world being a better foil for the player because you can interact with a group in a slightly
more iconic and abstract way than you can interact with an individual. Because some-
one can come and say, “I speak for these people and we think you’re a bad guy” or
whatever. And they can do that in a way that’s a little less personal and direct and there-
fore has a little less requirement on the AI and conversation engine. It was this idea of
having factions who you could ally with or oppose yourself with or do things for or not.
The other big idea was that these same factions would help you in off-screen ways,
because we didn’t want to have actual teammates. We didn’t want to write AI that you
would have to pay attention to and worry about whether they leapt the chasm when you
leapt the chasm and all that kind of mess you get when you put a second character in an
actually interactive environment as opposed to a big fat plane where you just fight. So,
the initial ideas were along those lines, where we set up a couple of game worlds where
there were a lot of different factions and you were primarily interacting with them and
they had lots of opportunities to help. You’d see the evidence of their help, such as an
arrow would come shooting in from off screen or something, but we weren’t going to
have to actually do all the AI work required to do real allies. So we had a couple of
designs along those lines. Also, most of the designs we were trying to do were a little
more interesting, a little less standard.
You mean in terms of the game fiction?
In terms of fiction and structure. We had a post-Cold War zombies proposal calledBetter
Red than Undeadin which you were fighting off zombies in a communist Cold War era
and running around and having different groups — communist spies and communist
government and Western government and all these different spy groups. Meanwhile,
the zombies were trying to take everyone over so you had to pick which groups you
were going to ally with and go against while everyone had this common enemy of the
zombies. But of course no one gets along so you had to play this delicate game of getting
everyone on your side or enough people on your side to get the job done.
And then we had this reverse-Arthurian fiction where you were Mordred and your
advisor was Morgan le Fey, who was sort of a good person. Lancelot was this evil jerk
and Merlin was a time-traveling marketing guy from the future. All the Knights of the
Round Table wore jerseys with logos and numbers, and the Holy Grail was this fake
thing that they didn’t think existed but they were using it as a way to continue to
oppress the masses and take all their money and treat them poorly. The excuse was that
they needed all the money to go find the Holy Grail and they’d just sit around and have
parties. So you as the Black Knight had to break into Camelot. And Guinevere was this
butch lesbian who would help you by betraying Lancelot because she really hated him
and all that sort of thing. Actually our marketing department wasn’t really into that one.
Not too surprising, I suppose. But we had a bunch of random ideas we were playing
around with and we did storyboards and initial setup and stuff.
But they were all still immersive simulation, first-person games?
Yeah, yeah. Once again, inBetter Redthere were all these spy groups and inDark
Camelotthere were all these different groups of outcasts you could work with to try to
get into Camelot and mess things up. But as we started worked on some of theDark
516 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church