7/26/99

We have received a number of submissions on Greg’s update before the weekend with many suggestions and comments, but mostly questions. Don’t get me wrong please, but many of you have supplied concrete questions as opposed to suggestions that lend themselves to elaborate on. The game’s release date is nothing that can be discussed in a daily update for example. :) Anyway, there have been some great comments and one thing I noticed was that many of you wanted to know more about creating a role-playing game based on a license - AD&D in this case - and why we ultimately ended up chosing “Planescape”. Justin Busschau for example asked quite eloquently “With all the wealth of talent, ingenuity and creativity bouncing about within the walls of both Black Isle and Interplay, why have you chosen to stick to 'pre-built' settings for your games?” Over the 16 years that I have been developing computer games I have done both. I created original content - yes, that’s how they call games that are coming from one’s own imagination - and worked with licensed property. They both have benefits and drawbacks, as you would certainly imagine. So what made us decide to pick AD&D to create a game rather than going out and doing our own thing? A number of thoughts and reasons lead to that decision. Let me start with the most obvious and blatant one, the one that probably grounds many of you. The prospect of money is a big reason to use licensed property. While it usually costs some money up front to obtain the rights to use a certain setting, in the long run it pays off easily. There is already brand recognition which oftentimes means you can either spend less money on marketing the product, or the level of interest is immediately above the threshhold that original games reach at the same point in time. Because there is usually a big fandom behind the licensed property - and don’t tell me you have never heard of the “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” - it is money well spent. Once the game hits the market it not only caters to the people who love and play role-playing games, but it also attracts the attention of many people who have never tried a computer RPG, simply because it carries the recognizable AD&D logo. Another important aspect is the fact that such a brand has an almost tangible value. Imagine this - you are unfamiliar with computer RPGs but you have to buy a Christmas/birthday present for your nephew who loves to play RPGs on his computer. What do you buy? Of course as soon as you see a famliliar AD&D logo standing out from the box of a game, that’s what you’re going to pick - or so we hope. For most people AD&D is synonymous with role-playing. In the case of the “Realms Of Arkania” games that I have been working on in the past, which are based on a hugely popular German pen & paper role-playing game called “Das Schwarze Auge”, this financial aspect actually killed a number of other products we had been working on parallel to the development. When the going gets rough, decisions were always made in favor of the ‘cash-cow’ - ultimately much to my personal dismay. If you’re in a position that you have to make money - and what company isn’t - you try to put your money on the winning horse. If the winner is as easy to spot as in these cases, the decision is made in an instant. There is a less commercial aspect to it as well, however. Even from a creative standpoint, choosing a license can be beneficial, although every designer has to make that decision for himself. I have come across a lot of people who would not want to touch any material other than their own. Whatever floats your boat is fine with me. There is one huge benefit to using a pre-built setting however that can, and should not, be underestimated. AD&D has been played by millions of players in gazillions of campaigns over countless nights. As a result the game system has been extensively tested. Most flaws have been ironed out over the years and most players have become accustomed with the “Murphy’s Law” snafus the system presents. Converting these functioning game systems to a computer is a no-brainer from a creative aspect. You just need to find ways to properly implement these mechanics in a computer game, which can be another challenge but it is unrelated to whether you’re working with an original or an exisiting system. You do not have to burden yourself with balancing the system however, because it has been done sufficiently in the pen & paper world before computers even entered the picture. If some weapons were too powerful, you can rest assured the good folks at TSR have taken care of that and implemented counter-measures over time. The time you save, not creating a new system and balancing it you can now spend on making your world and story much richer. It’s an advantage I cannot stress enough. It can be loathsome sometimes to be tied within the bounds of a certain game system and its ‘rules’ and history, but if used efficiently, a good designer can turn that into the strongest asset of the game. So why exactly did we chose to use “Planescape” for our game then and didn’t go with another, more popular campaign setting? “Planescape” is obviously one of the lesser known AD&D settings and although the benefit of the AD&D license is still there, the financial aspect takes the backseat. Everyone who has ever given “Planescape” a closer look will agree with me however that it is almost perfectly suited for a computer conversion. More so than any other game system I can think of. Why? Because it offers more flexibility than others. It uses an established set of rules, taken from the AD&D 2nd Edition and from there leaves so much open for interpretation and to the designer’s imagination. The AD&D rules were an easy one for us because we planned to use the “Baldur’s Gate” engine. With that in mind we didn’t even have to think about the rules or the comabt system really. It’s all implemented and with a few minor additions, it would deal with Planescape-worldly creatures and environments just as well as within the “Forgotten Realms”. The huge difference it offered however was the freedom of choice. We knew that as long as we stayed within certain boundaries and didn’t break with the universe’s integrity we were literally free to do whatever we wanted to. This is a liberty you do not have in the “Forgotten Realms” where everything and everyone is chronicled. When was the last time you encountered a creature you had NEVER heard of before in the “Realms?” When was the last time you could break the laws of physics or sat next to a robot in the “Realms?” The “Forgotten Realms” are the archtype of traditional high fantasy, just as Tolkien’s “Middle Earth” is, and as such there are rules, limits and expectations associated with it. People don’t want to see robots in the “Realms”, they don’t want to break the laws of physics, and new creatures have simply no room in that particular world. It’s material for a more fantastic setting - in our case “Planescape”. When we started this game we wanted to make a difference in presentation and content and only the visionary openness of “Planescape” gave us the liberties we needed. It was perfectly suited for the ambitious goals we had set ourselves, and if “Planescape” wouldn’t have been around, we would probably have been forced to create our own game system. That however, would have cost us a lot of time and energy to create, balance and refine to the point where “Planescape” actually begins. With that in mind I feel it was almost an inevitably obvious choice. My thanks go to Justin Busschau who raised this issue and who will be rewarded with a DVD version of “Baldur’s Gate”, but also to everyone else who sent in suggestions , comments and question. Please keep them coming. It helps us focus on issues that we know you want to hear, rather than going off in directions that bore you to death. See you all next time, Guido

Planescape: Torment & Design: © 1998 Interplay Productions. All Rights Reserved. © 1998 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Planescape, the Planescape logo, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Torment, the AD&D logo, and the TSR logo are trademarks of TSR, Inc. and are used by Interplay under license. TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Interplay, the Interplay logo, Black Isle Studios and the Black Isle Studios logo are trademarks of Interplay Productions. Exclusively licensed and distributed by Interplay Productions. All other trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners.