00:00My name's Todd McFarlane, and I'm the creative art director on the new video game from EA called Kingdoms of
00:08Amalar, The Reckoning.
00:10The company was started by Kurt Schilling, who's a former Major League Baseball player,
00:17and he, as he was at the tail end of his career, was thinking about what he was going to
00:22do once he retired as an athlete.
00:25So he gave me a phone call at the end of his career and said, and I had met Kurt
00:30in the past, and when I were acquaintances,
00:32and he said, hey, Todd, I'm going to start this video game company.
00:35I'm a big, huge gamer. I've got this idea. I want to fly you in and a couple other people
00:40in.
00:40I'm going to pitch you the idea, and I'm looking for an art director.
00:45I asked him if he could give me control over all aspects of the game, everything from characters to backgrounds
00:52to spellcasting.
00:54He said yes, we got it started, started developing it.
00:58He ended up picking up another development house called Big Huge Games.
01:02It was a console-based version of the idea that he had first pitched me.
01:06We got developing on that, and then we went around talking to various companies.
01:12EA came in and liked what they saw, and ended up putting some money into it,
01:17and said we'll help distribute and get it launched and put out into the marketplace, and here we are.
01:21The biggest draw was just the video game medium in and of itself.
01:26I mean, I dealt with, you know, comic books where I started my career.
01:31You know, I make toys now for a living.
01:33You know, dealt with Hollywood, both in television, animation, and filmmaking.
01:38Done some directing and music videos and stuff.
01:41So it's just another outlet of art, you know, another medium, if you will.
01:46It has a different set of rules, but it's still art in its basic sense of it.
01:51And so for me, I had done, I'd created a character called Spawn that had been licensed in the video
01:57games.
01:58But I was always the guy at the end that they said, hey, do you like what we've done?
02:02We need you to sign off.
02:03It needs to go out into the world.
02:05And there were some things they did that sort of irritated me,
02:08and I always vowed at one point I'd be on the other side and have input from day one into
02:13a video game
02:13so that when it came out, it was closer to what I had in mind.
02:16The people that are sort of big Todd McFarlane fans will probably be let down
02:22because, you know, they're pretty loyal and they want it to look like my style.
02:25That wasn't the undertaking I took.
02:28I, you know, for as much as I like my fan base, and, you know,
02:33there's just many people know who I am.
02:34There's just many people who play video games.
02:36I was way more concerned about talking to the people who play video games.
02:40So I wasn't concerned about doing something that was my art.
02:44I was concerned about having some kind of input into us putting out a role-playing game,
02:50an RPG game, that would actually speak to the people who play those types of games,
02:55which basically meant that it needed to be a big, huge, open-world game.
03:00The quests needed to be interesting.
03:02The characters needed to be interesting.
03:04And then even sort of the silly stuff like the lighting and the spellcasting and the weapons.
03:08and then all the big animation and the action had to be sort of at the forefront of all this
03:14so that no matter which direction they went and how they decided to play the game,
03:19because role-playing, you know, players are slightly different than people who are playing a racing game
03:24or a first-person shooter where it's very linear, right?
03:27Where a role-playing game, you build this world and then you hand the steering wheel over to the player
03:34and you say, go, go wherever you want.
03:37And we had to make sure that all those aspects were sort of skillfully done as they came to expect.
03:44And even more importantly, that each one of them had sort of raised the bar slightly
03:48so that when it was all said and done, they'd walk away from it going,
03:51and, wow, I play a lot of RPG games with that record and that's just kind of cool, right?
03:56I mean, we spend, just so you know, we spend years developing.
04:00We spend, you know, tens of millions of dollars getting this thing out.
04:03We have all these sort of goofy conversations behind closed doors
04:07about the theory of how we're going to get there and how smart we are.
04:11But the end consumer, when they're done with the game, only have three emotions.
04:16Love it, hate it, ah, it was okay.
04:18That's it.
04:18Everything gets distilled to those three emotions,
04:21and we're just hoping that most of them walk away going,
04:24it's kind of cool, wasn't it?
04:25And they'll tell their buddy.
04:26In the comic book, which is where I sort of made my career,
04:29you know, that's a different sort of mindset artistically
04:32because you've got words and pictures.
04:34So you have to read it, and then what I have to do when I'm telling the story
04:37is to actually pick singular sort of still pictures
04:42and make those sort of tell the story over and over.
04:45We don't have sound.
04:46You don't have music.
04:47You don't get sound effects.
04:49You don't get to have animation, which is sort of the big thing.
04:52And it's not really 3D, which is what a video game is.
04:54So there's all that depth that goes into video games
04:57that I don't have the luxury of when I'm doing comic books.
04:59But the upside of it is that the video game, especially for role-playing game,
05:05like I said, unlike TV and film and comic books and even novels,
05:12that has a director, if you will, I get to implement those things,
05:16and then you as the consumer have to follow behind me.
05:19I've set everything, you just go along with my story.
05:23The great thing with video games, especially an RPG game,
05:26is that we sort of build the story, the backdrop of the story and the characters,
05:31although ours is really an open-ended character.
05:34And we build sort of this canvas, and then we hand it over to you, the consumer,
05:39and then you basically get this sort of turn everywhere.
05:43So the challenge then becomes, wherever they go,
05:46we had better have done an interesting enough job with enough skill,
05:50with enough interest, and make it as user-friendly as possible
05:54so that no matter what it is that they want,
05:56whatever experiences they want to get from this sort of entertainment park here,
06:01that they walk away with it being very fulfilled,
06:05whether it was questing all day long
06:08or whether it was babbling all day long or somewhere in between,
06:12both of those components and everything stuck between it have to actually resonate.
06:16I think that the backdrops in the environment itself are just,
06:20if you just sort of take time to just look at it,
06:23I mean, we actually have these sort of clips
06:26where the camera is sort of craning up and down,
06:28and I keep saying I wish that the character could actually see the same thing
06:32we can see with our eyes, because you get to scale up all these buildings,
06:35just to sort of see the world.
06:37I mean, again, the movie Avatar,
06:39part of the thing that was interesting about it was just looking at it, right?
06:43I mean, minus whatever the story was,
06:44just looking at this world was kind of intriguing.
06:47And then, I think that, you know, historically RPG games,
06:52sometimes the action part of it has been a bit of an afterthought, if you will.
06:56So, I don't get a sense that they've made that priority number one.
07:01And I wanted to make sure that we sort of raised the bar that it's not that you have to
07:06do,
07:06you know, the amount of action that's in there,
07:08but if you're going to go there, if you're going to open the door called,
07:11you know, action and encountering an enemy or something,
07:14then that thing should sort of set you on your heels going,
07:17and go, wow, that's crazy, man.
07:19Hey, Joe, you see what we just did here?
07:21Look it, I'll do it again.
07:22Boom.
07:22And there should just, there should be a wow factor to it,
07:25that you just go, I'm going to do that again, right?
07:28Just because it's just fun to do.
07:30Hit a couple buttons, make it simple on them, have a good time.
07:33When you're creating an entire world, right,
07:35I mean, which is different than, you know, creating a singular character, right?
07:39I mean, you know, the world of Batman is sort of dark,
07:43and it's Gotham City, it's Gothic, right?
07:45And same with the world of Spawn that I created.
07:47This is broader than that, you know,
07:49and I think if you hit it with the same tonality,
07:53I think you're sort of, you're not sort of giving enough people enough variety
07:58to sort of enjoy the experiment as much as they can.
08:01Now my 12-year-old, which is my youngest,
08:04I can give him any game, he plays any game,
08:06he kills me and beats me because I never quite got the dexterity of all those buttons.
08:11I can't survive long enough in any of these sort of action, sort of fighting ones.
08:14But what I would do is I employ a lot of young guys,
08:17and at lunch they play all the games,
08:19and I stand behind them and watch them for hours.
08:21And I'm always intrigued just to, like, why the game can't do certain things.
08:26And so when I came on board as the art director,
08:29I asked all those questions.
08:31and there's only three stoppers when you ask a question.
08:35Technology, can't do it, Todd.
08:37Too much money, timing, can't do it.
08:40You know, we've got a deadline.
08:41But every now and then you keep asking questions,
08:44you get silence, you get the pregnant pause.
08:46And that means then, yeah, I guess we can do it that way, Todd.
08:50It's just, this is how we've always done it.
08:52And those are the ones that I was trying to break.
08:54The stereotype of, just because they've worked on five prior games
08:59and they did it a certain way,
09:00that now technology allows you to think a little bit outside the box.
09:05Don't self-edit yourself.
09:06Don't self-edit your imagination.
09:09Let it be a technical or a money answer.
09:13Don't let it be an imagination answer.
09:15And so those are the places that we wanted to go into
09:17and raise the bar up a little bit.
09:19Don't let it be an imagination answer.
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