Past Forward

Europa Universalis: Rome wasn't built in a day
5/2/2008 3:06 PM | 0 Comments | Page 4 of 5

Andersson: Well, you can depict much more and give greater information to the player with better graphics. We're still working on it. It's pretty new to us. But in theory it will mean larger maps with more detail for players.

Crispy Gamer: Your company has a reputation in some circles for releasing interesting games, but it also has a reputation of releasing games that need a lot of patching very early on to become playable.

Andersson: Yeah, 'we got that reputation from Hearts of Iron and Crusader Kings. But if you look at EU3 and Hearts of Iron II and a game we don't talk much about, Diplomacy, they were solid out of the box. No crash bugs, all the features are working, there is reasonable balance and reasonable artificial intelligence. If you look at the EU3 patching cycle, yeah, we had 10 pages of notes on the patches but only half a page of that is bug fixes. The rest is stuff where we said "OK, let's tweak the game a little where the community thinks it is not perfectly balanced." And there were some historical inaccuracies to correct that this province did not belong to that country on that date and so on. And we keep constantly improving the AI.

But yes, unfortunately we still have the legacy of Hearts of Iron being a buggy piece of shit. And there's not much we can do about it except keep trying to make games that are as bug-free as possible.

Crispy Gamer: Your community forums are very active.

Andersson: Yeah, we have about 90,000 members.

Crispy Gamer: You engage with the members on your forums quite often. Where does this fit in your corporate philosophy?

Andersson: When I asked him two weeks ago what I should spend time on, my CEO told me, "You need to keep spending your time on the forums because those people are the core of our business." They are the ones who buy the games. It's very important to be active. But I'm not just active there. I lurk on a lot of forums reading about games.

Crispy Gamer: Do you ever get led down the wrong path by the forums, where someone makes a suggestion that sounds good but proves to be unworkable?

Andersson: 'There are always people who think they can do a better job creating a game than you. No matter what decision you're making, there will be a bunch of people who think it's the greatest decision ever made and a bunch of other people who think the decision is total shit. You can't really let what people say influence your final decisions. It's more like you need to be there to explain why you think it will be a great game or feature. In the end, I must make the game that I think is fun to play, because if I don't think it's fun to play, then how can I persuade someone else to play it?

Crispy Gamer: The community is your core group of consumers. Suppose you wanted to expand your audience...

Andersson: Well, those consumers are not a monolithic group. I have a mostly positive view of people. I don't think that 95 percent of gamers are too stupid to play our games, but I do think that by easing the learning curve we should be able to broaden our audience. I don't want to make the games "dumber," though, because then I wouldn't enjoy them myself.