are going to make the near-realistic games we do today a piece of cake to do (in terms of visuals). Since the memory and processor pipeline for art is usually a significant limiting factor in game design, maybe that'll mean the designers and programmers will have more leeway in terms of what they can do. It would be awesome to have a game where you could really go anywhere and have interesting quests everywhere you went (instead of "dig for this," "bring me a critter," and "kill this guy" quests") ... multilevel quests that have different effects depending on your race, when you talked to the quest initiator, when you finish the quest, and so on.
Ten years, jeeze, it's really hard to predict that. By then we'll probably have the next-generation of media storage, which could handle dozens of hours of streaming video. Probably some sort of inexpensive goggle-based monitors so you could have a VR environment; that coupled with the mega-storage would let you really jump into the game world. Intelligent context-sensitive voice recognition, so you could just talk to NPCs? That would revolutionize dialogue design and scripting, if we could generate smart AI.
Thanks for your time, Sean!
