RPS: I spoke to you way back when Paradox bought White Wolf and now here we are at a Focus event.
Ericsson: This goes back to how we set up the deal. The Paradox group are financing us, it’s not Paradox who bought us, and we’re not an internal studio in any way. We’re the licensing company that develops a meta-plot, that ended with the Gehenna and Apocalypse books in 2004. We’re pulling back the timeline to slightly before the Gehenna books, and now we’re in the Age of the Apocalypse. It might be a hundred years before the world falls, but we’re solidly in it now. This is the age of the final battle.
RPS: Because it’s been so long since we’ve had a White Wolf game, could you talk about why it’s taken so long? And what does going back to digital games let you do, in a storytelling sense, that you can’t do on tabletop?
Ericsson: The first question is pretty easy. It’s because at CCP, I was one of the content designers on the MMO World of Darkness, and the strategy we took there was to put all our eggs in one basket. We wanted to make the most awesome, content-heavy MMO, and then content-heavy MMOs went BAM, into the sink. We saw Knights of the Old Republic fail and Warhammer Online crash.
We were in the middle of MMO death, so we tried to rescope, and we tried to do that by doing something in CCP’s style, which is emergent player-based stories. But we were a bit too late, and we maybe tried to bite off a bit more than we could chew.
During that time, all licensing deals were off. We kept Onyx Path because that was the old passionate writers, the people who really knew the lore, and who were working on 20th anniversary editions of the books – nostalgia editions for fans.
I was heartbroken when this happened. I had sold my apartment, my girlfriend had broken up with me. The whole thing crashed before my eyes and I thought “what the fuck am I going to do now?”
Fortunately, there was a connection between me and the Paradox group and we could make something happen. Now, a year later, there is a lot of stuff that we’ve done that we can’t talk about at all! But rest assured, the idea of having different products that feed into one another into one big brand, with a connecting meta-plot, that’s what I’m working with 60% of my time. We’re figuring out what has happened between 2002 and today, in the World of Darkness.
How have our supernatural nations and factions reacted to the situation in the Middle East, the war on terror…