TTH:
Along that same vein, what was the most difficult part of developing
Neverwinter Nights? You were designing and implementing fairly cutting
edge technology, how did you – along with Cathryn Mataga and
the your whole team – overcome the challenges of working with
such new technology?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: There were
really three parts to the problem.
Getting
the system running was really the work of Mataga and Dykstra, and was a
technical tour-de-force for which they don’t get enough
credit.
The
issues of how we prioritized the “packets” that
updated players on the status of the world required a series of design
tradeoffs that I coordinated along with technical gymnastics by Cathryn
and Craig. Picture 500 people who generate a message to 500
other people every time they hit a key. That’s
25,000 messages sent every fraction of a second, which is enough to
make any 1980’s or 1990’s system choke.
WE
made a series of practical calls on every detail of what did and did
not require a packet, how often each player needed each kind of packet
in each kind of situation, and how to keep each packet as small and
non-latency-dependent as possible. The sum total of hundreds
of these tradeoffs was the first game that actually succeeded in
getting graphics into an MMORPG.... because the packet volumes were
controlled enough to allow enough time to display everything on the
screen without making players wait too long.
TTH:
Aside from you and Cathryn, how many people were on your team? These
days MMORPGs development companies boast hundreds of employees, was the
Neverwinter Nights team that large?
alt="Gold Box D&D Games" title="Gold Box D&D Games"
name="photo_j" border="0" height="150" width="129">
alt="" height="1" width="1">
Along with Neverwinter Nights, Daglow also helped
create several "gold box" D&D games.
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow:
LOL! I was lead designer, Cathryn was lead programmer and
David Bunnett did the graphics. ON AOL’s side
Cathryn Mataga and later Scott Gries and Jessica Mulligan were
producers, Craig Dykstra was the programmer who made the AOL
system work with our code, a small group of testers and that was
it. Team sizes in those days were a lot smaller
than the 50-150 we see today!
The
other people who should get credit are our early players.
They helped us refine the initial balance of the game, organized the
first guilds in the history of MMORPG’s and generally were
“part of the team” in our eyes.
TTH:
How difficult was it to convince Steve Case at AOL, SSI, and TSR that
Neverwinter Nights was a legitimate title that they needed to pursue?
Did they have any hesitations about the game? How did you work past
those to convince them that this game would be a success?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: We got most
of the way there because I could go to each company and say,
“We’re already working with you guys. If
we add this project to our deal I know I can make it work because I can
see the nexus between all four companies and if we join forces we can
pull it off.”
I
wasn’t thinking about it, but it turns out I was betting the
company on my hunch. If Steve Case of AOL and Chuck Kroegel
of SSI lost faith in Stormfront we’d have lost our two
biggest backers… and been doomed as a game development
studio.
The
last hard part was convincing BOTH the Stormfront and the AOL tech
teams the game could be completed. Each programming team had
skeptics. Finally we had a “go or no-go”
meeting where all the issues were debated. Steve Case and Jack
Daggett of AOL said they believed we could do it, and the project got
its greenlight.
alt="Neverwinter Nights 2" title="Neverwinter Nights 2"
name="photo_j" border="0" height="113" width="150">
alt="" height="1" width="1">
This is an image from the latest edition of Neverwinter
Nights.
TTH:
Obviously you’ve worked on a really diverse selection of
titles since you finished up Neverwinter Nights in 1991. How did
developing NWN affect any of your next titles? What sort of
experience did you bring with you to your next few games?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: One of the
things that I’m most disappointed about in
Stormfront’s history is that by the time the AOL modem-access
crisis eased in the mid-1990’s we had moved on to focus on
Sega Genesis and then PlayStation development, so we got fewer chances
to leverage what we learned on NWN.
Ironically,
today we’re working on downloadable games for consoles and
PC’s and titles that have multiplayer versions, so
we’re returning to some of our roots by addressing the online
audience.
TTH:
Out of sheer curiosity, have you played either of the newest
Neverwinter Nights titles? They’ve achieved a tremendous
amount of popularity with the online community – much like
your previous title – and many developers have their roots in
the development tools included with the games. If you did play them,
did you enjoy them? If so, could you please comment on how it felt
compared to your initial project?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: When
I’ve played the new Neverwinter Nights, I have to say
it’s been bittersweet for me. Greg and Ray, the
founders of BioWare, are friends of mine and I admire them a great
deal. The BioWare teams have done a wonderful job of taking
the core property and making it a modern, leading-edge game system that
really represents their original creative vision.
But I
admit that I’ll always think of Neverwinter Nights as
“ours”, and seeing someone else take that fictional
world forward is not the same great feeling as doing it yourself.
TTH:
The only other D&D based MMORPG, besides the original NWN, has
been Dungeons and Dragons Online, which has received some harsh
criticism by critics for varying factors. Have you had a chance to
observe this title?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: To be fair,
I have not had the chance to follow the game closely. By
coincidence we have a number of friends at Turbine, so I’m
hoping the game builds a strong player base.
TTH:
Also, you have a really solid background in D&D produced
material, with one of your first games, Dungeon, being D&D
based and with one of your latest games, Demon Stone, getting fairly
solid reviews. Do you have any plans to return to the D&D
universe?
alt="15b" title="15b" name="photo_j" border="0"
height="113" width="150">
alt="" height="1" width="1">
One of Daglow's more recent projects was Demon Stone,
another D&D title.
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow:
It’s funny, but from my point of view all of my D&D
projects have been an unplanned byproduct of my love for
RPG’s, rather than a coordinated plan.
In
the 70’s I wrote Dungeon as an aficionado of
D&D. In the early 1980’s D&D was a
logical license for Intellivision during the time when I was Director
of Game Development there and we were looking for ways to counter
Atari’s dominance in arcade-style games. In the
late 1980’s and early ‘90’s it was
logical for SSI to do Gold Box D&D games with us because I knew
the license so well, but when Chuck Kroegel suggested it to me it came
as a pleasant surprise. And on to Demon Stone, which was an
attempt to marry the internal workings of D&D with a real-time
console action adventure.
After
each of those projects I had no reason to expect that I’d
work on a D&D game again, but it always seemed to happen!
TTH:
While your background certainly contains two very important online
titles, your present titles are not devoted to the online space. What
caused the drift away from online environments? Do you ever consider
working on a massively multiplayer title? Is it possible to see an MMO
produced by Stormfront in the future?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: Our move
away from online really comes from that period when AOL suspended all
game development in the early 1990’s and we ended up moving
on to other genres and platforms.
What’s
cool is that today’s console and PC game increasingly require
online extensions to gameplay, which is naturally bringing our team
back to the online multiplayer world.
TTH:
Finally, where do you see computer games, specifically MMOs, heading in
the next few years? What should we – as consumers –
expect from future titles?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: I think the
lines between casual games and mainstream games are going to blur.
I
also think that online games will increasingly be found on consoles as
well as PC’s.
Combine
those two observations and I think the next decade will be an
interesting one for game designers as well as for game players.
TTH:
Thanks for your time, Don, and I hope we can talk again soon!
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