Interview with Raphael Colantonio

2003-04-07

Raphael Colantonio is the CEO of Arkane Studios and the Lead Designer of the highly acclaimed Arx Fatalis. Our friend Dagon has conducted an interview with him in French language for his site The Dagon's Lair recently and allowed us to translate it and put it up on RPGDot. Thanks to Ekim for the translation!

Dagon: To begin, talk to us about yourself, what you did before Arkane and Arx...

Raphael Colantonio: After a stroke of luck, I started at EA France. It was great, I was only the 8th employee of the French division. My mission was to build up the technical and consumer support departments. 2 years later, I went to EA-UK where I worked on producing and game design for different games like Beasts and Bumpkins, Darklight, FIFA Soccer Manager, FIFA 97, Warcraft PSX. Next, after an overdose of England, I came back to France to work at Doki Denki (formerly Heliovisions). I was Project Leader on a PSX platform game (The Smurfs). It was a game for Infogrames. My real longtime dream was to make Ultima types of games, but whether at EA or Heliovisions I never had that opportunity since RPGs were viewed as being extremely difficult to develop, needing big American teams with experience. But I found associates that shared the same dream as mine and we decided to go for it, taking care to ignore all that we heard said at EA and, most of all, not to let ourselves be discouraged by the gossips that didn't give us more than 6 months before failing.

Dagon: Courageous

Raphael Colantonio: Yes, the most difficult part was to unlearn what I knew about, or else any sane person would not even have tried :)

Dagon: In short, you have founded Arkane Studios with the people that believed in your project.

Raphael Colantonio: Next we built Arkane with 1 million francs, which let us quietly make a demo in our offices starting from nothing... We then understood that it wouldn't be simple: even with a rather convincing demo, editors were a little cold because we had to convince them that a little developer coming from nowhere could create an "grandiose" RPG with a team of 5 people starting with Direct X and Visual C++ :)
That's when you realize that thoughtlessness and our dream has saved us. Finally, we got up to 10 interns + many contractors.

Dagon: Tricky. Some developers, like Sir Tech, had to create their own software before trying to sell it to potential publishers. Did you find your publisher before beginning the creation of your game, or was it the other way around?

Raphael Colantonio: It was the other way around. We auto-produced ourselves, risking the loss of 1 million francs in the process. But there's no other solution these days, only the stars sign without a demo and the stars represent only 10 studios in the world.

Dagon: Let's talk about Arx. How much time did it take to develop?

Raphael Colantonio: That's a difficult question... First, easy answer: 3 years. But this includes the creation of the company, the offices, build the team, making the pre-prod, finding a publisher, the death of our first publisher, getting on with the second...

Dagon: Was Arx as successful as was hoped?

Raphael Colantonio: Yes and no... In certain countries where it was properly marketed it sold enough, but Jowood was in a rather miserable financial state when we released it in the US. In short, to find the game people had to go to the big cities or order them on the internet. Let's just say that we had good and free marketing: word of mouth, press coverage. But besides that we didn't have enough support from traditional marketing.

Dagon: That's too bad. To suffer from Jowood's situation is frustrating.

Raphael Colantonio: Yes, but that's business, it's like that. The fact remains that what counts for us today is that the game was played a lot. Whether it was bought or not, at full price or in the bargain bin, etc... The goal was that everybody would know about Arx so that Arx2 could make a real boom this time.

Dagon: The reputation of excellence that Arx provided will make you benefit on future projects.
Also, the technical support that you provided (through patches) was very positive.

Raphael Colantonio: Hehe, yes we make it a point to make the players happy. It's a question of honor.

Dagon: I am very critical regarding role-playing games since I play them since the Apple 2 days. Arx isn't perfect but it's an EXCELLENT game. It's the first time that a French developer makes such an impression on me. Seriously.

Raphael Colantonio: :) Thank you.

Dagon: Talking about your projects you let something slipped... You talked about Arx2 :)

Raphael Colantonio: Ah... Well, yes... We anticipate to begin the pre-prod to present it to a publisher one of these days.

Dagon: Good! But it won't be Jowood this time...

Raphael Colantonio: Regarding the publisher: I don't know yet. We're only starting to look at them, but it's still much too early for the moment.

Dagon: So we'll surely see an Arx2. That's an excellent news, even if the beast is still far from being ready! What can you tell us about it?

Raphael Colantonio: Mmmh...

Dagon: :) Reassure me... Will there be sequences based on dexterity? I cursed your name whenever there were platform jumps over lava in the Dwarf mines!

Raphael Colantonio: In fact... The reason why people cursed us in the lava sequence was because it wasn't properly made. Here's what we realized by reading the reviews: the game being rather big and having few moments of action or role or adventure, the players didn't all take it the same way. Some tried to compare us to Morrowind or other hardcore RPGs with lots of stats everywhere, without action and lots of dialogues, etc... Those players blamed the lack of weapon, armor and sub-quests variety, etc... Knowing that we really didn't want to make a game like Morrowind, it's a little bit like if someone would have blamed the lack of variety of cars compared with Ridge Racer... It kind of bothered us a little.

Dagon: Among other things its complementary nature was its force. Its what made the jello take! Ultima Underworld didn't have lots of stats. Neither did Ultima 7.

Raphael Colantonio: Exactly. But in the last few years U7 and UW were completely forgotten and people think that the ultimate RPG = stats, mega dialogues, gigantic world, nothing scripted, etc... Those who have compared us to Deus Ex, Underworld, Thief, or other games that were of the "Looking Glass" type, adored Arx and gave very high marks.

Conclusion: we will do everything we can to confirm the game's position as a first person immersive. That means that we'll put focus on the ambiance, the immersion, stealth, an ultra-detailed and scripted world. We will make the game clearer: too many players got stuck for hours in places where they should never have been because they didn't have the object needed to go on yet... But we'll keep the high level of interaction, we will add a second school of magic, and we will have a few surprises that we'll reveal later (it's still too early for now).

Dagon: Will there be exterior sets?

Raphael Colantonio: Yes...

In fact, there was already stealth in Arx, but some people didn't notice it. In Arx 1 only magicians were favored in a certain way. This time we'll give the same attention to thieves and warriors. It'll be really fun to play a warrior: he will have his own skills.

Talking about skills, we'll be doing something very significant this time: when we gain skills it will make a real difference. The skills system won't be based on percentages anymore, but on a more ON/OFF kind of system with tiers.

As a player of (what I thought to be) RPGs, the last ones that I liked the most were Ultima 7, Underworld, Stonekeep and Fallout... I like the settings, I like being surprised, I like being frightened. That's why I love Thief, Deus Ex and System Shock also.

Richard Garriott once said: "Thief is a real RPG, I never felt more attached to a character in a game: that's a role-playing game."

In Arx, we tried to zoom in as close as possible to the detail: we work on the character, their behavior, their AI in order to feel like we're in their own world. This type of ultra-scripted and always varied is not very compatible with the RPGs that will capitalize on their 347,000 dungeons, their 586 million races, their 212,000 quests and sub-quests, etc... The immensity that characterize what is generally expected from an RPG is not what interests us: it's a respectable path, but it's not ours.

Dagon: Morrowind... Great liberty but a little too much cut-and-paste in it's world...

Arx 2 : the two master words will be immersion and attention to detail, is that it?

Raphael Colantonio: Immersion and detail, yes. Also a refocus on clarity so that the player doesn't need to look for a walkthrough every 5 minutes.

Dagon: I admit that it happened to me twice, which is usually extremely rare.

Raphael Colantonio: :)

Dagon: You've begun work on Arx 2 for a while now?

Raphael Colantonio: For a while, yes.

Dagon: You could say that you're not resting on your laurels. Judging from the first game's ending, I guess we'll play a new character?

Raphael Colantonio: In fact, no... Am Shagar will be sent back to Arx... Well, everything I reveal for the moment could always change... you never know. A publisher's decision, or anything else could happen...

Dagon: Other projects also?

Raphael Colantonio: Yes :) we'll be announcing something shortly... [Note from the editor: This has happened today with the announcement of Arx Fatalis XBox]

Dagon: Before we finish, I would like to thank you for this interview. It's clear, Dagon's Lair isn't the biggest site (although in terms of French CRPG sites I think we are the only one, only not known enough). It's very kind of you to have taken the time to answer my questions for my little site!

Raphael Colantonio: ok, np