An Interview with Tessera: Setting the Record Straight, In His Own Words, Part 1

[Cylnar]

by Cylnar
Monday, December 7, 2009

There is a lot of disinformation, bile and general lack of understanding on the web about who "Tessera" is and what he is about. Much, though not all, of this comes from the ongoing, so-called "Patch War" involving two competing visions for third-party updates to the late, lamented Troika Games' third and last release, the classic RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Before that, Tessera roused the rabble at Blizzard over their poor treatment (unjustified nerfing) of the mage class.

Tessera has since gone on to become one of the premier texture modders of recent years, specializing in high-quality, high-resolution depictions of the nude female form in such games as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the aforementioned VTMB and the mismanaged abortion Hellgate: London. In collaboration with others, he has also produced the definitive bugfix patch for Bloodlines and a companion mod for Oblivion starring two of his exquisite creations. He has also been interviewed for the German gaming magazine PC Action.

I decided to set the record straight by interviewing Tessera, to get his side of the story. I'm posting the first part of this ongoing interview below, in the public area of tessmage.com, so all site visitors and guests may read it and get the true story, directly from the source. Members of this board may comment in the discussion thread in the members-only area. If you are reading this and are not currently a member of tessmage.com, please feel free to register and join in the conversation! You will find a community of intelligent, politically-aware (but most definitely NOT politically correct) gamers discussing virtually every topic under the sun.

Read on to get the truth from Tessera in his own words...

An Interview with Tessera: Setting the Record Straight, In His Own Words

1. Cylnar: Tell us how you got your nic: the origins of "Tessera".

Tessera: The name "Tessera" goes back to 2005 and it was the name of a character that I played in World of Warcraft. The actual meaning of the word is taken from ancient Greek -- it means "four" or "fourth" in that language. Well, when I created my fourth WoW mage, I named her "Tessera" accordingly. That character later went on to become quite famous (or infamous, depending upon your point of view).

Cylnar: How so?

Tessera: To make a long story short, Tessera led a sort of mini-rebellion against Blizzard back in 2005, in response to a continuing degradation of the mage class by Blizzard's irresponsible devs. That conflict escalated into a major face-off between me and several of the trained monkeys in Blizzard's public relations department ("Tseric," "Caydiem" and "Fangtooth"). Eventually, I was banned from the Blizzard forums, when it became clear to Blizzard that I wasn't someone who could be intimidated. They couldn't shut me up and they had no rational defense for their neglect of the mage class, so they banned me in a lame effort to sweep me under the rug. As for the PR goons that I battled with, they didn't fare much better. Worse, actually. Two of them ("Tseric" and "Fangtooth") were eventually fired by Blizzard... for various reasons. When all of the dust had finally settled, my "Tessera" character had become fairly well-known (I still see posts on the mage forums which mention Tessera to this day... and it's been nearly four years since all of this crap went down).

So... after I quit playing WoW back in the summer of 2006, I decided to move into the world of PC game modding. And since I was already known to a lot of gamers as "Tessera," thanks to all of that WoW nonsense, I decided to just stick with that name. It's been my "handle" ever since.


2. Cylnar: What led you to create tessmage.com?

Tessera: I had three primary motivations for launching tessmage.com back in 2006:

(1) I was very angry at Blizzard Entertainment at that time, so I wanted a place to vent freely. Originally, this web site was devoted to busting Blizzard's balls. Hence its name: "tessmage" comes from "Tessera the mage," because I already gained a tiny amount of fame from my mage character in WoW. I was totally disgusted by what the greedy bean counters at Blizzard were doing to dumb down and undermine World Of Warcrap. Well, I knew that everything that I posted on this site would wind up in Google and other search engines... and I also knew that in turn, that would annoy Blizzard (and it did). It was just a way for me to rant against Blizzard, without having to worry about being censored and/or banned. I wanted my own bully pulpit, basically.

(2) I was very concerned about the way small, grassroots "fansites" were disappearing from the web at an alarming rate. There was a time when the vast majority of game-related web sites were privately owned and operated. But today, there are almost none left. They've all been steamrollered out of existence, by the large commercial sites. One might respond by saying "So what..?" Well, the fact is that the large commercial sites are in the business of selling games... either directly or indirectly. Telling you the truth about PC games and the industry that produces them is the very last thing on their agenda. So the tessmage.com Forums allow all of us to share some different... and in my opinion, more honest... opinions regarding PC games and the people who produce them. We have discussed issues on these Forums which would most certainly be censored from any of the commercial web sites. That's because they have a financial stake in this mess... but we don't. I have always ensured that tessmage.com will remain 100% commercial-free, so as to prevent any possible conflict of interest. People may agree or disagree with the things that we say over here... but at least you know that the things being said are honest and uncensored. We could care less who we piss off in the gaming industry -- and there's not a single god damned thing that they can do about it. Not so long as the First Amendment exists.

(3) My third reason for launching tessmage.com should be obvious by now. I have been an artist for most of my life (ever since I was a kid), and one of my hobbies is to produce a small number of adult-oriented textures for various PC games. This web site provides me with a place to showcase my creations and share them freely with the public. It could also be used to provide other modders with a similar outlet, should they so choose. I have always believed that the larger commercially-supported mod sites are more hassle than they are worth, which is why I have forbidden all of them from hosting any of my own work. A few of them have stolen my stuff anyway... but hey, that's the web for ya.


3. Cylnar: What prompted you to start modding PC games?

Tessera: It's something that I had sort of been messing with for quite a few years, but I had never really thought to do anything ambitious in the way of mods. In the past, my modding had been limited to silly little things... like adding a different background to the walls in "Wolfenstein 3-D," or changing the loading screens for "Doom." Just inconsequential things of that nature, pretty much.

A few years ago, when I happened to stumble across the first nude mods for games like "Morrowind" and "Half-Life 2," I started getting thoughts in my head like "Hmmmm... I've been an artist for my entire life. I bet that I could do a better job than that..."

But I never really got motivated enough to give it a shot. That is, until Oblivion came along.

Oblivion was the first PC game that totally blew me away, graphics-wise. I also saw the potential to do a lot of different types of artwork for that game, thanks to its modder-friendly construction. And when I eventually installed nude mods for Oblivion which were created by other modders, that was when I finally got inspired enough to try my own hand at creating skin textures for a PC game.

I liked my work enough to take a chance and release some of it to the public. And that's basically the way I got started as a texture modder.

After that, mods for other games followed... such as my nude skins for VTM: Bloodlines, Hellgate: London, etc. But it was Oblivion (and my Raven character) that first inspired me to actually take the plunge and join the modding community. And since I had already been doing more conventional nude artwork (sketches) for many years, it was a natural for me to produce nude female skin textures for games.


4. Cylnar: Tell me more about Raven, one of your signature creations.

Tessera: Raven..? She's just some cyber-bimbo that I dreamed up...

Errr... ahem. Okay, I'll try to give you a more serious answer.

Back in 2006 and after I had installed a few high-quality mods created by other people, I started playing around with Oblivion's built-in face generator. I was particularly inspired by Ren's Mystic Elf race, mainly because Ren had done such a beautiful job at constructing her head meshes. It occurred to me that it might actually be possible to put together a Mystic Elf face that could almost pass as being photo-realistic in its details.

So initially, I tossed together a blonde-haired Mystic Elf character with big brown eyes. There was nothing amazing about the method that I used, either. I simply kept adjusting the various face generator sliders until I was reasonably satisfied with the results. A little at a time, her face started to take shape. She was certainly a major improvement over the other faces that I had seen on Oblivion characters... but she still didn't look very realistic to me. So, I hauled her back into the shop (so to speak) and started changing various features. Just a bunch of different experiments, really.

One of the first things that I did was to change her hair color, from blonde to glossy jet black. It seemed to frame her face better. Then I started to work on her actual facial features. I was trying to create a face that was "elfin," but I also wanted to give her a glamorous look at the same time. I didn't really have any specific face in mind... but I knew what I liked, so I kept tweaking this feature and that feature until eventually, she started to look more and more like a supermodel and less like a plastic doll.

When I finally had a face that I could live with, the last step was to change her eyes. I always do the eyes last on any characters that I create. In the case of this particular character, I tried all sorts of different "conventional" eye colors. Blue, green, brown, aqua... all of them looked okay, but none of them seemed to give her the "I'm alive..!!!" look that I was trying to achieve.

After I had exhausted all of the other possibilities, I was left with one eye color that I hadn't tried in that face yet: the yellow eyes from Ren's Beauty Pack mod. I hadn't tried them up until that point because frankly, it never occurred to me to put a pair of piss-yellow eyes into the face of a glamour girl. Honestly... how could anyone look sexy with freakish yellow eyes..? But so far, none of the other colors had given me the overall look that I was hoping for. So with a bit of hesitation, I finally decided to give the yellow eyes a shot.

And as soon as I placed those yellow eyes into the model's face, it was as if her entire face suddenly lit up. She really looked as if she was staring back at me from my computer screen. Who would have thought that such a combination would actually work..? I certainly didn't. Not until I saw it, that is.

All that was left at that early stage was to give the character a name. Well... when I sat back and looked at her, with her glossy black hair and her striking yellowish bird eyes, I was instantly reminded of a raven. A bird with jet black feathers and piercing eyes.

And that is how the first iteration of Raven was "born," back in the late spring of 2006. In the time since then, her face has been reworked multiple times. if you look at the very earliest screenshots of Raven and then compare them to the way she looks today, you will see quite a difference. Each time that I reworked her face, the goal was always to make her look increasingly realistic. Well, as realistic as she could be... with her yellow eyes and pointed elf ears.

Towards the end of 2007, well over a year since Raven had first been created, I finally felt completely satisfied with the shape of her face. I haven't touched her face since then, nor do I feel any need to. The only improvements that have been made to Raven's appearance since then have all been in the form of custom re-textures created by yours truly. Eventually, all of those custom textures for Raven were incorporated into my "MELF Superskin" mod package.  

I'll wrap up this rather lengthy response by saying that to this day, Raven is the character that I am most proud of. Hers is the very best looking face that I have ever created... and that face came entirely from my own imagination; Raven's face is not based upon any real person. Although I have noted that there have been many comparisons made between her face and the faces of various models and actresses. But no... she was not inspired by anyone real. Rather, she is my humble attempt to realize my own personal concept of what a gorgeous and exotic female elf might look like.

I have always been gratified to know that many other Oblivion players enjoy Raven as much as I do. She has been a very popular character, ever since I first made her available to the public two years ago. She has even been published in a very popular European gaming magazine... which I must admit is rather humbling. Raven will always be one-of-a-kind in my book... and for that reason and many others, she has always been the "official mascot" of our web site.


5. Cylnar: Tell me about the creation of the True Patch for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

Tessera: It's fairly common knowledge these days... but okay, I'll recount the essentials:

Back in 2006, I was a member of the PlanetVampire community. Several people on that board (myself included) had been complaining to Werner Spahl ("Wesp5") about his abuse of the term "unofficial patches" for his series of VTM: Bloodlines mods. Basically, the complaint was that his mods were not eligible to be referred to as "patches," because in addition to the legitimate bug fixes that Wesp had included within his mods, he was also tossing in dozens and dozens of completely arbitrary and unnecessary modifications to the default quests, items, player abilities and overall gameplay. I also felt that by monopolizing the patch scene, Wesp was effectively holding every Bloodlines player hostage. If they wanted his bug fixes, then they also had to accept his ridiculous number of arbitrary changes at the same time. To me, that seemed tantamount to a form of sabotage. His approach was both subjective and dictatorial... and I simply couldn't keep my mouth shut about it anymore.

Initially, our complaints were firm, but cordial. In response, Wesp and his acolytes (whom I often refer to as "Wesp groupies") immediately attacked us with a torrent of verbal abuse. Wesp himself was arrogant, intractable, unreasonable and completely smug in his attitude. Eventually, Wesp said something to me on the order of "Well if you don't like my patch, then go make a better one... if you can." Obviously, Wesp figured that he... and only he... had been blessed with the magical knowledge of how to produce patches and mods for Bloodlines.

I replied by saying "Fine Wesp... I will." Of course, I had no idea if I would actually be able to produce my own patch for VTMB, but I sure as hell wasn't going to give Wesp any more food for his ego.

Shortly after that confrontation, I received a private message on the PlanetVampire board, from a guy who said that he knew how to deal with Python scripting and Source maps. He also asked me for my e-mail address, so I gave it to him.

That guy turned out to be Acrimonious... who is not only a top-notch professional programmer, but in my opinion he is also the finest source of Bloodlines information on the entire World Wide Web. He offered to help me produce an alternative to Wesp's mods and I eagerly took him up on his offer.

At first, we merely wanted to create a down-and-dirty alternative to Wesp's inappropriate garbage. We had no intention of releasing anything to the general public. So with that goal in mind, we grabbed the latest version of one of Wesp's mods and then, Acrimonious set about reverse-engineering it. Not to steal anything from Wesp, mind you... but to simply remove any and all of his arbitrary changes -- leaving only the legitimate bug fixes intact. And about a week or so later, Acrimonious sent me a copy of a completely sanitized version of Wesp's "unofficial patch."

I liked what he had done very much, even though he had elected to keep a few of Wesp's arbitrary changes. In fact, I liked it so much that I made a very foolish decision: I decided to release Acrimonious' "doctored" patch to the public. Hence we released the first True Patch.... and we called it "version 4.01" so as to distinguish it from Wesp's original mod (which was at version 3-point-something at the time).

Naturally, Wesp and his groupies were furious with us, because we had altered one of Wesp's mods without first obtaining his permission. And after a few months, I found myself in agreement with them. Being a modder myself, I know how it feels to have somebody steal your work and make all sorts of unauthorized changes to it. So ultimately, I got in touch with Acrimonious and told him that I was going to pull the original version of the True Patch from the server. I felt that it should be discontinued, because it wasn't really our work.

Cylnar: What then?

Tessera: Acrimonious responded by saying that it was easily within his abilities to create an entirely new patch from scratch. He was quite confident that if given enough time and resources, then he would surely be able to start with a clean copy of the "plain vanilla" game and then, go through the entire mess line-by-line and fix all of the bugs that he could find. It would simply take a long time for him to accomplish, if he tried to do all of the work by himself. Above all, he and I both wanted to produce a totally original patch that did not contain one single bit of code from anyone else's work. So, we took everything that we knew about Wesp and his mods and flushed it all down the proverbial toilet.

Meanwhile, the tessmage.com community was growing to respectable size and we had many people who were willing to assist with such an ambitious project. And as for me, I was quite ready to lend my own skills to the project.

So finally, we decided to go ahead with the project. Acrimonious would do the Python scripting, the system files and the Source map repairs. He was primarily the nuts-and-bolts half of the team and the quality of his work was outstanding in every respect. I would handle the dialogue repairs, various roleplaying considerations, the continuity decisions and a handful of Source texture repairs. I would also serve as the project director. And of course, I would also promote and distribute the finished patch via my own web site. As for the tessmage.com community, we enlisted a half-dozen of the most enthusiastic Bloodlines players to be volunteer beta testers. Their job would be to test each beta version of the patch and then report back to us with any errors or observations that they felt were important.

On that note, it is important for me to point out that one of the biggest differences between the True Patch and Wesp's mods is that we did indeed have a group of people who thoroughly tested our patch, prior to its release. Wesp, on the other hand, has admitted that he never tests any of his own material. He simply releases it, waits for people to bitch about stuff that he screwed up and then, he releases yet another and supposedly "fixed" version two weeks later. This is why there has been only one major version of the True Patch... where as in Wesp's case, he has vomited forth something like a hundred different iterations of his own work during the same time frame. I consider his approach to be irresponsible... but this is why the True Patch got made in the first place: to give Bloodlines players an attractive and viable alternative to Wesp's sloppily produced mods.

The entire process of producing our own patch took several months. In the end, we finally managed to produce a legitimate "bug-fixes-only" patch for Bloodlines that was compact, streamlined and very stable. Throughout its development, I went to great pains to ensure that there were almost no changes to the default gameplay whatsoever. You people have no idea how many times I said to Acrimonious "Is it actually broken..? No..? Then don't try to fix it." The only changes that we made were in a tiny handful of cases, when it was absolutely clear that those cases represented sloppily produced content that had simply been rushed by Troika... or was quite obviously intended, but incomplete. And even there, I tended to say "No" to all sorts of suggestions being made by Acrimonious and others. Above all, I wanted to keep Bloodlines as pristine as was reasonably possible.

But there were a few notable exceptions...

Cylnar: Such as?

Tessera: For example, the weapons being used by the vampire hunters at the Leopold stronghold are ridiculously puny in the default game. Most of them were wielding .38 pistols, which were totally illogical and completely underpowered when used against a late-game player character. It became clear to us that there was a very good reason for this nonsensical situation: it was because Troika had been VERY rushed when they were finishing up the late-game content and so, they simply populated that map with a bunch of generic vampire hunters taken from earlier areas of the game. Well, it frankly made no sense that they would be wielding weapons that the player had long since become nearly immune to, by that late stage of our un-life. So, we finally made the decision to re-equip the Leopold hunters with weaponry that was much more in line with the weaponry of most other late-game antagonists (such as high-powered rifles and semi-automatics).

There were a few other small changes as well and in almost every case, the rationale was the same: this is obviously NOT correct, so let's fix it. I must stress again that my primary consideration, throughout the entire process, was to maintain the overall atmosphere and continuity of the game. I am quite sure that if they had been given the same luxury of time that we had, then Troika would have made those very same decisions prior to the game's release. Whenever I was -not- positive about it (which was most of the time), my standard answer as the project director was "We're going to leave it alone... as-is." Acrimonious and I had quite a few long debates into the wee hours of morning, but he was always quite willing to accept my judgment on those few points of contention. He always knew that I had the game's integrity and the players' best interests at heart.

Once everyone was satisfied with the results of our labors, I officially dubbed our new patch as version 5.04AT and then released it to the public, back in October of 2007. We had worked for most of the summer and early autumn on it. And since the time of its original release back in 2007, there have been a total of six minor "hotfixes" added to version 5.04AT of the True VTMB Patch.

I'll wrap up this response by saying that in my opinion, the True Patch represents the best choice for new players who want to experience an untainted version of the classic game that they paid for. It is likewise the best choice for VTMB purists, who simply want to play Troika's original masterpiece, but without any frustrating and downright game-breaking bugs and glitches. It is really a top-notch piece of work, if I say so myself... and more than half of the credit for its creation belongs to Acrimonious. His minimalist approach to the exceptional work that he did is what kept the True Patch from turning into a gigantic piece of bloatware. Somehow or other, he managed to produce a volume of work that is extremely compact, and yet very very thorough and effective. Personally, I wouldn't even think of playing Bloodlines without it.


6. Cylnar: Tell me a little about your VTMB texture mods, including Lilith, the nude Malkavian.

Tessera: The reason that I was inspired to create nude and semi-nude textures for Bloodlines is based upon my general perceptions regarding the vampire myth. It doesn't take very much imagination or insight to realize that vampires are representative of human lust and oral-erotic fantasies. So it wasn't a very big stretch for me to start undressing the female vampires in Bloodlines. For one thing, several of them were rather scantily clad to begin with (most notably Velvet Velour and the female Malkavian player character). Stripping them down to their bare essentials was more or less my way of saying "Let's stop hiding the obvious. These Kindred girls are most definitely being portrayed within the game as sex objects... so let's just cut to the chase, and make them even more entertaining."

But instead of simply removing their clothing, I also wanted to add a bit of "kinky factor" at the same time. Bloodlines is a very dark and surreal game, filled with all sorts of gritty characters and freaky behaviors. I wanted to accentuate those aspects when I was producing my Bloodlines mods... most especially when I was creating new skins for Jeanette, V.V., and the very first female Malk costume. Yes, I wanted them to show a lot more skin -- but I also wanted to add some extra spice to their personalities at the same time.

You have also asked me about "Lilith." She is my female Malkavian character... the character that I personally play, whenever I settle in to enjoy another session of Bloodlines. Since I always play an RPG in third-person (I do not imagine myself to be my character), I used my imagination to give Lilith a believable back story, if you will. It's just my own fun little way to roleplay, really. Instead of imagining that I am functioning through my character -- which is the way that most people roleplay -- I kind of envision myself as being more of an unseen guardian angel, who is guiding my character through her world and (hopefully) protecting her from harm. If you roleplay the way that I do, then it helps if you can imagine a background and personality for your character... so in Lilith's case, I actually wrote an entire history for her, back when she was first created. As time went by, I found myself liking Lilith's character so much that eventually, I was inspired to sit down and write a short novel centered around her. Incidentally, you can read the first draft of the opening chapters of that novel on the tessmage.com Forums. Just look for "Childe Of Malkav" in the forum named "Original Works Of Fiction." If you take the time to read it, then you will quickly realize that from my perspective, there is nothing funny or cutesy about Lilith the Malkavian vampiress. In my mind, she is a sexually charged psychopath and very, very frightening indeed. Sort of like a female version of Hannibal Lecter, complete with ruby red lip gloss and a pair of world-class hooters.

Edited to remove some typos.