Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Can there be a better dream?

Salvatore: From there, I put together my team, my old Seven Swords team, and added my kids. My two sons joined in. We created a 10,000 year history of the world for the MMO so that everyone that comes into the company sees these deep threads so they understand why the races are where they are, who they are, what their relationships are to the other races, the commerce of the world, why it's this way, why these races have this deep-seated ancient hatred, etc.

So what happens is, the mechanics team, the content team, the art team, are all painting on the same tapestry. And it's working. I know it's working because when we first started, the art team came up to me and said, "What do you think of this concept?” I'd be like, "Well... I think this is kind of missing this because of this with this race. This might not quite fit because here's where they came from, here's who they really are." When the content team would tell me the stories they were adding to the more recent histories or the story of the game itself, I would say, "Yeah, but..."

This was a year and a half ago. Now, my reaction is almost universally, "Wow!" because they've all bought into it. They all understand it. They've all taken ownership of the world. So they know who these races are, what they look like, what they feel like, what they smell like, what motivates them. They know that as well as I do. Everybody's bought in.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is that something you typically do with most of your stories, create this 10,000 year history or is it something you had to do for this MMO just because it is such a vast scope compared to the limited scope of a book?

Salvatore: With the Forgotten Realms, obviously most of it was already there. Ed [Greenwood] had gone through the same process, starting when he was 8 years old, creating the Forgotten Realms. I'm not even making that up.

With Demon Wars, I really did go back and build societal structures, several hundred years of history, modeled very much after our world with the added ingredients of magic and other races that I put in. This is the first time I've done it to this level.

I really think if you look at the content of what we've created, you would be *stunned!* A Wiki that is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of the lore of the races, the history of the races, the history of the world. I've never done anything like this.

Ten Ton Hammer: It'll be fascinating to come in and see it, just because, from a writer's standpoint, seeing what a team of writers can do when presented with a uniform structure. How many people do you have working underneath you?

Salvatore: There are about 65 people here at the studio, but on the content team... six on the content team, which includes another writer who has been brought in, doing some wonderful work. Several of them are writers, but we have one who is specifically adding lyricism where it's needed, so to speak.

We have a mechanics team of 5 or 6 people that I interact with on a fairly regular basis. One of them is my son, so I have a lot of insight into what they're doing all the time. One of the people on the content team is Mike Leger who actually worked on the Menzoberranzan boxed set with me and has been a member of my Dungeons & Dragons group since 1989.

Ten Ton Hammer: That's a long time to be playing D&D together.

Salvatore: Yeah. It's pizza night. Then the art team I think has now, between the animators and the artists, like 14 or 15, and I interact with them, particularly like with the character team and the environment team, on a regular basis with them as well.

Ten Ton Hammer: So as a final question, as work continues to progress on Copernicus, what has it felt like to you to really watch it emerge? Because obviously, I've read in your interviews, and personally as a writer, when you make an outline for a book, by the time you finish your manuscript, lots of things have changed. It might even change from version to version. How has it been to watch such a big story emerge, take shape, and flow off the outline?

Salvatore: I get exactly what you're saying. Picture that on steroids.

Ten Ton Hammer: *laughs*

Salvatore: I mean, you have the needs of the game. My job lately, has become more that of a kind of "sage". So we'll sit in the content meeting and the last time, Steve Danuser who's in charge of that entire area (he's like my direct report), Steve handed it over to me because I told him I wanted to remind people of something. So I pulled out this green binder. That green binder was the original presentation of our world to the original members of 38 Studios. I said, "Don't forget the charm of what we were trying to do."

So my job is to constantly remind them of the "how cool would it be if?" attitude we had when we first approached this so we don't get put in the box of just being another MMO. "Well this is how we're doing this because this is how it's always been done." 

That's not what we're here for.

It's been an incredible ride!