Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Ken Rolston on RPG Design

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 2, 2011

This is one of the better, more thoughtful interviews with a mainstream, AAA RPG designer that I have heard in a long time.

Ken Rolston Interview at AusGamers

While he’s firmly in the big-money, big-production, mass-market RPG camp and happy to be there, he also notes appreciation for smaller RPGs that might not make “assloads of money” but have great things in them that “are eminently stealable from, many delicious things.”  He also notes the ease in which it’s possible to enjoy older classic titles from places like GOG.COM.

So he’s a mainstream, big-budget RPG developer who is respectful of past classics and lower-end games. That makes him pretty rare animal these days. He also speaks a little wistfully about his “closet drama” design ideas that he knows will never get made in the current environment. He’s a realist about making those kinds of games in today’s market without losing his idealism. And I especially appreciated what he thought was the worst thing to happen to CRPGs:

“…Let’s talk in the abstract about the worst thing that ever happened to role-playing games is recorded audio for dialogue. I happen to believe that was the death of my joy. Because that limits… that causes production things… the content has to be nailed down at a certain point.

“So [voiced] text is not easily revisable. As I play, text is easily revisable; audio isn’t. As I play, I want to make tiny little changes to the tone, to the feel of things, but you can’t do that when you have all this audio — oh my god, all the audio that we have to record! So what I’m going to say is: for what the audience wants, we are forced to create these things that are very brittle, that cannot be revised.

“Whereas in the happy old days of Baldurs Gate and things like that, I thought you had the best of both worlds. You could have a little snippet of dialogue that would give character, but then you would get in text trees which you could easily scan and click through. For page, that’s the important thing; dialogue pace. In a good old-fashioned role-playing game, the user controls the pace, where unfortunately in both video and recorded audio, you can’t scan it and you can’t backtrack in it. “

I was also amused at his reaction to the interviewer’s belief that with enough money and polish you could simply create enough voice recording to cover all of the player’s inputs:  “Gosh, what a refreshing and naive impression that is that you have. I bet you’ve never made a role-playing game.

I’m not sure what to say about his desire for faster-paced role-playing games. He’s careful about his words, so faster pacing of the storyline is probably something I can get behind. Faster pacing of action sequences, not so much, as they seem plenty fast already.

I recommend watching the video if you can – the transcript available at the site doesn’t do the conversation justice. It’s a really valuable look at RPG design from the perspective of a guy who’s a long-term veteran of both the mainstream CRPG and the pen-and-paper industry.


Filed Under: Interviews - Comments: 7 Comments to Read



  • Tom Wilson said,

    I enjoyed this chat. It got really good at about the 14 minute mark. And you’re right: you really have to watch it to see the joy with which Rolston says, essentially, “You want RPGs to do something they can’t do. Go play a LARP” 🙂

    A quote I jotted down: RPGs have “limited conventions — like a sonnet.” Interesting.

  • Karry said,

    What is with the interviewer guy ? Ex-con ?

  • Demiath said,

    Surprising sentiments coming from a man who (in previous interviews, at least) has been giddy with excitement over the prospect of churning out a Fable clone.

  • McTeddy said,

    Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about him.

    There is a difference between realism and defeatism and in many ways I think he falls into the second category.

    I’ve made RPGs… I’ve worked with spoken dialog… and I understand that there are limitations (Though I still mess them up plenty 🙂 ). But he seemed so adamant that “It is never possible… EVER… and you are foolish to think so!” That I couldn’t help feel that he is trying to cover the problems in his upcoming game.

    We have RPGs that are being played by millions of people at the same time, including voice chat. Can that not ever be used to fulfill the very same needs as LARPing?

    But “No… NEVER! Computer Games are only about one thing… survival… and if you want something else… GTFO!”

    Maybe it’s just that I’m young and naive… but I think that striving to do more than what is currently possible is a valid choice. Why should we stop TRYING to accomplish something greater?

  • mk2net said,

    @McTeddy: The technology necessary to create quality voice-over at the level Rolston’s thinking (think BG2 voiced-over) would require the ability to take a person’s voice and create through a software implementation varying emotional “states” that reflect each word being spoken. This way you don’t really need the voice actor to speak each line…you just need them to speak a certain amount of words to capture their basic speech pattern and intonation and then have an automatic method of turning text into spoken words through software.

    That might sound a little complex from how I wrote it, so here it is in a nutshell: voice actor records himself speaking for x number of minutes (pre-set script) so the computer has enough data to create fabricated emotional states. Computer then creates each required emotional state. Programmer inputs required text for the program to convert to speech using a specified emotional state from that particular voice actor. Program spits out audio file for the game.

    That type of technology does not exist in a manner that would merit the cost (or would have the requisite quality). Once that technology, or something like it, appears, then we will have the ability to do what he’s scoffing at now.

  • xenovore said,

    There is already technology that comes remarkably close to real human speech. The caveat, however, is that it can take quite a bit of memory and processing power to achieve, two things that are at a premium, particularly on 5-6 year old consoles (and mobile devices). (The other issue: quite a bit of that tech is patented and must be licensed; most game developers don’t see it as important enough to spend the cash on it.)

    Video games used to be a primary driving force behind advances in computer technology. Now, with everybody in a sort of “it’s good enough” mode developing for consoles and mobile devices, the tech has either stagnated or just flat-out been ignored (e.g. DirectX 11).

    There are still a couple of companies, like id Software, that try to push the curve, but they still tend to focus primarily on graphics; audio has been all but ignored. If somebody with the genius of Carmack would tackle the audio side of things, perhaps we could have quality, fast text-to-speech tech in our games…

    Finally, it doesn’t help that the current rage is the action RPG, where “action” typically just means “lots of combat”. But… there just isn’t much room for meaningful dialogue during a fight! Perhaps if the focus were more on character interaction and less on hacking things up with a sword, then we’d have a reason to have quality text-to-speech in our RPGs.

  • xenovore said,

    @McTeddy: Exactly — that was my take on it as well; he was pretty much like, “It can’t be done! Forget about it!”. The sad thing is: he’s not entirely incorrect. As long as main-stream game developers focus on developing for 5-6 year old tech, it’s never going to happen — that level of hardware can’t do what we want.

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