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Editorial RPG Codex Report: A Codexian Visit to inXile Entertainment

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Yeah I actually suspected that, but I guess what I really meant is "developer of games we give a shit about who created an account to post as their developer"
Kohan has always gotten quite a bit of love on the Codex. I remember this one guy who used to say nice things about it.
Kohan and Timegate's other games are cheap, if you want to pay homage to Anthony Davis
Kohan always needs love, but I never worked on it. TimeGate finished those games long before I went to work there.
Anyway, I would think that my work at Bioware would fit that bill. Really, I think the thing with Brian is that when he met me it was through the Wasteland 2 launch party invite from the Codex, so I was the "Codex guy" then, and you always sort of think of a person in the first context you encounter them.
 

Pentagon

Educated
Joined
Jan 17, 2017
Messages
69
Location
Cascadia
my work is sending me out to Bakersfield, CA to do some home inspections
OonYS.jpg


Bakersfield is probably the worst city in California. It's what the Necropolis in Fallout was built on top of, and I'm not even sure it was nuked.
 

Andhaira

Arcane
Joined
Nov 25, 2007
Messages
1,868,966
PsT was a game that was a product of it's time; it cannot be recreated, at least not in the same medium.

The 90s were a time when fantasy books were a dime a dozen, with lots of fans. These very same fans had a lot of time to read them as well, because there were not as many sources of entertainment at the time (especially no/rather basic internet) Even movies at the time were not as spectacular as they are now; the prequels had yet to be released (TPM came out within a year or so at the time) and the best superhero movie at the time was still arguably Superman I & II. TV shows were shit, they had actually declined in quality since the 80s. Sitcoms were all the rage on the silver screen

RPGs were in their golden age, the capstone to which was just around the corner (Baldurs Gate II). You can read more about my thesis on that in my megathread buried somewhere in GRPGD.

It was thus logical a game that combined RPG elements with the most popular tabletop RPG system and played like a readable, middling quality fantasy novel and included spell cutscenes like the recently released Final Fantasy 7 jrpg.

Today however such a premise would fall flat because no one reads fantasy books anymore, and the ones who did have grown up with little time and lesser attention-spans. In fact attention spans globally have dropped for there to be much of an interest in this sort of a 'game'.

inXile better put their all in Bards Tale 4, and I have to admit it looks really sweet. Given their track record though and their retarded obsession with the shit franchise known as Wasteland, I have the sad feeling BT 4 will suck, assuming it runs at all. (I predict it will have massive sys requirements and tons of performance issues at launch and for a long while after. Or that the graphics will actually be MUCH inferior to the trailers & demo vids we have seen)

Out of all the Kickstarters for PC RPGs so far, IMO Guido Henkels Deathfire appeared to me with the most promise, it seemed like a real RPG and a 'real' game, rather than an artsy-nostalgia simulator.

A real pity it never got funded and that he gave up so easily; he really needed someone to help him in spinning things (aka hyping things out of proportion)
 

*-*/\--/\~

Cipher
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
Messages
909
Colin simply rejects the negative feedback, claiming the NPCs are all interesting and relevant, and that the player is not obligated to read the loredumps. Again, I don't think anybody has an issue with him for defending the game, but "you're not forced to read it" is pretty much the worst defense.

Sheesh, that is like shitting in your living room and claiming that you don't have to smell it.
 

Bester

⚰️☠️⚱️
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Sep 28, 2014
Messages
11,003
Location
USSR
I love how Fargo considers MRY a codexer who worked on the game rather than a developer who posts on the Codex.

Actually, he's been a Codexer for longer than he's been a developer (there are...previous accounts :M)
My first paid work as a game writer was in 2001, $5k to write the script for Infinity, an unreleased Gameboy jRPG. Before I found the Codex, I'd done considerable paid work for TimeGate (02-04), and additional paid work for Bioware (04), Nikitova (03), and S2 Games (05). After finding the Codex I did more S2 Games work, Primordia, and TTON, as well as some random piecework.

Still, you guys should get all the credit for my good stuff, since my earlier work was pretty mediocre.
Would you share how much a writer of your stature would get for writing the complete script of an RPG the size of vtmb? Simple curiosity.
 

Fry

Arcane
Joined
Aug 29, 2013
Messages
1,922
In my HUMBLE opinion, Pillars 2 will be even more of a success than PoE, unless they let the crazy purple-haired "I love GAYS" faghags run the show (Josh "I scream at writers to make the game more GAY" Sawyer is included in this group).

:retarded:

Hate to tell you, but very few people who buy these games share your political obsessions or care enough about the developers' opinions to stalk them. I'm not going to turn this into yet another PoE thread, so I've leave it at the obvious. The majority of criticism of Pillars from outside the Codex can be boiled down to "urgh, too much reading and not enough VO" and "argh, I hate this style of combat." Those people are already checked out, and I have serious doubts they'll come back for more.
 

Klarion

Arcane
Joined
Oct 10, 2014
Messages
1,864,550
Location
Stonekeep
Am I the only one who thinks it is mainly because of the Numenera setting that it failed? Wasn't it a flop? I remember people I knew being very excited to try out the pen and paper game, and ending up finding it too absurd, pretentious and simplistic and giving up on it.

Nobody except those who made it like Numenera.

Are there seriously still people making regular campaigns of Numenera continuously, that have lasted for years, like is the case for countless other settings like D&D, Cthulhu or GURPS? I know guys who basically played the same Cthulhu or GURPS campaign for ten years.

The second reason why it failed IMO echoes the comment someone made in another thread about the gaming industry: game developers nowadays are game nerds who have few life experiences and have no frame of reference or ability to create good culture.

Millennials have lived very sheltered, controlled lives in safe environments, and due to growing up on the Internet, they haven't gone outside that much and had the experiences required to draw from and create good content. They also read useless web pages, Facebook posts, Twitter videos... whereas for those of us who knew life pre-Internet, we had to read classic novels and comics or films.


OK, grampa, we got it... It was better in the "good old days"...
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Would you share how much a writer of your stature would get for writing the complete script of an RPG the size of vtmb? Simple curiosity.
"Of my stature"!

The tl;dr is that I have no idea. My pay has been all over the place over the years. On a couple projects, my pay rate has been 20 cents or 25 cents a word. That included Infinity, where I wrote the 25k-word script in three days, by far my best labor:pay ratio ever. In a few instances, I was paid a salary -- that salary was ~$6700/month at TimeGate and $5000/month at S2 Games for general writing work (some PR stuff, some design stuff, some text). Before that at S2 Games, I was paid a flat milestone rate, which was not a very good arrangement for me -- I think it was ~$12k for the Kohan II; for Axis & Allies it was ~$10k. I think the limited work I did on Bioware was about $3500 on a milestone basis. For TTON, I was paid $20/hour, which is the lowest pay rate I've had since painting houses in high school. Nikitova paid me something like $1750 to write a plot outline for an F-Zero style racing game. On Primordia, I got a third of our cut of the game's profits -- basically Steam/GOG take 30%, then WEG takes 30%, then we split the rest up evenly. That has been by far my most profitable project, but also the one I spent the most time on.

My general approach has been to simply tell employers to figure out what they think would be fair, and then knock off an additional 20% so that they feel like they're getting a steal. Then, over time I negotiate upward if they're happy with my work. The only person who ever really took advantage of the offer was Kevin Saunders, and I bless him for his boldness in the face of my bluff. (Normally, people feel guilty and wind up paying pretty well in response to that pitch.) To be honest, making money at this has been fun, but it's not really why I do it. On early projects, the pay helped open doors to me (the industry looks very differently at paid and unpaid work) and helped defray my tuition expenses. At S2 Games, the money was the main reason for doing it, especially after they withdrew from a verbal agreement to co-develop Star Captain (a reasonable move, I suppose, but I still think the wrong one). I had offered to walk away from nine months' salary in exchange for them co-developing it, but to no avail. The idea was then that I'd plow the money they paid me into other projects, and that's more or less what I've done -- I put a fair amount into Fallen Gods and Cloudscape, but I also gave a fair amount of it away on Kickstarter to projects that seemed to be doing the things I wished I could. (I think I backed ~300 such projects, though usually at relatively small amounts.) With TTON, the money was totally irrelevant to my motivations. I would've done it for free, though it would probably have left me grumpier on nights when I stayed up late wrangling with OEI.

If I had the opportunity to write the story to a V:TM:B style game, I'd probably do it on the cheap, but I think if you were paying real industry rates it would wind up, I dunno, maybe in the ~$200k range spread across three writers? I'm actually not sure how many words the game had.
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
Why did you go through WEG, btw? You could've got the game on Steam through Greenlight, right? You think it was more profitable in the end to pay 30% to WEG?
And really, Steam takes 30% too? Jeez. That's what people deserve for helping make it a monopoly.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Victor, the artist, wanted to go through WEG, and it was easy enough to agree. I think it was a very good deal for everyone. WEG got >$100k for a relatively trivial amount of work and some inexpensive voice acting, and we got access to WEG's beta testing club, brand familiarity, and customer base. WEG also does the accounting and tax forms, which is a non-trivial benefit to us, though it's all automated on their end and thus entailed little marginal burden on their end. Primordia has proved in some respects its most popular game, in some respects its second most (after Gemini Rue), so it turned out we reached a lot of people beyond the WEG core. But that initial core helped get the game successful out of the gate, and I think that made a really big difference. A lot of indie games are dead on arrival, and Primordia might've been.

I think the truth is that WEG could add a ton of value at basically no cost to them, which is the perfect win-win scenario. For example, Dave could get Logan Cunningham to voice Horatio, Abe Goldfarb to voice Crispin, and Sarah Elmaleh to voice Clarity -- three great voice actors, and Logan's name had a lot of cachet. But they only paid those guys a few hundred bucks. Dave could get us quickly through Greenlight (also, when we signed the deal, Greenlight didn't even exist) by force of the WEG fanbase, which cost him no time or effort, but saved us an immense amount. Dave can feed us into his accounting software, which he has already paid for and set up, whereas we would need to buy and set that all up ourselves. It's the beauty of capitalism, and I can't really complain about being on the labor side of the equation when my overlord only takes a 30% cut.

--EDIT--

Also, the 30% by Steam is pretty reasonable. I mean, at the end of the day, without Steam/GOG and without WEG, what would Primordia have sold? Probably something like 50 copies.
 
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FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
Damn, dude, you're too happy with your life. I keep trying to make you get out something juicy or at least some personal bile but it's like talking to this:

smiley-face-thumbs-up-thank-you-LcKd8appi.jpeg
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
More like:
C9JE1mJXcAAzweZ.jpg

Just doing my best to help other people stay out of my own miserable quagmire.

Maybe this will make you feel better (or worse):
I worked for 2.5 years on an adventure game that was an homage to the games I loved most and the people I most admired, and the product of a decades-long aspiration to make an adventure game; professional critics universally called it crap. I worked for another 1.5 years alongside the developers I most admire on an RPG that was the spiritual successor to the game that meant most to me, an opportunity that was the culmination of a decades-long aspiration to make an IE-style RPG; the Codex universally called it crap. This year the grandfather who taught me to program died a month after my grandmother, whom he'd spent all his time and energy caring for through a decade of her dementia. His last words to me were that he looked forward to finally having the time to tell me about his career. Two months later I learned that the professor who redeemed me from being a worthless student and lousy person had died two years ago and I hadn't even known because I'm horrible at keeping in touch with people. I learned by way of a "DECEASED" stamp on a letter I'd sent to him trying to reconnect. Thus went two of the four people to whom Primordia was dedicated. The world is a world of tears, but we are all in it together. That's why I try to urge folks to temper their righteous and valuable criticism with a dash of kindness.
 
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Diggfinger

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2014
Messages
1,200
Location
Belgium
Great interview - really well done! Perfect Codexian snarky-ness mixed with insightful and relevant questions...

I had an idea: why doesnt the Codex do video-interviews (a la Matt Chatt etc.)? While reading though old Codex interviews are great, it would be so much more powerful to have Tim Cain, Boyarsky, JVC etc. do video (or at least audio) interviews. Would make it much easier to listen to while I brush my teeth ponder our fragile existence.

Indeed, it would allow the site a real YouTube present to make sure RPG history is preserved. Crucially, the traffic might generate enough income to render the pop-ups redundant (yes I have too much stomach fat but dont remind me every day:cry:)

Anyway I am preparing a new user-name, in case my proposal will get me exiled from the Codex...

- Digg
 

Kem0sabe

Arcane
Joined
Mar 7, 2011
Messages
13,076
Location
Azores Islands
Only George Z came off the interview with a margin of authenticity.

Fargo is a lying sack of shit that will lie through his theeth if it gains him an advantage, be it money or PR. He comes from a background where being a sociopath is seen as an advantage... Just look at his posture, smile and how he suddenly tries to be empathic towards the codex, it's fucking creepy.

Colin on the other hand, is the definition of a special snowflake artist who is in denial that people hate his fucking work.

His non answers, his refusal to admit his faults... Its sad.
 
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almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
WEG got >$100k for a relatively trivial amount of work and some inexpensive voice acting

WEG should outsource their voice acting help to other studios. Primordia had better voice acting than a lot of more expensive games (Blackwell did too, for that matter).
 

Old One

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
3,679
Location
The Great Underground Empire
So I read the interview and I've been reading through a lot of this thread, and there's one question that keeps surfacing in my mind. It's possible the answer is in here somewhere and I simply missed it, so forgive me if that's the case.

Fargo is officially apologizing to The Codex for accusing the site's representatives of doing something they didn't actually do, and for taking some punitive action based on this misinformation.

How long has he known the truth?

The most Fargo says is that the information came out "later." What does later mean? It seems like this kind of dispute ought to have been cleared up pretty quickly once the truth was known. I mean, if I had accused someone of doing something wrong, and then I found out they were innocent, I wouldn't wait to try to set things right. It doesn't seem to be the case that InXile just discovered last week and immediately jumped into action to repair the damage. Maybe that's the case, but it doesn't seem like it.
 

Ezeekiel

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 19, 2016
Messages
1,783
I worked for 2.5 years on an adventure game that was an homage to the games I loved most and the people I most admired, and the product of a decades-long aspiration to make an adventure game; professional critics universally called it crap. I worked for another 1.5 years alongside the developers I most admire on an RPG that was the spiritual successor to the game that meant most to me, an opportunity that was the culmination of a decades-long aspiration to make an IE-style RPG; the Codex universally called it crap. This year the grandfather who taught me to program died a month after my grandmother, whom he'd spent all his time and energy caring for through a decade of her dementia. His last words to me were that he looked forward to finally having the time to tell me about his career. Two months later I learned that the professor who redeemed me from being a worthless student and lousy person had died two years ago and I hadn't even known because I'm horrible at keeping in touch with people. I learned by way of a "DECEASED" stamp on a letter I'd sent to him trying to reconnect. Thus went two of the four people to whom Primordia was dedicated. The world is a world of tears, but we are all in it together. That's why I try to urge folks to temper their righteous and valuable criticism with a dash of kindness.

Sorry to hear that, bro.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Sorry to hear that, bro.
Everybody's life has ups and downs, and in fact they often happen at the same time. Consider that embedded in my complaints are: (1) I was able to fulfill decades-long dreams of making an adventure game and working on an IE-style RPG, and managed to get paid for it to boot; (2) I had a grandfather who took the time to teach me how to program, setting me on this crazy side quest, and he was a good enough man to do the essentially intolerable task of caring for my grandmother, holding onto his own life long enough to leave that burden for no one else; (3) I had a professor who was basically a saint-level human being who put up with a worthless person like me for who knows what reason; and (4) in making these games I've had the opportunity to connect with incredible people around the world, even you rascals. All said I count myself a very lucky person leading a charmed life in a very tough world, especially relative to the things other people have to endure. I got dealt a splendid hand in what may be the best place and time to be alive, and along the way just about every close call went my way. All the same, I guess I thought it was important to remind people things are pretty far from perfect for anyone, and that it's worth trying to help each other out as best we can.
 

Gunnar

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 10, 2016
Messages
819
So I read the interview and I've been reading through a lot of this thread, and there's one question that keeps surfacing in my mind. It's possible the answer is in here somewhere and I simply missed it, so forgive me if that's the case.

Fargo is officially apologizing to The Codex for accusing the site's representatives of doing something they didn't actually do, and for taking some punitive action based on this misinformation.

How long has he known the truth?

The most Fargo says is that the information came out "later." What does later mean? It seems like this kind of dispute ought to have been cleared up pretty quickly once the truth was known. I mean, if I had accused someone of doing something wrong, and then I found out they were innocent, I wouldn't wait to try to set things right. It doesn't seem to be the case that InXile just discovered last week and immediately jumped into action to repair the damage. Maybe that's the case, but it doesn't seem like it.

They knew, but were SJW crazy butthurt because Bester called Adam Heine a cuck, and thought they could get away with shunning the codex for daring to allow that on the platform. After the disappointing sales of their latest release they realized they couldn't afford to alienate one of the only communities that cares about their games so this is major damage control. Bending the knee, if you will.

As an aside, Colin McCuck is especially buttmad because he is the head SJW at InXile so being forced to speak to the Codex is especially galling to his snowflake sensibilities, especially if they are criticizing his work. His responses are hilarious.
 

Old One

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
3,679
Location
The Great Underground Empire
They knew, but were SJW crazy butthurt because Bester called Adam Heine a cuck, and thought they could get away with shunning the codex for daring to allow that on the platform. After the disappointing sales of their latest release they realized they couldn't afford to alienate one of the only communities that cares about their games so this is major damage control.
That's certainly what it seems like, but I didn't want to jump to conclusions.

It would be a lot easier to be less cynical about it if this had taken place a few months ago.
 

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