Todd Howard at NYCC

[M-26-7]

I could see him asking that joke, then quickly following it up with 'No, seriously I really liked...' It's still quite crass, but at least it's not being a total jerk.

 

[Yellow]

My argument was: it doesn’t matter if people remember it, this is really really cool. So who cares? It’s cool, trust me, this world is really cool. And doing it this way, we just felt that this was the game that we wanted to make. And a lot of other people like press guys or other hardcore people who are involved in the telling of people: “this is cool, this is what you should be interested in”, a lot of them said “yeah, this is awesome.”

[/quote]

Now I don't claim to be a social butterfly myself, but is Todd Howard really the person who should deem what 'cool' is?

Todd Howard, who admits to being the "Chess club geek from high school?"

Being a geek is okay and all, just stick to your geek roots, man. If you had, maybe we would've had a better Fallout.

 

[kyle]

Suddenly my hopes for a non-FPS X-COM are a bit higher. Well, if that's what he's working on, anyway.

Dont remind people of this game, please. Its better of being dead.

 

[Ausdoerrt]

Levine: “King’s Bounty,” a Russian strategy game. Played a ton of it.

Howard: “Can I say Fallout 3?”</blockquote>

LOOKIE! It's a guy who knows something about games and a jackass being interviewed together?

Either way, bitter irony can't help but bring the words "By Gamers, For Gamers" springing to mind.

If Todd considers himself a gamers, maybe he's just making the games to please himself, and make some money in the process? "By Todd, for Todd" anyone?

 

[DarkPhilly]

Is it really that easy to one up the Toddler?

 

[UncannyGarlic]

Howard: Wii has toy value to it as opposed to story arc or entertainment. Bethesda has Wii games division working on medieval games.

Not seeing how the Wii has any less "story arc or entertainment" value than the 360 and PS3.

Howard: Frustration, not boredom is the main reason people quit games.

Depends on the game and the person but I'd say it's generally dissatisfaction (generally boredom or realizing that it's inferior to other games) that causes people to quit playing games.

My argument was: it doesn’t matter if people remember it, this is really really cool. So who cares? It’s cool, trust me, this world is really cool. And doing it this way, we just felt that this was the game that we wanted to make. And a lot of other people like press guys or other hardcore people who are involved in the telling of people: “this is cool, this is what you should be interested in”, a lot of them said “yeah, this is awesome.”

That's from: http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/2294/Fallout-3-Interview/p2/. Just in case anyone was wondering.

 

[sarfa]

Does Todd just not game all that much anymore, or do his tastes truly run as such that, put on the spot, he could think of no single stand-out offering from last year's batch? Either way, bitter irony can't help but bring the words "By Gamers, For Gamers" springing to mind"

To be fair, Todd has fully embraced that ideal. The task of making good quests, etc and fixing bugs in Fallout 3 (and Oblivion) fell to people with the modding kits. Hence, by gamers for gamers.

I honestly hoped people this arrogant wre incapable of being put into leadership positions. It has to piss off his coworkers if he's really like this, which would seriously undermine his ability to act as executive producer you'd think. Well, "hope in vain" rather than "think".

 

[Ausdoerrt]

Howard: Frustration, not boredom is the main reason people quit games.

Depends on the game and the person but I'd say it's generally dissatisfaction (generally boredom or realizing that it's inferior to other games) that causes people to quit playing games.

Yeah, and there was no frustration in FO3, no, none at all. From the stupid metro to the mutant brute getting stuck between rocks when I looked forward to a challenge. Not at all.

 

[Atomic Cowboy]

Howard: Frustration, not boredom is the main reason people quit games.

Oh, absolutely. I'm still waiting for my dream game to come out. When you hit start, a screen comes up saying 'You Win!' while an electrode zaps the pleasure centre of your brain.

*Sigh*

The whole point of gaming is frustration - in discrete, measured ammounts. You set up a series of obstacles ranging from 'somewhat easy' to 'pretty hard' (while avoiding 'super easy' and 'really REALLY hard'), and put a piece of cheese at the end. It should be good cheese, so that the player doesn't feel cheated, but as long as it's not bad cheese it tastes ten times as good because of the effort it took.

Here's an example: right now my car's idle is acting funny. I'm not sure what the problem is, and I'll have to measure about a dozen different things to have any clue. That's frustration, and when I eventually get her working I'll feel like a million bucks (or at least a thousand, which is probably what her resale value is). This is a good situation to be in.

So what's a bad situation? Well, changing the oil filter, for example. It's mindless and dirty, with very little payoff; I hate doing it. It's not frustrating, it's boring. If I had to do it every week I'd buy a new car. Alternatively, what if I had some sort of electrical gremlin? Trying to figure these out is a pain, with no guarantee of success. This would be too frustrating - after a couple days trying to fix it and failing, I'd buy a new car.

So which is it, Howard? Do people stop playing games because you asked them to jump over 500 meter fence one time? Or is it that you asked them to jump over a 1 meter fence five-hundred times? While there have certainly been games in the past which turned the frustration knob up to ten (how did King's Quest I deserve a sequel?), I can't imagine a game made in the past ten years where this has happened. Most games nowadays come packed with low-grade frustration and low grade cheese.

And one last thing - RPGs are unlike Action Games, which are a linear-series of thinking problems, and FPSs, which are a linear series of tactical problems - there far more like Strategy games, in that you're not just fighting a the proximate battle (performing quest X), you're also thinking about the long-term strategy. The whole point of these games is to design and implement an engine that will carry you through to the end of the game - and if you make the wrong choices you don't get there.

Now let's look at Fallout 3: ostensibly it has all the trappings of the RPG genre. You step into the room and there's a whole ton of switches, dials, and blinking lights. "Awesome," you say, "Let's see what these things do to each other, so that I can get the best bang for my buck." So you play for a while - you only have access to a couple of switches and dials, at the beginning - and just as you're getting to the stage where some interesting reactions can happen between the different components... nothing. The karma switch goes off and on. The combat dials do very little. All of a sudden you realize that you're playing a Strategy game where every unit has exactly the same combat stats.

It's not frustration Howard, it really isn't. What you're sensing is a bored and upset public.

 

[wolfsrain]

Wow! The gap between the answers is crushing. Not gonna quote Todd, as we already established his level of character and his IQ.
But Ken's answers are something that we expect to see more often from the industry's representatives:

"Ken Levine: Achievements changed the way gamers interact with each other. We’re not just shooting each other in the head. We’re peeping scores."

"Levine: Is he worried about fans? It’s a fine line to walk with the fan base. The customer is always right but there’s no singular customer. Must take into account what fans want, what they don’t know they want and what they think they want."

"Levine: DLC is such a new part of our business, the answer is what the f— do we know?"

Mr. Levine went with straight, honest answers. And he didn't go to advertise Bioshock in every little sentence he got out of his mouth.
On the other hand, we have our little Toad (err, Todd, yeah), which can't help himself but to give half arsed answers, marketing his company's product at least twice in one sentence and speaking like he is the one who knows what goes on in the minds of the fans.
I'm starting to believe that Bethesda it's some kind of religious sect, seeing people like Toadie and Petty (Petey...). Praised be Bethesda and its Messiahs, right?!

 

[HoKa]

Note: King's Bounty: The Legend was indeed last year's best game.

King's Bounty was a piece of shit. Any HoMM game is better designed and much more addictive (and not to mention aesthetically pleasing).

2008 was a horrible year for computer games.

 

[Ranne]

Note: King's Bounty: The Legend was indeed last year's best game.

King's Bounty was a piece of shit. Any HoMM game is better designed and much more addictive (and not to mention aesthetically pleasing).

2008 was a horrible year for computer games.

I wouldn't King's Bounty the game of the year either. It has it merits, but I only see it as a seriously washed-out version of the older HoMM games. Only where HoMM offered strategy, King's Bounty offers rather boring and repetitive quest design. From this perspective, does it matter who cloned what first? I'd rate the game as high as I rated HoMM V and most other games that come from Russia — promising in concept, amateurish in execution.

For me, Mass Effect and GTAIV were the only two 2008 games that were truly and throughly enjoyable. I only play on PC, and I haven't had a chance to see Red Alert 3, Left 4 Dead, Prince of Persia, and a couple of other popular titles. If I had to choose the third place, I'd give it to Assassin's Creed (innovation), Crysis: Warhead (quality), or Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (cooperative gameplay). World of Goo, Audiosurf, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and other one-hit wonders? Let's put it this way, if these games were made by Rockstar Games, would any of you still consider them viable nominees? For me, to compare World of Goo to, say, Grand Theft Auto IV is to compare a well-made doghouse to a a soaring skyscraper. One good idea is simply not enough.

 

[Brother None]

You played GTA IV on PC and you'd still call it GotY?

That's borderline insane.

Of the mainstream titles GTA IV was the best. But it was a poor year for gaming.

Dismissing King's Bounty as boring is just lazy. Comparing it to the original or the HoMM series and finding it to fall short does not remove the fact that it is a surprisingly polished and aesthetically pleasing game with a solid core concept. It's far from perfect, but in a weak year it's easily tops.

 

[Ranne]

You played GTA IV on PC and you'd still call it GotY?

That's borderline insane.

As I said before,
GTA IV may not be a good port, but it's nowhere near as bad as some paint it to be. The game requires an insane amount of prerequisite installations (Games Live, NET framework, DirectX, C++ redistributes, Rockstar Social Club, even SP3 for XP x86, I hear) and all my technical expertise says that this is probably one major reason so many people are encountering so many problems with it. .. . I managed to spend at least 20 hours with the game without encountering a single crash, game-breaking bug, or any similarly bad problem so many people are screaming about. All I can noticed was the lack of SLI support and less than stellar but still pretty acceptable performance. Incidentally, same goes for a friend of mine who happened to finish it on an entirely different setup, one with a different operating system and a different video card. If such firsthand experiences do make me less susceptible to unfamiliar people's "GTA4 is unplayable!" or "worst console port ever!" claims . . .

Dismissing King's Bounty as boring is just lazy.

At least it is honest. It took me a couple of hours to get into the game and to find a perfect army setup for my mage (i.e., a couple of quick units and a whole bunch of ranged casters). Considering that the main map is only used for basic movement, the gameplay became increasingly boring and repetitive after that. Once again, I would never call King's Bounty a bad game. It's a well-made remake that happens to be uninventive and unoriginal. A clone of a clone of a clone, there’s nothing special about King's Bounty that could deserve the award. Let's save it for Fallout 3

 

[Brother None]

Well then you're a lucky one. It's still one of the worst console ports of all time, tho'. Easily.

Haven't we been over this nonsense before? Dismissing - purely by personal experience - general complaints supported by hard facts is b/s. I mean, congrats on lucking out, but I can't finish the game due to massive memory leaks, much to my detriment because I was enjoying it.

At least it is honest.

Uh...what? How does this statement even begin to make sense?

Considering that the main map is only used for basic movement, the gameplay became increasingly boring and repetitive after that. Once again, I would never call King's Bounty a bad game. It's a well-made remake that happens to be uninventive and unoriginal.

Right, because right now we're completely flooded with tactical RPG/TBS hybrids. And I'm not sure if being uninventive and unoriginal is supposed to be a criticism in this sense. What exactly is wrong with just doing what works when no one else is doing that?

And I gotta wonder...Did you finish the game? Either you're a tactical genius or playing on easy, because getting through that game with a single set-up and without varying tactics per region/type of enemy is fairly impossible. I mean, how would your casters not get slaughtered when facing dragons and/or greater demons?

 

[Multidirectional]

You played GTA IV on PC and you'd still call it GotY?

That's borderline insane.

I believe GTA IV PC experience largely depends on what PC does one have. Some people can barely run it (and not necessarily cause of requirements), while others may have no problems at all. I personally had very few problems with it, and after last patch it runs even better on my PC. Not a single crash too. Considering better graphics than in console version, and superior aiming with mouse over gamepad and I can say that I would choose PC port over console version any time. Only real complaint I have about it is annoying "Rockstar Social Club" bullshit. Of course that's not the case for everyone.

I can't get into "Mass Effect" though, I tried really hard several times already. I wish I knew the appeal of this game, it bores me to death both as RPG and shooter. I'd rather play Gears Of War.

And.. GTA IV is a much better PC port than Saints Row 2, that one is borderline terrible.

 

[Brother None]

I believe GTA IV PC experience largely depends on what PC does one have.

Then it's a shit game in technical sense. To imply anything else is insane. My computer isn't perfect, but it isn't low-end, and it runs GTA IV fine...unless GTA IV decided to dump all textures, or goes into massive memory leak mode.

Seriously, guys, are any of you seriously going to claim GTA IV PC is not a shit port? If so, please bring better proof than "it runs fine on my computer". Hell, begin by explaining the insanely steep system requirements.

 

[Multidirectional]

I didn't mean it's not a shit port. I just tried to paint a picture how someone would call GTA IV "GOTY" after playing it on PC, and not be insane, as you suggested. I know people are having many problems with it, and of course I realise system requirements are nonsensic. It runs worse than Crysis, while looking much much worse too.

On the other hand I feel like Saints Row 2 took shitty porting even further, I could barely get 20+FPS while indoors with it, and it looks last-gen compared to GTA IV.

 

[Ranne]

Well then you're a lucky one. It's still one of the worst console ports of all time, tho'. Easily.

Haven't we been over this nonsense before? Dismissing - purely by personal experience - general complaints supported by hard facts is b/s.

I guess I should have quoted myself in full:
One of the worst console ports ever? Er... Try playing Resident Evil 4 or Dynasty Warriors/Warriors Orochi on PC and come back to me on that one. . . . I guess you haven't played any of the games I mentioned. Or, say, Beijing 2008, or Bully or any other really crappy console ports out there. Once again, there are ports out there that are equally unplayable for everyone and their bugs have less to do with bad installations, firewall restrictions or broken no-cd cracks. Ports that, say, require a Xbox 360 controller to run. Or ones with complete lack of mouse support. Or how about ones that only run on default 4:3 type resolution and offer no graphic/sound/control options whatsoever?

As a former PC technician, I don't really care about anonymous complaints. Just because "somebody's Internet isn't working", doesn't really make the Internet dysfunctional, does it? I gave you my perfectly reasonable assumptions above. Two patches, three different installations on three different machines, and countless in-game hours later, I still don't see what it is about GTA IV that makes it that bad.

Right, because right now we're completely flooded with tactical RPG/TBS hybrids. And I'm not sure if being uninventive and unoriginal is supposed to be a criticism in this sense. What exactly is wrong with just doing what works when no one else is doing that?

Nothing is wrong with it. As I said in my previous post, I just don't believe that an unenhanced clone of a previously cloned product is worthy of the Game of The Year award.

And I gotta wonder...Did you finish the game? Either you're a tactical genius or playing on easy, because getting through that game with a single set-up and without varying tactics per region/type of enemy is fairly impossible. I mean, how would your casters not get slaughtered when facing dragons and/or greater demons?

I'm a tactical genius playing on normal, and an occasional removal of more delicate units from the field of battle is hardly a notable gameplay feature.

P.S. If you're still having these problems with GTA IV after the patch, try lowering your video memory consumption settings.

 

[Brother None]

As a former PC technician, I don't really care about anonymous complaints. Just because "somebody's Internet isn't working", doesn't really make the Internet dysfunctional, does it? I gave you my perfectly reasonable assumptions above. Two patches, three different installations on three different machines, and countless in-game hours later, I still don't see what it is about GTA IV that makes it that bad.

So let me get this straight. You're honestly saying, based on the grand total of three tests, that GTA IV's PC port is fine, and all the people complaining are just imagining shit?

Fine, don't call it the worst ever if it makes you feel better. It's still a piece of shit.

Nothing is wrong with it. As I said in my previous post, I just don't believe that an unenhanced clone of a previously cloned product is worthy of the Game of The Year award.

What exactly do you think game of the year means? Let me answer that for you: It means best of the year. It doesn't mean "great game". It doesn't even mean "good game". If everything else was shit, and this year it was, then you don't have to be that good to be the best.

And that is if I even agreed KB:TL isn't a great game. But it is. It is an unenhanced clone, yes, yet it is still great.

I'm a tactical genius playing on normal, and an occasional removal of more delicate units from the field of battle is hardly a notable gameplay feature.

Interesting. It is what it is, I suppose. I had a hard time of it, and certainly had to adopt my tactics and use rage and spells to the fullest to get through the fights later on, though I made the mistake of skipping tougher fights early so I was probably undermatched by that point.

But honestly, I'm not sure what to do with your criticism otherwise. It's not a perfect game, and calling it just a clone is valid enough. I'm not sure I can take a complaint that the game's combat is simple seriously, tho', I can only feel you're reaching.

If you're still having these problems with GTA IV after the patch, try lowering your video memory consumption settings.

I'm not playing GTA IV anymore.

You...uh...honestly think I hadn't tried lowering settings? Heck, I did everything from turn down the ingame settings to using a memory optimizer with an auto-recover feature to using various tips from the official forums including simple command lines to this one - which is set to circumvent broken programming that should simply not be there. None of it worked and I have better things to do.

The fact that "GTA IV memory leak" zoomed up as torrent fakes and a popular virus file says it all, really.

Seriously, I could take your "it runs fine it's all your fault" approach to GTA IV's horrible porting more seriously if I wasn't someone who keeps his computer perfectly polished and knows how to deal with technical issues clearly enough in almost all cases. I'm fairly sure there is no one to blame for GTA IV messing up on my computer except GTA IV.

On the other hand I feel like Saints Row 2 took shitty porting even further, I could barely get 20+FPS while indoors with it, and it looks last-gen compared to GTA IV.

Yes, so I heard. I was looking forward to that game, but "fool me once" and all that. I'll pick it up later.