Ken Levine: "People tend to overdo it with their story"

Ken Levine stated in an interview last week that he has had enough with developers who lecture other developers on how to make a game. In a new interview with Digital Spy, Levine has also had it with games whose stories are overwrought and overdone and include “too much information.”

”People tend to overdo it with their story and not strip it down to the bare minimum,” Levine stated. ”There is a rule that you start the scene as late as possible. When two people are going to discuss their divorce, you don’t start with them waiting outside, going inside, picking up their menus - you come in at the last possible moment while also giving all the information required in the scene, and then you end it as soon as you can.”

Levine added that games with long cutscenes also irked him. ”A lot of games have that problem in that they don’t understand that - there are long cut scenes and a lot of talking. I try to respect the gamers’ time as much as possible.”

Anyone who’s played Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Final Fantasy XIII or Devil May Cry 4 know exactly what he means - games that don’t even allow you to interact with the game for a good quarter hour, at the very least, as they engage in their prerendered cutscenes.

Levine’s current project is BioShock Infinite, which will be released next year on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.