The Broken Hourglass Interview

Tales of the Rampant Coyote has conducted a lengthy interview with Planewalker Games’ Jason Compton about The Broken Hourglass, his personal video game history, how to go about designing an RPG, and more.

Q: In your opinion, what makes a great RPG?

A: It depends! I think of the games that I’ve really enjoyed, there’s a single quality about them, I guess, but not a universal way that they achieve that quality. The quality is the immersiveness of it. Not necessarily that I believe I’m in that world, but I really believe that I’m controlling that world, and interacting with it. And I don’t want to leave it alone, because only I can save it, or only I can manipulate it in the way it needs to be manipulated, or whatever.

Different RPGs have done that in different ways. I mentioned Wasteland, and certainly Wasteland did it in a different way than I think Baldur’s Gate did it. Wasteland didn’t have really engaging characters with lots of dialog that really made you feel a part of that world. You know, Wasteland had a book of paragraphs you looked up. And I loved Alternate Reality but the first game in particular had no plot OR dialog to hook on, yet the sights, the sounds, the songs all made you feel like you really were plodding around this city trying not to get killed by Champions and Brown Mold.

There’s the sense of putting you in a situation where you matter in some way. Different games do it in different ways, but yeah, you have to make the player feel like they matter in the world. Whether that’s with a lot of different mysteries that have to get unraveled that only you can get to the bottom of, or different characters who come to you with problems that only you can solve, or that feel a certain way about you, and they’ll only ever feel that way about you, or your player character or whatever you want to call it. Or, an Alternate Reality, where you are so busy worrying about survival that nothing else matters and you get fixated on that goal.

That’s the quality, immersion, but there’s no single strategy for getting there.