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.)
