Interview with Warren Spector
- September 17, 2003 17:50 PM PST
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Ion Storm?s studio director talks about old RPGs, sweater vests, and the fate of Deus Ex 42.
Warren Spector?s game design history goes way, way back?so far back, in fact, that Dunjin Master was playing Warren Spector games when he was in high school, and that was a million years ago. He worked on Wing Commander (the awesome PC game, not the crap movie), for crying out loud, wrote a few tabletop RPG books and adventures for role-playing standby Steve Jackson Games, and then went on to PC gaming notoriety, becoming famous for creating games that were actually innovative and cool. An old-school game designer, Spector doesn?t believe in just rehashing the same crap sequel after sequel. As you?ll read below, he just wants to make games people like.We caught up with Mr. Spector at an event at Ion Storm, where the star of the show was Deus Ex: Invisible War?s playable Xbox version. We asked him about the challenges facing Invisible War in its final development days, his thoughts about PC and Xbox gaming, and a few interesting things he has sitting in his office.
GamePro: Before we start, I notice some interesting things up on your walls. Can you tell me about these wacky Warren Spector pictures on the wall? And I didn?t know you worked on Toon.
Warren Spector: Toon, yeah. I started working at Steve Jackson Games in September of 1983, and it was my first game job. I was a geek, you know, playing D&D and running my own little campaigns, and I designed a little game on the side?a role-playing game?and I played a bunch of board games. Anyway, I got a job at Steve Jackson Games, and I wrote my Masters? thesis on Warner Brothers cartoons. And so I was a cartoon freak, and a gamer, and the first week I was at Steve Jackson Games?I was an assistant editor?I was going through a bunch of proposals that had been submitted. One of them was for this thing called ?Toon?, by Greg Costikyan. It was, you know, 20-30 pages of SPI Case format. I don?t know if you remember what that is, but it?s these dry, lots of tables, complicated rules for how to do cartoon role-playing. And everybody at Steve Jackson Games was like, ?This is nuts! It?s a cool idea, we love Greg, but we can?t do this! A cartoon game in SPI case format?? And I said, ?No, look. We?ve gotta publish this. It?s going to be great.? And so I started working; I was the developer on it. I took these 20-30 pages and basically stripped out half the mechanics and ended up with this wacky, fun little thing. I worked with Steve Jackson, who obviously had a lot of input, and Allen Varney, who was one of my big, old-time collaborators, worked a lot on it; and ultimately, we shipped that thing at Gencon 1984, the same day that West End Games released Paranoia. And so there were two funny, wacky role-playing games that came out at the same time. We were competing to get bigger crowds and bigger laughs for our demos and stuff. Our demo tables were right next to each other and we were trying to drown out the other table. It was great. Toon just went out of print this year?I got royalties on that for 20 years.
Oh, and the funny illustrations on the wall, the first one, the one up on the top, with me going, ?AAAAAAAaaaaaaa? like an airplane, was done by a guy named Terry Manderfeld, who was an artist on Wings of Glory, which is a game nobody remembers I did. Man, I was so proud of that game?it was such a great team on it. It was unbelievable. It was a World War I flight sim, and it was a terrific little game, but nobody remembers it. Anyway, Terry was just doodling one day and he came up with that, and so we put that little thing of me going ?AAAAAaaaaaa,? which I used to do around the office all the time, on the T-shirt, and after that, just on his own, he did a little sketch of me in the costume of whoever the hero was for every game we did after that. So this little character of me ended up on all of our T-shirts and stuff. Terry is my lucky charm. He?s unbelievable. He?s been in this industry for probably 12 or 15 years, and every game he has worked on has shipped, which is an amazing track record. He?s like the Buddha; I rub his belly, you know, to insure that my games ship. And he?s working here now, he was working on Thief, he?s worked a little bit on DX.
GP: So do you have a little Warren Spector ?Garret? picture?
WS: No, no, that was an Origin tradition, so that one stopped after a while. But he even did ones for games that didn?t ship. Another guy did the one for Fire Horse, a game that never finished, down there at the bottom. But there was one for every game I did for a couple of years. It?s cool. It?s either affection or mockery, I?m not sure which.
GP: I see you still have the beard.
WS: Hey man, I haven?t changed much over the years. Those pictures only span about two years. It was ?93, ?94, that period around there. ?94-?95, maybe. I don?t wear a vest anymore. I used to wear a vest every day. It was weird. Seven days a week for fifteen years of my life, I wore a vest. At that point I realized it wasn?t a fashion choice; it was a neurosis, so I stopped, went cold turkey. I don?t wear a vest anymore. [laughs]
GP: Harvey [Smith] was saying that Invisible War has really come together in the last couple of months. What did the game look like before it started to come together, and where was that break were you were like, ?Oh, it?s a game? and then you said, ?Oh, now it?s Deus Ex??
WS: One of the frustrating things to me is that I guess I?m kind of an old-school developer, and the folks who come up with me are old-school developers, too, where the only way we know how to do things is to sort of muddle along until the game is completely playable but no fun. You take your best guess in pre-production, you put it on paper, and you start implementing in production, and you?re going, ?I don?t really know what this game is going to be about. I don?t really know how the game is going to feel, I don?t know how it?s gonna play.? And then you get to a point where it?s completely playable, and you sit down to play, and you go, ?Oh my god, this is horrible.? And it?s not working. It looks bad, the spaces aren?t interesting to explore, there are a hundred things that could go wrong. Then it?s like you have a piece of marble, and you can start chipping away the stuff that doesn?t look like what you want it to look like. So there?s that moment where it?s completely playable that?s critical. Then you spend anywhere from six to nine months, typically, turning it into something great.
I keep saying that we don?t so much develop games as lurch toward greatness. Even now, we?ve got a couple months before we ship this thing, and there?s a lot of, you know, filing, and sanding, and chipping we still have to do. And we?ll do it. It?s stressful. It?s more stressful, I think, for publishers than it is for us, because we know we?re going to get there. Every game I?ve ever worked on has been like this. I wish I knew another way, where we could be more predictable and get to the point where you can implement everything you see in your head and say, ?Hey look! It just magically worked.? But it doesn?t work that way. It?s a lot of grinding, tweaking, tuning, gut-checking? and it really does come together.
There?s a point six to nine months before you ship where you can start the process, and then you get to a point where you get your first complete play-through. That?s a big moment, because at that point, you get to the end of the game and you say, ?I never had enough bio-cells.? So then we have to put more of those in. ?I never felt challenged by the A.I.? Well, okay. Is that a redesign, is that a tweaking numbers thing. Is our A.I. system broken, or are the numbers we?re plugging in not right? There are a hundred things you notice when you can play from start to finish and get the totality of the experience, and we hit that point probably about a month ago with this game. We were playable much earlier than that, but we hit the point where we could really get our minds around the whole game, start to finish, about a month ago. That?s when it gets kinda fun.
I was talking to Harvey this morning and said that the stress level around here is crazy, but this is the fun part! The dreaming part in the beginning is fun, and then there?s this grindingly dull couple of years where you just gotta get it all on the screen, go, go. And then there?s the part where, okay, let?s be sculptors now. Let?s turn it into fun. That?s where we are now. So that?s really kinda cool.
GP: Has there been anything in making this game that you never had to focus on in making previous games?
WS: Yeah. There?s a lot of stuff. When we started building our own tech. The renderer was a big deal for us. We?ve never really used physics to the extent that we?re capable of using it now. Sound propagation, all the new tech stuff was a real challenge for us. We kinda knew what game we wanted to make, because we understood Deus Ex really well when we got done with it, but the tech stuff was a little bit of a risk. It?s kinda frustrating in a way?I probably shouldn?t say this out loud, but I?m going to anyway. The first time [for the original Deus Ex] we had a pretty stable code base from start to finish; we knew what it was capable of, and we were able to focus on the gameplay. This time, we knew the gameplay, so we took the risks on the tech side. And the same way we didn?t maximize the gameplay possibilities the first time, I don?t know that we?re maximizing what our tech is capable of. It?s kind of exciting, actually. I think the gameplay is compelling enough that Invisible War will be great. I think it?s going to please fans, I think it?ll attract a new audience. All of its goals are going to be achieved, but I think Thief is going to take a little bit better advantage of the tech, and in the future, I think we?re going to be doing some stuff that you wouldn?t believe, just because there?s all this capability that we don?t know how to deal with. Starting with, how do you use lighting for gameplay? How do you use sound propagation for gameplay? Our A.I. really is much more robust than it was before. How do we use that in gameplay? We?re probably getting to 60% of what we?re capable of. Which means there?s a reason to keep going.
GP: Right now there?s a convergence between PC and console techonology, or there has been with the Xbox. As a developer who develops for both PC and Xbox, do you worry that that sort of convergence will become more difficult as PCs outstrip the Xbox?
WS: I don?t think the convergence of consoles and PCs as far as ultimate computing capabilities is a bad thing in any way. I think clearly PCs are going to be far more powerful than the Xbox, but hey, you know, the Xbox 2 and PS3 are right around the corner, and they?re going to be pretty rockin? pieces of hardware. It?s an interesting challenge. It?s a challenge on the PC alone, just trying to keep up with all the configuration possibilities, and so this just adds another twist.
GP: So the Xbox is like one more configuration.
WS: It?s one more configuration. Yeah, exactly. So I don?t think it?s a bad thing at all.
GP: Do you think that the technology of games will ever get to a point where it?s simple enough that an independent game developer could come out with a game that could compete with the stuff on the store shelves?
WS: You know, people have been saying that we?re finally at the point where technology will stabilize, and we?re never there. There?s so much that we are not capable of doing right now. The PS3 and the Xbox 2 are going to be so much more powerful than any other console anyone ever conceived, and the PC just keeps getting exponentially more powerful, which means that we can generate more content, we can make things more and more realistic or more and more fantastic. We can go in so many different directions. As long as the hardware keeps going ahead as quickly as it is, the tech can?t stabilize. There are a couple of developers who somehow get away with making games that run on low-end systems, and they attract the largest possible audiences; I don?t know how they do it. If we tried that, we?d get blasted. We can?t do that.
GP: Do you think that?s a matter of having more eyes on you, more press?
WS: Maybe, I don?t know. I don?t want to flatter myself or the studio, but I think maybe we?re a little more ambitious than a lot of other people, maybe we?re stupider. You know, if we just wanted to make maximum money, we could do things differently and more easily than we do. I?d just rather fail than sell. If Invisible War isn?t the game people want it to be, it isn?t because we didn?t try. And it won?t be because we pandered, and it won?t be because we dumbed things down. It?ll be because we took risks and we failed. And I?d much rather do that. I think that attracts attention from the press and the hardcore gaming audience pretty dramatically. Maybe that is part of it. Maybe we?re just under a microscope. I don?t know.
GP: It?s refreshing to hear someone say that.
WS: You know, I will go on record saying that this studio will in fact continue to make games in the Deus Ex universe or Thief universe as long as people want to play those games. I promise that. But I have told the people who pay my bills that if I have to have hands-on involvement with Deus Ex 42 or Thief 17, I will kill myself. There?s too much new stuff to do, and somebody?s got to do it. I want to be the one. And if they don?t want to let me, I?ll go open a bookstore somewhere.
GP: Eidos announced that they are putting their emphasis on Ion Storm and Crystal Dynamics more now. Do you feel more pressure now, with the UK teams less in the picture?
WS: The reality is, the last year or so has been Eidos UK?s year. The year before that, the US was in the hot seat, and now we?re in the hot seat. It?s kinda nice in a way that we get to sort of trade off years. The pressure that I feel is the pressure of expectations. No one was paying any attention to us when we did Deus Ex, and we were kind of a surprise to a lot of people. Certainly a lot of people at Eidos were surprised. And now, we have to deliver not just the quality that the players expect, but we also have to deliver to a schedule that Eidos expects. So there?s this tension, constantly, in every creative business but certainly in gaming, between innovation and execution. We?re trying to walk the fine line between the two. It?s obviously not a ?ground-up? development effort on Invisible War, but we don?t want to just be the company that churns out a sequel every year to milk a property. So we?re trying to walk that line, and it?s very hard. There are elements of this game, as well as we understand Deus Ex gameplay, that we still don?t understand, and we are months away from shipping. So that?s kinda scary. And it?s especially scary for the people who are paying the bills.
GP: Do you have any interaction with Crystal Dynamics?
WS: Yeah, that?s one of the coolest things about the way Eidos is going these days. There were some lean times for a while, and there wasn?t very good communication among the various studios, but recently, over the last year or so, interaction between the two studios has been terrific. I love a lot of the guys over there. They have some really talented folks, and Crystal Dynamics brought in a guy, John Spinale, who?s now running that studio, and he and I get along really well. Without saying too much, there?s very, very close interaction between the two studios on a couple of things that Eidos isn?t ready to announce just yet. But we have constant interaction. They?re feeding us input on their console experience, we feed them input on the whole ?emergent gameplay? phenomenon. We?ve been working in that arena for a long time, and they?re now moving into it with games like Whiplash. Backyard Wrestling is another game where the Deus Ex/Knights of the Old Republic/GTA freeform gameplay idea is really taking hold, and we have experience in making that kind of gameplay. So there?s been constant feedback and interaction. It?s been great.
GP: Does it help with developing Deus Ex?
WS: Certainly, having the expertise they have in terms of console development has helped. I think it?ll help even more in the future, because we already have established the communication system. We?ve been in development on Invisible War for a couple of years now, and there wasn?t much communication early on when we probably could have used it. I think you?ll see even more collaboration and even more communication in the future.
GP: Do you think of the PC version or the Xbox version as the primary build of Invisible War?
WS: No, they are the same. One of them is going to have a keyboard and mouse and will support higher resolutions. There you go.
GP: Do you think there?s a big difference between the hobbies of PC gaming and console gaming?
WS: Consoles are easier in a lot of ways. You put your CD or DVD in the drive, and you?re done. And we know exactly what you have, which is both a blessing and a curse. Damn, I wish the Xbox had more memory. [laughs] I think they both have their advantages. I wouldn?t say one is better or worse. I personally find myself playing more console games than PC games these days, but that?s mostly because it seems like most of the innovation is happening on the console side. I?m older than most of the people in this business, and I?ve played a lot of games, and I have no interest in playing games I played ten years ago anymore.
GP: Do you think that communicating with console gamers is different from communicating with PC gamers?
WS: A lot of people on the publishing side keep telling me it?s different, but I haven?t experienced it personally. Gamers are gamers. I guess the difference is that the PC audience is almost exclusively a ?hardcore? audience, and the console audience has a hardcore component, but it also has this much larger ?casual? element. I have no idea how to reach those guys. There are a certain number of people out there who are interested in the kinds of games I?ve produced or designed or directed over the years, and apparently there?s this much larger audience that isn?t reached through the Internet or even the gaming press, necessarily. And someone else has to worry about how to reach those guys. I would love to reach them. God knows, anyone who tells you they don?t want to reach the largest possible audience is a fool or lying. I think Deus Ex gameplay is really cool. I think Thief gameplay is really cool. I think there are a lot of people out there who would love it if they knew it existed. So I?m hoping Eidos can get the games out there, and that we?re providing a game that they?ll enjoy. I think we are. We?ll see.
