Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Warren Spector Interview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has another interview with Warren Spector.

RPS: Games have changed and evolved by an incredible amount even since you released Epic Mickey 2. Crowdfunding, Early Access, virtual reality, etc, etc, etc. What are you most inspired by these days? Where do you go next?

Spector: I’m certainly inspired by a lot of indie games. That’s where most of my interest is right now. Just as a developer, if I were to make another game right now, it would not be a big triple-A console title with 800 people working on it. I hope I’m done with that. I hope I never do that again. You know, we’ll talk again in a year and see where I am, but that’s the hope.

But just the idea that you can get together with some friends, make a small game, and find an audience for it, that’s like being back where I started. Where everything is a frontier. Nobody knows what games are again. So mobile and PC, I’m there. I’m your guy.

RPS: When you go back into making games, do you think you’ll take a more open approach to development? Would you try and get the community involved by way of, say, crowdfunding or Early Access? Or do you think your games are too story-focused and that you’d risk spoiling everything?

Spector: I’m a story guy. I’m a story game guy. I want to keep exploring that. And so right now I’m thinking a lot about how we tell a story but really empower players more than we have in the past. Every game I’ve worked on – whether anybody else sees it or not – has been a progression toward empowering players more and more and more. That’s an unsolved problem. How do we let players really be the heroes of their own story?

So I’d like to play around with that. A lot more procedural stuff, a lot more simulation. I’d still be pursuing that, just on a different scale. Maybe not crazy 3D amazing over-the-top graphics. There’s a lot of opportunity to do cool stuff without having to pay the price for graphics and sound and everything else in the triple-A space.