"There's a lot more to the narrative than what we're used to," Schaefer says. You have to figure out why you're there and what you're doing. Hob is an adventure game where you play a mysterious character who wakes up on what seems to be an unknown planet. The game that came out of all this work is called Hob. "That's pretty much it," Schaefer laughs. The process sounds like something that might involve a sweat lodge and peyote. Management invited the studio in to talk about ideas, and then took several of the project leads off-site to nail down specifics. There would be no dialogue, and it would be up to the player to explore and figure out what was going on. The team had an idea for a game that was single-player and filled with mystery. I'm not going to lie about that," Lefler says. Shifting from nearly a lifetime of action RPGs into a space game that will be finished at another studio - and now a completely different idea - required a lot of change from a studio that had been built on talent and technology that focused on a single genre. "That was the very first time I've ever worked on a game I didn't finish," Runic President Marsh Lefler tells Polygon. Rebel Galaxy spawned out of this base game we were working on at first," Schaefer says. "It was different, but the basic structure of that is what Eric and Travis are making now with Rebel Galaxy. The good news is that Runic had been able to shake off some of the action RPG cobwebs in the meantime by working on a game set in space. "That person doesn't exist in the world," Schaefer says. The studio couldn't find someone who could step in and replace Baldree. "The new company and the new project requires new structures and new rules." You never want to downsize and say goodbye to friends, but we really had to do it," Schaefer says. Runic let some people go, slimming the studio down to 24 people. There were missteps along the way, and some hurt feelings.
"That obviously comes with struggles," Schaefer says. Everything about how they did things had to change. Those still at Runic had to grow and gain more responsibilities. "Suddenly that safety blanket wasn't there anymore." It didn't help that because so much of the previous games went through Baldree and Erich Schaefer, the studio was used to depending on them. "It shakes people's confidence when two top guys in the company leave," Schaefer says, looking back. It made sense that he was a mismatch for a 30-person company." While Schaefer makes the co-founders' departure sound amicable, he admits Runic had to change significantly to survive. To some extent, other people just slow him down. He likes to have his hands in everything.
"It made sense," Schaefer says, talking about the departure of the two men. This is the story of how a studio put itself back together to create its next game, Hob. Co-founders Travis Baldree and Erich Schaefer left Runic to form their own company, and to finish what would later become Rebel Galaxy. Runic spent about a year on a game set in space, and then the studio changed forever. "It's basically all I've worked on from Diablo 1." The team was ready to tackle another genre after the success of Torchlight 2. "I've been doing now since around 1993," Schaefer says. Runic staffed up to around 26 people and took over three years to make the game. It featured multiplayer and extension support for mods. Schaefer describes Torchlight 2 as a "natural extension" of the first. It sold close to 2 million copies, and as ultimately ported to the Xbox Live Arcade. The studio used computers it had purchased out of liquidation, and there were only 14 people at the company when the game shipped. Runic knew the genre from front to back, and stuck to single-player to reduce complexity. Torchlight had a manageable scope, and that was by design. His brother and then-Runic chief creative officer Erich Schaefer was likewise one of the Diablo series' creators. "We were a new studio and we had to come quickly and make a big hit right away to establish ourselves," says Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer, talking about creating a hit game the way you or I may talk about making waffles for breakfast.Īs a debut game, Runic made Torchlight, a hack-and-slash in the tradition of Diablo, a game the studio was familiar with, as Max Schaefer was an executive producer on Diablo and Diablo 2.
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