Interview David Braben (English)

Interview with David Braben from Frontier Developments
Interview: David Braben Quelle: David Braben
PCGH: You started developing games at a time, when the industry made it first commercial successful footsteps. What part of the games development has changed most in your opinion since mid-eighties?

Games are now 'mainstream'. Back in the early/mid 1980s they were more of a specialist activity, where a great many of the people playing the games also had an eye on making them themselves. In fact, there were a huge number of type-in listings in games magazines, where people would type in code, usually in BASIC, line by painful line to create a program that very nearly worked. They would then have to try to fix any errors to get a working program - and as a result often learned a great deal about how they worked.

Most development was on the same machines that the game was to be run on, in my experience at least. It was rare for people to be able to use a separate machine for this. This meant the developers had to grapple with many of the same problems users did - for example initially I had to save my programs on to cassette tape - which took a long time (often twenty minutes) and was not 100% safe, so if I was worried I would do it twice, to two different tapes. My first 'floppy disc' drive was an amazing step forwards.

PCGH: What was the fascination of games like Elite in 1984 for people back then? From today's point of view the graphics looks quite simple.

Elite looked completely different to other games around at the time. It was full 3D for starters and line-drawn. It was in stark contrast to other games at the time which were generally a lot more colourful but fundamentally 2D in nature. Most games had a play time of five minutes or less - and even then playing for five minutes could be quite an achievement because of the harsh difficulty curve making it become ever more difficult to progress or even survive. Elite in contrast required a great deal of dedication. To reach the rank of "Elite" required weeks of play time, not minutes, and the player was expected to save their progress on to cassette tape, but it was this dedication that provided the fascination. Elite was the very first of what we would now call an 'open world' game.

PCGH: Elite used Lenslok for the ZX Spectrum as a rigid hardware DRM method. What's your opinion on today's DRM situation?

I personally dislike most DRM. I get annoyed when music I have paid for won't play in my car, or when I have to type in a 16 digit (or more) alphanumeric code via a laborious controller interface to get some feature in an Xbox or Playstation game I have just bought.
I hated Lenslok, and insisted it was removed from the later print runs of Elite.

PCGH: Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen share some obvious similarities. Funding via crowd, close cooperation and maximum transparency with the community, Sci Fi setting, PC focus, space ship simulation, two well-known "veterans" making their comeback with games like in their early years. Is this just by chance?

I think the coincidence is largely because of the rise of Kickstarter, which has started to democratise the publication process by letting people support the games they want. Demand for space games is at a high - largely because there hasn't been anything for a long time. Also the PC has been a bit of a forgotten platform by big publishing - with PC versions coming out months later than their console companion versions.

There is room for both, and I look forwards to playing Star Citizen once it is released (I am an Alpha backer in the meantime), but they will be quite different experiences with different release dates.

PCGH: Frontier Developments is celebrating its' 20th birthday this year. Do you remember the best "moment" of the studio and the probably toughest "moment" as well?

Difficult to say. We've had a lot of highlights. When a game releases it is always a big moment. Launching RCT3 to great fanfare with Atari in 2004, Launching our first self-published game at the Nintendo Wiiware showcase in 2008, launching Kinectimals with Microsoft at the launch of Kinect, or Disneyland Adventures at Disneyland in 2011, or the first roll-out of Elite: Dangerous to the public on schedule in December 2013. The toughest is probably when we had to make people redundant.

PCGH: Are you still actively involved in the Raspberry Pi foundation? If so, what's your role?

Yes. I am a trustee. We speak regularly and meet monthly, to plan what we are doing and how we spend the money we are making (yes we still make a profit even at those low prices) to help kids learn.

PCGH: Frontier Developments clarified very early, that Elite: Dangerous will get charged add-ons. What exactly is the business plan after the main game is released? What type of add-ons and dlcs will the game get? Do you have plans to include microtransactions, e.g. ship-upgrades, special missions, unique ships or in-game credits?

We already have announced some elements that will be featured through paid-for expansions (though of course the higher tiers of game backers, will get these for free), including walking around your ship, ship to ship boarding, and landing on planets and walking about. We haven't announced further details, though I am against 'pay to win'.

PCGH: Many indie games have problems to get the long-term motivation upright, because at some point gameplay elements repeat over and over again. In particular, if there is no plotline present. You also plan to go without a fixed storyline and mentioned that cutscenes aren't your favorite element. So the question is, how do you plan to sustain long-term motivation in Elite: Dangerous?

The galaxy will continuously evolve. Effectively that is a common storyline, shared by all the players, though of course the players will participate in that, even to the extent of bringing down governments, crushing (or backing) revolutions, racing to the latest gold-rush. Entwined with this there will always be plenty of action and activity on offer for people to choose if they wish.

PCGH: Frontier Developments is using the in-house engine "cobra" to get things done. What are the technical particularities that players can expect (e.g. dx11 tessellation, cpu core scaling)? Why did you choose your own engine, and not one of the many which are on the market?

We don't believe any currently available engine other than Cobra can do what we are doing. Each stellar system is vast - up to a light year or so across - and there are about 400 billion of them! We use fully 64 bit data for everything. A 32 bit world would seriously constrain the play space and feel like a constrained arena in an FPS game - you'd probably have to have glass walls around it that cause the player's ship to turn around at those edges, with everything beyond painted on to a 'sky box', so you would lose the majestic scale we have already.

In addition to the 64 bit nature of the engine, it supports deferred rendering, physically based rendering, scales for multiple CPU cores and the latest GPU core arrays, tessellation, stereoscopic 3D rendering, 5.1 and 7.1 sound, 4K, etc etc. As new features appear we can support those too very quickly - look at how quickly we added support for Oculus Rift for example.

PCGH: David, thanks a lot for the interview!