4cr Interview – Eskil Steenberg (LOVE) – Pt. 2

Eskil on game design ideas versus reality:

“When talking about it, a lot of people speak of game design being ideas. Ideas have little importance in games and actually in life in general. People put a lot of weight in ideas and they have little importance until you make things happen. You’ll realize actually making the thing is so much harder than the idea. The idea disappears into the hard labor of making something happen. If you talk to any game developer you will find that they didn’t have a problem with the ideas, that was fine, the problem was implementing them. They would run out of time. You can ask any developer about any game and they’ll have ideas that they missed because of deadlines. My feeling is that games have become so expensive to make that we can do less and less with implementing new ideas in games.”

Here’s the second part of my interview with Eskil Steenberg, sole creator of LOVE. We actually get to talking about the game this time!

Eskil continues his thought from the opening quote by taking some time to explain why gaming this decade isn’t nearly as radical with its ideas as it was in the 80’s.

“Take Red Faction, they boasted destructable environments–and it’s really hard technically and that’s why so few games can do it. But when you look at a game like that that says no one has done it before, well look at Super Mario Bros. It’s really easy. It used to be super simple in 8-bit games but it’s incredibly hard now. It means doing things we could do in the 80’s isn’t as easy anymore, meaning we can’t be as creative as we could be in the 80’s. The cost and difficulty have gone up and are we really selling more? I think Mario has sold like 80 million copies, so each programmer had a return that is amazing and we would never see that today. That’s why I think games are harder and you have to be more conservative because we can’t as easily do the things we could do in the past and that’s why I always come back to productivity and the importance of the choices you make in development. Game design isn’t about coming up with ideas, it’s about managing your time well and deciding what to implement, deciding to make the right bets.”

So now, after hearing all of his interesting thoughts on game design theory, I finally began to steer the discussion towards the actual tangible formation of all of Eskil’s beliefs about games — LOVE.

Q: Since you’ve really stressed the point of efficient development and practical implementation of ideas, how has the game changed since its original inception? What did you set out to make originally?

“I think I knew pretty well the basics of what I wanted. To me nothing is ever as immersive as first person because you move the fastest and have the best control from that viewpoint. You’re looking down the barrel. I like the combat of it. I think first person is my favorite view so I knew I was gonna make a first person game. Then, I thought what sort of world I wanted. I like exploring so I decided to make an exploration game. What I really wanted to do is a game with several levels of things to do. I wanted personal combat with a 30 second “moment”, but then I also wanted a game with a sort of mission to it. Why not make a real world with a sort of cause and effect, like a strategy game, so the game is sort of like a strategy game where you play first person as one of the units. Then on top of that you have a larger objective which is sort of like your civilization game. So you imagine a civilization v. a simulation game, and each battle is an RTS game, and then within that each unit is an FPS game. I wanted that sort of scale so the player could understand the decision of “why am I doing things.” If I need to attack an outpost it needs to happen in a grander scheme.”

I understood the concept of utilizing a hierarchy of gameplay elements to give the players greater control in this game, but this all still sounded very vague to me. Giving up on my attempts to feign complete comprehension, I had to ask Eskil flat out what it is that players do exactly in LOVE.

“What you do is you join a settlement, or create one if you’re early, and go out into the world and bring in things to your settlement. So as a civilization game you gain new technologies and things. In that way it’s a civilization game because you’re building this environment. You can find objects or you can hang around your city and build things and defenses. Then the surrounding world will interact with it. Creatures may attack and destroy it or take away technologies. You may feel you need to counter that then. You may attack back or maybe you can’t immediately. Maybe you need to attack their power supply or manufacturing facility. You need a plan with a bunch of players and how to coordinate an attack. You need to figure out the larger scheme of how to make your settlement survive. I use a lot of fiction to spec out what I wanted to do. In Star Wars you need to destroy the Death Star, but why? Well, it will destroy your planet if you don’t. So how do you do this? Well, some guys will go to Endor and destroy the deflector shield and some will go after the Death Star. You have to figure out your own mission. You can choose to respond to the situation or not, but if you don’t you may get bombed back to the stone age. Still, the game doesn’t end. Those are the kind of events and the kind of stories I want to build. The steps range from taking the strategic decision down to the tactical decisions; “We need to destroy the Death Star,” and “We need to destroy the deflector shield”-type of decisions down to the individual action sequences. Or you can say I’ve got one agent and he’s really stealthy and he can sneak in and you don’t need a firefight.”

Q: I’ve heard LOVE referred to as an MMOFPS. Would you agree with this label or any labeling for that matter?

“I’ve called it a not so massively multiplayer online game, but I feel the MMO part has really been a mistake of mine. People to tend to think MMO as short for MMORPG and my game is not a role playing game. Not the sort of game you would associate with RPGs. I would say it’s a collaborative adventure game. Maybe I would add first person.”

My next set of questions for him were about some more of the gameplay mechanics. I was curious as to how many people would need to be online at the same time, how big the world was set up to be, and how it would interact with the players.

“There’s 200 people in the world registered to the server and maybe 50 at a time. There can be up to 4 settlements at a time and each of these can be their own civilization. The settlements can fight, but they’re still separate.”

Q: People will need to sometimes coordinate it so they can be online at the same time for larger attacks?

“You don’t have to time it, you can just do it when you’re there. The key is to make the AI for the enemy to care about how many people are online. They won’t launch the biggest attack when nobody is online. If there’s a lot of people logged on, the AI will be more aggressive.”

Q: So who exactly is going to be the primary antagonist in this world — the AI or other players?

“I sort of want the stupid stormtroopers in the game. If you want an action game you want the clones to come out. It won’t be an exploration game if you’re constantly worrying about conflict with other players. What I’m working on right now is how to work out communication. If you play a game like civilization you’re looking top down with all these top down icons because you need them. But in first person you have to be clear about how things are changing and how the civilization is developing. Things have to have the right amount of visibility and clarity to work and that’s what i’m working on right now.”

Q: Another thing people often point out about your game is the truly unique visual style. Did you have a thought-out purpose in presenting the game this way or were you just aiming for something that looks good?

“There are several things, I wanted to know what I *could* do, and I wanted to be distinctive. I wanted to create something that people just wanted to be in and I think I sort of succeeded. I think that just being there feels good and I think that’s important. I’ve actually heard complaints about things like Fallout 3 because everything’s so gray and depressing. It’s a great game but it’s exhausting. Also, I didn’t want it to look like computer graphics. I wanted it to sort of be different for the sake of being different.”

Q: How far away are we from seeing the release of this game?

“I’m in closed Alpha right now. I’m working on payment systems and little things like that. The game will never truly be done because I will always work on it. The engine and things like that are almost done, it’s just about tweaking it right now. I need to test the game in a controlled sort of way right now. I get at least one email a day about people wanting to test the game and I’ve garnered several hundred over the year now, but I can’t go into open beta yet because I need a bit more control over it. The amount of testing I’ve done so far is very minuscule, I think I’ve had 2 or 3 people playing at the same time. If I have two hundred people at a time at this point it’ll be a mess. So what I need to find now is about two hundred people around Sweden who I can trust to give me good feedback. So that’s the problem I’m having right now — how to test the game.”

Despite the execution of all the ideas he wanted to accomplish, at this point, he told me he wasn’t even sure if the game was fun yet. Him saying this to me was a total riot. I’d been talking to Eskil for probably over an hour at this point and amid all of the lofty ideas and bold statements he’d thrown out he only expressed any notion of uncertainty when he discussed the testing phase of his game. I mean, when he explained why this was the difficult part it made absolute sense, but still, one would expect the act of polishing the product to be the least trying aspect of developing it. Nevertheless, during the whole interview everything that Eskil said was never said in anything but a tone of frankness. Any one of the things he said about game development or creativity could have easily been said in a pompous and even derogatory manner, but coming from him it all just felt like an intelligent and effective attempt to explain his way of seeing things.

My last question for him was about why he chose the name “LOVE”.

“I think I meant sort of the love of gaming. It started out as project LOVE and then the game sort of became LOVE and then the name just stuck. It’s one of those names that in a marketing meeting would’ve gotten voted down as terrible but has actually worked out really well. You know, usually I just pick names that mean nothing and are words that I make up so nobody will sue for copyright infringement. LOVE is sort of same thing because nobody can copyright it.”

Eskil Steenberg Interview Pt. 1

LOVE official site