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Editorial RPG Codex Report: A Codexian Visit to inXile Entertainment

Longshanks

Augur
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The dumbest criticism of the game has been over wordiness. If you're making a game in the style of PST, the number one thing that differentiates it from other RPGs is wordiness.
Wrong.

This is a criticism that has been levelled at many games and writers before Numenera, see the Pillars review for a recent example. Wordiness is nothing without quality. Actually, I'd prefer a minimalist approach if the writing's going to be mediocre or shitty.

And it's not the wordiness that differentiates PST from other games, but subject matter and how it is approached. It makes one think. Its wordiness is nothing without that.
No issue with the quality of the words being questioned, but if you're making a a PST spiritual successor it needs to be wordy and have a heavy story focus. Without even attempting that the game would have been torn down far worse than it has. As I said I've not played the game so was not talking about quality but design focus, and I definitely think they focused on the right areas even if the result didn't quite work (yet to see myself).
Well the criticism is surely not against the amount of words at all. All wanting a PST successor have liked PST, and its words. No one has a problem with reading, or they shouldn't if they're looking at a PST successor. But that's not the criticism levelled against the game here. It's always been about quality. And when words are added, bringing nothing to the table but drowning the good in a sea of mediocre/bad, then it is legitimate to want less of them, to ask the writers to edit themselves. Every good one does it, and so do movies, music, etc. More isn't automatically better.
Well, that's where the reasonable criticism sits. The point I was making was a simple one, which I think most anticipating a PST type game would agree with, that it needs to be wordy and story focused. I think the criticism has reached such a level where even reasonable design decisions or focus are being challenged (descriptive text, limited combat etc). The broad goals of the game seemed spot on for a spiritual PST successor to me. The difficulty was always going to be in the execution and the challenges there were far greater than even POE faced, as the PST experience was more lightning in a bottle than pretty much any other game. Planning for your game to be well written is tricky especially without an established team. From what most have said it seems that they may have got carried away with working on a "reader's game" and overwritten it. This was always a risk with the large writing team and the remit to make a wordy game.

I'm not going to say much more on this till I've actually played the thing, but I backed T:ToN mostly because of the boldness of their design decisions (text heavy; reactive; turn-based; low combat). The possibility that it wouldn't come together was always there given the ambition, but even if they did fall short I still salute their effort and don't regret backing a rare game that largely aligns with my preferred design (maybe this will change after I have played it).

Edit: now that I remember, TBC would not have been known during the kickstarter. Not actually sure when I bought it, but probably before TBC was confirmed.
 
Last edited:

Prime Junta

Guest
Okay, back to a computer with a keyboard, so a bit of a longer reaction.

First off, mad props to our secret agent Cleveland Mark Blakemore for taking the time off to do this thing, in what must be a hectic period leading up to the release of Grimoire. Well done.

Second, there were some refreshingly candid answers in there, specifically regarding the budget and production. I had not expected that.

Third, George Ziets is and remains a class act.

Fourth, MRY is awesome. He's responsible for some of the best writing in the game as it is, and he's an all-round great human being. Too bad he wasn't in charge.

And finally, there was a LOT of weaseling, PR-speak, and outright bullshit in there too. Now that we've got the good stuff out of the way, let's focus on that because it's more fun.

It's clear that Brian does want to mend fences with the Codex -- having this thing in the first place is ample evidence of that, and not all studios would have dared. He deserves some credit for that. However let's not kid ourselves about his motives. If the drama had been a simple misunderstanding as he tries to paint it, he would have taken action long ago. What Bester said about Heine was way beyond the pale, even for a Codex vatnik modder, and inXile getting seriously pissed off about that is both understandable and laudable -- I respect a company that stands by their people. However, inXile pissed away all the moral authority they had around that by not being up-front with the Codex about that, and using the trumped-up embargo-breaking excuse instead. And as to the Nazi problem, while no-one would be more delighted by a thorough Codexian de-Nazification program, I do think we have gone beyond the call of duty as it is, by making the Nazis wear those little yellow badges so we can easily recognise them when it's time to start the cattle-cars for Siberia once again.

They also continue to be shockingly cavalier about the promises made to the backers during the Kickstarter, essentially going "but look, 1.3 million words!" or "whaa publishers aren't as mean." The latter is obvious bullshit: if you contract with a publisher to deliver something with some set of features and then deliver something with the majority of them cut, the publisher will be pissed off. The difference is that you can negotiate with a publisher. You can say "hey the Oasis isn't working out, we'd like to expand the Bloom instead" and they'll probably go "Okay, go ahead." But inXile didn't do any of that with their new "publisher," i.e. the backers. On the contrary, they tried to keep it quiet. The vibe I get is of plain ol' un-professionalism: it was nobody's job to take on that particular unpleasant duty, so nobody did, until the shit hit the fan.

A bit like the non-handling of the Codex debacle, as a matter of fact. Somebody got butthurt, did a lot of damage, and nobody got around to fixing the damage until T:ToN tanked and somebody there started blaming us for it.

I get the same vibe from the stuff regarding the production of the game itself. There was a lot of collaboration, a lot of peer review, a lot of this, a lot of that, but somehow the word count doubled or tripled from the estimate while nobody got around to designing and implementing the stuff that was actually promised. Crafting for example, they just dismiss it as "oh well, you wouldn't want it in a game with so little combat anyway." That's either another excuse, or betrays a shocking lack of imagination, as if weapons and armour were the only thing you could craft. They could easily have made a crafting system integral to the quests, so you could solve noncombat problems yet another way by crafting a suitable type of numenera. As it is, the crafting system is a huge hole in the game -- you've got a shitton of oddities floating around with nothing to do with them, and a shitton of prebaked cyphers and artefacts. A crafting system would've tied all that together; it could have been just the thing to give T:ToN the systemic depth it needs to be fun to play, while retaining the Numenera/Cypher System design principle of keeping cyphers and numenera front and centre. But "we wouldn't want it anyway because so little combat." Really.

So the interview did clear up some stuff, but many other mysteries remain. What, exactly, did they do during that long preproduction period? I would've expected them to write out the main plot arc and central faction and NPC concepts, make concept art/drawing of maps, write up a big library of sidequests to put on those maps, make blockouts of some of the maps and prototype and iterate on the game's most central systems in them, take one or two maps and push them alllll the way through the production pipeline to get a good idea of how much it costs to create a given amount of content, and so on and so forth. But instead they ended up with a stub of a game and so. many. words. It can't be simultaneously wildly over-scoped and exceed estimated wordcount by 100%: that really is a guns-or-butter kind of equation.

I.e. I'm overall not all that mollified by inXile's performance. Ziets is good, which means there is a smidgen of hope for W3. The rest sound like a bunch of amateurs; in Colin's case, an extremely unhappy amateur. (BTW as it was so obvious Colin didn't want to do the interview, IMO it was really uncool of Brian to force him to do it -- unless of course it was his idea to blacklist the Codex in the first place, in which case I'm sure the penance is good for his soul, Easter time and all.)

That's all.

(BTW Croatia is great, you should check it out, it turns out it is actually possible to combine crystal-clear seas, olive oil, wine, and fresh seafood with hard spirits, track suits, and copious squatting, and it's a pretty compelling combination.)
 
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Lurker King

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If anything, T:ToN shows how important the first decisions are. We are talking about those initial meetings in which the game is just a concept. It was obvious that key decisions regarding setting, narrative premise, writing, NPCs and combat system were rushed and poorly thought, and are impossible to defend in comparison to the most obvious features of PS:T. Once the first key mistakes were in place, they snowballed and turned into an avalanche of mistakes. No amount of feedback in the world would be enough to fix this mess, because the long-term consequences for the gameplay are irreversible. You would need to tear down the building and put something else in place.
 
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Lurker King

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BTW as it was so obvious Colin didn't want to do the interview, IMO it was really uncool of Brian to force him to do it

What is uncool is not holding people accountable for their selfish and immature behavior. He is an employee, he is the main responsible for this mess, etc. Fuck you and your indulgent leftist logic.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
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A crafting system would've tied all that together; it could have been just the thing to give T:ToN the systemic depth it needs to be fun to play, while retaining the Numenera/Cypher System design principle of keeping cyphers and numenera front and centre.

That crafting system really tied the game together, and they peed on it.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
What is uncool is not holding people accountable for their selfish and immature behavior. He is an employee, he is the main responsible for this mess, etc. Fuck you and your indulgent leftist logic.

Making someone do an interview they don't want to do is a really fucking petty way of holding them accountable. It's also bad for business since most likely he'll come across poorly, and thereby reflect badly on the company.
 

SausageInYourFace

Angelic Reinforcement
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Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
If Codex is ever going to have any influence over any game again, we're going to need to look through the anti-Bioware threads, where we're hyping up how great it used to be to have so much text, and criticising Bioware catering to illiterates - and either work out whether it's simply a product of the Codex having a different membership back then, or working out what it was we were asking for there, and how it differered to what we got.

Could it be that the quality of the walls of text matters?

I think it has much more to do with the pacing of the game. Even PS:T is sometimes called a glorified visual novel here and that game still had more gameplay elements to it than (from what I understand) Numanuma has. Even in PS:T you'd have to engage in combat or crawl through a dungeon every once in a while and while those sequences arguably sucked at least they spiced up the flow of the game.

PoE also has better pacing. People complained about WOTs in that one too but I never was bothered by it cause once you get tired of reading you could always just go and explore some wilderness area or Caed Nua.
 
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Lurker King

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Making someone do an interview they don't want to do is a really fucking petty way of holding them accountable. It's also bad for business since most likely he'll come across poorly, and thereby reflect badly on the company.

Of course, following this line of reasoning kids would never need to go to school because they don’t want to, and society would fall apart. Don’t change the focus. You should criticize Colin for being so immature, not Fargo for doing what is expected from him and his team. An apology interview without the creative lead would be pointless, if not insulting.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Making someone do an interview they don't want to do is a really fucking petty way of holding them accountable. It's also bad for business since most likely he'll come across poorly, and thereby reflect badly on the company.

What sort of commie faggotry is this? Colin is an employee, if your boss tells you to do an interview, you do it and you act professional. Colin should consider himself lucky that he just had to do an interview as penance. The game failed so badly it wouldn't be out of place if Fargo made him scrub toilets in front of Codex rep and stream the whole thing on Twitch.
 

Sizzle

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Messages
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Making someone do an interview they don't want to do is a really fucking petty way of holding them accountable. It's also bad for business since most likely he'll come across poorly, and thereby reflect badly on the company.

Of course, following this line of reasoning kids would never need to go to school because they don’t want to, and society would fall apart. Don’t change the focus. You should criticize Colin for being so immature, not Fargo for doing what is expected from him and his team. An apology interview without the creative lead would be pointless, if not insulting.

That's not the way things go in business. Any good boss and team leader knows that you shouldn't force the shy, uncomfortable introvert to give out interviews against their will.

So while I do find Colin's answers (and especially his unwillingness to face some cold, hard facts about T:ToN's many failures) and attitude both interesting and telling of the overall lack of structure and focus in T:ToN's development - he probably did more harm than good with his presence and answers in this interview. Another blunder and miscalculation on Fargo's part.
 

Tramboi

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It's clear that Brian does want to mend fences with the Codex -- having this thing in the first place is ample evidence of that, and not all studios would have dared. He deserves some credit for that. However let's not kid ourselves about his motives.

I can't help wondering if this act of contrition would have happened, had TToN sold a million copies.
They probably wouldn't have bothered, would they ?
 

Sizzle

Arcane
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Any good boss and team leader knows that you shouldn't force the shy, uncomfortable introvert to give out interviews against their will.

Does Colin come across as a shy, uncomfortable introvert?



I'll admit that I haven't kept up with his interviews (let alone his Twitter), but wasn't that the way he was initially "pitched" when T:ToN was first Kickstarted? I seem to remember that several people from inXile mentioned a couple of times that he was very uncomfortable in front of the camera (which was part of the reason why they thought his apology for the Complete Book of Elves would be fun to watch).
 
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Lurker King

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That's not the way things go in business. Any good boss and team leader knows that you shouldn't force the shy, uncomfortable introvert to give out interviews against their will.

Any good boss would never put Colin in charge in the first place, or at least would fire him for delivering this awful game and behaving in this unprofessional manner. Lucky for him, InXile is not managed like a business of grownups and developers don’t see themselves, and are not perceived by their audience, as ordinary people. So Colin can do as he please, deliver no results, act unprofessionally and harshly with his audience and still get paid every month. In fact, he can do all this and still be shielded from criticism by the very audience he dismisses.

he probably did more harm than good with his presence and answers in this interview.

So he is an “uncomfortable introvert” who happens to be the creative lead of a game that was crowndfunded, have no problems about giving interviews about this game in the past, is known for political activism on social media, and still manage to dismiss codexers’ criticisms on an apology interview. Yet somehow Fargo should be blamed for asking him to doing his job because “he can’t help himself”, he is an “uncomfortable introvert”. Have you ever heard of professionalism? You people baffle me. You deserve every shitty game made by shady development practices because you feel morally superior for treating developers like prima donnas and shielding them from accountability.
 

Roguey

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I'll admit that I haven't kept up with his interviews (let alone his Twitter), but wasn't that the way he was initially "pitched" when T:ToN was first Kickstarted? I seem to remember that several people from inXile mentioned a couple of times that he was very uncomfortable in front of the camera (which was part of the reason why they thought his apology for the Complete Book of Elves would be fun to watch).

There is some difference between giving a presentation in front of a camera for something that will be watched by a bunch of people and answering someone's questions over the phone.

Granted he was passive aggressive in both. :M
 

Prime Junta

Guest
If I was in Brian's shoes, I would simply dismiss Colin. He's clearly not up to the job he's been doing, and his game failed commercially.

Making him do a sulky interview instead is petty and unprofessional, reflects poorly on the company, and is unlikely to get him to change his behaviour.
 
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Lurker King

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Granted he was passive aggressive in both.

He was always like this. Do you guys remember this?

4 years later, I finally get to fucking gloat.

Time for a trip down memory lane with ol' uncle Harold. Hands inside the vehicle at all times, kids.

Upon chancing on an article detailing McComb's work on PST, Harold expresses some concern.

Having been summoned by the local newsjew, mr. McCuck provides this excellent rebuttal, wherein one can already discern his writerly talent and his perchant for being a giant nu-male faggot.

Being the gentleman he is, Harold attempts to assuage the Shillarytard's fears, whilst also drawing his attention towards his hurting butt.

Harold's response is met with a prompt 'no u' from the fearless twitter warrior.

Little did I know at the time that McCuck's butthurt was so great, he actually put a giant butthole in the game that you had to sensually massage to relieve his pain. For what it's worth, bros, I'm sorry for my part in making you go through that in 2rment.

At last, 4 fucking years later, I get to both "crow all over the internet about how foresighted" I was and "dig up my old rant" so I can FINALLY GET. MY. FUCKING. WELL-DESERVED. INTERNET MEDAL!

He was always arrogant. I think this makes sense, since SJWs tend to have a dismissive and condescending view about their target audience, with the "gamers are white males misogynists" narrative.
 

Sizzle

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That's not the way things go in business. Any good boss and team leader knows that you shouldn't force the shy, uncomfortable introvert to give out interviews against their will.

Any good boss would never put Colin in charge in the first place, or at least would fire him for delivering this awful game and behaving in this unprofessional manner. Lucky for him, InXile is not managed like a business of grownups and developers don’t see themselves as ordinary people by their audience. So Colin can do as he pleases, deliver no results, act unprofessionally and harshly with his audience and still get paid every month and shield from criticism by the very people he dismisses.

He was the Creative Lead, not the Project Director. While he deserves scorn for the godawful story and narrative structure, T:ToN's problems are much bigger than merely a bad story.

he probably did more harm than good with his presence and answers in this interview.

So he is an “uncomfortable introvert” who happens to be the creative lead of a game that was crowndfunded, have no problems about giving interviews about this game in the past, is known for political activism on social media, and still manage to dismiss codexers’ criticisms on an apology interview. Yet somehow Fargo should be blamed for asking him to doing his job because “he can’t help himself”, he is an “uncomfortable introvert”. Have you ever heard of professionalism? You people baffle me. You deserve every shitty game made by shady development practices because you feel morally superior for treating developers like prima donnas and shielding them from accountability.

No, Fargo should be blamed precisely because he knows (or should have known) what Colin is like. Like PJ said in the reply above, if Colin doesn't know, or want, to act like a consummate professional, then Fargo should either have him dismissed, or keep him away from (live) interviews such as this.
 

Hirato

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Codex 2012 Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
What lessons have you learned from Torment and its reception?

Brian:
First, we have to be very careful about what we promise during a crowd funding campaign. We're used to having agile latitude behind the scenes and we just can't have that with crowd funding. That was a huge lesson, but I think we've already self-corrected on it. That's a huge, HUGE one here.

The second is just to get into production faster, get out of preproduction and into a period in which we can get a feel of the game and iterating on it. That is the absolute single most important thing, and that's how we're doing Mage's Tale, Bard's Tale IV, and Wasteland 3. They're all being done that way.
What's Mage's Tale, are they working on a third game or did he merely correct himself to Bard's Tale?

lul, why didn't BN show up there too? Apparently they don't know who did it... it was "someone".
Maybe the interviewer was none other than Brother None himself!
 

Grauken

Gourd vibes only
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VR offshot of Bard's Tale, not sure whether its a full game, or more of a tech demo

ninjaed, damn
 

almondblight

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So the interview did clear up some stuff, but many other mysteries remain. What, exactly, did they do during that long preproduction period? I would've expected them to write out the main plot arc and central faction and NPC concepts, make concept art/drawing of maps, write up a big library of sidequests to put on those maps, make blockouts of some of the maps and prototype and iterate on the game's most central systems in them, take one or two maps and push them alllll the way through the production pipeline to get a good idea of how much it costs to create a given amount of content, and so on and so forth.

Ziets was writing in August of 2015 about how he had to work to fix all of the problems created by the latest round of Torment cuts. Keep in mind that this was before Saunders was let go, it's quite likely there were even bigger changes when Fargo decided "I had to change plans" and a new director took over. Pre-production doesn't help as much if you start throwing the pre-production stuff out when you get to production.

People who have been in bad companies should be familiar with this. Boss decides to do Plan A, which will take 10 months. Employees spend 7 months working on Plan A, and then the boss comes in and says we need to do Plan B instead of Plan A; Plan B also takes 10 months. But the boss says, "Hey, since you've already been working on this for 7 months you should be able to finish it in 3 months. But I'm a generous boss, I'll give you an extra month to switch over the the new plan; be done in 4 months."
 
Weasel
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Must also have been fun watching WL2 development go on and on... then "one person a month" starts coming over. To later be told that you've had "two years of production" and haven't made enough progress.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Must also have been fun watching WL2 development go on and on... then "one person a month" starts coming over. To later be told that you've had "two years of production" and haven't made enough progress.

Pillars 2 had just a year in production and look how far they've already gotten. To have extensive pre-production, then 2 years of production, even with limited staff at first, and still not be even in reasonable alpha stage is some shoddy fucking work.
 

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