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CliffyB talks about new game design philosophy, wants less linear/scripted games

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
There's a lot more in the article, but I thought this would interest people the most.

Vox said:
Cliff Bleszinski on his new game design philosophy:

"I always refer to that .gif that went around [comparing the] first-person shooter design of Doom to where we’ve gotten to: straight hall, cutscenes, straight hall, cutscenes, straight hall, cutscene. So many games these days, with their campaigns, feel like the game designer is chasing you with a sharp pointed stick saying,’You will feel something at this moment.’

My favorite games lately are the ones when you come into a hallway and you are like, ‘Oh, how did that dungeon instance turn out for you?’ ‘Oh, well I went in as a mage and I did this or I snuck entirely through that one,’ or, ‘I haven’t even seen that, where is that.’ As opposed to, ‘Yes, I came around the exact same corner, and I saw the exact same tower fall, and I saw the exact same experience.’ And if you look at it from a production standpoint, the fancy falling tower in the scripted experience is actually much more expensive but it yields far less of the actual gameplay.


So I want to get back to systems interacting. This is something Will Wright talks about all the time and always has. I would sit there, being a 20-something at DICE, being "I’m Cliffy, blah blah blah" with all that young swagger, not listening to his wisdom, and [saying] ‘I’m going to go make a fancy scripted Hollywood experience.’

[I’m] really realizing that there is a direct correlation, bugs notwithstanding, between how good your game is and how many unique YouTube videos it can yield. And that is one of the mantras I am continuing to hammer.

The amount of viral videos we sent around of Skyrim of millions of wheels of cheese going down a mountain or a frozen bear that flies off into space -- it is just golden. You want a game where programmers are like, ‘How did that happen? Did I even code that?’ That is when things are great and we had that in many ways with Unreal Tournament [with] emerging gameplay [like] teleporting and the translocator. I want to get all of our games back towards that in the future."
Source: http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/4/2/2910735/better-with-age-a-history-of-epic-games
 

Sinatar

Official GAF Bottom Feeder
Hopefully more designers come around to this viewpoint.

All these identikit linear corridor crawl shooters are painfully boring.
 
Testify!

This is the image he's mentioning by the way:

BITmX.jpg
 

Ketch

Member
Thank goodness. Now maybe if some other folks will realize the same things we'll stop seeing the same game come out every 2 months.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Go back to Unreal 1, Cliffy! It was a glorious game, barely any scripted events (the few that were there were pretty cool though). Telling the story through the translator was pretty cool.
 
You know what else, in the age of used game sales everywhere it's a very smart strategy to make a game with some degree of freedom and dymanicism. Not every game has to be huge open world like Skyrim or Just Cause 3, but by widening the space of the levels a bit (like the Halo or Crysis games, specifically the outdoor areas), throwing in vehicles, and letting you approach objectives in a variety of ways- all these things add replay value and may very well hold someone back from trading a game in as soon as they've beaten it.

In contrast your average Call of Duty style game- once you've beaten one of those games once, you've seen everything there was to see just about, and done everything you could do (other than changing difficulty levels or going for silly collectibles.)
 

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
As someone gets older, they start to realize the wisdom of their peers. That's something awesome to take from that. I'm glad that Cliff is seeing that open world emergent gameplay is way better than scripted sequences.

Hopefully that shows through in his future games.
 
As great as amazing open world games are, amazing linear games are just as good.

I want there to be a lot of tight, guided linear games and amazing, open games.

There's room for both and different games suit different game designs.
 
Sounds fantastic, but it's like he's preparing everyone for their next game or something. I prefer systems-based experiences to the wannabe AAA cinematic tripe that's been crushing the industry. What's Molyneux up to?
 

PowderedToast

Junior Member
he's only just realizing this is a valid way of designing games? that's comforting. non-linear and linear games have co-existed for a long time and both are as legitimate as each other. i expect better insight from such a celebrated name.
 
I feel Deux Ex forced you to play stealty, any other way leads to your death.

"Forced" is a bit much. I mean, the bosses certainly don't fit in with stealth. The stealth was just more obvious, but run-and-gun was still an option.

And even when playing stealth, there's the choice between lethal, non-lethal, non-contact... which is what Cliffy was talking about. "Oh hey, how did you deal with the police station? It took me ages sneaking through the back, left a right mess." "What? You didn't just chat up the guy at the reception? Ha!"
 
Um... some games are going for that experience. So what? Blame the me too devs wanting to cash in on such a game and not the games that do it well. In the day we had linear side scrollers and open top down games.
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
Go back to Unreal 1, Cliffy! It was a glorious game, barely any scripted events (the few that were there were pretty cool though). Telling the story through the translator was pretty cool.

I thought Unreal 1 was terribad. The level design was trying so hard to be like Quake but it failed completely.
 

KageMaru

Member
I really hope more developers realize what Cliff is talking about. I enjoy the random linear games like Gears and UC, but the more open games are far more fun and involving.

Go back to Unreal 1, Cliffy! It was a glorious game, barely any scripted events (the few that were there were pretty cool though). Telling the story through the translator was pretty cool.

The hallway where the lights gradually turn off will forever be burned in my mind. =)

IIRC Cliff himself designed that part too =p
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
I'd love this, but wouldn't this extend development time to ridiculous levels?
 

Misterhbk

Member
Eh, idk, I like a well written script. I like to feel connected to the characters in playing as and and involved with. These open games with all their "freedom" don't really give you that connection. Don't get me wrong, I love te Skyrim's and Dragon Age's but I always feel like I'm just a bot with no emotion or anything. Those games are great but I wouldn't want all my games to feel like that.
 

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
Yeah, but hasn't the linear trend been a reaction to people complaining about getting lost in levels?

(Not saying that good design - like Valve's for instance - can't overcome that.)

It's more of an OVERreaction. But you're right: good design overcomes that.
 

theBishop

Banned
I like his point about systems interacting. I have a little concern about the fps map thing. First, Doom had shitty map design. Everyone used to agree that this is no-fucking-fun:

Doom Gameplay:
1. Wonder around, looking for the unlocked door
2. Find unlocked door
3. kill bad guys
4. find 'yellow' keycard
5. wonder around looking for door locked with 'yellow' symbol
6. repeat with 'red', 'blue' and 'green' keycards.

There's no one answer. Yeah obviously FF13 got it wrong. But Doom had it wrong too. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Bioshock is relatively open, but still directs you. Dead Space is also pretty good.
 

Derrick01

Banned
As great as amazing open world games are, amazing linear games are just as good.

Good for 1 playthrough at least. I'm at the point where it's tough to justify buying linear rollercoaster games at full price because like movies they're only good for 1 go.

We should be moving towards a more open world/unscripted future to evolve the gameplay. Story and character development doesn't necessarily have to suffer either.
 
Good for 1 playthrough at least. I'm at the point where it's tough to justify buying linear rollercoaster games at full price because like movies they're only good for 1 go.

Disagree. I must've played Gears 1 and 2 at least half a dozen times each. More, probably. Ditto for the Uncharted games, CoD 4 + MW2, etc etc.

It's never as exciting as the first time, but I can appreciate a linear experience just as many times as any other game.

I mean, I've played Resi 4 maybe 15 times, and that's linear as fuck.

Man, I love linear games. Open world games are amazing when done right, but so few get it right. So, so few.
 
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