Editorial RPG Codex Report: A Codexian Visit to inXile Entertainment

[Azarkon]

It's occurred to me that authority and legacy may be a problem for development studios run by old school developers. Think about it: you're George Ziets, you've got a lot of cool ideas, but are you going to challenge Colin "second only to Chris Avellone" McComb on the writing in a Torment game? Probably not, and from the interview it seemed as though George just went with the "more words the better, Torment = wall of text" style without questioning it. Of course, that doesn't excuse why whoever decided that more words was better came up with that idea in the first place. But many of the checks and balances in a development studio like InXile might be out of place due to authority differences. Which just makes it even more important that those older, more famous developers make the right choices.

 

[ArchAngel]

I'd say it's self shock on the part of writing teams. Who would have thunk a wordy chunk of text disguised as a game fall flat!
I am not surprised at the passive hostility of the representive for the writing dept. But thank god for that small favour, that Numenera fall flat, or we would have a flood of amateur writers jump on the gaming industry, professional writing being competitive as it is.
That said, the various insufficiency of gameplay prolly can be fixed in patches and mods. If we are lucky, expansions.

I will note that "commercial failure" is not a bad point in Codex's book, particularly mine. We like flawed gems, and a feature of flawed gem generally is a low sale number. bad for devs, sure, but there you have it.

We're also trying to get more efficient by using outside contractors. Like for the combat system in Bard's Tale IV we're using a small team out of North Carolina. They're not employees; it's about four people.

Not sure if outsourcing your combat system to contractors is a good idea, but I guess we'll find out.

Could work if instead of North Carolina they outsourced it to a group in Serbia known for making a good tactical rpg. As it is, we are probably going to get a bad(worse) version of Heartstone.

Nah, Eastern Europe, either Poland or Russia is where it's at. I would have said jap devs will save the day but those otaku fuckers are expensive.

And he blame Codex's opinion of wallotext. Problem is, Codex is not a hivemind, and storyfags is just one very vocal but minor faction.

I don't know if you are trying to be edgy or you somehow managed to not play Underrail, but nobody from Poland or Russia has made the game of similar or better quality as those Serbian guys did (at least in terms of tactical gameplay and combat).

I see your Underrail and raise a triple of Silent Storm engines, a full house of Space Rangers engine, and Witcher series. Say what you will but Eastern European and Russians are good coders, artists, and mapmakers.

Silent Storm is super old, what have those guys do recently?
Space Rangers LOL, that game cannot be even put into same sentence as Underrail when it comes to tactical combat. Witcher series?! Are we still talking about games with tactical combat here?
I was wondering if you were going to be retarded enough to mention a storyfag game in a conversation about tactical combat system design and I guess you proved yourself a retard afterall.

 

[MRY]

It's occurred to me that authority and legacy may be a problem for development studios run by old school developers. Think about it: you're George Ziets, you've got a lot of cool ideas, but are you going to challenge Colin "second only to Chris Avellone" McComb on the writing in a Torment game? Probably not, and from the interview it seemed as though George just went with the "more words the better, Torment = wall of text" style without questioning it. Of course, that doesn't excuse why whoever decided that more words was better came up with that idea in the first place. But many of the checks and balances in a development studio like InXile might be out of place due to authority differences. Which just makes it even more important that those older, more famous developers make the right choices.

All the meetings I attended had hearty debate and no one seemed to be holding anything back, though George is a particularly attentive listener and somewhat less likely to go off half-cocked than someone like, say, me. As a result, when he gave an opinion it had a kind of oracular force to it. But still, he chimed in at least a couple dozen times that I heard, offering positive and negative feedback in more or less equal measure (though always in a respectful way). The idea that he would be intimidated by Colin's stature or unlikely to give helpful advice is extremely implausible to me, and equally implausible is the idea that Colin wouldn't accept it.

I don't think anyone made a decision in favor of more words. From the get go, there were fairly strict guidelines on how many nodes per character type (e.g., a trivial character would have so many, a minor character so many, etc.), and each character was classified before being handed to a writer. Each node was also limited in the maximum number of characters it could contain (a truly hard-and-fast limit, with a recommended limit about 20% below that one). My guess is that the increased word count happened not by some decision at a high level, but rather because each writer tended to push near the node cap for each character, not even as a conscious choice but out of the goal of having the maximum amount of reactivity and branching possible. Then there may have been individual exceptions to the node cap based on particular factors, and those might've been granted too liberally, probably with the view that it wouldn't hurt if you went over by five nodes here or ten nodes there. In other words, I suspect it was a collective, unconscious, structural process rather than an individual decision.

 

[rohand]

So Bubbles stealthily returns with another Codex interview.

 

[Azarkon]

It's occurred to me that authority and legacy may be a problem for development studios run by old school developers. Think about it: you're George Ziets, you've got a lot of cool ideas, but are you going to challenge Colin "second only to Chris Avellone" McComb on the writing in a Torment game? Probably not, and from the interview it seemed as though George just went with the "more words the better, Torment = wall of text" style without questioning it. Of course, that doesn't excuse why whoever decided that more words was better came up with that idea in the first place. But many of the checks and balances in a development studio like InXile might be out of place due to authority differences. Which just makes it even more important that those older, more famous developers make the right choices.

All the meetings I attended had hearty debate and no one seemed to be holding anything back, though George is a particularly attentive listener and somewhat less likely to go off half-cocked than someone like, say, me. As a result, when he gave an opinion it had a kind of oracular force to it. But still, he chimed in at least a couple dozen times that I heard, offering positive and negative feedback in more or less equal measure (though always in a respectful way). The idea that he would be intimidated by Colin's stature or unlikely to give helpful advice is extremely implausible to me, and equally implausible is the idea that Colin wouldn't accept it.

I don't think anyone made a decision in favor of more words. From the get go, there were fairly strict guidelines on how many nodes per character type (e.g., a trivial character would have so many, a minor character so many, etc.), and each character was classified before being handed to a writer. Each node was also limited in the maximum number of characters it could contain (a truly hard-and-fast limit, with a recommended limit about 20% below that one). My guess is that the increased word count happened not by some decision at a high level, but rather because each writer tended to push near the node cap for each character, not even as a conscious choice but out of the goal of having the maximum amount of reactivity and branching possible. Then there may have been individual exceptions to the node cap based on particular factors, and those might've been granted too liberally, probably with the view that it wouldn't hurt if you went over by five nodes here or ten nodes there. In other words, I suspect it was a collective, unconscious, structural process rather than an individual decision.

So you think all these attempts to hype up the 1.6 million words count are after the fact justification? It wasn't part of the plan?

I just don't understand why developers think walls of text are the best way to honor old school CRPGs. Personally, having played through the game, I think the Crises are underdeveloped and underused. There was so much more they could've done with better, more reactive Crises versus 600,000 extra words.

 

[MRY]

So you think all these attempts to hype up the 1.6 million words count are after the fact justification? It wasn't part of the plan?

People try to come up with quality metrics that roughly coincide to their particular traits. A lesser version of this is that people highlight whatever random factoids they're associated with as if they are noteworthy. For example, I used to brag about Primordia having a three-man team that spanned three continents, but to be honest, I don't think that amounted to anything other than some headaches on coordinating team meetings. But it sounds neat, I guess, for people looking for an angle to talk about the game. The word count is something to talk about, but I definitely don't think it was a goal to push it higher.

I just don't understand why developers think walls of text are the best way to honor old school CRPGs.

Obviously they are a poor way to honor most old school CRPGs, which were generally not text heavy at all. But PS:T was text heavy, as were the Baldur's Gate games in their own way.

Personally, having played through the game, I think the Crises are underdeveloped and underused. There was so much more they could've done with more creative Crises instead 600,000 more words.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Time and money are fungible, and at least some management time and development money was spent on writing that could've been spent on Crises, but the two are really pretty different, mostly implemented by different people, I think, and Crises had special coding/scripting/art needs that writing didn't. I'm not saying that you're wrong. I haven't played the game, but almost all the reviews I've read complain about the Crises, which is really too bad because as they were described to me in concept, they sounded like the coolest thing ever and a huge leap forward in RPG encounters. I'm just not sure that you're right that the guns-or-butter equation here was better Crises or 600,000 more words. Someone in management would know better than I would, but I don't think you would've gotten that much more in Crisis resources by cutting back the writing. My sense is that a lot of resources did go into the Crises, they just didn't all come through as well as they sounded at conception.

 

[Darkzone]

your false sense of self entitlement.

I know it's trendy with manchildren of all ages to use nice, beefy expressions; i do. You know what isn't very trendy? Reading comprehension. Children need to read first, think afterwards and reply last.
There are many sites out there that have "guest writers"/anonymous "articles" and so on. Not coincidentally, they're all shit. All of them.
Are we shit? No. Will be become shit? Sincerely doubting it.
That however does not negate our just having set a bad precedent. Unlike what you think in that teenage brain of yours, we are all interlinked. The same thinking, practices, you call it, people tend to have one place, they tend to in another. Human nature.
Do not mistake your 'prestigious' Codexian gaming preferences with human nature. My using the term precedent was not accidental. That we hold different games in high esteem, does not make us any different (in everyday practices, life, etc) than most.
And to prove to you how shallow your thinking/mentality is, let me also address your last part. Our "secret agent" you say wanted anonymity because he fears being called a cuck.
First of all, if one is so immature so as to fear other peoples' opinion, the fault lies in that person, not the audience. It's in his head.
Secondly, what and how you are judged by is your actions. You do it right, you respond to the criticism right and you'll always, always be fine here.
If you can't stand being yourself (figuratively), in the Internet of all places (anonymous, safe), gimme a fucking break and go kill yourself. Don't white knight unnamed "secret agents", not with me. Leave SJWing for other, younger folks.
And as to self entitlement; if you think someone's voicing a disagreement or reminding of bad practices (as seen elsewhere) relates to entitlement!? You need stop jerking off and playing games and get some fucking life into ya. The real kind.

This interview is not a Master or PhD thesis and neither a study on the subject of inXile, therefore it has no need for a revealed identity of the conducting interviewer (which is also not a necessity in double blind and tripple blind studies). It is just an interview with the only necessary revealed identity of the questioned persons / interviewee. Many authors use a pseudonym or act as ghost writers for other personas, and in some cases the identity of the writer remains unknown or questionable, even for the very important works in history. Names do not guarantee quality, and quality does not guarantee a name.

1) I know it's trendy with manchildren of all ages to use nice, beefy expressions; i do. You know what isn't very trendy? Reading comprehension. Children need to read first, think afterwards and reply last.
2) Unlike what you think in that teenage brain of yours, we are all interlinked.
3) And to prove to you how shallow your thinking/mentality is, let me also address your last part. Our "secret agent" you say wanted anonymity because he fears being called a cuck. First of all, if one is so immature so as to fear other peoples' opinion, the fault lies in that person, not the audience. It's in his head.
4) If you can't stand being yourself (figuratively), in the Internet of all places (anonymous, safe), gimme a fucking break and go kill yourself.
5) Don't white knight unnamed "secret agents", not with me. Leave SJWing for other, younger folks.
6) You need stop jerking off and playing games and get some fucking life into ya. The real kind.

Are you are fucking retarded?
As you have proposed i will judge you by your actions : which is insulting ( i would skip over this, if it was smart or had an certain esprit ) and false conclusions.
Premise:
1) Your just assume that i didn't understand what you wrote. Not a Part of the Premise 1: But i will show that you fail on all accounts, like that you didn't understand why i wrote the post and why i have used you just as an example, without especially referring to you. And why your psychological analysis, of me and my motivation of the entire post, fails.
2) You are are talking about an abstract concept without the knowledge of what a system and what interaction between the variables of the system are. And you call me a teenager, which per se is just retarded to do, without any evidence.
3) You assume a depth of my statement without thinking about ( perception -> action ) => consequences, and why a person would avoid this cycle, especially here where there are no standards concerning behavior. And also why people would like to remain anonymous for the reason of not influencing the behavior towards them, just because they did something that other find good / bad or expected / unexpected.
Just as an invented example: If i would be a game developer (which i'm not) i would never reveal here who i am, because i would rather have the unfiltered and uninfluenced opinion here about me and my statements and my work. People here act like dogs, around game devs, and try to lick their ass, at least in some cases.
4) The live on internet can have also real live consequences, good or bad. People have lost their jobs, friends and families over stupid comments in internet, and therefore it is childish to assume that anonymity on internet is shit. Doxing is for a good reason a defined term. Btw.: You are also using a Pseudonym and not your real name.
5) Ohhh the language of millennials that have been red pilled ( sarcastic joke about your used terms ). I do not white knight somebody, but respect/notice their personal wishes, as long as their wishes are not influencing my private sphere and the wishes belongs to their own private sphere. Do you understand the terminology of 'respect/notice" and 'private sphere'? Think about the sentence "live and let live" carefully, and let it sink deeper into your mind. Btw are you that old to be senile?
While we are here in a public sphere, our true identities belong to our private shere, but in some cases this may also apply for our pseudonyms. The person might have also this reason: inXile knows the true identity of the interviewer. Perhaps the interviewer doesn't want, that inXile knows his Codex identity? If you have both identities you can doxx someone, and this may not be in the interest of the interviewer. Currently only the Codex's most inner circle has both identities and sadly Overlord has committed ones the mistake of unintentional doxing someone.
6) An answer to this is retarded, and therefore i ask myself how retarded you gotta be to write it down?
Btw. my motivation for the post was to show that people here often result in name calling and insulting instead of presenting examples and evidence for their statements, which by the way was also evident by your posts, and now you have verified me two times. So while i ask for certain standards with just a small hint, you just talk about them out of your ass with some long platitudes.
Conclusion:
Therefore your psychological analysis fails concerning my motivation to write it down and using your post as a simple example and in your estimation of my age and etc.
In other words: while i solve differential equations and analyze agents interacting in a changing environment, you fail in analytical psychology.
And btw.: i'm over 35 and have a family with my own offspring ( verified by gen analysis ).

 

[Murk]

Damn that's pretty dope. Is that what all of California looks like? In a month, my work is sending me out to Bakersfield, CA to do some home inspections. Really looking forward to it now cause Dallas is wearing me down. Yesterday I had to call the cops on a house for child abuse and in another inspection I found bullet holes in the aluminum siding. An alcoholic whose hands wouldn't stop shaking showed me the round. And then I got accosted by an addict with an arm more scab than muscle. Anyway, I'll put this picture in my sunblocker to look at while driving. California, here I come!

my poor, poor dude

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

To me it's how artificial the Crises feel. You'd think that making encounters with non-violent, puzzle-like solutions should be a natural extension of TB combat, which by it's very nature requires you to stop and think. But that's not what happens, what happens is, combat starts, and you go, motherfucker, I don't wanna be pressing some secret magic ding-dongs to scare the bad guys away, if these suckers want to fight I'm gonna fight.

It was just weird to have a non-combat tasks in a combat mode.

 

[Bester]

The interviewer is extremely self referential and full of himself. Codex this, codex that, what do you think of the codex, what advice would you give to the codex, blah blah blah. And not a single good question about the game. Extremely retarded guy, whoever this is. I take it back, Adam Heine is no longer a cuck, this interviewer is.

 

[Zeriel]

(Video evidence of Tumblr's crimes against humanity and the Geneva Convention)

I did not know Double Bear had fallen so far. I wish I still didn't know.

There has definitely been a shift in Codex preferences. Case in point: written descriptions. Used to be the best thing since sliced bread, now suddenly you have the retards spouting their "show don't tell" lines and asking why they put those stupid, tedious descriptions in there instead of visual effects.
Same thing with CYOA bits. I remember before the release of PoE everyone was fapping about those cool, Darklands inspired little episodes, now they are some kind bullshit nobody in their right mind would consider including in a video game.
Voice acting used to be something we could gladly do without, now we bitch about there being to little of it in ToN.
Different approaches to quest-solving that you will only notice on multiple playthroughs? Who the fuck cares, I ain't playing games more than once.
Realistic female armor? Fuck you, are you some kind of SJW or what? (that last one has litte to do with ToN or wiriting though)

The list goes on.

The problem appears to be that before the Kickstarter games actually came out we had blind faith. We assumed Darklands vignettes would be as entertaining as Darklands' were--after all, why not? There is a plethora of free text games produced in the decades since with equally good writing. There has been a turn against blocks of text not because descriptive text is bad, but because for whatever reason much of the text written for these Kickstarter games appears to be written to be a block of text first, and an entertaining piece of writing second, if at all.

Really, I'm talking out of my ass here, but I get the feeling that the way InXile (and to a much lesser extent, Obsidian) look at it is as a bulletpoint. We've got to have big ol' dialogues here! Why? 'Cuz Infinity Engine games had them! With such a mindset, it's very easy to forget to use the dialogues for its original, utilitarian purpose (we are showing things we can't afford to render and animate), and to treat it as a fetishized necessity that just hangs there like a vestigial limb.

 

[Azalin]

I wonder how long it will take MCA to get over his "Die Obsidian,die" phase

 

[Azarkon]

So you think all these attempts to hype up the 1.6 million words count are after the fact justification? It wasn't part of the plan?

People try to come up with quality metrics that roughly coincide to their particular traits. A lesser version of this is that people highlight whatever random factoids they're associated with as if they are noteworthy. For example, I used to brag about Primordia having a three-man team that spanned three continents, but to be honest, I don't think that amounted to anything other than some headaches on coordinating team meetings. But it sounds neat, I guess, for people looking for an angle to talk about the game. The word count is something to talk about, but I definitely don't think it was a goal to push it higher.

I just don't understand why developers think walls of text are the best way to honor old school CRPGs.

Obviously they are a poor way to honor most old school CRPGs, which were generally not text heavy at all. But PS:T was text heavy, as were the Baldur's Gate games in their own way.

Personally, having played through the game, I think the Crises are underdeveloped and underused. There was so much more they could've done with more creative Crises instead 600,000 more words.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Time and money are fungible, and at least some management time and development money was spent on writing that could've been spent on Crises, but the two are really pretty different, mostly implemented by different people, I think, and Crises had special coding/scripting/art needs that writing didn't. I'm not saying that you're wrong. I haven't played the game, but almost all the reviews I've read complain about the Crises, which is really too bad because as they were described to me in concept, they sounded like the coolest thing ever and a huge leap forward in RPG encounters. I'm just not sure that you're right that the guns-or-butter equation here was better Crises or 600,000 more words. Someone in management would know better than I would, but I don't think you would've gotten that much more in Crisis resources by cutting back the writing. My sense is that a lot of resources did go into the Crises, they just didn't all come through as well as they sounded at conception.

You should play the game, not for the story but just to see how much of a missed opportunity the Crises are. And you're right - the idea behind assigning equal importance to conversation, exploration, and combat skills during encounters is a direction worth pursuing. It's the sort of progress we desperately need in CRPGs where the three aspects of the game - combat, dialogue, and exploration - have always felt disjoint, usually with combat being the only well-developed system.

I did not expect it going in, considering the writing focus of the game, but the Crises system in Torment ended up being the one feature where I felt there was actual innovation. Too bad it was pretty much wasted by the relative lack of Crises in the game and how poorly developed many of them were.

 

[MRY]

I'm sure I'll play it someday, but for now I like maintaining my easy way of avoiding any substantive debate about the game's merits. (Also, I have neither time to play, nor a computer that can run it.)

 

[Volrath]

His request.

What a raging fucking faggot, jesus christ.

 

[Israfael]

Also this situation is reminiscent of a classical movie plot - "a man gets rich, leaves his ugly, but loving wife for a trophy wife, then gets bankrupt and begs forgiveness"

 

[Prime Junta]

Codex as ugly but loving wife, that's fresh

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Codex, the wife inXile deserves...

 

[Gunnar]

I like how Besters one comment triggered them hardcore and practically gave them PTSD

 

[FeelTheRads]

Throwing BN's naziness on the Codex was also interesting. After all he posted here too, so I guess you can still blame the Codex.

 

[Goral]

Crispy
So does it show that Brian Fargo has botox on his face? And why is he advertising Atari company and not his? Does that mean they're so poor they need to wear used clothes thrown by other companies? Was someone walking in Bethesda clothes there?

So Bubbles stealthily returns with another Codex interview.

It's not Bubbles, the pictures are too crappy. Unless DarkUnderlord defrauded the money that were supposed to go to Bubble's camera...

 

[Tramboi]

So...
What can change the nature of PR ?

 

[FeelTheRads]

It's like the members of a band wearing the t-shirt of another band. You're trying to hard.

Here's something to get mad about: Is that a Power Armor bobble-head produced by Bethesda?

 

[Goral]

It's like the members of a band wearing the t-shirt of another band. You're trying to hard.

Joined: Apr 18, 2008
I wasn't serious, it was an attempt to bait the anonymous interviewer for an answer but you blew it!

Spoiler

I'm not serious now either.

 

[Ruzen]

I will read other comments later on; I have to say this at first. It was a very good interview and wording. Finished It in one reading; It was very enjoyable. I wished Colin was a bit more involved but you can't blame the guy. I wanted to support codex but paypal is banned in my country so fuck my government. Nevertheless, the job was well done!