Interview Chris Avellone is still pretty mad about Obsidian

[Turisas]

Would MCA be able to bring some modicum of incline to Bethesda tho, or would he just be swallowed up by that endless mire of popamole as well.

 

[Latelistener]

If the Obsidian management desperately wanted to be bought by someone, why they choose Kickstarter instead of an endless torture and slavery under a thumb of Zenithesda / Younameit?
I don't believe there wasn't a single offer, when they were at the verge of bankruptcy. I'm even surprised to hear that Bethesda didn't plan anything, considering how successful New Vegas was.

 

[agris]

Second, bad builds only serve to reduce the actual depth offered by the system compared to the depth it might theoretically offer. They are combinatorially wasteful - for example if a system offers a way to express some inherently contradictory or sucky build (like dumb wizard), it's one less useful, sensible and potentially interesting build it could have described instead of a nonsense one.

Without bad builds you don’t have good builds, because bad builds are only bad in comparison to the good ones. Without bad choices and mistakes you don’t have the possibility of learning how to make right choices. Without less useful choices you don’t have more useful choices. And so forth. The only thing you manage by removing all the bad choices is providing a bland experience of a system that you don’t need to understand in order to beat challenges that are inexistent.

To me, this is the most fundamental point. Players have to experience misery to experience joy - they have to experience defeat to know success. The only alternative is everything being 'meh'.

 

[Lurker King]

To me, this is the most fundamental point. Players have to experience misery to experience joy - they have to experience defeat to know success. The only alternative is everything being 'meh'.

Of course, if everyone is special, no one is special. In a sense, the ideal game that popamoles long to is the heaven of christians. Sounds great in theory, but in pratice is an inspid endless experience of boredom. I think Orwell has a point when he says that “nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.” The causal developer wants to remove challenge out of the equation because this bothers him like a toothache. In his utopia there is no challenge, but if you remove challenge what else do you have? A fool's paradise in which nothing is meaningful. I was about to say that Sawyer's philosophy shows how his inclusive agenda tainted his design beliefs, but the reality is more blunt. He is a causal gamer who doesn't enjoy cRPGs. He should be designing a stealh game since he always plays Hitman so much.

 

[Roguey]

To me, this is the most fundamental point. Players have to experience misery to experience joy - they have to experience defeat to know success. The only alternative is everything being 'meh'.

I have never experienced misery because all my builds are fantastic, simply the best builds, believe me.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I have never experienced misery because all my builds are fantastic, simply the best builds, believe me.

Have you built the most important stronghold update yet?

South Curtain Wall - Protection from the south + 0 + 4 2500 cp 4 days

 

[l3loodAngel]

it's obvious to me that avellone was the only person at obsidian with some real talent.

That's absurd. Kevin Saunders and George Ziets are universally beloved.

Looks like the key to be loved is to have an one-hit wonder

One-hit wonder is much better than no-hit wonder. Or one meh game...

 

[Roguey]

Have you built the most important stronghold update yet?

I wanted to maximize security asap so you better believe that was a priority.

 

[DraQ]

Bad builds are definitely a problem.

First, building doesn't really test any skill - at least one build, the most important one, is generally done without any clue, unless you happen to already know the system and at least general tone from somewhere else or unless the choices to make are trivial.

You did not think this through, did you? The whole skill test in any RPG or cRPGs lies in understanding how to make effective builds, understanding the mechanics, creating interesting combos, managing resources, etc. Ignoring this amounts to ignore the first thing about cRPGs.

Ignoring only the first part does not, however. And not in its entirety either - understanding how given build translates into the gameplay is still very much in, just without the "poorly" answer.
Moreso, build - both initial and level-ups - is only minuscule fraction of gameplay, so if it's supposed to be *the* core part of your gameplay you have a shit game that mostly plays itself. If that's your definition of a good RPG, I'll pass.

Finally, my point still stands:
In general there are two kinds of ways player can lose - one where a hypothetical ideal player that never gets carried away by butthurt exclaims "Gah! I'm such a moron!" and the one where he nevertheless says "This is such a bullshit". The former relies on player having a way to make the informed right decision, the latter is, well, bullshit, requiring either meta-knowledge or pure luck.
The latter is, obviously, indicative of bad design - losing should be a consequence of player error and player error implies that player could and should have done it right, player should be able to track loss of a game back to a mistake on his part and by mistake I emphatically mean not a good decision according to the best of player's knowledge at the time.

But, since there is nothing before chargen and necessary knowledge about further challenges is generally not available before level ups, any sort of build failures and thus build difficulty is necessarily bullshit, unless it's illusory and relies on the obvious which makes it equally pointless, if maybe not as harmful. You simply can't construct meaningful build challenge (as in "do it right way or suffer") - it's all either bullshit or trivial and superfluous - in a class system if a class X needs an attribute Y to be at least Z to work properly, then requiring player to put it in the right range is superfluous - they've already declared it by choosing their class.

There is a reason for that. Stats and skill are abstract representations that set the boundaries and possibilities of role-playing.

And game designer's job is to make the boundaries of roleplaying and boundaries of actual gameplay match as closely as possible. Otherwise he's both being wasteful and bullshitting the player.

There is no point allowing failing builds.

You could just as well have said that there is no point in allowing players to take damage or die.

If you don't see the difference here, perhaps it is YOU who didn't think this through?
At the point when you can take damage and die, you are already IN the game, hooked to the feedback loop. The game gives you information, you tell it what you do based on this information, the game modifies its state accordingly and the cycle continues. It's game's job to give you enough information to make the right decision (in particular the decision might be where and how to seek additional information you need). If the game doesn't give you enough information you get pointless and frustrating trial-and-error also known as learn-by-dying. But since there is no feedback loop during chargen, any life or death decisions you make in it are either superfluous or learn-by-dying.

cRPGs are games. Games are attempts to surpass challenges.

And since there is no way for a game to legitimately pose a challenge during chargen, chargen is not a game - simple.
Wanting to be allowed to make a mechanically unsuitable character makes as much sense as wanting to play PS:T as a shapely elven princess - neither fits the game as designed, neither makes any sense in the context and neither has any job being in the game.

Letting players neglect particular stats makes perfect sense because it is a responsibility of the player, not of the developer, to master the system in order to role-play.

And since during chargen there has not been a system for player to master yet, it is dumb to expect it.
Also player's responsibility does not involve having to tell the game the same thing repeatedly in different ways. If I want to make a wizard and wizard in your world require intelligence to function, it's not my job to also say I want to make a smart guy. I have already said that by stating that I want to play a wizard - if you make me say it twice, you've made shit job designing the interface between me and the mechanics.

Without bad builds you don’t have good builds, because bad builds are only bad in comparison to the good ones.

Without bad builds you have just the good ones. I don't need a gradation of build quality discoverable only by trial and error, neither do I need a trivial one.
Neither "guess the right build", "pick the right build based on meta-knowledge" nor "pick a build that's not obviously retarded" add anything of worth to a game.

Without bad choices and mistakes you don’t have the possibility of learning how to make right choices. Without less useful choices you don’t have more useful choices. And so forth. The only thing you manage by removing all the bad choices is providing a bland experience of a system that you don’t need to understand in order to beat challenges that are inexistent.

What a nice strawman have you set up. Wanting to remove forced trial-and-error isn't the same as wanting to remove all ability to play badly or make a bad choices. Player needs ability to make bad choices and often mechanics itself has no way of judging whether a choice is good or bad without letting it happen. The thing is player needs to be able to make informed bad choices - that doesn't mean being told explicitly that they are about to fuck up, but the information must be out there, reachable by the player and player must have at least enough information to be able to start a search for more.

Meanwhile chargen doesn't tell player enough to make an informed choice and not being a complex, dynamic system it also makes it easy to delineate and remove bad choices a priori - as opposed to, for example possibility of plumetting to your death (a no brainer bad choice) being a natural consequence to being able to jump or drop from ledges or destroy objects that can be walked on.

Learning how to make a good build is a not a trivial problem that should be ignored, it is one of the main elements that a good cRPG should attempt to provide. Any intelligent cRPG player will look forward to understand the complexities of the system, this is not a problem to him. It is only a problem to players that don’t like cRPGs.

Learning how to make a specific good build doing some specific thing is an interesting problem (though necessarily not on the first playthrough), so is learning how to play your build properly (from the very start). That's how you learn and explore complexities of a system. Having to have played the game in order to start playing the game is fucked up and ass-backwards.

Somewhat less glaringly so in an iron-man games, because unless the player is perfect or the difficulty nonexistant chances are an informed mistake will kill the player far sooner than a fucked up build would, and by the time they make any progress they will know how to make a good build, but it's still wasteful.

Of course, you can! See how to roleplay a dumb character in Fallout 2. Besides, you are assuming a definition of intelligence that it is not uncontroversial. What is intelligence? Abstract reasoning? Capacity to master symbols?

I'd settle for solving problems.
And the more complex the gameplay is, the more this relies on player's own intelligence and ability perform a large number of basic actions to achieve desired outcome.
The more interactive, involved and actually interesting is your gameplay, the more hopeless are any attempts to force stupid character to behave stupidly. The choice is therefore between a shit RPG that does a passable job enforcing an intelligence attribute, a good one without such attribute at all and and inconsistent one where you can talk like a moron but fight like a master tactician.

If it's just dumb(ish) dialogue you want, make an 'eloquence' attribute, magical abilities? - add a 'magic aptitude' one, but a generalized intelligence score is just hopeless. To determine if player is doing something smarter than their character's intelligence score would allow you need to be at least as smart as the player. Computers are not.

I know people with mental disabilities who can do what most regular people do, including driving, marrying, etc.

...solving difficult problems, devising complex tactics allowing them to beat overwhelming odds, surviving pissing off nefarious figures of power by thwarting their plots and saving worlds against apocalyptic threats.

Well, that makes no sense. Most heroic stories involve dumb regular dudes against evil characters, who in general have more intelligence, are more sophisticated, etc. Dumb vs sophisticated, strength vs smarts, pure vs corrupt, good vs evil. 9 out of 10 narratives of acts of heroism demands more courage and strength than intelligence.

What heroic stories? Modern kwanzanian ones?

Original Greek and other assorted heroes were dirty munchkins at least as cunning as they were physically fit, and their deeds frequently involved doing clever things to tackle challenges they couldn't approach head-on.

Courage is important but it's hard to model in a game, as player will readily jump onto any suicidal quest, and winning just due being able to hit your arch-nemesis HARDER makes for both a shitty narrative and an equally shitty gameplay - rolling a bigger stat block over a smaller one is just not going to be terribly interesting, end of story.
Interesting heroic stories are made by protagonist doing something unexpected yet effective - this requires intelligence to figure it out first.

Instead of removing a fundamental stat, I think it would be better to remove the dumb player who can’t make a decent wizard. Without dumb players, you don’t have to worry about protagonists making dumb choices. It would be awesome.

You'd only have to worry about dumb protagonists consistently making smart ones - much improvement.

OTOH smart players playing smart protagonists and dumb players playing dumb protagonists that soon become dead protagonist seems like the obvious way to go.
If you can't hope to fence intelligence in and would end up with an excessively dull ungame if you could (especially if TB as it only leaves player's intelligence to take any part in their gameplay skill), then embrace player's intelligence as character's and problem solved.

What happens in most cases is that players that were spoiled by Bioware demand that real cRPGs should give them absolute power to realize their whims.

Let them drink whine.

But every developer impose their visions of the world. It is foolish to think otherwise.

No, I mean it's letting, nay, forcing the *player* to impose their vision on the world (which should be evident from the rest of the sentence, really ). If you force the player to pick just the hammer that simply means you have made everything into nails.

If you have problems with some items being unconditionally superior/inferior, then you're either not describing them with enough variables or are doing a complete botch job using those variables in actual gameplay.

Shit-tier items automatically have following important advantages:

They are easily obtained.

They are easily replaced (see above).

They are easily maintained (repaired if possible, see above otherwise).

Agreed and this shows how wrong Sawyer is.

Not just Sawyer, sadly. If your guiding principle is inducing item-fever, you can't make meaningful use of those traits either, especially taking account for the stupid power curve item-fever entails.

No, they are two different topics. One thing is providing skills that can’t be used in most cases. Another one is to make bad builds because you don’t understand how the mechanics work, with good skills or not.

And focusing on shit skills leads to shit builds.

Unexpectedly bad choices are bad design no matter where they are involved.

 

[Santander02]

Would MCA be able to bring some modicum of incline to Bethesda tho, or would he just be swallowed up by that endless mire of popamole as well.

Look at what happened to all the talented people who worked in Beth pre-Oblivion and you get the answer: Fired, sued, or corrupted. I for one hope he does not end up there.

 

[Latelistener]

Things certainly aren't looking good for Bethesda. Every next project is more retarded than previous.
Basically, right now they're just trying to find a large niche of gamers, or a huge trend, and make their next product accordingly, putting a famous name on it (aka F4 for Minecraft fans).
Fucking disgrace.

 

[Jaesun]

Things certainly aren't looking good for Bethesda. Every next project is more retarded than previous.
Basically, right now they're just trying to find a large niche of gamers, or a huge trend, and make their next product accordingly, putting a famous name on it (aka F4 for Minecraft fans).
Fucking disgrace.

And yet, they continue to rake in MILLIONS.

 

[Ludo Lense]

Things certainly aren't looking good for Bethesda. Every next project is more retarded than previous.
Basically, right now they're just trying to find a large niche of gamers, or a huge trend, and make their next product accordingly, putting a famous name on it (aka F4 for Minecraft fans).
Fucking disgrace.

And yet, they continue to rake in MILLIONS.

It is more than that. Bethesda is an ironclad gaming powerhouse financially and investment-wise. Their last flops were Brink and Hunted: Demon's Forge. Since then they pretty much have printed money even with their lesser received titles like Evil Within and Elder Scrolls: Online. We can bitch about decline and all but that doesn't change the reality of the market.

It is like when people where saying that COD was over since COD:Ghosts made a hill of money instead of the usual mountain. Then things went back to normal.

 

[Prime Junta]

A fighter/mage or fighter/cleric outperforms a fighter from level 1.

Yeah but the block on specialising bites later on. Some of the higher-level enemies have sick AC, if you don't have THAC0 pumped up really high you won't hit a lot. Especially true for IWD. (Of course casters have their spells, so it's not like that's a major roadblock but still.)

 

[Grunker]

A fighter/mage or fighter/cleric outperforms a fighter from level 1.

Yeah but the block on specialising bites later on. Some of the higher-level enemies have sick AC, if you don't have THAC0 pumped up really high you won't hit a lot. Especially true for IWD. (Of course casters have their spells, so it's not like that's a major roadblock but still.)

Eh? I have played these games dozens of times with SCS alone in addition to older playthroughs before SCS existed. The additional attack and few points of damage from mastery is nothing compared to stoneskins, mirror images and the rest of the buffs.

Granted - Icewind Dale takes the fact that AC automatically becomes a useless defense when THAC0 gets high enough into account (meaning that some enemies can actually be missed unlike in BG2), and you won't need the magic protection that SCS demands to the same extend. What this means is that you'll at most enjoy one pureclass fighter on your team, and you won't notice a huge improvement. Later on a self-buffing Fighter/Cleric will reach Mastery-levels of THAC0 easily. There is one fight in Lure-DLC with massive dispelling that will fuck your multiclassed team pretty nicely, however.

In BG2, pure-class fighters and most of alternatives save for a few choice kits are strictly inferior to multi- and dual-classed options. Despite mastery.

 

[Cosmo]

Things certainly aren't looking good for Bethesda. Every next project is more retarded than previous.
Basically, right now they're just trying to find a large niche of gamers, or a huge trend, and make their next product accordingly, putting a famous name on it (aka F4 for Minecraft fans).
Fucking disgrace.

And yet, they continue to rake in MILLIONS.

I'm sure GTA 5 and The Witcher 3's competition has already shaken their design philosophy.
Before they had no true competition, now they have.

 

[Lurker King]

Moreso, build - both initial and level-ups - is only minuscule fraction of gameplay, so if it's supposed to be *the* core part of your gameplay you have a shit game that mostly plays itself. If that's your definition of a good RPG, I'll pass.

You are ignoring that most of the stuff that is fundamental to gameplay is related either directly or indirectly to character building. You don’t just make a character and level up. You decide what is the best strategy to make a given build, where to spend your hard-earned experience points when you level up, which new skills you should unlock, which items should be improved (for instance, by crafting) or how to make a item more deadly (for instance, with alchemy), how to relate with a NPC with a particular stat or skill (persuasion, charisma, pickpocket, etc.). You also consider which character is doing more damage, which one is taking more damage. You celebrate when you do a devastating critical; when each blow of your combo hits the target or when you carefully strategy was successful. There is a whole universe involved here that you are trying to dismiss as not engaging gameplay. The only alternative of gameplay that is not governed by skills or stats is action games. But since action games are not really cRPGs, I fail to see how this is relevant to a discussion about the importance of knowledge in savoring cRPGs.

The former relies on player having a way to make the informed right decision, the latter is, well, bullshit, requiring either meta-knowledge or pure luck. The latter is, obviously, indicative of bad design - losing should be a consequence of player error and player error implies that player could and should have done it right, player should be able to track loss of a game back to a mistake on his part and by mistake I emphatically mean not a good decision according to the best of player's knowledge at the time.

I understand why someone would like to think that way, but this is obviously wrong. Suppose I design a dungeon. Your next room is filled with a particular type of monster that you didn’t face until know, e.g., beholders. You enter the room using the same tactics you used before and you die like a dog. In this circumstance you can either cry like a baby, complaining that this is bad design because you couldn’t have known that those things were expecting you on the other side of the door, or you can take this with enthusiasm, as an opportunity to change tactics and try different things. Naturally, a solid cRPG with provide many occasions in which the player will be blindsided by things he doesn’t know without meta-knowledge including hidden traps, different monsters, you named it. Most of the fun lies in surpassing these challenges. Only a popamole player would dream of complaining about the necessity of meta-knowledge.

You simply can't construct meaningful build challenge (as in "do it right way or suffer") - it's all either bullshit or trivial and superfluous - in a class system if a class X needs an attribute Y to be at least Z to work properly, then requiring player to put it in the right range is superfluous - they've already declared it by choosing their class.

Of course you can! Developers and dungeon masters have being doing it for decades! If you are not a cleric and doesn’t have a cleric on your team, you can’t heal properly without staffs and other things. Thus was created one of the first divine laws: “Thou shalt have a healer on your team or there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth!”. Developers and dungeon masters had also been gating content in the most coward manner for decades, leaving players with symbols that they can’t understand because they are either too dumb or don’t have the proper magical skills to decipher. Of course, this is all perfectly fine. What is not cool is allowing every build to access or achieve the same things under the false pretenses that this is shit, trivial or pointless. This makes all the classes, choice of stats and skills, in fact it makes the attempt to beat the game itself, bland and pointless.

You know, after much thought, I concluded that causals suffer from weakness of the will. They have no moral fiber and are self-indulgent. They are aware that they should understand complex mechanics in order to succeed and surpass the challenges, but they can’t help themselves. They can’t tolerate short-term deprivations (frustrations, try and error, reading stuff) in order to achieve long-term benefits. I bet the same thing explains graphic whorism.

And game designer's job is to make the boundaries of roleplaying and boundaries of actual gameplay match as closely as possible. Otherwise he's both being wasteful and bullshitting the player.

Obviously, but the irony is that the developer is doing his job precisely when he is demanding unforeseen skill/stat checks that can gimp your character and other dangers that gives life to the game. What you fail to understand here is a very basic thing: If stats and skills are abstract representations of the abilities that are required to deal with the challenges presented by the gameplay, then these challenges should present themselves as a form of requirement of these stats and skills. When every stat and skill check is fluffy and is there just to make you feel awesome, it is because they doesn’t matter and the developer is not doing his job. When the combat is so easy that every build can surpass their challenges, it is because the character build is just a joke. Thus, what you want and what you say you want are opposite things.

It's game's job to give you enough information to make the right decision. If the game doesn't give you enough information you get pointless and frustrating trial-and-error also known as learn-by-dying. But since there is no feedback loop during chargen, any life or death decisions you make in it are either superfluous or learn-by-dying.

Well, the point is that I never saw a case in which a player can’t beat the game due to lack of information. Usually, the information was presented, but the player don’t have the willingness or the patience to understand it.

Wanting to be allowed to make a mechanically unsuitable character makes as much sense as wanting to play PS:T as a shapely elven princess - neither fits the game as designed, neither makes any sense in the context and neither has any job being in the game.

You are confusing two things. Being able to make a bad build and being able to make a build that doesn’t fit the setting. I was clear that one of the many problems of sawyerism is allowing players to make builds based on whims, e.g., muscled wizards. So I don’t know why you are still talking about this. On the other hand, this implies that the developer is justified in imposing challenges and restrictions based on his vision of the laws of the game world.

Without bad builds you have just the good ones.

Do you know Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron”? It’s a dystopia about a society where people achieved the perfect equality by handicapping the well-endowed. The Handicapper General equipped smart people with an earpiece that disrupted their concentration and prevented them from developing sophisticated thoughts. The beautiful had to wear masks. The athletic were saddled with weights to slow them down, etc. Sawyer, with his social program design doctrine of “no bad builds left behind!”, is the handicapper general of game design. You can’t shine by making game breaking or super-effective builds anymore, because everyone needs to be on the same page. Leveling up and character building shouldn’t make players stand apart from the rest. No build should be superior. No item should be bad. Everything must be equal.

I don't need a gradation of build quality discoverable only by trial and error, neither do I need a trivial one. Neither "guess the right build", "pick the right build based on meta-knowledge" nor "pick a build that's not obviously retarded" add anything of worth to a game.

But it adds a lot of value to the game! In fact, any game (not only cRPGs!) that it is not insulting to the players intelligence and abilities will require lots of meta-knowledge and understanding of the right choices, whether we are talking about a race game or a platformer. The only thing that is surprising is that popamole pseudo-cRPGs gamers complain about the very bedrock of every decent game.

Wanting to remove forced trial-and-error isn't the same as wanting to remove all ability to play badly or make a bad choices.

But every real challenge created by a developer is a “forced trial-and-error”. In fact, everything in a cRPG is to some degree forced. It would be an illusion to think otherwise. The only real question is whether the forced trial-and-error makes sense and rewards patience and planning or not.

Of course you can! See how to roleplay a dumb character in Fallout 2. Besides, you are assuming a definition of intelligence that it is not uncontroversial. What is intelligence? Abstract reasoning? Capacity to master symbols?

I'd settle for solving problems.

And the more complex the gameplay is, the more this relies on player's own intelligence and ability perform a large number of basic actions to achieve desired outcome. The more interactive, involved and actually interesting is your gameplay, the more hopeless are any attempts to force stupid character to behave stupidly. The choice is therefore between a shit RPG that does a passable job enforcing an intelligence attribute, a good one without such attribute at all and and inconsistent one where you can talk like a moron but fight like a master tactician.

Not good enough. If intelligence involves solving problems by persuading people, you can’t persuade them without specific skills. If solving problems requires fixing a computer, you can’t fix it without a specific skill. If solving problems requires doing math, you can’t solve them without a specific skill. Someone can have the “intelligence” necessary to move a bolder, without being able to do any of the things mentioned above. Thus, even by your vague definition of intelligence, the stat would still be useful and necessary to have other skills. Arguing that the player can use his own intelligence to cheat the game is a very minor thing. Every player can use his knowledge of previous games when they are creating their own characters, but we won’t demolish character building because of that. Nothing to see here.

Unexpectedly bad choices are bad design no matter where they are involved.

Unexpectedly bad choices are a fundamental element of challenging gameplay.

 

[Lurker King]

Now I understand why combatfags hate storyfags so much. By focusing only on the story elements, they tend to dismiss the importance of character building, challenge, etc. It is no surprising that so many players drool all over the latest Obsidian game, even if it is completely popamole.

 

[Lurker King]

I have never experienced misery because all my builds are fantastic, simply the best builds, believe me.

That's what happens when you only play Obsidian popamole games.

 

[Roguey]

That's what happens when you only play Obsidian popamole games.

I've played just about every big RPG made in the past 20 years.

 

[agris]

I've played just about every big RPG made in the past 20 years.

I think that's the problem, what about the great small ones?

 

[Lurker King]

I've played just about every pop RPG made in the past 20 years.

Fixed.

 

[Excidium II]

riveting thread

 

[Azrael the cat]

going miles about defending Bethesda and praising them and their games

One day, he might be in need of employment.

while only saying bad things about Fallout 2/New Vegas is just terrible.

...but obsidian is out of the question for him.

Yeah, plus bear in mind the difference in perspective for developers. Say you're a developer who has a devoted cult following due to a couple of games you made back when your youth + the industry's tech cycle allowed you to have the kind of grand thematic control that's very difficult today. Now you're more interested in writing for contract on projects that take your fancy. You've given company management a shot, but were burnt because you disagreed with the direction of the company and got shut out so badly that you've burnt bridges with colleagues you were friends with for decades. Nonetheless, you're getting to the age where income and status matters, and you probably want the option of 'moving up in the world' after taking a couple of years away from the stress of management.

From time to time you run into Toddler, a guy who makes extremely different games for a very different crowd, but is the undisputed commercial master of that market - possibly the undisputed commercial master of crpg development generally. Regardless of difference in gaming taste, you're going to respect the guy for his success. Even more so, when he and his company have shown themselves open to publishing games from a very wide variety of genres. Bethesda as a developer is garbage. Bethesda as a publisher is one of the few companies around that will occasionally go 'you know, I don't think this game will make much money, but it's really interesting and totally different to what we would do ourselves, so lets fund it'.

They're a bit like later-era George Lucas in that way. The epitome of shit, overrated development - the kind of company that all the indies hate because they make millions selling garbage - yet they also, very quietly, with no ego or fanfare, fund a suprisingly large number of indie projects. You could even draw the direct Lucas and Todd Howard similarity, in that they're guys with great oldschool taste in terms of the games and movies that they like, such that it's really hard to reconcile with the shit they produce...until you get a bit older, and reach the age where you realise your kids are going to think you're the most uncool, boring guy on earth regardless of what you make, and it's time + $$$ for parenting that matters more than your creative output. From that point on, there's going to be a massive gulf between what you make, and what you used to like - but you still might throw a few million at some young bright spark with a good idea, just for the hell of it.

And if you're in MCA's position, you're not only going to want to keep that guy on side. You'll probably genuinely respect him.

 

[tuluse]

The Legion aren't supposed to be morally ambiguous, you either believe harsh authoritarianism is worth law and order or you don't.

The problem is almost total lack of displaying the upside of law and order. You mostly just see the rape and pillage side. It's missing the high technology and clean streets of a Vault City to make the player thing "well maybe this is worth it".

Also, the way the Legion is depicted, it's totally dependent on Ceasar and should fall apart as soon as he dies (what's the point of supporting law and order if it's just going to descend into chaos?). I know that goes against the *lore*, but it's a writing failure.

Would tactical combat games even be enjoyable if your long-term dayjob was creating crpgs? I mean, wouldn't there be a point where you're so familiar with what's under the hood that you can't enjoy those mechanics.

What about modern crpgs gives you the impression the designers understand what's going on under the hood?