Towards New Horizons

Despite setbacks, Tulga begins to surpass its original vision for Horizons

By Jeff “Ethec” Woleslagle and Pat “Troon” Connoy

Click here for background info on Horizons: Empire of Istaria.

The setting is Tulga’s HQ in Phoenix: strangely apropos since Tulga, who formally acquired the game in January 2005, has struggled to see Horizons rise from the ashes of bankrupt Artifact Entertainment’s over-promised, under-delivered MMO concept of June 2003. The 20-person Tulga Games team work long hours to turn around the frown most long-time gamers wear when Tulga’s bread-and-butter fantasy MMO Horizons: Empire of Istaria comes up in friendly conversation.

Upon entering, we were greeted with a broad smile by David Bowman, CEO and Creative Director of Tulga Games, though as your apt to find in any relatively small development house, he “wears many hats.”

The rest of the staff present in the Horizons live team area this Friday before E3 were nearly as textbook-standard developer office as the stygian lighting; focused and intent on their work, avoiding eye-contact as they traded an occasional spurt of wry humor. A game of Axis and Allies was well underway on a nearby table, and dry erase boards covered with arcane messages were as numerous as kung fu posters, examples of game art, and the other incurious scenery of a workaday studio.

Anyone would be impressed by the team’s dedication, but why did they stick with the title, rather than packing it in and focusing the team elsewhere? The answer is refreshing: the Tulga team, especially Bowman, is in love with the game’s community, and they believe strongly in the game’s future.

Meeting with the Tulga team

Creative Bridging

One key figure in Horizons’s future is well-known fantasy author Peter Beagle, who we had the unique opportunity to speak to last November when he originally came on board (click here to see our original interview).

The time since has been spent on developing a toolset to allow Beagle to work effectively with the Tulga team, and Peter Beagle’s first quest went live at the end of April. Grateful fans simply refer to it as “the wedding quest.” How worthwhile is taking this kind of approach, when the process involves tapping artists who, while very creative, have little to no technical proficiency? While Bowman warns developers of the enormous complexities involved with tapping outside talent, he feels the approach fits well with the more “worldy” approach he envisions for the game’s future.

“Our goal, and unforunately Peter's having to bear the brunt of the experimentation phase, is to develop our skillset and our toolset so that someone with really good value-added abilities, whether it be a musician, an author, or someone from stage that has the abilities to lay out interactions that are compelling, that they can take those talents and apply them to us as guests. There's a lot of really talented people who, I can't hire them full time, they don't want to be hired, but they think this is a really cool space to express themselves. Peter is the first to say, ‘I’m really intrigued by this, I think this is more of a young persons’ thing,’ but that’s never stopped Peter at all because he’s taken on every format he can take on… movies, books, a TV series.

“Even though it all comes back to the small mechanics, we wanted to design a quest where players had to make a decision that matters, that evokes emotion. The Wedding Quest is the first example of this... do I want to support this marriage, or do I want to break it up? In most places in our industry the writing's pretty immature. I've been in the industry a while, I know why, but it's time to step up.”

Bowman explains his vision

“Games have done a good job of mechanical entertaining… we haven’t done a good job of entertaining in what we know we could do. It takes a while for these technologies to let us show our humanity.” David described the evolution of the film industry to show how films progressively more and more realistic and entertaining, and I was reminded of the usual debate when a movie is made “based” on a book. Flashy effects and first-rate actors can seldom effectively retell a good story and, when the story is bad, it always seems to shine through.

Bringing it back to MMOs: “The toolset is always changing, because it’s been driven by that client-side front-end, you know, higher-res textures, more polys. You’re spending millions making it look better, look better, look better. Well, we’ve gotten to the point that it looks really good, but we’re still pushing the same buttons again and again. Let’s entertain. Let’s make more emotional decisions in these games. It’s the story, it’s the world players live in.”

“To have true emotional impact, players have to be taken down a few one-way streets. But should games have these sorts of irrevocable decisions? Yes and no. “Four years ago, I was having this discussion, and I said that Horizons should never have these kind of irrevocable decisions. I’m starting to divide the future of Massively Mulitplayer games into 2 categories (with a few sidebars): games and worlds. I was firmly in the “games” category when I started in this industry. But now, I think there’s a good space for worlds to be developed. I think a portion of the audience would like to go into a world, then step out. An (if not irrevocable) an impactful decision in this space can add more weight and impact. In a game, this won’t work: ‘I’m here to be entertained, and you just let me do this awful thing!’”

For David, decisions about permanence are all about the size of the audience you’re trying to attract: “If you wanted a really small audience, you could do a game with permadeath. You can make a profit with a really small audience, if you’re using a proven technology and limit your costs.”

Will we see more of Peter Beagle’s work in Horizons? Definitely. “He plays the game, he thinks about it for a week… he gave us 170 pages of further dialogue just this week! The man’s prolific, so we have to evolve our tools and support this kind of creative outflow for external people to use. He’s got a half dozen quests that he’s building. At any moment, players might run into these characters, these are Peter’s characters, this is his space. You’re not driven to complete Beagle’s quest, it’s just there. Our goal with other authors and creative people, we’re sparking the interest now, is that they’ll come to us and say ‘Hey, can I do a quest or an episode?’ Absolutely! That’s what we’re building towards.” (click "Next Page" to continue reading the article)