RPGCodex Interviews Ian Frazier
The good folks at RPGCodex managed to score an interview with none other than Ian Frazier, lead designer of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Of course, they didn’t want to talk to him about that game. No…instead, they wanted to talk to him about the thing we all know and love him (and many others who worked with him) for: Ultima V: Lazarus!
It would be both uncouth (by web standards) and far too long of a post to reproduce the interview in its entirety, so here are a couple choice quotes:
Tell us a bit about yourself. When did you first get into computer role-playing games? Did you come from pen and paper RPGs? Which cRPG was your first love?
I’ve been playing CRPGs since I was…oh…maybe 10 or so? I have fond memories of the old Gold Box TSR games, but I think the first RPG that truly captured me and made me love the genre was Betrayal at Krondor. That game was pure magic. I still have some pieces from the soundtrack in my music collection to this day.
As for pen and paper: oddly enough, I don’t come from that background at all. I played a little bit of the board game Hero Quest as a kid (and yes, I still have it), but that’s as close as I got to tabletop RPGs for a long time. I had a few friends in both high school and college who tried to get me into D&D, but I wasn’t really interested. Big Huge Games has always had a big tabletop culture, though, and I’ve found myself getting into it myself since I started working here. I’ve had a great time with several different systems at this point (D&D, Savage Worlds, Aces & Eights, the Dragon Age RPG, Chaosium’s Cthulhu, etc.) and have been DMing a Forgotten Realms campaign for a couple of years now—good times.
What were your primary motivations for recreating Ultima V in a modern engine? How did the Lazarus project come about and how did you get involved with it? Why did you choose to remake Ultima V as opposed to one of the earlier or later games in the series?
The first motivator was simply a love of Ultima. After Ascension came out, I was incredibly sad. Partially because I was disappointed by Ascension itself, but more because I hated for the series I loved so much to finally be over. The idea of bringing it back to life (i.e. Lazarus) in some form was very appealing to me.
The next motivator was that Ultima V itself seemed to me like it had so much potential to be an amazing “modern” game experience. It had this story with shades of gray and this giant cool world to explore and an interesting, dark atmosphere…but all of those things were hinted at more than actually there—after all, the game was from 1987! NPCs had tiny snippets of dialogue, the graphics were archaic, the music was beautifully crafted but sounded very dated in midi form, etc. I wanted to take that core idea and spirit that made Ultima V so cool and bring it back to life with all that 15 years of technological advancement afforded us. (this is also why I didn’t choose to remake one of the later games—I felt Ultima V had the most potential, plus I thought Ultima VII was still playable enough that it didn’t “need” remaking)
The third motivator was selfish: I knew from 6th grade onward that I wanted to be a game designer, and as I was preparing for college I knew that I needed to make a game of my own to learn the skills and “prove myself,” because class-work alone was not going to get me into the incredibly competitive games industry. I figured I needed a project and, well, Lazarus was it! Starting my first week of college, I began to sketch out the early designs for Lazarus and start trying to get fellow students and some Ultima fans online to join me in working on this crazy project, and eventually it started to build up steam. A long 5 years later, we finished!
Do go and read the whole thing, Dragons and Dragonettes; it’s really quite a good interview (and the Lazarus screenshots are pretty nice as well).
(hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)
More from the interview:
“I think there were two major factors: First, Ultima is beloved by a LOT of people around the world. That made it much, much easier to find and recruit people to help with the project, as well as getting just enough media attention to keep the team excited and motivated. If Lazarus had been “An adventure in the magical land of FRAZIERIA, where you are the CHAMPION OF GOODNESS and must save KING SCOTTISH from the dreadful DARKMASTERS,” I wouldn’t have been able to easily recruit a team and it likely never would have gone anywhere.”
“Second was that from day one, we treated Lazarus as a side job, not a hobby. I’m not saying we didn’t have fun with it—we did—but everything about the project was handled as close to professional game development as we could manage. We had a team hierarchy. We had a formal hiring process. We had regularly scheduled meetings (online) and would post the notes afterwards. We had a structured preproduction process. All work was reviewed by a lead before being finalized. We had dedicated QA testers and used a bug tracker (Bugzilla). Above all, we had standard waterfall production schedules with explicit deadlines and milestones, and we did whatever it took to meet those deadlines, even though they were entirely of our own creation.”
Pretty hard core.
Ian Frazier is a good guy, I remember him from the old Horizons Tavern days. He was even nice enough to send me all of the Lazarus design docs so that Aiera could host them. Stand up guy, and I’m glad he’s seeing so much success.
Also, his uncanny physical resemblance to Richard Garriott should not go unmentioned.
I wish the Ultima name was enough nowadays to bring as many wannabe developpers to work on Ultima fan projets.
I wish we could somehow adhere to such a strict schedule for Return. Meh.
Ian’s a unique guy. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and had learned enough from… somewhere about project management already. I think he probably underestimated the gestation of the project, but not by as much as most do in a fit of creativity.
Note this: I’m not ‘in’ on industry practice so I didn’t understand all of what MS Project could do until recently. Let alone what a Gantt chart was.