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Game Developers On Game Criticism: Spector & Church

Posted by Hemos on from the picking-it-apart dept.

Milktoast writes "Warren Spector and Doug Church, the developers of Deus Ex and Thief hosted a session where they critiqued each other's videogames apart at the game developer's conference. You can see the coverage here."

6 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Argument for Playing Slowly by kvn299 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd much rather play a FPS in a stealthy manner. Thief was right up my alley. I know other people like to run through these games with guns pointed at anything that moves. Not me. If a game is well made, then I hate to rush through it.

    I remember those early levels of Half-Life, how utterly creepy they were. Remember the sounds of those screams and bones crunching? Hell, that scared the crap out of me.

    Or in Jedi Knight, knowing a dozen stormtroopers stood between you and your goal. That buildup, of getting the courage to round those corners really made the game so much fun. Its speaks volumes about a game when you can get so involved in it. That's what made Thief and these other games to much so great. You could really enjoy the game. AND play it the way you wanted.

    I just bought Deus Ex this weekend and can't wait to fire it up!

    1. Re:Argument for Playing Slowly by rednuhter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      you would like RTCW (Return To Castle Wolfenstien).
      I played through the whole single player game in normal difficulty and found that planning and stealth were my best weapon (and the most fun !).
      Of course you could just run through the levels blazing wildly and the stealth option does not always work in multiplayer (but it can be rewarding :) )

      I hope more game like this come along soon.

      --
      ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
  2. Quite interesting.... by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I love it when features like this happen.. A friendly hacksawing apart of 2 applications by friendly rivals helps to give the rest of us more insight into the minds of these programmers. The best type of "picking apart" of this type is in every issue of Game Developers magazine... the Post-Mortem article series is just that but with the game developers themselves admitting to the mistakes and bumbles they made.

    it's great to see that Game developers can be hones and open... now to get the Development team for outllok and office to publically admit their mistakes and accept a tearing apart...

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  3. Cutscenes and in-game conversations by Violet+Null · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Warren Spector doesn't like Thief's cutscenes, and prefers to use in-game conversations to convey information.

    Why not use both? The ability to have conversations in Deus Ex was very nice, but Deus Ex's mission briefings, compared to Thief's, were pretty dull and monotone. It would seem a simple enough matter to have some sort of mission briefing before entering a new map, but still have conversations that occur within the map itself.

  4. Re:What about improving the "simulation" aspect? by drivers · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If you want to know about the SIMS than you need to go to (or read about) a different Game Developers Conference session such as the conversation between Will Wright and Scott McCloud.

    There is some excellent coverage at gamasutra, free registration is required but it is worth it. Here's a fair use excerpt:

    Wright touched on the "phase space" of games, which could also be described as the size of the game universe, or how free a player is to go off track and explore. Decades ago, most games were linear, driving players from goal A to goal B and onward, constraining the player to a single course of conduct along the way. Games have evolved to include branching storylines, or to make use of disposable storylines. An example of the latter would be Grand Theft Auto 3, which lets you progress from challenge to challenge in the game, or bypass the story and go off and explore, steal cars, beat people up, get arrested, and cause mayhem. That game, Wright noted, had a large phase space which impressed him with its potential.

  5. Re:They didn't mention.. by TRACK-YOUR-POSITION · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Why should you be able to save the game so often?

    I should be able to save when I want because I paid for the game and it's mine ;). If I want to go eat dinner or walk the dog when I'm playing, I shouldn't have a choice of losing progress or fighting to the end of the level to do it.

    A better solution to the problem you describe would be to give the option of SUSPEND--save the state of the game to play later, but destroy the suspended state as soon as they start to play. Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask would let you do this at "owl statue" landmarks--but I suspect it confused and pissed off a lot of users who didn't understand where their saves disappeared when they reloaded their games a second time. (The game had a normal save, but you could only save when...eh, never mind, that game was too complicated, that's why it failed.)

    Save and restore can be fun. A friend of mine loved to load up Deus Ex, kill civilians to watch their reactions, then reload to avoid consequences. It was a common joke that he might get confused and do that in real life.