Iron Tower Studio - Designing Worlds with Brian Mitsoda

VD and Obsidian's Brian Mitsoda talk about various design aspects in an interview spun off from Iron Tower's Roundtable Interview from some time back because of Mitsoda's lengthy answers:

Setting is an important RPG element. It's a foundation of a game and sometimes even a pretty good reason to play one. So, how do you create and breathe life into new worlds?

Hmm… You know, this is a tough one to answer, and it’s because I don’t think settings matter at all. I think some settings can appeal make the designer’s job a lot easier like an apocalypse scenario or alien/unfamiliar world where there is no expectation of order or society or even physics – this can be interesting, but often times it is lazy and adds to magical anything goes/lack of internal consistency design.

Some settings can make a designer’s job difficult, like real world settings. The expectations of recreating the world around us is, well, everyone knows what the real world’s like and has expectations that are impossible to faithfully recreate, not to mention the realism impacting the design.

Quite a few settings have been done to death (Tolkien fantasy, space marines in high-def warehouses, World War II) and I suppose some players want to play them because they keep making them, sometimes if only because of the setting.

Chiefly, I think you should start with a solid game idea or two and figure out what kind of setting works for it. And then you prototype the hell out of it until it is fun as a daiquiri waterslide.  In some cases, your game mechanics trump the setting. My favorite game last year was Saint’s Row 2; I’m kind of tired of the gangster/crime setting, but the game is just solid and it seems like the team tweaked missions and diversions until they were a joy to play and doled out rewards satisfactorily. When it comes to their gangster fantasy, they firmly planted their tongues in their cheeks, and set up a world where you could do things like throw yourself in front of traffic for insurance money while wearing a diving helmet and prom dress and it wouldn’t feel out of place. If the setting had been any concern at all, I never would have bought it.