Lesens-, hörens- und sehenswerte Fundstücke aus der Welt der Spiele.
Barry Hawkins: The Story of Why I Left Riot Games
- “There were two predominant flavors of behavior. One was the use of sexual references and gestures by straight men toward other straight men, and the other was the sexist and inappropriate language about women. […] The head of Communications said that we were edgy, and that if we as Riot started chipping away those edges, we would become shapeless and bland, like EA or Blizzard. […] I concluded that I was not going to be able to effectively impact the issues with the culture at Riot, and my first significant attempt at raising concerns had put my job in jeopardy.”
Jeremiah Reid: The Indie Post-apocalypse
- “We’ve arrived at the worst it can get because you can’t sell less than zero. An experienced game designer with multiple shipped titles and a moderately sized following shouting into the void and getting no response whatsoever… I guess that’s the new normal, but something about that doesn’t seem normal to me at all.”
Jim Sterling: Ubisoft And The Division Of Content
- “It should be no surprise The Division 2 will feature a division of content as per Ubisoft tradition, because we’re expected to believe that a healthy industry is one where its leading companies can’t simply make products and then make money selling those products. […] If you need to do what Ubisoft is doing, the industry is fucked.”
Matthewmatosis: God of War Case Study
- “It’s hard to connect with the events on screen when we’re juggling several roles, one of those being a camera man wrestling against subpar equipment. […] Combat systems are complicated […] but generally speaking two major priorities should be clarity and consistency. […] The terrain is more concerned with looking nice than providing a clear battlefield for you to work with. […] Every combat system has flaws, but the ones in God of War are so pervasive they leave little left to be enjoyed.”
- “Outside of combat the experience falls down in numerous other ways: Huge chunks of time are occupied by the sort of walkie-talkie sequences you’d find in Uncharted or The Last of Us. […] As it is now you’d have to be insane to replay it on a regular basis because you’d be forced into the same lengthy dialogue sequences every time.”
- “Interacting with inventory and RPG mechanics costs time, which should pay off by enhancing the underlying gameplay in some way. […] But many games get away with tacking them on regardless because seeing the numbers go up is a shortcut to your brains pleasure centers. Combat systems that are good for their own sake don’t need leveling systems, in fact they’re better off without them.”
- “Everything [God of War] does is better represented elsewhere. […] My problem isn’t so much with the developers of God of War, I’m sure they tried their hardest to make the best of what is fundamentally a bad situation. […] Games are more like films than they ever have been, not just because they shoehorn in shaky cams and other filmic techniques but because the business itself now mirrors the Hollywood machine: Budgets have gotten so big that games have to cram in a bunch of extraneous tickbox features or compromise on their vision to recoup costs.”
Paul Kilduff-Taylor: The 10 Secrets to Indie Game Success (and Why They Do Not Exist)
- “If your game is too familiar, it’ll be boring and obvious. If it’s too novel, it’ll be weird and difficult to parse. […] Stylish, constrained art is always a thousand times more evocative than ‘my best stab at AAA’. […] I firmly believe that the best games are created by a combination of generalised grand-scale systems-oriented thinking, and microscopic nit-picking pedantic perfectionism. […] A very large proportion of any success you have will be entirely down to luck. You need to be conscious of this, embrace it and take it to heart.”
Ludokultur 