Dispelling the Mythic Myth
Interview with Matt Firor

Devin Cambridge, 2004-04-13

Mythic Entertainment's rise in the game industry placed it on Deloitte and Touche's Technology Fast 500, at number 112, above the other two game companies listed, Bioware (#345) and Radical Entertainment (#401). Not bad considering the fact that two overachieving Medical Doctors run Bioware. I caught up with Matt Firor, executive producer at Mythic to talk about the industry and their upcoming title, IMPERATOR.

Matt: Well, unlike all the others that you mentioned, excluding Turbine (Asheron's Call), we were independent. We could pretty much chart on our own course; moreover, at the time, we were one of the best kept secret of the online game industry. Before Camelot, we had about twelve titles already released, and they were only online titles. So, we had a lot of experience making online games. Now obviously, none of those games were nearly as big as Camelot or [any of the other games mentioned], but we had a lot of the underlying technology necessary to make a good game. We had a lot of network code and very good server technology; thus, we leveraged all of older games into Camelot. We had a great graphics engine, i.e. the great 3d graphics engine that we used for our first person shooter. Also, we had a server for a text MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) that we had written. So, we sort of merged the graphics engine and the text server together and made an online game. What we gained was a huge leg up in terms of reliability and platforms. We could develop the game much quicker than our competitors. We developed Camelot in about 18 months. Our ability to move quickly allowed us to look at what all the games that were out didn't have, make Camelot quickly and get into the market before the next round of games.

MMORPGdot (Devin): What do you think were the key game play differentiators between Camelot and the others? What do you think really made or broke you during that initial cycle.

Matt: Well, at the time, it was pretty much probably one thing, player versus player (PVP) combat. It's a much different game now and it's a much different industry now. Back then, there were really only three really big titles and that was [Ultima] Online, Everquest, and Asheron's Call. Ultima and Asheron didn't have PVP. They had perhaps a little PVP here and there, but they really weren't PVP games. Ultima Online, at that time, possessed the no holds barred, wide open PVP approach. You log into the game and immediately got killed. So, we thought, "Alright there has to be a happy medium between those two models for PVP to make a sense." That's where we came up with our Realm vs. Realm (RVR) combat system. We actually designed the game around that concept because we knew, if we had a chance to compete against the big boys, we had to come out with something that's completely different from them and one step ahead. So we pitched ‘You know, MMORPG with a PVP combat system that makes sense.' That's right along the line of what we accomplished, and that's how Camelot came to be.

MMORPGdot (Devin): That's interesting, because one of the topics [at GDC] was "how do you get into this industry." Besides the copious books about how to program a 3d game, there was only one true production book for a while. Now there are two production books out which are Game Developers Magazine's Compilation of Postmortems, and Erik Bethke's Game Development and Production.

Matt: Is my post mortem in there?

MMORPGdot (Devin): Yes, it is, as a matter of fact…..

Matt: Amazing, I should call the publisher!

MMORPGdot (Devin): Definitely, the publisher is CMP. It's a good book; it's great to read. People ask me, "What do I have to do to get into the game industry?" I tell them that the industry has changed quite a bit. You have to be so much more business savvy. So, I tell them to read these books and learn from some of the triumphs and mistakes of the great developers.

Matt: We made a fair amount of mistakes. They are laid out in there. We are not perfect by any means. Definitely learn from our mistakes.

MMORPGdot (Devin): The other book was on production techniques like using UML models in game design, what to budget for various elements, and how to pitch your game. This leads to an interesting thing, brought up from your one line description earlier. I heard from the game publishers, who are now starting to close off their doors to external submissions, that what they want when they do hear a pitch is a one line description of the game.

Matt: No longer can you make an MMORPG that's just an MMORPG. It must have something different. If you look at the recent campaigns launched, with the exceptions of Star Wars Galaxies, there has to be a separation concept. There needs to be something that the public says "Okay, this is MMORPG X which has Feature Y." In other words they have to think "This MMORPG is not just another MMORPG"

With Dark Age of Camelot, in 2001, we obviously had it much easier when there was not much competition. Now, we are up against the competition for our next game, IMPERATOR.

Matt: We are looking at end of 2005, maybe beginning of 2006. I will use the phrase 2005ish for the launch date. (We laugh). Mythic is in a very enviable position. We have no pressure to launch IMPERATOR from a publisher. We are self-published. We are not going to bring out a game until we are damned ready for it to come out. We are not going to rush it. We'll make sure that what's released is what the public wants and actually up to our standards.

MMORPGdot (Devin): Speaking of standards, as you know, almost every developer feels that the bar has certainly being raised with World of Warcraft. Blizzard always displays good technique of execution. They have always reduced games to a basic element of "fun." Do you see WOW as the main competition? Are you watching them or looking at what they're doing?

Matt: Well, I would love to watch them, but they won't let me into their Beta (laughs). Yes, I would love to play WOW because obviously I'm a big fan. Any game developer that is rational is a big fan. However, I really don't know what WOW is doing. I only know what I have heard from people. What they say is that it looks great, and what Blizzard posts online looks great. I don't know how their game really plays (editor's note: see our own Dialogue's WOW journals). However, from what I heard, it seems that they are not really a PVP centric game. Camelot is a PVP game. IMPERATOR is still in the development phase. So, we have some time to figure out where it is going to fit into the 2005 MMORPG landscape. We can build in new plans as the industry changes.

MMORPGdot (Devin): The interesting difference between MMORPGs and single player games is cost. MMORPGs have a large backend network with 24-hour a day technical support. They have in game support. They have lots of quest writing to do, which requires huge amounts of research. This leads to investors taking a lot of risk in creating a MMORPG. How do you mitigate that risk? Also, if I can hit you with a second question, what do you think are some of the new areas of technological development in the pipeline for MMORPGs?

Matt: Well, for the first part of your question, fortunately, we already have a customer service center. We already have lots of rack space and a great relationship with UUNET. So, those are things that we don't have to re-invest. We will add more customer service for IMPERATOR and more servers. But the server technology will be the same. We already have staff on hand that is very familiar with our server backend. Also our client is the Camelot client; we aren't going to re-invent the wheel. However, it won't look like the Camelot client, but the underlying code is much the same. In terms of what kind of new technology we may be using, we have a policy of upgrading Camelot every year. We constantly release expansions and we upgrade the graphics engine with the new release. Over time, the releases will morph into the IMPERATOR engine. Right now, we are talking with Microsoft about DirectX 10. Of course, we are going to put that into Camelot, which means that it will end up in IMPERATOR.

Matt: Oh ya! As you know, we had two-retail expansions and one free expansion since our launch in October of 2001 in US. The first retail expansion, Shrouded Isles, added a whole continent per realm. So, each of the three realms gained a continent they could explore. The first free expansion was Foundations. Foundations was a housing expansion and added more territory for real estate transactions. Our most recent expansion, Trials of Atlantis, added a tabletop style role-playing RPG area. Trials is our attempt to create a "beginning and end" campaign as you would experience playing a pen and paper RPG. So, we are committed to expanding Camelot. Conservatively, with the expansion and a few free additions here and there, we probably added as much territory after the launch as was originally in the first release of the game. We also added special zones for free, including one epic zone to introduce dragons. So, yes, as long as people play the game enough to make it profitable, we are committed to expanding Camelot. When you look at Camelot, you see that we have added a lot to our graphics engine. We want to make new users who may be logging into Camelot think that they are using a current game with a brand new graphics engine and not an old dinosaur. We want to make sure that players will experience things that are up to date. We just announced our use of Emotion FX 2 in order to give some our characters facial expressions and we started using SpeedTree to increase the environment animation speed. Again, all of these new advances will also make it into IMPERATOR

MMORPGdot (Devin): So tell us about IMPERATOR.

Matt: Just as Camelot is based on King Arthur and Celtic legend, IMPERATOR is based on Roman History. The concept: at some point in Roman history, something did or didn't happen - we are going to keep that to ourselves. Basically, development of our world never happened because Rome never collapsed. The game takes place 300 years in the future from our current date of 2005(ish). Of course, in the IMPERATOR timeline, they never had the dark ages or any sort of medieval times. Their timeline's technology develop much faster, science developed much faster, and, of course, space travel happened much, much earlier than in our timeline. So the game will have space exploration but based on the ideals of Rome. So there are praetors and centurions. Basically, Roman culture spread out very quickly into space. That's the baseline for the game. There is a whole lot that I'm not telling you of course.

MMORPGdot (Devin): Of course. (Grin) You're "still in development." (To read a more in-depth preview of the game, check out this article from ignvault from August 2003)

Matt: Yeah. Of course, we're going to do a lot of cool things with IMPERATOR that are very, uh, unexpected (grins).