Quest for Glory was a potent cocktail of several gaming flavours that make it stick in the hearts of many golden era adventure gamers, and it’s a series that turned Lori and Corey Cole into cult figures amongst the retro gaming scene. One part point and click adventure and one part roleplay stat building, add to the mix a charming sense of humor and a beautifully realized game world that’s just begging to be explored, and you have an idea of why Quest for Glory is so fondly remembered. Play through these classics today and you can feel the genuine love that was poured into each title by the creators.
Lori and Corey have had a sizeable break from video game development since Quest for Glory V in 1998, but they have never forgotten their fans. The duo have always kept themselves open and engaging to the fan base, even running a website ‘The School for Heroes’ which acts as a spiritual successor to the QFG series, and shares the spirit of adventure instilled in the games they brought to life.
Enter early 2012. Tim Shafer and Ron Gilbert, legendary Lucasarts adventure game designers from the same era as Lori and Corey, launch their Kickstarter project for a brand new point and click adventure game. An classic gaming renaissance ensues. ‘Crowdfunding’ is a term that didn’t originate from the website ‘Kickstarter’, but the site has put it on the lips of classic PC gaming fans the world over. Kickstarter essentially connects creators and fans with no middle man. Voluntary contributors can donate dollars towards project proposals, giving indie game development a model with which it can stand on its own two legs, and for game designers which earned their ‘cult’ status in the adventure gaming golden age of the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s, crowdfunding gives them a new means to do what they love.
Lori and Corey launched their Kickstarter project, ‘Hero-U: A Rogue to Redemption’ on October 19th of this year. Essentially it is a brand new fantasy roleplaying adventure, instilled with the same fun and humour of The Quest for Glory series. As of this post they only have a few days left on the project funding period. Corey was kind enough to answer a few questions for me during the home stretch towards the development future of their new game.
Me: What sparked your return to game design?
A perfect storm of;
1. The rise of crowdfunding for games.
2. The success of recent adventure game projects on Kickstarter.
3. We had already started back into games by doing contract design for outside projects.
4. Making contact with Andrew Goulding to lead the programming.
5. Getting past some family issues that were eating up our time, and
6. Dropping out of World of Warcraft, which was taking the rest of our time.
From the information you've released on Hero-U it really
seems to share the ‘tongue-in-cheek’ tone of the Quest for Glory series. Would
you say this game is connected to that universe or is it more of a spiritual
successor?
Yes. Or maybe it's "and" rather than
"or". We can't make a new Quest for Glory (no license), but our
brains are wired into that Universe, so inevitably similar things will creep
into Hero-U. As for the humour, my brain is wired that way too. I see absurdity all around me and usually
feel the need to comment on it.
Hero-U definitely seems to have that classic adventure/RPG
aesthetic. Are there any more modern gaming sensibilities that you are
incorporating into the game?
Well,
it's our game, and we love tabletop role-playing, and that's what the
"classic adventure/RPG aesthetic" is all about. We're using Unity for
a platform-independent experience, and we're taking advantage of the increased
memory and processing speed of current PC's. But instead of using that for
ever-more-detailed 3D graphics and millions of polygons, we're packing a lot of
that power into the artificial intelligence, character, and story side of the
game. And nice graphics too.
Aside from Lori and yourself, are any more of the ‘old
guard’ from the Sierra days involved with Hero-U?
Not
directly, but we're all supporting each other's projects. The Leisure Suit Larry, SpaceVenture, and
Moebius projects have all promoted Hero-U recently, and we're sending people
their way. We all feel that building a
bigger audience for modern adventure games is good for everyone – us and the
players.
Crowd sourced funding is clearly ideal for veteran game designers with cult followings such as yourself. How is it different working independently without a publisher like Sierra behind you? Is there anything you miss about the traditional game development structure?
With a
publisher, you propose a game, nothing happens for a while, then they either
say "Yes" or "No" – with "No" much more
common. Even when they say
"Yes", they might decide to cancel the project any time during
development. With crowd-funding, things
are much more transparent. You can see
the momentum build. But in a sense that
also makes the process more stressful – Until the project passes its goal, you
have to keep wondering, "Will we make it?"
As for
working independently, we've done that before.
For the Shannara project, we set up an office in Oakhurst, and worked
with artists around the world (as well as a few local ones). Most of our
contact with Legend Entertainment was remote.
Hero-U will be similar. Even
though we don't have a publisher breathing down our necks, and we know that
funding won't be cancelled, we have to answer to our backers. We will have
complete transparency about the process and progress, and we will pay close
attention to suggestions from the people who supported our new game from the
beginning.
What has changed about game development since you last
worked on a Quest for Glory title?
It's
split into two paths. On the one, AAA titles have gotten completely ridiculous.
They have teams of hundreds, spend years developing a game, spend tens of
millions of dollars on development, and that much or more on promotion. The top
games sell millions of copies, and most of the rest lose money.
We saw
the beginnings of that with Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire. I think it started
with a $1.5 million budget and an 18-month development cycle. It ended up
taking more than twice the time and three times the original budget, as we kept
developing new 3D technology, trying and eliminating MMO functionality, and so
on. Much of the expense was necessary, and much was... well, "wasted"
is too strong a term, since we learned a lot from every experiment.
On the
other path are the indie games. Many are made by young developers living with
their parents, and most are on total shoestring budgets. Our budget for Hero-U
looks more like an indie than an AAA budget, but we will be making at least an
"A" level of game. It's too small to interest a traditional
publisher, but it's a big ask for fans to support.
I think
there's a strong need for "in-between" games costing between $100K
and $1M to develop. Players want a smooth, attractive game experience, and they
don't necessarily need vast 3D worlds and finely tuned multiplayer automatic
weapon fire in those games. I want to see more mid-range, high-quality games,
particularly ones that explore different genres and game styles than the big
blockbuster titles.
Where did the concept for Hero-U begin? Did you have a story
you wanted tell and built mechanics around it or vice versa?
Ah,
origin stories. "In the
beginning..."
Ok, you
could point to lots of antecedents. Lori was a schoolteacher before she became
a game designer. Our "Fantasy Guild" (homebrew rules system that led
to the Quest for Glory skill and spell system) campaign featured "The School
of Harad Knox". We had a "correspondence school for adventurers"
in Quest for Glory.
But
more recently, the idea of the school came from a young adult novel Lori
started on with Mishell Baker. They
created the How To Be A Hero site to support it. Later, I worked with Lori on
the successor site, www.theschoolforheroes.com. Hero-U is our project to make the school more
game-like and available to many more players.
We upgraded to a "University" to make the game feel more
adult.
Which aspect of Hero-U are you most excited for your fans to
experience?
Exploring
the catacombs, and the trickiness-based tactical combat, is going to be a lot
of fun. But the main thing that Hero-U offers is more subtle. Everyone will
experience the story differently as the result of their decisions. The game
will feel as though we tailored it for each individual player. In a sense,
we're doing just that.
This isn't some generic
throw-away story to act as an excuse for the game play. The story and characters are a major part of
what makes the game. Players will
immerse themselves and become part of the story.
Where do the development rights to Quest for Glory lie now
days? Could you have branded Hero-U as a new QFG title, or were you more
interested in keeping some distance from that series due to game design changes
in Hero-U?
Activision
owns the Quest for Glory rights since the acquired Sierra. We could not do a
new (or remade) Quest for Glory game without first obtaining a license. We've
heard from three companies that have tried to get that license, but could not
get an answer from Activision. The last word was that Activision executives are
deciding on a future policy for their adventure game titles. They might
reactivate them in-house, license them out, sell the rights, or continue to sit
on them.
Earlier
this year, Activision authorized www.gog.com
to sell a collection with all five Quest for Glory games, plus the original EGA
version of QfG1. We no longer get
royalties from the games, but we're delighted that they're back "in
print" and that new players can experience our games.
Since
we could not do a Quest for Glory game, we are not trying to make a clone of
one. Certain things are common, such as the mix of adventure and role-playing,
the strong emphasis on characters and story, etc. If you look at it that way, I
guess you would say that Atlas Shrugged is to Moby Dick. J As with novels, the computer adventure game
genre allows for a wide variety of stories and styles.
Of
course, we're closer to Quest for Glory than those examples. All Stephen King
novels feel as though they came from the same pen. Hero-U is set in Marete, our world's analogue
of Crete, a location last seen in Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire. There are
reasons for the setting, but we probably could have placed the school in Iberia
with similar results. We set it on Marete as a nod to our fans and because we
"know" that area inside-out from previous game research.
But we
have a different type of story to tell this time. Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption
is all about a particular Rogue, Shawn O'Conner, and his search for
redemption... or power. We let the
player choose his path. It's a coming-of-age story, and your character will
change dramatically during the course of it.
Nominally, Quest for Glory 1 was also a coming-of-age story, but the
Hero really didn't change much other than in stats and skills. Shawn will
experience real character growth in the player's hands.
In terms of your plans for Hero-U, do you think this game
will be the first in a series, or are there other gaming projects you’re
interested in pursuing after this one?
We want
to make it the beginning of a series. Your actions in one game will affect the
next, but you will play a different character in each story. The second game
revolves around a female Wizard with a completely different background,
motivations, and personality from Shawn.
How do you feel about the current independent game
development movement?
It's
exciting. The challenge is for all of these indie games to get noticed. There
is also an issue in that a lot of them are what a professional developer would
consider throw-away prototypes. They may be unfinished, unpolished, or just
plain bad. It can be really hard to tell the difference.
Maybe
what we need is an objective (probably with some subjective points) game rating
system. Two excellent blogs (http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
and http://advgamer.blogspot.com/)
are devoted to exhaustively analysing classic RPG's and adventure games
respectively. We need something like that for current games.
Most of the game trade press either
prints press releases as though they were articles, or has intimate carnal
relations with the games from the biggest publishers and the largest
advertising and slush fund budgets. You can get a good anecdotal idea of some
current games from less biased sites such as http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/,
but it's necessarily incomplete.
I'd
like to see an independent site with a huge database of games classified by
multiple different criteria, and with lots of fan and critic ratings. I guess http://www.mobygames.com/
comes closest among the sites I've seen, but they could use a lot more ratings
and reviews. I'm also not sure how much attention they pay to indie games from
small developers. Few players = few
ratings.
You’ve previously stated that you’re interested in making
more thoughtful, challenging and less violent gameplay mechanics. Is Hero-U a
good representation of this?
Yes.
Combat is turn-based, so there is no twitch action in the game. Even Quest for
Glory had real-time combat, and some players found it frustrating. We do have
combat, but it's presented as a puzzle or problem, rather than a violent fight.
Hero-U is suspenseful, not gory. And the story is about becoming a Hero, or
consciously choosing to do non-Heroic things. We reward thoughtful actions and
good decisions.
Many classic adventure game designers are jumping back into
development via crowd sourcing like Kickstarter. Who else from the Sierra Online
days would you like to see launch a new project, or which classic series would
you love to see revived?
Well,
it would be great to see Ron Gilbert make a new game. Of course, he's working
with Tim Shafer on Double Fine Adventure, so that may fulfil that goal.
We had
a pretty small cadre of Sierra designers, and most of them have already had
successful Kickstarters – Al Lowe, Josh Mandel, Scott Murphy, Mark Crowe, and
Jane Jensen. The obvious missing one is Roberta Williams. You never know though
– She has always had the story-teller's itch and might decide to make a
comeback.
Jim
Walls is in his 70's, and probably not interested in making more games. That
pretty much covers the Sierra designers most people have heard of.
If there are younger gamers reading this, that might not
have ever played your classic adventure/RPG’s, how would you convince them to
get behind the Hero-U Kickstarter?
Ask
them, "Did you love Harry Potter? Or Lord of the Rings? How about
Brave?" We're making a story telling game that combines that type of
heroism and fantasy elements. Like "The Hobbit", Shawn O'Conner is a
relatively unimportant person until he finds himself thrust into the midst of
adventure and given the chance to be a Hero or a scoundrel.
Hero-U
is unlike most current games, in that our focus is not on violent action or
fast reflexes. It's like reading a good book or playing a board game with
friends – Slower-paced, but just as much drama and suspense. Humor too, because
good dramas are better with some humor in between the tension.
Do you have a launch window in mind for Hero-U?
There
should be some tall enough buildings in San Francisco if the Kickstarter
fails... Oh, you mean for the game!
We're targeting October 2013. Our smaller budget means we should be able
to get the game out in less than a year; in fact we almost have to do that
unless we get additional funding during development. The goal is to make the
game relatively modest in scope – All of the action takes place in the school
and catacombs – but gigantic in story, characterization, and depth of game
play.
Hero-U's funding period ends November 20th. If you're reading this and you love classic adventure/roleplay gaming you can make your pledge on the Hero-U Kickstarter page right now.
