Dan Tudge interview in Familiar Magazine (or: Oh, This Crap Again)
shawne
Member Posts: 3,239
For those who haven't read it yet: the first issue of Familiar Magazine has an interview with Dan Tudge, director of Sword Coast Legends.
And I took emm-effing issue.
If there's one rhetorical trend I am well and truly sick of in the game industry, it's when developers foist the blame for poor reception onto players, as if the only reason their product has mixed reviews is because the audience has somehow "misunderstood".
Here's a gem when Tudge is asked about the lukewarm response to SCL: "I think we've been very polarizing. One reason is that we didn't do a literal translation of the D&D rules, we did an adaptation."
Really, Dan? You did an adaptation? You mean like every other D&D video game that has ever been or will ever be released? That's the problem people are having? You sure? That's what everyone's been complaining about?
The disingenuous part here is that if you really want to know why SCL isn't so much the new Baldur's Gate as it is the new Daggerdale, all you have to do is read those mixed reviews. Because they'll tell you, in full detail. Tudge's problem isn't that the players don't "get it" - it's that they do, and they're not impressed.
The moral of the story - and yes, I'm looking at you, Beamdog, because you gave space for that BS on your platform - is that if you make questionable design decisions, or take shortcuts, or get your community gassed up for features your game doesn't actually contain, don't think you can fool anyone afterwards by saying it's the audience's fault for missing the point. They already paid their dues, and they don't owe you anything.
And I took emm-effing issue.
If there's one rhetorical trend I am well and truly sick of in the game industry, it's when developers foist the blame for poor reception onto players, as if the only reason their product has mixed reviews is because the audience has somehow "misunderstood".
Here's a gem when Tudge is asked about the lukewarm response to SCL: "I think we've been very polarizing. One reason is that we didn't do a literal translation of the D&D rules, we did an adaptation."
Really, Dan? You did an adaptation? You mean like every other D&D video game that has ever been or will ever be released? That's the problem people are having? You sure? That's what everyone's been complaining about?
The disingenuous part here is that if you really want to know why SCL isn't so much the new Baldur's Gate as it is the new Daggerdale, all you have to do is read those mixed reviews. Because they'll tell you, in full detail. Tudge's problem isn't that the players don't "get it" - it's that they do, and they're not impressed.
The moral of the story - and yes, I'm looking at you, Beamdog, because you gave space for that BS on your platform - is that if you make questionable design decisions, or take shortcuts, or get your community gassed up for features your game doesn't actually contain, don't think you can fool anyone afterwards by saying it's the audience's fault for missing the point. They already paid their dues, and they don't owe you anything.
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Comments
"Tudge says that the second biggest complaint has been that the toolset didn't go into the deep level of scripting that games like Neverwinter Nights had done previously. ... People really wanted that type of product but we were focusing on accessibility..."
Well, I guess now you know the reason that people hated your game, huh? When has focusing on accessibility done anything positive for a niche genre? Casuals won't give an elven arse and your hardcore player base will tell you to screw yourself for insulting their intelligence.
"Tudge says the second biggest complaint has been that the toolset didn't go into the deep level of scripting that games like Neverwinter Nights had done previously. He says despite being very clear that n-Space was not building that kind of title right from the start, expectations were that it would be similar."
Don't be disingenuous. You brought this on yourself by making that the selling point of SCL.
"I know at BioWare with Neverwinter Nights there was an incredibly tiny percentage of people that actually created meaningful content with the tools. And while that content was pretty damn amazing, we wanted to create a game where a huge, broad audience could create a lot of meaningful content."
Simplifying building tools won't allow everyone to make quality content, it just allows everyone to make something mediocre. Not everyone is cut out to be a builder, which is why the NWVault was made, and is why NWN's multiplayer thrived as it did, due to the natural player/builder hierarchy that was created as a result. He must not have seen them in their prime.
TL;DR
Sword Coast Legends was done better a decade earlier.
Sad thing is, of course, that they're not entirely wrong. It's difficult to make a high production value title with a hardcore audience in mind because that audience is by its very nature smaller than the blob of unsophisticated brogamers that throw their money at companies for the greatest tripe. That being said, why you would then go and think you can make that very thing work for a franchise that's always been at the hardest of cores...
It hit me weird when I first read it too, but there's a difference between the Infinity Engine, for example, which tries its best to replicate AD&D rules in the context of a real-time-with-pause environment, and Sword Coast Legends, which doesn't try at all to replicate the rules and instead focuses on the aesthetic of rolling dice and playing with friends.
None of that is to say that Sword Coast Legends was more successfully implemented than people gave it credit for (although I do think n-space's mistake was in marketing their game as a D&D product, rather than a Forgotten Realms product, since it's clear that they wanted to make a game set in Faerun and weren't as interested in using the 5e rules as-written), but that may offer some clarification as to what might have been meant by that particular statement.
SCL's release (and subsequent reviews) seems to have suffered most greatly from a failure to manage expectations about the game they were creating, which to me is the big take-away from Dan's interview. When it comes to indie efforts like this that are led by teams who are used to working with big publishers, there's always going to be some growing pains and identity crises about "What is this game" and "What is the story of this product"--questions that a AAA studio would have entire marketing teams working on, instead of (maybe, I don't know n-space's working environment) one guy in an office trying to put years worth of development time into a fifteen-word tag line.
I'm rambling.
All equivocating aside, I look at Sword Coast Legends as a valiant effort and a solid game (even if it's not a great game, by the industry's standards), which was marred by an overly ambitious marketing campaign. But that doesn't mean n-space's next game won't or can't be great. I mean, look at the game's credentials:
- Visually the game is stunning, especially when you consider that it doesn't have BioWare money backing it.
- The game's website is phenomenal (I look at it often just to admire its unity of design).
- Even the story is pretty good, from what I hear (I haven't played it myself).
- Despite not being a modding toolset, the campaign creator is capable of letting storytellers create their own stories and share them with friends. It doesn't go deep enough for a game designer to create the kind of campaign they might envision in their mind, but game designers aren't the target audience: DMs are. And not every DM has the technical skills to learn scripting languages that would allow for that kind of deep-level design.
All of those things point to a development team that knows what they're doing, and they know how to do their job. So I wouldn't write off n-space just yet.
And I may be remembering this wrong, but was SCL not sold on the notion that you could recreate your favorite D&D campaigns using the toolset? Meanwhile, there's been a Pool of Radiance module for NWN2 since 2006. So... *shrug*
So, I wouldn't consider the presence of this interview in the Beamdog's magazine as telling something other than a politics and acting with goodwill towards WotC.
I think that's a little unfair. Storytellers already have plenty of avenues for writing and sharing their stories. If you're designing a tool set, you usually want to go with too much rather than too little. Better to have features people have trouble grasping than to leave them grasping for more. DMs in particular are a crazy-creative bunch who come up with settings and scenarios for fun, and facing an ever unpleasant "That can't be done" basically pushes them back to a white board in the back room of a comic shop where the only restriction is their imagination.
The game looks like it ended up conflicted between being a dungeon crawler and trying to be an online table-top simulator, and ended up doing neither particularly well.
n-space's goal seems to have been to adapt (there's that word again) the tabletop experience to a video game, where every participant in that experience gets to take part, including the DM. The problem is that most people were expecting the game to be an upgrade of Neverwinter Nights. When it inevitably wasn't that (because that was never the goal), people were understandably disappointed.
I'm starting to piece together bits of memory from before the game was released, and I do remember reading interviews with Dan Tudge where he seemed to float back and forth between "There'll be a story campaign but that's not the focus" and "DMs can create their own campaigns and share them with friends, in addition to running through adventures with the players in real-time"--but I'm trying to recall whether that second part came with a caveat of "But we're not trying to replace Neverwinter Nights, here".
I'll see if I can find one of those interviews; it might help illuminate things.
EDIT: This one from VentureBeat is helpful, I think: http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/01/how-sword-coast-legends-is-a-digital-boxed-set-and-on-the-bleeding-edge-on-realmslore/
There's a moment in there where Dan points out that he's an artist at heart, not a programmer; when he picked up the NWN tools he felt intimidated by the amount of technical knowledge it required in order to create a campaign or tell even the most basic story. With SCL he wanted to change that.
So @shawne - I don't think their target market was mass appeal; I think they definitely were going after a niche market, it's just that the niche they were aiming at was "People who play D&D", rather than "People who play D&D video games". And looking at some of their other marketing, that target makes sense. But they never drew a clear line of distinction between the two groups, which is probably why the masses got a different idea of what the game was going to be.
And that's still on them, don't get me wrong. But it's not like n-space ever claimed they were making Neverwinter Nights 3; they might not have even realized why or how or when their marketing failed to convey the game's concept. And until they figure that part out, I don't think it's disingenuous to start with the assertion, "People didn't get what we were trying to do."
- One thing that creates replayability is a good base game with a great story and many customizable options for the player in order for him or her to want to replay it again under different circumstances (race, class, stats, random events, skills, allowing different quest outcomes).
- Another thing that creates replayability is the prevalence of mods, and in order to support this you need a good toolset. I truely believe that without the time and effort spent by the BG community to create good toolsets (there have been several iterations), people would not still be playing BG today.
With respect to Sword Coast Legends.
From a marketing point of view it actually makes perfect sense to emphasize that the SCL game supports the user in easy creation of mods. The questions that SCL should have asked are the following:
1. What is the balance between casual and advanced mod creators
2. Which of the two users is the main scope of our game that will bring us the revenue.
3. How do we best support our main scope (i.e. what do they want to achieve if they were to create a mod)
If they find out that many casual players create a mod and keep playing the game, then fine, the toolset does not have to be super advanced. If they find out that a select group of heavy modders will create a top 10-20 mods and casual players will just jump into those, then sure you need a highly advanced toolset.
I do not play SCL, but from the discussion above and the article I read I understand that expectation management from SCL towards the player and vice versa was not performed very well... that would be a pity.
With respect to toolset discussion for BG series and Beamdog.
I actually expected Beamdog to facilitate a tool set ever since launch of BGEE. I held out for quite some time to play BGEE because it only added a few NPCs over BGTuTu or BGT. In the end I caved of course because this is my favourite game (I just had to own that new copy of it).
Huge steps for BGEE would have been A) creation toolset that combines the best of scriptcompiler/DLTCEP/NI/Gatekeeper/others, B ) incorporation and continuous support of weidu inside BG(2)EE interface (backwards compatibility), C) mod loader/organizer (like BWS), and D) Resource dictionary like IESDP... Maybe a few other 'huge' steps I cannot think of, but I guess that makes them less than huge steps.
I am really curious what the toolset will provide that comes with Siege of Dragonspear. I think it is imperative for Beamdog that the toolset is well-received to bind both modders and players to the enhanced editions for the next two decades.
(It is an L)