Sean, I don’t know if you follow Dragon Quest much, but over the last few years, Yuji Horii has had a … shall we say … different outlook on gaming than most of the other directors of big name franchises (being one of the first to decry the graphical arms race a few years back). I’ve gathered a few interviews he’s done over the past few years.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6390/25_years_of_dragon_quest_an_.php?print=1
http://uk.ds.ign.com/articles/110/1105212p1.html
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/07/10/why-is-dragon-quest-a-turn-based-series/
http://kotaku.com/5583150/the-ideal-length-of-a-role-playing-game-is
Especially check out what he has to say about kids in the last one there. Be interested to see what you think about his approach to making his games.
Let’s look at this. Below are going to be quotes I yank from his interviews.
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For the Dragon Questseries, control itself is not the main focus of the games. When we design the game, it’s just like driving a car. When you’re driving a car, you don’t really get concerned about how you control the car itself; you just enjoy the drive. You know how to drive it without thinking about it — that’s what we’re trying to do.
We want to let people enjoy the content without really worrying about the control, so we keep maintaining the same kind of gameplay system people are used to playing, so they still play the game and enjoy the content. That’s how Dragon Quest VI maintains the fun part of the game, even after 13 years.
Finally! Someone is speaking of content in its proper context.
What is referred to as the ‘gameplay system’ is more properly called the ‘mechanics’. It is HOW you play the game. But the focus should be on WHY someone plays the game. Why does someone drive a car? For the mechanics of it? No. It is to drive to a destination.
I think it is a mistake for game developers to obsess over ‘inventing’ new gameplay mechanics when they really need to focus on the content. It is like a writer obsessing on ‘inventing’ new narrative styles instead of focusing on the content. People do not care about how a writer structures his sentences and lays out his paragraphs. People want the content.
I’ll let you in on a novelist’s trick. Many new writers, when writing dialogue, will use a wide variety of words in place of ‘said’. He ‘gasped’. He ‘shouted’. He ‘murmered’. He ‘smiled’. All of this is very distracting to the reader. It is better to just use ‘said’. The focus should be on the substance of the content, not how it is delivered.
The only changes that should be made on the gameplay mechanics side is to make it simpler, more accessible, and less repetitive. The mechanics are the obstacle between the player and the content. So the mechanics should be as smooth and as invisible as possible. This might sound strange, but it is true: if the player notices the gameplay system, the game is bad. When you played an awesome game, you were so engrossed you didn’t even think about the ‘gameplay system’. And in the same way, when you read a good book, you do not think about the sentence structure.
Adding on to this thought of Horri’s, I absolutely hate it when a game alters mechanics on you. An example would be Mega Man 8. You learn the mechanics of the game, and then you are focused on the game’s content. But no! In Freeze Man’s stage, the game puts you on some sled and you must learn a whole new set of mechanics! It is beyond annoying.
Just like gamers do not like buying hardware, gamers do not enjoy learning the mechanics of a game. That is the hardest part to getting someone to play your game is getting them through the mechanics. Adding more mechanics only annoys them.
This is why in a game like Super Mario Galaxy, I become very annoyed when the game shifts mechanics from rolling a ball to slingshoting Mario around. Why not just focus on the core mechanics and concentrate on more content?
It is very intentional for me [that the main character have no dialogue], because the main character in the game is actually the alter-ego of the player — so you don’t want to push words into the player’s mouth. We want the player to feel like they are playing the game, and their own play affects the game. So the only thing you can actually say in the game is “yes” and “no” — but there’s no other dialogue.
Yuri Horri definitely understands the old school RPGs. This is really true with the Ultima series. The game was presented as a world in itself. You, the player, were to be the Avatar. The Avatar actually didn’t have many lines aside from ‘Name’, ‘Job’, and ‘Bye’.
The big problem with gaming is that people believe the RPG is a ‘graphic novel’ and the developer’s imagination is what is important. To the contrary, the only imagination that is important is the player’s. The job of the developer, like the job of an actor, is to stimulate the audience’s imagination.
Horri understands the job of the RPG. It is a sort of alternate world for the player to relax after work.
If you look at the Dragon Quest series, it’s often concentrated on family relationships. That’s pretty rare for a video game, particularly in the past. Why is that so important for you to explore?
YH: Initially my feeling towards the computer was that it was very cold and impersonal — so using a computer when creating a game, I thought, “Well why not create a more personal, more warm, human-like game?”
That is one thing I’ve noticed about the older games. They are much ‘warmer’ while the Industry games seem cold and non-human. As if it were built by robots.
As strange as it might sound, a fan of Ultima would find it fitting to describe Ultima as a ‘very warm world’. Everything is very Human in it.
My objective is to make the games intuitive and accessible for anybody. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t read the manual before playing a game, so I want to make sure the game is simple, with simple controls — but you can still have complex action, and enjoy the gameplay. I wanted to include humor in the games — so the people who play can actually really enjoy, and have laugh-out-loud moments.
A bad communicator thinks complex words means complex thoughts. That is not the case. People who use simple words are not simple people. Usually, the idiots are those who try to force every phrase into complexity.
Horri is a content driven developer. This is very rare to see a Japanese developer to be content driven. He understands that gameplay mechanics are an obstacle.
For example, Wii Sports has extremely simple controls. You just pick up the controller and swing it! But everyone made the mistake of assuming that it was a simple game. It was not. How you swung the controller mattered.
This is why the word ‘casual’ is stupid. Simple gameplay makes the game easier to get into. People need to stop assuming that if someone plays a simple game that the person is ‘simple minded’.
The first thing we do is create the game world, what kind of main character we want to have, what kind of evil enemy we will have — but we also have postmortem meetings from the previous titles and try to make sure that things which were difficulties in the game are addressed in the new one too.
Create the game world? Oh no! Don’t let Miyamoto see this! Miyamoto doesn’t believe in game worlds.
Dragon Quest games are generally challenging, but the thing about Dragon Quest is that if you persevere, you’ll eventually succeed. If you just continue, even if you die and you’re sent back to the church, you just get up again and go back to the dungeon and eventually you’ll make it.
YH: Yes, that’s a very traditional thing for us. At the end, you will always be rewarded for your hard work.
That seems to be Japanese somehow. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that just seems very Japanese, and not as American.
YH: What does an American think?
I don’t want to necessarily speak culturally, but if you look at games right now — especially mainstream games — you’ll be rewarded just for putting the disc in the drive. It will be cool immediately, and you don’t have to work at it. We’ll give it to you; it’s like a rollercoaster.
YH: Yeah in Japanese style, you have to try, try, try, try — and then at the end you can finally get a reward.
You’ll often hear American game designers often talk about theme park rides as a model of how games should play out and I don’t think that Dragon Quest is Disneyland.
YH: Agreed. It’s like climbing up a steep mountain — you have to keep climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing, and then at the end you finally get to the top of the mountain, and you see the beautiful view.
The ideas of Dragon Quest came from the Old School RPGs. The notion that you have to do something to earn a reward is Old School. The notion that you just insert a disc and get the reward is New School (e.g. Industry games). This isn’t a cultural issue. It is an Old School / New School issue.
For example, Old School games revolved around scores. Most people didn’t even beat the game or get to stage 5. But with New School games, it is a given that you will beat the game and see all the content. You don’t have to earn it.
Damn, that was just the first interview. I am scared to look at the other ones! Here we go…
IGN: One of the criticisms of the game has been the reduction of personality in the supporting cast, which is necessary for the multiplayer mode in the game. How did that affect the development of the story?
Yuji Horii: For Dragon Quest IX one of the biggest things was being able to create your own character, and your party members too. The importance of it is that you can customize the face, the name, or something like that so the party members are really a reflection of you. It becomes more of your own experience. Particularly because of the undefined elements of the characters, we wanted it to become the player’s story.
Who made these criticisms? I don’t think it was the consumers.
Game developers have this absurd notion that a video game is supposed to be a graphic novel. So when they see something like DragonQuest IX, they think, “Oh! Less personality for the characters! This is bad!” They are thinking an RPG is supposed to be a graphic novel. It isn’t.
Up until this point, Dragon Quest always had party members you could talk to. With the character customization you can’t do that anymore. In part, that’s why we introduced the character Stella. She goes along with your journey and is the person that always talks to you to kind of bridge that.
Talking to your party members was definitely a staple of Ultima.
For Dragon Quest, we really want the player to identify with the main character and Mr. Toriyama does such a great job making that possible and not overpowering the art with his “color.”
Horri understands that the artist’s ‘creativity’ should be kept in check especially when it comes to the protagonist. The job of the protagonist is for the player to identify with him/her.
IGN: Having been in the industry so long, what’s one of the biggest changes you’ve noticed, especially in Japan?
Yuji Horii: One of the main things is how much hardware has improved over the last twenty-five years. Also, I’ve noticed interviewers have become a lot friendlier. When I started people would come to interview me, and just knowing that I worked in videogames—it was like people wanted to stone me, it was that bad. People thought of videogames as kind of a bad thing in society. Now people that come to interview me, they have grown up with videogames and they know what they are, they’ve experienced it. Thirty years ago, people who interviewed me had no idea what it was all about. That’s made it a lot easier for me.
Interesting.
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But 40… that’s the sweet spot for a role-playing game, he said. “Probably to complete the main story, around 40 hours would be ideal,” Horii said, “However, with Dragon Quest VII it took about 100 hours to complete the game. What we focus on is not the time constraint but the amount of content we put in.”
Oh, there’s that word again! Content! Horri is unique as he is the only highly visible Japanese developer who is content orientated.
“When you purchase a game for a few thousand yen [3000 yen = $34], you want to have the value of the game,” Horii said. “For kids you really want to have a game they can play for a long time. For adults, maybe they will play for six hours and if the gameplay is good maybe they’ll be happy and want to play longer. But for kids, they might only get a couple of games a year and I would like them to continue to be playing.”
Now isn’t that someone you want designing your games? He understands kids do not have the purchasing power to get many games. This may be the only game they get for a long time. So it better be good.
What is refreshing is Horri’s attitude toward gaming. He is looking at his games with a servant’s heart. He does not see it as a crusade in the name of creativity. The goal is to satisfy his customers like a chef satisfying his king. Perhaps this is why Dragon Quest is still a very healthy franchise while all other Japanese franchises have declined.
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