Back in the game: David Jones' hot new set o' wheels

LOS ANGELES--David Jones comes to E3 this year with the kind of baggage most designers only dream of. As a founder of Scotland's DMA Design game development studio (now Rockstar North), Jones was one of the pivotal players on the team that created Grand Theft Auto, the 1998 game that spawned one of the industry's most notorious, profitable, and playable franchises.

Today, many years after leaving DMA Design, Jones is returning from his hiatus from the front lines of game creation. His new company, Real Time Worlds, has for the past two years been hard at work on a new game--one which we know little about other than that it was picked up by one of Korea's biggest operators of online games: Webzen.

Jones presented the kernel of the game to attendees of the 2003 DICE Summit. But there wasn't much to say about it at the time. All the game industry knew then was that Dave Jones' news game would be expansive in both scope and scale; it would be a city-based game; and it would have cars and driving would have some presence in the gameworld.

This week, if you're lucky enough to have secured demo time with Jones, you'll get an insider's view of where he stands in the new game's development.

But for those unlucky thousands who will not move behind the velvet ropes at the Webzen booth, we give you a small taste of what's to come from the mind behind Grand Theft Auto.

GameSpot: Where does the Real Time Worlds team stand in the development cycle of the game?

David Jones: We're in preproduction. So we have lots of prototypes that we're playing. But the way we tend to develop is we tend to build the game, minus graphics. It's the way I've traditionally developed games in the past.

GS: What are you trying to find out at this preproduction stage?

DJ: With this production, it's all about physical gameplay hooks. Just how much fun is it, and how long can we make it fun? And obviously, this is very different from doing a single-player game. As you know, we're talking months and years now, rather than weeks and months. So it's all about balancing...and what happens when you're offline as well as online, because it's persistent. So it's a bit of a learning exercise for us as well.

GS: To what degree are you trying to make this a unique game, or is being the best at an existing format good enough?

DJ: I wouldn't do it if it wasn't unique, something you can't really compare it to. That's one of the design goals. Obviously, you can't do absolutely everything new, so there are a few familiar elements in there--things like combat, driving--but then again, there's quite a lot, especially for the longer-term elements, that we feel are very new and haven't been done before.

GS: If you're not drawing upon existing gameplay models and you want to make a game that's completely new, where do you go for ideas and inspiration?

DJ: We find that building prototypes actually generates ideas. You build something, you play with it, you tend to get runoff effects. If we did this--X, Y, and Z--that would actually be quite a cool feature, for example. So [progress] tends to be driven through small prototypes, where you would find out small things that you do repetitively, but you really enjoy. If that's the case, then let's build a good game feature around that.

GS: It sounds like much trial and error.

DJ: I find a lot of the time, it just comes through having something very, very simple to start with, and you keep playing and playing and building upon, and really layer the gameplay that way. It's very hard to be trying on paper to decide what's going to be fun. One challenging thing about our industry is we have no medium like you have in music or something...where you can just sit down, play away, and try and develop something. We have to create lots of small little prototypes to do that.

GS: How do you deal with the fact that the nontraditional approach usually equals a greater financial risk?

DJ: [We] try and play it safe with the settings of the game. So the game is all about contemporary life.

I find that as long as you don't have to teach the player too many new things, then they're fairly comfortable. I wouldn't go off and do something with new gameplay, or a game set in a completely new universe. I think that would be way too risky.

GS: But there are some boundaries in game development you want to push, correct?

DJ: Absolutely, yes. And there will be teaching involved. I fully realize that we only have a minute, really, to capture a player. Then once I've got them for a minute or two and they really start to get into it, then you know, we think OK, we've had them for five or 10 minutes. [We then] carefully introduce new features and make sure we explain them, making sure the curve is really, really gentle.

GS: What are some of the boundaries you are willing to push?

DJ: I don't want to give too much away. I'm trying to think of a good example I can use. One example is being contacted when you're out of the game. So we have the notion in our game of turf wars, where you can play in a traditional sort of way...where you and your friends get together, or you take over an area that becomes yours, [and you] spend time maybe using graffiti, making it feel like your home.

But then when you go offline, what if somebody else comes and starts to attack you? Then you start to look at things like, well, OK, I'm offline now, and somebody's attacking my area. So you get an e-mail, and then the response to that is, well, how much do we let the person influence the game back, because you have to let them walk back into the game. Could we have a level of interactivity where you can respond by e-mail and actually make some changes to the persistent gameworld? Could we extend that through the mobile phone with messaging? Could we look at another device that's in between the two, where you can actually start to play a subset of the game? That's the area that we're playing with and experimenting with.

GS: You once said that mobile and handheld platforms would be the predominant platform. What appeals to you about mobile?

DJ: I like the feeling that it's not black and white...that you're not necessarily either in the game or you're not. I think what mobile gives you is, if you're really into the game you're playing, or your friends are into it, and you're away for a few days or something, it's just the fact that it's a device that will let you keep in touch, keep doing things and not have to break your connection with the game space 100 percent.

And I also think it's, thinking further down the line, some people might much prefer playing games on a much higher strategic level on your phone. Some people may actually just want to do that all the time.

GS: So it's not as if the mobile phone is one of many game platforms, but it could be the preferred and sole gaming platform

DJ: It could actually stand alone, yes. It really depends on how high we want to develop the control of the elements in the actual persistent world.

GS: Are you targeting a platform yet with the title?

DJ: PC initially, yes.

GS: OK. Give me a little sense of what your thinking is as the consoles become more able to give gamers a networked playing field similar to PCs. Would you consider bringing APB to one of the console platforms?

DJ: We'll basically keep looking and evaluating. And in the back of our minds, we're always developing with the fact that the consoles, especially next-generation ones, are going to have connectivity out of the box. They're going to have, hopefully, some sort of storage. That will open them up to new forms of games, ones that have decent connectivity build into them.

But definitely, every time we're making decisions on the PC game, we're thinking through the process, "How would that translate to a console game?".

GS: On the topic of working with Webzen, how did your deal come together? Was it the result of Western publishers not getting what you were trying to do with the game? Or that the Korean mind-set was the only one that could understand your goals?

DJ: I think it was a bit of both. I never really expected to get a good strong backing partner for this in the West. All the indications are there that it's just not really happened here to the extent that most publishers want to really back something that's big and ambitious.

We didn't really go out of our way to speak to too many people.

What we did do is establish a small office in Seoul. We went there and started to talk to people and said we have ambitions in the online space. I really liked what was happening in the market over there: the fact that you have such a diverse range of games. I mean, you have [Nexon's] Kart Rider, which is a simple cart racing game, but it's the number one online game. [It's] probably a small six-month project, which has gone on to great things, all the way down, of course, to, you know, to Lineage II and things like that.

When we started talking to companies over there, we found that, especially companies like Webzen, that the people at the top are really into games. They're gamers.

[Most Korean publishers and game operators] haven't been around that long, but you still find that people at the top are the ones that created the first game and really understand what it takes to do a game like this. So when we're having conversations, they're the ones that are asking all the tough questions, and that's good. We feel confident that they know what we're talking about...that they can make this happen.

And from there, it was the fact that they're the ones with the most experience of actually putting together the whole system: the whole back-end and infrastructure to run a game like this.

For us, well, we think we can create the game, we've got a great plan, we've got everything running, but to scale up to hundreds of thousands of users, you won't get that experience unless you've gone through it. It's hard to find companies here that have that sort of experience.

GS: Certainly, the Korean market must hold some allure: so many gamers.

DJ: Obviously, wanted to be in that market over there as well. Up until now, there's been no track record of any Western companies going into Korea. We felt we had to team up with a Korean company to make it work over there. We wanted somebody who wanted to bring their products and actually make it over here as well...let them build a presence over this side of the pond as well.

There were quite a few factors that just all seemed to come together really well.

GS: What do you think sold Webzen on your game?

DJ: One of the nice comments that came back afterwards, and I think the main thing, was that we only ever talked about the game and not money.

Obviously, the prototypes helped as well, where we showed how we develop games. And how we'd managed to come up with what they felt was a game that would work just as well over where they are, as well as over here.

That's something that is very hard to find normally. They felt with minimal culturalization, it's got every chance of being a huge hit in their market, as well as ours.

GS: Did you pick the driving genre based on the ease of it appealing to an international market?

DJ: We went into a city-based game, with driving and action, mainly because it was recognized worldwide, and it did break down quite a few barriers. The more modern and contemporary we could make it, the more chance we had of it working globally.

GS: Can you tell yet in what ways working with a Korean company is different from working with a Western publisher?

DJ: First of all, they're very, very hands off, which is great. Once they signed up, they said, "Yeah, that's great. We absolutely love this, but it's very much your baby. Get on with it, and do it. We don't want to interrupt in any way whatsoever."

Right from the start, they recognized how big a project it was going to be resource-wise, especially with the culturization, from their side. So Webzen said we'll build a team for you over here, which will look at every aspect of the project, and they'll work with you and make sure that it has the maximum opportunity of working over there [as well], rather than saying just do one [for us], and we'll just try and make it work everywhere.

GS: Do you get a sense that Korean publishers are interested in taking a more central role in the Western market?

DJ: Yes, I do. The fact that the consoles are going online as well...they know that now is a good [time] for them to [build on] what they've proved in the PC world, and if their console market goes the same way, then they're the ones with the experience to create these online games.

GS: Backing up just a little bit. From your perspective, what's the pitching environment like currently?

DJ: I think, obviously, the number of titles that are being commissioned is going down, down, down. But that's just market forces. Publishers are not wanting to be too risky. I'd be very, very nervous if I was trying to create or trying to pitch anything out of the ordinary--which, I think, is a shame. To try and establish a new IP that has anything risky or slightly different about it is going to be very, very, very tricky.

We're doing another project that's a more traditional project. We were fine with that for the investment that's required these days.

GS: You've got a publisher on board?

DJ: Yes. We are actually signed up with that now. I'm not sure when that will be announced, but it won't be too long. So we're effectively a two-team company doing two titles, which I think is all I would ever be comfortable with these days. That's about the maximum I would recommend to development companies when they're trying to do something new and different. These days, it's very hard to come up with ideas that will get the heavy backing.

GS: What's your read on what consumers, gamers, are looking for from interactive entertainment these days?

DJ: I think the market's split. In some respects, it's like the music market, even though we may not like that. A big, big part of the market just wants the most popular things you can come up with. Britney Spears is always going to sell many millions.

In some respects, it's the same in the game world. You'll always have companies that will write products that are not the most innovative. There's a big part of the market that just wants the flashiest new driving game or fighting game. There's always a big market for that sort of stuff.

Then you've got the smaller segment of the market, which is a bit more, sort of, you might call them hardcore. I tend to find they will go out on a limb; they will try new stuff. And if they find something that's really cool, then that's the thing that can start to bubble up, and casual gamers start hearing about it. And providing that they hear about it enough, they will actually spend the time to seek it out. So, to me, it's just like. It's breeding a new Radiohead.

But that's really hard to do. You can't engineer that. I'm sure just like the music companies try to engineer that, it just won't happen.

GS: What's your agenda at E3?

DJ: Spending a lot of time discussing the features we're going to have in APB. Starting to put it on the radar for people to think about. We'll do some of that at E3.

GS: What's the response you think you're going to get?

DJ: I think we're going to initially get a lot of response from the hardcore online community, and I'm a bit nervous about that.

GS: Because?

DJ: Because in some respects, they're going to be expecting a lot of standard stuff. There will be questions like: Do you have classes of character in your game? Do you have character progression? Well, I'm going to say no to both of those, and they'll go: Oh, but how can you make your game last two years?

I'm going to start having to answer some of those questions.

GS: Last question. What's your opinion on what the former DMA team has done with the GTA franchise?

DJ: Absolutely brilliant. They've really taken it to a height even I couldn't imagine. And they've pushed the controversy angle quite a bit, [though] I'm not sure if it needed that, actually.

GS: Best of the series?

DJ: Vice City was probably the pinnacle, I felt San Andreas went a bit too hardcore in some respects. It's going to be real interesting to see how they keep evolving and where they go with it next.