Editorial RPG Codex Report: A Codexian Visit to inXile Entertainment

[Zeriel]

Nice interview. Thanks, mystery SoCal man.

I think the uncomfortable truth is that T:ToN's poor sales have little to do with the Steam reviews or angry Codexians and more to do with broader trends. I don't expect future isometric RPGs to sell much beyond their backer numbers, as Obsidian is likely to discover next year.



Now I'm curious which county he works for. I need someone to yell at the next time I get stuck on jury duty for a month.

But D:OS sold like hotcakes. I think the lesson to take away here is not that isometric games don't sell (hell, Diablo 3 of all games is isometric of a sort!), but that boredly phoning in a game obsessed with nostalgia and nostalgia alone won't cut it. When there's no passion, fans can tell.

 

[Sensuki]

Hahahah, I remember this song.

OH OH AL OH EYE EE EYEE AH

 

[ArchAngel]

Pretty sure he's talking about implementation. The combat system is being designed by David Rogers: http://www.rpgcodex.net/tags.php?id=1742

One is not disconnected from the other. What can be implemented is often more important than what the designer wants.

 

[Don Peste]

Hello, I'm glad you enjoyed my interview. Thank you, guys!

 

[Tramboi]

Pretty sure he's talking about implementation. The combat system is being designed by David Rogers: http://www.rpgcodex.net/tags.php?id=1742

One is not disconnected from the other. What can be implemented is often more important than what the designer wants.

Moreover, sometimes the game designer is good and analytical, can think about the system globally, and can convey a vision that can actually be coded.
Sometimes not, he can't envision edge cases and interactions, and you get communication trouble, and dozens of iterations do do even the simplest thing.
Most game designers I worked with were of the second sort, the first one is a rare and precious breed.

 

[aratuk]

Slightly surprised at all the people hung up on "broken promises," like whether there are five companions, or seven, or how many towns you can visit, or whether you get to have your own house, or make your own clothes.

Please realize that no one — not even you — would give a shit about the presence or absence of these arbitrary extras if the result had been a coherent, genuinely engaging game. And such a game could have been made from the same number of pieces as there currently are in the one we have.

From what I'm hearing, I can only guess that it wasn't, since I personally haven't got around to playing it yet
Having read this interview, maybe now I'll wait until the game has received the benefit of some of Fargo's famous iteration magic.

 

[panzertoter]

 

[Iznaliu]

I think the uncomfortable truth is that T:ToN's poor sales have little to do with the Steam reviews or angry Codexians and more to do with broader trends. I don't expect future isometric RPGs to sell much beyond their backer numbers, as Obsidian is likely to discover next year.

I think PoE2 and DoS2 will sell reasonably; the failure of T:TON was due to more specific elements of the game's design. For example, there has been a trend towards more of a focus on gameplay (vs. story) over the last ~5 years, and T:TON doesn't fit in

 

[Goral]

Colin: (...) This is a subjective thing, people enjoy the things they like and there's no accounting for taste.

Sadly, Colin comes across as someone still deep in denial... like he actually thinks he made a game that's better than PST and people don't see that because they aren't "open to enjoying it".

And lowering price will of course increase sales, but nowadays there are so many games being released with prices all over the spectrum that that alone won't cut it. I can go to Steam right now and buy PST:EE, Bayonetta AND Cosmic Star Heroine and it would still be cheaper than Numanuma alone. And a thousand times more enjoyable.

I agree he's in denial but he's right about tastes, for example you love to play shitty Japanese games...

 

[karfhud]

Cool interview, thanks. TToN has its problems, but it's a solid story-driven RPG, with moments of brilliance. The user reviews paint an ugly and simply untrue picture; I feel sorry for inXile, they really didn't deserve this much of a backlash.

Also, asking about releasing on consoles and that somehow hampering the quality of the game? Seriously, it's not 2003 anymore, developing for consoles isn't as hard as it used to be... this issue has been milled over a thousand times and it still makes it into the interview.

 

[Gauldur's Bait]

Great effort with the interview!

Their best this, their best that...

 

[hivemind]

i hope inXile make another kickstarter fig campaign and scam some more of you retards

 

[TheWorld]

Very nice interview, even though Fargo mostly went with the "PR" route and gave the "right answers". I can sympathize with what he said about user reviews because I feel it's a current trend. Some people will point at some issues in a game (rightly or wrongly) , and then everybody else will follow hive-mind style, often without having played the game for more than half an hour and not knowing what they're talking about. Some games are completely destroyed on steam this way, often for issues not even related to the game itself.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

I enjoyed that. Shame the interviewer didn't want to identify herself and thus forfeits brofists. Couple of things that occurred to me:

Torment 2 would have been a hell of a lot better of if it was called anything else. Still make it Torment influenced but don't call it that and set people's expectations so high. For example, I still haven't played it for more than a few minutes because it doesn't feel like PS:T. If it had been some other game I might have finished it by now. It may not have received the same amount of backing but those who bought it might have reacted more positively.

Sounds like they got out of their depth with T:ToN pre-production. Not surprising as many of us were carried away by the name. Sounds like Brian is aware of the problems.

Whatever motivated the contact from InXile, it seems like there is a genuine attempt at reconciliation, and it would be nice to have some level of communication back. It's not like we're so overrun with mid-table RPG developers that we can afford to give them the silent treatment. It's not as though Brian has much incentive to lie to us since W3 is going to be his last game.

Lots of avoiding the issue when it comes to T:ToN writing and design problems. It will find it's market. Maybe not, and maybe the patches will fix a lot of the problems, but from what I've played of it so far it's only ever going to be a flawed gem at best. If it had been from any other company and under any other name it might be labelled a 'brave failure'.

Still, I feel a bit more positively towards InXile now, and I think this was an interview that needed to happen. Given time and patches I might be able to play T:ToN without getting angry, and I may even end up buying W3!

 

[FeelTheRads]

And, to talk about scope, the product was wildly over scoped. Even today, after we made the “cuts,” the original specification for the game was 600,000 words. You know how many we are at now? It’s 1.6 million words, probably a world record for a single player game. I think the only games that have more word count is MMOs done over a long period of time.

Jesus, he keeps yapping about the word count. And they had a specification for a minimum amount of words? What the fuck?

 

[ArchAngel]

i hope inXile make another kickstarter fig campaign and scam some more of you retards

I had a bad feeling about quality of TToN so I learned my lesson and skipped on WL3. BT4 will be for me the last KS of theirs I backed, they will need to have at least two awesome games back to back to get me to trust them again.

 

[Infinitron]

And, to talk about scope, the product was wildly over scoped. Even today, after we made the “cuts,” the original specification for the game was 600,000 words. You know how many we are at now? It’s 1.6 million words, probably a world record for a single player game. I think the only games that have more word count is MMOs done over a long period of time.

Jesus, he keeps yapping about the word count. And they had a specification for a minimum amount of words? What the fuck?

I think the specification was for maximum number of words, or rather the expected number of words.

Does that sound soulless and creatively bankrupt to you? I'm sure most professionally developed games have things like this. Specification for number of areas, specification for number of hours of playtime...

 

[ArchAngel]

I will note that "commercial failure" is not a bad point in Codex's book, particularly mine. We like flawed gems, and a feature of flawed gem generally is a low sale number. bad for devs, sure, but there you have it.

We're also trying to get more efficient by using outside contractors. Like for the combat system in Bard's Tale IV we're using a small team out of North Carolina. They're not employees; it's about four people.

Not sure if outsourcing your combat system to contractors is a good idea, but I guess we'll find out.

Could work if instead of North Carolina they outsourced it to a group in Serbia known for making a good tactical rpg. As it is, we are probably going to get a bad(worse) version of Heartstone.

Nah, Eastern Europe, either Poland or Russia is where it's at. I would have said jap devs will save the day but those otaku fuckers are expensive.

And he blame Codex's opinion of wallotext. Problem is, Codex is not a hivemind, and storyfags is just one very vocal but minor faction.

I don't know if you are trying to be edgy or you somehow managed to not play Underrail, but nobody from Poland or Russia has made the game of similar or better quality as those Serbian guys did (at least in terms of tactical gameplay and combat).

 

[FeelTheRads]

I think the specification was for maximum number of words, or rather the expected number of words.

Does that sound soulless and creatively bankrupt to you? I'm sure most professionally developed games have things like this. Specification for number of areas, specification for number of hours of playtime...

Oh, right, guess I misunderstood. What with his bragging about how many words there are I thought it that he set up a minimum of 600k.

I'm not sure what you mean about the second part of your post. I'm only talking about this focus on word count like it's something that means anything.

 

[Shadenuat]

I'd also forget about making games and working and just slack off if my office was at a place like that

One (Belo)russian studio also got far away from reality because their lead designers live in a building on friggin Cyprus

To be a good writer one must suffer (replace potatoface with Dostoevsky portrait)

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Good, honest and frank interview. I regained some respect for the InExile guys though I won't be backing any of their future projects antytime soon. Maybe if against all odds Wasteland 3 turns out decent and they keep supporting ToN I'll change my attitude.

I think that interview shows that Fargo is not the fraudster super villain some people on the 'dex regard him as.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

This could be the best interview I've read on the 'dex. Bravo!

Deserved credit to inXile too. They didn't need to do this.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I also fully agree with that they said about the shift in tone at the Codex. This placed is becoming filled with retards, and all Kickstarter related topics are especially bad.

 

[Bleed the Man]

Pretty great interview. For all the talk of Fargo being an oil snake salesman (justified I might add. Not communicating all the cuts to the backers when they were one month away from release is a fucking questionable move even if I were to believe it was just incompetence as they say. Considering their update regarding the cuts didn't even cover all of them, they will need more to convince me that they weren't keeping things quiet intentionally), he comes off very sincere in his answers, even when trying to diminish their screw ups. McComb though just comes across as deeply butthurt, which I can understand, but man, he sounds way too defensive to the point where he seems to be incapable of processing negative feedback of his game.

I would have liked some more follow up questions (the voice acting specially, as they didn't really answer the question, but I get that there are time constraints and is not good to linger on one question too much), and all the background art stuff that Prime Junta posted in the questions thread I think should have been there in some abridged version, but all in all, fantastic interview, with much better responses than what I thought the Codex would get.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Glad the question about extended preproduction got asked, interesting response considering Fargo's views on it in the original pitch video. The 'one person a month' response when talking about ramping into production and moving people over from WL2DC also raises a few questions. Wonder if Kevin feels he actually had 2 years of production on the project before leaving. Question for a Matt Chat in 10 years or so.