Interview Chris Avellone Interview at The Critical Bit

[Infinitron]

why the fuck does the fact that Alpha Popamole was popamole mean that any other snarky spy game would have to be popamole
that's what doesn't compute FFS

fuck this, you're trolling again

I just gave you the Alien RPG example. A game of "stealth and survival" which they later revealed to be about killing stuff with explosive traps and extravagant alien boss fights. In short, a "Stealth & Survival RPG" that is anything but stealth and survival. A concept that is echoed through the entirety of Alpha Protocol. An "espionage RPG" that's anything but espionage. A recurring pattern of the design philosophy at Obsidian when the subject is stealthy stuff.

I know, it's hard to face the truth. While AP had some good stuff, it fails as a game. There are far better console corridor shooters that don't shit on my game experience with their juvenile crap. Not to mention they didn't deliver on any of the 3Bs ie. Bauer, Borne, Bond. It's more like Banal, (Bull)Shit, Boring.

1) I'm not an Alpha Protocol fan. This is not a defense of Alpha Protocol.
2) You haven't answered my question. Given freedom from publishers via a Kickstarter campaign, why would an Obsidian spy game have to be popamole. You honestly think making cover-based shooters is an Obsidian "design philosophy"?

 

[Brother None]

He still hedged his bets as far as talking about developer/ publisher interaction like when talking about South Park. He knows which side his bread is buttered, that is until his own Kickstarter gets going . Then he can really open up and the Codex will fall even further in love.

I dunno. MCA just doesn't seem the type to badmouth publishers. And Obsidian always wants to work on a huge scale, with a huge staff, so it needs publishers much more than inXile, which is a smaller studio and fine with being smaller.

 

[felipepepe]

Burn the heretics, for the God-Emperor!

 

[Nael]

 

[FeelTheRads]

Given freedom from publishers via a Kickstarter campaign, why would an Obsidian spy game have to be popamole. You honestly think making cover-based shooters is an Obsidian "design philosophy"?

That's why I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If even without publishers he can't make something better than the Obsidian crap, then it would be pretty obvious he's burned out, even in the writing department.

 

[villain of the story]

1) I'm not an Alpha Protocol fan. This is not a defense of Alpha Protocol.
2) You haven't answered my question. Given freedom from publishers via a Kickstarter campaign, why would an Obsidian spy game have to be popamole. You honestly think making cover-based shooters is an Obsidian "design philosophy"?

Facts speak for themselves. Yes, Alpha Popamole is game developed around the publisher model and it had much publisher intervention from what we heard. Reportedly, they enforced a number things and then enforced a number of changes. This much is fact.

What else also is fact, however, is that the publisher had nothing to do with the original vision of the game. You know, the one they pitched at the very beginning. Despite what the subtitle of the game ("Espionage RPG" R00FLES) would have you believe, the game clearly wasn't developed with the slightest concern for stealth/espionage as a genre as it exists in popular culture. The fact is that AP = a bunch of isolated, self-contained and one-time-visit only hubs that serve to push the player in a single direction through corridors. Literally a Console Corridor Popamole Shooter(TM) in every sense of the word.

That is the gist of their vision of what an "Espionage RPG" (R00FLES) meant to them and it shows all over the game. Even a lot of stealth related stuff was a mere after thought, as many of us will remember from their own mouths from the videos in the build-up to the release and that also showed in the game quite very poorly. A lot of us were bitching about stealth elements even before the game came out.

Plus their marketing pitch, which also was their original vision by their own admission, is utter bullshit. Borne, Bond, Bauer? Let's look at these individually and try to mark some of the essential elements of these franchises:

Bond:
+ Strong social elements. Bond doing traditional adventuring in social and civilian environments. Talking one minute, breaking into places, investigating stuff and playing with his gadgets to figure out things.
+ A lot of impersonation and use of disguises in said environments, either to blend in, break into, to steal, to rescue or to escape.
+ Chase scenes, whether in a social, covert context or in an adrenaline packed actiony one.
+ Futuristic science and special emphasis on gadgets.
+ Weird and eccentric elements to villains that always stand out somehow.
+ Lots of sexism, exoticism and tokenism (hey, I'm not complaining. This is one of the essential things to the Bond franchise)
+ Was there even a story in any of the films? I can't remember. I was too fascinated with all the other stuff, I guess. Villains do stuff. Bond try to infiltrate/get close to villains. Things get out of hand and there are lots of explosions.
+ Bond's trademark way of expressing himself.

Borne:
+ TRIGGERIN BITCHIN FIGHTAN scenes.
+ Pretty much that.
+ Oh ok, some light adventuring elements, investigations and short lulls which always end up in FIGHTAN.
+ And hot chases too.
+ Banal shit boring stories about super-soldier-assassins or something like that.

Bauer:
+ XXXTREME COLLAR GRABBING NON-STOP ACTION!
+ Interrogation and torture. LOTS OF TORTURE.
+ Never ending web of twists and turns that tries too hard
+ Ever-present plot urgency.
+ Over-the-top conspiracies.
+ Crazy motherfucking stunts.
+ Liberal use of high-tech (as opposed to futuristic gadgetry)
+ DO IT NAU!
+ DAMMIT!

Now let's look at what Alpha Popamole draws from those:
+ Lots of sexism.
+ Lots of guns.
+ Some twists and turns that you hear from a mile ahead.
+ An over-the-top conspiracy
+ A Bond-wannabe hipster college graduate's imitations at expressing stuff in juvenile ways.

What it DOES have is:
+ Self-contained dialogue mini-games that exist separately from gameplay. COMPLETE WITH ADRENALINE PACKED TIMER!
+ Entire game about killing people.
+ SHIT FIGHTAN.
+ Shit combat.
+ Shit action.
+ Self-contained dialogue mini-games that exist separately from gameplay.

Yeah, that's quite some vision for an "Espionage RPG" that's based on 3Bs. Banal. (Bull)shit. Boring. This masterpiece of banality is what they pitched around. Reportedly, the tone was different and had Mitsoda have is own way, we would end up with a game where none of the plot characters would even die, but this is the gist of an "original IP" they came up with that's supposed to be about "Espionage".

No wonder their idea of stealth for Alien RPG was exploding aliens with trip mines. Quite some stealth. Coincidence?

R00FLES!!!

So you ask, does that say anything about a prevalent design philosophy at Obsidian? To me, it certainly does when it comes to the peculiar subject of stealth. AP wasn't somebody else IP that they tried to pull a slamdunk with. No, sirree. AP is an IP that originated in the minds at Obsidian which they managed to pitch and see through. So much for creative vision, I guess.

And no wonder it tanked. It was obvious from pre-release videos that it would be rather unremarkable as a game, regardless of its quality of writing (which was rather mediocre if you ask me), characterisations and C&C (which were pretty good, I must admit). And the game didn't have half-bad a PR campaign.

So if I'm starving to get an espionage fix, I'll just play Assassin's Creed series over again. A popamole console action game on autopilot which provides on a lot of those BBB points that a game subtitled "Espionage RPG" (R00FLES!) fails to do.

And if Obsidian were to do another stealth/espionage game, I most certainly wouldn't trust them to do a proper one and wouldn't support such a Kickstarter project either unless they elaborated on what espionage and stealth represents to them and provided a coherent vision that meets all the criteria of espionage genre as it exists in popular culture.

 

[Infinitron]

Long screed attacking AP after I've already said I'm not a fan.

Two sentences relevant to my actual point.

BTW, what about the stealth in the final dungeon of SoZ? That was pretty cool.

 

[villain of the story]

Shhh, it will rile up the actual AP fans.

I haven't finished SoZ.

 

[DwarvenFood]

If anything, I'm getting more interested in this AP thing, alredy liking it THIS MUCH without playing yet.

 

[villain of the story]

When will homos stop registering at the Codex?

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

When will homos stop registering at the Codex?

 

[Infinitron]

Wasn't the game originally supposed to be more srs bsns Syriana than pulp spy fiction?

 

[Roguey]

Yes but that's exactly what I'm saying as well

Spiritual successor, not as in Torment 2, But more like Fallout1 was to Wasteland1.

But in that case wasn't MoTB a spiritual successor to Torment, already? Hell, even Kotor2 gives you planescapey vibes, which is hell of an achievement in Kotor universe. Do we need another one.

No, but much like Bioware, his audience only wants the same thing from him over and over again.

BTW, what about the stealth in the final dungeon of SoZ? That was pretty cool.

NWN2 engine stealth is pointless though, it's just a RNG. All you had to do in that section was not talk to the wrong people (or use your speech checks) and navigate one hallway full of traps (which was annoyingly slow). Clearing it out was more fun.

 

[villain of the story]

Wasn't the game originally supposed to be more srs bsns Syriana than pulp spy fiction?

Supposedly but the recent revelations of one of the ex-Obsidianites on some forum cast some doubt on that. Either way, it would turn out to be a action blockbuster version of Syriana anyway, obviously.

 

[Roguey]

Wasn't the game originally supposed to be more srs bsns Syriana than pulp spy fiction?

Supposedly but the recent revelations of one of the ex-Obsidianites on some forum cast some doubt on that. Either way, it would turn out to be a action blockbuster version of Syriana anyway, obviously.

Yep, here's something from a QA person:

One of the original intro levels had terrorists somehow assaulting the white house and kidnapping the president, and you were sent in to rescue him. It was all very James Bond Intro-ish, and after the conclusion of the tutorial, you were woken up by your boss slamming his hands on your desk and startling you awake, looking around and seeing you were in a dreary cubicle stacked with tedious paperwork as you did the kind of analyst NSA/CIA paperwork that no one ever talks about because it's the most unglamorous part of the job. There was also a sympathetic nod and wink from a female co-worker after you got yelled at by your boss, if I'm remembering correctly, but yeah, on paper at least that was one of the proposed openings of the game. Given that it was obviously never used and probably didn't even make it to prototype, I don't think there's that much soiled from me telling you. There was going to be a white house level in the original Deus Ex, too, this stuff just winds up on the cutting-room floor in the course of development.

 

[villain of the story]

That doesn't sound half-bad if it would be just a dream. Now if only the entirety of AP turned out to be a dream

 

[Roguey]

It was definitely a precursor to shootins' to come though.

Perhaps those skills had noncombat applications. I doubt it.

Drug smuggling, gene trafficking, civilian killing, so much grit.

 

[Azrael the cat]

But you are dead right about the three Bs. HOW CAN YOU MAKE A BORING SPY GAME? HOW HOW HOW?

The main thing that you are criticising with the three B's is story design. Yes, that flows into gameplay issues - but if, as you say, you could live with the popamole, then we're talking story concept as implemented via gameplay (i.e. I don't mean story design in the Bioware-esque 'collection of dialogues and cutscenes' sense of the word).

The games industry is diametrically opposed to good narrative, and that applies equally to indie/Kickstarter games as it does to publisher-backed games.

When developers make a game, they are basically saying to the design+writing team: 'here: create a masterpiece on this topic, that fits this feel and will turn out like X'. Then they kick it over to a pre-established design/writing team, who goes to work and then kicks back the best product they can come up with in a budgeted time-frame. That might be good for the writers who get to have safe jobs, but it's terrible for actually producing a decent outcome.

I've made this comparison before, but consider the methods of literary books, films, and daytime soap TV:

(1) Literary books: massive numbers of writers put forward manuscripts, the publisher (who is far more fluent in literature than games publishers are in game writing) gets to pick the 'best' ones and run with those. Some very talented writers receive longer contracts and greater security. ALL writers get complete creative freedom over what they are writing on.

(2) Films: same as above, except sometimes an established writer will be contracted to produce a manuscript. They get paid for the manuscript, but there is no guarantee that it will be the one used for the film - and the producer will usually commission several in any event ('quality/premium' television works around a similar 'commission multiple authors' method).

(3) Daytime soap-tv and 'Mills and Boon'/'Forgotten Realms'/etc type of pulp franchise books: have pre-set writing teams who write a product to pre-agreed specifications within a budgeted time-frame, and unless the product breaks those specifications the producer will almost always just run with whatever product is turned out.

Guess which method the games industry uses.

Obviously some companies are better at story design than others, and no doubt are more demanding in terms of re-writes, quality of hires, creative freedom and so on. But you still have a pre-set team being asked to perform on demand, in return for job security.

It's the 'perform on demand' part that's the problem. Some very talented writers can do that consistently if they have full control to run with whatever genre or idea they have going at that point in time - unfortunately, most of those writers do not work in the games industry. For most professional writers, if you ask them to perform under factory conditions (i.e. make a product to specs on demand) they'll produce a factory product. The best of them might occasionally produce a Planescape:Torment, but that just emphasises the point: whilst preparation and training certainly helps, these are occasional sparks, not a constant flow. Most other creative industries are built around turning that into something approximating a flow by doing the exact opposite of what the games industry does, i.e. jettisoning reliance upon a pre-set team of authors. One author might not be able to produce a PS:T (sticking with the video-game example for the sake of the topic) every attempt, but if you are commissioning from 10 established authors, or getting manuscripts from hundreds of authors, then you have a much better chance of producing those on a semi-regular basis.

Now the downside of that is a massive loss in job security for the writers, which in turn might decrease the quality of writers to choose from. The other alternative is to try and put the writers in a similar position to literary authors by placing them much higher up the design process, so that ideas go from the writing to the game design instead of the other way around. But that sounds decidedly risky as a game design method - I doubt that any company would want to subject their choice of franchise or their game design ideas to a process where they need a good story design set out before they start working.

I remember being a uni student playing PS:T, Deus Ex, System Shock 2 and The Longest Journey, thinking that interactive narrative (again, I don't mean that in the Bioware 'choice of dialogue leading to cutscene' sense - Deus Ex and SS2 do terrific jobs of story-telling through level design, with dialogue/cut-scenes being secondary at best) was the future of computer games. It wasn't until years later that I realised where that leads - to Bioware dating sims, not to mention games like Bioshock where neat narrative is ruined by tedious gameplay. Game design needs to be about making great gameplay, with narrative as the secondary 'great when a PS:T comes along, but isn't vital to the game' element. Because putting aside any issues of why people play computer games, gameplay is the only element where good developers can consistently produce great outcomes - the demands of game design simply relegate narrative to something that must be produced on demand and to specifications, and under those conditions you can never rely on its quality.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

I remember a discussion GRPG had on story as game component a while back

we concluded that a good story does nothing to help a crap game but can add a lot more than the sum of a game's parts if it is seamlessly built with both that and good gameplay in mind

the trouble comes from gamers who now think that story is a core foundation unto itself

 

[Chateaubryan]

OK dude. Go back to the codex and start a big MCA fan club group hug to get over it. I hear that he is quite handsome and can write words with his hands.

Wrap your mind around this, bros : the Codex is someone else's BSN.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I remember a discussion GRPG had on story as game component a while back

we concluded that a good story does nothing to help a crap game but can add a lot more than the sum of a game's parts if it is seamlessly built with both that and good gameplay in mind

the trouble comes from gamers who now think that story is a core foundation unto itself

Precisely. I used to be one of those gamers, before I realised that once put to the fore the overwhelming majority would be dialogue+cutscene based, due to lack of the required skills to convey narrative through level design and gameplay, and that most of that dialogue/cutscene narrative would be of the level of Mills and Boon/Forgotten Realms pulp franchises. Worse, we've seen companies like Bioware lose the skillbase necessary to creating good gameplay mechanics, while pursuing a type of game narrative that is so linear that it feels like a poor approximation of a film, yet remaining incapable of hiring writers of film (or even tv) quality.

If someone has a brilliant idea for a narrative-focused game, then by all means do a PS:T and put the narrative to the front. The problem is where companies try to use that as their primary design method, where a dialogue/cutscene-heavy narrative is pushed to the fore every time regardless of its quality. There was a short period near the end of the 90s and early 2000s where you had a disproportionate amount of games with good narrative (again, in the broader sense including the use of level design and gameplay to convey narrative): PS:T, the System Shock series, Deus Ex, Longest Journey and the first Half-Life (again, storytelling through gameplay - those marines that fucked me up the first time I thought I was at the surface, and again the first time I was grenade-pwned when I took the then-standard FPS strategy of hiding behind a door and cheesing, was better than any Bioware story-twist).

Thing is, we've seen since then that - just like before that extraordinary run - narratives that are strong enough to carry a game are usually incredibly rare. As well as the above, a great narrative can only be used once. A good character system, talented level designers and strong mechanics, on the other hand, enable you to churn out multiple great games using virtually the same formula.

I'd still love to see more games like PS:T. But I've come to realise that if we ask for the games industry to be built around them, we won't get any increase in the number of PS:T's, but we WILL get a lot of thinly disguised dating sims in lieu of strong game mechanics. I'm as story-fag as they come when the narrative is good enough. But it's better to demand something the industry can plan for and consistently deliver - i.e. good game mechanics - and just treat the PS:Ts as exceptions that will only ever crop up occasionally.

 

[CrustyBot]

You are a BRO among BROs Azrael, I have always wondered about the generally poor quality of storytelling in games. I had come to the conclusion that too many studios treated gameplay design and story design as wholly separate entities and that the two would rarely sync up. The writers would have little knowledge or competency of how the gameplay mechanics were essential to the experience and the gameplay designers did not understand how the narrative elements of a game could be told and reinforced through the mechanics (or level design, music, etc).

The disturbing push forward into cinematic narratives for mainstream games was proof of that for me - developers did not know how to tell their stories in any other way other than to poorly imitate film or TV. That, combined with the apparent lack of talent on the part of most game writers, seemed to be bane of the narrative driven game.

But you bring up a really interesting point with how the narrative design process in games differs from that of literature and film. I never really considered that angle and it does shed some light as to why it almost feels like the industry goes out of it's way to hire shit writers. Maybe it does or maybe it doesn't, either way, the conditions under which the writers work are not conductive to quality narratives, especially on a consistent basis.

sgc_meltdown: I think that story can be a core element of games (not the core foundation*), but with the way games are designed, quality narratives that are properly integrated into the gameplay are incredibly rare. Perhaps not all games (sports, racing, strategy, casual shit, etc), but it depends on what the game is trying to accomplish. I just don't see the problem with story being a core game element from a conceptual standpoint.

I mean, the best narrative or story based games don't keep "story" in isolation from the rest of the game. So you can't remove "story" and all that entails, without removing a large portion of what makes the gameplay fun too, because it's the story and it's peripheral elements that puts the gameplay into context. (Almost) Everybody here masturbates over Deus Ex or MotB and those are prime examples.

The problem arises when we see games like Uncharted or Dragon Age 2 being hailed by fanboys or the bought press as a mastery of storytelling in games. When it's clearly not for a plethora of reasons. It's easy to go "fuck your shit wannabe movie stories set in a corridor, give me good gameplay first and foremost, you morons" in response to that. But to me, that's less about gamers and developers wanting a strong narrative foundation for their game being the problem, but more about how gamers have shit taste and how developers aren't competent enough to design narratives that sync in with the gameplay.

Still, as long as the narrative design process stays the same, it's something that's not likely to change. So I do agree with you for the most part, meltdown.



Azrael the cat: I really liked your posts. I can't brofist, so to return the favour, I'll copy paste them onto the BSN if there's an appropriate thread for enlightenment/butthurt.






*The core foundation of games is always going to be gameplay, otherwise they wouldn't be games, no?

 

[bussinrounds]

Azrael the cat: I really liked your posts. I can't brofist, so to return the favour, I'll copy paste them onto the BSN if there's an appropriate thread for enlightenment/butthurt.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/13/index/11538961

 

[Outlander]

So I linked sgc_meltdown's post to MCA and:

Yes, my girlfriend showed them to me the other night, she loved them, and so did I. Kudos to whoever did them, much appreciated.

Hope to get working on those RPG Codex trolls soon and get them off to the site.

 

[Micmu]

I hope he doesn't browse these forums because you guys are creepy.