No. I'm done with work for hire, at least on RPGs. Whatever others may think of it, for me TTON was the right game to end on.
Whats your plan next MRY? Finishing your current game? We still need good RPG writeer in the industry you know
I do intend to finish Fallen Gods, but the pace of it is glacial. I am lucky to have a tremendous #2 on the project, whom I found on the Codex and have been working with for the past 30 months, otherwise I would've surely abandoned it. With his help I think it'll get done. I have no idea whether it will ultimately constitute "good writing" or even "RPG writing" but I think it will be okay.
Game writing has always been a hobby for me, not a full-time job, and I doubt it will ever be any more than that. It's just that as my full-time job has gotten fuller time, and better compensated, paid game work has become more costly and less rewarding.
In ~2009, when I wrapped up work with S2 Games, I said to myself that I had finally accumulated enough game-generated capital (literal money) and social capital (
i.e., connections) to make the games that I dreamed of making, one of which was Star Captain. But then I got diverted on Primordia, and by the time I came back to Star Captain, the genre was saturated. Then I got diverted with Cloudscape, then Torment, and by now Fallen Gods is also in a saturated genre. So it goes. Working on Torment was basically not what I intended to do -- after S2 Games, I already was done with work-for-hire. It's just that there is no game that mattered more to me as a game-story-teller than PS:T* and no group of people I would rather have a chance to learn from than Colin, George, Chris, Brian, Kevin, Adam, etc. It was simply an opportunity that I couldn't not chase. Still, Jack Vance says everything best: "Deflated, perhaps."
It is entirely possible that under all sorts of metrics the games Larian makes are better than TTON, but to me it would just be another exhausting 18 months in which I hawk my tiny contribution of spit into a whole ocean of someone else's genius for some relatively trivial amount of money. I can't justify it.
* This is a little bit of a hard thing to quantify, since arguably some other games like Karateka, Ninja Gaiden, Megaman III, Final Fantasy II, Wasteland, A Mind Forever Voyaging or whatever all hit me earlier in life and actually made me want to tell stories with games. By the time I came to PS:T I'd been working at it for at least a 12 years already. But still, PS:T probably mattered most.
(Maybe I'd go back to have the chance to add a ridiculous character to PST:EE, like a female incarnation, just to immiserate the world. "She was the only one of you worth a damn," Xacariah sighs, his blind eyes watering. "Beautiful, funny, swore like a sailor, could fix any machine with a bobby-pin and a nasty look. Put my archery to shame." Dak'kon nods. "*Know* that with a sword, none could fight better." Etc., etc. Probably she would be called "The Underdog Incarnation" -- the only one who didn't get to play the game on easy mode.)
