Warcry interview, February 2004
Interview with Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer for SOE
02/02/2004
Filed by Pika
Warcry: Mr. Koster, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today! Let’s start off with your new job at Sony Online Entertainment: Chief Creative Officer. What exactly does that entail? Does this position give you more freedom to shape upcoming MMORPGs as you envision? Or does more power entail more responsibilities to the financial bottom line?
Raph: Well, there’s multiple parts to my job now. Whether I actually have more power is kind of up for debate. 😉
One part is that I do interviews like this one. I’ll be doing a lot of that sort of thing, I think, acting as a sort of spokesperson, but also trying to build bridges with researchers, universities, that sort of thing as well. Basically, a conduit of information.
Another part, I advise and consult on all the titles within SOE. My job is primarily to help the teams make their games better, not to have them make my game. I know a lot of folks have been wondering if I’m here to change EverQuest to be more like UO or SWG, and the answer is no. I want to help each team fulfill their vision. I don’t claim to have the Ultimate Answers for Online World Design(tm) in my back pocket.
I’m also trying to take a lead on revamping the community relations approach we’ve had at SOE. Those of you who have been around me in the various games know that I place a high premium on interacting with players and being honest with them. We’re going to be trying to reach out to our playerbases more, not just via forums but also trying to foster more of a sense of community, via things like newsletters.
Lastly, I do get to mess around with some of my own ideas a bit on the side, but I am not working on a project of my own right now.
As far as responsibilities to the bottom line-I’d say instead that it’s given me more understanding of the bottom line and how it impacts decisions. One of the nicest things about the new job is interacting with all the different aspects of the company, from marketing to customer service as well as development. I really enjoy that.
Warcry: What’s a typical day like for you, Raph? I imagine a morning phone call from George Lucas, then you ride to work in your Limo, spend some time in a Virtual Reality machine for an Everquest 3 prototype, and then play games for four hours before going home. Pretty close to the mark?
Raph: Yah, right. I drive my five year old Saturn to work, and spend the day in meetings and reading documents. I’ve never spoken to George, nor gotten an email from him either. I don’t even know if he uses email, actually.
I guess if I had to list unusual things to feed the glamorous image, I would say that I do get to read pitches and talk to people from all walks of life who are interested in making MMOs. That’s kind of neat, because it’s literally all sorts of folks. I get to spend a bit more time now on research and reading up on things, which is nice. So far, more time to play games hasn’t really manifested, sadly.
I’ve been trying to stay in touch on places like Waterthread.org, I hang out on the Terra Nova blog, I still participate in MUD-Dev. Stuff like that is what keeps you in touch and honest.
Warcry: Sony Online Entertainment is undoubtedly the biggest player on the MMORPG scene. In what ways does SOE continue to innovate, and how are you involved in that process?
Raph: Well, innovation comes in a lot of flavors, from the wild crazy high risk thing to the incremental feature addition. I’d like to think we’re up for all the flavors, in different proportions. For example, PlanetSide was a big risk for us-an unproven type of MMO. I’ve noticed that we don’t necessarily get credit for the incremental innovations, but it has to be our bread and butter anyway. You can only do so many hugely risky titles at a given time. Of course, I doubt you guys care how cool the backend conversation tool on EverQuest 2 is.
Innovation usually seems to happen when you see crosspollination of ideas. A lot of my job at SOE is ferrying ideas from one team to another, and for that matter from other disciplines altogether into games and into SOE. That’s pretty much how I always got my ideas too.
Warcry: One extremely popular feature of Star Wars Galaxies is the player’s ability to customize their character’s appearance to an unprecedented level in an online game. Some other games that have or will soon come out, most notably Final Fantasy XI and Lineage 2, have breathtaking graphics like in SWG but much more limited character creation options. Do you attribute this to a Western desire for individuality vs. an Eastern emphasis on group homogeny? Or is character customization maybe not that important a feature when compared to the overall big picture? Something else entirely?
Raph: I’d be hesitant to jump into cultural comparisons-it’s all too easy to stereotype. I think that we are seeing quite a lot of interest in Asia in increased character customization these days, though the preferred technologies (isometric view, 2dish games mostly) lends itself towards approaching it differently.
I do tend to see it as important. People want to have their own identities online, and being able to determine your appearance contributes hugely to that. But it’s less important than a fun game, obviously. Look at games like the modern Gauntlet games or Diablo-the sense of identity comes through skills and items and of course, your name. I do think that as the games place more of a premium on social interaction, the character customization matters more.
Warcry: We are seeing more and more MMORPGs that blend genres, such as RTS-MMORPG, FPS-MMORPG, etc. Passing fad or is the ‘straight’ MMORPG to which we have become accustomed too limited?
Raph: I don’t think that it’s a fad, I think it’s a natural exploratory development. Online worlds can hold a heck of a lot more in them than RPGs. I also think that there’s a playerbase out there that has played a bunch of the RPGs and is looking for something new, but that maybe doesn’t want to go back to single-player or smaller multiplayer gaming. So I see it as completely natural.
If anything, I see a little bit of a backlash here and there against the MMORPG in its classic form. There’s maybe a sense that we haven’t advanced the genre fast enough. My main answer to that one is “it takes three years to make one of these things, give us a break, we haven’t actually gotten to iterate very much yet.” Those who think we’re bumping up on the limitations aren’t keeping that fact in mind. We try things out at a much slower pace than other types of games with faster dev cycles.
Warcry: The ‘Legends’ server in Everquest offers enhanced content and support for an enhanced subscription cost. While that server seems to be holding it’s own, we haven’t seen an additional Legends-like server go live yet. Do you think that there is enough of an audience for these types of servers in other games?
And if I recall correctly, you once speculated on offering customized Player Character action figures, an idea I found pretty exciting. What other things might we see in the future to capitalize on an existing player base?
Raph: This is getting at the whole larger issue of cost to play. Look at it this way-every time the average hours played per week gets tossed around, people react with horror to the high numbers they see. But the other way to look at that is that the cost per hour is dirt cheap. Probably the best value in entertainment spending anywhere.
Don’t react with horror over this, but the fact is that back when UO got launched, we probably underestimated the price the market would bear. That’s why you’re seeing all the games edge up slowly in price. Things like the Legends server or other premium services, upsells ranging from Magic Moments to character transfer services to whatever else, these are all attempts to get a little more money out of you the consumer.
Now, I am not saying this to be moneygrubbing. If the industry finds the correct price point via upsells, premium services, and so on, we’re more likely to be able to provide you with the best value for your entertainment dollar. There are things we don’t do right now because we can’t afford to. The Legends server was basically an attempt to explore that very thing. But there’s other ways as well. I don’t know how many people want action figures of their characters, that particular example might not make sense. But maybe there are other things that say, EQ subscribers might want and that we can provide as part of an EQ service. I don’t know-you tell me.
Warcry: Lots of games you have had a hand in offered what I call ‘sandbox’ play: the ability to be creative in ways not directly related to the game itself. Furnishing a house in SWG, for example, can be a showcase for the artistic talents of the player. What other types of sandbox play would you like to see in the future?
Raph: All of it. This isn’t something that is necessarily widely held in the industry or within any given company, so it’s a somewhat controversial issue. But I am a huge believer in user content. The fact right now is that you cannot base a whole game on it. Nor do I necessarily want to. But I do favor finding ways to give players tools in addition to the burden of entertainment that rests on us as designers and developers.
People tend to tar me as the guy who wants everything sandbox and no handcrafted content. That’s not really an accurate depiction of my approach or (if you go back to the work I did on muds) even of how I personally design things. But oh well, it’s how I’ve gotten labeled, so I guess I have to live with it.
Warcry: We’ve seen Fantasy and Sci-Fi MMORPGs come unto their own since the inception of the MMORPG. If you had to bet on the next big genre, what would it be?
Raph: Hmm, I am not sure. There’s obvious candidates, but genres rise and fall in popularity all the time. I think that we’re not going to see just a setting result in a huge success-the game has to bring something new and interesting to the table beyond just the setting. Certainly there’s a boomlet in social games happening, for example.
Warcry: Some online games coming out seem to be eschewing the trend towards photo-realism in their graphics and are opting for a more animated ambiance. Which do you prefer?
Raph: I think that you cannot divorce art style from the game as a whole. Everything should be working together to create an ambiance. So I don’t have an overall preference, I just have preferences for given games.
That said, I think that photorealism is sort of hitting a wall. It’s getting very hard to stand out in that area. I hope that leads to more interesting art direction. There’s some awesome stuff being done with non-traditional renderers. A few years ago I saw one being done by researchers that literally looked like Japanese brush work. It was amazing. Stuff like that just opens up new ways of thinking about what we can accomplish in terms of setting a mood.
Warcry: Lastly, I was reading an interview with the designers of another game and they stated that MMORPGs today had become more social experiment than entertainment. In your opinion, to what degree are the MMORPGs of the early 21st century social experiments? And what have you learned about human nature from all the time you have spent studying and designing these virtual worlds so many of us call a second home?
Raph: I think anyone who doesn’t think that MMOs are social experiments hasn’t tried running one yet. It’s not that you set out to create a social experiment-we don’t have test plans for our subjects, formal hypotheses to prove, or anything like that. You set out to make a game, and quickly discover that you’re suddenly a politician running a game the size of a city. You’re suddenly a social architect worrying about issues you never had a clue about. Going in and thinking of it just from the side of game means that you’re simply not considering all the aspects of design. It’s a rude awakening.
The ultimate goal is still fun. But for example, when you look at some of the things that have been done in other games recently in the name of streamlining out the tedium and focusing on the fun, you often find that the stickiness or the community got streamlined out as well. There’s interactions there that aren’t necessarily understood by any of us.
I’ve learned a lot about human nature, but it’s been the hard way, empirically, by messing up and making big mistakes that affect thousands of people. Some of it isn’t intuitive at all. That’s why I’ve been reading more and more in psychology and anthropology and sociology; if you’re dealing with people, then it just makes sense. Game design is only one facet of online world design, frankly. Those of us who sound all high-falutin’ and academic when we talk about it aren’t chasing after that stuff just because we like it (I actually kind of hate some of it-economics textbooks get pretty dry!). We’re chasing after it by necessity. We need to understand those things if we’re going to provide better experiences for you the player.
And the bottom line is, that’s what it’s all about, right?
