{"id":73,"date":"2008-01-09T14:29:31","date_gmt":"2008-01-09T21:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=73"},"modified":"2008-01-09T14:29:31","modified_gmt":"2008-01-09T21:29:31","slug":"rps-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/rps-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"RPS Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part of a recent interview<\/a> I did with Kieron Gillen just went up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I’ll post links when the rest of the interview emerges. Here are some quotes:<\/p>\n

RPS: Ballooning team size is a trend which has been well discussed over the last decade, but do you think that\u2019s reversing slightly on the PC now? As long as you set your sights intelligently\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Soren: I\u2019m in an odd position, going from Civ 4<\/em> which was a big project, to Spore <\/em>which is a mammoth project\u2026 but it\u2019s just that I think most of the stuff which is going to benefit from smaller teams is going to be stuff comes across the web. We see that all the time now. It\u2019s finally a viable market. Think of Defcon<\/em>. That game didn\u2019t have art. Which is brilliant.<\/p>\n

RPS: Very artfully chosen unart, if you know what I mean.
\n<\/strong>
\nSoren: It\u2019s a weird feeling \u2013 I play the game, and it looks great, because they chose a brilliant style. It doesn\u2019t need art. It just fits their game perfectly. But the interesting thing to me about Defcon <\/em>is that the size of the game is right. It\u2019s a pretty good game \u2013 it\u2019s not quite a brilliant<\/em> game, but it\u2019s a fun game to play. But you can\u2019t say that it\u2019s too simple or too complex. It reminded me of a lot of RTS’s when I first discovered them a decade ago. Now it\u2019s really difficult with an RTS to\u2026<\/p>\n

RPS: Not submit to the endless feature bloat. You have to have all the bullet-points.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Soren: Yeah, you can\u2019t make it without a campaign and scenarios and an editor and cutscenes and all that extra junk. Really, that junk is preventing us from making more interesting games. It\u2019s kind of a paradox. Obviously, people want that junk, and it\u2019s a good thing for those people. And the editors with which people make their own scenarios is great\u2026 but that stuff all comes at a cost. I think maybe we\u2019re starting to realise that now. The answer is that the economics get turned entirely around when you don\u2019t have to deal with Best Buy and Wal-Mart and what not.
\n
\nRPS: People endlessly talk about the declining PC, but the figures never include those specific areas where the PC is expanding \u2013 the online sales, MMOs. When we started RPS, for me it was about trying to redefine what a PC Game is to include all that. I\u2019m sure Peggle will be in everyone\u2019s top 10 games this year\u2026 but can you imagine a game like Peggle being included in mainstream PC talk a few years ago?
\n<\/strong>
\nSoren: Or Desktop: Tower Defense<\/em><\/a>. That\u2019s an awesome game too. I play that more than most strategy games I\u2019ve played this year. Which is weird but\u2026 what does that mean? So yeah, absolutely. The PC Market is no one thing any more. There\u2019s no sales figures you can look at. The question is simply is \u201cWhat is the variety coming through? What are the different options available we didn\u2019t have three or four years ago\u201d. For me, PC Gaming should be like Punk Rock \u2013 being able to do whatever you want. And people are forgetting that the Punk period isn\u2019t just the Ramones and the Sex Pistols\u2026 it\u2019s Talking Heads, Televisions, Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four\u2026 this huge variety of stuff because people were making it up as they were going along. It was easy enough to make music that people did what they wanted to. And that\u2019ll always be the advantage of PCs.<\/p>\n

RPS: I interviewed Doug Church about what it was like developing when the PC had started being a real gaming platform, circa 92 or whatever. And, basically, when doing Shock they just didn\u2019t know what they were doing. They were original by default. In the following 15 years, like the feature bloat, by learning what works, it also limits you a bit. The people in the mainstream need to work out what ELSE works. But the European teams try stuff which no-one else does, because they don\u2019t know any better. Like the Bohemia Armed-Assault guys, trying forever working on their butterflies\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Soren: That\u2019s games. And it\u2019s funny how much pleasure people can get from little things in games which you\u2019ve never seen before. I know what you mean \u2013 think about RTS. What does that term mean? Now it means a very specific thing\u2026 but what else is Real time strategy? The first Sim City<\/em> was real time strategy. Populous <\/em>was an RTS. Rollercoaster Tycoon<\/em> is RTS. You could say M.U.L.E.<\/em> was RTS. Obviously Defcon <\/em>and Darwinia <\/em>are. RTS should be the biggest category there is, but right now it\u2019s very, very specific. There are a few triple A titles which are trying to push it \u2013 World in Conflict<\/em> was an interesting take on that. But you need people to come along who aren\u2019t intimidated by all the stuff that exists already in the genre.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part of a recent interview I did with Kieron Gillen just went up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I’ll post links when the rest of the interview emerges. Here are some quotes: RPS: Ballooning team size is a trend which has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3EGlq-1b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}