This is a two-parter, but the longer part is defining what a game designer is. The second part involves Bill Roper and Blizzard, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
First off, I must admit that each company defines a game designer a little bit differently. Some companies think of them purely in the level design sense, while others consider them the creative thinker of the entirety of the game. As such there are really three titles for game designers that everyone abides by. I’ll start with what most people consider the lowest on the totem pole and move to the top.
Level Designers – Level designers are the designers that are the closest to the end result of a game. They create the documentation that tells you what specific gameplay elements will take place in an area of the game. Then they craft the initial blockout of the physical space the gameplay will take place in. Then they script in the actual gameplay. Sometimes they handle some of the cinematics and it is often their responsibility to make the game “fun.” The amount of trust that a company has in its level designers can greatly impact whether the end result of a game will be fun. If the level designers feel micromanaged or that they can’t get what they need for their levels, the end product will often suck, no matter how good any previous stage of development might have been. This is why it’s critical to give level designers all the tools necessary to make a complete game.
At some companies, level designers have near complete control over the level they are crafting. For instance at Blizzard and Oddworld, the level designers could do pretty much anything they wanted as long as they hit the major story points that were handed down from the creative director. Having that sort of creative freedom will typically result in a very fun end game experience for the player, see Warcraft III or Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath for examples. If the Level Designers are micromanaged or if bosses come in and nitpick gameplay elements that they don’t understand or attempt to force gameplay into the game that doesn’t make sense for it, what you end up with is The Da Vinci Code or The Golden Compass style games (i.e. crap).
Level Designers are the heartbeat of a game. A game lives or dies by the polish and attention they give to the levels. If a level designer is concerned with the level of fun of the game, you had best listen, or you are pretty much guaranteeing the release of a turd in a box (though level designers also have a tendency to be a little too close to the product, unless of course you’ve beaten them with poor decisions to the point where they do not give a fuck anymore).
Game Designers – Believe it or not, the game designers are actually a semi-new thing in the game industry. Most designers were typically level designers or the lead designer up until a few years ago when lead designers either became less competent or the scope of games became too large for one designer to handle every aspect of the background design. What do game designers do?
They handle game balance, the design of gameplay systems and the fine-tuning of control schemes, including the documentation of all such features. Usually their job is to stay on top of things that the lead designer is too busy to handle. That is to say, at a good game company, they handle the aspects of design that the lead is too busy to undertake. At a bad game company, they deal with everything because the lead designer is likely incompetent.
Being a game designer can either be a lot of fun or a hellish nightmare vortex from which there is no escape.
This primarily has to do with the lead designer’s competence. The more competent they are, the easier and more obvious the game designer’s job becomes. The less competent the lead designer, the more difficult and hard to define the game designer’s job becomes. The reason being that a game designer without direction will often make attempts to design all of the needed gameplay systems for the game, which the bad lead designer will then see as an attempt to usurp power from them. Power struggles over core gameplay systems always end badly, and good work will be thrown out by the lead designer in an attempt to show everyone “who’s in charge.”
Within the game designer arena, there are typically a few specializations that different game companies will hire depending upon the needs of their game.
Balance Designer – These guys deal with balancing aspects of the game. For instance in World of Warcraft, a balance designer might take all the base weapon damages for the warrior class and make sure they progress at an appropriate rate compared to paladin weapon damages.
Writer Designer – These folks are associated with writing for video games. Some companies do not hire them at all and rely on level designers or lead designers to handle the job on the side. Other companies hire a bunch of writer designers to handle the majority of the content for the game (Bioware for instance is HUGE on hiring writer designer types).
Scripter Designer or Technical Designer – Scripting is a limited form of programming that allows designers to create gameplay experiences without getting specially made code. Scripters typically have some background in programming though if the company is making their game properly, the level designers can handle almost all aspects of scripting. It is my opinion that any game company that has more than one Scripter Designer (or more appropriately, Technical Designer) is doing it wrong and will fail. Level designers should be able to script all aspects of their level.
Other Specific Job Designer – Many game companies make specialized design positions for their particular game niches. In an MMORPG game, you might see them hire a Spawner Designer who handles the placement of creatures within the world, or an Item Designer who only deals with creating items. As MMORPGs become more and more common, you’ll see a lot of these more specific design areas open up.
Senior Designer – Senior can be appended to any design title in order to recognize someone as being particularly veteran at their job. Being a senior designer sometimesleads to the most coveted design position, the lead designer.
Lead Designer – This is usually where the initial direction and feel of the game comes from. In combination with a good artist and programmer, this is the third leg of the footstool that keeps a game fun and moving forward. That is to say, if you have a good lead designer, the game is probably going to come together nicely. The lead designer is often responsible for the initial direction of the game, the story, the gameplay, and the feel of the world. The lead designer is almost always responsible for keeping their game designers and level designers busy and more importantly, happy. A lead designer will also document the core features of a game and typically present the game idea as a whole to the rest of the company.
You can typically tell whether a game is going to be good or not simply by talking to the lead designer. If they seem to have a good design sense and really interesting ideas about what the game is going to be, the whole game is probably going to come together quite well. If they can’t make up their mind about any of the features or they don’t seem to have a solid foundation of what is good versus bad design, you are proper fucked.
A good lead designer will delegate to hungry designers areas that the lead is weak in. Most designers that make it to the lead position are well rounded and know their weak points. So where they are weak, they let others cover for them. A bad lead designer will not recognize their own areas of weakness and will try to cover every aspect themselves out of fear of being shown up. Proper delegation is key to being a good lead.
What is a Game Designer?
A game designer is an individual that deals with creating, documenting, and implementing the ideas for making a fun game.
As such, there’s a little bit of design in every field. Programmers and artists can come up with game ideas just as much as a pure game designer. However, it’s the game designer’s responsibility to make those ideas fun. If the game isn’t fun, the designer will be the one who is blamed, and rightfully so. They are responsible for all the little tweaks and polish that goes into making the game perfect.
There are some who argue that game designers are unnecessary and that programmers and artists are all you need to make a game. To a certain extent, I agree. However, if you want a fun game, you need to have a good game designer or the end product is going to be lackluster in quite a few areas. See the original Dungeon Siege as an example, or any of the early Ready at Dawn games. They’re not bad, but they just lack that certain fun factor that makes a game great.
Incompetent designers can also cause a game to lose its fun factor. The Golden Compass is the best example of this, as the gameplay and game systems in that game just seem hacked together by a simpering moron or a retarded monkey.
The point being, good ideas can come from anywhere, and it is a game designers job to recognize the good ideas and make them a reality. Coming up with ideas is definitely part of the job, but designers have to recognize when their own ideas are bad or if there is a better idea that comes to the table. It can be rough to kill your own idea (or kill your own baby as we sometimes say) but it is probably the most critical design skill you can have. If you can’t recognize good or bad gameplay from the initial idea, you fail at design.
Anyways, I did mention this was a two parter, so let’s get on to the next part of the question.
What was Bill Roper like, and was/is he a good designer/producer?
Bill Roper is a great person. He’s amicable, easy to get along with, pretty much a laugh riot. I remember seeing him at the Renaissance Fair singing lusty songs about wenches and ale and that sort of epitomizes how I see him as an individual. He’s a really cool guy on a personal level.
As a producer, he did a good job of keeping things moving. I don’t think anyone had a bad thing to say about Bill as a producer. However, Bill didn’t want to be a producer, he wanted to be a designer and that’s when things started to go wrong. Not because Bill was bad at design, but because of who he had to deal with in order to work in design.
Bill Roper had as much to do with the design of Diablo and Starcraft as any valued member of the Blizzard team did. Though he was often the face of Blizzard and the perception was that he did a lot for Blizzard games (he did the voice of the Footsoldier in Warcraft II), any single level designer contributed as much or more to those games. That’s just how it is at Blizzard. It’s a largely collaborative effort with a couple of people who usurp credit for others work either because they want it to be that way, or because they happen to be likable and in the spotlight so it ends up being perceived that way. Bill was definitely the latter.
So then Bill went to Blizzard North to work on design for the next Diablo game. The only issue was, he didn’t want to do another Diablo and neither did the rest of Blizzard North. With that in mind they showed us something they called Starblo, a product named to fail. It was basically a science fiction Diablo with all the same perspectives of Diablo II. No one was impressed. It was about then that I realized Bill had a bit of a rebellious streak in him.
I believe it was only 3-6 months after seeing Starblo that we heard about a big score of scary changes that might come down from Vivendi Games onto Blizzard. The scare revolved around how much control Blizzard would have over distribution and such, and ultimately it ended up being a big fuss over nothing. However, it was Bill Roper and the gang at Blizzard North that demanded that Blizzard North have more say over how Vivendi Games was to be run. To back up their defiance, they offered letters of resignation if their demands were not met.
Their letters of resignation were accepted and thus Blizzard North began to fall apart quite rapidly. With all of the primary leadership gone, the few who were left scrambled to piece together something to show that they weren’t a hollow shell. Their efforts produced a PVP oriented version of Diablo 2 that was not very impressive. I believe it was a year or so later that Blizzard told everyone at Blizzard North that they could move to Irvine (where Blizzard is located) and reapply for their old jobs, and that they might just get rehired. In other words, they were all fired.
Meanwhile, Bill Roper and crew formed Flagship studios and quickly strip mined the remnants of Blizzard North to assemble a team (which also contributed to the ultimate firing of everyone left at Blizzard North). They already had a new game in mind and Hellgate London quickly began to take shape. What the contributions of the individuals were at Flagship, I cannot say. I did not work there, but I imagine (given Bill’s past desire to move into design) that Bill contributed a lot.
Now, making a new studio and funding a game are not easy tasks. Not by a long shot. To make it sustainable they needed a lot more funding then their own pockets and eventually it was Hanbitsoft that came along and decided to sustain them until Hellgate London could come out. Now, again, knowing nothing of the details, this is entirely speculation, but…
Without the code base from their past games to fall back on, they now had to craft a new 3D engine, an entire massively multiplayer networking system, and almost every tool that they would have to create the game with from scratch. This is no easy task… In fact, most game companies take crappy small jobs like porting Tetris to the N64 in order to work on that sort of infrastructure on the side for several years. Flagship was having none of that and went full bore on trying to create it all at the same time.
Sadly, when a publisher is involved (like Hanbitsoft), there’s a time table you need to be concerned with. One that they would ultimately meet, but at a tremendous cost. You see without an infrastructure already established they were having to develop the tools to make the game at the same time as they would have to generate content. What you usually get is a lot of content you either have to throw away or redo.
Let me put this in perspective for you. Diablo 2 from start to finish took about 3 years. Hellgate London from start to finish was done in about 2 years. Is it any wonder it was plagued by a horde of problems? Not to me. I imagine, were it given another 2 years of development (with 1 year being entirely devoted to tools and infrastructure) it would have been a far superior product (and let’s keep in mind it still got a 71 on Metacritic, no easy feat).
So whatever Bill Roper’s contribution to the game, do I think that it’s somehow his fault that Hellgate London has not lived up to its expectations? Not in the slightest. I’d be willing to bet he put his heart and soul into that game, but without the proper time for those efforts to be allowed to flourish, there was little hope that Hellgate could be the blockbuster it might have been. How much of Hellgate’s lackluster appearance is Bill’s fault? No more than any member of the team that contributed to the game.
Games are the effort of many people working together. No one individual can be said to matter more than another. Without a tools programmer, a level designer’s job becomes extremely difficult. Without a good artist, a brilliant game idea may never work out. In the case of Hellgate London, Bill Roper just happens to be the most charismatic and well known person on the team. You can’t blame him for Hellgate’s problems just because he makes the most public appearances.
As to his design skills, I honestly don’t know. =)