Looking Glass Studios Founder Interview

[Fidcal]

Worth posting here for those of you who don't get over to ttlg.

 

Paul Neurath is the founder of Looking Glass Studios, which created Thief, the inspiration for Dark Mod. It's an interesting read...

 

http://grupo97.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=429:pneurathinterview&catid=9:juegos&Itemid=86

[grayman]

Interesting interview.

 

I thought this bit:

 

"I believe innovation is an essential ingredient. If you’re not innovating in at least some aspect of a new project, then why do the project? Passion is another essential ingredient. If the team is not genuinely passionate about the game then the results are invariably going to be less than great. The third essential ingredient is a strong team who are a good fit for the project."

 

was particularly pertinent to what's going on here. The TDM team obviously has had a passion for making this a great game, and it shows.

 

Thanks to all!

[Tels]

Worth posting here for those of you who don't get over to ttlg.

 

Paul Neurath is the founder of Looking Glass Studios, which created Thief, the inspiration for Dark Mod. It's an interesting read...

 

http://grupo97.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=429:pneurathinterview&catid=9:juegos&Itemid=86

 

Very interesting read, thank you! Wonder what he'd say to TDM - probably ripped it to shreds

[Melan]

Well, creative people sometimes have problems when they are being associated only with their older work. This also cropped up when RPS interviewed some of the main people behind Deus Ex 10 years afterwards; it was apparent some had moved on, or changed their opinions on things in ways that wouldn't go over well on TTLG or here.

 

On the other hand, it can also be a little bit of immortality to be remembered fondly so many years later, so who knows.

[Tels]

Interesting interview.

 

I thought this bit:

 

"I believe innovation is an essential ingredient. If you’re not innovating in at least some aspect of a new project, then why do the project? Passion is another essential ingredient. If the team is not genuinely passionate about the game then the results are invariably going to be less than great. The third essential ingredient is a strong team who are a good fit for the project."

 

Yeah, its a shame that we never had the nec. team, tho.

 

(I kid The fact that TDM happened until now could mean that it happened "because" of the team, or "in spite" of the team Sometimes I think it happened in spite of me

[aidakeeley]

To spite you.

[Baddcog]

To spite you.

 

LOL, you beat me to it

 

--------

Yeah it was an interesting article. Too bad he's ended up doing 'popular' games, things that a profit can be made on. I'm not familiar with that studio or their games so I don't know, they may be really good. But it deffinately sounds like they are taking the safe route nowdays.

 

Guess everyone's got to eat, and artistic integrity only goes so far...

[aidakeeley]

But it deffinately sounds like they are taking the safe route nowdays.

 

Wow. So he says all of the above about how FIRST we need to innovate! Then SECONDLY we need to be Passionately In Love For Love's Sake The Love Of It...And then THIRDLY we need to be a team cooperatively, fraternity... equality... liberty!

 

And in the end he is a sellout in it for the bucks?

 

I shall not bother to bother with his blather then...

[demagogue]

Guess everyone's got to eat, and artistic integrity only goes so far...

 

Or it's a young man's game.

 

I liked the parts about "immersive simulation", and the connection between the flight sims to RPGs (Blue Sky & Origin) being the first-steps for that, and the roles Paul Neurath & Warren Spector played in that. (Reading the Ultima Underworld wiki page again, on the development of UU, in light of this interview was interesting too.)

 

Of course it's relevant for TDM since much of the original motivation was to restore the simulation & immersive elements to stealth gameplay that TDS turned its back on with its unwieldy HUD, awkward controls, mini-games that pulled you out of the PC, in-your-face froblighting, etc, etc. It's as if TDS was trying to undo the whole original ethos that The Dark Project was created for.

 

I shall not bother to bother with his blather then...

 

Just remember that his "blather" is at the root of basically every game we care about and was the vision that started a line through Ultima Underworld, System Shock 1 & 2, Thief, Deus Ex, Half Life, Vampire Bloodlines, Bioshock... First-person games would have gone a different direction if Wolfenstein & Doom had been the only vision of what first-person gaming could be.

[Baddcog]

I don't know. I mean it didn't sound so much like selling out... maybe...

 

I think he probably learned a valuable lesson from LGS though, if you can't sell the numbers to keep the studio open it's time to find a new job. And I bet LGS closing was probably a fatal blow, it really did sound like it was a great studio to be a part of.

[aidakeeley]

Well, I am in a bad mood... so I am itching for a bitching.

 

But I do believe I was responding to hearing:

 

Too bad...

...he's ended up doing 'popular' games...

...it deffinately sounds like they are taking the safe route...

...artistic integrity only goes so far...

 

So soon after hearing his preamble about innovation or die; passion and love; talented team together...

[Mr Lemony Fresh]

Speaking of originality and immersion, has anyone ever made a game where you're dropped on a weird and wonderful planet with strange and unpredictable plants and animals and you have to find out what you can use and what's good to eat ect, to survive? that has idea been circling around in my head for a while.

 

For instance, if you find a funny residue crystallisation growing off some poisonous animal, you can either use it as a weapon, eat it (causing you to die), etc, or use it on some rocks and get a powder which is an ingredient for explosives which a native told you about after you turned on your psi link to communicate with them after prevented a large and ugly animal from destroying their home.

 

I'm talking the kind of interaction you get in an adventure game but with more things to interact with and on big scale like oblivion. Also, similarly to how you need to collect ingredients in oblivion, but with a science fiction theme and more emphasis on survival and finding out what stuff does like in system shock.

 

So in other words, a free roaming survival horror.

 

And yes it sounds extremely implausable to pull off succesfully, but I'm fond of the idea then again someone else might have already done it...

[Sotha]

Speaking of originality and immersion, has anyone ever made a game where you're dropped on a weird and wonderful planet with strange and unpredictable plants and animals and you have to find out what you can use and what's good to eat ect, to survive? that has idea been circling around in my head for a while.

 

For instance, if you find a funny residue crystallisation growing off some poisonous animal, you can either use it as a weapon, eat it (causing you to die), etc, or use it on some rocks and get a powder which is an ingredient for explosives which a native told you about after you turned on your psi link to communicate with them after prevented a large and ugly animal from destroying their home.

 

I'm talking the kind of interaction you get in an adventure game but with more things to interact with and on big scale like oblivion. Also, similarly to how you need to collect ingredients in oblivion, but with a science fiction theme and more emphasis on survival and finding out what stuff does like in system shock.

 

So in other words, a free roaming survival horror.

 

And yes it sounds extremely implausable to pull off succesfully, but I'm fond of the idea then again someone else might have already done it...

 

Yeah, this game exists. It's called "notrium," developed by a talented finnish guy. Try it, it's quite nice.

Plus it's free!

[Tels]

Yeah it was an interesting article. Too bad he's ended up doing 'popular' games, things that a profit can be made on. I'm not familiar with that studio or their games so I don't know, they may be really good. But it deffinately sounds like they are taking the safe route nowdays.

 

Guess everyone's got to eat, and artistic integrity only goes so far...

 

To expand on this, I think it is also unfortunate that he always talks only about "how to work with a publisher", "how the publisher takes the saferoute" etc. but apparently the entire independent scene either is not in his mind, or he dismisses it so that he doesn't talk about it. (Or maybe I overread something in the article, I was tired when reading it).

 

To me, most creativity today comes from small independent games. World of Goo, Limbo (although they went the publisher route, so closed the game for me, somehow proving my point about publishers being evil), Osmos, and a host of other games.

 

Yeah, it is true FarmVill got 20+ mil "players". But almost none of them pay any money, and it is not really a game (in defence of it, it has at least a creative component, where people can "draw" pretty pictures by arranging stuff on their farm. Compare with Mafia Wars, which is just a glorifier "click here so you can click more"-hell. It still amazes me that people can spent 1h+ each day "playing" this shit, tho... but then argue that "bringing out the garbage takes to long and they are tired and don't want to do it" only to continue to "fertilize the crops of random people" in game... oh well...

[Tels]

I don't know. I mean it didn't sound so much like selling out... maybe...

 

I think he probably learned a valuable lesson from LGS though, if you can't sell the numbers to keep the studio open it's time to find a new job. And I bet LGS closing was probably a fatal blow, it really did sound like it was a great studio to be a part of.

 

The funny thing is it can't be about money, only, because Daikatane blew through 30mil US$, while LG took 1mil per game. And I don't remember Daikatana being any "hit" in any shape or form. For Daikatana, Eidos could have kept LG around for a few dozend years even if they never sold a single game in that time...

 

Me thinks it is mostly a great gamble, with heaps of money thrown around silly-nilly-willy (who says that 10 million in advertising will really be recovered?) and sometimes some developer gets lucky, others get unlucky, and sometimes someone can accidentily fulfill his creative vision by being at the right place when the money gets thrown at him

[Sotha]

Me thinks it is mostly a great gamble, with heaps of money thrown around silly-nilly-willy (who says that 10 million in advertising will really be recovered?) and sometimes some developer gets lucky, others get unlucky, and sometimes someone can accidentily fulfill his creative vision by being at the right place when the money gets thrown at him

 

Hey! There must be some truth in that, because in the 'science industry' this is exactly how research projects are funded. Except that the amount of money involved is much smaller and the advertising money goes to instrumentation.

[Mr Lemony Fresh]

Yeah, this game exists. It's called "notrium," developed by a talented finnish guy. Try it, it's quite nice.

Plus it's free!

 

Basically yes, but an a 2d overhead shooter can only be so immersive, let's face it. I know you'd expect that to take the same game and make it a 3d fps would be dumb, but this game is a really light version of what I have in mind especially in terms of immersion, and Aesthetically, completely different.

 

The thing that would need to make my idea special is being able to land on a planet that is completely different from anything you'd find on earth but plausible, that's what would make it interesting to play, and that's what would make it a fun challenge, because you need to uncover the secretes of this strange and unusual land. With this game I kinda get the impression of some kid's playtime with a bunch of plastic figures in a sandbox with a bunch of stuff thrown in. Not that it doesn't look interesting, but it's really not what I thinking. In terms of new content it's kinda predictable because beside the fact that you can see everything from a birds eye view, there doesn't seem to be anything I haven't seen before eg robots, alien birds, angry locals etc. bare with me though, I'm too lazy to watch more than 20 minutes of gameplay.

 

Anything else?

[demagogue]

Mars Colony is (will be) a survival-exploration game building a Mars colony and making it self-sustaining. Here are 3 videos on it:

,

,

 

What I think you're talking about is like this, this level of complexity and type of interaction, but putting it on a living planet with alien stuff around. At any rate, I think that would be an awesome game concept and would like to play it. I worry that in a Mars sim, you might start running out of things to do after a while or it gets repetitive; and you just have more desert to explore. But if it's a living planet, you still have the same survival things to do, but now you also have to set up a secure perimeter, and it adds a lot to the exploration, discovering new plant & animal species at every turn, not knowing what risks or benefits each one has (is it edible? does it carry some disease?) until you test them in the lab or watch what happens in the wild. The more I think about it, the cooler the concept gets.

 

........................

 

By the way, in my last post defending Neurath, I didn't mean to say that we shouldn't feel disappointed that he's gone the casual-game route (and not just him!). But these guys are paying a price for it, too. I think they all realize that the casual games they're making now won't be recognized beyond their little sphere and won't have the influence or cultural impact that the great FPSs had in the glory days. No one knows or talks about the games his studio is making now. People choose their legacy, and on this track his is going to be as a founding father of one line of immersive and inspiring FPSs then disappearing into more comfortable obscurity. Maybe he's okay with that; there are worse legacies. And to be honest, all of the developers associated with our favorite games didn't make it into our era entirely unscathed ... Spector, Levine, Romero. People like Garriott could get a pass because they retired before the reality of contemporary game-making set in.

 

Then again, if I think where all the inspiration is these days, I think about indie developers like Introversion, some Eastern European & Russian devs (though the pressure is on them too), but probably the type of dev I admire most is like Armağan Yavuz, the guy that started Mount & Blade pretty much as an independent personal project, he had a lot of awesome ideas, built a community around it, listened to them!, and could get funding and immediate feedback, then actually put in the work to turn it into an awesome game. That to me is the ideal of how great and inspiring games can be made in our era. It's just limited by the production limits; there's only so much a small team with limited resources can accomplish.