Bartlett's Quotable Game Developers: A Work in Progress

Damnit, I have to be on the lookout for two kitty assassins?

I think at this point he's going to need his own quotes thread.

Yeah, we all know how those Australians are always making offensive generalizations about other nationalities.

I'm not going to try to defend Alex, since he makes it a point of pride to be "outspoken," and because racism was the wrong word to use. I do have to wonder what was so controversial about his comments, though, since I saw somebody else on NeoGaf trying to build up an anti-Hutchinson campaign there across multiple threads.

Are people really suggesting that there's anything controversial about the claim "a lot of Japanese video game storylines don't make a lick of sense"? Because I've seen plenty of cases, from Bayonetta all the way back to Parasite Eve, not to mention every other Final Fantasy game, where plot incoherence is defended as just a case of westerners not understanding the cultural sensibilities of Japanese storytelling. As if it's inconceivable that a Japanese developer is just like every other developer, capable of starting with a high-concept plot and seeing it fall apart after 20 to 60 hours.

And does anyone, anywhere, genuinely like explicit difficulty modes? I thought that was what achievements were intended to fix in the first place.

Boy, have I got some good news for you...

That is totally not what anybody [here] is suggesting.

Man, I know all of that is being said without a single ounce of self-awareness, but I really, really want it to be more Uwe Boll than Lars von Trier. Unfortunately, I'm thinking it is the latter.

I'd respect it if the torture resulted in false information that led to innocents being killed.

And the agencies learned nothing from this and kept doing the same thing.

Then Splinter Cell would be grounded in reality!

FOR A GOOD CAUSE

"I thought, if this crashes the plane, me turning my phone on, so be it."

- Peter Molyneux really, really wanted to find out what people thought about Curiousity, so had no issues running his phone during a plane flight between Israel and England.

On the contrary, I think we all know the answer to that.

Obviously. It's where the Elemental Materials are hidden.

It'll be Milo's decaying corpse.

If it's a completed copy of B.C., I just may forgive him for Black and White.

The revelation is that you wasted hours and hours clicking on an empty box for the sake of being the first to see its contents.

"Western RPGs is a sort of different style, born from first person shooters."
-Sakaguchi Hironobu, father of Final Fantasy

I hope that's just an odd out of context quote or a mistranslation. Because I can actually sort of see him being correct for some of the newer, more modern western RPGs. Mass Effect is actually a good example on several levels, from being developed in Unreal to actually having lots of FPS/shooter elements in it. The Skyrim / Oblivion / Fallout 3 series of Bethesda RPGs are also all first person, though that's pretty much where the similarity ends for them. (Except for Fallout, which does a fair bit of shootin')

Yeah but CRPGs have existed over a decade before the first first person shooter! In fact a lot of early CRPGs were FIRST PERSON. If anything, it's the other way around.

That's my point, it initially sounds like a stupid statement, as you are correct CRPGs and western CRPGs predate both JRPGs and FPS games.
Unless there was some missing context, or missing translation, in which the guy was actually just talking about modern RPGs or something, and then it's no longer stupid and misinformed, but more of a factual statement.

Here is the source interview: http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/8...hironobu-sakaguchi-interview-remaking-the-rpg

Question:

Answer:

LAFFO! Nope, definitely sounds stupid to me.

It has a lot of third person cover shooter elements in it and approximately zero FPS elements in it, unless you mean you shoot things.

Try using a sniper rifle, notice how it goes to first person? =)

Also, it's pretty easy to see the FPS influence on Gears of War and other cover shooters, and Mass Effect is very much influenced by Gears of War and TPS cover shooters. C inherits from B inherits from A, therefore C inherits from A.

I often think that the decline of japanese game development has been from hubris, the inability to really look at and absorb anything that the western world has been doing in game development.

Yeah, this is true or at least it's not so blatantly false that it's stupid to even suggest it. Like, you know, the actual quote is ;). It's so far wrong that it almost has to be a mistranslation.

I think the main thing is that "single country vs arbitrarily grouped North America and Europe" along with many things beyond the control of many developers create a perception of decline that isn't really very accurate or proportionate. That way of organizing things is useful shorthand for quick points but it's not useful for deep analysis without a hell of a lot of legwork in rationales that probably isn't worth it. It's reminiscent of the Ameritrash vs Eurogame contrast in boardgaming.

Perhaps it has something to do with Japanese developers stating in interviews that they're targeting children, while in the west the primary gaming audience is 24-32 or something.

I think that's the sort of cherrypicking that turns it into an attempt to attach personal tastes to a big idea for artificial gravitas rather than anything resembling useful analysis (again, without a tremendous amount of legwork). It's fun for a thread like this, for instance, but not much beyond that.

Personal taste? I referred to an interview that happened and stats that are true. I even put a perhaps at the beginning.

What more do you want?

It wasn't clear to me whether you meant "this is a phenomenon I believe is actually happening and this is a valid, representative cause for it" or "Some people might think this because of this". The former category is what I was arguing against, and please ignore it if I misread it as your position.

Can I generalized that to be the case though, based on first hand experience of the Japanese and Asian developmental process contrasting with the Western developmental process. I worked a little for Koei and now am at Ubisoft, and as a short hand, "The Japanese's inability to really look at and absorb anything that the western world has been doing in game development" is fairly accurate, combined with their rather rigid hierarchical structure of decision making.

Then again, it could just be Koei, who god knows hasn't created a good game in a long while.

It just doesn't seem to me that it says a whole lot about anything much more than Koei and other similarly troubled companies that haven't aged well. From Software was clearly paying attention to the rest of the world when they made Demon's/Dark Souls, and you could just as easily point to the creative bankruptcy that characterizes many big "Western" releases if you want to consider them narrowly.

If there's a key difference between the groupings, it would seem to me that the difference is that the market used to reward creatively soft, iterative Japanese designs the way it now does creatively soft, iterative North American designs. Sandwiched in between those you find a lot of good stuff and some really innovative great stuff, but you can horribly mischaracterize both by combining the criteria of mass appeal and cultural barrier.

I think Japanese companies generally are facing structural issues adapting to current market conditions after peaking in the late 80s and 90s when Michael Crichton was predicting the inevitable consummation of their sick ambitions for white women, but I'm not sure it isn't simply a differently problematic approach to the shareholder-obsessed blockbuster paradigm of the big North American and European names.

I guess it depends a great deal on how much you thought Nintendo, Sega, etc really had going on back in the day versus the rest of the world; I just never really valued the widely praised original creativity in consoles all that much until around the late Dreamcast PS2 Xbox generations where they really took off for me (and in my early 20s, no less!).

I don't see it.

That's because you're not from this world, you're from Bizarro World.

To me it seems like Japan was overachieving for a while, but the West's market has expanded quicker than Japan's, and Western console devs have caught up, so now Japan is putting out good games in proportion to their market size (which is smaller than America's). Also they like different games over there. Generic military manshoots don't do much business in Japan.

Is anyone seriously putting generic military shooters forward as an example of where Western development could teach Japan something? I mean, let's not beat around the bush here, get on with naming them so we can burn them!

It's honestly a lot of little things, like UI, controls, etc. Did you play Lost Planet 2 at all? It had the inklings of being a good game, it was just oddly terrible in so many ways.