“A wrong man at the right place can make all the difference”
- -G Man
I felt like I was living a part of my dream when I entered the offices of Exigent studios based in Noida, although the journey to the Unchartered land was akin to finishing a quest in the land of Hyrule but it was all worth the effort, for I had the chance to share the stage with a world renowned game designer Mr. Paul Steed and his creative team of artists who are veterans in the industry.
Here’s a little about Paul Steed, he has done it all from bearing the brunt of Id Decision of creating Doom 3 to working on some of the most critically acclaimed games in the industry; the sequel to Quake, American Mc Gee’s Alice, Quake III: Arena, The Wing Commander series, Strike Commander (his very first game), the list seems virtually endless. The “Tolkien” of animation has crafted out numerous characters, which have been killed/filled by gamers worldwide, He harbors dreams of being an English professor in his kid’s college to being a Playboy photographer if he weren’t in the gaming industry.
Our little meeting started off with Paul explaining the areas where Exigent functions, the company is a game art studio which handles outsourced work from renowned game publisher and developers, currently with working with an army of 50-60 artists catering to about 8 publishers and growing, Why India, was our instinctive question. According to Paul, India and China are the major players in the gaming arena, There is tremendous potential in our country which needs a platform to express itself moreover the projected growth in the console sector is pegged at 0% whereas the P.C. market is brimming and growing at an unprecedented rate, by 2010 there will be 20 million computer users in our country alone which enables us to create a game that appeals to the entire globe. Their main objective is that they are trying to be an outsource company that would beat China, and they aim to be a company that functions and caters to the needs of the growing industry. The talk then drifted onto piracy, which is rampant in both India as well as China, and I gave him a little information about the grey tentacles of our country
I put forward a thought to which Paul had a real interesting answer, we are at that part in the gaming scenario where America had been invaded by the NES and the only games people loved to play on them were arcade ports of Beat em ups and racing games, the only difference is that, we have a 360/PS3 to tinker around with instead of an NES. Would this affect our development process, he replied by saying that this would act as an advantage because the population of both India and China has more English speakers than U.S. and Europe combined which makes the countries almost impossible to ignore, to add to that the American culture is more self centered which may not allow ideas to flow as freely as our country, it is the newness of gaming that makes us all the more a mighty player the sense of waking up all over again is a wonderful feeling in itself. He was impressed at the recently Chaos ’07 held at IIT Rorkee because of the level of organization they had, he sees this growing into A GDC (MY jaw dropped when GDC was mentioned, yes GDC India may happen after all… and now let our normal course of activities resume)… Paul being a regular speaker at GDC told us that the road to GDC China was already under construction, so India was not far away.
We then ventured into the gaming business and analyzed the potholes in character designs while creating sequels, Gordon freeman is the most common example of flaws in character design from a confused Physicist trying to burrow himself out of the mess he had created in Half Life to being a Savior/Demi god/Messiah in its sequel, I as a player was not able to identify with the character which only looked alike, the same thing was with Snake/Big Boss from a hero in Metal Gear Solid to a battered and bruised guy in Snake Eater, Lara Croft was nothing short of the world brilliant in the original Tomb Raider game but she completely lost touch with her character with their successive sequels.
Steed says that there are two things at work over here one was the pressure of developers on making a sequel and living upto the hype of rabid fans, sometimes the thought of the sequel comes into the minds of the developers only after the success of a game, he cites the Matrix as one such example, the sequels had nothing new to keep the audience hooked onto their seats, the part of Neo kicking an Agents arse was nothing new after the original, the same technique applies with games, us as gamers tend to want more out of our games because as gamers we have grown and learnt to speak the language the developers wanted us to learn in the original ,hence they have to live upto the expectations of and add new elements as well which is getting harder as time passes by, one of the key features that Paul discussed was nostalgia and their role in creating future content, they apply a lot to handhelds and mobile games but rarely to full fledged games on big consoles or the P.C., the reason underlying the fact is that implementing nostalgic elements works only for a niche of the population not the entire gaming community but was slightly put in a fix when my friend brought up the topic of Nintendo using nostalgic gaming characters, he believes that with every successive sequel Nintendo adapts its character retaining the core elements which made it fun thereby cashing on both new and old alike.
Halo 2 was a major success story on Microsoft’s part whilst creating a sequel, the acceptance of Xbox Live to the masses was defined by the fact that Halo 2’s multiplayer component was designed in such a way that it allowed players to dictate the content. Sony is trying to do a similar thing with its interactive project called “Home” on its Playstation network along with little big planet they are looking to transform the way We look at videogames, user based content will help the PS3 the base they need for further expansion and might give birth to the next big game designer. My friend popped up an interesting question about a recent Atari game Called “Bullet Witch” whose posters he had seen on the walls of their office on their website, Steed was a bit amused and told us that the game art was done right here sitting in these offices and was a parting gift when he had left Atari.
Then came up the topic of platform wars which would decide the fate of the gaming universe, to narrow it down further we asked him about India, MMORPGS and Wii was the flavor of the discussion henceforth. Paul is of the view that Wii shall do really well in the world market because of the fun factor in the games released, the word fun is very important for Nintendo as a company, the numerous game developers he has worked with use the word fun sparingly while describing/writing reports for a game but for Nintendo the word fun has to be the center of the game. Japanese developers treat their games as their own children, give it their all nurturing their growth with a range of emotions which is an important element in designing a game, which is what he is trying to do, I grumbled on with the imminent death of cinematic gameplay in the current generation of games for which he takes us back in time when he worked at origin games where the motto was “we create games”, cinematics were rewards for a player completing the game because of technological constraints, it was what kept the player hooked onto a game, since they were far cry in those golden days they were a huge success, Halo and Gears have nothing to hold them together their stories seem they have been ripped off from a kindergarten book, Live pumped air into them and made them what they are today, and have a fan base of 14 year olds who know jack shit about gaming, they see that Quake is gone so what to play now… oooh look at this Halo how pretty… which automatically translates into higher sales figures and a rabid fan following.
Paul Steed has a vision of transforming Exigent Ltd to Exigent Interactive and making full fledged games for all types of gamers out there, touching upon the female audience, he feels that entry of casual games might make life difficult for us, imagine a situation when you are at the tear jerking ending of Metal Gear and you better half decides to paly a little bit of Wii Sports as a group/*bonding* activity… a little hard to digest, worst case scenario come true, but on the other hand if they are shopping you have all the freedom in the world to enjoy your secret one true love!
Betty bad was his homage to Tempest, a hit arcade game made by Atari in the 1980’s. The game was years ahead of its time, the ideas that Paul wanted to implement were truly genre defining during that time but now with the advent of broadband connection and services like Live the industry needs such ideas to stay afloat in turbulent times.
Well I would have love to talk more on the industry but Paul does have a company to run so next up were the artists who did the dirty work of rendering objects and creating engines(from analytical to technical..)
–Neelesh Mukherjee