Next Generation 30 Jun 1997 An interview with
Roberta Williams and Mark Seibert
One of the best-known names in computer game design, Roberta Williams is still going strong after 16 years in the business. Through Mystery House and Time Zone, to King's Quest and Phantasmagoria, she is arguably the single most influential figure in the development of the modern graphic adventure. Mark Seibert began as a sound designer, then moved on to produce the latest titles from genre stalwarts such as Al Lowe's Leisure Suit Larry 7. Next Generation visits the Sierra offices and asks, what's next for adventure games?
NG: In terms of gameplay mechanics, graphic adventures haven't progressed much since the invention of the point-and-click interface. What are you doing differently with Mask of Eternity ?
Roberta Williams: Well, we're not really doing much of that click-on- an-object-and-watch-what-happens stuff. Since it's all in 3D, we're concentrating more on the physicality of the world and of Connor. He has a palette of actions, and we're trying to structure the gameplay and the puzzles around those actions. The fighting is its own thing and is determined by what he's fighting, what his strength is, what weapon he has, and the strategy he uses. As far as puzzles go, well, for instance a water mill in Daventry sits on the edge of a river. Inside, a turning millstone moves around a grappling hook and rope you need, but you can't get to it because the stone is moving around and would crush you. You need to stop the stone from turning. A tree upstream hangs over the edge of the river, so you can chop down the tree. The tree falls, dams up the river, stops the water, and stops the water wheel, so you can go back and get the hook. That puzzle is different from what we've done in other adventure games — you're not clicking on the tree with the ax icon, you're physically chopping it down.
NG: Do any puzzles have multiple solutions?
Roberta: We thought about doing that but decided not to.
Mark Seibert: When we first started the design, we talked about multiple solutions and multiple paths. The more we talked about it and the more we researched it, we learned that especially with adventure games only about 13% of the people who buy them actually finish them. [Laughs.] Then it was like, why do we want to make all these multiple paths? Let's spend out money doing really cool stuff, as opposed to making it replayable, since most people aren't going to replay it anyway.
Roberta: Yeah. King's Quest l/was probably the most linear game I've done. It didn't have many multiple branches, but it's been by far the most popular one. And I'm not sure exactly why, except that maybe it was very straightforward. We've really come to the conclusion that people do not replay adventure games.
Mark: We didn't want our puzzles to contain stuff from out of left field. That's a problem in many games, and that's what causes people to stop. When I get stuck, I play around for a while and then quit. Roberta: But the bottom line is that we really are trying to minimize that adventure game idea of point and click, pick up something, sit back, and watch the animation. The animation has been kept very short and to the point — it's very quick. The player controls just about
everything Connor does. In the windmill, the player sees an ax stuck in the
ceiling above that Connor can't reach — he can jump, but not high enough.
That's not the way. But you'll notice that in the room there's a box Connor
can push — he has a push mode like Mario. So you get behind it and push
the box under the ax, jump up on the box, and get it. I know that's not an
especially challenging example, but it's certainly different for an adventure
game, and it shows the kind of action-oriented approach we're taking.
Mark: You get into thinking about the things Connor knows how to do and
how you can use those things to solve problems.
Roberta: So he can jump, he can push, he has all these motions. We're also thinking about his weapons — he can carry any weapon around and has different moves for each one — and he can use those for activities other than fighting. He can cut down the tree, but in the underworld he has to cross the black river of Styx — he can swim, but not there, because it's poison and he'll die. On the other side is a wall with a drawbridge gate.The
gate's up, and there's a button on the wall next to the gate, but he can't
swim there and he can't jump across it, so how is he going to reach it?
Well, eventually in the underworld he can find Thor's hammer that
behaves like a boomerang — you throw it and it comes back. Now if
Connor throws this weapon — using the mouse you aim, whether it's
swinging a sword or shooting a bow or whatever — and it hits that
button, the bridge comes down and the hammer comes back. There's
another example of his palette of moves and how can we use those as
much as possible so the
player feels in control.
Players know the things he can do and have to figure out howto solve problems. So when he's pushing the box, he can push it anywhere in the room, you don't just click on the box and watch him move it. That was the whole idea, to try and have the player feel
totally in control of Connor and what he's doing every minute.
NG: Has the move to 3D precipitated this?
Roberta: I think that with the real-time games that are so popular now, it's obvious that players want more action and want to explore in a 3D space. So when you have the option of doing that, when you have a 3D engine, more possibilities of how to handle a game present themselves. We've got this technology, we can create these worlds in 3D, and put all it together in whatever kind of world we want. But now that we have that, we ask ourselves, "What do we do?"
Everybody's tired of the old adventure game format. They seem to want or like the action-oriented, real-time, role-playing games, but the RPGs get old, since you do the same thing over and over again and rarely have a good story to keep you interested. But people still want more action than traditional adventure games offer. So how can we put that together? How can we marry the two and come up with something new? That's been a real challenge.
Mark: When we started, Roberta had just finished Phantasmagoria, and she commented about how that was as far as we could go movie-wise with adventure games. After that we said, "Let's try something completely different and go a completely different way."
Roberta: Totally different! I mean, with Phantasmagoria I was able to push the scripting and the story and the characters. With this, the story — at least compared to Phantasmagoria — is hardly there. We're really trying to emphasize the action. I've learned over the years, and it became especially clear doing Phantasmagoria, that the more you emphasize story, the less interactivity you're going to have. It's just a fact. I think I was able to marry interactivity with story pretty well in Phantasmagoria, but even then, there were a lot of scenes in which you sat back and watched a conversation, and then you'd click, "Oh, I want her to do this," and then you'd sit, and watch some more while she did it.
Mark: For ten minutes in some cases.
Roberta: Yeah, and you didn't really get a sense of "I'm doing this." So with this game, we really wanted the player to feel totally in control. We don't want animations longer than a few seconds. Actions are based around Connor's moves, as opposed to pointing, clicking, and watching. Mark: But I think the story is still really strong. I think you've got a really good story for Mask, it's just being told in a different way. You don't just sit and watch stuff, you experience it as you go, and get little bits and pieces as you go through the game.
Roberta: The other thing is the story fits and makes sense for the world you're creating and the kind of game you're creating. And so we decided
The story is really strong. You don’t sit and watch stuff, you experience it as you go
that this game was going to have action and combat — it wasn't going to be emphasized in a Quake or Duke Nukem kind of way, but it's definitely going to be there.Then we had to decide how much of the game would be action/combat. I guess we're still arguing about what percentage it should be. [She turns to Mark] You said 80%, but I think more like 70% — maybe 60% ! [Laughs.]
Mark: Well, I've been upping the percentage because other interesting elements present themselves. You can fight monsters; you can improve
your character. So we wonder how big the world is and what other things you will have to do. So I'm saying 80%.
Roberta: Mark is really helping me with the design, because he's really into the role-playing games. He really likes them and understands them. I've
played them, but I have to admit I don't have any particular affinity for them. I love adventure games. I just want to sit down with something like Myst and solve puzzles — I love it! Mark, on the other hand, doesn't play adventure games, although he produces a lot of them! [Laughs.]
NG: You produce but you don't like them?
Mark: No, no. I like them and play a lot of them, but I've never finished one! I always get halfway through and get stuck someplace, and then I have to download the walk-through off the Internet and read the solution, and it's always like, "Well that's a stupid puzzle!" I get so frustrated, I throw it down and never pick it back up. I mean, I liked Phantasmagoria. NG: But at the same time, certainly there has to be some level of challenge, or you might as well watch a videotape.
Roberta: Well, it is a fine line, and the hard part is finding that line.
Mark: True. It's frustrating to have to apologize to people for certain puzzles.
In Larry 7, you have to push on a certain door — in spite of all these guns coming out of the wall implying you shouldn't even touch it — and all of us knew that was a bad puzzle, and that we shouldn't be putting it in, but it made for a big joke and so we left it. Sure enough, people have written me about it all the time and say, "Hey! That was a stupid puzzle!"
Roberta: The two of us make a good mix. He'll sit down and go, "Well, in role-playing, this is what I really like," and so on. And I can say, as someone from an adventure game background, "OK, explain this to me." And we'll talk about it, simplify it, and work it out.
NG: Simplify it?
Roberta: Well, sometimes role-playing games can be very complex, and one of the things I like to do is take a complex idea and make it simpler. I'm sure you've played some adventure games that were complex or illogical. I like to take something that could be a complex idea and bring out its strong points, but break it down into something that's more accessible to people. And so Mark will explain how, for example, the whole character creation system works in a lot of role-playing games, and I'll say how that sounds way too complicated and ask how we can make this more accessible.
On the other hand, I'll want to put in all these adventure game elements, and he'll stop me when I start to put in something that's just more point and click. So it's really been a good back and forth kind of thing, and I think we're doing a pretty good job of melding those two concepts.
Mark: Try to take the fun things about both, but lose the baggage of both. NG: So where do you see adventure games going? The list of games you've created very nearly represents the evolution of the genre.
Roberta: You know, this game is almost like going backwards for me, in a way. When I was thinking about it, King's Quest I is not as dissimilar from this game as you might think. You had a fantastical world, you had limited actions, the story was simple and straightforward, you even had to fight in a couple of places — it happened in an adventure game way, but you fought. It wasn't very deep really.
As I went forward, with each successive game, the story started coming out more, the characters had to be more developed, conversations became more important, and it really culminated with Phantasmagoria, where we were doing video and camera work. I think the story began to overpower the game.This game is almost like going back to King's Quest I. You're on a quest, and everything is very straightforward in that sense. There's a story around that — it's not devoid of story — but everything happens in an interactive, physical way. But as for where they're going next — well, I can't speak for other developers, but I would probably bet that adventure games will have to be more action oriented. When you're in a 3D world, by its very nature it's more physical.
Mark: We put a lot of action into this, and I don't know if this kind of action is necessarily the wave of the future for adventure games, but I do
The idea was to have the player feel totally in control of Connor and what he’s doing
think the idea of interactive action is important.
Roberta: Yet there's a fine line, because as soon as you say there's going to be more action, you get into a prickly area. Should the game have an arcade feel like Mario ? Do we want to require timed jumps, hand-eye coordination, and lots of complicated button moves? We talked about that, and we decided that in this case, we did not want to be so action oriented that the player had learn all these special moves. Mark: Our solution is a solution for King's Quest itself. I was talking to Al Lowe about the next Larry game, and he looked at what we were
doing and said, "So we're going to have Larry run around and hit people?" For that game, it wouldn't work. He'll have to figure out what action means for Larry. Roberta: That's very true. I was able to put together a kind of fighting thing for King's Quest, and it works very well because we have knights and swords and dragons anyway. But something like Larry, or something like Gabriel Knight, what are they going to do? They're going to have to figure that out.