Interview with Turbine's Les Nelken

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''Original Link (now dead) - http://www.zone.com/asheronscall/news/ASHEinterview0802.asp



 Interview with Turbine's Les Nelken 

During the June 2002 event, Castling, players were introduced to the Arcane Pedestal and the “Precarious Sojourn” floating dungeon. The designer, Les Nelken, took time to answer a few questions about that particular quest and content design in general.

'''How did it all get started? Did you go into the quest to provide a specific reward to the players? Or did you have a specific experience you wanted to give the players?'''

The rewards were what started it--the Dereth Map and the Arcane Pedestal had been created during the production phase of the Dark Majesty Expansion Pack. We decided that we wanted to make these items available in June. How that happened was entirely up to me. The Arcane Pedestal had been created with no lore in mind; it was just a cool decoration. Designing quests driven by existing reward items was not totally new territory for me--quests I'd done over the two previous months, such as Thorsten's Armor and the Horn of Vigilance, all started as items that had been previously created.

With this item in hand, the main experience I wanted to give players was the “Precarious Sojourn” floating dungeon.

What was your inspiration for a floating dungeon?

The concept of a floating dungeon was a dynamic I had in the back of my mind for some time. Underground dungeons are great, but I wanted to create a new experience for players, something different. Also, while Asheron's Call is a 3D game, there are few opportunities for players to battle monsters in a fully three-dimensional setting, one that uses the “Z” axis. I came up with all sorts of technical and game-play reasons why the dungeon wouldn't work, but figured out ways around them, and went ahead and did it.

To start with, I did a concept sketch of the structure and its components. I gave this list to Sean Huxter [Lead Artist for AC], who did his usual fantastic job and created the art assets necessary to build the dungeon. Because the formats of the platforms are the same as those used for buildings, this is the largest outdoor structure on Dereth. As part of the experience--like you might see in a movie--I wanted players to arrive at the dungeon, but not see the full extent of it. As they go around a corner, a vista would open up and they would get to see the rest of the structure, with the endgame tower floating off in the distance. And if the time of day was just right, they would see the sun rising behind it.

I spent some time trying to find the proper location in Dereth for this structure. Eventually I found an appropriately shaped canyon, although it wasn't completely perfect. I had to modify a cliff so that it blocked the view of the rest of the dungeon when you first arrived. I also modified the canyon so that if you are really good at jumping, you can jump onto a platform from the cliff. But don't miss!

What problems did you encounter when you were developing this quest?

Originally, I had the entry portal to the “Precarious Sojourn” dungeon floating a ways away from the suspension bridge. The concept was that players would have to do a “leap of faith.” Properly quest-flagged, they would succeed. Otherwise--well, there are numerous skeletons down at the bottom of the cliff. Happy landings!

One of the first problems appeared when I was trying to test the portal's placement. This test essentially consists of playing AC on a private server located on my computer. It isn't completely independent though; the local server is still linked to a remote database server that stores and retrieves game information.

When I had placed the portal in Worldbuilder, our in-house content tool, I had it floating out in the air at the end of the bridge. However when I would enter the game world on my private server, the portal was completely missing. After tracking the problem down, I found that the portal was falling to the earth below and disappearing. Modifying the portal's properties and setting the portal to ignore gravity made it essentially weightless and kept it from falling and disappearing. While this seems obvious, Worldbuilder had given nary a clue that this was going on and had given the appearance that the portal was floating exactly where I put it. Okay, fine!

The placement of the portal caused another problem. I had placed it close enough to the bridge so that if you strained forward, you would get sucked through. However, for some reason this would cause you to appear at the arrival point with an incredibly high forward velocity, flinging you, screaming and flailing, to the hard soil of the Direlands far below. This was a bit more of an arrival thrill than I had intended! Sean Dickinson [Data Integrator for AC] suggested putting up invisible walls to contain the errant characters. For some reason the portal was adding inertia to the avatar. The invisible walls were a simple solution and they seem to have worked.

Another issue turned up when I was scripting the Slithe Traddittor NPC. I wanted to push the tech a little so that players could hand in the bronze statue parts in any order. This sounds like a simple goal, but it's harder to implement than it sounds. In AC1, the scripting process that makes our NPCs function requires a certain degree of programming logic. In the end, I could see a couple of ways that it could be made to work. And it did too, but not without everyone racking their brains over it. Half the time, I still expect Slithe Traddittor to hand me a toaster-oven instead of the Arcane Pedestal.

Was there anything in the quest that you wanted to do, but couldn't, for whatever reason?

I would have loved to make the floating dungeon much bigger, more elaborate, and with more monsters. Unfortunately, performance concerns prevented that. I also would have liked a greater variety of architecture and platforms of different sizes. The landscape is a grid of 24-meter by 24-meter squares called “land cells.” The current platforms have to take up a full land cell horizontally. That's really too far to jump, straight horizontally. With smaller platforms and tighter distances I could have added more jumping puzzle dynamics to the dungeon. I sometimes find jumping puzzles as frustrating as the next gamer, but as a designer I feel obligated to create at least one!

'''There are a number of steps in completing the quest and receiving the final reward. How did you determine the number of steps you wanted to use to complete it? Do you go into a quest thinking of how long you want it to take the players to complete it?'''

A quest has several stages. First is the “introduction,” where the player is given some of the background lore and receives the “mission statement.” Then comes “questing,” in which the player goes off to accomplish the mission, during which several varieties of mayhem are bound to occur. Eventually the player reaches the “reward” stage, but this can have several sub-stages. The reward can depend on, among other things, whether the player finds the final quest item in a chest, has to craft it, or have an NPC give it to them. It can be fun for players to assemble an item, but it didn't make sense that they could do that in this quest.

With regard to how long I wanted the quest to take, the story really influenced my decision. Slithe is a thrall of Gaerlan and wants to be able to produce a number of these devices for him. The length of a quest has to “feel right.” It would have been too short if all the players had to do was capture the image of the Pedestal in the Imaging crystal and hand it to Slithe. Also, since the Arcane Pedestal is partially a mechanical device, it made sense to use some of the bronze statue parts that had recently been added to the game.

'''Alatar Locke, the long lost explorer, reappeared in your quest! Was he in the quest from the beginning, or was he just a bit of flash that came later?'''

My initial concept for the quest was that the character now known as Slithe would be a Cartographer and would offer the map as a reward to players who brought him the pedestal. This changed at some point, and during a team meeting when I was outlining the quest, Allan suggested that Alatar Locke give players the map of Dereth, using the floating tower as a good vantage point to draw it from. I thought that was a good idea so why not?

'''For quite a while, you were involved in placing housing on the landscape. Was it a relief to start doing something other than housing?'''

Are Mites annoying? Yes!

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