General:Richard Guy's Posts

Richard Guy's Posts
Medium/Format	Online Forum
Interviewee(s)	Richard Guy

These are a few notable comments from Richard Guy on The Elder Scrolls setting.

2012

On the games Azrael's Tear and Battlespire (05-16-2012)

Thank you very, very much for the kind words. I'm frankly amazed anyone is still playing Azrael's Tear – I'm amazed it's even playable on current machines. I guess there are emulators that slow the clock down to an acceptable rate for the engine?

I'll answer your questions as well as I can – although I see reading over this that I haven't answered them in order...

It was a huge pleasure and challenge to work on both AT and Battlespire, although my input on the latter was much less: Ken Rolston's the person to credit with any and all design cleverness there (and also, I think, the voices of the minor daedra).

Ken Haywood came to Intelligent Games with the core story for AT written, under the working title "Raptor;" with all the elements inspired by "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and the idea of Aeternis and the mixture of Templars and dinosaurs and the switch ending in his original design. But he was quite sketchy at that time about what was actually in the temple. Over about a year, he and I worked through that together, developing a very deliberately non-linear plot (or, rather, a series of parallel plot options: IIRC there are 4 mandatory "gates" in the design that you have to work through in sequence, so it's a limited kind of non-linearity, but still a huge headache to design, despite its limitations).

[Ken Haywood] may remember it differently, but my sense is that during that process you really couldn't have said who designed what – it all came out of conversation and back-and-forth creation, which extended to the whole team of artists, programmers and dialogue writers.

We were lucky to have such good artists and sound people – we were all just starting out, but there was a lot of talent to draw from... and 3D graphics were then still at the stage where you could learn to do cutting-edge stuff quite quickly. Once we knew what had to happen in a room and where it had to fit in the map, we'd hand it over to a single artist to develop (Doug Telford and Andy Grove did standout work), which I think had the advantage of making each room quite individual and cohesive, rather than enforcing a consistent art style too strongly.

Music was down to Harry Holmwood, who had a lot of very innovative ideas, which have since become quite widespread – he was a real enthusiast and a pleasure to work with.

The engine could use some polish

Yup. And IIRC the game came out in the same week as Quake. Despite having really smart engine and tools programmers, we just didn't have the resources to improve the engine significantly – it was pushing what machines could do at the time, but still not getting anything like the framerate or polygon counts of... well... Quake, which became the de facto industry standard overnight.

a slight impression of being kind of rushed

That's true too – one of my jobs was managing the schedule, and that seemed often to come in direct conflict with polishing up the design. We slashed out big chunks late in development and had to close up some plot plumbing to make it work. And some of that's down to my inexperience at the time: I had some ideas of things to do with the player character but no very clear idea of how to communicate them (with the drop into the grail chamber I can see I was thinking like a film director, not a game designer, for instance).

the intro could make a better job of accustoming player to the game.

...and I think that's down to a shortage of outside input: it was one of the last things to be done, by which time everyone looking at it already knew what it was trying to do – it needed fresh eyes.

one of the best adventure games, I've ever played (not THE best... Riven

You're too kind. Myst set the pace when we started development, and over the next few years after AT, I worked for several game companies that dreamed of replicating Riven but lacked the capital, which for the state of the industry at the time was enormous.

bad luck, Quake release, lack of promotion

some of each, I imagine. I was never happy with the marketing Mindscape gave it, but that was entirely outside our control (like the box art that you mention, which made a lot of folks on the team angry). If I were to work in the industry again, I would pay a lot more attention to that interface between marketing and game creation. At the time I confess I didn't see how important it was (I heard that was also pretty much the year that overall marketing costs for games outstripped production costs across the PC industry: a sea-change was happening in retail, and we were busy dealing with the sea-changes in processor speeds and graphics).

similarities between AzT and the first Tomb Raider game

We were very conscious that TR was in development because of their much smarter marketing presence, doing previews through the magazines. I think the similarity in mood is coincidental, though... maybe we were watching the same movies.

How much was the concept of sequel developed at the time it was decided to drop it? Was there a complete script ready?

Not at all. [Ken Haywood] had some story written, but the rest of the team immediately went to work on another game using the same engine, to try to develop more than one property. That game was never finished, though a bunch of levels were developed for it. It aimed for a lot more running and jumping and combat, and frankly the engine just wasn't competitive.

Regarding Battlespire, it sounds like you've been enjoying Ken Rolston's sensibility. I've been a big fan of his for as long as I can remember (he co-wrote Paranoia, and I think something of his sense of humor shines through in everything he does, even Battlespire). I like the idea of the Elder Scrolls games, as computer equivalents to the old DnD sandboxes, but I've never been satisfied with the execution. And Daggerfall has/had the same bug-ridden trouble as Battlespire, only scaled up, together with the complexity of the game.

It's a facinating example of a really good game created by a small team of really dedicated people

That's certainly true, although I couldn't fault the dedication of the Redguard team, who were in the next room over – they had real faith in what they were doing, and [Todd Howard], who I see is still there after Oblivion, was a great team leader.

...it was released exactly the same day as Quake 2, and with much less sophisticated engine

John Carmack, my nemesis. Well, me and the rest of the games industry through those years...

I want to sincerely thank you once again

Thank you, for writing this, for taking such an interest, and for trawling through these really quite elderly games!

Is there any chance you could consider returning to game industry?

If my son had his way I'd be back there right now! I still think about it from time to time, but I'm working on very different stuff now – architectural and maritime history – and I'm eager to see where that takes me. What I'd really like to do is marry the two – the 3D technologies from gaming and the educational content of my historian work, but that's a topic for another day/post!

Thanks again, and I hope this was of interest,

Richard