alt Hacker NewsFallout 2's Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy
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> “Players are selfish,” Avellone said, reflecting on his time designing the seminal computer roleplaying game Planescape: Torment. “The more you can make the experience all about them, the better.
Put more charitably: the user is paying for this experience with their money AND their time. Let’s pack a wallop into the experience.
More software should be this way!
If you like this sort of content, I recently found Sandy Petersen (Call of Cthulu, Doom, Age of Empire, Halo) is extremely active on X. Lots of interesting tidbits about game design https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu
Obligatory link to Tim Cain's[1] YouTube channel[2] where he talks almost daily about every aspect of game dev.
[1]: Tim is the original Fallout creator/designer, who also made Arcanum, and worked on Outer Worlds.
Great find and also worth a watch is the Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout video from Fallout creator Tim Cain
I didn't know the same person was behind both Planescape: Tormentand Fallout 2, some of my favorite games of all time. Torment I actually played only recently (had only played Baldur's Gate 1&2 before) and absolutely loved it. So it's not even just nostalgia.