Despite dabbling with retirement, legendary developer Ken Rolston is back in the game. Having launched his career in the realm of pen-and-paper role playing, Ken is perhaps in the best known to video gamers for his work on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and IV: Oblivion - but he's most excited for his latest effort,
Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning. A new fantasy offering from Big Huge Games, Amalur also boasts New York Times best-seller R.A. Salvatore as head writer and comic book maven Todd McFarlane overseeing art and visual design.
Recently, I was lucky enough to meet with Ken in person, where we discussed his career to date, his plans for Amalur and views on games design as a whole.
Matt Kamen: I’m going to go straight for the elephant in the room....
Ken Rolston: Great!
MK: Elder Scrolls. Do you think it’s going to be hanging over your head with Reckoning? Your heavy involvement on Morrowind and Oblivion...
KR: The worst possible answer is yes, in the sense that I think it’s perfectly fair for something that’s well-established to be god-like, certainly since I had something to do with it being godlike. But I don’t want to take any credit for Skyrim. Skyrim, I think, has sort of done some amazing stuff, so that’s going to suck all the air out of the room for a while. And then they’re going to play my game and say “oh my god, that’s fun! The combat’s fun! Where did that come from?” Nobody has done fun, tactile console combat in a role playing game. Since I think we’re kind of like oranges and apples, I think there’ll probably be a period of discovery where they’ll be drunken, like me, from Skyrim. But then they’ll play this game and they’ll say “what a refreshing and original thing to do” and they’ll play it for what it’s worth.
MK: What were your thoughts when you were first approached to get involved with Amalur?
KR: I’d been thinking that I’d retired and I thought I’d had all the fun that I could have, and really I was done, I’d done everything worth doing. I enjoyed doing Morrowind more than Oblivion simply because it was more complicated and rough. It was jazz, whereas Oblivion was in many ways better polished and running better software but not as soulfully complicated, rich and deep. So when they said “you want to try and do something?” and Big Huge Games needed someone to help them make a roleplaying game – don’t ever try to make one unless you know how to do them, because that’s a terrible idea – and I got sucked in. I decided they were already going in that new IP direction. And then it got complicated because it took a very long time to get publishers, and then THQ [got involved] – it was wonderful working with them but they didn’t have the money to develop it.
MK: So that said, what’s your experience working on the game been like?
KR: I love it, I love the people, I love what I’m working on and it’s probably been the easiest thing narratively, working with R.A Salvatore and he’s a good teacher. All of them are good teachers. I started with a really good world and I got the opportunity to cherry-pick places where to tell the story, and there were some wonderful places which meant I knew it was a good setting. But at the end of the day what I really wanted was a really good console game and a really good console game would have better combat and better animation, stuff like that. It was just dumb luck that Todd McFarlane really wanted good animation. I wanted it but I didn’t think there was a really good reason to have it, because I’ve had successful games without good animation before. The point is that it needed to be there for the combat, and I said “Great!” It’s not something there to be cosmetic, it’s built into the combat of the game. And I’m not someone who enjoys action gaming, because the stories and the experience, the puzzle solving is all down a narrow channel. I said “I betcha it won’t be a bad thing for some action players to find an opportunity for some free form exploration and loot”. They’ll be all over it like a cheap suit.
MK: It's interesting that roleplaying elements seem to have crept into every other genre of gaming over the last five years.
KR: I would say yes, it’s interesting, although I don’t have any profound observations on it. I think it’s just a very clever way to give the player more entry into his role. All games, almost all games, are roleplaying games in one way or another and one of the things that’s bad about roleplaying games is they’re very abstract, distant and time-consuming. But if you’re using that time-consuming stuff in the interface, in aid of bringing the player closer to the material, you have to be careful how you do it. There are car racing games with roleplaying aspects! It just allows you to get closer to your role as a person who owns cars and cares about cars. It’s a logical thing, I don’t it’s that odd.
MK: It’s most common in the level-up aspect, either as a literal level up or just “now I can get this better bit of equipment, or this better part for my car”. It’s a nice system of rewards as you go through the game.
KR: And then you see games like Borderlands that do use reward systems that borrow from the RPG. But again the biggest mistake is talking about genres and I certainly think this is the pot calling the kettle black, because I love roleplaying games, but what I really want to do was get back to where Wizardry, Mad Overlord or whatever the title was – they weren’t genre games. They were mainstream games. They were the only type of games you could play and I wanted a game that would make me feel a lot of people would play whether or not they were an action fan or a roleplaying fan. They would play it because it was fun and they can play on the computer and it was delicious on a controller
MK: You mentioned the animation and it being for a console game. Do you think the PC is secondary or even tertiary for gamers now?
KR: I play it pretty much all the time on the PC, and I think it’s for a pretty obvious reason. I pretend that I’ve broken my chains, but I really haven’t. I’m a hardcore roleplaying guy but it’s.... delicious. There are things that work better on the PC interface and I’d never have guessed that, you know. And there’s this cheap trick recently where you pull the cursor across the screen when you have the controller, the interface pops in and out of whatever thing you’re using. And I may start using the PC interface with a controller, but the mouse seems a better fit, so I think the real answer is just not to be bound up with your expectations for each console. I must admit that originally my goal was to have a console game, but that’s because I’m stupid! I didn’t realise that what I really wanted was a fluid game, that I wanted good control, and it never occurred to me you could have good control on the PC too. I’m not an interface master and watching them come up with really good interfaces, it’s good because I don’t know how to do it.
MK: Given Reckoning is a new IP, and most people haven’t had a chance to play the game yet or have anything to gauge it against – how would you describe its style?
KR: You won’t get it at all until you get to play it. You should trust nothing I say until you actually play it! I think all that marketing stuff is shrewd communication but I think shrewd communication is not what’s fun about games. What’s fun about games is when you’re sat with the controller in your hands and do something that makes you say “I like that!” It’s the discovery that counts.
MK: From what we can see of the combat, it seems to be God of War style, fast-paced melee.
KR: I wish I could comment because I played God of War and I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t get into the flow of it. I was just saying “you’re kidding me, you’re going to make me do this stupid puzzle? I don’t care.” But I do believe the visual language will have people looking at it and going “oh, it looks like God of War” and that’s not a bad thing. It means it doesn’t look bad, that’s the way I read it! If you look at it and go “it looks like a roleplaying game” I’d go “aww, I’m sad.”
MK: Do you think certain people who still identify themselves primarily as roleplayers will balk at having such a fast-paced alternative?
KR: I assume so, but that’d be before they play it. The thing is, it’s designed to be played as a roleplaying game, as though you never had. Okay, imagine you’re seeing God of War, but there didn’t exist any action games and you found you could walk around, it moves a little better than it normally would, but nothing in it is bad that’s relevant to a normal roleplaying game. And then you push a button and something pretty happens for you, great special effects from great magic. I have a feeling that if it weren’t for people knowing ‘action games’, they wouldn’t feel uncomfortable playing. If they played action games and felt betrayed by the quality of them then there’s a reason to suspect we also would betray them. Oh my god, no. If I made a roleplaying game that was action-game content and narrative, they should drag me behind pick-up trucks. That would be fair, that would be betrayal. I would hate that game.
MK: Getting into the numbers of stuff now, how big would you say the game world is?
KR: All the time I played it, I played it 50-80 hours and I’ve only done a fragment of the main quest and one of the factions, but then I’m being deliberately perverse! I came from Oblivion. When I see a plot or a quest, I run the other way. I beat on things and I try to get places I didn’t think I could go and listen to people’s stories and stuff like that. It depends on the sort of player you are. The game is just too big! All great first roleplaying releases, in their first release, are all way too big. From Morrowind to Oblivion, we decreased in size. Almost all games in an IP have to be compressed. This one may be just too big.
MK: And the structure is still very open world?
KR: Very open world. I think there’s one narrative gate which you can’t get to, out of five areas, two areas aren’t achievable until you pass through a certain gate in the main quest. Not much of a constraint.
MK: Are you going the typical character class route with Reckoning?
KR: No character classes. It’s like three character archetype models and three hybrids of the different archetype models, and one jack of all trades. Essentially you assemble your character out of these ‘destinies’ which are kind of like character classes. You can redefine your character's ‘class’, so to speak, as you go along and add new things. That’s a completely new package. No-one’s ever done a game like this before and I think ‘enlightened games’ are trying to get away from constraints of character classes. However, archetypes are very important for roleplayers to know who they are. You want to have those trappings, you just don’t want to have them as rigid as they were in earlier adventures.
MK: Is there going to be any gameplay crossover between the RPG and the still-secretive 'Copernicus' MMO? Are they going to be taking any gameplay elements from one into the other?
KR: I can’t comment on that because I don’t know. Those are very speculative things. The answer is ‘yes, but who knows what’?
MK: Lastly then - you've spent a good chunk of your life devloping games, in one form or another. Where do you see the game design of open world RPGs going, or where would you like to see it going? MMOs have kind of nailed open world. They can make it open and more open as they go along.
KR: I think Elder Scrolls is doing a very good job, and has done a good job in the past, with open worlds but I wanted something more like what I’ll call a guided world. You feel the freedom but the fun per unit of time is times two from an open world. Now, that’s my personal needs. I just want to have a denser experience, and I think I need to continue to feel that freedom. I personally would be taking a step back from the open world of Oblivion. See what happens with Skyrim. I definitely don’t want to go in the direction of narrower worlds like Bioware and Fable have done. I’ll continue to want a lot of content, a lot of freedom, but I think I will want the player not to be as frustrated as often.
Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning is released this Friday on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.
Follow Ken on Twitter here.
