Chris Sawyer interview

[beeb375]

Afternoon. The man who started it all (no, not Owen) has done a wide ranging interview with Eurogamer, which may be of interest to some of you: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... ter-tycoon

[Chrill]

Also a new roller coaster under construction at Kolmården in Sweden called Wildfire. This looks like it'll be fast and smooth with tall drops and loads of air time, and well-situated in a forested area of their safari-park.

ME TOO!! It looks super awesome. Kolmården is a zoo, but they're building this large roller coaster. Good on you, Mr. Sawyer.

[Dave]

It would have been all too easy to create a "designed by committee" game so watered-down that it contained no character and just a lot of disjointed features bolted together. So since then I've kept my head down a lot more and just got on with creating my own vision of whatever game I was working on, even if that meant the game was flawed

About as pointed a comment as it gets, don't you think?

[Pyoro]

It's actually kinda funny, but he (sort of) did what lots of indie devs nowadays do 20+ years earlier (keeping their IPs), and he even had in ways similar problems then they have now. One look at some of the Steam Greenlight list and everyone can see how true that quote can[/b] be. But of course it doesn't have to be that way. Perhaps depends a bit on the personality of the dev/s. Writer. Artist. Similar problems all around.

Don't know why he gives of this "detached from the gaming world" feeling, really could be his time right now, if he wanted it to be. Just do something like Dwarf Fortress or somesuch. ^^

[Chrill]

I'm happy to see RCT2 being planned for mobile release. Would suit an iPad perfectly.

[orudge]

Quite an interesting interview, and always good to hear from Chris Sawyer. I did pick up on that comment, Dave - it's a sentiment he's expressed in the past, certainly. But I also noticed his reference to a large community developing for Locomotion, and that he does apparently keep an eye on some of the online communities, etc!

[siu238X]

I saw Mr. Sawyer said:

To be honest I rarely play games these days. The world of games moved on and I didn't, and I miss the flawed style and clunky simplicity of games from 20 years ago.

Which I think is very honest. Indeed it shaped his development philosophy -- IMHO it is the reason he didn't make new titles after Roller Coaster Tycoon, and partly contributed to the fact that Locomotion is substandard compared with Simutrans and OpenTTD (although his previous dispute with Atari probably mattered quite a lot)


Another quote I have a deep feeling on:

I admire the amazing graphics and awesome size and realism of many modern games but for some reason can't summon much enthusiasm to play them. Perhaps some are too realistic?

I have to say that it's the gameplay aspects that matters. Games like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Cities:Skylines are not seen as too realistic to some, yet they have so much replay value that I don't mind paying for their next DLC. Of course developers must handle the business model very well in this case, and I can see Sawyer chose a more traditional path, i.e. keep the copyright and let big developers pay him, which is why he can do things as he wants to.