Welcome everybody! For the second time around Ted Peterson, Lead Game Designer for Daggerfall, answers our questions. Since MW-Italia is not in the condition to post news thanks to the Italian Order of Journalists, I thought there would be no better place to host this article than Dalin’s. If you have missed it, rush yourself to Ted’s first interview before going on.
At this moment Ted Peterson is busy designing Jurassic Park Survival, the first title from Savage Entertainment based on the Sabertooth engine. But he has also written short novels and comedic acts for the books of the game we eagerly await.
Ultimate: So Ted, first off can you tell us exactly what is your role in Morrowind and what have you done so far?
Ted: I have really no official role in Morrowind, except as the original author of a number of short stories, poems, plays, and a variety of other writings that will be available in Morrowind as “books.” It’s sorta a strange situation, where such a lot of time has gone by between Daggerfall and Morrowind that a lot of stuff I wrote a long time back is resurfacing.
Of course, the designers who are currently employed at Bethesda are the ones who are doing all the editing and restructuring of the books when needed. They’re also the ones who pull out the fat, and add some emphasis to the skill-building portions of the book, since that’s the real gameplay aspect of the books. They’re meant to be entertaining, of course, but they have the added functionality of increasing a player’s skills. So a passing reference to someone using her sword, or someone else enchanting a necklace becomes more of a focus, without losing the narrative. It can be kinda easier-said-than-done.
Other than that, I’m lucky enough to be consulted from time-to-time about certain issues about the Elder Scrolls universe. Ken Rolston and Todd Howard have a very firm grasp on all the game aspects of the world, but sometimes they like to have someone to bounce ideas off of, usually about real minutiae of the world – is the Emperor ambidextrous? Does Sheogorath have good or bad breath? How long was the Five Year War between Valenwood and Elsweyr? (Answer: Five years).
Ultimate: So is the emperor ambidextrous? 🙂
Ted: That’s one of the great mysteries of the Empire, which I believe Ken and Todd plan to answer definitively in The Elder Scrolls XIV: South-Western Skyrim Suburbia. The Right Hand League of the Colovian Estates, of course, insists that the leader is right-handed, as all Emperors of True Blood have been (mad Pelagius and his Dunmer wife Katariah, naturally, not being of True Blood, and therefore being lefties). The cabalistic Sinistera insists that the Emperor is not only a leftie, but that his right hand is also a left hand so when he thrusts his hands out palms down, both thumbs point right. They are mad, but is there truth to it? I wonder…
In order to keep peace in the kingdom, the Emperor writes ambidextrously, with perfectly terrible handwriting with either hand. He also can’t catch a ball, even thrown to him underhand. It is said that his heir has perfected the ancient Bosmer art of foot-writing. Of course, all this may be wrong. I only say what I hear.
Ultimate: People greatly enjoyed the two pieces of literature that have been published on Elderscrolls.com. What was the main inspiration behind them?
Ted: I don’t think anything specifically inspired their style, but in each of those there was something in the Elder Scrolls background that I wanted to remind people of. “A Hypothetical Treachery” takes place in Elden Grove, one of the dungeons players of Arena will recognize; and “The Armorers’ Challenge” occurs during the reign of the Empress Katariah, the only Dunmer who ever ruled all of Tamriel. Of course, the narrative of the stories don’t really depend on the existence of Elden Grove and Empress Katariah, but before I wrote them, I remember thinking, “I’d like to revisit this place” and “I’d like to describe the world around this person.”
Ultimate: Approximately how many words did you write for new literature in the game, condensed in how many pieces?
Ted: There are well over a hundred books I’ve written myself, and I know that Ken Rolston, Douglas Goodall, Michael Kirkbride, Ken Kuhlmann, and a bunch of other writers have sizeable contributions as well. Unfortunately, I can’t really answer how many words total, since they’re not being edited by me. But, let’s say, at least on average a 1000 words a book. In MS Word, they’re between one and four pages in length. So, I’d estimate somewhere along the lines of 150,000 words of fiction.
Ultimate: Shall we be able to see the comedies represented by npcs in the game in theatres?
Ted: I doubt it, though I’m sure you could put one together in a mod if you wanted to. It’d be a pretty strange experience, bringing your character into a theatre, sitting him down, and watching a bunch of npcs act for you. Probably not everyone’s idea of fun, since it’s not exactly interactive, but who knows?
Ultimate: Is there any culture, race, or great house you focused on?
Ted: I didn’t really focus on anything, except whatever interested me at the time. That’s the nice thing about writing just for your own amusement. The current designers at Bethesda are the ones who really fleshed out Morrowind, so they wrote most of the books detailing the world you’re playing in.
Now there are some books that are serials, six to twelve books in length about certain characters and time periods that I thought needed more than a passing reference.
Ultimate: Can you name one of these arguments that deserved more space?
Ted: A serial about aforementioned Five Year War between Elsweyr and Valenwood; another about Potema, the “Wolf Queen” of Solitude, who started the civil war of the mid 3rd Era; a month by month serial about the final year of the 1st era, when the last of the Cyrodilic Emperors died without heir, and left his Empire to the Akaviri Potentates. I don’t know if anyone beside some hard-core fans and myself are going to care about the stories except that they’re entertaining (hopefully, that being of course the first aim) and many of them can help the characters raise skills. But I write chiefly, like I said, purely to entertain myself and answer questions I’ve asked myself.
Ultimate: An argument you greatly enjoyed writing about?
Ted: What I enjoyed about writing the Morrowind books was the level of detail I could start to afford myself in the fiction. In Daggerfall, I wrote serials like “A Brief History of the Empire,” in which I had to zip through four hundred odd (in some cases, very odd) years of history, touching on each Emperor in a paragraph or two. For Morrowind, I could devote an equal amount of time talking about characters briefly mentioned before that I’ve found interesting, some of which are very peripheral in history. In several books, I’ve found it rewarding to deal with a historic event with a dramatic backdrop from the point-of-view of a very common, non-heroic protagonist. For some reason, writing fantasy I need to keep it grounded like that for coherence. Other writers, Michael Kirkbride particularly, write stuff that’s almost prose poetry, very cool but almost incomprehensible. It’s nice, because he writes stuff that reads like Tolkien’s The Simarillion, which is very different from my style. So the reader can really get a sense of different authors writing. I can honestly say that I didn’t write about anything I didn’t enjoy writing about. That’s the nice thing about it – no one said what I had to write. How rare an experience is that?
Ultimate: What about the daedra (and the aedra as well)? Shall the books shed more light on these beings, given the relationship that links them to the dunmer?
Ted: Yes and no. The daedra individually and as a group are very complex and sometimes paradoxical. A lot of their power is in their mystery, and as a writer, you don’t want to make them too easily understood. That said, there’s a lot more about the daedra in Morrowind, both in the books and in the world itself. After all, like you said, there’s a closer bond between them and the Dunmer. The Redguards and Bretons who populated the world of Daggerfall worshipped the Aedra, not the Daedra.
The Aedra are even more mysterious than the Daedra, and less inclined towards direct involvement in the world. I haven’t written anything myself that deals with Mara, Kynareth, Akatosh, and all the rest, but that’s not to say that there aren’t books about them in Morrowind.
Ultimate: What makes the TES world stand out from the crowd of fantasy worlds out there is its huge amount of lore, of which you are one of the main authors. Considering the actual size of all this lore as contained in Xanathar’s Library (Note: now The Imperial Library), how much will it grow when Morrowind ships?
Ted: Many, many times over. There were only about sixty books or so in Daggerfall. There’s also a good amount of lore written by people like Michael Kirkbride and Kurt Kohlmann during the development of Redguard, particularly the Pocket Guide to the Empire.
And that’s just the “official” stuff. There’s a lot of fan fiction out on the web, and I’m amazed by the quality of a lot of it.
Ultimate: One of your favourite fan fics, so we can go out and read it?
Ted: Check out the Chaos Panache website (Note: site does not exist anymore). It’s been going on for years now, just an endless story the fans keep contributing to. There’s enough there to keep you entertained for weeks, and its amazingly researched by each writer.
Ultimate: Shall we be able to find the cool old books from daggerfall like “the real barenziah” in morrowind?
Ted: From what I understand, a number of the books from Daggerfall are also going to be included in Morrowind. I don’t know specifically which ones, but Barenziah might make the cut. There are some books with really no relevance to the world of Morrowind, so I wouldn’t expect to see them all in the game. After all, there’s not much call for a book describing the flora of Wayrest in a bookshop on the other side of the continent.
Ultimate: Talking of e3, after the show was over many gaming sites selected the “best of” titles for each game category. Neverwinter nights was the overall winner for rpgs, thanks to its excellence and to the leading position and (history of quality) of black isle. Yet morrowind did exceedingly well for a title that lacks the hype of games like baldur’s gate.
Indeed Morrowind managed to beat Neverwinter Nights for the Best RPG prize on many a site, last but not least the infamous Desslock at GameSpot. What are the reasons of this success and what the features that a hardcore crpg like Morrowind has to offer to the average roleplaying gamer?
Ted: I did get to see Morrowind at E3, and I think what excited a lot of people was how beautiful it looks. The screenshots don’t really do it justice – it’s one of those things that needs to be seen in movement. Todd Howard is particularly brilliant at designing unobtrusive but flexible and intuitive interfaces, and the look on the reporters’ faces as he casually ran around the world and interacted with everything was pretty priceless.
As far as the question of whether the average gamer will like Morrowind or not, I don’t know. I myself am not attracted to the mass-market games like Deer Hunter, and I have to assume that people who play them won’t care to play Morrowind. I think it’s pretty dangerous to try to expand your game’s appeal too much. If you try to make everyone like a game, you end up watering it down so no one will like it. From everything I’ve seen, Morrowind will be infinitely more accessible than Daggerfall was, but it’ll be a far cry from the dreaded “RPG-Lite.”
Ultimate: You pointed out the beautiful graphics, and the ease of the interface. Do you think that these prominent features will be able to attract the more casual gamers that know little of rpgs, and make them get past the initial confusion caused by such a complex title?
Ted: Can there be any doubt? Only a hard-core gamer is willing look past pixellicious graphics and a complicated interface in search of a great game. That’s one of the sad facts about the industry, and the reason why old games, unlike old movies, quickly lose their appeal. I’ve talked to a lot of people who actually work for game companies and ought to know better who won’t play any game that came out before the era of super high end 3D graphics cards. Let alone pre-CD-Rom games.
Ultimate: In the previous interview, you said daggerfall had a moderate influence on the gaming industry, which at that time had been taken by storm by diablo. Do you think that Morrowind will leave a deeper mark on it, to the point where the future market will spot other complex and hard-core rpgs like it (as of now, the only title that could be compared to Morrowind would be project ego by molyneux, which is in early development. But i’d still say there is a far cry between the two. In Morrowind magic users don’t get bald! :d).
Ted: I think it’ll take a couple months after the release of Morrowind to be able to tell. In the vast majority of cases, the decision about what kind of game will be done is made not by developers, but by publishers. Bethesda’s in an unusual position because it’s both a developer and a publisher, so the money and marketing people are in the office next door to the designers and programmers. In most other cases, the publisher looks at market data and time and money estimates, and role-playing games in general are not very cost effective. They require veteran talent and lots of time, which is a formula for high expense. And except in rare instances, they aren’t breakout hits.
In the case of Morrowind, it’s bucking the trend so much by being a single-player only RPG in the days of MMORPGs that it’s bound to spark the imagination of rival publishers and developers. It’s certainly posed for greatness.
Ultimate: In your opinion, where does the future of TES lie after Morrowind and its official expansion?
Ted: The immediate future will obviously be in the fan-created mods. As far as what the boys and girls at Bethesda have planned for us next, your guess is as good as mine.
Ultimate: But if you were to name a title set in tamriel, belonging to a game genre untried in this fantasy setting, what would it be? “tes: the sims” ? :d
Ted: How about a god game, or actually a daedra game? Instead of Black and White, it’d be, um, Black and Blacker. Off the top of my head.
Ultimate: Are you going to play Morrowind?
Ted: Oh, I have some moderate interest in it, I suppose. Unless another huge, beautiful, complicated CRPG comes out, featuring stories written by me. Heh heh.
Ultimate: What race/class combinations are you going to try first?
Ted: Well, you gotta try out the Cyrodiil and the Orc, first, since they’re the guys who weren’t playable in the other Elder Scrolls games. I’ll probably design my own class, but as for what combination of skills I’ll pick, I’m not sure yet. I do have a hankering to be a Morag Tong assassin. Heh heh.
Ultimate: Let’s talk about you. How is life going at savage?
Ted: Mighty fine, thanks. We’re gearing up towards alpha, and most of the functionality of the game is in there now. Next to the beginning stages of a game where you figure out the story and how everything should work, this is my favorite part of making games. Seeing everything come together.
Ultimate: Give us a description of the game you are working on.
Ted: It’s called Jurassic Park Survivor, and it basically continues on where Jurassic Park 3 left off. Of course, since Jurassic Park 3 isn’t out yet, that doesn’t mean anything to you, but hopefully it will soon, since the movie’s out this summer and the game’ll be out for Christmas.
Anyhow, you play a security system designer who is brought on to set up safe laboratories for a group of scientists who are studying the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna. Without going into too much detail – the plot really reveals itself as you play the game – things go … Wrong Horribly Wrong ®.
It’s an action-adventure kinda game, focusing on combat with both humans and dinosaurs and a good amount of exploration and puzzle-solving. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, but what the hell do I know?
Ultimate: Your role as the lead game designer?
Ted: Well, in the beginning it was all about writing a bunch of documents, coming up with a story, figuring out features and their practical impact, laying out preliminary levels, and mission logic. Now, it’s basically just being present so the designers and artists and programmers can ask me questions. I figured out ten years ago that it’s not just enough to say “just make it cool.”
Ultimate: How long have you been working full time on this title?
Ted: About a year and a half, I think. I’m a bad judge of time, and it’s a little hard to figure out when the full time work on the game itself began.
Ultimate: If you were to choose between action-adventure and thriller-adventure, how would you define it?
Ted: That’s interesting, there’s a lot of plain straight-forward action in the game, but maybe a thriller-adventure would be a more apropos genre. You can go in guns-blazin’ like you were playing Quake, but you’re probably not going to last too long on the island with that strategy. Early on in the game, you’re going to be faced with some really dangerous situations you’re going to have to use your brains to get through, not your trigger finger.
I guess if Heavy Gear Solid, and Thief, and parts of Tomb Raider and Resident Evil would be called thriller-adventures, so would Jurassic Park Survival.
Ultimate: So there is some degree of stealth and strategy in the gameplay?
Ted: Definitely. You’re dealing with dinosaurs, after all. Standing in the way of your goals can be something 13 meters long, seven tons in weight, with jaws capable of eating a human in a single bite. And you’re hugely outnumbered. If you don’t employ a little strategy and care, you’ll be passing through something’s digestive tract in no time.
Ultimate: A cool feature you greatly enjoy?
Ted: It’s not really a feature per se, but the atmosphere of the game is coming together nicely. We’ve got raptors stalking you through fields and weird cave dinos and a pretty nail-biting couple of levels where it’s just you and a hungry T Rex. I like the interactions between the predator and the prey in the game, where sometimes you’re just an observer, and sometimes you’re one or the other.
Ultimate: What structure did you choose for the unfolding of the story? Are we going to find documents and letters that reveal it bit by bit?
Ted: Certainly, compared to other games I’ve worked on, this one is very linear. We’ve got an introductory animation, and several more sprinkled throughout the game to tell the story at those time where the player can’t be distracted by actual play. But there’s a lot you pick up in the course of the game as well when you meet certain characters.
Actually, there was a discussion early on in the development of the game about whether we should try to follow the storyline of the Jurassic Park III movie. The idea (which I should hasten to add wasn’t mine, though I’ve had my share of crack-smoker ideas myself) was that the characters in the movie leave you notes to help prod you along. If you see the movie when it comes out, you’ll realize how ridiculous that would have been. There aren’t exactly a lot of times where Sam Neill, Téa Leoni, or William H. Macy would have paused to put pen to paper. It’s not, well, what you’d call a quiet movie.
Ultimate: Any funny events recently?
Ted: I don’t know if this will translate as a you-just-had-to-be-there, but some friends of mine swung by the office to see how the game was looking. There’s a jungle level where you run into a bunch of compys (those are the little meter-high critters from the second movie that travel around in packs). Just so I wouldn’t die, I set invulnerable mode on, but even though you don’t take damage with the cheat up, the character you’re playing reacts to damage.
So I’m playing the game and showing off all the lush jungle locations, and suddenly a compy jumps out of a nearby bush and rushes straight into my character’s crotch. My character doesn’t take any damage, of course, but he kinda rocks back and groans. The compy continues to attack my guy’s crotch region. Naturally, it looked like something very naughty was going on, which my friends were quick to recognize. “What kind of a game is this?” “Ah, at last, a game that isn’t afraid to expose the tender love between a man and a prehistoric lizard.” “Well, I suppose I could stay on Jurassic Park for a bit longer…”
Ultimate: What are your plans after jurassic park survivor?
Ted: Ah, vacation, with any luck. Reconnecting with friends who’ve left a lot of messages on my answering machine asking where I am.
Ultimate: Is there a chance for you to get working on an rpg sooner than later?
Ted: Oh, sure. One of the people we hired on at Savage a couple months ago is Michael Kirkbride, whose name fans of the TES series will recognize. He’s gotten me talking about role-playing games again, for the first time in a while. Most everyone else here plays the games, but they’ve mostly had experience making big robot games like Mechwarrior 2. We’ll bring ’em around to the Right Way of Thinking, don’t you worry.
Well, thanks a lot for your time, Ted! Keep up the good job and hurry up with any RPG project you have in mind!