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Interview: Bill Roper on signing with Namco, gameplay speed, concept art, and online support.
Date: May 19, 2004
Source: eToyChest.com (Site merged, archives dead.)

eToychest Interview

eToychest: First of all, why Namco? Why a Japanese publisher as opposed to an American one, or was that not even part of the equation?

Bill Roper: Yeah, it really wasn't where the home office was based at, it was more about 'what was the fit going to be between our companies?' and with Namco that was actually a really excellent partnership. Namco looked at their overall business about a year and a half ago, and as they were planning where their company was going to go the next fifty years, because it's a fifty year-old company and they've been doing games the whole time. [Namco] has a bunch of great licenses, a ton of great games, millions of copies sold over the years- but they were console specific. They were looking for a way to expand their business, not just sell more copies or ship more product, because they have a real dedication to quality, of shipping less titles but better titles. So they realized, 'you know, all of our main competitors are in the PC market, why aren't we doing PC products?' and so they made the decision to start a PC division. And as they started looking for people to work with, Flagship Studios was out looking for a publisher. And they even came in pretty late to the process, we'd been looking into publishers for a few months already at that point. But they were really aggressive in approaching us, and everyone we talked to seemed very knowledgeable, very excited, really dedicated to making this PC thing work, and they let us know early on that Flagship would be a cornerstone in that.

I think they wanted more than a game from us, they were expecting to be able to make use of our expertise in building up some of the infrastructure- quality assurance, customer service, that kind of thing. At the same time, we knew they were a publisher that could handle the size of the product we wanted to make, someone who could get as many copies as we wanted out the door. Namco had a worldwide presence and a known name, and they were willing to really be an integral part of the whole process, so it wound up just being a really good fit- less of a publisher/developer relation as it was a partnership. Namco had a lot to bring to the table, and we had a lot to offer as well. Namco is starting up their PC division, and we're starting up Flagship, so hopefully together we'll really be able to do something great.

eT: Quoting from your E3 literature, "...In some ways, the concept of this game is quite different than any they have done in the past, but many philosophies of game design they incorporated into previous titles will be apparent." Is that going to mean that when the game comes out, there's going to be a lot of "Oh, this looks like "?

BR: I don't think it will be 'this looks like blank', I think it's more the systems that we use, the way that we approach what we think is fun about an RPG. An example that Erich Schaefer likes to give is 'I don't like RPG's that have these big, long dialogue trees with a ton of choices so that when I go into town to do something I've got to spend eight minutes talking to some guy before I can get it done.' He wants to get in, he wants to do my maintenance, and he wants get back out and play. Not that that means we don't want story, but there's certain things that some RPG's do that from our design philosophy, we don't do. I mean, you can definitely assume you're going to see much more action-driven gameplay than fighting one monster and taking eight minutes to kill it. We've never built games like that with this team, it's just something we've never been interested in doing. We like having a lot of different things to do, a lot of different things to get, and I think that even though we're going to be doing a lot of things differently, have a different approach to how we go about things, you're going to see those common threads existing. You're going to see that 'wow, there's a lot of places to go to, a lot of surprises I wasn't expecting, etc.' and you'll always have something to move towards.

eT: The concept art for the game you guys are working on seems to fluctuate from high fantasy and mysticism to post-apocalyptic wastelands. I hate to pigeonhole you guys, but could you maybe nail us down to a genre or era at least?

BR: Well, other than RPG, no, but I think that you're hitting a lot of the right levels when you're talking about what's there. We're playing with a lot of different looks, we don't want to just do the same thing everyone's done before. We don't want to go the same worlds, we don't want to have the same settings, so we've been playing with a lot of different looks and feels, and how we can integrate monsters and characters into it. One of the things that's been exciting for us is realizing that we're going to get to create something new again. I loved working on the Starcraft stuff, the Warcraft and Diablo stuff, and nurturing and growing it, but at the same time it was 'Okay, what's the next thing we could make, what's the next crazy idea we could throw out there, what's the next world we could build, what are the next myths and characters and legends we can create within the game?" And we're still doing a lot of that now, we're still experimenting, coming up with different ideas, figuring out how we can integrate the different concepts into the world.

Yeah, there are definitely elements of magic there, elements of technology, sometimes it looks sci-fi, sometimes it looks post-apocalyptic, sometimes it looks like straight-up fantasy. One of the things we're doing right now is seeing which of those directions we like, and we really like to push the envelope. You can kind of think of the art direction as a big circle overlaid on a graph that has different genres and feels, and we're kind of moving the circle around right now. We're kind of at the stage where we're going 'Yeah, we like a little of this, a little of that, maybe skew the circle over this way a little bit, now we catch a little of this over here...' and the end result is something that gives us something with a look and a feel that has a really unique flavor but still lets us build the kind of game we want to build. We don't want to make something that feels schizophrenic, but at the same time we want to try and find a way where we can incorporate a couple of different ideas, different genres, and kind of use them in the new world that we're building. I think that's what the concept art so far is reflective of, is trying this mix of a little magic, a little technology, set in a post-apocalyptic type of thing, where it's not the standard lush green fields. And that's a part of it, too, is that you want to move past where you were, pushing new things and just basically trying to pick the things that we thought looked coolest of all the stuff that's being brought to the show.

eT: Does Namco have anything in place to help support an online matchmaking service or anything like that for your game? Back at blizzard, having battle.net at your disposal probably made a big difference in the game's success, so what do you have in that regard now that you're with Namco?

BR: Namco currently doesn't have anything like that, though they are looking at all that stuff and are actively in the creation stages of it. With Xbox Live and the PS2 [Broadband] adapter, as those move into the next generation consoles, Xbox 2, or NeXtBox, or whatever the heck they're going to call it, PS3, the hardware companies are going to make online abilities a much more integrated part of that. So it fits into the console side of Namco's strategy. Obviously, we've always been massive supporters of multi-player online gaming, and that's definitely a component we're going to have in this game, and that's also an area where we're going to lend Namco some expertise, because we have had that knowledge before. So working with them on setting up what their solution to that stuff will be, how they can service their communities and all that stuff is something we're really looking forward to doing.