Sorcerer King Interview With Stardocks Brad Wardell

Recently, I had a chance to speak to Stardock’s Brad Wardell about his 4X fantasy strategy game, Sorcerer King, which was just announced for the PC as a Steam Early Access title. In our interview, we discussed the creation of the game, its core aspects, its inspirations, the rise of Steam Curators, and more. 

Transcription by Jacob Saylor. 

Gameranx: For our readers who aren’t familiar with Sorcerer King, bring us up to speed and tell us what it is about.

Wardell: Sure! So, Sorcerer King is a 4X fantasy game, but works under the assumption that you’ve probably played a 4X fantasy game in the past. 

Over the past couple of years there have been an assortment of excellent 4x fantasy games and its given us the opportunity to make a game where were not having to introduce the standard tropes of fantasy 4x. So, this game assumes you’ve played one of the previous games and lost really badly.  

In this game the sorcerer king, he’s not you, you’re not the sorcerer king. The sorcerer king is the bad guy and he already has conquered everything, basically. Now he’s going to try and become a god and your job is to try to gather the remnants of the empires and the kingdoms that were in the previous game and stop him from becoming a god. 

Gameranx: Neat. That’s actually pretty cool. 

Wardell: Yeah, it’s the type of game that’s only become possible because there have been so many fantasy 4x games right, it’s kind of like in a superhero film right, the first movie is always the origin story. Then it’s the second one they go off in a different direction – well it’s almost in every fantasy 4x game, ‘You were a king and you are competing against ten empires for control of the world and you must capture these da da da and make treaties,’ it’s like well that’s great, that’s the origin story, right for a 4x. 

Well, we’ve got that now, people are familiar with that now. Now we’re going to go with ‘Here’s what happens next.’ The bad guy won, now he wants to become a god, his magic allows that kind of thing usually, and this time it’s not about making treaties. I mean, he wants to – the sorcerer king, you probably know this already – he wants to ally with you. He’s trying to bribe you, cause you’re a minor race to him. 

Gameranx: Yeah, I noticed early on in the game, one of his toadies comes to me and says, ‘Hey, you want to join us?’ 

Wardell: Yep. As you take the path, and this will come up even more as you’re playing, is where he’ll come to and you and say, ‘There’s no need for us to be fighting all, and as a token of our appreciation, here is a gift,’ and you can take the gift in exchange for going up on the doomsday counter. 

Gameranx: Neat! So, first thing I noticed upon booting up the game, was that there were spell books beneath by playable character class, harkening back to Master of Magic’s spell books. 

Wardell: Oh, I have no idea what you’re talking about there. Master of Magic, is that a game? (Laughs)

Uh, well let’s see. In this game and in the course of it, you choose a wizard and then with that wizard you choose a number of spell books, which determines what spells are available to you and you choose a special ability and when you go in you can capture shards you get magic which you then spend between mana, skill, and learning new spells. Now, I assure you that is wholly completely new concept that has never been in a game called – what’d you call it, ‘Master of Magic?’ (Laughs)

Gameranx: Yeah, I wanted to ask about the extent of the influence Master of Magic had on Sorcerer King. 

Wardell: Yeah, well one of the ironies is that when we were going and making a game, I brought my Elemental design that I had wanted to do years ago that was a complete turd when it finally came out, and there’s bunches of screenshots of Master of Magic and I think, ‘I want this game – make me a modern version of this game,’ of course it didn’t turn out that way. 

So, this time I’m on the game day-to-day and making sure, ‘Alright, look. When I go into a battle, I want every guy, I want it to be about the cool abilities my guys have versus what their guys have.’ I want to have each race be very different. No, I don’t want to be a bunch of humanoids, as that look basically the same just with different clothing. I want there to be giants, I want there to be goblin men, I want there to be stuff that look very different on the screen. I don’t want my dwarves to look like fat humans, I want them to be dwarves. Actually, if you look at the user interface of Sorcerer King, right, it’s the thing on the right side: here’s your units, here’s your mini map, here’s your main menu. So, it’s definitely taken a lot of influence from that.

Gameranx: Yep. Besides Master of Magic, what other titles does Sorcerer King draw inspiration from?

Wardell: I would say FTL, ironically, has been a major inspiration for it. When you go on those little quests, they’re like in FTL where you have an event come up and you get multiple choices and the choices that you make are based on the day that you fed our in-game dungeon master, so to speak, so that there’s some differences from game to game. The tone of the game, and this is one of the things that’s probably going to be a little controversial, cause people on your forums do take their fantasy strategy games very seriously. All the writing in the game is from cracked.com, so it’s very much more tongue-in-cheek than we’ve done in the past, cause we want people to be able to read the quests and even though people say they want these quests and everything to take itself very seriously, as a practical matter, the best way to get people to read stuff is if it entertains them. 

Gameranx: Yep, I noticed that the quest dialogue was pretty interesting compared to, you know, the writing of these games is usually pretty vanilla.

Wardell: Yeah, and there’s more and more and we have so many hundreds more, just quests that haven’t been entered in yet. We had to actually build a special editor just to keep up with all the quests that are getting made. 

Gameranx: That’s nice. 

Wardell: Yeah, it’s so important on a game like this that every game feel very different and you know, underneath these covers there’s this dungeon master, that, when you’re making choices, those things are feeding the dungeon master, to make sure each game is different. 

You know, you’re a Civilization fan, there’s iron and oil and plastic and those are your resources. Well, in this game what we are trying to feed is concepts like loyalty or benevolence or greed and all these other things feed into the dungeon master’s resource pool. He’s not a player by the way, he’s more of your traditional D&D type dungeon master, and so based on the choices you’ve made, he can change the world overall and because it’s data-driven, after release, modders will be able to make their own and put them up through Steamworks. It’s not hard-coded C++-wise. 

Gameranx: Cool. So, going back to the characters, I noticed that the character classes save for the default one were all the grayed out. When are you planning to add more classes and will they be customizable? 

Wardell: Yeah, in our build they’re only disabled for the first because we want to make sure that before we put in the final polish for the others that the early access people are satisfied with what we’re doing and if they have an idea we can easily apply it to all the others without having to throw away a bunch of word, but yes, what we think will typically happen is that players will make custom ones, right. So, they’ll go in and they’ll call their Igor or – hopefully not Igor – but some cool name. You know, the they’ll pick the books, maybe some of them will try to be generic and have little bits of all the spellbooks or they’ll focus on one spell book so they can get those legendary spells to pop up and that way every game should feel very different and the type of sovereign you pick decides what units you get, too.

Gameranx: Ah, I see. That makes sense. So, correct me if I’m wrong, but Sorcerer King is Stardock’s first Steam Early access title. What drew you to Early Access rather than developing the game traditionally? 

Wardell: Well, actually Galactic Civilizations 3 was our first one, I think, that’s cause for this new Early Access thing and all of our games historically have been available as betas. You know, for people to get their feet back on. The Early Access system has matured to the point where it’s a great way to get feedback from the people before the game is released from people who are interested in the title so we can get their ideas and thoughts. 

If you think about, I was talking to someone earlier and saying, ‘In Civilization, the number of turns it takes to crank out that first settler can make or break the game.’ If it takes thirty turns its boring. If it takes two turns it’s cheap. Having lots of people sit there and we can take all kinds of analytics on how people see the light, where are they quitting, making sure the game doesn’t drag out or that it doesn’t feel unfair is going to help us make the final game a lot better, I think. 

Gameranx: That makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. Do you plan on soliciting feedback from players with these Steam Early Access forms and furthermore, what level of transparency do you plan to offer throughout the game’s development.

Wardell: I make games because I like hanging out and talking to the people playing the games. If it weren’t for the forums, and I’m always getting myself into trouble, but I always enjoy talking to people online. To me, when someone criticizes one of our games or even if they’re flaming it, they’re doing us a favor because even things people things aren’t constructive is still data. That’s still helpful, because it gives me information that I can use to try and make the game better, because I love hanging out and talking to people and getting their ideas. We have a wild website launching called sorcererking.com and the forums are there and we’ll be in there talking to people.

Gameranx: What’s your opinion of the new Steam Curator pages. Have you been seeing anything with a positive or negative impact on the sales or promotion of your game since Steam introduced them?

Wardell: I tell ya, that is one of the biggest events internally going on here, because – and it depends on who you talk to – but I happen to love it. I love the Steam Curator Page. I set one up, Steph’s not in on the call, I got into huge trouble when I got in this morning from the marketing team because I created a Steam Curator page for Stardock, so I come in this morning, ‘Why is Endless Legend featured on our page?’ I go, ‘It’s a great game and I created Steam Curator and I recommended Endless Legend to people.’ They’re like, ‘Well, shouldn’t you be recommending our games like Galactic Civilizations 3?’ I’m like ‘I’m not going to recommend Galactic Civilizations 3, it’s in beta!’ It’s like, I’m supposed to be some objective person posting under Stardock. This morning, I came in and they had gone in and changed it and they’re recommending Gal Civ 3 now. 

I like the system, I think it’s great. Forty percent of our traffic for our games is coming from Curator and it’s only been up for a few days, and on our Steam Pages, I should say. The reason I like it in particular, and I’m not speaking for Stardock when I say this, and Derrick, who’s in charge of Stardock, has the opposite opinion. The reason I like it is because it’s really good for indies. 

It’s such an equalizer, like you and I may not always agree on political stuff, but I think we’re both very passionate about the little guy getting a chance and what about the indie getting a shot out there. I started to come in when I was in college, I made my first game and it got out there and the stratification that we have today didn’t exist. It was possible for some kid to make a game on their own, pick up a book, learn C++ in 21 days and write a game and get it out there. Then, all these gigantic public companies come in and suddenly it becomes really hard for these indies to get in there and get the word out – well these Curators can make a huge difference. 

This is where something like Gameranx – one of the reasons why I like Gameranx so much – is that you guys are so good about covering not just the big games, but the little guys. There’s a lot of good stuff out there and like what happens when a guy makes a really good game but he doesn’t have the marketing budget. Stardock is lucky, we have a Stephanie, we have an Elizabeth, we have an Adam who can go to talk to the journalists that know them. But what happens to those of us who don’t? I think what’s nice is that Curators – you guys should definitely set up a Gameranx one. You can combine your influence. You can have this piece of game coverage and provide a link to your Curator. 

Gameranx: Mhm, we should set one up. What’s the long-term plan for Sorcerer King in terms of DLCs or additional content?

Wardell: Well, down the line depending on how much people like the game, in the first game, you’re playing as the king and you get six different wizards to play as. It’s kind of like in Master of Magic where I’m picking my wizard to play as. Down the line I would like to make it so there’s more playable races to play as. I mean like, instead of playing as kingdom I could play as the dwarves, for example and I’d like to see a lot more quests in the game. I’d like to see a lot more monsters, creatures in the game. I think a lot of that’s going to come from a combination of both us writing that content and I think modders will probably be able to polish up our Quest Editor and make that available for people to make their own content. I like DLC and all that, but I also like creating an environment where fans are able to take the game and do interesting things with them as well.

Gameranx: Right. So, the editor. Is there going to be a mission editor as well,you know like civilization has a map editor that you can use.

Wardell: Yeah, and hadn’t decided if we are going to release that stuff or not, but the map editor is pretty user friendly, but it’s not super polished so there’s going to be a little debate on how polished does something need to be before it’s made available.

Gameranx: Right. Yeah, and Steamworks support. What extent of that are you going to do?

That I can’t commit to. I know one of the minimum things that I am very interested in is making it so that people can put in more quests into the game. How XML-savvy are you?

Gameranx: Reasonably. I mean I did some modding for a game called Temple of Elemental Evil back in the day. That was years ago.

Wardell: Oh, my god! I remember that game!

Gameranx: Yeah. 

Wardell: One of the things you can do in this game is you can define what resources – so you’re familiar with iron and oil and plastic from Civ – so we have these resources in here and so you can define any resources you want as long as you’re consistent. Then, in the quests, you’re going to have your various choices to provide those resources. The resources then are used by the Dungeon Master, will look at them and then make available different options and different quests based on what resources you have. So, it’s not rolling the dice randomly here, it’s looking at the resources that are in the game and what the course of the game is based on the resources. So, you’re able to impact the world as you play. We hired a cracked.com columnist to do the text for the game and the reason that we did it so we could have a full-time guy writing this stuff. It’d be even better if the more things that are feeding into the system the more each thing will feel different.

Gameranx: I’m all out of questions. Is there anything else you wanted to say about this game?

Wardell: No, that’s pretty much it! October 2 is when Early Access comes out and we expect the game to come out pre-GDC.

This interview with Brad Wardell was conducted by Ian Miles Cheong on September 26, 2014 via Skype. It may not be reposted in its entirety without permission.