Interview Pete Hines interview at Gaming Trend

[Drakron]

No company would release a game and then say "go download this software, so that you can play the game you bought".

I own Gabriel Knight Collection and it needs a slowdown program to pass some sections of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers because of diferences of computers adverage speed today and when the game was released.

Its included in the CDs, they need to having people download things since they can include then in the CDs.

 

[Seboss]

Come on, you guys compare Oblivion and M&B all the time but what do theses game have in common except that they are 3D and involve sword fighting and horses ? I mean, we're speaking of 2 completelty different scales here. I agree that the 2 devs of M&B do an incredible job and implemented great mounted combat, lots of weapons, armors, but that's about it in term of content. No storyline, no cities, minimalist NPCs.
They don't have deadlines, they don't have a huge payroll, they got no market pressure, no publisher...

Don't get me wrong, I am not praising Oblivion nor bashing M&B here. I'd want to point out that -despite they did a GREAT job so far- I don't know how the two M&B people would perform in the corporate context.

 

[bryce777]

Come on, you guys compare Oblivion and M&B all the time but what do theses game have in common except that they are 3D and involve sword fighting and horses ? I mean, we're speaking of 2 completelty different scales here. I agree that the 2 devs of M&B do an incredible job and implemented great mounted combat, lots of weapons, armors, but that's about it in term of content. No storyline, no cities, minimalist NPCs.
They don't have deadlines, they don't have a huge payroll, they got no market pressure, no publisher...

Don't get me wrong, I am not praising Oblivion nor bashing M&B here. I'd want to point out that -despite they did a GREAT job so far- I don't know how the two M&B people would perform in the corporate context.

Still an idiot, I see. It is a .7 beta right now, and does not have the story in but that is forthcoming.

The most we have seen with oblivion are some grind quests to get up the ranks of the various guilds, and that is no better than the quests already in mount and blade.

As for the combat, obviously M&B utterly smokes oblivion implementationwise. It also has much better performance it seems. I would not be surprised if the finished product was better in every single way than oblivion.

 

[Drakron]

Because M&B managed to create better combat and implement mounted combat as Bethsoft could not ... sure they dont have a timetable but also lack the resources and staff that Bethsoft have.

And Oblivion development did not started when the game was anounced, it started when Morrowind was completed and gone into full gear when they completed the last Morrowind expansion.

 

[elander_]

Hell, a lot of people hated Daggerfall at release just because of this.

A lot of people are morons who think role-playing is barbie and ken dress-up party. Thats the only thing modern role-playing is about.

What, in your mind, is the most innovative part of Oblivion?
I think it's the combination of everything. The visuals, the open-ended nature of the game, the fun of being a gladiator or a dark brotherhood assassin or a necromancer-fighting mage...and it's all in the same game, potentially at the same time.

The man has said it all. Visuals, open-endeness, hack-and-slash doesn't make Oblivion a role-playing game. Theres no role-playing in dialog. Dialog is as safe as browsing a shoping site. Npc reactions are too simplistic. Theres hardly any possibility of causing any credible reaction with one word dialogs which is safe. Oblivion will be a voyer wet dream.

Mage quests only serve the purpose of gaining access to the guild services. Theres nothing more to it. It's just like gaining bonus in an action game to become more powerful and gain even more bonus.

There seams to be two worlds in Oblivion. One is the beautyful and misterious world described in the lore books and the PGE. Another is the FPS gameplay focused on levels, status, power-gaming, visuals, fighting and lots of different ways to kill things that looses all its credibility. Trying to make an rpg that will please both inexperienced juvenile player and experienced adult player simply doesn't work.

No doubt Oblivion is a much better game than Morrowind. It may even be a fun game if it doesn't stop every minute to load content. It may be a bit like deusex with insipid mage quests and god knows what other quests are screwed.

 

[bryce777]

You've never heard of patches? Well, jokes aside, they can add DosBox or any other emulator to the package, and it would be no different than installing DirectX before playing a game.

Actually, you can set it up so that installshield or whatever you use installs your emulator and creates an icon that starts your game in emulated mode - there is no need for the customer to know you use an emulator at all.

I said this before but did not elaborate enough, probably.

 

[Section8]

Man, I've owned Mount & Blade since midway through last year, I would have played a few hundred hours worth of it, and still managed to spend most of yesterday playing and enjoying it.

And you know what? The fairly simple quest generator beats Oblivion hands down, because there are two resolutions to most quests - ie you can actually fail. That and the fact that most quests give you a goal and no explicit steps to achieving it make better in practice than Oblivion's hype sounds.

As for having no story, I think M&B benefits from this, and I hope when the story does come along that it isn't horribly shoehorned into an otherwise freeform world, a la Pirates of the Caribbean, or Morrowind. Anything I've heard about Oblivion's story has made me wince, and normally I'm a big proponent of working on improving something rather than scrapping it, but in the case of Bethesda and writing stories beyond a few pages in a virtual book, they just need to give it up.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

MSFD is probably the closest bethesda developer to share some what of the same views as our community.

 

[Gwendo]

I didn't compare M&B to Oblivion. I compared what 2 people did in 2 years to what 100 people did in 4+. See my point now?

I've seen now and before. The fact is that Oblivion is something bigger and better looking than M&B. I doubtthose two developers could had made Oblivion themselves. You could argue that they could do better than Oblivion in half the time with half the resources, but that would be pure speculation. You're comparing the two games as they are and, really, Oblivion is out of M&B's league (although we didn't play Oblivion yet, so it isn't completely fair to compare right now) (If Oblivion turns out to be another Boiling Point...)

It's like if ID's Carmack was asked the same question and replied with: Well, we've got monsters, and guns, and you shoot monsters with guns. I guess he could have been talking in a relative way, whatever that means.

Maybe he was talking it was something new, meaning that it was new for THEM? What is new for me, might not be new for you. That's what I meant with relativity.

You've never heard of patches? Well, jokes aside, they can add DosBox or any other emulator to the package, and it would be no different than installing DirectX before playing a game.

I don't know if it would be legal to do that (inclued a third party software bundled with theirs).

Patches? You think they come from nowhere? Could you even start imagining what would be necessary to port Daggerfall to windows? Probably a simple patch wouldn't be enough. Maybe emulation, then? Sure, they would develop an emulator for a game that is many years old and that wouldn't sell enough to justify the expenses. (I loved Daggerfall, back then, btw).

 

[Levski 1912]

Oblivion is out of M&B's league

Yeah. M & B is eons ahead in terms of originality and quality. They don't let in just anyone in the "divine game" league.

 

[Gwendo]

Yeah, let's get real for a moment fine sir. It's a $14.00 game, still a BETA, is stable, implemented excellent mounted combat that the big 100 person $20 million budget Bethesda said can't be done right, is $14.00, is steadily evolving, is a shit load of fun, is mod-able, weighs in at around 40MB, is $14.00, was started as a personal project, has a developer that implements fan suggestions, is $14.00, has graphics that are good enough for an action-RPG, runs smooth, did I mention it is $14.00?

And did I mention that Oblivion will be just about $50? A 100-people-$20million-game-developed-in-4-years for just $50?

Horseback fighting: can't be done right in Oblivion, not in general. Don't confuse things.
Modable: Oblivion has a dedicated editor to make mods. M&B's mods are hacks and are just more of the same (new textures, models, names and such?).
Wheights 40Mb? So what? It has a lot less content than Oblivion (graphics, quests, etc). When I played Daggerfall, my HD was 512MB. Now it's 150GB. 40MB, 4GB, whatever.
ActionRPG: so that's only it. Oblivion is not an action RPG, so maybe we shouldn't be making comparisons. Anyway, M&B is just riding the horse through the enemies, turn back and ride through them again ad nauseum until all are dead.

What do you have from Bethesda that you can't compare? Poorly implemented features, graphics that are less than cutting edge, shitty game engine, lots of marketing hype bullshit that doesn't deliver, almost no quests, repetitive after a while, no random quest, no story (because the PC can't impact the outcome of the main quest or any quests).

Where one has bad implementation, the other just doesn't have them.
Graphics less than cutting edge? Then how about M&B? It seems your criteria is somewhat unstable.
Marketing hype bullshit? That's right. But no one forces you to eat it up. I got hyped with Morrowind, and it was a disapointment. So I just don't get hyped with Oblivion, I learned my lesson.
Almost no quests? Where did you get that info? No story? Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean there's no story. Sure in Oblivion there's a purpose. M&B is just like a sandbox. Either repetitively travel in an ugly overhead map between towns, to trade goods, or just go find bandits and kill them. That's the whole structure of the game (M&B).

You are right, in some areas they don't compare ... M&B wins.

That's right. Maybe with Oblivion, it will be us, the players, that will win.

 

[Seboss]

Still an idiot, I see. It is a .7 beta right now, and does not have the story in but that is forthcoming.

The most we have seen with oblivion are some grind quests to get up the ranks of the various guilds, and that is no better than the quests already in mount and blade.

As for the combat, obviously M&B utterly smokes oblivion implementationwise. It also has much better performance it seems. I would not be surprised if the finished product was better in every single way than oblivion.

Well my overly aggressive friend I invite to read posts more thoroughly before abandoning yourself to your foaming litanies.

Don't get me wrong, I am not praising Oblivion nor bashing M&B here. I'd want to point out that -despite they did a GREAT job so far- I don't know how the two M&B people would perform in the corporate context.

I'm not defending anybody here. And so much I respect independent developpers, I know -personnaly- great developers (no games) who could not stand the pressure of professional software development.
I do hope that M&B ends up the greatest RPG/Tactical medieval combat sim of the last few years. But I'm afraid that an hypothetical M&B 2 might get bogged in sales objectives and other corporate crap. Because that's what happened to Bethesda.
It used to be a great game developer you remember ? A bunch of good friends, fans of RPGs, ohoh the good ol'days, just like Origin and Black Isle.

I hope that Taleworlds won't end up like them. That's all.

 

[bryce777]

Yeah, let's get real for a moment fine sir. It's a $14.00 game, still a BETA, is stable, implemented excellent mounted combat that the big 100 person $20 million budget Bethesda said can't be done right, is $14.00, is steadily evolving, is a shit load of fun, is mod-able, weighs in at around 40MB, is $14.00, was started as a personal project, has a developer that implements fan suggestions, is $14.00, has graphics that are good enough for an action-RPG, runs smooth, did I mention it is $14.00?

And did I mention that Oblivion will be just about $50? A 100-people-$20million-game-developed-in-2-years for just $50?

Horseback fighting: can't be done right in Oblivion, not in general. Don't confuse things.
Modable: Oblivion has a dedicated editor to make mods. M&B's mods are hacks and are just more of the same (new textures, models, names and such?).
Wheights 40Mb? So what? It has a lot less content than Oblivion (graphics, quests, etc). When I played Daggerfall, my HD was 512MB. Now it's 150GB. 40MB, 4GB, whatever.
ActionRPG: so that's only it. Oblivion it's not an action RPG, so maybe we should be making comparisons. Anyway, M&B is just riding the horse through the enemies, turn back and ride through them again ad nauseum until all are dead.

What do you have from Bethesda that you can't compare? Poorly implemented features, graphics that are less than cutting edge, shitty game engine, lots of marketing hype bullshit that doesn't deliver, almost no quests, repetitive after a while, no random quest, no story (because the PC can't impact the outcome of the main quest or any quests).

Where one has bad implementation, the other just doesn't have them.
Graphics less than cutting edge? Then how about M&B? It seems your criteria is somewhat unstable.
Marketing hype bullshit? That's right. But no one forces you to eat it up. I got hyped with Morrowind, and it was a disapointment. So I just don't get hyped with Oblivion, I learned my lesson.
Almost no quests? Where did you get that info? No story? Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean there's no story. Sure in Oblivion there's a purpose. M&B is just like a sandbox. Either repetitively travel in an ugly overhead map between towns, to trade goods, or just go find bandits and kill them. That's the whole structure of the game (M&B).

You are right, in some areas they don't compare ... M&B wins.

That's right. Maybe with Oblivion, it will be us, the players, that will win.

The people actually look like people in M&B and the animations are superb and natural. In morrowind they were utter crap, and some of the previews suggest we can see more of this.

As for not being an action rpg, you are completely on crack.

As for not existing, that is because the game is incomplete as has been pointed out before.

As for mods, the mods in oblivion won't be able to change the combat or character system, or to fix the shitty load times or any of the myriad of bugs morrowind had which oblivion will also have, though in some cases worse since it's a bigger game with bigger textures.

M&B also has its own tools, as well,a nd from what I have seen of the mods they are pretty powerful. Someone actually modded in ship to ship combat and a mod that makes the game into pirates! except with mount and blade combat. To me, that says that the modding tools must be more than adequate but again they will also get better as time goes by because (yet again) it is an incomplete game. At .7 most software is damn near useless, but I have already played at leadt 40-50 hours and enjoyed it immensely.

 

[Thrawn05]

I've seen now and before. The fact is that Oblivion is something bigger and better looking than M&B. I doubtthose two developers could had made Oblivion themselves. You could argue that they could do better than Oblivion in half the time with half the resources, but that would be pure speculation. You're comparing the two games as they are and, really, Oblivion is out of M&B's league (although we didn't play Oblivion yet, so it isn't completely fair to compare right now) (If Oblivion turns out to be another Boiling Point...)

Sure OB had a bigger staff, but we should break down that 100 number. How many artists v. writers v. coders? I'm pretty sure that the artist number is extremly high. OB might be graphicly impressive (at least in some of the stills), but people like me look at gameplay first above all.

M&B as well as many other games (including freeware Indies), tend to better at the gameplay aspect.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I've seen now and before. The fact is that Oblivion is something bigger and better looking than M&B. I doubtthose two developers could had made Oblivion themselves.

*sigh* You are looking at it from the wrong angle. Of course, 2 people couldn't have made a game like Oblivion. The question, or the point is what 100 people should have been able to do in 4 years.

Maybe he was talking it was something new, meaning that it was new for THEM? What is new for me, might not be new for you. That's what I meant with relativity.

But that's not what the question was about, is it?

I don't know if it would be legal to do that (inclued a third party software bundled with theirs).

There are tons of third party software being bundled with games: DirectX, Acrobat, GameSpy stuff, anti-piracy soft, etc. Some are free, some are paid for.

Patches?

It was a joke about software that must be downloaded in order to play a game.

 

[Tchan]

The question, or the point is what 100 people should have been able to do in 4 years.

Create a money making piece of software ?
Oblivion has been designed for the young'ens, has it not?

 

[Solik]

Are you are expert on selling old games, good Sir? If you are, you can tell Vivendi to cancel the upcoming (Mar 30) and eagerly anticipated "Classic Sierra Adventure Games" compilation pack.

Does it contain all of two games, one of which has already been given away for free?

 

[Vault Dweller]

http://xbox.joystiq.com/2006/02/23/clas ... -released/

Point and click adventure gamers rejoice! If you've been struggling to (legally) complete your collection of Sierra classics, Vivendi Universal is finally ready to give you just such a chance. They are releasing "compilations" of King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry, available March 30th through Amazon, Target, and who knows where else.

There is almost no other information about the compilations, except that they run on Windows XP. Have they been ported or are they running through an emulation layer like Sarien? Does the compilation include all the games in the respective series? At $20 each, this could be a great way to build that collection. Then they'll just need to release Gabriel Knight and Quest for Glory... then maybe LucasArts will get in on it...

 

[Solik]

Yep, sounds like more than two games, one of which has already been given away for free! Means they might be able to make some money off the work they'd have to do to port them.

 

[Vault Dweller]

However, Daggerfall is a very popular game, so it doesn't really matter how many games you have, 1 or 10. For example, in that Sierra pack, I don't really care about Police Quest or Larry. I'm mostly interested in the KQ series to play them with my daughter.

 

[Solik]

I'm not really convinced they could make much money off it. I'd rather they released it for free in a year or three, heh.