Bleszinski also remarks that the ‘old guard’ of E3 reveals and a cover on magazines ”is dead,” because YouTube and the like let you and fans get a far greater message across.
In fact he swears he’ll ”never make another disc-based game for the rest of my career,” preferring to take the Minecraft approach where the community builds beside the game.
”Your game is as good as how many YouTube videos it can yield,” Bleszinski tells Gamasutra.
”My wife and I are totally hooked on Rust right now. It’s not about the ‘new user experience’; in these games the new user experience is utter shit, and it’s okay. There are two lessons people have not learned from Minecraft: Get the game out there and build it. Some kid will put out a video. Players will teach each other. You don’t need the ‘press A to jump.’”
”PC is where I’m going to wind up. That’s where the community is,” he says. ”The trend will always be the core. If I start a studio, I want a community manager there day one. I want weekly video or podcasts; I want task lists available on the subreddit. When my wife and I play Rust, before we play, we check the subreddit. Whenever you get a little bored with a game, someone issues an update. I feel like a game developer again, where I get to check out the build list.”
”The whole ‘old guard,’ where you get a Game Informer cover and an E3 reveal, is dead,” he continued. ”I’ll never make another disc-based game for the rest of my career,” as E3 is targeted at ‘wooing’ buyers from main retailers.
”As a developer myself, I will probably always make shooters. It’s in my DNA,” admits Bleszinski. ”…I want to get back to the point where I go to PAX, and a couple comes up to us and tells us that they met in a game that my team made. Cosplayers. Kids with tattoos. That sense of camraderie with developers. That’s where I want to get back to.”
This new direction is partly to ‘atone’ for the way Gears of War got away from him creatively.
”It didn’t wind up what I’d hoped; I’d pitched it as ‘Band of Brothers with monsters’ – you know Band of Brothers is well-done and emotional, telling the story of the Greatest Generation and what they did in the war. Yet somehow we landed on ‘Predator’… the characters being all ‘buff and manly’, I’d never planned on that.”
Check out the full interview between Cliff Bleszinski and Gamasutra.
