Above: Amy Hennig, Scott Probst (both of EA Visceral Games) and Jade Raymond of EA Motive in Montreal.
Della Rocca: What about working on new IP versus developing within a franchise? Both of you have done amazing work both in creating new franchises and servicing existing franchise. Is there a different mindset to how you manage creativity in those different contexts?
Hennig: Not basically. Making a game is making a game. The processes are different. It’s different working on something like Uncharted compared to Star Wars. There’s a lot of people involved in Star Wars, you know. Biggest IP in the world and all that. But Lucasfilm has actually been a great partner. They understand this idea of empowering your creatives and letting them go and then just tugging the reins gently if they go too far.
Raymond: When you’re working on an existing franchise, you think about what it was before and what it is to all the fans. That’s the main thing. When you’re starting from scratch, you have an audience in mind — you’re always making games for players and thinking about what players are going to want — but when you have an existing franchise there’s this legacy of what your fans are looking for. They’re the number one player and customer you have to consider.
Hennig: The pressure is a little different. On the one hand, yeah, you’re trying to make sure you satisfy the fans and the stakeholders in an existing IP. When you’re trying to make something new, you’re trying to convince people that it’s going to last. You’re following your gut. Are people going to like this? Is this going to be a hit? You don’t know until it ships.
Della Rocca: Amy, you talked about how different the process is working on Star Wars, given the extent of the brand and the franchise. Can you elaborate on that?
Hennig: There’s so much regarding this project and this collaboration and this partnership that people wouldn’t expect. All of these companies are going through a lot of really good changes right now, and have been over the last couple of years. Lucasfilm is under new management, which has brought in a lot of new life. Kathleen Kennedy’s a rock star. Her team there are just the best. I’ve been working with them for a year and a half. That’s not PR. It’s true. When I went up there before I took the job and talked to them, it was a kind of revelation to me, what this relationship was going to be like.
Add that to the fact that there’s new management at EA under Andrew Wilson and it’s a whole new vibe that’s been evolving over the last couple of years. With Visceral Games we have new management taking the reins. We’ve been restructuring to put our money where our mouth is and say, “This idea of creative ownership and empowering leads is critically important.” With Motive starting up under Jade’s leadership and sharing that same philosophy and co-developing this game as partners, even though we’re miles away, it seems like this perfect collision of everybody being in the right mindset at the right time.
Della Rocca: With the studio you’re building in Montreal, Jade, can you give us some insight into what that collaboration looks like?
Above: Amy Hennig also talked about messages versus fun in games at MIGS 15.
Raymond: It’s a similar approach to what we were talking about. The same ideas of flat structure and empowerment, and also just making the part of the game that’s going to be developed into Montreal and the part that’s going to be developed at Visceral clearly defined. Each team can have ownership. We’re not stuck in approval loops or whatever. We’re collaborating and each delivering our own section.
Della Rocca: What about DICE, back in Sweden? Are they going to be involved?
Raymond: One good thing about everyone EA being on the same engine is you can obviously build on all that stuff. All those assets for Star Wars, all the tech for spaceship battles, we can leverage and build on top of that. It’s the same with stuff that’s done for Dragon Age or any other games. That’s a difference for me. I feel like the kid in the candy store. All this stuff made everywhere is in the same engine.
Hennig: It’s always baby steps, always a learning process. That’s part of this change too. Studios used to always use their own bespoke engines. Now everybody’s on Frostbite, which has been a learning process, but the fact that you can leverage the know-how of all these people across the company. If we’re working on a piece of tech that benefits Mass Effect, or we’re working on something that benefits them, we can have those conversations at the ground level.
Della Rocca: That sounds great in theory, but….
Raymond: It’s just that easy! No, it’s never that easy.
Hennig: The point is that Patrick Soderlund is the head of all development for EA. He’s very much holding the reins of the Frostbite team. He wants to make sure that game teams, as customers, are getting served, and he’s encouraging collaboration between teams so people aren’t reinventing wheels. It does require good communication. But as long as we encourage people to do that at a grass-roots level, as opposed to making them go through some long process….
Della Rocca: You said before that sometimes tech and tools can hinder that sense of creative ownership. That’s not a critique of Frostbite, but there is this sense of it’s a tool that’s trying to serve many games and many needs.
Hennig: Well, there’s different versions of it. There are different branches throughout the company. Things that are useful to everyone get folded back into the main branch. But it has to be shepherded, of course.
Above: Scene from Assassin’s Creed II.
Raymond: The indie scene is booming in Montreal, so I imagine there are indie developers in the audience. If you think of Unity, that’s an engine that services — how many game teams are on that? Millions? And the community is pooling things together. People are making their own modules and you can buy the ones that are useful to you. That’s working great. I don’t know why you couldn’t do that within a company as well.
Della Rocca: While we’re on the topic of indies, obviously a lot of work that the two of you have done has been with much larger franchises, much larger teams, much larger budgets. Do you see any of your approaches or processes as relevant to a four-person or five-person team?
Hennig: The same philosophies of working collaboratively apply whether it’s four people or 400. It requires humility. All these problems are hard to solve. Sometimes the stars align and things come together easily, but sometimes they don’t. That idea that you have to distribute ownership, the one-plus-one-equals-three idea.
A lot of the philosophies I would take to the stage, working with actors, are the philosophies I would apply in the workplace. You might have four people, five, a little indie team, and you’re working together. You come in with a script, throw pencils on the table, and say, “This version is crap. Let’s make it better together.” Everybody checks their ego, if possible. We elevate the work together.
You should also build a safe space. There should be a freedom to fail. You can try something and have it not work. It’s okay to show something ugly. It’s okay to have an idea that isn’t fully formed. We’ll fully form it together. Taking that philosophy from the stage into the workplace has always been an ideal.
Above: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
Raymond: Before starting at EA, I did some consulting with small indie teams, friends who were working on stuff. One thing I found is that there are a lot of similar questions that happen on small teams as on bigger ones. Especially on teams that have had one success and they’re moving on to the next game. They’re still a small indie studio, but now that it’s no longer a question of, “Are we gonna be able to buy food?”, what’s the new structure?
When you start an indie studio, you have the pressure of everything being new. Then you finish your first project and maybe the pressure goes down a bit. What’s the motivation now? How do you hold the team together? All those question surface. I found a lot of commonalities in the types of things you need to put in place to support bigger teams.
Della Rocca: It’s interesting, this notion of having some success and what that enables you to do, or prevents you from doing, on the next thing. It goes back to the franchise question, but indies face it as well. They get some momentum and it feels like a big risk to deviate from that initial success.
Raymond: Or, for example, the team that put out Monument Valley, what’s their next game? Can it be as impactful and artistic? You were asking Amy about the pressure of success. Indies feel that too.
Hennig: It’s almost paralyzing to have something so successful. “Holy shit, I don’t know how we did that. Can we do it again?” I’ve often said, too, that everyone worth their salt suffers from impostor syndrome. Everybody thinks they’re a fraud and it’s just a matter of time before they’ll be found out.
I talked to Jenova Chen after he finished Journey. He was trying to figure out what would be next, and I think it was a little paralyzing for him too. “I don’t just want to turn the crank and do something people expect.” That’s a lot of pressure, to feel like you have to outdo yourself.