Last week, we took a journey back to the world of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to stream a chat with lead designer Ken Rolston about his work on Bethesda's breakout role-playing game. Today, we've taken the time to transcribe our conversation with Rolston for your full perusal. Read on for some in-depth insights on his work on Oblivion and its predecessor Morrowind!
This interview has been lightly edited for clarification. Gamasutra's Alex Wawro and Bryant Francis both peppered Rolston with questions.
Alex Wawro: Hello and welcome to Gamasutra’s Thursday stream. Today we are playing Oblivion. I am Gamasutra editor, Alex Wawro and I am joined by Gamasutra contributing editor, Bryant Francis and most importantly, Oblivion lead designer Ken Rolston. Ken, how are you doing?
Ken Rolston: I am perfect in every way.
Wawro: Ken, I was surprised. You know, when we first started corresponding about this you mentioned to me that you had sort of been idly considering doing some of your own livestreaming, some of your own YouTube video production. I kind of wanted to get, pick your brain of what you think the value is there and what makes you excited about returning to older games and sort of sharing your experiences working on them.
Rolston: Well the larger concept is that I don’t believe that any work of literature or art, and this, I must admit is “Light Classics,” but this is a form of art, depends on the creator, the text, and the viewer or the reader. And I’m always very interested in the various different ways that people write criticism. And in terms of games they also do Let’s Plays. So I was interested for myself, I wanted to go see how other people played my game, because when you design a game you don’t really have a lot of feedback from your audience. So you don’t know what they’re going to appreciate and enjoy.
And then after the game is completed, you get to watch and find out how people really play your game. And from my point of view, I said, “Well, what would it be like if the designer of the game went and became the audience for his own game and started to play it. And then tried to do a let’s play, which then became kind of a story about my relationship with making the game.” So it’s just a dumb opportunity to try to blend the user and the creator in a way that an open game does accidentally and trying to be a little more purposeful about it. I was just doing experimental crap, that’s all.
Francis: Yeah, my question first, Alex, is did you just try to light this church on fire there?
Wawro: Uh, look. Oblivion is part of our classic games series. It’s a little older. It’s been a while since I’ve played this game. It’s been a whole week in fact, and I kind of forgot which was the crouch key and which was the cast key. Turns out C is cast and Control is crouch. I won’t make that mistake again, I promise.
Francis: Yeah, I guess I’ll jump off with a question that Mitchell Sabbagh, who joins us very regularly in the chat wanted to ask for you, Ken, how do you feel your design philosophy evolved between working on Morrowind and working on Oblivion?
Rolston: Uh, I believe I did not have a design philosophy when I was doing Morrowind. By the way, you have now joined the Temple Climbing Club. This, by the way, for Morrowind, was the idea of open world means if you make your own fun then you decide on your own goals. And in Morrowind, we decided that one of the ways to play the game was to be the Temple Climbers Club. I’ve never seen anybody climb one of the religious buildings in Oblivion. So you accidentally joined a very important freeform gaming group.
Wawro: And now I have a new purpose in life.
Rolston: I’m sorry, I’m going to go back to your question, now.
Francis: No, that was important.
Rolston: How did my philosophy of development evolve? I think it did not exist at all before Morrowind, and then once I had a chance to see how people played with things in Morrowind, I began to try to have more explicit conversations between myself and the player in the non-quest dialogue. I didn’t work nearly so much on the detail level of Oblivion. They’re almost two completely different lead design concepts. In Morrowind, I essentially wrote the outline of all the quest lines. There were only three designers, so that was practical. And I made an awful lot of the content myself.
"I essentially wrote the outline of all the quest lines. There were only three designers, so that was practical. And I made an awful lot of the content myself. "
With Oblivion, I made hardly any of the content myself, just a few scraps in the main quest and a couple of different quests. So my design was changed from a highly centrally controlled, centrally authored content to something which had as many different voices as possible. All the different designers, I wanted them to take my rough outlines for the designs and then remove the content of the outlines and simply make sure they hit all the basic elements, but have completely different content. That result, for example Emil [Pagliarulo], did amazing work with the Dark Brotherhood, I could never have done anything like that. Emil’s skills are completely different, orthogonal to mine. And the thief system -- the thief guild quests by Bruce Nesmith were completely different than any of the other quest structures. So the way it evolved in that sense was in the way the development evolved.
The more designers you have, the more opportunities you have to have a larger game with many different voices, many different styles. I think one of the great things about the Elder Scrolls games, as they’ve evolved, is that they have many more voices and therefore they suit the ears of the players better. By example, when I used to teach high school, I used to hope that at least once in your life you found a teacher who was your soulmate. That was kind of what I wanted you to do in the games. I hope you find one designer that did some content that really was your soulmate as a player that was able to have his own particular personality and express it in the gameplay and the design.
Wawro: Hm, I wonder, you gave us the hot tip before we started that it would be wise to sort of expand the boundaries of a new Oblivion playthrough by opening up everything, looking at the game and opening up the Oblivion gates as well. Is there an area you would suggest that well shows off what you’re talking about here? Maybe it shows your hand directly or the hand of a designer you admire?
Rolston: Uh, no, because the possibility of a lead designer knowing the content of any Elder Scrolls game is diminishingly small. Morrowind is the only one I can really talk about, but I don’t think I’d actually played more than 60% of the built content when we released the game. I had certainly played it in prototype or white box or things like that, but you just cannot play the whole content, it’s just too big to put the iterations into it. So the reason I suggested wandering to different places, just be a tourist.
Francis: Yeah, I was going to real quick, invite our viewers to give Alex -- Alex you’re still playing that pilgrim from last week, right?
Wawro: Yeah, and I’m level two and I unlocked Oblivion Gates early, so if you don’t give me somewhere to go, we’re going to go to a quick death pretty soon.
Rolston: Oblivion! Yay!
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