Fantasy author R. A. Salvatore talks video games, 38 Studios, and the future of the video game and MMORPG industry.
"When I'm telling stories of my video game days," R.A. Salvatore tells me, "when I was a really hardcore MMO player, I played EverQuest for two years and played World of Warcraft and several other games for the last ten years or so...95% of the stories I'll tell you are EverQuest."
The world, the way the game was designed, Salvatore describes it as chaos. You were never safe. Games aren't like that any more, he says.
"You'd be in a fight and wandering monsters would come by and join in, or someone would come by with a train of monsters chasing him and get you wiped out. Now people say 'Yeah that's a lot of fun.' It's not a lot of fun, but that sense of danger was there. In a game like World of Warcraft, which I loved and played for many years, it really became a numbers game.
"I'm thinking when Burning Crusade came out," he continues, "if you didn't know the formula for beating the bosses in the dungeons than no matter how well you played you were gonna get wiped. It got to the point where you had to have your damage meter running and if you weren't doing X damage per second for your class they would boot you out of groups. It's just a different way to look at gaming and adventuring than the old EverQuest was."
Video games have lost what makes them great, Salvatore argues.
"When I was working at 38 Studios my argument was that there were things that we've lost in video gaming since EverQuest that have been big losses that people don't understand as losses," he tells me. "For example, in EverQuest if you lost a fight to a monster it was painful. You had to go on a corpse run, you had to get your body back, you lost experience, it was brutal. And everyone's like "Yeah nobody would do that anymore" and that's a shame. When you take the cost of losing out, you take away much of the sense of accomplishment of winning."
Interestingly enough, my biggest critique of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the game Salvatore worked on with 38 Studios before that studio's financial collapse, was that it didn't pose enough of a challenge.
The combat was a lot of fun---at first---and there was a big, epic world to explore, but as soon as you powered up and grabbed a couple of those seriously over-powered chakrams, you could basically spam your way through just about every enemy you encountered. Death had no serious consequences. There was never a real sense of peril.
I ask Salvatore which video games he plays these days.
"I talk to some of my friends who tell me about some of the single-player RPGs that are just brutal...I think Dark Souls is one that they were telling me about." (And here, I make a mental note to talk more about Dark Souls as soon as I have the chance....)
But really, Salvatore hasn't bitten on any of these, and with good reason.
"I really haven't played much in the last year or so because the last game I got into was Reckoning," he says. "When 38 Studios collapsed, the pain of all that, I just turned away from gaming for a while."
38 Studios, the game developer founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, collapsed in 2012 after the company ran out of money while developing a new MMORPG set in the Amalur universe.
The once-promising RPG developer fell to pieces quite suddenly, laying off all of its employees when it turned out the studio could not make payroll or loan payments to the State of Rhode Island, which had loaned 38 Studios $75 million through its economic development program.
While Salvatore has been working a bit with Cryptic on the upcoming Neverwinter MMO, it's nothing like his involvement with 38 Studios. Salvatore says he has no plans to make that sort of commitment to a video game in the future.
"It was a lot of fun," he admits. "It was wonderful, I made friends I'll have for the rest of my life. If you look at my Facebook friends, half of them are people I met at 38 Studios. These are just good people who...we share a wonderful hobby. But when I quit my job in 1990 I said I'd never work in an office again, and I wound up working for someone else in an office again. I would do freelance work from the side, but I don't think I'd get that involved in anything again."
When the World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria came out, Salvatore dipped back into the game again, but the thought of leveling up a new character was simply too daunting. So he went back in with an older character he hadn't played in a few years and realized, to his horror, that all his once-powerful gear was now irrelevant.
"It's amazing to me how just the color-coding can change your perception of things," he says, "because I had purple items and now I'm going to green items that are better than purple items on my first quest. It was such a disconnect at this point that I just couldn't go back to it."
We talk a bit about loot. These days, so many RPGs are defined by their loot systems I say. That wasn't always the case, Salvatore says.
"This is another debate I had with the designers [at 38 Studios,]" he says. "If you look at the way it's gone in games, even tabletop RPGs, and compare it to 1st Edition D&D or EverQuest---we'll call those old school and World of Warcraft and newer editions of Dungeons & Dragons new school---you're making weapons and they're +1, +2, +3...and they're magic and they're all over the place. If you look back at 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons in the Dungeon Masters Guide they had all of the weapons: they had a Frost Brand, they had a Dragon Slayer, they had a Giant Slayer Sword. These weren't supposed to be common items. You could find a +1 sword or a +2 sword and all of that, but they had names for items, and a lot of them had history, or the names implied history."
This might be a good time to jump in with some Dark Souls talk---after all, that game has a name for basically all the special weapons and items, with a tidy little description for each of them that fleshed out the lore and history behind the item. But I wait.
Instead, we talk some more about EverQuest---a game which, I'm ashamed to say, I've never played. Salvatore makes it sound fascinating.
"One thing that always makes me crazy is when you're playing games like Reckoning, Elder Scrolls, is if you learn how to min/max your trade skills you'll build better weapons than you'll get off the top boss in the game," he laments.
In EverQuest, on the other hand, weapons and items matter partly because they're not as easy to come by.
For instance, Salvatore knew that if he hung out in the Oasis of Marr he'd be able to fight a legendary alligator named Lockjaw who showed up once and a while.
"If I could ever kill him and get his vest, it would be the optimum item for my character," Salvatore says. He was playing a monk at the time. And, to be fair, he says the game went sort of overboard in this regard, since five hundred other people would be hanging out waiting to kill Lockjaw at the same time. Other times, a high-level character would come and kill some monster he was waiting to kill and run off with the loot, leaving his the poor monk empty-handed.
Another time Salvatore was playing his monk character and was about to get the skill Flying Kick. This was a big deal, apparently. He loved the animation, the move's damage potential, basically everything about Flying Kick, and he was just one level away from getting it. So he's once again in the Oasis of Marr and there's a massive battle going on. Six teams of six players are all lined up fighting an endless horde of monsters.
In the end, "it looked like the Antietam battlefield...there were bodies piled on bodies the length of the oasis."
But he survived and he made his next level, so he raced back to the trainer to get the much-anticipated Flying Kick skill. He was too excited apparently, and when he got to the trainer he hit "Enter" to type out the word "Hail" but he didn't hit it hard enough. So the interface didn't pop up and when he typed "H" nothing happened.
Unfortunately the letter "A" is mapped to "Attack" so when he unwittingly typed the second letter he attacked his trainer. Naturally, the trainer killed him with little hesitation---and in EverQuest, death isn't just a corpse run, you lose experience.
Salvatore's monk lost enough experience to lose the level he'd just gained. So much for Flying Kick.
"At the time I was ready to throw my computer out the window," Salvatore recalls, "and then I was laughing so hard I couldn't stop laughing for a day. Those are the kind of things that really made it, but they don't allow any of that anymore."
Still, "life isn't always fair," Salvatore says, "and there's supposed to be pain to go with the pleasure. Otherwise you don't even notice the pleasure." The trick is the realization that everyone's tastes vary, that there's a different sweet spot for everybody.
So here's my moment, because I have a similar story about Dark Souls that this reminds me of, and I guess at this point I want to convince my interview subject, a famous fantasy author, to play a video game I like. Maybe this isn't how interviews are supposed to go, in a strictly traditional sense---I'm not sure, I just feel like we're talking about similar value systems at this point.
So I talk about the time I was first playing Dark Souls, and I was in the Undead Burg and I'd only just found the Undead Merchant. It was maybe my second or third time down there and I got attacked by one of the skeletons that was lurking behind some crates. I knew he was there, but I forgot about him, and then suddenly there he is while I'm trying to buy arrows or chain mail. I can't remember.
All I know is that when I swing my sword I accidentally clip the Undead Merchant and he attacks. Instinctively, I fight back and kill him. It's not until later that I realize he's not coming back. There's this immediate, unchangeable consequence to my action that simply can't be undone, and it stung.
"It's not like that now in gaming," Salvatore says. "It's just different sensibilities. I'm not saying one is right or one is wrong, but I do think in going the way that games have gone they've lost some of the charm...and the pain, and pain is not always bad."
Everyone may have their own sweet spot for video games, but that just enforces Salvatore's belief that the days of massive AAA blockbusters designed to appeal to everyone are drawing to a close.
"Here's what I think is going to happen," he tells me. "I don't think $100 million games are dead, but they're certainly going to become fewer and further between. If you look at the number of studios that have just exploded, fallen into bits, because one game they were doing that didn't hit the way they needed it to hit, or because they were never able to finish because they ran out of money---I know this painfully and personally---what you may see coming from that are people doing niche games. I think you'll see more of the smaller, less ambitious in terms of "We have to have a World of Warcraft" audience MMOs and things like that coming out and maybe you'll get more for everybody."
More for everybody in that you'll have more games designed with smaller audiences in mind rather than fewer massively expensive games geared toward that ever-elusive "mass appeal."
"If you're gonna make an MMO that costs $150 or $200 million or up like the Star Wars game that came out," he continues, "who's gonna have the courage to not make a WoW clone and spend that kind of money? And if you're gonna make a WoW clone, at what point is it just not worth making a WoW clone, because you're not gonna steal their audience away anyway? Because Blizzard has a polished WoW out there that if you wanna play that kinda game it's there. I think the industry's about to go through a lot of changes."
What Salvatore would really like to see? Five guys in a garage making great games for niche audiences. Maybe we're already seeing that with the indie PC scene and the growth of crowd-funding. Maybe not. It's hard to predict these things, though I tend to agree that the industry is in for plenty of change in the next few years.
These days Salvatore is working with Cryptic a bit, giving them Easter Eggs from the Neverwinter Saga to use in the game. He's working on a series of Drizzt comic books with IDW Comics which are tie-ins to the Neverwinter Saga. And he's got a bunch of other books in the works, including the Sundering series which is due out in August and serves as a sort of bridge over to 5th Edition D&D.
I ask him if, between all this writing and comic-book writing and everything else he's working on, if there's been any talk of a Drizzt movie. I mean, for someone like me who started reading Icewind Dale and Dragon Lance and all the other D&D books back when I was eleven or twelve years old, who's seen the rise of Harry Potter on the big screen and the Jacksonification of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, it only makes sense that we'd see some Forgotten Realms film or television. The geeks have inherited the earth, right?
"Oh there's always talk," he says, sounding a bit disheartened, or maybe just resigned. "It doesn't mean anything until it happens. There's been talk for twelve years. Twelve years ago I heard there was somebody who wanted to do a Drizzt movie and nothing happened. It's Hollywood, there's always talk. When it happens it happens, until then I won't believe it."
For his part, Salvatore has books to write. He says The Last Threshold, and the entire Neverwinter Saga, was a major turning point in his Forgotten Realms writing. Now he's hard at work on the next books, and he's deeply involved with the next round of changes to the Forgotten Realms universe.
"They did it so well this time," he says, referring to Wizards of the Coast. "They brought everybody in, we sat in a room, and they told the authors what they wanted to do with D&D and [asked] 'How would this effect the Realms?' And all the authors, including Ed Greenwood and myself and several other very prominent people who know the Realms got to decide, 'Well how would this affect the Forgotten Realms?'"
These days, Salvatore is hoping to do a bit more work with Cryptic on the Neverwinter MMO, and maybe some freelance stuff on other video games on the side. But mainly he just wants to keep writing and has no desire whatsoever to retire.
"I'm in my mid-fifties," he says. "And I'm having more fun than I've ever had before."
The Last Threshold hit bookshelves yesterday. You can read more about the latest adventures of Drizzt Do'Urden here.
You can read Part One of this interview here.
