J.E. Sawyer Interview

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Written by BuckGB on June 22nd, 2009

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Those were really long games, offering multiple secondary quests and ingame texts, as in Planescape Torment for example. J. Kaplan from Blizzard has recently remarked videogame developers are not any Shakespeare so they should stop writing whole books for videogames, because nobody is going to read them. Do you share his point of view?

I don't think we should be writing books, no. Any text we write should engage the player in the game. That said, I don't think developers should shy away from trying to create high quality writing for players. Just be sure that the player is involved in the process, not being vomited on by the game authors.

That said, if you're not a good writer, the solution to the problem is not to stop writing. That is the exact opposite of the solution. I've never met an artist who's the equivalent of Bouguereau, but that doesn't stop them from trying to improve their skills every day. Learn from others, be realistic, be humble, and work hard.

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Publishers usually take first or second selling weeks since shipping date to measure a possible commercial failure or success. This may work for consoles but we've seen many times many games still selling years after they were launched. A clear example of that is Unreal Tournament 3, whose numbers raised to a whooping 3000% after last update. Brian Mitsoda talks about a narrow-minded industry when recalling Vampire Bloodlines is still being sold through digital platforms. Should publishers be more patient regarding this tendency?

RPG developers (myself included) tend to be a bit cynical about these things because some PC RPGs can have incredibly long lifespans. But the truth is that most titles sell the vast majority of their units in the first month. And while some do have great success at reduced prices on a long timeline, publishers typically aren't into long-term investment

Publicly-traded publishers really aren't patient, because stockholders lose their minds if an investment doesn't have a quick and strong return.

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