An Interview With Julien Roby

I decided some time ago that I wanted to try something different - something never before seen in these blood-black pages of Malygristle - an interview. But, since both my doctors and my legal counsel had informed me that nearly everyone involved with the gaming industry is in the process of taking out restraining orders against me, actually getting it done was looking like a dicey proposition. Peter Molyneux? He thinks I'm an idiot. Chris Taylor? I think he's an idiot. John Romero? After what I've called him, the only thing I can reasonably expect from him is an ass-kicking. I was ultimately forced to cast my net farther afield - to France.

Ah, the French. What have they given us over the years? Well, let's see. Fries, for starters. Kissing. Good, clean roads for the Panzers. And, more recently, a bunch of guys calling themselves Arkane Studios, responsible for the best RPG that nobody's ever played, Arx Fatalis.

An exploratory email quickly revealed that nobody at Arkane had ever heard of me - working for Warcry has it's advantages, such as never having to worry about the pressures of fame and fortune - so I went to work. A sleazy combination of lies and begging wormed me into their graces, and soon after I was granted an extended look into the inner sanctum. (Which is to say, someone agreed to answer a couple questions via email.)

Welcome, then, to An Evening With Julien Roby, wherein we discuss RPGs, European games, wang sizes, and I make a concerted effort not to say "fuck," because we all know how sensitive these French guys are.

Okay, before I switch into "hard-nosed journalist" mode here, let's start off with something simple. Care to introduce
yourself?

Hi. My name Julien ROBY. I'm working as a Game Designer at Arkane Studios, the studio behind the game Arx Fatalis.
In the past years i've been tester on "Dark Earth" & "Nightmare Creatures" at Kalisto Entertainment.
I've joined Arkane Studios in 2001, working on Level Design / Scripting on Arx Fatalis.

On the Arkane Studios website, you're listed as a "game designer." When I think of game designers, I think of days spent shopping for Ferraris and nights spent whoring and drinking. But that may be a misconception. What exactly do you do for a living, anyway?

As Arkane Studios is not really a big big studio to say the least, Game Designers usualy work on many different things: we're working on gameplay conception, story, level design, level scripting and even testing and tech support when needed... so no time (nor money by the way) for shopping for Ferrarris... or any cars at all... :)

Assuming you have time for it, what games are you playing at the moment? Played anything in the last little while that really stood out?

Last game that stood out for me was Deus Ex... Well it's not very recent but it is the only recent game I felt real excited about... I've played many recent games but none of them managed to drag me in... I'm now waiting for games as Deus Ex 2 (I bet you could have guessed), Sea Dogs 2, Thief 3, Greyhawk and Fable.

Pretty much from the start, Arx Fatalis was hailed as the next coming of Ultima Underworld. Did Arkane Studios originally come together specifically for building such a game, or were you all sitting around the office one day when someone said, "Hey, I got an idea - Let's do Underworld?"

Arkane Studios was created in order to do Arx Fatalis. As players, Arkane founders had been waiting for a game worthy of the Underworld legacy for a looong time... as it seemed no studio wanted to do it for some mysterious reason, they came together, founded Arkane Studios and started to create the game they had been dreaming of for so long.

Ultima Underworld is generally regarding as a pinnacle of computer gaming, one of the finest RPGs ever produced. So here's a simple one: given that Underworld came out ten years ago, why the hell did it take so long for someone to make a decent follow-up?

That's an interesting question. There was Underworld, then underworld 2.. Both of them were commercial successes. But then.. no UW3. It is still a mystery for me too. I can only witness that there is some kind of a gap between early 90's RPGs and nowadays RPGs: When you think of game as Ultima 7 or Underworld you think about massive interaction.

It seems that what people now call RPGs are games that have evolved toward some kind of hack and slash experiences featuring lots of stats, fake multi-choiced dialogues where the main part of the gameplay consist in leveling up and in running from one dungeon to another, doing "Fed Ex" quests...
And maybe, the Underworld style is more evolving toward more action / adventure games such as Deus Ex and Thief, which have the same "immersive" feeling than Underworld without having the "heavy" (and sometimes confusing) RPG elements in.
Now, for the question: why did it take 10 years for a team to decide to make a game like UW, I'm not sure I have the right answer but now that we've done it, I can tell you that it's been very hard and maybe the amount of work and effort without being sure that new wave of players would like it, is a good reason enough to stay away from the genre.

Was the initial intent to design a true Underworld sequel - Underworld 3, I suppose - or did you decide from the start to make a "spiritual successor," without having to go through all the legal hassles involved with gaining rights to the license?

Actually we asked Paul Neurath (Creator of the Underworld serie) about it and he was OK. Then we had to ask Electronic Arts but they didn't want to use the Ultima Underworld franchise for a RPG of this style again. So we've done without the license, though it is true we would have liked this very much :)

Massively-multiplayer online RPGs are continuing to grow in complexity and popularity, and can be expected to do so for the foreseeable future. What sort of impact do you think that will have on the future of single-player RPGs over the next, say, five or ten years (or whatever time frame you think is appropriate)?

One thing that may have an impact on the Offline RPG is interactivity. When you play online MMORPG you have access to tons of items craftings, items combos, world interactions and avatar customisation.
Maybe this features will finally be massively back in most of Offline RPGs so CRPG could get away from the Hack & Slash way of gaming.

There's a feeling among some long-time RPGers that future, major RPG releases in North America will be "dumbed-down" titles, along the lines of Diablo or Dungeon Siege, in order to appeal to a broader range of gamers who may not enjoy the depth and detail work of a game like Planescape: Torment, for instance, or Arx Fatalis. The impression is that the North American RPG audience will become more and more reliant on European developers for our RPG fix. Do you see the interest in "heavyweight" RPGs being greater in Europe than in North America, and if so, can we expect European developers to continue to produce such titles - or is anyone who wants more to his RPG than "click on this bad guy, click on that bad guy" just completely screwed?

It's right that "old school" RPGs are not that present on the Computer Games market (even if we got a lot of CRPG in 2002).. and that many of this RPGs comes from Europe (Divine Divinity; Gothic 2; Arx Fatalis..), but you must not forget "heavyweight" north american rpgs as Neverwinter Nights or Morrowind. I don't think both Europe & Americans will stop doing CRPG. There is a large audience for this kind of game and there is no reason for CRPG to disappear. They can co -exist with Action RPG.

About Diablo/Dungeon Siege: They are different games. You can't compare a game as Diablo to a game as Fallout. It won't be fair as they don't try to provide the same pleasure. They're focused on a particular gameplay point and they do it really well. It's a bit like saying "Quake is too linear". Quake was not meant to be non linear. It's an action game. It's here to provide fun & explosive action. Many reviewers tend to compare games between each other instead of trying to consder a game as a new unique game with its own features and visions. For instance, some reviewers said "Arx Fatalis' game world is smaller than Morrowind". Well. Ok. That's right. And then? That's not what we focused on from scratch.To conclude, I'd say Diablo and Dungeon Siege have created a "different" style of RPG that is totally respectable as the things they do are done extremely well.

Related to the previous question, along with the anticipation of greater reliance on European developers for solid RPGing, there's also concern that European developers aren't quite up to the challenge of publishing top-flight RPGs, such as Morrowind or the Baldur's Gate series. Divine Divinity, for example, despite being a solid, enjoyable game, still wasn't overly well-received in North America, at least in part because of it's particular European "flavour." (The weird title, for a start.) Do you think that European RPG developers will continue to mature and eventually catch up with their North American counterparts, or is this simply a matter of American videogame hubris?

In fact I think the main problem is money. One day Publishers should understand that We, Europeans can't make great game without money. Our budgets are 2,3,4 even 5 times less important than budgets for american games. We're trying our best to make incredible efforts to deliver the best games as possible but it's like if publishers are fighting against us. They want studios to make best seller games (as the US blockbusters) but they don't give us enough money to do so.

In Canada, at least, Arx went through a troubled birth, with its release date being pushed back several times. I've read about similar problems in other countries, and I've seen a few rumours floating around about financial troubles plaguing JoWood (Arx's publisher). Can you shed any light on why it took so damned long for some of us to get this game?

Arx Fatalis launch went totally wrong. Many people have been asking and complaining that they couldn't find the game in
their nearby shops while the game was already available in big cities of the country... People even had to take their cars to go to NewYork to get the game: this is definitely wrong. JoWood ran into a bad financial situation and
it is the main reason why the release was so blury (to say the least). This obviously had HUGE impact on the sales of the game, and on our own finances as well.

In spite of solid word-of-mouth among RPG fans leading up to Arx's release, and favourable reviews all the way around, Arx sold rather poorly in North America. Is this a big problem for you? Is the North American audience vital to your success as developers, or is it just a nice bonus above and beyond your home market?

The American Market is our main market with the German one. About Arx sales: if you know them, can you send us an email and give us the sales figures please ? We've been trying to get the numbers with no success.
I've already told the financial gap that we felt in because of the poor promotion in the US, moreover, despite very good an positive reviews many people still haven't heard about Arx Fatalis. We've got some mails from players telling us the game was not even on the shelves of their local shop.. some times the shop had received it but it
was lying in the storage room and even the shop keeper didn't know about "a game called Arx Fatalis". Believe me it's really a hard situation for us.
Our game was really well received, critacally acclaimed but, due to a "near to ZERO marketing plan", the game stays unknown to many people..

If you could acquire the rights to develop a game based on anything in the world - movie, television show, another videogame, whatever - what one, single game would you want to make, above all others?

Ultima 10 ? :)

How big is your weiner? (HA! No, just kidding. I saw that on a Simpsons episode a couple nights ago and I've been dying to throw that in somewhere.) Try this instead: you're known to be quite active on the JoWood Arx forums, which most players really seem to appreciate. Aside from the usual bug reports, how much influence do the comments, suggestions and so forth from the community have on design decisions in Arx patches, and even more importantly, in future products? Is player feedback an important factor in making these decisions, or are they more often made too far in advance for the community to significantly impact?

Indeed we've been (and we're still) very present on the Arx Fatalis boards. Players feedbacks are really important to us. It help us to see what people like or not in our game, what people have understood easily or not, so now we know what should be changed in our next game to do the better game.
Talking about Arx support, we've done our best to get the game working on any PC, thanks to the players who sent us emails.Also when it was possible we even add features to Arx Fatalis through patches according to players suggestions.

Final question, then - What's next for Arkane Studios? Are you planning a sequel to Arx - something most Arx players have been clamouring for - or are you on to other things?

Well there nothing official right now because we haven't got a publishing deal yet, but it won't be a real secret if i tell you we're working on the pre production of a game called.. Mmmm.. i don't remember.. but i think the game name ends with "2";)

There you have it. Short, but most sweet. Now that you've finished reading, I strongly urge you to get off your ass, find yourself a copy of Arx Fatalis, buy it, and play it. (If you'd like to know more about the game itself click http://www.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_columns.phtml?site=15&id=185" title="" target="_blank">here for the best damn Arx review you're ever gonna read.) Games like this - and developers like Arkane - deserve our attention and our encouragement.

I sincerely hope to see more from Arkane Studios in the future - and maybe we'll have a chance to do this again for their next release. (On the assumption that it doesn't suck, of course.) Many thanks to the guys at Arkane for giving us an RPG we've been waiting years for, and especially to Julien Roby, for taking the time to talk with me, and for being alright with me making fun of his effeminate nationality. (That was alright with you, right Julien? Right? Julien?)

Email if you dare!