"I always refer to that .gif that went around [comparing the] first-person shooter design of Doom to where we’ve gotten to: Straight hall, cutscenes, straight hall, cutscenes, straight hall, cutscene. So many games these days, with their campaigns, feel like the game designer is chasing you with a sharp pointed stick saying,’You will feel something at this moment.’
My favorite games lately are the ones when you come into a hallway and you are like, ‘Oh, how did that dungeon instance turn out for you?’ ‘Oh, well I went in as a mage and I did this or I snuck entirely through that one,’ or, ‘I haven’t even seen that, where is that?’ as opposed to, ‘Yes, I came around the exact same corner, and I saw the exact same tower fall, and I saw the exact same experience.’ and if you look at it from a production standpoint, the fancy falling tower in the scripted experience is actually much more expensive but it yields far less of the actual gameplay.
So I want to get back to systems interacting. This is something will wright talks about all the time and always has. I would sit there, being a 20-something at dice, being "I’m Cliffy, blah blah blah" with all that young swagger, not listening to his wisdom, and [saying] ‘I’m going to go make a fancy scripted hollywood experience.’
[I’m] really realizing that there is a direct correlation, bugs notwithstanding, between how good your game is and how many unique youtube videos it can yield. And that is one of the mantras I am continuing to hammer.
The amount of viral videos we sent around of Skyrim of millions of wheels of cheese going down a mountain or a frozen bear that flies off into space -- it is just golden. You want a game where programmers are like, ‘how did that happen? Did I even code that?’ that is when things are great and we had that in many ways with unreal tournament [with] emerging gameplay [like] teleporting and the translocator. I want to get all of our games back towards that in the future."
