The Dread Lord

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Stardock are an unusual company in the world of PC games. One half maker of desktop software found in PCs worldwide, one half bastion of hardcore PC games design.

CEO and designer Brad Wardell's no-nonsense, pragmatic attitude sets him apart from many PC developers. Now Stardock have moved from publishing their own games to publishing those of others, namely Sins of a Solar Empire. We thought it was time we talked.

Where do you see Stardock right now?

Brad Wardell: Our company's kind of spread between PC games and what we call desktop experience software, which customises your Windows experience. On the game side, the strategy game genre has been left kind of open in the past two years. A lot of other companies have kind of moved out of it. We see there's still a market which has lots and lots of users, because the PC is so good at doing strategy games.

All these abandoned sub-genres... you're sort of recolonising them.

Wardell: That'd be a good way of putting it. I've always looked at myself as a gamer first who just happens to know how to code. I want to play these kind of games. I want to play turn-based space games.

I want to play RTS - and when I say RTS, I mean actual strategy games, not ones where I'm memorising hotkeys to fire off special abilities. I want to play a magic fantasy game. And I think a lot of other people feel the same way, but in the last few years, it seems that every other game is just another FPS. And I love FPS... but I also want to play strategy games.

GalCiv II was incredibly successful, but it still wasn't a multi-million game.

Wardell: There's a myth because back in the days before NPD (American retail sales tracking - Ed), that we'd have PC games companies saying they were selling eight million copies of their game.

But there was no way to verify it. And I know that a lot of those came from bundling deals... which count as sales, but when people think of something that sells millions of units, they're thinking of someone buying it in the stores. It still happens occasionally - The Sims and World of Warcraft do sell millions of copies.

But typically it's always been considered if you sell 100,000 copies of your PC game, that'd be a success. That'd be the equivalent of a movie making 100 million dollars. In the case of GalCiv II it sold over 300,000 copies, so we're pretty happy, especially considering the budget.

Digital distribution is a big thing for more niche games. Hell, for Sins, it's the only way you can buy it in the UK.

Wardell: From an EU perspective, I think digital distribution is probably the best thing that's happened for PC gaming. For many years, a lot of games don't reach Europe, or a lot of great European games didn't reach us.

With digital distribution, it doesn't matter. We struggled and struggled to get good European publishing for Sins. We went to most of the major places and they kept on saying things like "Oh - the Germans don't like games about the future". Which I thought was an awful thing to say. They don't like games about the future? "No - they like games that talk about the past."

I'm not sure what they're trying to say by that but... well, it was only the UK where we had any success, but by then it was so far and late in the process that it wouldn't have been a good thing.

What game would you make if you had limitless time?

Wardell: We'd be doing an RPG right now. A Baldur's Gate style RPG or an Ultima V style RPG. I'm not talking about Oblivion, but a traditional, top-down party sort of game. Because I don't see them - Neverwinter Nights has that, but there hasn't been that many. I don't understand it, because I think there's still a market.

Ultimately, it comes down to how much it'll cost you to make the game and how many do you think you can realistically sell.

If you made a Baldur's Gate with good graphics and story, that's well produced.... well, I don't think it'll be very hard to sell 200-300,000 units worldwide. If a turn-based strategy game could do that, certainly a well produced RPG could.

How much money that translates to? Six to eight million dollars. And it just becomes a matter of "Can I produce a game with that?" And unfortunately, a lot of studios can't any more.

You are working on a fantasy game though...

Wardell: We're working on a turn-based fantasy strategy game. It won't be out for another couple of years still. We've been developing a new 3D engine for it. The game relies heavily on user-created content. And, I stress, we started before Spore.

The modding tools, so to speak, are built into the game in such a way that's how we're putting content in the game. You can build your own worlds, your own races, your own characters and cities. You'll design everything you want. You can submit it into the game, and it goes up to us.

Once it's moderated, any user has the option to download third party content. The game itself is a little like Civilization, a little like Master of Magic, in that you start in a world that's been totally devastated by an event called the Cataclysm. As you start rebuilding the world, the map starts to come back alive.

But outside your realm, things are pretty desolate. It's not like Heroes of Might and Magic when there's just cities there - you actually get to build cities, build settlers, move them out, form new cities.

There's these things across the world called Shards. If you get them, they give you mana which you can use to cast increasingly powerful spells. I know one thing people liked about Master of Magic was the spell effects. But imagine what you could do on today's 3D hardware with spell effects.

This is two years away, and your strategy-MMO Society is five years away. You're very open about your future plans.

Wardell: I don't really see any reason not to disclose it, because the game industry just isn't that competitive. When someone buys Company of Heroes or Supreme Commander, I don't think they're any less likely to buy Sins of a Solar Empire.

First of all as a gamer, if someone says "Hey - I think there's a market for a fantasy strategy game", I go "Go knock yourself out". I'll buy it. I want to play as many of these games as I can. We have open betas of our products, we don't have NDAs. We like people to know what we're doing.

One word that comes to mind is 'maturity. You're like a grown-up business.

Wardell: Game development is engineering to us. It's not art. We're gamers first. We don't look at ourselves as artists creating some vision. We look at ourselves as gamers making a cool thing.

Why do you think some devs don't see it like that?

Wardell: I think it comes down to whether you think of yourself as an artist or an engineer... People always come to me and say "Did you take that feature from Ascendancy". And I'm: "yes. And?" "Don't you think..." No. If someone makes Ascendency 2, I'll be first in line to buy it. But they're not, so I'll put it in my game.

Twilight of the Arnor, the new GalCiv II expansion pack... it's enormous. Why so big?

Wardell: When we were about mid-way through, we looked at our schedule and realised there wasn't going to be any time to do another expansion pack. So let's go crazy. ...we want to be able to put it out and say LOOK AT THIS. Have you seen the graphics are different? It's the same engine.

And then the graphics use 1/8th of the memory. I don't know if you ever go and look at the tasks, but load up a game of Dark Avatar and play that for a while, and then do it with Arnor and look at the memory useage. It's massively less.

That's impressive.

Wardell: Every process on a 32-bit machine, no matter how much memory you have on your computer, can only use two gigabytes. Almost every game developer is bumping up against that limit.

The only reason why it hasn't become critical is because you can dump a lot of memory to videocard. And that's one reason why these newer games require these mega-videocards. It's not because of the polygons, as much as they need the memory.

What were your big influences?

Wardell: Oh, Civilization, the original one. I started out as one of the guys on usenet on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic. I was just one of those guys posting saying "I wish Civilization had this feature". And why couldn't you continue the game after you go to Alpha Centauri? Why isn't there a space one? And one day I picked up Teach Yourself C in 21 Days and started programming GalCiv.

It's a fascinating period. It was like the frontier.

Wardell: Basically, a game that's made by one guy went to retail. Today? You'd have to go back to Rollercoaster Tycoon, which was basically made by one guy. I remember I drew all the original ships in GalCiv in IconEditor as I couldn't afford a graphics package.

You tried to license some classic games like X-COM and Master of Magic from Atari...

Wardell: The funny thing about that is they came to us. Over the years they'd acquired Star Control, Master of Orion, X-COM and Master of Magic... what they wanted to do was license the rights because they won't sell millions of copies...

We all agreed on everything but the lawyers just killed it. All kinds of requirements. We're very open about things, and every time we wanted to say something we'd have had to run it by Atari Legal. We couldn't even put out a news item.

And it's not like we'd be using code. Which was another point - the lawyers didn't understand we were just doing a trademark licence, and they wanted the rights to the code of anything we wrote. Which was obviously a deal breaker too. It was so incompatible with how we do things.

Kieron Gillen