Game developer Mike Laidlaw had a hand in some of the best role playing games of the modern era. During his long career at BioWare he worked on both Jade Empire and the original Mass Effect, before moving onto the storied Dragon Age series. The creative director for Dragon Age: Inquisition then had a stint at Ubisoft before leaving with fellow veterans to form new studio Yellow Brick Games.
We caught up with him ahead of the release of debut effort Eternal Strands to talk about his career so far, the liberation of working in a smaller team, and not trying to compete with never-ending live service games. Oh, and why you shouldn’t expect his new game to be another Dragon Age.
My first computer was a Commodore 64
I grew up in the country, and my dad was a dairy farmer. But I was really lucky because my parents thought computers were neat. And so they got me a Commodore 64 when I was a kid in 1982. I remember very clearly being so excited that the original cartridge-based Loderunner I had for my Commodore would let you build your own levels, so suddenly I was doing level design. And I remember for Christmas, begging my dad for a 1541, five and a quarter inch floppy disk drive so I could save the levels that I had made so that my grandmother could play them. It felt really awesome to be able to create something.
Teaching myself programming got me into the games industry
I was fascinated by games from a young enough age that it was sort of like I always wanted to learn how they were made, or how programming worked. To that end, I got books out and the one object-oriented programming language I knew back in the day was Turbo Pascal. Learning it almost directly led to me getting my job at BioWare because part of the application process at the time was having to go into the Neverwinter Nights toolset and build a playable module to actually sort of make something that you had scripted on top of the dialogue and logic. So suddenly I’m like, I remember these from Turbo Pascal.
My favourite game of all time is Star Control II
I joined BioWare because of my love of the classic CRPG formula. Star Control II is kind of my all-time favourite game, not traditionally a role-playing game, but in terms of dialogue choices and free form exploration, and basically giving you the universe and saying, ‘Hey, find out what happened and why Earth is under a big red bubble and lost to the bad guys.’
I love the sense of choice, and even in [my first game] Jade Empire, which was interesting because it was the very first action game BioWare had ever attempted, the writing stuff never really went away. There was still a lot of dilemma, the open hand and closed fist as a sort of morality system was an interesting paragon/renegade precursor.
Eternal Strands shares a postal code – but isn’t a Dragon Age-style RPG
I have a fear that people see my name or the names of people who worked on the big Ubisoft titles and go, ‘Oh, it must be a Dragon Age or an Assassin’s Creed‘. We’ve tried to be very clear in any of our marketing that this is very action-y. It is a game where some wild physics can happen, where mid-jumping when an enemy hits you with their hammer makes you go over a wall at high speed. It’s a really cool piece of gameplay that I think helps set us apart.
If you go in expecting a grand story with dilemmas and choice, we’re not delivering on that. But I do think it’s great to have a cast of characters who have their own goals and desires that you can talk to. There’s also a whole subset of their dialogue that’s completely optional, where they are just waxing philosophical about what stuff happened to you, or giving a perspective, and fleshing out the world.
Working in a smaller studio has been liberating
As a general rule, very disruptive changes in direction, especially when a project is at a high fidelity, when you’re dealing with a ship that big, and then you decide to turn it, it’s a slow turn. One of the benefits of working at Yellow Brick is that it’s 60-ish people. I’m able to just quickly hop on a call with the three people involved in this character design and have that decision made in an hour tops. I’m enjoying this period of my career immensely, in part because I’ve been able to be involved in and shape the culture, and we’re trying to build something reasonably healthy where people don’t feel crushed, where people feel heard and valid in the work they’re doing.
Shorter games can provide a good break from never-ending games
A recent report has made it clear that players are continuing to put a lot of time into games from 5-10 years ago. With Eternal Strands, we wanted to make a game where people felt that they could say, ‘It’s got a story, I’m gonna have a full experience, and then I can go back to my everyday comfort game.’ I think there’s an advantage to a shorter game, simply because you’re not asking people to sort of enter into a state of conflict with their own habits. More importantly, it was a thing that we could build with the size of the team we had, and wanted to have in a reasonable timeline without crushing people’s souls.
Plateauing technology can lead to more creativity
We are starting to reach a plateau in terms of what hardware can do, how many processes can be running on the chip, how hot they can get, and how small we can print the circuitry. That said, if we are seeing that plateau, are we also going to see sort of a plateau in terms of player expectation for raw visuals and raw performance? I think there’s an opportunity for more room for artistry, because you won’t feel like the tech is going to move under you three years into a four-year project. When people are more sure about the platform they’re building on and the sort of engine that they’re going to be using, that it won’t be suddenly blowing up or changing directions wildly, that a lot more artistry can come out of it. Stable ground is probably one of the best things you can give to an artist, and then stretch creatively.
Find out more about Eternal Strands at eternalstrandsgame.com
