Category Archives: Quick Quotes

“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.

“When both games succeed it’s better for the industry as a whole. It’s not just us – we want the gaming industry to succeed because the better the gaming industry does the better we all do. We root for everybody. Honestly, it’s the fans you want to listen to. They’re gamers, they’re going to play both games, both games are great. Much respect for everyone involved on the DICE side and I think they feel the same way with us. We’re friends with them. It’s not what they portray on the EA side.” – Modern Warfare 3 executive producer Mark Rubin to Eurogamer.

“I think the only way to still see some potential come out of current-gen consoles is improvement in graphics. This will really depend on the skill of CG designers, but any further dramatic evolution in current consoles that could be plainly understood by the general gamer would be fairly difficult to achieve…. I don’t think there is a great need anytime soon for the next generation of consoles to advance the industry. I say this because I believe that gamers thirst for great content, which doesn’t necessarily rely on new console hardware as there are other options to produce a good console game experience. A good and captivating game is just that. As a an avid gamer I can still see myself playing on X360 and PS3 for a bit longer since there continues to be great new games. In order to advance the gaming industry into the future, performance on its own is not the key.” – Yosuke Hayashi, Team Ninja leader to Industry Gamers.

“Resident Evil Revelations is an all new Resident Evil title with over 20 hours of gameplay, and cutscenes beautifully rendered in fear-inducing 3D. A true console experience on a handheld device, Resident Evil Revelations is an epic title that offers both a single-player campaign for that classic survival horror gaming experience, and an additional RAID mode that can be played cooperatively or single player. To handle all of that data Resident Evil Revelations requires a 4GB cartridge [instead of the normal 2GB card], resulting in a higher price point.” – Capcom spokesperson to Kotaku on the $10 price difference to other 3DS titles.

“It’s a world of difference to work together at one location. The whole game is made at DICE in Stockholm. It’s great having the guys running around, talking to each other. Co-op, for example, is actually based on a lot of the philosophy behind multiplayer. Teamwork is never forced, but we have different gadgets and mechanics that help you work together. Just the co-op and the multiplayer guys talking to each other, what you should be doing, it’s a much more coherent and better product overall.” – BF3 producer Patrick Liu on the differences between Battlefield 3 and Medal of Honor multiplayer development (via MTV).

“We’re deliberately avoiding [first-person shooters] right now. It’s in our DNA to avoid doing what other companies are doing. I suppose you could say that Max Payne 3 is something close to an FPS, but there are really unique aspects to the setting and gameplay there, too, not just in the story. You have to have originality in your games; you have to have some kind of interesting message. You could say that the goalpoint of Rockstar is to have the players really feel what we’re trying to do.” – Rockstar VP Dan Houser to Famitsu, via 1UP. Thanks, Yoshi.

“I think Call of Duty delivers epic scale, so the single player does amazing stuff. It effectively puts you in the heart of a movie that Michael Bay directed, and it’s just… explosions everywhere. It’s that experience that really resonates with people. They love it. That once-in-a-lifetime, you get in there, and you’re like ‘wow, I can’t believe I’m doing all this stuff.’ So yeah, I think that’s what Call of Duty delivers. Epic scale, and fantastic storytelling.” – Activision senior brand manager Eric Folliot to Spong.

“People like their PCs. There are huge numbers of them and each person gets to have the one that they like rather than the one that someone else has defined for them. There were 350 million PCs sold last year so the economies of scale are tremendous so you get great value for money.” – Valve’s Gabe Newell in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK (via CVG).

“We were very confident after Dead Space, especially with our development processes. We knew we could deliver within a deadline and with a lot of polish. And that confidence was exactly what was needed. But there are days [with Modern Warfare 3] when you think: ‘Holy shit, this is a monster’. There is a lot of stress. It’s not crippling, but the thing that worries me most is people going: ‘Look, there’s the guy who brought down Call of Duty!’ That scares the crap out of me.” – Sledgehammer co-founder and former Visceral head Glen Schofield to Edge (via CVG).

“It’s a possibility we could use Geomod in Saints Row and, yes, we considered it [for SR3]. For Saint’s Row The Third, we decided not to do it, partially due to time reasons but also because you could make a good argument that if you had full-on destruction then it’s not a Saints Row game. A lot of those structures are mission-critical because they take place in the interior, so if you could allow users to decimate the entire world, what would you have left? It’s game-breaking.” – Volition’s Greg Donovan to Xbox World magazine, via CVG.

“The story for Other M was definitely the product of Mr. Sakamoto at Nintendo. We definitely worked with them on the project, but that was all him. For NG3, we’ve worked with Masato Kato to create our own story. It’s going to be different in a lot of ways. There are definitely things we learned from Other M by working with Mr. Sakamoto and with Nintendo that we’ve applied to the NG development. The actual story that you will experience here, however, will have a very different feel. A ‘Team Ninja’ feel, you might say.” – Team Ninja’s Yosuke Hayashi to G4 regarding the stories in Other M and NG3.

“It was definitely a conscious decision for id to move away from that dark corridor setting. We didn’t want to follow the same formula. When you’re inside RAGE’s missions, they’re very classic id. But the technology allowed us to really move out of that and let our artists be artists.” – Tim Willits, creative director of RAGE to MCV.

“We think the best position we can be in with respect to studio structure is fewer is better. The two we just shut in Australia were working on games that aren’t consistent with our strategy anymore – one on a movie tie-in, one on a kids’ game. Our strategy now is bringing fewer, bigger triple-A titles to market: one or two original IPs each year, and sequelling them every two to two-and-a-half years. We’re trying to reduce the cost of bringing high quality games to market. Our studio in Montreal will grow from 150 to 400 employees in the next couple of years. We’re going to be able to make games there for 40 percent less than some of our other studios.” – THQ CFO Paul Pucino speaking at the Citi Global Technology Conference.

“I absolutely am a big Call of Duty fan. Every time a new Call of Duty comes out – I never play the games online, but I play the solo version super fast. My family knows not to interrupt me the day they come out, they know it’s a sacred date for me. I think my favorite visually, of all of the Call of Duty games — even if it’s not as sassy and high tech — is World at War because, that game has some really incredible episodes in Berlin and the Japanese fields. It’s really quite arresting for me, visually, and it was very immersive. But I love Modern Warfare, too.” – Guillermo del Toro on his love of CoD games.

“It’s something that we’re still thinking about and we’re not talking about any aspects of that yet. We already smashed two genres together to create one so let’s not get too ahead of ourselves [laughs]. It really eats into our development time to make the main core game as solid as possible.” – Gearbox in an interview with NowGamer, via RipTen.