The recent announcement that the Wheel of Time video game has appeared in the film has shocked fans.
The announcement, first reported by a variety of Hollywood Product Publications, described the PC and console “AAA Open-World Role-Playing Game” based on Robert Jordan’s much-loved 14 The Wheel of Time. A three-year development period was also mentioned.
IWOT Studios’ new Montreal-based game developer is currently developing. Alexander oversaw the development of all turbines (now WB Games Boston) franchises, including Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Asheron’s Call. This will usually cause great excitement from the fans in the face of it. But that’s the name IWOT Studios, which won the rights to The Wheel of Time in 2004 (as Red Eagle Entertainment), and this story about the last three years of development process that raised this eyebrow.
A rough online search for IWOT Studios reveals that the company has a fractured relationship with the hardcore The Wheel of Time fanbase. I’ve found multiple posts from fans who are skeptical about the business. Others believe that IWOT has “washed” IP of time over the years and has had multiple projects that have not been able to go anywhere. Fans often point to 10-year-old Reddit posts.
This has scoffed the idea that a brand new video game development studio could essentially come from anywhere, allowing them to spin a triple-A RPG that fits the expectations of fans of time, leading to an attitude of “I believe we’ll see it” online.
However, The Wheel of Time has recently achieved significant success with the Amazon Prime Video TV series. This concludes Season 3 (season 4 has not yet been announced). The show exposed the circle of time to an army of new fans, turning the story around in Season 3 after upsetting the core fanbase with a major story change in season 1 and 2 compared to the book.
With all this in mind, I set out to learn more from IWOT Studios itself. We spoke with IWOT Studios boss Rick Selvage and studio head Craig Alexander for the company’s video game effort.
Passthecontroller: What did your video game project look like?
Rick Servege: We have a very big and deep story. It also controls rights over time, including all interactive rights. And video games are the main platform for any IP, fan platform, like the wheel of time. Of course we were going to play video games. The question is when, what type and how do you enter the market? So we felt that it was right now to do that.
Passthecontroller: What are the details about the setup needed to make that vision come true? Here we are talking about playing a Triple A Open World role-playing game. It takes a lot to achieve such things at a certain level of quality. What exactly does this have? Which setup do you have now? Where would you like to go in the future?
Craig Alexander: The first step is the team formation that begins. The plan is to work with the franchise for many years, develop a series of games, sequels, expansion packs, DLC, etcetera, and build as many worlds as possible. And considering that we have a vast rights set with one of the world’s greatest fantasy IPs, it’s a labor of love and we look forward to getting started.
But the way we divide it over time is something that needs to be organized in advance production. But we are confident that given the richness of the materials we can build a large part of the world. And you were mentioning complexity. I fully realize that these are big games to build. This is a big IP. I have played quite a few fantasy games to build the biggest and most difficult game of all, the MMO. I have helped pioneer the genre and believe this is a time of fitting for a great time immersive experience, and fans have been hoping for it for years.
Passthecontroller: It sounds like you’re just starting out with this, but that means you don’t have hundreds of developers working on the game right now. Is it necessary to actively start hiring to achieve this?
Craig Alexander: yes. We are now actively recruiting our leadership team. Fill in the leadership team and you’ll be given a presentation soon. Next, you build a prototype team that will become rather small and less than 20-30 people over time, build a prototype, build a vertical slice, and eventually enter into production with staff of 200-300 or more.
These numbers are fairly typical for building this world range. As you mentioned, these are massive games, but as I mentioned before, we’re planning on creating a sequel strategy from the start, so we’re sure our fans want more and we want to tell the whole story, so it’s something we need to plan. And this applies to other big fantasy and science fiction IPs.
Passthecontroller: Do you plan to self-publish the project yourself and self-publish? Or do you want to market that vertical slice and put it on the publisher?
Rick Servege: no. First of all, it’s not self-funded. That’s not a problem as you have a lot of money to build a company. And when it comes to publishing, I think it’s too early to commit to publishing yourself or another publisher. You know, over the next year, technology and business models will change dramatically, and we are in a position that we do not need to make these commitments. You need to focus on creating and developing the best games.
Craig Alexander: The focus on recruitment is on development studios. Like Rick said, the publishing feature comes much later.
Passthecontroller: I’m asking this because I’ve seen all the questions under the sun on the internet as a result of the announcement. One of them lies around the support that this vision may have to be realized. Going out and talking about Triple A open world role-playing games creates a level of anticipation among the fans. Because I know Triple A’s open world role-playing games look like these days. In recent years, the latest Triple A game budget balloons have reached hundreds of millions of dollars. So, if there’s no big investment to make it happen, I think there are doubts about how it can be achieved.
Rick Servege: Understand the financial requirements to build a game like this. Craig was centered around that business, and with hundreds of developers he made sure to run all the developments for the Lord of the Rings online MMO. And we understand the costs, we understand the challenges, and that’s why we have a leadership team that can do it now. And the funding aspect is that there is no concern about investing in a Montreal studio to achieve the goals established today.
Passthecontroller: The announcement mentions the game’s three-year development process.
Rick Servege: Yes, for three years, I don’t know where it came from.
Passthecontroller: I was going to say, that sounds very ambitious.
Rick Servege: The problem we’ve always had over time is that we have excited fans there. We decided to do our own thing and make TV, games and movies. I know it takes several years to do this.
Craig Alexander: It will take time. The first game is the most difficult and requires proper scope and frame, but you want to have reasonable high quality releases in reasonable time, but in the future you can have success, set up workflow tools, processes, etc, and build follow-up releases as we mentioned. It’s a long-term thing. Because we have a big story. I’m not underestimating the amount of work to build the whole world, but our intention is to do it.
But to discuss, these details are still sorted out: “When will the number one release come out?” and “Which book and which regions cover?” We produce in advance
Rick Servege: That is impossible to state. It’s just as inappropriate to try to state that as fans want a concrete answer. There’s a lot to do.
Passthecontroller: The announcement also states that it will be released on PCs and consoles. Is that accurate?
Craig Alexander: Yes, the intention is to be multi-platform. You cannot speak exactly which consoles, as there is a high chance that you are planning to migrate your console. For example, Switch 2 is unknown, but Xbox and PlayStation are most likely, but obviously PC and even Macintosh are typical of most open world RPGs.
Passthecontroller: Based on what you’re saying, this is probably a PS6 game, whatever your next Xbox is. Of course, the PC is a PC, but this doesn’t sound like what will come up by the end of this console generation.
Craig Alexander: Yeah. Now you might want to support the previous generation as well, support the Series X and support the PS5 as you say. But obviously, if you can launch a title that matches the launch of a new platform, that’s great. But none of us have these details yet, exactly when it will happen. But the good news is that the technology can be developed to be scalable, supported multiple platforms, and run on a previously made Triple A plan. Yes, this is difficult, but we know how to do it.
The experience is too small and released, and you don’t want a potentially high-quality compromise. Meanwhile, we have no intention of developing this game for more than a decade for its first release. That won’t happen.
Yes, the first one is the most difficult, but we balance all of those things and have that Goldilock in the middle, not too long or too short. But it’s important that we do the right thing first, as it sets expectations. And there are plenty of great materials, even in the order in which you communicate the materials. As we know as a Wheel of Time fan, the whole experience is non-linear. Because that’s the core of IP, we’re tilting it a lot.
Passthecontroller: It makes sense to follow the story of a TV show and the story that followed from the beginning. Those who haven’t read the book but have seen the show will recognize it in that case, right?
Rick Servege: There are really two things. For one, it’s certainly the vast number of people around the world who have read the book, and certainly the shows are distributed to over 200 countries. They are well-versed in it, and certainly we follow that story.
Another piece I want to add is that we’re doing the origin movie, The Age of Legends now. And we’re ready to cast into it. The good news is that we believe that the era of legend is at an age where even fans and non-fans can be very easily understood. You begin to understand the origins of the abandoned person and the Trorok and how the world was broken, and the story is not really told. And there’s the opportunity to do that with an epic feature film. And of course, we will be engrossed in the development of not using assets in games as well. It is probably a logical path, a legendary era, and following the book. But where do we start, we understand that.
Passthecontroller: Craig, your background is in MMOS, right? So, what is that here? I mentioned live services before. This suggests that it is not necessarily a traditional single-player open world game, like the Bethesda game or the Gate 3-type game of Bardur.
Rick Servege: Or the assassin’s beliefs or avowed?
Passthecontroller: Yes.
Craig Alexander: The simple answer is that I played all kinds of games. Yes, we cultivated the MMO experience, mainly because you were asking about range and size. We didn’t particularly enter the announcement of MMOs because we think it’s the level of taking on it…I’m not sure if that’s right for IP. In other words, there are almost 3,000 characters in the world. I want to give players the opportunity to play those people. Usually, in an MMO environment, you need to play an unknown character. You may be able to interact with these iconic characters from fantasy and sci-fi franchises, but you cannot play them actively. So treating it like a single player experience with multiplayer elements is a much better way to do it. However, even games mentioned, such as Balders Gate 3, have the opportunity to do online integration.
As for live services, they were trying to point out that releases happen over time. There will be a lot of them. And I know there is this attention, when is the first modest release of the first and most difficult title? This is just one of many decisions about how this content will be rolled out over decades.
There are many resources that can work on this in our careers. But beauty is that there is enough content to draw. And this was true for me, for the Lord of the Rings. It’s been live now for 18 years and they’re building everything in Middle Earth. Similarly, the same can be done here.
Take your big assassin creed releases, often with about 300 hours of content in each release. If we could have covered every book, prequel, everything that Rick said, and built many sequels into the experience, can we imagine the thousands of hours we could put in? We have the luxury of doing all this because the medium supports it and the players want it. In contrast, if you are trying to support other media, the focus must be much narrower. And that’s what we don’t need to do when you’re building these big open world experiences.
Passthecontroller: One of the things I wanted to tell you is the online reception from the community to announcements. I think it’s fair to say that there was probably some skepticism about the presentations and projects, and actually the studio company you have. I’ve done my research online and people have pointed out that before that happened, previous announcements, and Reddit posts from 10 years ago are appearing. Why should fans be sure this game and this series of games will meet their expectations, as you’re talking about?
Rick Servege: You know, it’s a big world with so many people and there are a lot of fans. We have not been informed in the past and are not concerned about what we have made comments. I think I mentioned you in the first half of the interview, but we cannot deal with all the misinformation.
There are comments about Hollywood and comments about the game. People said when we signed a deal with Sony and Amazon and brought in the showrunners, they said, “See if that happens.” Well, that’s an example of what fans and market minorities mentioned that have come to life in such a critical way. And we have had a lot of success in Season 3. We’ll start meeting key cast members when it comes to the new film with A-list Director Kari Skogland. All of these things happen when the timing is right, and when they are done and done in the right way.
We had a very long chance to put the circle of time on TV. We had the opportunity – I’ll nurture it now – we announced obsidian 20 years ago. That was when there were movie-based games. Craig knows this from Lord of the Rings. And we have a big publishing agreement with EA. We have a development agreement with Obsidian. The problem is that the project was set to Universal Pictures and the film was all based on the green light of the film. Well, there was no game development as the movie never happened universally. And it was our first and only effort directly in the gaming business. Since then, we have had many opportunities and entered the market in an important way and decided it was not right for the market. That wasn’t the right game.
We wanted the TV series to come out and be successful before we made a decision. Before that, we could have put the wheel of sci-fi time on the sci-fi channel in an episode budget of $2 million. And we didn’t announce it, but as the brand managers, we were extremely careful to do the right thing at the right time and make it a success. And many of these things like the first game effort certainly didn’t come from us. It just didn’t deliver the film.
The good news for fans now is great. Because I don’t think a two-hour movie from back then could really set the world. And we had the opportunity to see Game of Thrones come out and do well. It showed that fantasy on a big budget can be done on cable. And, as you know, the circle of time is so big, in width and depth, so television is the best way to tell that story and the best way to launch it.
So there are many reasons why there is information. The only thing we can do is provide a good quality fan experience. This is something I did with Sony Amazon. This is about doing the same thing on the video game side with my partner and me, executive producer Larry Mondragon. We’re going to do the same thing as in legendary times. And the only thing we can do is realize our commitment to those projects in a way our fans are excited about.
And we are finally pleased that fans have appeared in The Time Television series. You know, there were a lot of people saying the same thing about the TV series until season 3 came out, but that was a different story.
I think this all comes from goodwill, concern, excitement and interest. I don’t want to be disappointed by anyone. We don’t want to be disappointed either. And we are committed to delivering the best fan experiences on a variety of platforms as much as possible. That’s where we are. We’re bowing our heads. We’re doing what we’re trying to do. There were a few missteps. For one, I wouldn’t call it Misstep, but it’s the whole console game I was trying to do with Obsidian as an example.
Passthecontroller: I think I’m typical in that I came to Season 3. Is it typical of community feedback?
Rick Servege: that’s right. And Game of Thrones also took three seasons. Ours is a much more difficult adaptation because it is much deeper and more complicated. And the fact that we did it right in season 3 is great.
In other words, fans were throwing rocks at showrunner Rafe (Judkins). I think all the actors and Rafee and his team did a great job and stuck with it. But these things take time. It’s not easy. Depending on the industry, there are sometimes many challenges in the market. But we are brand custodians, and it’s our interest to provide a premium fan experience and get it right.
Craig Alexander: The team formation is currently on a very good pace and has achieved very high quality talent. I know we were talking a bit about the story and the writing side. We have the best game writers in the industry and are approaching us who want to do this. Often they would say, “The circle of time is the reason I entered the industry.” This is a big thing. And they want to do this as a showcase project for them.
Rick Servege: And you will start early next week and continue next month, and there will be many announcements about the leadership team that we are on board. And I think that shows commitment. People with experience like Craig have in their field of expertise. Some of them have been working with Craig in the team before, but they all come together.
Rather than letting our work speak for us, we will make a deliberate effort to begin communicating with our fans in a much more direct way in the future. We communicate in our community in a way that is proactive. And at some point we can spend our day and fix all the misinformation that has been spread by a small number of people over the past 10 or 20 years, but we are not worried now. Our efforts, our dedication and our commitment lie in our work. I think TV shows are one of these examples. Both 3D animation and live action features and video games show other things as you move forward.
Passthecontroller: You can’t let go of you without asking if Season 4 is happening. What is the transaction?
Rick Servege: That’s a question for Sony and Amazon. I’ll leave it to you.
Passthecontroller: Well, are you happy with how Season 3 turned out? Are you satisfied with it not only from an important reception or fan reception standpoint, but also commercially?
Rick Servege: Yes, we’re excited. Although we usually use words that are not used in business, the price performance ratio means production costs and value created from a commercial and fan perspective. I think it’s comparable to other fantasy sci-fi shows. I think we’re doing very well. I’ll leave it as is.
We are very pleased with the TV show and the performances of the team and Rafe and the cast as a whole. And of course, we weigh our fans. I believe the show deserves more seasons.
Wesley is the UK news editor at Passthecontroller. Find him on @wyp100’s Twitter. You can contact Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
