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Warren Spector's Soapbox Thread

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So Warren Spector's got a new job, it seems:

One last thing before I call it quits for this month - I'm actually calling it quits, at least insofar as writing a regular column for GamesIndustry International is concerned. I've really enjoyed writing the six columns I did this year. I can't express how much I've appreciated the forum the editors gave me, or the thoughtful interaction I've had with readers.

Unfortunately, I have to call it a day. See, I'm about to embark on the next phase of my professional life. I have a new gig starting soon, one that will occupy most, if not all, of my time in the days, weeks and months ahead - I can't say much right now, but you'll hear plenty more in the months to come.

Thanks for sticking with me this year. Talk to you again soon.​

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...-recognize-both-good-and-bad-effects-of-games

What is it this time? Donald Duck? Bugs Bunny? Cinderella? Place your bets.
 

Metro

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Woody Woodpecker's Insane Adventure.

iOS exclusive.
 

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New interview: http://www.fmvmagazine.com/?p=18512

We’re about to plunge into a whole new console generation of course, with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One just weeks away. What potential innovations most excite you?

I think I’m more intrigued these days by new ways to reach an audience than I am in processing power or graphical capabilities. I think the focus on direct distribution and free to play models is the most interesting thing going on right now.

I think we may have just learned something about his next game. :M

Which of the launch games do you most like the look of?

Honestly, I haven’t been paying all that much attention. I think some of the racing games look absolutely astonishing. I’m looking forward to that. Watchdogs looks amazing, but (somewhat to people’s surprise, usually) I’m not a huge fan of open world games, but it looks sort of DX meets Thief meets GTA-like. I’ll certainly check it out.

Foolishly, perhaps, I’ve taken most of the last year on holiday from gaming. I’ve played a bit here and there, but after decades of immersion in the business, I haven’t been keeping up. It’s probably time I started again.

Not surprising after our interview!

What were your thoughts on BioShock Infinite?

I thought it was beautiful to look at and told a compelling story. I always love a good game story. And you have no idea how sick I am of all the games set in worlds that are all gray or all brown or all blue… That monochromatic color scheme is what passes for sophistication these days, I guess. I think it’s just boring. Infinite was bursting with color. And I loved the audio, too. The game sounded great.

Damning with faint praise?

Are there any mechanics or ideas that particularly impressed you the first time you encountered them?

The most intriguing thing I’ve encountered recently is the proliferation of narrative games that mostly remove the skill element from play, leaving just the ethical choices to be made. I go back to Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead again. There were moments in each of those games that required skill to get past and they were by far the weakest moments. I’m really intrigued by that. Can we make a game that isn’t pre-scripted, as those games are, that isn’t skill dependent? I don’t know, but I’d love to find out. I’m tired of skill-driven games. My twitch skills aren’t what they used to be!

It's called "turn-based gameplay", Warren. :negative:
 
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Jarpie

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Is anyone even surprised that Spector has seemingly lost his marbles? His games from the past 10 years has pretty much showed this.
 

LESS T_T

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Warren's lecture on C&C, emergent gameplay and shared authorship.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/204942/Spector_Go_emergent__game_design_is_not_all_about_you.php

Now, speaking at New York University Game Center's annual PRACTICE conference on game design, he says that what unites the broad variety of his favorite games is that they exploit the power of emergent gameplay.

In his "oversimplified universe," there are scripted, linear games like BioShock Infinite, The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain, and player-driven games like Deus Ex and Dishonored.

"I want to focus mostly on games that put players in control of the experience," Spector says -- with the important caveat that he "absolutely adored" many linear experiences, including Heavy Rain and Walking Dead.

"Games that don't offer quote-unquote 'real choices' might be just fine," he suggests. "Some people may want a game that's all about squeezing a virtual trigger, or moving forward like a shark, or solving a puzzle that shows more about how clever the designer is, rather than how clever they are. I'm just more interested in emergence than in scripted adventures... and I believe once players get a taste of that kind of game, it's very hard for them to go back."

Spector's favorite definition of the term "emergence" is "engines of perpetual novelty." His historic collaborators, like Harvey Smith and Randy Smith (unrelated) agree -- the latter Smith sees "less pre-scripted agenda" on the part of the developer, whereby anything can happen, and players share authorship with developers. Doug Church believes firmly in the future of procedurally-generated narrative, and says emergence empowers player choice, even while complexity and scale leads to cost and risk.

"[I don't think] this is just 'Warren and his buddies over beers thinking we're smarter than everyone else', "says Spector, citing the work of developers like Richard Garriott, BioWare, Rockstar, Lionhead and Maxis for working closely alongside emergent gameplay concepts."

When you leave a book to go to bed, the words don't rearrange themselves as you sleep (although we could probably do that now, he jokes). But games can keep that sense of life and novelty, giving every player a different experience that's unique every time they play -- a goal distinct from linear narratives where choice-making turns players into "semi-intelligent button pushers".

That games can generate player-driven experiences are "the only thing that sets us apart in any meaningful way from other mediums, so I think we have a moral obligation to enlist players as collaborators in the telling of a story."

How can designers approach their work to better embrace emergent design? If you can reasonably predict the player's end to end experience, you may want to rethink. And a fail-learn-retry model that forces players to hit the same switch or pass the same jump scare multiple times until they learn how to avoid it isn't good gome design," he says. You may thrill your players or even make them cry, but "you're not sharing the spotlight."

It's true that games where every player's experience is basically the same may have stronger traditional stories, but games focused on emergence and giving players tools to discoer or create re more game-like, spector says. "Embrace the idea that your job is to bound the player experience, to put a sort of creative box around it -- but you don't determine the player experience. It's not about 'here's where every player does X.'"

Create global rules versus specific, instanced behavior of objects and characters; build interlocking systems that are predictable and consistent (some objects are flammable, some guards are light-sensitive, the player has torches) but not pre-determined. Have a variety of object properties with plausible or simulated effects ("let water be water") that players can learn and engage with.

"You can make a plan and execute it, intuiting on an experience you had earlier in the game, almost like the real world," Spector says. "How much more powerful is that?"

It can't be overstated these are significant technical and artistic challenges, he says. Players will break the game. They might be intimidated by the freedom to make decisions. But it's essential to try to go further than what designers can create by planning the player's experience in advance.

"Embrace this idea that the most interesting games are those that let players devise personally-meaningful goals, formulate and execute plans to achieve their goals," says Spector.

"Plans must be devised by the player; it's not about how clever you are."
 
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"[I don't think] this is just 'Warren and his buddies over beers thinking we're smarter than everyone else', "says Spector, citing the work of developers like Richard Garriott, BioWare, Rockstar, Lionhead and Maxis for working closely alongside emergent gameplay concepts."

I don't think anyone is thinking that because you're not delivering those games Warren. You're just talking about it. There comes a point (10 years) where you really need to question if you've just hit a dry patch in your game dev career or if you've actually completely lost your way.

Compare

Warren Spector's Game Development Experience 1990-2000

Mobygames said:

Warren Spector's Game Development Experience over the past 10 years

Mobygames said:


Time to have a think about things Warren.
 

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He's only in the Special Thanks for Dark Messiah. The Arkane guys hero-worshipped him or something.

Also, lol BioWare emergent gameplay. Why not mention Bethesda at least?
 
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I noticed that and was going to remove Dark Messiah from the list but I wasn't willing to go through all of the other games' credits to make a balanced point out of it

Naming Bioware for emergent gameplay seems like a case of name dropping any big developer that came to mind for extra boy's-club & diplomacy points. It really shakes the integrity of his point using examples that he clearly hasn't thought through.
 
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Why Bioware?
If anything Bethesda at least seems capable of nailing emergent gameplay in their own broken way even if it seems to occur completely by mistake or even against their efforts half of the time.

And I'd definitely take one 'roid raging Mjöll over a thousand nomheaded Merrils.

Time to have a think about things Warren.
Live fast, die young and leave an attractive track record.
:martini:
 

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The man doesn't think clearly; I think he has a tendency to conflate in his mind "mature writing" and "emergent gameplay". Two things that he likes, but really have nothing to do with each other. Bethesda is unashamedly stereotypical fantasy RPG, so he ignores them.

The real question is why he seems to completely ignore the existence of Black Isle-style RPGs. He didn't seem to show any hint of recognition when we mentioned PS:T and Fallout in our interview. I guess he was too busy making Thief and Deus Ex when those games were released, but you'd think he'd have found the time to revisit them later on.

Maybe it's an East Coast vs West Coast thing? "We don't play games made in California."
 
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DraQ

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The man doesn't think clearly; I think he has a tendency to conflate in his mind "mature writing" and "emergent gameplay". Two things that he likes, but really have nothing to do with each other.
And I find it baffling. Especially given that BW does neither and that they are often at odds given that writing, at least when striding beyond dialogue and backstory, because writing compelling quest scenarios pretty much sets the available paths in stone precluding some emergent gameplay.
Hell, even extensive dialogue may sometimes be too specific.

Bethesda is unashamedly stereotypical fantasy RPG, so he ignores them.
Actually, Bethesda is somewhere on non-stereotypical end of the scale. True, Oblivion was among the most stereotypical fantasy games ever released, but Morrowind definitely wasn't and while Skyrim is not everything it could have been, it's still less stereotypical than par.

What Bethesda doesn't do is engage in much writing apart from background (which is good, because their current writing abilities are low and background has thankfully been mostly set up already).
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/18/interview-spector-on-fears-legacies-and-returning-to-pc/

DraQ Has he been reading us? Bethesda mention! He also repeats that "you're not allowed to say the word story" anecdote from our interview.

Interview: Spector On Fears, Legacies and Returning To PC
By Adam Smith on November 18th, 2013 at 7:00 pm.

spectorheader.jpg


There are a lot of words being written about the new consoles this week but when I spoke to Warren Spector a few days ago, he was clear about where his future lies: “I think all the interesting stuff is happening on PC now… Assuming I make more games, which I intend to do, PC and Mac are going to be my targets.”

It’s good to hear. We spoke at the Bradford Animation Festival and covered a wide range of topics, from his theories of design and pioneering role in PC gaming to thoughts on the current state of the industry. In this first part of our conversation, there’s insight into how Spector see his own legacy and the work of his former colleagues, and how frustrations with Thief’s difficulty inspired the player empowerment of Deus Ex.


Spector’s presentation included a trailer put together for the non-existent Epic Mickey movie. It’s a lovely piece of work, with an animation style that captures the Disney characters but paints their edges with a sharpness at odds with the dreamlike backgrounds. The style of the storytelling, conveyed by the animation and the dialogue, isn’t gritty or edgy – it’s a dark take on Disney, sure, but the mood is melancholy. Epic Mickey is, after all, a story about forgotten things.

Of all the things that he has helped to create, Spector seems most proud of something not entirely his own: he is uncharacteristically lost for words when he describes the amazement he feels in seeing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit resurrected.

“If you go to a Disney park or merchandise store and see Oswald there, that’s because of a game.”

That part is characteristic. In the time that I spoke to Spector, he did express pride in his work but reserved the majority of the credit for his colleagues. There’s more to the Oswald statement though – he’s not pleased that his game resurrected Oswald, he’s pleased that any game can have that influence on a forgotten Disney character who is more than eighty years old.

mick.jpg


As a lover and student of both cartoons and film, Spector recognises that what people dismiss as silly and inconsequential can have a profound influence, just as the Disney and Harryhausen films that helped to shape him did.

“I discovered movies when I was about two but I became a serious student of film when I was fifteen. I think that informs everything that I do but I don’t think it’s so much that cinematic technique informs my work, it’s that I saw first-hand how a medium could be judged just as entertainment, or as a waste of time, but clearly be an art-form, and so I saw the potential in videogames from the start to be more than a way for kids or adults to waste time, but to be something more. I think that came from my background as a film critic.

“A lot of people keep saying ‘where is our Citizen Kane, where is it?’ A lot of people think BioshockInfinite is it, some people say Deus Ex is it. People look for the moment that we became an artform. I think we became an artform with Pong. Maybe even Spacewar for crying out loud.

“My first actual conscious memory is my dad taking me to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. There’s a dragon and a Cyclops. That movie gave me nightmares. Ray Harryhausen is one of my heroes and I got to meet him – he was everything you’d want a hero to be, and that was awesome. Sinbad changed my life. And then when I was three I saw King Kong. It gave me nightmares for years. I was about two or three when I saw Sleeping Beauty for the first time, and Maleficent turns into a dragon and the forest that the hero has to carve his way through. You think about Alice in Wonderland, you think about Snow White, when the trees turn into alligators. All these scary scary moments that turn you into a fantasist.”

spector1.jpg


There’s a biographical similarity here. We may be from different times and different places, but when I tell Spector that I was always drawn to films with moments of darkness, he nods in agreement.

For me, it isn’t Sinbad and Sleeping Beauty – it’s Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Films that exist in worlds of adventure, where heroes are invincible and threats are often more slapstick than sinister. It’s the moments when something horrible tears through into the carefree, a reminder that terrible consequences are possible, that left pleasant little scars on my psyche. It’s often the villains who suffer, for meddling where they shouldn’t, and the fact that my younger self was rooting to see them defeated made their fate even more troubling. I’d willed their faces to melt.

We talk briefly about these kinds of stories and I ask Spector if he has any thoughts as to why he was drawn to the dark side. “We’d need years of therapy to answer that”, he laughs. “I think the contrast is important, as you say. I showed a vertical slice of an early Epic Mickey build in my talk and it was dark and gray. And I said to the art team, we need more contrast. We want a game that’s dark, but we need the light, we need the contrast. I think you just hit on that – the scary moments work in those classic Disney films, and even in Jason and the Argonauts or Invasion of the Bodysnatchers or a Hitchcock film, because they show a happy world and snatch it away from you.”

How does that compare to System Shock or Thief, games which contrasted their darkness against more darkness? Before moving on to discuss System Shock, Spector interrupts himself with a brilliantly unexpected two sentence anecdote.

“Here’s a fun fact – my first D&D dungeon master was Bruce Sterling, the father of cyberpunk fiction. The best dungeon master on the planet too, by the way.”

dx75.jpg


I’m sorely tempted to ask Warren if he’ll come and be my dungeon master for a while but it seems wildly inappropriate in many ways.

“System Shock came out of that cyberpunk tradition. Those games are very oppressive but I think in a game and in certain genres there are somewhat different expectations. In Blade Runner they didn’t have to show a bright, happy world. Certainly when you’re doing something like an Ultima game or a Mickey Mouse world, you’re obliged to show the bright happy world. Like Alice in Wonderland too, that starts in a nice English garden and then descends into madness.

“I have to be very careful about Thief because I get a lot of credit for that game but in fact I worked on it for the middle year of a three year cycle. That started out as Doug Church’s concept and he was the one that drove it in a particular direction.”

Since learning about Thief’s earlier incarnation as Dark Camelot, I’ve wondered how late in development the setting changed, so I asked Spector what the title was when he joined the project in its second year. That’s when I found out that Ken Levine, ever the pioneer, wanted to make a zombie game.

“It was still Dark Camelot. Ken Levine actually wanted to do Better Red Than Undead, a zombie game, which was way ahead of its time!”

That would have changed the entire history of gaming. As it happens, history nearly did change and if Spector had been more pushy or the team had been less sure of themselves, it might have done.

“I had arguments with the team about Thief quite a lot in the year I worked on it. I wanted more contrast and there were parts of the prototype that I just wasn’t good enough to sneak past so I kept on saying, let me fight my way through. They never backed down and it was the right call. I’m so glad they didn’t give in to my requests! A lot of Deus Ex came out of my frustration with Thief, which is a game that I love, but I wanted to make something a little different and Deus Ex was the result of that.”

harryhausen.jpg


During our all-too-brief meeting, Spector is never as animated as when he’s talking about the people he’s worked with. I ask if he thinks about his legacy, aware that it’s a slightly preposterous question to ask somebody who has been so careful to avoid taking too much personal credit for its work.

He sighs, smiling. “Oh God. Yeah, I do, I do. It’s a little embarrassing to admit though. I think a lot about the word ‘legacy’. I think it’s a function, at heart, of being the oldest guy in game development. (laughs) It’s funny because I used to always be the youngest guy in every circle I was part of and now I’m always the oldest.

“When you start getting older you stop caring about a lot of the things that you cared about when you were a kid, and you start thinking about leaving something behind. I don’t have kids, so I’m not leaving my DNA behind, but I hope the DNA of the games I’ve worked on lives on. When I see things like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I realise I was part of a team that created something that’s bigger than us and that’s really cool.

“The fact that our kinds of games are making a resurgence is great. They never went away completely but there was a period where it was the hot thing and then it kind of cooled off. There was a period where it was just me, and maybe Bethesda and Peter Molyneux a little bit, and then it kind of died off. And then out of the blue, it’s back – I think you’d have to look to Bioware picking up on these things with KOTR and Mass Effect, and I think Skyrim taught people some stuff.

“And then there’s the GTA guys. Rockstar just kept going and going with open world games. That all made a difference. The biggest change – and I don’t know why this happened – but people are interested in story again. I came from a tradition of storytelling but I’ll never forget – and this is a quote by the way – I was at a product meeting at Eidos and I was told, “Warren, you’re not allowed to say the word ‘story’ ever again.

“It blew my mind. Now, nobody’s saying that. Everyone wants narrative games and it’s a question of asking how we tell interactive stories. And we have the gamut now, everything from Telltale with The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, and Beyond and Heavy Rain from David Cage at one extreme of storytelling, and somewhere in the middle Bioshock Infinite and the stuff that Valve does, and then at the other end the kind of games that Bethesda’s making and that I like to make. It’s the other extreme in terms of player empowerment. We have every extreme of narrative experience out there, which is great for gamers.”

harveydishonored.jpg


Amidst the games, there’s a personal element to Spector’s legacy as well and when he talks about that, he seems at his most contented.

“When I see Harvey Smith or Randy Smith, or Jordan Thomas who worked on the Bioshock follow-up games – when I see those guys going off and doing their thing, that fills me with pride. That’s what Looking Glass and Origin, and whatever role I played in those studios, left behind. That’s our legacy.”

Part two will follow shortly, with conversation about King Kong’s scary mechanical arm, growing up in a world without games and the current state of the industry, and how to improve it.
 
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spekkio

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ITT we learn that the Devs actually know fucking shit about why certain game is good / bad.
Get the fuck out with your 7-th grade stories / narratives and give us games that are fun and demanding to play.
Thief is one of the best games ever made not thanks to its writing / story, but because of all various elements working togother just perfect (writing beeing only part of the whole experience).
If the gameplay was shit, nobody except total spergs would bother (PS:T case).

[/edgy]
 

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Oh, heh. It turns out that Warren Spector's new job isn't in game design job. He's a full time academic of gaming now: http://ultimacodex.com/2013/11/warren-spector-new-job-emergent-game-design-fears-and-legacies/

Deus Ex creator Warren Spector has been named director of The University of Texas at Austin’s Denius-Sams Gaming Academy, a development-focused post-baccalaureate program that will launch in the fall of next year.

Spector was one of the first industry veterans who signed on as part of the Academy, joining Blizzard COO Paul Sams, Ultima creator Richard Garriott, EA CCO Richard Hilleman, and BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. Only 20 candidates will be selected for the program’s first semester, and the first batch of incoming students will receive a tuition waiver and a $10,000 housing stipend.

:mhd:

This also explains Garriott's recent talk about having to "improve education" in Texas.
 
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He has basically given up then. You don't go into teaching unless you've accepted the idea of no longer doing or creating anything substantial of your own. It will just take up too much time.
 

Dexter

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“A lot of people keep saying ‘where is our Citizen Kane, where is it?’ A lot of people think BioshockInfinite is it, some people say Deus Ex is it. People look for the moment that we became an artform. I think we became an artform with Pong. Maybe even Spacewar for crying out loud.
:deadhorse:

“I had arguments with the team about Thief quite a lot in the year I worked on it. I wanted more contrast and there were parts of the prototype that I just wasn’t good enough to sneak past so I kept on saying, let me fight my way through. They never backed down and it was the right call. I’m so glad they didn’t give in to my requests! A lot of Deus Ex came out of my frustration with Thief, which is a game that I love, but I wanted to make something a little different and Deus Ex was the result of that.”
:roll:

“When you start getting older you stop caring about a lot of the things that you cared about when you were a kid, and you start thinking about leaving something behind. I don’t have kids, so I’m not leaving my DNA behind, but I hope the DNA of the games I’ve worked on lives on. When I see things like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I realise I was part of a team that created something that’s bigger than us and that’s really cool.
:negative:

“And then there’s the GTA guys. Rockstar just kept going and going with open world games. That all made a difference. The biggest change – and I don’t know why this happened – but people are interested in story again. I came from a tradition of storytelling but I’ll never forget – and this is a quote by the way – I was at a product meeting at Eidos and I was told, “Warren, you’re not allowed to say the word ‘story’ ever again.
:lol:
 

Cowboy Moment

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If the gameplay was shit, nobody except total spergs would bother (PS:T case).
[/edgy]

11282.jpg


Right.
So, you're implying that Psychonauts has shitty gameplay? Still butthurt that it's not an adventure game, but a platformer?
Adventurefags gonna nig.

:rpgcodex:

I'm actually not an adventurefag at all, and am playing lots of platformers and action games currently, Psychonauts being one of them (first time playing it).

And yeah, despite the presentation being great, mechanically it's simply not a very good platformer. It has a bunch of cool mechanics both for platforming and puzzle solving, but never really uses them beyond a single-level gimmick. It's also really, really easy, and pads its length by forcing you to do boring collect-a-thons at times.

It's funny that you mention it not being an adventure game, because its adventure roots are clearly visible, and the best level thus far (The Milkman Conspiracy) was also the most "adventury". Maybe that will change, just finished Gloria's theater yesterday.

In general, I think a Metroid-like structure, where you gain new powers as you progress, and they enable you to explore previously closed areas, would have fit the game better than what it ended up with.
 

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