Games Industry.biz is in the middle of an interview with Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack, where he makes some bold yet classically wrong assertions. I like his work, but he is so off here.
You'll remember Silicon Knights from two incredible yet underplayed M-rated games, Eternal Darkness and the Metal Gear Solid remake, Twin Snakes. (Hey all you Wii owners out there looking for something to do that isn't Super Paper Mario... pick up one of those!) Silicon Knights is also rather infamously known for the game Too Human, which was originally announced as a PlayStation game in 1999... then shuttled over to the GameCube when Nintendo bought them... and is now tracked as a 360 release now that Microsoft owns them. And it's now announced as a game trilogy, with part one due this fall.
Dyack, company president, says this:
"I don't care how good the game is, I don't want to play something that's one hundred hours long."
Denis, I do. If the game is really good. For reference: San Andreas, Pokemon Sapphire, Animal Crossing. I just did 60 hours in Baten Kaitos. And before I dupe my older bitch session on this topic, I'll end it there.
I doubt I have a hundred hours in on Dyack's own Eternal Darkness, but having played through the game three times, I bet I'm in the 50s, which is still no small amount of time invested into one game.
The key qualifier is that the game has to be really good. He throws out "100" rather randomly but it's the game's quality that really matters. Would I have done a hundred in Baten Kaitos? I doubt it. I was feeling a major drag around the 40 hour mark, because the game's overall presentation is lacking. Would I have enjoyed another 40 hours of new worlds (NOT backtracking) in Kingdom Hearts 2? Absolutely. Games with enough built-in variance can carve out a hundred hours with no trouble at all.
What he's doing here is setting up Too Human Episode One as being A) not very long and B) not very good.
And don't you think the average person has dumped over a hundred hours into Pac-Man or Tetris over their lifetime? Not to mention stuff like StarCraft, World of WarCraft or any given popular online shooter. He's trying to attack Final Fantasy-style RPGS with 100 hours of dense, overpopulated story, but he's sideswiping people's play habits in the process.
I'll grant that I don't get excited when I see "over 60 hours of gameplay!" used as a ridiculous bullet point on the back of the box, but I don't see "under 20 hours of gameplay!" selling many units either.
"Each game needs to be self contained. That was flaw in the The Lord of the Rings movies. (sic) Too Human will be self-contained across each game of the trilogy."
Denis, the LOTR trilogy made over one billion dollars, and that's just from the US box office. Not to mention the DVD sales. That's a lot of people who had no problem sitting through a trio of exceptionally long and convoluted films over the course of three years. That's not a "flaw" in the least. If Peter Jackson had made three lengthy film epics that nobody went to see, then you've got a flaw. But clearly the world had no trouble swallowing Lord of the Rings, so what's the point in comparing it to big-scale video game projects?
If the story is unavoidably good, gamers will follow it. If you crap out nonsensical cutscenes with lousy acting and average graphics, and then make them skippable... yeah, duh, people will hate it.
By all means, make each edition of Too Human self-contained. But do it because it makes sense for your game, not because you think gamers can't handle it.
Again, he's carefully positioning Too Human as Not What You've Been Expecting for the last seven years. Wikipedia calls it an action-RPG in the vein of Devil May Cry, which is fine, but does he need to send shots across the bow of gaming in general to get it done?
"I think there are too many games. The market is over-saturated and there's too many consoles. I think we'll eventually migrate to just one console. It's inevitable. I love all three home consoles, but as a person who creates games I wish there there was just one console."
I also wish there was only one TV station, because there are too many TV shows out there.
This is all very futurist of him, but it's not practical in the least. If this was truly the obvious inevitability, why did Microsoft start up their own (failing) game division for the Xbox? Why not just make Microsoft games for the PlayStation? Or, for that matter, for the PC.
No, Microsoft created their own console because they fully intended to create a monster moneymaker from which they control every aspect of content distribution. That was a nice dream, and as long as the mouthpieces can keep convincing the shareholders that they'll turn a profit "next year," then they can keep trying.
When he says "we'll eventually migrate to one console," he means "we" as in "Silicon Knights." And they have. Repeatedly.
Who would want one single console with one company at the helm? That's just not diverse enough to maintain an industry... as Nintendo proved during the NES days. They were the only game in town - which was fine for a couple years - but they got to rook over whomever they wanted, maintained strict controls on products whether it was warranted or not, and ended up caught with their arrogant pants down when competitors did finally arise.
When a market gets "over-saturated" (whatever that means), that means the market has actually just busted out into niches and you're just not standing far enough away to see it.
What's going to happen is you're going to see more and more games offered for sale digitally, but that's certainly not going to end up as this fanciful "One World, One Console" vision.
So, when Microsoft bought this guy, did he become a moron?
