Chris Avellone Interview
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Every once in a while, the stars align and veteran designer Chris Avellone decides that he's going to share a substantial amount of information about his previous work, his current projects, and his game design philosophy, all while sneaking a few previously unknown nuggets into the conversational mix.
Such is the case with this new interview on RPG Codex, where Chris talks about everything from the work he's doing on Divinity II: Original Sin to his nostalgia for Fallout 3 (Van Buren) to what they were planning for a Star Wars: KotOR III, and other far-reaching topics that are beyond the scope of this summarization. Onward to the nuggets:
JMR: Do you have any other unannounced projects besides the ones we spoke about before? Let's say, how many unannounced things are you working on now?
MCA: [thinks for a while] Quite a few. [laughs] And that's all I can say.
JMR: More than three?
MCA: Quite a few. [laughs]
JMR: Did you do any work on Dwarfs?
MCA: No... so, my work on Dwarfs was... I reviewed the work that Kevin Saunders and Brian Mitsoda did. Because Brian Mitsoda was the lead story writer for Dwarfs. And I think he did a really good job of sort of categorizing what each dwarf's personality was, what their character arc and abilities were. And Kevin did a good job of managing the project. My involvement was mostly on an advisory capacity, where I'm like “Okay here's my thoughts on the story, like, here's elements that I like, here's things that I think are working really well, here are things I think need to be shored up a little bit.” That was basically my involvement on Dwarfs.
JMR: Were the dwarfs party members?
MCA: Yes.
JMR: All of them?
MCA: Yeah, but you could only switch out two at a time, so like, you have a main character and then you'd be able to choose two dwarfs to join you in a party. And each of them had special powers and abilities, and you'd just switch them out.
JMR: Who was the villain?
MCA: [thinks for a while] Not sure I can say. Um... the dwarfs I'm gonna talk about but the villain I will leave for another time. [laughs] It was a really weird franchise, though. The fact that someone wanted to do Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as an RPG... I was like, “All right, that's weird.” [laughs] But then, they wanted to do it... a thousand years before Snow White. So you saw like, all the history that led up to the Snow White world, and that was really cool. And then I like got it, I'm like, ”Oh, okay, I understand why it's cool now”, so... but initially I didn't think it was very cool.
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JMR: What was the storyline for the third KotOR game? What would the player do in the Sith Empire? Was it going to be structured like the first two KoTORs: prologue, four planets and then the ending? Or something else?
MCA: So it was gonna be a little bit different. So basically, I think I've said this before, but the player would be following Revan's path into the Unknown Regions, and he goes very, very deep into the Unknown Regions and finds the outskirts of the real Sith Empire. And that's a pretty terrifying place. The intention was that it would be structured on a basic level like KotOR 1 and KotOR 2, but what would happen is you'd have a collection of hubs, but every hub you went to had an additional circuit of hubs, that you could choose which ones you optionally wanted to do to complete that hub, or you could do them all. But ultimately there was just a lot more game area in KotOR 3, just because the Sith Empire was just so fucking big. But yeah, so, on some level it was a similar structure, but it was intended to... so one of our designers, Matt MacLean, had this idea for Alpha Protocol mission structure, where what would happen is, you'd sort of go to a hub, but it wasn't really a hub, it was like a big mission you had to do as an espionage agent, but then there were like six surrounding missions, that central mission, and you didn't have to do any of them, but by doing some of those, you would cause a reaction in the main target mission that could even make your job worse or easier. Or you could choose to try and do all of them, and he let each of them like cater to like, a speech skill, or stealth mission, or shoot 'em up mission, and that would cause different reactivity. And I always liked that, because I felt like you were being given a larger objective, but you were getting a lot more freedom in how to accomplish it and how to set the stage, so it was easier for your character. And that's kind of the mission structure I would have liked to have bring to KotOR 3, because I thought it was much more intelligent design.
JMR: Sounds really cool.
MCA: Yeah, it was a great idea he had. He was very modest about it. I think he still gets mad when I bring it up. [laughs]
JMR: What functionalities and gameplay elements do you want to see in future RPGs?
MCA: Oh, less talking. More things that you see. More stuff that you do to interact with the environment. Like, one thing I like about Divinity is, they have in my opinion superior dungeon exploration mechanics. I think the way that you can manipulate the environment very easily to solve sort of environmental puzzles, I think it's really cool. And it makes me wish that other games would do, would follow their footsteps. But I'd like to see more ways for the player engaging with the dungeon environment that isn't just talking to NPCs and killing monsters.
