Matt Firor
President, ZeniMax Online Studios
Matt Firor is a game developer and executive with a long history in online games. His game credits at Mythic Entertainment (1995–2006) include Rolemaster: Magestorm (1996), Godzilla Online (1998), Spellbinder: The Nexus Conflict (1999), Aliens Online (1998), Starship Troopers: Battlespace (1998), Silent Death Online (1999), Dark Age of Camelot (2001), and Game Director of The Elder Scrolls Online (2014).
On getting into the game industry:
I was a big fan of dial-up BBS multiplayer role-playing games in the 1980s, and a few friends and I decided to make our own game. We worked nights and weekends over the course of about four years on the project. The game, Tempest, came out in 1992 and was a fantasy role-playing game that allowed up to 16 players to play simultaneously on dial-up modems in the Washington, DC area. This was strictly a hobby, though—it was for fun, and we all had day jobs. Eventually our lawyer hooked us up with another company, we merged and became Mythic Entertainment, got some contracts, and I started full time in the industry in January 1996. I was at Mythic for over 10 years, which is a long time to be at any one company in the game industry.
Looking back on it, we didn’t really know how hard it was to make it in the game industry when we started, which probably explains why we were successful. No one was around to tell us that the odds were almost impossible.
On favorite games:
In no special order:
• Fallout: It had the best story and immersion of any game I’ve played. Even though the technology was basic (this was a 1997 game, after all), you really felt like you were exploring a vast postnuclear wasteland. Fallout, among all games, shows how important story can be to a game.
• Half-Life: The best shooter of all time, with a great story. Even though as a first-person shooter, there wasn’t much room to tell a story, Half-Life still did an excellent job of explaining why I was in the Black Mesa facility, and even though I really didn’t know who the bad guys were, I knew I had to escape. It had such a great feeling.
• Wizardry: My favorite fantasy single-player RPG, the one that got me hooked. Now it is hopelessly dated, but it was my first really exciting, immersive game experience. When I went back to try it again a few years ago, I was shocked at how hard-core it was—it was very easy, especially in the beginning, to lose your characters completely. Games have gotten a lot easier in that respect over the years. In Wizardry, though, you really cared how combat turned out because one wrong move and you had to basically restart the game. That made things exciting!
• EverQuest: This game proved that online role-playing games were just as good (if not more so) than single-player games. This was my first MMORPG, and it is still one of my favorites. Looking back on it (much like Wizardry), I find that EverQuest was a lot more hard-core than today’s crop of MMOs, like World of Warcraft. This again explains why it was so exciting—when failure in combat meant a two-hour “corpse retrieval” run, you really, really didn’t want to die.
• World of Warcraft: This game changed the online landscape forever. WoW showed what we online game developers have been saying for almost 20 years: Online games are the wave of the future. WoW was the first game to hit the public consciousness—at least here in North America and Europe—that had massive success and spillover into mass culture. WoW, at its core, is a very simple game, with lots of content and awe-inspiring production values. It’s a very simple equation, but it’s one that is extremely difficult to pull off. Even though I’ve been making online games since 1990 or so, and I have played them all, I’ve spent more time playing WoW than probably all the others put together. Why? Because it’s so much damn fun.
On designing MMOs:
In MMOs, you really have to think about creating a world as well as a game. Usually you start with an intellectual property (in Dark Age of Camelot’s case, it- was the Arthurian legends, of course), and start creating the world from there—terrain, types of monsters one would encounter, architecture, player classes, weapons, armor, etc. It all flows from the IP of the game. On top of that, you start adding the rules for how players interact with the world—the class system, the economy, the combat system, and so on. Usually there are strict rules for the direction of the game—it is a PvP-centric game, for example, or a socialization/exploration game. It is very important to stick to these rules when completing a design for an MMO—if you stray far from the original vision, then the game will become less sharp and defined and players will become confused as to their purpose in the world.
On designing PvP in Dark Age of Camelot:
The implementation of the player-versus-player combat system in Dark Age of Camelot was an extremely thorny design problem. Players had to use skills, combat abilities, and spells to kill monsters in order to level, but then they had to use these same abilities when fighting other players to remain consistent. Making abilities work against AI opponents (monsters) is relatively easy, but when you try to apply those same abilities against human-controlled enemies, it gets really, really difficult to balance. Any player of Dark Age of Camelot back in the original days of the game (2001–2002) can attest to the fact that the game was balanced in some areas, but not so well balanced in others. It took a long time for the design team to come up with a system that was fun and balanced for both player-versus-player combat as well as player versus monster.
Advice to designers:
Don’t be afraid to do whatever it takes to get into the industry. If you have to start as an artist, QA tester, programmer, whatever—just do it. When you’re in the door, it’s a lot easier to get your voice heard. And be patient. People won’t respect your ideas until they know that you are competent and level-headed. This takes time.