broken on 9/11/2005 at 04:00

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Gamers with Jobs Radio, Episode 7 features our very own gavin carter :)

The original show can be downloaded and/or listened to at:

(http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/19991) Interview with Gavin Carter

Gamers with Jobs: We managed to score some sit-down time with Gavin Carter, producer of Oblivion. We've heard the game has been delayed, he wasn't able to tell us anything about that, but he is able to tell us an awful lot about the game itself, what producing a game like Oblivion is like, what working with big name stars like Patrick Stewart, and John Bean is like, and many other things. Very exciting interview.

Talking to Gavin Carter, he's the producer on Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Let's start by you telling us a little bit about what a producer on a game like Elder Scrolls Oblivion does.

Gavin: Well, it's really a little bit of everything, your basic producer is a project management type position, so you do lots of things like tracking schedules, making sure people know what they're supposed to be doing, when they're supposed to have it done, lots of things like that. You're basically the person responsible for making sure people under you know when they're supposed to have things done, and making sure they do it to the quality that the game requires. I spend a lot of time going around making schedules, going around communicating with people. I also am heavily involved with running our bug database, and tracking everything that goes in and out of there.

Gamers with Jobs: I guess the question I want to ask is how many people are there over your head, but a more clear way to say it would be how responsive do you have to be from suggestions from above, and where do those suggestions usually come from.

Gavin: Well, the people who work above us, the quote unquote suits, as people might refer to them, they definitely have an interest in the project, and they have goodwill towards us all down here, but at the end of the day we're the people, we're the developer and the publisher of the title, so we have pretty much as close to complete autonomy as you could hope for in the gaming world. I mean, yes, we have bills to pay and we have to be responsible to business interests and things like that, but no one from PR or Marketing is going to come down and demand that we change a feature in the game, or anything like that. They trust us to know what we're doing. They trust us because of the success we've had with Morrowind where we had a similar relationship, so it works out really well for us, I think. We have a great degree freedom to do what we think is best for the game without having to worry about some executive coming down and telling us what he thinks is good, and forcing our hand to do that.

Gamers with Jobs: So let's talk then a little bit about what we're going to be able to expect from Oblivion. I'm assuming you can't tell us when we're going to see the game, but when we do get our hands on it, what do you think is gonna to jump out in a typical gamers’ first impression of this game.

Gavin: Well, it's a big experience to take in. I mean, the first and most obvious thing that makes people go nuts are the visuals which are just astounding in places. We're really doing everything we can to push that envelope as far as it will go, and we say we're making a game for the next generation, and that's what we mean. Also, just the range of game play options that we have is just way far and above Morrowind that the whole experience just playing the game is so much more fluid than it was in Morrowind, we think. It's more like, revised combat, all the new AI stuff gives you much better feeling of just existing in this world, you know what I mean?

Gamers with Jobs: Uh huh.

You mentioned the visuals, and I think that's really the first thing that has just jumped out. The screen shots which we have seen, and the material we have seen of the game, it just looks incredible. What aspects of living in the world are you guys really working on? How, when we look at these characters in the games, and the NPCs, how real are they going to be to us?

Gavin: Well, we're trying to do absolutely everything that we can. Using Morrowind as a benchmark, it's just leaps and bounds ahead I mean everything from daily schedules that we're doing, people go about their business, they have a life, they have a job, they eat, they sleep, they read, some of them go on adventures and go looking for treasure in caves and things, even to that extent. There's more immediate things that we've done like facial animation technology, we try and incorporate a lot more expressions into standard dialogue so you get a better feeling that the person is much more real than a database, like people felt in Morrowind, the feeling a lot of people got with Morrowind characters. Things like emotions, facial animation, and the full speech really helps those aspects.

Gamers with Jobs: On that point, I don't know how familiar you are with the Uncanny Valley Theory of Robotics, I guess is where this theory originated, in that you reach a certain point in attempting to make something artificial more human like in appearance and behavior, where the end product ends up being a little bit creepy.

Gavin: Right.

Gamers with Jobs: How do you feel that applies to video games, and particularly a game like Oblivion which you said it's really the goal to make it more realistic.

Gavin: Well, it's tough, and you kind of just have to take it as far as you can and see what happens, and it's kinda like an iterate process where you're like "Aah, this isn't really working, and maybe we should try it this way." I'm not sure how much we're running into the Uncanny Valley, or the Too Human problem, or whatever you want to call it, but I think you can attempt to, I think you can improve the aspects of the characters in your game, things like dialogue, and you know, their emotional responses to your actions, I think you can do that and not have to worry about whether or not people are going to be creped out about it, as much as you worry about just making a good game that's fun to play. I think when characters are more reactive to the things that you do, I think that's better all around.

Gamers with Jobs: Would you consider that a bonus really, if the game was so realistic it was slightly creepy, would you feel like you'd really done it.

Gavin: [laughs]

Would I consider it a bonus if people were creped out by my game? Not too sure how to answer to that one. I hope people are affected by the characters and maybe even make some connections, but I hope they aren't creped out except where I intend them to be.

Gamers with Jobs: Fair enough. One of the more interesting news items that came out about Oblivion, this has been a game that people are very excited about, and news about Oblivion is very noteworthy whenever it comes out, what would the things that we saw not too terribly long ago was mention of some of the voice actors you guys have employed, and it's been theorized that the near coincidence of the announce price of the game increased simultaneous with the announcement of a certain voice actor participating. Tell me a little bit about the process of getting such big name stars like Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean, and Linda Carter, and those kind of folks.

Gavin: Well, it's really just... I think we sat down early in the project and came up with a wish list of the actors who we would want to voice these parts if we could have anybody in the world. And then it's basically we give it to the executives upstairs to take care of, and to go try. There are basically these talent agents that work with the game industry and top actors who we can go to and try to get them to seek out to these people, so we talked to a few people, and I think we got a cast who we're really excited about, and we're really proud to have.

Gamers with Jobs: How does the process of integrating them into, I mean I assume they're not in the offices with you where you're coding, and making your spreadsheets and that sort of thing, do you ever get the chance to meet these folks?

Gavin: They did not come to the office, unfortunately, no, I mean, I would have loved to have Patrick Stewart hanging out at my desk, but it just wasn't in the cards, unfortunately. My boss, Todd Howard, ended up flying out to London to a recording studio there, and taking him and Terrance Stamp out there in London, and Sean Bean, we actually taped him in South Africa while he was doing some sort of movie shoot down there. So yeah, I wish I could have met them all in person, but having them just be in the game is very cool in and of itself.

Gamers with Jobs: It was suggested on this very radio program that Sean Bean alone is worth an extra ten dollars in the price of the game, do you agree with that?

Gavin: Absolutely, absolutely. The combination of him and Patrick Stewart in the exact same game, I don't see how any true gamer could resist, honestly.

Gamers with Jobs: When you're talking about big name stars, especially big names in the science fiction fantasy movie community, guys like Patrick Stewart, they'll be a draw. What do you think is the more important aspect of getting big name stars like that, the amount of attention that they'll draw, or the sheer quality that they'll bring to the project?

Gavin: You know, I think... there's something to be said about those of us that’s certainly attention getting when you can say, you know, "You're the first game ever to have General Zod voice a character", and there's also, I mean, these guys are seasoned, really, really, really great actors, which is something that, you know, it's not something you’re gonna find in every video game that you go out, I mean, voice acting, I think, has been a sore spot for the industry, up until fairly recently, but I think that the performances and the dramatic qualities that they can add to a game through their performances are really valuable.

Gamers with Jobs: We talked about the entertainment side a little bit, let's go back and talk about the technology behind Oblivion, just briefly, you said you're trying to make a game for the next generation, I think you guys are gonna be successful with that from what I've seen. When we're talking about the X-Box 360, when we're talking about the next generation of PC games, however you want to apply that term, what challenge does that present to you to work with such radically new tech, like the core of the X-Box 360?

Gavin: It presents a wide range of challenges, but, you know, it's pretty much similar to any leap in technology that you're gonna have to deal with, they all carry their advantages and disadvantages with them. I mean, if we were just doing a PC game would we still have to worry about all the headaches that, you know, different configurations that cause all the compatibility things like that, with the X-Box 360 we really kinda had to change how we think about architecting our code to work better with like, with the multi-core aspect of it, it's really, it's quite a bit different than your traditional PC single core setup, but at the same time, the multi-core setup, it allows access to a lot more power than a traditional setup. So you have pros and cons with each approach, and you just kinda have to take it in stride and see what you can do with each one to get the most out of it. You know, it's something we're pretty familiar with having done Morrowind on the X-Box. It was more similar between the X-Box and the PC in the last generation, but even that had its challenges, and I think it really prepared us well to deal with this kind of dual platform development that we're doing right now.

Gamers with Jobs: A lot of the buzz about the next generation of consoles and developing for the multi-core consoles has been that it would dramatically increase the cost and the production time of producing games. Have you found that to be the case?

Gavin: Me, I find as expectations rise, you know, the more time and the more money your gonna have to spend on development to meet those expectations. I don't think it's necessarily the fault of the technology, or you know, it's not anyone’s fault, it's just people want better experiences, and the technology can provide that, provided you work it over enough. So development costs are going up, but I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing on face value.

The X-Box 360 being such a new, kind of unknown quantity in some ways, how does that impact you in the production process, and the development time working with a product that was in some ways I'm sure still in development when you guys started working on this game?

Gavin: Right. It definitely presents challenges, and it basically means that you have to be a lot, you have to be really smart about your development decisions, and you have to plan ahead as well as you can, and then you have to react once you actually get the hardware. Microsoft is really quite good about keeping their developers in the loop on what's going on with the hardware, they have really good representation to developers out there who are doing the titles right now, and they're absolutely willing to help you out in any way that they can to make these games as good as we can. So that's been a great experience, I mean, we had a good experience working with them with the X-Box and I think it's carried over to 360 development, I think they took a lot of lessons that they learned with the X-Box and they applied them really well, and I really look forward to playing a lot of the games on it myself, actually.

Gamers with Jobs: What is there, if there is one, what is the one thing that you may have been developing, and may have had to drop, what's the one thing you'll miss in Oblivion, or another way to put it is what's feature number one for the next Elder Scrolls game going to be?

Gavin: [laughs]

I don't know if I can spoil it like that, man. I mean, there's, you know, honestly, like anything else, your eyes are gonna be bigger than your stomach, and there's always gonna to be things that you're gonna have to cut, so there are definitely things we wanted to have that just aren't gonna make it, but at the same time you can't look at is as we're cutting out stuff, and it's really a terrible horrible process. You gotta look at it as 'we're gonna take that time, and apply it to making everything else in the game as best as we can', so while there's stuff I wish we could have gotten in, it means we can apply that time and make the other things better. As far as which one I would have liked to see, I don't know, there are tons, we have so many ideas that it's crazy.

Gamers with Jobs: Fair enough. So back to Oblivion then, what do you think is the single most exciting element that you are gonna be able to bring to the table?

Gavin: I really think that the one that most people are going to react to positively is the whole new AI system, and the one that we're terming Radiant AI, I really think that is going to change the formula for Morrowind that people are expecting the most dramatically. I really think that impacts the immersiveness of the world and just the way you experience the world just walking around, seeing people going about the day, seeing them interact with their surroundings, and interact with another, it brings back all those feelings of amazement that I had when I was playing old games like Ultima 7, where you would see the world kind of acting on it's own without your influence.

Gamers with Jobs: Sounds exciting, I can't wait to get my hands on it now, I'm wishing I had it right now just talking to you. This is Gavin Carter, he's a producer on Elder Scrolls Oblivion, he's kind enough to spend some time with us talking about their upcoming title. Before we draw this to a close, one more quick question, what can you tell us about Fallout 3?

Gavin: [laughs] I can tell you anything you would like to know about Fallout 3, I just have to answer by saying 'no comment.'

Gamers with Jobs: [laughs] Fair enough. It never hurts to try. Gavin, thank you so much for joining us.

Gavin: Thanks a lot for having me.