“This edition of Boss Fight Books is heavily interview-based, and I think it really works. As much as this book is about a game, it’s also about the making of a game, the way a studio and real human team puts something together. The book really does a nice job balancing the game with the real world considerations. Studios closing, money, and business. It’s really quite an interesting treatment.
Something I found really fascinating was a discussion about the issue of programming a game in the current age, and how in some ways, less complicated gaming systems can be an advantage.
In an interview, a current developer was talking about how he wanted to add vultures to his game. You’d see them in the scenery, far off, and then before too long you’d come across them feeding. Which is when you discover a corpse and launch the next part of the game. This developer felt the vultures added texture, and hopefully the player would notice them far off, and when they became more numerous and closer, the player would slowly realize something was wrong.
The vultures couldn’t be added. The thing is, to add something like that to a modern game, you have to get an art department, designers, programmers, and a whole team of people to make the vultures work.
In fact, I heard a different interview once, and the topic was a programmer whose only job in a game was designing smoke. Some fire smoke, some gun smoke. But that was his entire job, adding smoke into this game.
Things have become very specialized and niche, and that means adding something that seems small can make a huge impact. It can cost production several weeks as opposed to a couple days, maybe even hours.
In Jagged Alliance 2, the system was simple enough that small details and giant amounts of story could be added without doing too much extra work. Which is why they could afford to have a gigantic cast of characters, many of whom would go unused and unplayed depending on the choices players made. The simplicity of the system meant that the game could have a depth not available today, the option to have a game where a player might only experience 25% of the options, situations and characters on the first playthrough.
Awesome point, and really interesting stuff.”