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I attended the GCA conference 2008 today and yesterday.
Not a lot of interesting stuff, but I wanted to say something about Peter Molyneux's presentation of how to make believable worlds, using Fable 2 as his showcase.
First of all, many of us probably already know he is notorious for talking highly about his games - talking about them as if they're the next best thing since the invention of cars.
So he had one of his minions show us a few of the features in the game, yeah it's quite impressive, but generally its the same old thing, just.. slightly different.
So I talked to him afterwards because I wanted to get across to him that he needs to stop talking so highly about his games, because it causes too much disappointment - let the gamers decide for themselves if its good or not. Besides that, I actually wanted to talk to him about something I think game developers should start doing.
When Half Life came out - gamers realised more than ever, how much better a game can be if it has a deep and interesting story. So for the next 10 years every game had a ****ing story. Everyone's story is deep, interesting, unique, blah blah blah, and I think gamers are sick to death of it.
He was saying that his new game has many branches of the story, but I said to him, look at your "Tree", look at all the branches. To you, there are many paths to follow, but to the gamer, there is only ONE, because the player is only going down one path, no matter what he does, its LINEAR to the player. It's not linear to the developer, because the developer KNOWS the many different paths already.
So I told him, what you should be doing is creating a game where the player actually creates their own story, based on PHYSICS, CAUSE AND EFFECT and CLEVER AI.
Create a world, where everything lives and breaths, tree's grow and die, people are born, they get jobs, they die, they all have emotions and react differently to different circumstances. When you as a player, do something to interfere with the common life, you will cause a domino effect of changes that in essence, create a story. This is your own unique story, that you have no idea how it will end, but what's important is that you are the one who created it, and you KNOW that it's not made up by anyone else. It's completely unique and personal.
For example, lets say we have a path way through a forest. Every Tuesday at 12pm, a caravan wagon passes by carrying food to a small town in the woods. This food is sold on the market, the people buy it and have food for the next week. Lets say you come along and disrupt this somehow, by putting a rock on the path way, the driver doesn't see it, physics kicks in, wagon wheel breaks, driver falls out, over cliff, dies. Wagon never makes it to the village, now all the village people are wondering where is the food, some are angry, some are upset, some are worried. Some try to do something about it, by either finding their own food, or finding out where the food is, etc. Perhaps one of them finds the wagon, thinks someone did it on purpose and vows to find the person who did it and kill him, so now you have a guy after you.
After 1 or 2 weeks of playing, you would have such an incredibly deep story, an incredibly different world than what you started with.
Well, Molyneux didn't say much, but he was trying to figure out how the idea would work, or how to make it work.
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Aside that talk, I also attended a talk with a guy who heads mainstream media, or something, I can't remember the exact title, but basically it's all about outsourcing artwork, etc. He was saying that most developers, big and small, now outsource their needed work, especially artwork, because it's hard to find good artists. But he was talking about how people keep forgetting to treat their company like a BUSINESS. But I think that's exactly what's wrong with the industry. Games were successful because they were FUN, if you treat your company like a business, then the game may lose its sole purpose - to be fun. It's an industry that is closely edging on going the wrong way, where only a few developers out there will create games for FUN not for MONEY, and ironically, the bonus of creating fun games, is that you get a LOT of money.
Not a lot of interesting stuff, but I wanted to say something about Peter Molyneux's presentation of how to make believable worlds, using Fable 2 as his showcase.
First of all, many of us probably already know he is notorious for talking highly about his games - talking about them as if they're the next best thing since the invention of cars.
So he had one of his minions show us a few of the features in the game, yeah it's quite impressive, but generally its the same old thing, just.. slightly different.
So I talked to him afterwards because I wanted to get across to him that he needs to stop talking so highly about his games, because it causes too much disappointment - let the gamers decide for themselves if its good or not. Besides that, I actually wanted to talk to him about something I think game developers should start doing.
When Half Life came out - gamers realised more than ever, how much better a game can be if it has a deep and interesting story. So for the next 10 years every game had a ****ing story. Everyone's story is deep, interesting, unique, blah blah blah, and I think gamers are sick to death of it.
He was saying that his new game has many branches of the story, but I said to him, look at your "Tree", look at all the branches. To you, there are many paths to follow, but to the gamer, there is only ONE, because the player is only going down one path, no matter what he does, its LINEAR to the player. It's not linear to the developer, because the developer KNOWS the many different paths already.
So I told him, what you should be doing is creating a game where the player actually creates their own story, based on PHYSICS, CAUSE AND EFFECT and CLEVER AI.
Create a world, where everything lives and breaths, tree's grow and die, people are born, they get jobs, they die, they all have emotions and react differently to different circumstances. When you as a player, do something to interfere with the common life, you will cause a domino effect of changes that in essence, create a story. This is your own unique story, that you have no idea how it will end, but what's important is that you are the one who created it, and you KNOW that it's not made up by anyone else. It's completely unique and personal.
For example, lets say we have a path way through a forest. Every Tuesday at 12pm, a caravan wagon passes by carrying food to a small town in the woods. This food is sold on the market, the people buy it and have food for the next week. Lets say you come along and disrupt this somehow, by putting a rock on the path way, the driver doesn't see it, physics kicks in, wagon wheel breaks, driver falls out, over cliff, dies. Wagon never makes it to the village, now all the village people are wondering where is the food, some are angry, some are upset, some are worried. Some try to do something about it, by either finding their own food, or finding out where the food is, etc. Perhaps one of them finds the wagon, thinks someone did it on purpose and vows to find the person who did it and kill him, so now you have a guy after you.
After 1 or 2 weeks of playing, you would have such an incredibly deep story, an incredibly different world than what you started with.
Well, Molyneux didn't say much, but he was trying to figure out how the idea would work, or how to make it work.
===========
Aside that talk, I also attended a talk with a guy who heads mainstream media, or something, I can't remember the exact title, but basically it's all about outsourcing artwork, etc. He was saying that most developers, big and small, now outsource their needed work, especially artwork, because it's hard to find good artists. But he was talking about how people keep forgetting to treat their company like a BUSINESS. But I think that's exactly what's wrong with the industry. Games were successful because they were FUN, if you treat your company like a business, then the game may lose its sole purpose - to be fun. It's an industry that is closely edging on going the wrong way, where only a few developers out there will create games for FUN not for MONEY, and ironically, the bonus of creating fun games, is that you get a LOT of money.
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