Runic Games, Dungeon Masters: The Torchlight Interview, Part II
In part II of our interview with Runic Games (you can check out the first part right here) we talk about what went wrong at Flagship Studios and what the future holds after the single-player part of Torchlight is released on Oct. 28.
Crispy Gamer: What do you think went wrong at Flagship Studios from your perspectives and are you still on speaking terms with Bill Roper?
Travis: Oh God, yes - I love Bill.
Max: The short story is we tried to do too much, spread ourselves too thin, tried to appease everyone, do everything for everybody and we didn’t have very strong partners that we were working with. So while our partnerships were kind of crumbling, we failed to make the proper adjustments and simplify everything and just plain ran out of money in the end. It’s something all of us here have learned a lot from. We’ve taken a lot of lesson learned from that and have applied them to Runic Games and Torchlight. Hopefully we’ve learned from this and won’t ever make those mistakes ever again.
Travis: We’ve tried to apply that to what we’re doing here. Twenty people and 11 months is not a lot of time to make a game so we made a conscious decision to not multiplayer as an example.
Crispy Gamer: What do you think the take-away is from developing that game and how close to being complete was it before the plug was pulled?
Travis: We were approximately one month away from the open beta –
Crispy Gamer: Oh man, that sucks..
Travis: There was significant work to do beyond that. We had additional areas that we wanted to add and we would have continued development for as long as we possibly could - after the fact, once we had people in the open beta.
As far as the take-away, we chose to think of it as an extremely protracted pre-production period for what we’re doing now where we got to try everything out.. Find out what worked and what didn’t work. It certainly saved us a lot of exploratory design now that we’re re-starting.
Max: We have realized that the era of the giant budget and the giant time schedules is over and one of the lessons to take from the Flagship stuff is how to make a game efficiently with a small crew and a small budget and still maintain all the fun.
Travis: There’s nothing like losing your game a month before it going to be seen by the public eye to make you want to be very pragmatic about work.
Crispy Gamer How many former Flagship studios employees work at Runic?
Travis: Basically the entire Flagship Seattle team is here - in addition to Erich Schaefer and Peter Hu, who were at Flagship proper.
Crispy Gamer They were all working on Mythos, Right?
Travis: Max was working on Mythos — he was the producer on Mythos. Erich and Peter were not. They worked on the technical backend that ran both Hellgate and Mythos.
Max: Previously Peter had worked on Battle.net with Blizzard back when we were making the Diablo games so he’s been with us forever as well.
Crispy Gamer You’d agree that Mythos is dead right? It’s owned by another company and there’s no chance of you guys making a game with that name?
Travis: True. It’s nothing we will be working on the foreseeable future.
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