Carbine Studios Interview
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Ten Ton Hammer: You've been working on games a long time, and you were at Interplay when they were putting out games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Stonekeep, and other notable titles. How does working at Carbine compare to your previous work at Interplay?
Eric: Working on an MMO is way bigger than anything I've ever done before. The scope of the project, the resources we're being given, the size and caliber of the team; everything is just much, much larger than anything I worked on over at Interplay.
The problems that we ran into while working on a single player RPG were big. Fallout 2 was definitely a really big project, and we had to worry about getting people through a test run of the entire game by a certain date so you can get it off to manufacturing and things like that. It was still orders of magnitude smaller than an MMO.
In an MMO, you're going to find people that are playing solo, grouped, in their guilds, as tradeskillers..there's just a zillion games inside of one MMO. On the other hand, it is still similar to single player games. There are just things that are the basic tenets of an MMORPG that aren't any different than making quests for games like Fallout or Stonekeep. These are things that engage the player and develop the player over time. I mean, the reward systems and that sort of thing are exactly the same. It's kind of weirdly different and similar at the same time.
We have a really powerful scripting system on this game, and it reminds me a lot of when I first worked on the original Stonekeep. We had a bunch of junior programmers that were the content guys and could do CRAZY stuff that we never imagined. I mean we had one guy in Stonekeep scale down a couple orcs so you had one normal orc come out then three mini orcs come out and stand on the heads of the others. It was a really funny thing that no one ever expected.
Now we've got the same sort of thing, except it's in an MMO. Our scripters are doing crazy stuff that you wouldn't even expect. There's a lot of power there.
