PAX is always a great opportunity to collect your thoughts and reflect on the industry. Last year the themes I saw crystallized around the changing demographics of games: the takeover by casual gaming, the encroaching territory of free to play, the failure of developers to reflect the diversity lurking beneath the surface. Those problems haven’t been “solved” by a long shot, but now those ideas have baked for a while and don’t seem to terrify as many people. The message this year, if I may blithely condense 3 days and 80k people into a single concept, was taking these new developments for granted and focusing on the best methods for moving forward.
PAX Panels 2011
Written by:zach
Some very nice insights. I remember playing edutainment style games as a kid and being very engaged in them, definitely worth more exploration. It's also a shame there isn't more collaboration between writers and level designers, you'd think a couple twenty minute discussions could really improve environmental story telling
ya but the other thing brought up in that talk was the issue of pipelining. if the writers are lucky, story goes in first and everything follows from that including levels and game design and etc. but the story stays relatively immutable while levels and design are at risk of sudden radical change or cuts (cue the silent anguish of the V:TM writer here, again) – and add in voice acting which is even more expensive and needs to be locked in early (not to leave out text that needs to be translated) and it's pretty easy to see how even with the best intentions the whole idea of a neat orderly progression from writing to execution can spiral into madness.
THAT SAID: yeah i agree hugely that process affects output in a significant and extreme way. and i would not be even a little bit surprised if lots of studios were not optimizing their pipelines to get stuff like better environmental storytelling a higher priority because how do you justify that to management in terms of $$$$$$$?