(chill music)
(keyboard clacking)
(dial-up tone)
- I'm Harvey Smith.
I'm a co-creative director at Arkane Studios.
I was co-creative director of Dishonored One,
and I was creative director of Dishonored Two,
and I'm probably best known for
the Deus Ex and Dishonored games.
- Alright.
People still talk to you about Deus Ex a lot?
- A lot, yeah.
It seems like every few years
it has an anniversary or whatever
where we all get interviewed,
Warren Spector and the other people involved, so.
- Warren's doing a post-mortem this year, actually, in fact.
- I got to see Warren recently,
I guess we were in Spain, we were in Bilbao.
And it's funny how the years give you perspective on things.
I mean, it's obvious, but like
you know, the things we thought
the day that we signed the game off
versus a year later versus ten years later,
those things change over time.
You see it more clearly, maybe?
Or you see it through nostalgia, I don't know
but it'll be interesting to hear his post-mortem.
- Right, so when you do look back to that game,
what are the things that stick out to you?
Whether it be the design
or the time and place in your life?
Or, like, what was Deus Ex One for you
and the Harvey Smith stories or?
- I probably can't give you the answer
that you'd like to have
because it's so wrapped up in
my personal understanding of myself.
And I'm a very different person today than I was then.
I had a lot of perspective to gain on
creative work and team chemistry
and interpersonal relations and things like that.
I think part of it is a tinge with regret
for how hard I was to work with.
- Right.
- And it was a different time in my life, like
my ex-wife was a school teacher
so she literally had to be at school
at some insane hour, like seven,
to prepare for the students
so we only had one car.
She'd drop me off at like six thirty.
The team didn't really get in til ten,
so I would literally have like three hours
working alone in this empty building as a level designer
before everybody else rolled in.
And then I would switch gears and be like, you know,
leading the level design team
or working with the systems guys
or working on the fiction or whatever,
or alternating between those three tasks, talking to Warren.
But when I think about the game,
when I think about that time so long ago,
I think about how many talented people we had working on it.
The team size was probably 20 or 30.
- My goodness.
- Which seemed fine for the time, right?
We had three programmers, I think.
Three or four.
If you count a contractor.
And Doug Church would come by every now and then,
our old mentor, and like just play the game and comment
and talk about, help us refine our goals.
What we were actually trying to accomplish creatively.
But there was a lot of tension,
a lot of conflict on the team
and I kinda regret that because
I know now some of those same people, working with them,
I'd probably have a smashing time, you know?
- Right. - It's funny I see
the Austin office of Ion Storm as like two phases for me
because I was there six years
but three years on one game, three years on the other.
And I would say one was more fulfilling
in terms of accolades by far.
You know, Deus Ex One, of course.
But the other one, in terms of interpersonal relationships
and how much I grew and how much I learned about myself
and creatively how, you know,
I got to stretch some muscles.
Built some muscles that I had been working on.
The second one was very satisfying
but it was also turbulent in a completely different way.
I went through a divorce, you know,
we grew the team size drastically,
we were working on two games at once.
Which is a huge challenge.
- What was the other game you were working on?
- Well, the other side of the studio was my friends
Lulu LaMer and Christine Coco and Randy Smith, certainly.
They were working on Thief three, yeah.
It's interesting to look at Deus Ex one
and two back to back and say,
you know, why is the second one not as popular
as the first one?
And there are a lot of technical reasons you could point to,
changes in personnel and title and role.
You could talk about writing our own engine
versus using Unreal.
You could talk about the publisher
asking us to make the game not just for PC
but also for console at the same time
and how we had not done that before.
You could talk about us feeling this weird pressure
not to repeat ourselves. - Right.
- Because I just went through this experience with
Dishonored one and two, back to back,
working with Raphael Colantonio and Arkane.
And when I felt that twinge like, you know,
don't just repeat yourself.
I was like, wait a second,
there is a pattern here in this game
that the players of this game love
and they want to see again.
They want it as familiar as possible
and as fresh as possible at the same time.
And it's that old Raymond Loewy,
the designer from the 50s,
concept so it really served me well
having worked on Deus Ex one and two
when it came time to do Dishonored one and two.
The fact is every time you make a game,
it's a big undertaking by a team of people.
It's incredibly complicated,
you can't predict how it's gonna turn out.
There are so many factors and so many influences
that you could take the same group of people
and the same tech base maybe and try ten times
to make the same type of game and each time
it's gonna come out a little differently.
Now under very controlled circumstances
it might be better and better and maybe,
you know, some teams are capable of that.
But in our case, there was so much change
that it was harder to predict from project to project
what was gonna work and what wasn't gonna work.
So, yeah, it's just.
It's very easy to point to things that are your pet theory
or whatever, you know, but in reality
these games are really complicated
and there's so many minds involved
and so many hands involved
that it's volatile each time.
But there were many things I did like about it
and occasionally I do, every year,
I talk to people that didn't play the first game
but only played the second one.
Or they were only Xbox or PS2 players,
so they encountered that and it blew their minds
cause it was kind of an immersive sim
and unlike anything that was out on the console at the time.
And so I like things like
Sheldon Pacotti's,
he worked toward the end of Dishonored one with us,
the second half, and had to do a mad scramble
to pull all our stuff together into a coherent script.
He did a great job.
But he had all this time on the second one, right?
So, yeah, I like the fiction.
You know, JC didn't coming back into the world.
The two coffee shops at war with each other in the end
and they're being owned by the same corporation or whatever.
There were many things I like about it, you know.
So like you were saying at the beginning,
if you just took Invisible Wars as a standalone game
like it wasn't associated with the Deus Ex series,
I think it would have been perceived differently
because expectation is a huge thing.
Especially once someone invests in something
and they're a fan of it,
then it follows a certain pattern
that they want to see repeated
and there's nothing wrong with that.
Familiarity is very strong.
- Let's talk a little bit about world building.
The opening level of the first Deus Ex was set in
a very contemporary icon of America
that most people could sort of empathize with, right?
- Yeah. - And in the second game,
was sort of pushed that little bit further into the future
and was sort of a little bit less relatable
and with the Dishonored franchise
you've done it in a completely fantastical universe
but there's a lot of flavors and note in there
that actually are very easy for people to connect with
in this sort of contemporary world
and could you talk a little bit about that sort of process?
- Yeah, so, the first Dishonored game is
an analog to Edinburgh or London
and it speaks to the power of our art team
to be able to take those elements,
but also our narrative team,
to take those elements and make them familiar
and yet tweak them a little bit
so it feels like a fantastical place.
And the second Dishonored game
feels much more like Southern Europe, you know,
places in Spain or Italy,
the art team had a very strong vision for the second game
and so narrative, like, complimented that.
But they work hand in hand the entire time
on both games in different ways
and so there was something to be said for
making something familiar so that people feel grounded.
And you alluded to Deus Ex,
we built the first game around New York initially
and then had moments of Paris, for instance.
But the fact that it was
right around the corner science fiction,
I think was one of the very strong things about it.
And then for the second game we tried to go,
I don't remember how many years it was,
this is one of those Jeopardy questions
in my retirement year that I'll be asked, I guess.
But, like, you know almost unrecognizable in some ways.
I mean, like, you could extrapolate
but it doesn't feel like you're exploring a city in it.
And I think at the time, we even saw that
as a criticism of Deus Ex one.
We were like, oh, it just kind of looks like
New York from the 70s or whatever, you know.
Built by a bunch of people that hadn't been to New York.
You know, like, Warren obviously grew up there
and I think went to film school there,
but like working hand in hand with him
he was talking about different locations.
Battery Park, I'd never been to Battery Park, right?
And a guy named Bob White built that map in particular,
but I built the Statue of Liberty
and I've still never been there.
It was this moment where I was working on it
and I couldn't get the base right
because back then you did not only the level design,
meaning the game play and the flow,
but you also did the architecture.
We weren't specialized enough yet
to have really good architects working on it
like we do now with the Dishonored games.
And I couldn't get the base,
this rim piece on the base to line up,
and I realize that my two references
for different sides of it
were photos from wildly different periods.
The base of it was changed at some point
like buttress, originally it was just on this
big grassy hill kind of thing
and I was like oh, no wonder, you know?
But yeah, there is something to be said
for like, again, I think Raymond Loewy
is the theme of the day but it's like
the most familiar you can get away with
while also making something feel different
and worth exploring, new.
- Dishonored, to me, feels like a game
that is quite, it has very European sensibilities.
Do you think that there is a difference in
working with two different teams
from such different parts of the world
that sort of have different touchstones
when it comes to building worlds?
- Yeah, as in games I worked 23 years now
and I worked in Texas,
I worked in California,
I worked in France in Lyon
and I definitely think cultures put an influence,
have an influence over the way the game feels.
Whether they intend to or not.
You know, Deus Ex was made by a team in Texas
with references to New York and Paris and places like that.
But I worked on FireTeam
which was like one of the first games with voice
and we did it in San Mateo
and it was definitely like kind of a Silicon Valley
tech culture influence over that game, I think.
You know, like the innovation was there.
Like we, hey, we made a game with headsets and voice
before anybody had done that.
We were looking at matchmaking and teams
but there was also kind of an MIT influence over that
because it was a spin-off of Looking Glass.
Dishonored one was made by a team in Austin, Texas
and a team in Lyon working very tightly in ways
that would be hard for anyone else to reproduce.
We started the project, Raphael Colantonio and I,
in Austin with a small prototype team
and then at some point we rolled more and more people
from Léon onto it and then by the end of the project
the bulk of the production was done in France.
But it was very much like this the entire way,
video conferencing and traveling
and people moving back and forth.
And so, I don't know, I mean it's like
once a team gets to a hundred people
obviously you're talking about a lot of people influencing
the direction of the game
but at its core, there are a number of people
trying to steer the ship and the culture of those people,
the personality, the histories of those people,
they all definitely influence what the game is about
and how it feels.
You know, we wanted to make a game
that felt like you were a single agent
set upon by hostile forces
and you had to either outsmart them
or overpower them or get good enough at the game
to avoid them.
There's that tension, right?
Like of avoiding attention
because too many guards can overwhelm you
and even fighting five guards in Dishonored is difficult.
But we also, it's a power fantasy about mobility
and about being able to stop time
and you know, it's multiple things and multiple people.
Like there are people that play the game
and they ghost their way through the game,
they feel the power of fantasy that they have
is that no one even knew I was there.
And then other people that just, like, destroy everything.
The power fantasy there is
I left the town burning at my back.
So it was that whole gameplay pattern
and servicing those types of players.
Then there was the art aspirations,
we wanted to create something very beautiful
but not photo realistic.
All the plague and death and oppression in those games.
And then there are probably personal touches
here and there from me and Raphael,
besides the systems we're interested in
and the mobility and the fighting and the stealth
and jumping from rooftop to rooftop.
Aside from all that stuff,
there's a lot of mother trauma in the Dishonored games
and familial connection in both Deus Ex and Dishonored.
- Right.
- And for some of us it's a source of power.
Other people would rather leave that out
of the game or whatever. - Right.
- And then we also wanted a narrative layer
that told stories just through visuals.
You know, you like look around
and get a sense of the place
and who lived there and what happened.
You know, it's a game about corrupt aristocrats
working very hard to create a two lane society.
One for the gilded few of their friends
and everybody else sort of crushed under foot
with no rights, no middle class,
the guards can knock your teeth out
and collect money from you just because
you looked at them wrong
and it's a bit of a fantasy.
Instead of us all pulling together
and working legally to counter that sort of thing,
it's a bit of a fantasy that if you just knife
the right five people, the world goes back to normal.
But that's part of the purpose of media, right?
Is I guess to let you countenance those things
and to give you a way to blow off steam.
At the end of the day the creative directors,
or in the case of me and Raphael working together,
the two of you, the little collective that makes the game,
your personal tastes and desires matter.
They influence the game in ways that are not rational.
They're not the friendliest to the tech,
they're not the friendliest to the production,
with the schedule and so in many cases,
we pitched an idea, we prototyped the idea
without people on the team changing the idea.
We play tested and then we changed based on play test.
But in a few cases we stuck to something
from the beginning to the end
that probably didn't make sense.
And sometimes you hang onto those things
for too long and then you realize
you're gonna have to kill them.
We killed a power of Emily's
called Void House pretty late in the game
and it was a cool idea
but it just didn't fit in the end
and we probably should've cut it earlier.
But having Corvo or Emily as playable characters
is something that I'm very happy that we did
because Erica Luttrell and Stephen Russell
did such an amazing job of emoting as those characters
and players really responded to one or the other of them
and it gave players more choice on top of that.
It's familiarity and nostalgia for people
who love the first game.
Starting in Dunwall and going to Cardoca
and then going back to Dunwall is another thing like that.
Where I feel like most teams that's the first thing
they would've excised because it's a lot of extra objects.
We literally had different furniture,
different tech devices in Dunwall versus Cardoca.
We wanted the two cities to feel very different.
We wanted you to feel like you were leaving home
going to an exotic place and coming back home.
But, yeah, those are things that were important to me
and to other people on the team
so we stuck to them even though they were hard.
At the end of Dishonored one,
I knew I wanted to work on Dishonored two.
I was very excited about it
but it made the most sense
for the team in Lyon to do that project
and so I moved there
and it ended up being four years that I lived in France.
It's an amazing place, amazing people, amazing food
and architecture and history.
But I moved back to Austin
and I've been play testing Prey for a couple of months
and I've given feedback to Raph and Ricardo
and the team there in Austin.
Prey is one of the best games I've ever played.
And it's another alt world that's beautiful,
it's like what if Kennedy had lived
and the Russians and the Americans had worked together.
What if the Russians and the Americans work together?
- Imagine that. - Imagine that, yeah.
- I can't imagine a world in which that's the case.
- As much as the United States is challenging right now
and there are undercurrents that
I think most people weren't aware that they were as dark
or deep as they actually are,
it's threatening, it's concerning,
it's not just the United States,
it's the UK, it's France, you know.
Yeah, there's kind of a rising tide of
you know, nationalism I guess or something
so, what, you know.
A lot of the things that we've put in
Deus Ex and Dishonored, you know?
It feels like I came back to a changed America
or an America that has a different awareness about itself.
Yeah, it's an interesting time to come back
to the United States for sure.
Yeah, GDC is odd for me and I guess a lot of people
would feel this way because
I haven't been coming for the last few years.
It's just been too hard to get over here,
we're working on the project,
I had some life stuff going on.
And now I'm back and it's so fascinating
because I hear people saying things like
this talk was great, that talk was great,
I hear other friends saying oh my god
I was so under pressure to give this talk
and then I got good responses to it
or I learned some things.
I hear other people saying,
oh, my favorite part of GDC
was having dinner that night where across the table
we had this design discussion about this problem
this other friend is having
and we all gave our opinions on it.
Just like so much enthusiasm,
so much passion for that stuff
and I feel like GDC has this arc where
it's super overwhelming and exciting initially
for all those reasons
and then you sort of become good at it.
You find the talks that you want to attend
and you make those conversations happen more,
but then it like,
you get to some point where you're like
I have those conversations at work every day.
I sit next to Seth Shane and like we started talking about
during the course of the day,
we probably had three talks each 15 minutes
rapidly going back and forth on like skill trees
and whether you should assign a lot of points
to the first level so that the successive levels are cheaper
and it encourages specialization
or should you assign higher point values
to the high end of the powers
but then people end up with a wide range of skills
and going deep on nothing.
And we're just like ranting and rave
about those type of subjects based on what he's working on
with Prey or what we just did.
Didn't get an eye on the other guys on Dishonored two
and I feel like that's like a micro talk
or whatever, you know?
So I get here and I'm more like
I want to see old friends,
I want to just reconnect with some people.
I like seeing the new faces,
it's a more diverse crowd now
and I'm really happy about that.
But honestly, I found some of it exhausting to be fair.
- We won't keep you any longer in that case.
Thanks so much for your time.
- Yeah, thank you.
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