From Shadowbane to Child’s Play: KingsIsle’s Todd Coleman on Wizard101

By Steven Crews | April 20, 2009 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: KingsIsle, Wizard101

The MMO Gamer: There’s been a stigma in North America attached to the free-to-play genre.

The concept originally came out of East Asia, where it’s at almost 100% acceptance versus the subscription model.

The importers of East Asian titles tried to make inroads here starting five or six years ago with games that seemed like they just ran them through the Korean to English translator on Babelfish and pushed them out the door-and that kind of sullied the entire concept for many players.

But, now we’re starting to see some real AAA free-to-play titles coming out of Western developers.

When do you think it’s going really begin to catch on in the mainstream here, and get past say, the 50% acceptance mark?

Todd Coleman: What’s funny is that kind of curmungeoning. I am with you on that, by the way. I think that there are a lot of people, especially people like myself, who have been doing MMOs since the UO days, then MUDs before that. Definitely there was a huge amount of resistance there.

Where we’re pointed, in the kids market, that not the case at all. Club Penguin, Webkins, and games like these, the kids don’t have that preconceived notion and the inherent resistance to the FTP model. It’s just a natural normal thing.

They’re used to playing casual games on these websites that never cost them anything. So it’s a different mindset. I definitely see where you are coming from and I agree that we have seen that among the older players, but among the kind of new up and coming generation that hesitancy is not there.

In terms of the 50% mark, that’s really tough, too, because FTP numbers are almost not even applicable against subscriber numbers.

If you just compare them apples to oranges, it’s kind of hard to make that call. But as a mindshare, when will the curmudgeonly MMO players that have been around since the UO days, when will they come to accept it? I don’t know. That’s a tough call.

My gut tells me probably within the next year or two years. But then again, I may be completely biased because what I am seeing is I have a very strong very loyal group of players right now who it’s normal to them, it’s not weird at all.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned “Shining Force” a little while back, and that was one of my favorite games growing up as a kid, I have to admit. You drew a lot of inspiration, obviously, from the old-school RPGs, How did that inspiration work into the game? Where is it popping up?

Todd Coleman: You will see it in a couple of spots. You see it definitely in our questing engine. Instead of presenting quest information as a big multi paragraph chunk of text, we inset portraits with lines of dialogue and you click next to go through the pages.

We are now adding voiceover for all that so it will seem more adware interactive, which is obviously something that you’ll see out of the newer consoles. So the old Shining Force games it was the…

The MMO Gamer: “Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep…”

Todd Coleman: “…beep, beep, beep, beep,” kind of stuff. Yeah.

Which I actually originally wanted to put in this, but I have to admit voiceovers is definitely a better option because it will be more appealing especially to our younger players, 6 and 7, who have trouble reading and our 35 year olds who are tired of reading. So you’ll see it in the questing.

Obviously, you can see it in the combat. The kind of very cinematic style and the I hit you, you hit me, kind of play by play, you get that. That is pretty clearly drawn from that.

You also see it in the sensibilities of the story line. We specifically set out to make a universe that was a connected series of different worlds.

That way it totally opened us up from a creativity standpoint because basically anything was fair game. We were like, “Oh let’s have a world that’s Victorian England. Kind of like the Muppet Christmas Carol. OK, no Problem. Who lives there? Well there’ll be dogs. Great. Let’s look on the London Underground map. Hey, here’s a station called Marleybone. That’s funny. We’ll name the world Marleybone.”

So it was very, very open and freeing from that standpoint. And I think a lot of that is drawn from, like I said, all sorts of different sources from our childhood, not any one particular.

You can’t just point at one book and say this is the book that drived it. Basically it is almost a Who’s Who of all the fantasy books that me and all my guys have ever read. Steal from the best is I guess what they say.

The MMO Gamer: I like to round out my interviews on a philosophical note, so: Why do you make games? Why do you get up every morning, go to work and do what it is you do?

Todd Coleman: I actually started in corporate software. That was like my career path, if you will.

I started a company with some of the guys that worked with me on Shadowbane and Wizard, James Nance and Josef Hall, my two partners in crime. It was a database tools and techniques company, a good run and a good experience.

But we came out the other end and we were like, “Is this what we want to do for the rest of our lives?” And, just like everybody else, you have passions.

Back in college we used to run a text-based MUD. So MUDding was kind of our hobby. That was about the time UO was coming out and we were like, “Hey, look. Somebody actually finally found a way to make money doing that thing that we used to do back in college.”

Our professors told even then you can never make money, stop doing it, it is a waste of time, you’ll never make money doing it.

So we came out of that company, we had a little bit of money in our pockets, and we had this idea, we were going to go off and create something different and unique. And we did. It was a huge, grueling ride. It was an exercise in triumph and tragedy.

But I still wouldn’t trade it for anything, and I still wouldn’t go back to corporate software.

You’ve got to find something that you really enjoy and that you’re really passionate about, and for me that is storytelling in one way or the other. I love games. I love film. I love writing. So I can’t imagine myself ever doing anything other than telling stories.

The MMO Gamer: Alright. Well thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate it. We hope can do it again some time.

Todd Coleman: Thank you very much.

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