Category Archives: Quick Quotes

“I understand people may think it is a silly game and even though we put serious work into gameplay too it is difficult to communicate that. Bryce [the main character] doesn’t need to evade or avoid [attacks]. If you get shot, it’s OK. It’s also hard to show this to the audience because it would change the way they play the game. It’s complicated just like trying to explain the story. It might be my fault, I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you honestly I tried to make the E3 trailer show Bryce’s true personality. I’m not sure if [it was] a success, but in the middle of the story it becomes more serious. He comes back to his young self, in his mind. NeverDead, when you look at it, is a story of vengeance. I need to make more effort to communicate this – I want people to know it’s a serious game with a guy who has a lot of bad luck.” – NeverDead director Shinta Nojiri to Siliconera.

“Despite the fact that RPGs have made such deep and passionate inroads into the mainstream market, I still feel they are slow-paced, abstract, and awkward. Reckoning reflects my hunger for a faster pace of action and combat drama, and a desire for simpler, easier-to-use interfaces. RPGs are naturally the deepest, longest, and most complicated kinds of videogame entertainment… that’s what makes them great. But making them just a tiny bit less clumsy in the interface, and just a big, fat, huge amount more physical and exciting in combat, gives them more fun-per-unit-time. Me? I want All-Fun, All-the-Time, Right-Now, thank-you-very-much.” – Ken Rolston to GameFront on how the current state of RPGS affected the design of Kindoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

“We felt it deserved to be bigger than the 4.3 inch screen on PSP. It’s almost as if we settled on five inches in order to really maximise the same impact that we felt when we first saw it. There was a great deal of discussion and we even talked about using a 5.5 inch screen, but that had a negative impact on the operability of the device. There is always a battle between engineers and designers and I’m not just talking about PlayStation Vita when I say that. I was pushing through this idea of ‘thinner is better’ but I had to be reminded of things like the feature set, processing power, battery life… the overall package. I actually wanted PS Vita to be entirely made of metal but then it was pointed out that this was impossible due to the internal Wi/Fi, 3G and GPRS antennae.” – Vita designer Tokashi Sogabe on the differing perspectives between designing and engineering the handheld.

“I’ve never experienced a game like it before, and that’s been the difficulty of talking about this game. It’s an RPG with good combat, and people have a hard time figuring out what that means in their own heads, because there’s no example of it, really. Now we’re in this age where we have all these action games that have RPG elements, that right there has just destroyed to me what an RPG means because we’re talking about RPG elements. There are all these different ways we can spread out, and these are all valid representations of RPGs. But you ask any different person what an RPG is and they’ll give you a different answer.” – Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’s lead combat designer Joe Quadara to Gamespot.

“Piracy is not a solution to anything,” says Minecraft creator Notch. The Swedish developer has never really hidden his views on piracy. Summarised, the Minecraft creator considers software theft a “minor offense” overall, something on par with jaywalking or littering.

It’s not really surprising then, that when a fan commented that he loved the game but couldn’t afford a copy for himself, the creator suggested that he “just pirate it“. Almost as an afterthought, “don’t forget to feel bad.”
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“What I find at SCE is that we’ve lots of passionate and committed people. But there’s definitely an opportunity to up the pace of our competitiveness. We still have a bit of a hangover – at least in the UK company – from the days of being market dominant [with PS2]. I don’t think we are as sharp as we can be. There’s room for improvement there. So it’s not change everything, but it is turn up the dial, and learn to compete.” – SCE UK’s new boss Fergal Gara to MCV.

“The idea of giving people constant incremental playable content and making it so you’re never more than a few weeks away from the next new experience within the Call of Duty universe is part of what we’re experimenting with. This franchise doesn’t really behave like most franchises. It’s become something of a year-round activity for a large percentage of our player population. One of the things that was most appealing when we were researching these ideas with consumers is the idea of breaking up the DLC so that it comes more often and more regularly. We want to provide DLC to people more often and also experiment with more of a variety in the forms of playable content. The nature of this kind of service requires constant iteration. There are things [in development] that consumers don’t yet know they want… because they can’t imagine it.” – Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg to Wired.

“I’d love for [Akira Yamaoka] to be involved. Unfortunately, he left Konami, and can’t do the music for the new games [which is] a Japanese business politics sort of thing. We’d like for him to be there, but he’s not. So we took seriously finding a replacement, because you can’t throw in just any old sound guy. So we found Dan Licht, who does the music on Dexter. He was actually our top choice, so we were fortunate that he was willing to jump in.” – Silent Hill: Downpour producer Tomm Hullet to GameFront.

“It was a long, painful process, but making games is like making films in that it’s a marathon, not a sprint – and some people come into the process not knowing that – I’d love to spend more time at home with my family and kids. We run things differently now – we have flexi-hours, for example. But everybody has their view on who’s the worst boss in the world, and maybe that’s me. I’ve read some amazing things about Steve Jobs in his biography, and I’ve never seen him get as vilified any way as much as I have. Sam Peckinpah [’70s film director] fired [plenty of] people off one movie, and nobody said a thing. Werner Herzog pulled a gun on Klaus Kinski to get him to finish a movie! Obviously I don’t compare myself to any of those people…” – Team Bondi boss Brendan McNamara to OPM.

“We had backup plans. In all, the design team was like three of us at that point, in total. So we were looking at doing a Lord of the Rings MMO, a Silmarillion MMO, a kind of a Gunslinger-esque Dark Tower MMO, a Game of Thrones MMO. When we were first were deciding on what kind of game we were going to build, I really wanted to do a story-based massively multiplayer game because hey, it hadn’t been done before. I thought: ‘hey, good way to innovate’ – that’s what Bioware stands for and that’s what we’re good at. We had an in-built fanbase with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. In fact, when you ask our fans ‘what kind of MMO would you like us to build?’ they almost always say ‘how about Knights of the Old Republic massively multiplayer game?’” – SWTOR director James Ohlen to PC Gamer.

“Itagaki might have left, but the hatred for Tekken is still around in the team [laughter]. So when we see Street Fighter X Tekken and those kinds of games… We’re coming out with Dead or Alive. We don’t need to rely on anything else to present Dead or Alive as a strong fighting game in the genre. We don’t need that kind of thing to prove ourselves. We understand that Tekken has… It opened the way for 3D fighting games, we understand that it has a long history, we respect that history, but we’re coming in as a challenger to those 3D fighting games. We’re there to represent and take them on.” – Team Ninja studio head Yosuke Hayashi to VentureBeat.

“I don’t think we’re averse to making sequels. I just think we haven’t had a real mega breakout hit. If Brutal Legend had done five million copies we’d probably still be working on Brutal Legend 2 right now. It would have been a slam dunk for EA to immediately sign it. So, I wouldn’t rule it out but there’s still this passion and hunger to make new shit here that I absolutely love. Tim is so good at attracting really creative talent. These four games – they’re so different, they’re so creative, they’re so out-there, and they don’t come from Tim. They come from the brains of other people who are here at the studio. And that’s super-cool, so I’d hope we can keep doing that.” – Iron Brigade project lead Brad Muir to Eurogamer on the possibility of sequels in Double Fine’s future.

“With developers taking stuff that they normally would have put on the disc and selling that for DLC later, we think that lowers the value of the actual disc, the players that are going to buy that disc. We don’t think that’s a good way to do things. But as for using DLC as a way to add more stuff and increase the longevity of the title, if we’re adding stuff later we think that will… Fans will enjoy that, we as developers will enjoy that, we’ll just have that much more time to spend with that game. That’s the approach that we would like to take.” – Team Ninja studio head Yosuke Hayashi to VentureBeat.

“I doubt I would leave this company in 10 or even 20 years. It’s not that I’m satisfied at Sega so much as I really owe one to Sega — they taught me how much fun making games can be. Unless something really drastic happens, I’m not going to leave on my own volition. It’s hard to say whether the trend [of developers quitting large firms] is a good thing and for everyone’s best interests, but a creator needs to be someplace where he can shine the brightest, and that’s not necessarily always going to happen by going it alone.” – Yakuza’s Toshihiro Nagoshi to Gamasutra.

“We never set out to make a three-part [Uncharted] series from the beginning. We have always sort of seen it as a stand-alone adventure, like you are gonna pick up any one of the games and play and out of order. It still makes sense. You can still understand the characters and the plot. Obviously, if you play the other ones, you get more out of it. I have always seen it as a single-part adventure story. We have always said that if we think that we can make something new and interesting, if the fans still want them, then we can make another one. But at this time, everyone is sort of on vacation. We’re trying to recover from the process of making it and I think we will come back together and maybe this month and next month make a decision about what we are going to do next. But we never said how many of these things there will be. There are plenty more stories in the universe. It is just a question of what’s the company interested in doing next. We really don’t know at this moment.” – Uncharted 3 game director Justin Richmond to VentureBeat.

“I think that if anyone is ever going to tell you where they think [the industry's] going to be 10 years from now, and if they exude confidence, that means they’re trying to sell you something. I think that the industry is changing so fast, the best we can hope for as a developer, is to try to keep your ear to the ground. And I think the most important thing you can do – I told a friend this recently – I said, ‘Don’t mistake the present for the future.’ I think that happens a lot with trends. Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, social games. This is what the future is.’ By the time there’s a gold rush, the gold is already gone, generally.”

“So I’d be thrilled if I could figure out what’s going to happen six months, a year from now and try to stay on top of those trends and be flexible to be wrong, but I think that the biggest mistake people make is not in predicting the future, it’s thinking the present’s going to be the future. And I really try to avoid that.” – Irrational’s Ken Levine to IndustryGamers.

“When everyone agrees that there’s a change coming, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the change or the outcome is easy to predict. What maybe seemed like foolproof bets even a matter of weeks ago now seem a little less certain. Nintendo needs to make decisions not only by instinct and experience, but also based on where the market is, and a determination of where the market might be headed. New forms of games are growing, but not necessarily at the expense of other forms of games.” – NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime at the19th Annual Digital Entertainment Conference attended by IndustryGamers.

“As game creators, we put up too much front in our creations and we don’t make ourselves nearly vulnerable enough. I think our audience senses this, and they emotionally withdraw from our games. I’m not calling for us to get soppy and overwrought. We human beings are also fascinated and impressed by nuance and restraint. We have to get in better touch with our emotions and become more adept at portraying them in detail… with restraint, clarity and above all, vulnerability. I think that we owe it to our audience of players to really dig deep, and tell some stories worth playing.” – Naughty Dog’s Richard Lemarchand at an NYU lecture attended by Gamasutra.

“Even Mr. Miyamoto himself has been talking recently about going back to the 2D Zelda games. In particular the ones that were designed with multiple levels to the world like A Link to the Past, and taking those 2D graphics and recreating them in 3D so that you could get a sense for the depth of those worlds. That’s something that might be interesting to do, so I would say there might be a possibility of something like that in the future.” – Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma to GamesRadar on the possibility of a Link to the Past remake.

“I think that the person who plays the sniper on a team can have a ton of fun, but one of the biggest criticisms you always hear is about campers, right? We don’t want to emphasise that dynamic so much that the other people in that engagement aren’t having fun. We have less verticality in our maps, there are less camping points. And so the challenge for snipers is to hang back on the perimeter or the periphery and pick people off – the maps aren’t set up to really capitalise on that, by intention. Unlike other games, where you’re going to be sniped from across the map by a guy you can’t even see, and then respawn and you’ve got to run for five minutes to get back to the battle, right? That’s not the Modern Warfare 3 method. This is about getting you in the action, you’re pulling the trigger fast, you know what I mean? That’s the essence of it.” – Sledgehammer’s Michael Condrey to OXM on camping.