| ▲ | After 40 years of adventure games, Ron Gilbert pivots to outrunning Death(arstechnica.com) |
| 76 points by mikhael 4 days ago | 27 comments |
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| ▲ | dbalatero 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This title freaked me out... I thought he was dying. Glad to hear it's just a new game! |
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| ▲ | BLKNSLVR 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | First I thought he was dying, then I thought he was committing all his resources into extending human life / reaching the singularity (like Kurzweil) Then I read the article :) |
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| ▲ | kentm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| He mentions living through the dialog fast and says that the takeaway is that people don’t care about the story. However, I wonder if his players just read very fast. I grew up on JRPGs and read through dialog quickly, to the point that people around me don’t believe that I could possibly be following the story. But that’s just how fast I can read game dialog. |
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| ▲ | ACCount37 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I've seen quite a few streamers that click through the dialog and don't care about the story. It's even more common among playtesters. Ever noticed how some games seem to go out of their way to avoid any subtlety and repeat the major plot points at least 4 times? Or give way too many hints for the easiest of puzzles? One of the causes is that a game was playtested within an inch of its life. But I've also seen a couple of streamers that can just scan entire pages into their mind in a second and click through text while retaining all the information. I thought myself a quick reader, but even I was in a disbelief seeing someone read this quick on the first playthrough. | |
| ▲ | vidarh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm sure some do, but also I know some don't, because I typically don't. There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring, and so after the first couple of screens I will just hammer whichever button to skip the dialogue as fast as I can, repeatedly, until the dialogue is gone whenever it pops up. | | |
| ▲ | latexr an hour ago | parent [-] | | Fortunately, these days it seems more common that games highlight important pieces of information in the dialogue, so you at least get the important keywords. I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember one where I was pressing “A” furiously for minutes, with no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing any gameplay. A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It throws you directly into the action and shows you “this is how the game is going to feel” from the get go. Then it pulls back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come and liked it, I became much more interested and patient in experiencing the story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossCode | | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, exposition overload is a rookie mistake a lot of writers make. And video game writers in particular? Sometimes it feels like just having a Wattpad account could put you in top 50% of them. I've seen AAAs where saying the writing was "fanfic tier" would be an insult to fanfics. Like they either hire the cheapest people they can get, or give the job to someone like an executive's daughter with big ideas and no ability to execute on them. A good writer knows the power of "show don't tell", and knows the value of keeping the audience hungry and wanting for more. |
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| ▲ | hyfgfh 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Two words: Disco Elysium Maybe you need VA too |
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| ▲ | acomjean 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| His website is pretty fun. https://grumpygamer.com/ He also blogged the development of tumbleweed park https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html |
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| ▲ | szczepano 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| his new game link
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3773590/Death_by_Scrollin... |
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| ▲ | HelloUsername 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Ah, too bad to hear his upcoming game is cancelled! |
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| ▲ | p2detar 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s not. It’s about an older RPG. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@grumpygamer/1156577401223472... | |
| ▲ | abnercoimbre 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do we know why it was? | | |
| ▲ | schnebbau 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | He can't be trusted after fumbling the ending of Return to Monkey Island. | | |
| ▲ | donogh 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | In his defence, Monkey Island is Ron’s creation and the ending is probably what he always intended. It felt like a fitting conclusion to me that neatly tied a bow on the whole saga. | | |
| ▲ | simpetre 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | He's also been creating absurdist controversial endings to adventure games for a long time before Return to Monkey Island (SoMI2, Thimbleweed Park)... |
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| ▲ | kg 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The publishing and investment climate
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ron-gilbert-cancels-rpg-projec... It's pretty tough getting a game funded right now. | | |
| ▲ | willmadden 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's self-inflicted. The big studios are beyond terrible. The games are more about social conditioning than entertainment. See Clair Obscur. They got funding from the State of France and the French National Centre for Cinema, and the game is 100x better than the slop the big studios publish. | | |
| ▲ | samiwami 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Social conditioning? Clair Obscur is good and was very unique, but is not 100x than “the slop big studios publish”. | | |
| ▲ | UpsideDownRide 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Infinity times better coukd be a better hyperbole, very goos game versus no good. Dividing by zero gets you infinity instead of just 100 | | |
| ▲ | ido 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Let's just all make Clair Obscur/Minecraft/Blue Prince" is not a repeatable strategy (every indie dev is trying to make good games). How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys? Why don't the big studios today with all their money just hire another Beatles? Same reason why Ubisoft isn't just making another Balatro. Industrializing culture isn't (yet?) a solved problem. | | |
| ▲ | Supernaut an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys? The Beatles did only take a few days to knock out each of their earliest LPs. However, per Wikipedia, "the group spent 700 hours on [Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]. The final cost [...] was approximately £25,000 (equivalent to £573,000 in 2023)." So, actually, envelope-pushing cultural landmarks typically do require a lot of effort and money to complete. | |
| ▲ | recursivecaveat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | On the other hand I'm kind of shocked that the big gaming studios never seem to be fast followers. It feels like we've been through multiple waves of Balatro-likes from indie developers already. Where is the Ubisoft Lethal Company or something? You'd think having a studio full of experienced developers with tons of tech they could hop on trends quickly. It seems like they think it's beneath them or something though. Or maybe they're just structurally incapable of moving quickly. It did take 11 years and like 4 redesigns to make Skull & Bones after all. | | |
| ▲ | tikotus 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a conjencture, even if I do work in the industry but not AAA, but: Following the trends simply isn't part of their business model. Following current trends is a very unpredictable business. Many try, and many fail. AAA had the luxury of somewhat predictable sales. They can make big bets like working years on a game, since they know they will have millions of players. And they know smaller studios can't compete with them in that business. But, of course, making games is hard, and sometimes they fail. And now the free tools are getting really good, and smaller studios are becoming increasingly competent. Will we soon see the big ones fall? Their only way to survive is to keep going bigger, escaping the smaller studios to a place they can't reach. Now we have AAAA games. But is there a limit where players stop caring how many As a game has? | |
| ▲ | ido 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The more people you add the slower you get, not faster. Large companies are nutorously slow moving (and particularly slow to change directions) vs small upstarts. | | |
| ▲ | baud147258 an hour ago | parent [-] | | yeah, but at this point it's weird they just don't grab a studio, give them a funding for 2 years and say them 'copy the latest indie trends with a tad more polish' and let them cook to see what comes out. |
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