George Ziets Interview - Page 2
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GB: Most of our readers are probably familiar with your contributions to Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, Dungeon Siege III, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Torment: Tides of Numenera. But you also worked on a few MMORPGs like The Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and The Elder Scrolls Online. What are the major differences between writing for an MMO and a single-player game, and do you think having experience with one makes you better at the other?
GZ: I found them to be enormously different, or at least they were when I was writing for MMOs in the 2000s. (My last MMO experience was in 2008 with Elder Scrolls Online. I can’t speak to the state of MMOs nowadays, and I don’t really play them anymore.)
Classic MMOs focused on group activities and player vs. player conflict – not story or narrative choice. Some people played solo, but in my experience, MMO development teams always wanted to drive players toward grouping with other players because that, in turn, drove player retention. (Players who made friends and joined guilds had more incentive to stay with the game.)
Sophisticated dialogue and talktrees don’t push players toward action and group activity, and they are usually frustrating for players who just want to get back to adventuring with their friends, so our mandate was to keep dialogue short, focused, and simple. Bonus points if it could be humorous, especially to a mass audience. Also, reading dialogue is not a team sport. I recall playing the original Guild Wars with some random groupmates who got rather irritated when I didn’t instantly skip past all the dialogues.
Single-player RPGs are completely different. Many players want to lose themselves in the fictional world, and branching dialogue is part of the fun, as long as it’s sharp and well-written. It’s a striking contrast to a traditional MMO, where the writing is secondary or tertiary, existing primarily to push the player toward the next activity. (There are exceptions that attempt to blur the lines, of course.)
I didn’t find MMO writing in the 2000s to be particularly transferrable to Obsidian and InXile RPGs. Writing and structuring a branching RPG dialogue is a very specific skillset that needs to be learned and practiced. Before joining Obsidian, I learned that skill mainly by using the original Neverwinter Nights toolset to make modules in my spare time.
GB: I don't think it would be unfair to describe Mask of the Betrayer as your magnum opus. Despite being a mere expansion, plenty of people consider it a worthy successor to Planescape: Torment. Can you tell us a bit about working on that project? Did you know right away that you had something great on your hands there?
GZ: I loved Mask because it was the first time I was permitted to be creative without any significant constraints (besides budget). I also had a lead, Kevin Saunders, who trusted the instincts of his team and saw his job as empowering them, not telling them what to do or meddling in their creative process.
I’ve mentioned this in other interviews, but one benefit of making an expansion was that we were able to focus entirely on building great content, rather than trying to develop the engine and the gameplay at the same time. Additionally, our team had already made the main game together, we had strong working relationships, we knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and we trusted each other.
None of that meant it was easy. We only had about 9 months to make Mask, and our design was ambitious. There were a lot of crunch hours, tons of writing, art, and level design to be done, and revisions upon revisions during preproduction as I kept trying to improve the quality of the story. I didn’t think about much of anything else during those 9 months, whether at work or at home. It was the most intense creative experience I’d ever had (and entirely self-imposed).
Until the first reviews started coming in, I absolutely didn’t know we’d made something people would like. To his credit, I think Kevin knew, but I tend to be harsh on my own work, so I had no idea how it would be received.
GB: I remember Mask of the Betrayer's Spirit Meter feature (it limits how often you can rest and ties into the overarching narrative in a variety of ways) being somewhat controversial back in the day. But having played through the game with it, and while using a mod that removes it entirely, I have to say that as far as I'm concerned, having that meter constantly pushing you forward and changing your character as you go really elevates the overall experience. But considering the aforementioned pushback, do you think you'll include something like that in any of your future games? And if not, what would you consider an appropriate substitute?
GZ: For a long time after Mask, I would have answered “no” to that question. The reason is that most RPG players want the freedom to explore at their own pace, discover and pursue side quests, and enjoy the story without a countdown clock hanging over their heads. I consider myself one of those players.
My answer is a little more nuanced nowadays – it depends upon the kind of experience you’re trying to create. If you want to build an open-ended RPG with lots of side quests for the player to explore at their own pace, adding a “timer” mechanic is not the best idea. But you could easily build an RPG with a time pressure where choosing which side quests to pursue is a core part of the choices and consequences in the game. If the player knows they only have time to complete some of the available side quests in one part of the game, and there will be narrative and systemic consequences to that choice, choosing between them could be interesting rather than frustrating.
In the best RPGs, mechanics like the spirit meter should support both the gameplay and the narrative. They should be motivated by the narrative (as the spirit meter was) but also encourage the intended gameplay and create a better overall experience for the target audience (which the spirit meter didn’t, at least for most players).
