Big Huge Games' Ken Rolston on RPG Design
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AusGamers: Yeah, but RPGs are big business now. And back in the day, they were almost closet in themselves. You had your kind of core audience and now they've reached this mainstream saturation point. Surely people can take that kind of risk factor, like (let's just put this out there and see what happens).
Ken: Ah no, because what the audience wants is a polished product, and it turns out that if you wanted to make an experimental role-playing game, you could not make a modern looking one or a modern feeling one. For example: let's talk in the abstract about the worst thing that ever happened to role-playing games is recorded audio for dialogue. I happen to believe that was the death of my joy. Because that limits... that causes production things... the content has to be nailed down at a certain point.
So [voiced] text is not easily revisable. As I play, text is easily revisable; audio isn't. As I play, I want to make tiny little changes to the tone, to the feel of things, but you can't do that when you have all this audio -- oh my god, all the audio that we have to record! So what I'm going to say is: for what the audience wants, we are forced to create these things that are very brittle, that cannot be revised.
Whereas in the happy old days of Baldurs Gate and things like that, I thought you had the best of both worlds. You could have a little snippet of dialogue that would give character, but then you would get in text trees which you could easily scan and click through. For page, that's the important thing; dialogue pace. In a good old-fashioned role-playing game, the user controls the pace, where unfortunately in both video and recorded audio, you can't scan it and you can't backtrack in it.
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AusGamers: So does that mean that the future of RPGs -- and I'm talking like maybe 10 years down the track -- is these ever-branching worlds; these definitively dynamic worlds that are systemic and just have massive cause and effect?
Ken: I'm absolutely certain that won't happen, because of these brittle production features. And it's the same thing as film. You learn to accept the conventions and the limitations -- and I'll give you though, what I'll say is a caveat on that. Imagine that we had truly dramatic and satisfying voice synthesis out of text.
I've always thought that one of the great games I would love to make -- a role-playing game -- is Paranoia, which is one of my old paper and pencil games, in which every character is a robot and therefor the fact that their voices are synthesised is a feature of character -- and I would even create like stuttering as a part of it. But the real thing from a game designer point of view is: I would always be typing the next, and then the voices are created on the fly during the presentation of the game. That's like heaven to me.
And by the way, that might not be impossible. I mean, there are ideas that -- science fiction books sometimes write about -- 10-20 years from now, that you'll be able to take dead actors and simulate them in the movies and do that. That's still an awful lot of work now, but you might be able to automate some of that -- create persistent avatars of old characters. But you know, I can't see the future of gaming in that same sense.
