Great interview! I'm actually surprised by the frankness of the answers. Sad about the untapped potential of the ToEE engine.
We really needed to learn how to edit, because we would spend a lot of man-hours putting a feature into a game that hardly any of the players would ultimately care about. For example, Arcanum had newspapers that reported on major incidents that were caused by the player, but I don't remember a single review mentioning that.
I care! I cared!
Me too.
Tarant wouldn't be the same without the newspaper. It was its life, an indicator of a dynamic world, and really brought forward the feeling of the industrial revolution. Also a great way to show the effects of your actions, and that the world is reactive rather than waiting for you to clear some level without consequence. I actually really wanted more of it while playing.
The newspaper gave the relationship between the world of Arcanum and the player character a sense of cohesion and consistency, a relationship which is, in most games, dissonant.
Fallout 1 had the same sense of cohesion and consistency, however, less so. If we compare the world of Arcanum as the setting for an rpg in which a player character makes an impact on the world at large, with, for example, more recent RPG outings (I won't gun for the obviously, howlingly inconsistent worlds, such as Fallout 3) exemplified by Risen 2, or perhaps, Divinity II: Ego Draconis, the world and the character's actions do not gel. One would think the player character has had no impact, and that the repercussions of his actions do not affect anyone or anywhere but himself.
In Risen 2 for example, once you begin the fight against Mara, the world state does not change. One would think the Titan of the Sea would try to hamper your journey somehow, or destroy your chances of succeeding ahead of you, or deny you safe port behind you. The war between Tarant and (I've forgotten the name of the town, apologies) which is a war between technology and tradition actually has a visible effect on the game-world and the newspapers telegraph, or punctuate, the player's role in these events.
World cohesion is probably just as important as having solid mechanics, because if your world does not make sense, it will very quickly be forgotten in the name of larping, which creates a situation in which the game developer is not driving a narrative, but leaving it to the player. This leaves us with the likes of Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3, and in response to this problem, Fallout: New Vegas, which drives for a balance between player driven "emergent" (how I despise that term) narrative, and a crafted narrative. In the former category one finds games in which the game world has absolutely no sense of consistency, and in the latter, a world which restrains player agency in favour of presenting a tight narrative within a logically constructed world. The fact that, by and large, the response and reception of the former games was more favourable than the response to the latter example, can be explained in part by developer's trying to make games more cheaply (shoehorn in as much content as possible with as little artisanal-labour required to craft it in line with the rest of the content), and players who are responding to the industry generated norms: sandbox games are sold with favourable reviews and word of mouth (look how much I can do!), as opposed to narrative games which require a greater depth of engagement in a less casual mode of interaction.
Etc etc, I'll stop there, suck my dick and all that.
/emotional engagement
