TTH:
In some past interviews, you’ve made some pretty insightful
comments about storytelling in today’s video games. This is
an area that the current MMO industry is severely lacking in, and many
future MMO developers are really trying to address this issue. How do
you think storytelling in current MMOs can be improved?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow:
I’m always happy to give away what I think is the secret of
MMORPG design. Unlike writing a novel or even a
highly-scripted adventure game, creating an MMORPG is not about telling
a story. It’s part theme park design, part
architecture, part tour guide, part history-re-enactor.
It’s like writing the first chapter of 64 books instead of
writing 64 chapters of one book. That’s how we
leave room for the players to come along and experience the fulfillment
of creating the next 3,402 chapters.
Of
course, the underlying skill is to build the framework of a
role-playing system that can stand up to large numbers of players,
large areas of territory and a wide variety of objects, NPC’s
and quests. Just designing the economy requires someone with
experience at the World Bank!
But
what we’re not trying to do in MMORPG’s is to
define what goes on within that framework. That part must be
left open for the player, because an RPG in which the player is robbed
of the chance to bring his or her own character to life is not a true
RPG.
alt="Neverwinter Nights Retires"
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Neverwinter Nights was brought down in 1997 by AOL
TTH:
Neverwinter Nights was a thorough success, achieving a player base of
nearly 115,000 by 1997, according to the NWN archive located here. Did you ever believe that the
game would reach such a huge level of achievement? Why did AOL pull the
plug in ’97?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow:
It’s funny, but the real untold story is based on the
question: “How did we all keep Neverwinter Nights running as
long as we did?!”
When I started working
with Steve Case at AOL on games in 1987, on a good night there would be
25 people in the chat room during evening prime time on the Apple/Mac
system, and about the same number later on the then-separate PC
version. By the time I did the design for Neverwinter Nights
in 1989 we were up to 50+ people in two or three rooms. The
idea of building a community of 115,000 players was far beyond my
wildest dreams.
Ironically, the
game’s closure in 1997 was a byproduct of AOL’s
explosive growth. Just as we completed our first expansion
set AOL users’ email was hooked up to the Internet, and
suddenly millions of people were signing up… and getting
busy signals when they tried to dial oin with their modems.
The newspapers had headlines asking, “Will AOL crash and burn
because of its overnight success?”
AOL suspended all new
game development and for almost two years we were the only game design
team working with the company. After we finished the NWN
expansion Steve Case called me personally to say, “We have a
hit in Neverwinter Nights and we should be following up on it, but
we’re fighting for our lives over here and I’m
putting everything I’ve got on handling the new customer
crush. I’m really sorry, but it’ll be a
while before we do expansion 2 for Neverwinter Nights.”
Those two NWN regions
worked for five more years, but AOL redesigned its entire network to
support the growth from a few thousand to a few million
subscribers. Eventually the old game was the last vestige of
the old system, and it wasn’t practical to keep it
running. The closure in 1997 was a recognition that the old
game was a transplant within the new AOL system, and keeping it goping
was going to be increasingly difficult.
TTH:
Even before you began work on the Neverwinter Nights title, you had two
decades of game development experience. How did your early titles, like
Star Trek and Dungeon, help prepare you for the various development
issues that you encountered with Neverwinter Nights?
style="font-weight: bold;">Daglow: Star Trek
was really a strategy board game converted into a “screenplay
style” strategy computer game. There were other
script-style Star Trek games around the university mainframes of the
day, and it was natural for a kid who was a gamer majoring in
playwriting to try to push that form of game ahead.
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The Stormfront Studios Logo
Dungeon
was an unabashed reflection of the fact that in 1975 I “fell
hard” for the original Dungeons and Dragons paper
RPG. When I graduated from college and entered grad
school I felt I had taken Baseball and Star Trek as far as I could, and
my newer games like Killer Shrews were smaller-scale sim
experiments. Since we never dreamed we could ever sell games,
there always came a point where you longed to start the next big
project.
I got
to do this for 9 years as an undergrad, then grad student and then grad
school instructor. I had no idea at the time how lucky I was
to keep computer access that long before home computers and video games
were invented and most people got 4 years on a school computer at best.
Dungeon
helped me a great deal with the SSI Gold Box games Stormfront created
and with Neverwinter Nights because it taught me so much about
pacing. In paper RPG’s the best DM’s keep
the game moving by not allowing the action to stall in too many
meaningless die rolls. In Dungeon I faithfully recreated all
the melee combat detail of D&D… which meant that it
could take 20 minutes for a full party to dispatch a group of 8 or 10
orcs that appeared as wandering monsters.
After
hanging around with Dan Bunten (designer of M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities
of Gold) in the early days of EA I had acquired a deep respect for
always seeking simplicity and elegance, not complexity in
design. So in Neverwinter Nights we tried to simplify the
Gold Box engine even further to get the game structure “out
of the way” of the fun.
