Just replayed Bastion and it did exactly that. I remember 5- to 20-hour games (Bastion, Papo y Yo, Braid, Hollow Knight, Undertale) more fondly and more clearly than I do most games I’ve sunk 100+ hours into. More Arkham Asylum, less Arkham Everything After!

There’s a reason that no “choose your own adventure” books are literary classics. :)

trust your players

That sounds like 90% of my steam library. 

No amount of “open-worldness” will ever be able to compete with a well- and DELIBERATELY-constructed, FOCUSED world in which a very specific series of events is designed to take place. To me, “open-worldness” always comes across as just a lazy cop-out to avoid having to do any real world building. BotW avoids this…

I guess I have that pressure to some degree among my friends. It takes me an average of 3 months to finish a new release by which time most of my friends have moved on.

Every game’s trying to be the only game you play. Even annual franchises like Assasin’s Creed. It’s just not sustainable.

Game makers have completely forgotten the “always leave them wanting more” axiom, and have gotten into the “how many hours can we pack into this game” arms race instead.

I’ve had similar experiences, but at least with Breath of the Wild, the endgame was right there, ready and waiting for me whenever I wanted to hit it. So when I got to that point of starting to feel bored with the game, having done everything I wanted to do, I pointed myself at the castle and finished it off. Which is…

Is this sarcasm?

Fortnite, Splatoon, Mario Tennis, Mario Kart, NBA, Doom, Minecraft, Rocket League are all frequently played online. 

more good deals in this twitter thread, courtesy of kotaku’s own heather alexandra!

Seems like overkill to me too. At some point it will all just become a meaningless mob of tiny, low detail (due to distance), mob of NPCs. And I’d guess that point comes well before you hit 100K.

But is that truly necessary?

I mean, I’m all for innovation but, at some point... there are limits to the human mind’s ability to perceive and comprehend.

I’m not ready to face the abyss.

Second this. Interviewing is a really tough skill to do well, and Jason is one of the best.

Doing all these one-on-one dev interviews has been a blast - I’m hoping to find a way to make this a regular thing.

Really liked your questions and interjections, Jason. You know your subject, which leads the dialog into the right direction, unlike most other interviewers I read on other sites. Some site even asked an avalanche of generic gamedesign questions to a ... level 3D artist ... Result was 50% of generic answers, 50% of “I…

WOW that’s a blast from the past. Do Americans even know about Terence Hill? His movies with Bud Spencer were to European (pre)teens in the 80s and 90s what Saturday morning cartoons were to Americans.

Terence Hill 2015 (76 years old)