Arkane Studios' Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio have been fielding questions about life, the universe and greasy action odyssey Dishonored on Reddit over the past week. Good for them. Why not read back their posting histories? Well, because their posting histories are full of comments like "what" and "haha" and interviewer's favourite, "that's a great question". Better skim the highlights instead, cut and pasted below.
The evergreen topic of People Nicking Stuff On The Internet surfaced during the discussion. "Piracy's hurting the industry," Colantonio mused in response to one query. "I understand your fear of buying a game that is not good though. I don't have a solution unfortunately, it happened to me too. Ideally the industry would let you play any game for 10 minutes before giving you the choice to buy it. Maybe an idea for online services." There's a smiley winking face at this point, but I've redacted it as you can't put smiley winking faces in quotation marks without looking utterly ridiculous.
"Games are still considered entertainment," he added. "Personally I think the attention gets stronger every year. Also, we're probably only one generation away from having a president that plays videogames, so sooner or later, all decision makers and taste makers will be familiar with games."
But will they be the right sort of videogames, the ones you wouldn't mind introducing to your Mum? Smith confesses to being "shocked" by the market's taste for linear, spectacle-driven experiences, rather than games where you pull the strings. "It's hard to pull off and gamers vote with their dollars," he explained.
"For my part, I feel like Stalker, Bioshock, Far Cry 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution all are related enough that the [open-ended action] genre is still alive. But I have to admit that I am shocked: why don't gamers demand more non-linear, interactive games with atmosphere and novel settings?"
Which is another way of saying "why don't gamers demand more games like Dishonored?" We like Dishonored, in case you didn't know. Here's how to fail completely and die while playing it.
9 comments so far...
CunningSmile on 31 Jul '12 said:
I think you'll get few complaints in these parts about more open ended games with multiple paths and novel settings.
Lancer Armstrong on 31 Jul '12 said:
Why don't gamers support more non-linear games? Because of the examples you just mentioned: Stalker, Bioshock, Far Cry 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Now, I never played Stalker, but I have played the other three and they sure weren't the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had. I'm one of the few people who didn't like Bioshock. It was a chore to play. The same can be said about Far Cry 2. I never finished it and I've never met anyone who has. I started playing Deus Ex the other day and haven't felt the need to go back to it at all, because the gameplay was very mediocre. I guess that's what happens when a game tries to be everything to everyone, but at the end of the day it felt like a sub-par shooter had a baby with a really bad stealth game. Few games can do what Fallout 3 did.
At the end of the day you want a great experience supported be excellent gameplay. Give me Vanquish. Give me Halo. Give me Crackdown (non-linear in a non-boring way). Give me Portal. Give me Rainbow Six. Give me Blur. Give me Gears. Give me Trials Evolution. Give me Limbo.
I'm very excited about Far Cry 3, but if there's even the slightest hint that it's anything like Far Cry 2, I'm avoiding it like the plague.
krisskross on 31 Jul '12 said:
Bioshocks my favourite game of all time and Dishonoured looks brilliant too! I completely agree though, i'm fed up with fancy graphics and spectacles out of your hand! i'd settle for decent graphics and a world that reacts to your actions and choices any day of the week.
I am a huge Battlefield fan but I won't be buying the next one along with alot of my friends as I am fed up of boring linear millitary shooters! Besides instead of sticking to their strengths they've gone and outright copied COD and it saddens me
Going off the plot but yeah give me more games like Dishonoured!
Grummy on 31 Jul '12 said:
And on the flip side from Lance, give me Elder Scrolls, give me Fallout, give me Bioshock, give me Saint's Row, give me Crackdown, give me Bully and RDR, give me The Godfather, Fable, Darksiders, Alpha Protocol, Forza, Viva Pinata, Minecraft, Tropico, The Sims, Dragon's Dogma, Assassin's Creed, Arkham Asylum/City, Dead Island, Borderlands, Dead Rising, do I need to go on? None of these are really linear games, and all are utterly fantastic.
msbhvn on 31 Jul '12 said:
I don't mind non-linear if there's a strong sense of purpose. BioShock nailed it with its self-contained areas and objective system. What I don't like is games that just drop you somewhere and tell you very little about where to go or what to do, which is the main reason I hated Dark Souls and haven't bought Minecraft. I even felt lost in Batman Arkham City because it throws too much at you at once, I preferred Arkham Asylum's tighter feel where it only opens up fully towards the end.
SidTheSloth on 31 Jul '12 said:
I suggest you don't ever go to a Next sale - had the misfortune of being in one once by complete accident and through my own stupidity/ignorance, i felt very similar to how you describe there!
And the whole sandbox/consequences/cause & effect concept in games is 100% win for me, the hours i've lost hunting in Red Dead, wandering/faffing in skyrim etc etc. The freedom can sometimes be a little overawing but it hands down beats 'walk here, fight this'. I actually really liked the story in FF13, but the gameplay was a shockingly bad example of monotonous linearity and tedious dullness!
msbhvn on 31 Jul '12 said:
Skyrim doesn't overwhelm me that much, because I tend to stick to one quest line at a time or just wander around looking for trouble. The only thing that's p***ing me off about Skyrim at the moment is the Dawnguard bugs and every dragon I meet thinking "Dovahkiin? Bollocks more like" and buggering off!
Bezza89 on 31 Jul '12 said:
Hmm a toughy, what is non-linear, in all games we are just pressing a button at a certain time to progress - to me non-linear giving you many different buttons. The problems associated with the games some people dislike above, bioshocks gameplay, far crys perhaps annoying mishaps (checkpoints and cars, no stealth) are probably disliked for the aspects I just said and not the non-linear nature of the game, in fact, the non-linear nature would be the stand-out feature for me as I love to go into a game and be able to do whatever I want to get something done and not be noticably bound by things, like choosing how to approach far cry missions but the stealth is off - so you mix it up with fire/bombs/guns/knives/road rage, sure it would have kicked arse with some stealth but the options are good enough. It's a lot of fun playing with the plasmids in bioshock, I replayed with different guns and tonics just to experiment. Linear games frustrate me due to them might as well being films, a reason I wont ever play heavy rain is how it makes you choose set options rather than being non-linear, it's just a few different linear things and why uncharted annoys me with its cutscene esq gameplay.
Sorry to rant, I'm tired.
Lancer Armstrong on 1 Aug '12 said:
I don't have a problem with non-linear at all. I love sandbox games like Red Dead Redemption, Saints Row and GTA. I absolutely adore Crackdown. Fallout 3 might very well be the greatest game of this generation.
But I still demand a great experience supported by excellent gameplay. When a game starts to bore me with endless repetition, I'm out. I never finished GTA 4, because every time you fail a mission, you have to restart and spend another ten minutes getting back to wherever that mission is. Same thing with Far Cry 2. That kinda bullshit makes me switch off very quickly, because it destroys my immersion in the game and turns it into a horrible frustration and a chore.
I really hope GTA 5 does what Crackdown 2 did. Whenever you die in that game, you are given a choice: Respawn exactly where you died (which is great) or pick a spot where you want to respawn, so you can plan and prepare. That's great. Driving for ten minutes just to get back to the last place I died, that's just horrible.