Všeobecně o hrách

Mark Darrah (ex-Bioware) odpovídá na otázky.

Vybírám (a krátím) nejzajímavější odpovědi, enjoy:

Q: What is the limit of optimization in the game…
A: Two things. One, there's usually a line that we're not willing to cross from a fidelity perspective, and then two, there's a limit to how much money we can spend on the optimization in order to make it run on really old hardware. And then there are actual hard limits, bc each creature, you have in a game, needs to have time to update its AI, so you can't take it forever, unless you're starting to get in really deep and start to strip out creatures and stuff, in which case you're not really optimizing the game, you're porting it to another piece of hardware. So, you can make anything run on anything if you have no fidelity constrains whatsoever.

Q: People think that the Series S is holding back the next generation of games…
A: Honestly, what I would argue is if you want 60 fps, you want the Series S to hold out for as long as possible, bc one thing the Series S does is it means you have to have a version that runs on the Series S and that version that runs on the Series S can probably run at 60 fps on the X and the PS5. So, if frame rate is what you care about, you should want the Series S to hold on for as long as it can.

Q: The time and people required to create AAA experiences keeps going up…
A: I think it's in the process of starting to break down. Budgets have gone up and up and up, complexity has gone up and up and up, it's not linear, a team of 200 people is not twice as hard to manage as a team of 100 people, it's probably four times as hard.

Q: Is liberal politic really plaguing game companies or is it just a paranoia by conservative political group?
A: It is absolutely paranoia by conservative political groups, most video games are pro status quo and that is a very fundamental conservative belief which is that things should remain largely as they are (…) if anything the messaging is on the other side of that.

Q: Why are games teased so early?
A: Bioware has teased games for a couple of reasons. One, EA feels like their press conference is too light and they need something to throw in there that makes it look like they're not just making sports games, so therefore you get an early early tease of Anthem. Or, the team feels like they're gonna get canceled, so by making an announcement they make the game more real and make it much harder for the publisher to cancel them, that's the primary reason why Dreadwolf was at TGA in 2017.

Q: What happens inside the company after, for example, Jason Schreier releases his newest article? Do you think journalism is positively influencing the industry?
A: I would argue that other than Jason Schreier most of the industry doesn't contain journalists, most of them are more like people who are reporting what the companies want them to report, which is great, it's actually what exists mostly in movies as well, there's not a lot of investigative journalism happening in video games, so for the most part if what they're doing is reporting what the company is doing, they're not influencing the industry positively or negatively, really, Jason Schreier, as annoying as some of it can be, is probably influencing the industry positively, he's forcing some of these conversations into the light which probably is what we need.

Q: I feel like we're seeing far less linear RPGs in favor of open world experiences…
A: I actually feel like we're moving away from this (…) I think we're actually backing away from this (…) If you're gonna do storytelling in an open world, you need to have a story that exists in these bubbles and makes sense in the person's mind knitting it together, but that weakens your ability to do a strong central arc, bc the person is wandering through it in a relatively random way.

Q: Of all types of AAA games, RPG seems to be one genre everybody struggles to produce as of late…
A: RPGs are the most content driven of all the games (…) I think what we'll see is a little bit of backing away from that fidelity cliff and maybe that's the best way forward.

Q: Beside the rusty launch that mostly got fixed eventually, people still had complains about the story of Andromeda, bc the Ryder twins were childish in almost all serious situations (…) Do you think Alec Ryder being the protagonist for the full game would have been a better choice for the game story and audience?
A: I don't think Alec being the protagonist would be better. I did provide a feedback on Andromeda and I said that this feels like a CW show and was told that's on purpose. I've actually thought about this some more since then and I actually think it's this: Shepard is a protagonist of an action movie from the 80s and 90s, Ryder is a protagonist from an action movie from the 00s, so there's essentially an intentional kinda moving with the audience to some degree. I don't think this is the biggest problem with the story in Andromeda. My concern on the Andromeda's biggest problem is that it could've told a refugee story, it could've told a story about colonialism, but instead it tells the story in the middle of that that isn't the interesting version of the story.

Q: Do you think if EA managed more RPGs, it would have been easier for Bioware to make more RPG quality of life features?
A: Yeah, for sure, EA just inherently doesn't understand RPGs, the same as they don't understand the Sims, so it's always been a struggle to get them to understand why things take the amount of time they are, why certain features matter, why other features don't really matter, there's been a disconnect all along, for sure.

Q: Will Bioware make a new IP?
A: I don't think it's gonna be allowed to make a new IP for quite a long time, bc I think EA will tend to interpret Anthem's problems as a problem, so I think it's gonna be a while, for sure.

Q: I remember you talking about how most videogames promote the idea of the exceptionalism of few individuals that actually solve problems while most people are useless. What are some other ways in which videogames are shaping our vision of the world, for better or worse?
A: Most games are very status quo focused, bc usually the general plot is there is a status quo, something's coming to upset that, you need to fight that to bring it back to the status quo. They are inherently conservative in their general storytelling. But that's true of most media…