Q&A with Ragnar Tørnquist

By Jonathan Yalon, HebrewQuest.com

 

Getting Personal

 

How old are you, where do you live and what are you doing besides working on Funcom?

I'm thirty-six, I live in Oslo, Norway, and besides working on my new project at Funcom – which takes up a good chunk of my life – I try not to do too much. I spend time with family and friends, and whenever I get the opportunity I play video games and watch movies. I also do quite a bit of traveling – mostly for work – and I enjoy the opportunity to visit new countries and meet other industry professionals.

 

For quite some time you've been running a pretty active personal blog.  Why did you choose to start such a blog and make many efforts to maintain it?

Everyone has a blog these days, don't they? Originally, it was just a fun experiment, but as I started getting more and more readers, I saw it as an excellent opportunity to keep in touch with the people who play my games.

Most recently, I've used the blog to voice my thoughts and ideas about game development in general – something that I definitely want to continue doing – and in the future, it will also serve as a development journal for my current project. Hopefully, readers will find it an interesting and insightful place to learn more about game design and development from an ‘industry perspective'.

 

What are your favourite movies, TV shows, music, books and computer games?

This is always a tough one to answer... Games – right now, I'm playing Okami on the PS2 – it's beautiful to look at, and it's a ton of fun. I often return to World of Warcraft and Civilization IV on the PC – those games don't get old. On the Xbox 360, I'm currently playing Test Drive Unlimited, which is pretty impressive, as well as Call of Duty 2. I'm really looking forward to both Bully and Final Fantasy XII on the PS2.

TV? Lost remains one of my favourite shows, together with Battlestar Galactica and the U.S. version of The Office. Movies… Hard to pick just one, I'm afraid. I watch a lot of Asian movies – Korean, Chinese, Japanese. Lots of good things are happening over there, and it's more interesting than most of the stuff coming out of Hollywood.

As for books – I recently read two great novels: Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke – both of which I can heartily recommend. I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi, but I do try to read as many different things as possible.

 

Adventure Games

 

What are your favourite classic adventure games (e.g. the ones of Sierra and LucasArts)?

Day of the Tentacle is my all-time favourite. It's brilliant, and a textbook example of adventure game design. I love all the classic LucasArts adventures – Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango. I was never the biggest Sierra fan in the world, although the first Gabriel Knight game was a masterpiece – that was a big inspiration for The Longest Journey. And way, way back, I was also a fan of the Infocom text adventures, although I rarely managed to complete any of them.

 

Since the late 90s, it seems that the adventure genre has lost a great deal of popularity, with a few “fighters” like Funcom and Revolution being the only “significant” developers left.  What do you think about the state of adventure gaming and about its future?

I think adventure gaming has a future as long as adventure developers are willing to push the boundaries of technology and defy player expectations, and as long as they don't get stuck in the past.

Like I've said in past interviews, I think adventures are alive and well – they're just not called ‘adventure games' anymore. I think games like Silent Hill, Shenmue – they have all the building blocks of the classic adventure. A strong storyline, conversations with characters, puzzles, exploration, various world interactions, an inventory… Yes, they also have combat, but adventure games can have combat, stealth, action – there's no rule that says the gameplay has to be all puzzles. So I think the heritage of the adventure lives on, and we'll see lots of examples of that in the future.

I also think that the episodic format used by Telltale for Sam & Max is something that suits the adventure genre well, and it might – I hope – trigger a resurgence of the single-player, story driven game.

 

What advice will you give to someone who's developing an adventure game?

Try to think beyond the boundaries of the traditional adventure, but take note of the things that work – don't discard something just because it's ‘old-fashioned'. Know your market, play as many different games as possible, understand what people enjoy playing on your target platforms – and then take that into consideration when designing your game. Surround yourself with skilled people; 3D artists, programmers, writers and designers. And don't build your own engine from scratch! License something that's proven and that works, and create content on top of that. It's always the best course to take, unless you're going to focus on the technology. Everyone wants to build a game from scratch, but it's rarely a good idea these days.

 

As you probably know, investing in a high-profile adventure game is considered by many publishers as a “marketing suicide”.  Do you expect Dreamfall to be a profitable project?  Have you already got a clue of the sales so far?

I believe we've shipped about 300,000 copies worldwide – at least those were the official numbers for the second quarter of 2006. As for actual sales and profits, I can't really say anything. I honestly don't know.

 

Dreamfall

 

How did you get the inspiration to write Dreamfall?

The inspiration came from the original game, plain and simple. We wanted to continue the story. In terms of gameplay, however, we looked at games like Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness, Shenmue, Zelda – a wide range of titles that aren't considered ‘traditional' adventures, but which definitely have carried on the heritage. Like the original TLJ, I was also inspired a lot by Neil Gaiman's work, particularly on Sandman.

 

What is your favourite part in the game? [for me it most definitely was the reuniting scene of April and Crow…]

I have a lot of favourite parts – but if I had to pick one… The scene with Zoë and Faith near the end of the game carries a lot of emotional resonance for me, and I think it was a nice conclusion to that part of the story. The music especially, combined with the lovely voice of the young actress who played Faith – together with the beautiful visuals – really made that scene work better than I'd imagined.

But I agree, the scene where April and Crow reunite is also one of my favourites. And the opening scene with Brian Westhouse in Tibet. And the Zoë-in-a-coma scene. And the flashback in Russia. And the Wonkers scenes… And—

Well, like I said, I have a lot of favourites.

 

Although played in a real-time 3D engine, I consider Dreamfall to be a solid “adventure” title (and not an “action-adventure” one).  Yet, it contains several parts of fighting and stealth, which many found a little simplistic and not essential for the story development.

It's definitely simplistic compared with action games and most action-adventures, but I think the game would have been a lot less interesting without the fighting and the stealth. I would also say that all of it was essential to the story – without the element of danger, the story wouldn't work as well as it did. Yes, we could have done that with cutscenes, but we wanted to make the player feel a part of the action. But, sure, the action and stealth was simplistic, and that's definitely something we'd like to improve for the sequel.

 

In your creations, do you criticize the society and stress the individual's part within it?  You once mentioned that Dreamfall is a story about faith.  What is Zoe's faith?

We were careful not to make Zoë's quest for faith be about religion, but rather about her faith in herself. She may believe in a god, but that wasn't a factor in her journey. She'd lost faith in herself, and she needed to rediscover that, to believe in herself again – and that's something she does accomplish during the course of the story, which is why Dreamfall, to me, is complete – even though it left some threads hanging.

 

The ending of Dreamfall is extremely open-ended.  Could you “spoil” us a little and stop being so cryptic?  :-)  I want you to personally promise me that my dear April is alive and well!

I'm sorry, but you'll have to wait until the story continues!

 

Have you already written the story of DF2/TLJ3?  Several months ago you denied that Funcom have already began working on the sequel.  Have something changed since then?  Can you roughly estimate when the game might come out?  2008?  2009?

Yes, most of the story for a potential sequel has already been written and it's ready to go. We haven't started working on anything yet, but there are ongoing discussions. Obviously, I can't give you any release date since we don't even know if it's going to happen, but I'd personally love to see a sequel out before 2009. It'd certainly be nice to conclude the story before the end of the decade!

 

Ragnar, thanks a lot for this interview – and keep on the good job!

Thank you!