Twinfalls
Erudite
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2005
- Messages
- 3,903
From an interview with the Ebony God himself:
link (warning: wanker's blog alert)
There's something about Daggerfall which suggests to me that if you expand the 'shallow' possibilities sufficiently, and especially the playing space exponentially, you can overcome that hurdle that many-shallow-options gameplay presents.
Doug Church said:”Warren and I have this debate all the time. Whether it’s better to take the Deus Ex approach to very shallowly include a lot of possibilities, and hope that as years go by you’ll learn to increase those experience’s fidelity. Whereas I believe it’s better to start with a complete system, and then branching out adding more systems with more interactions. Our job should be less to give them a a little piece of the plot, and a lot more about whether the player has a lot more expression to control and whether they’ll remember what /they/ did rather than remembering what /we/ did.”
“If you look to Underworld to Shock to Thief, I think you can see a progression of taking out everything that kept you from diving into the world. That’s the reason why the CD version of Shock was so much better than the floppy disk version. We desperately tried to stop them releasing the floppy disk version, as - well – the whole reason we overlaid the automap, the whole full screen, the augmentations was because we wanted you to play it full screen, not to stop and read but be in the world all the time. With Thief it went even further. We really tried to narrow down the player’s ability, but within that narrow scope to give them complete control. I can see the progression that way. In a lot of ways, with Deus Ex and the stuff Warren’s doing, is the reverse of that. Okay – you guys took all that lot out. We’re going to go back to the Kitchen Sink approach and go for broad but shallow game as opposed to a deep and narrow game.
link (warning: wanker's blog alert)
There's something about Daggerfall which suggests to me that if you expand the 'shallow' possibilities sufficiently, and especially the playing space exponentially, you can overcome that hurdle that many-shallow-options gameplay presents.