Interview: Scott Jennings

Tabula Rasa, consoles and 600-pound Gorillas.

Scott Jennings is the lead technical designer on WebWars: Eve at John Galt Games. Formerly of NCsoft (working on an unreleased title) and previously at Mythic, Jennings' star has been rising since his entrance to the industry. In a former life he had an alias that's escaping me at the moment. His blog, Broken Toys, is written completely in iambic pentameter. I caught up with him late last night to talk about, well, everything.

Giant Realm: So, Tabula Rasa. What do you think happened there?

Scott Jennings: OK. Well, first off, bear in mind I am by no means an expert on Tabula Rasa. As in, I played it a couple of times, decided I didn't like it, moved on. That being said, I think there were a couple of key things that could have been done differently.

Mainly, the game really tried to straddle the MMO/FPS divide. Thus, it managed to make few happy; MMO players comfortable with WoW and other D&D-style games saw the shootery elements and went, "Hey, whoah, too different, I dunno." Whereas FPS fans didn't think it was enough of a shooter - you couldn't dodge fire, there were still to-hit calcs, etc.

So, that was a pretty hefty strike against it. Another was just simply that it went into beta too soon and got a lot of bad press from that. People tried it, saw it was a mess, never gave it a second chance. You don't get a second impression with MMOs and for a lot of players TR blew it. It's been worked on pretty steadily since then - but for most people, they won't bother to try, because it's a lot of trouble and they already have newer games to play.

Overall, though, I think it just tried to be both an MMO and an FPS. It's really hard to be both. There's a lot of demands for those playstyles that go at cross purposes.

GR: Do you think Tabula Rasa's troubled development (the revisions, restaffing, etc.) and poor launch essentially doomed the game no matter how much work was done or who worked on it?

SJ: I think it made the work a lot more difficult. I have nothing but respect for the guys in the trenches who worked on it (and a lot of the managers for that matter). They basically had a very accelerated development cycle as far as MMOs go simply because it was stopped and restarted.

Can it come back from a poor launch? Has any game done so? I don't think so, so the deck is pretty stacked against it.

GR: How about EVE?

SJ: Excellent counterpoint, and also a great roadmap for TR. Cleave to your strengths, don't worry about the mass market, and let your market find you.

Personally, the thing that excites me the most about TR's future is what they call PAUs, personal armor units. MECHAS. Mechas make every game better. Spore will sell more copies if it has giant mecha.

GR: I'm pretty sure that's what Sega said with Chromehounds.

SJ: Well yeah, but dude. Sega. (cries over Dreamcast)

GR: It's well-known at this point that Tabula Rasa was a giant money sink. It's also well-known that it put a huge amount of strain on NCsoft and essentially caused them to change their entire direction in the market. Do you think that, in today's MMOG market, that putting all your eggs in that sort of basket is a completely insane strategy now? Rather, from your experience at NCsoft, is it a picture-perfect example of dollar signs blocking their ability to see reality coming to smack them in the face?

SJ: Woah, that is a question, isn't it. So, actually, you have kind of a faulty assumption there.  Namely, that TR's problems caused NCsoft to change direction ... whereas actually, it's causing NCsoft to focus to where they perceive themselves as strongest. Which is big, large scale MMOs. Guild Wars 2, the one Carbine Studios is working on, Blade and Soul, others in the pipe that haven't been announced yet.

GR: OK, that's sort of what I meant by changing their direction. They're going from a sort of catch-all to a "nothing but AAA" studio.

SJ: Well, they never were really a catchall - there were movements in that direction, away from big AAA titles. Dungeon Runners was the one that made it to market first.

My project was slated to be second. I can't talk about much about that, save that well, I'm no longer there and neither is much of the Dungeon Runners team.

Is TR to blame for that? You know, NCsoft is so big globally, I honestly don't know. They've had issues in Korea as well - their last big success was, well, Lineage 2, and that has been out a while. The Korean market is so large for NCsoft that other markets are drops in the bucket.

That being said, I'm sure if TR had been a huge hit, there may have been the willingness to experiment more. Or, we all could have been moved to TR's live team! Who knows!

GR: Well, the market perception right now is that if you're making a AAA MMOG, you're going to run directly into the WoW train. Do you think that Korean design mentality has the ability to do this? Do you think PS3 development is magically going to make that work?

SJ: I personally believe that if you're going to challenge a giant, one excellent way not to do this is to run up to the giant and go "YO! DOWN HERE! I'M TAKING YOU DOWN, GIANT!" and then start swinging at its toes.

There may be subtler ways to kill giants.

The WoW train is a real factor, and it's what I was referring to in the Wagner James Au piece.

GR: Well, you're going the opposite direction (at the moment) with your move to John Galt Games. Obviously that nebulous market between WoW and casual games is growing as people float between the two. Is that particular space where more companies should be looking if they want to make a splash?

SJ:  If they're good at it. If they just want to make monies, there's plenty of easier ways to do it.

GR: Like?

SJ: I hear dikumuds are popular with the kids these days.

One of the things that attracted me to the JGG (John Galt Games) position is simply that Webwars is fun. It's also fairly hardcore PvP, oddly enough. Sort of like a Diplomacy game with dreadnaughts.

GR: For those that don't know, what are you going to be doing at JGG?

SJ: My job title is Lead Technical Designer. I'm going to be the guy on the design team that speaks programmer. I speak up during design meetings if something isn't very doable, and help explain to the engineers what the wacky designers wnat to implement.

I also have (in the one whole day I've been there so far) been kibitzing like crazy on the core design as well.

GR: Jumping back in time to four minutes ago, in the aforementioned James Wagner Au piece, you said the following: "While Age of Conan cost just $25 million, the game is having retention issues, largely because the budget wasn’t big enough." Do you really think that was the problem? Maybe my glass is still half-empty, but I see it as more a case of "trying to do too much with too little." They knew their budget. Surely scaling back is better than trying to shoehorn in everything and the kitchen sink, right? In short, would $15 million more have magically saved the game, because that's what the previous article implies.

SJ: Well, the budget wasn't big enough to make a Tortage-style experience from 1 to 80. Would $15 million have bought Tortage-style polish for 60 levels? Probably not. Would any amount of money have? Probably not. But ... that's what players expected.

When they got past Tortage and got to the "kill 40 snakes and bring me the skin because it is yummy in my tummy," players got angsty about it. They felt bait-and-switched because here was this very polished experience which then ... stopped.

Even more than that, though ... the cutoff at that point was just so drastic, I feel like it was a decision point for subscribers. As in, "Hmm, I don't think I want to play any more" decision point. But, zooming out from AoC for a bit to the larger view.

AoC is what they could make with $25 million. If they could have spent $75 million - would it have been a better game? I don't know.

More stuff.
More content.

WoW's earliest days post launch show that players will put up with an awful lot - queues, inability to loot, etc. - if the content is there and is fun. The only way to get that level of content, that type of leading you by your nose, amusement park experience content that people are familiar with from WoW, is through the application of ungodly amounts of money.

If you suck at project management, that won't help either, you'll just waste more money.

GR: It's not just project management though, one of the topics that's been on my mind is "it'll be released when it's done" mentality. It seems that only the best dev studios are willing to put that sort of investment into a game. Blizzard, Valve and Squaresoft come to mind. Do you think the bulk of the industry is heading backwards in that respect, instead of learning from the best?

SJ: So, how long was Team Fortress 2 in development? A decade? No one can afford that unless they are insanely rich with another project and can do it almost as a hobby.

GR: Valve recognized that though, and released what is arguably the single best value in the history of gaming: The Orange Box. Though, I'll continue to contend that the GOTY edition of Deus Ex is the best value in gaming. $19.99. Can still be found at Walmart.

Scott Jennings: Was WoW released "when it was done"? Of course not. They had a release date, and they had to meet it. Blizzard may have been better than most in planning and allocating resources to meet that date.

So, you can say, "Oh, you should just release when it's done! Duh!" but that's not always the luxury you have. Or even maybe the best option - look at 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever .

For the vast majority of projects, you have a finite amount of resources. Developers. Time. Money. All these things have to be allocated somehow. Basic project management stuff. If you misallocate, you miss milestones, and eventually your publisher yanks the rug out. If you mis-estimate, you release incomplete or buggy and everyone hates you.

Message board pontificating to the contrary, this is not a simple process. There isn't a Project plug-in for "MAEK GAME." Good producers that can actually reign in project schedules and deal with publisher pressures and manage their developers are gold.

Which is true in every industry, not just gaming.

GR: Perhaps my question wasn't quite on the mark. Let's try this again: Do you think one of the biggest flaws in the gaming industry is the over-eagerness of the companies (and players) to show off the game before the game is ready to be shown off? For example, the Tabula Rasa Unicorn, Bard and Weird **** trailer.

SJ: There is a reason we never showed off what I was working on. People are learning that. There's no real reason to get players hyped on a game that may be completely different from what they eventually get.

What is the benefit to having a manic website community forming guilds for your game two years before ship? Chances are good they either are going to play your game regardless or will go play something else - much like everyone else.

All early hype benefits are message board punters. I'm one in good standing myself, so I like it. But ... has Darkfall benefited from keeping their fans pumped pumped pumped for years and years? Will that form the nucleus of a strong community, or simply transition into "those wacky guys from beta"?

You played SWG, so you have personal experience with that - the beta community was radically, radically different from the community after ship. It was the same with DAOC - same with every game.

GR: Right now we're staring in the endless maw of a pretty huge release and the dropping of the NDA is taking just days short of forever. What's your opinion on how NDAs should be handled? Between this being one extreme and WoW being the other (no NDA through beta)?

Scott Jennings: OK, without naming names of a Certain Ex-Employer, once you get past a certain point, NDAs are kind of silly.

I mean, people are going to talk. And sure, you can use it as a cudgel and way to threaten people on larger boards - but if you are threatening your potential customers? You may have larger community issues to begin with. If you have a beta that is larger than a real honest to God QA fix bugs alpha - you want people to talk about it - because it is a sales tool at that point, in addition to load testing or balancing or whatever.

Back to TR, that was what hurt them - people did talk about it, they did tell their friends, "Hmm, this may not be ready for release," and it did do damage. So if you aren't ready for people to talk about it like that, then maybe you shouldn't be allowing members of the public into your game.

I really feel that using legal threats to act as clubs against your customers is ... counterproductive. Now, has anyone ever literally been sued to death for breaking an NDA? Of course not, at least not in MMO betas.

But have they lost leet private acksess? Of course. It's a tool to act as a little tinpot dictator on your private boards, and it's a pretty petty and juvenile one. There are ways to manage communities besides using NDAs to squelch all discussion. Obviously, I might be a minority view here. But I do believe that once you have a beta population over ... 10,000 or so? NDAs are useless. You can't enforce them. And if you have a rule you can't enforce? You are simply encouraging the perception of your own weakness.

GR: Shifting gears a bit (completely); we know Age of Conan is supposed to hit the 360, NCsoft and SOE are working on PS3 titles and there are MMOG-like titles coming in the form of M.A.G. and EndWar. Do you think this generation is really where MMOGs could break out, or do you think we're going to end up revisiting the first years of MMOGs all over again?

SJ: I'm not sure that today's consoles really can deliver an "MMOey" experience similar to what we're used to. They can do a Guild Wars-style persistent online game fine! But ... picture guild management via Xbox controller. There's going to have to be quite a bit of just simple interface development to get to that point where we're familiar with on PCs. Which isn't to say it won't happen - but it will be different, and that can be a good thing.

When you have some very clear constraints on how to do things technically, it encourages more out-of-the-box thinking. Or we can get something like the 360 version of Final Fantasy XI, which is ... a port from the PC version, which was a port from the PS2 version. Yeah, let's not go that way.

GR: Is there anything you want to say given the recent climate shift in Austin development? To the players, or coworkers or whoever?

SJ: God. Someone make a new studio here, because there are tons of awesome people out of work and moving that don't want to. Also, if you make a new studio, make something besides MMOs. Austin is getting typecast as Teh MMO City and there's a lot of ex-Midway folks who kinda resent that!

GR: Insert obligatory thanks here.

SJ: Insert obligatory thanks and response here.

Scott Jennings, recently of NCsoft, is now a designer at John Galt Games. He's currently shrugging at the writer. Eric Schild is a writer at Giant Realm and editor of f13.net and likes to end interviews in a way that says "I have run out of room on this page, I will now scribble in the margins."

TAGS: