Pirates of the Burning Sea
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- Developer: Flying Lab Software
- Genre: Historical
- Status: Final
- Platforms:
- Website: http://www.burningsea.com
- Retail Price: 49.99 BUY IT
- Monthly Fee: 14.99
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The Producer of Pirates of the Burning Sea gives us a developer's perspective on AGC
This focus on theory and practice rather than promotion and sales means that AGC is a very small event and it's very focused on the nuts and bolts of producing games. This also means it's easy to meet leading practitioners in the field and exhange notes on what you're doing. We had a great time talking to people working on City of Heroes, Stargate Worlds, and many other games. We learned a lot from our colleagues at other companies and we told them all about what we're up to. This kind of knowledge sharing is vital to keep your mind open and willing to test your own assumptions about what works and what doesn't. It's very much like an academic conference in this respect. I went to a bunch of panels and many were fascinating. The keynote by Blizzard's Rob Pardo about game design in World of Warcraft was terrific, and I particularly respected his portrayal of hard design decisions as choices between two roughly equal sets of trade-offs rather than clear right-and-wrong decisions. In many areas of game design, that really is the case -- both options present reasonable outcomes and neither will make everyone happy. Pardo's contention was that you should really consider making those choices and living with them, rather than trying to achieve a compromise between choices that waters down the best in favor of the most broadly acceptable. Another good panel was about Sam & Max: Freelance Police, the episodic comedy game from Telltale and GameTap. They explained how they're doing a project in which they will release six installments in seven months, each with about 4-5 hours of gameplay. I really think that's what episodic content should be like. The approach we're seeing with Half-Life 2 and Sin episodes seems wrong to me -- spacing them apart by half a year or more doesn't actually feel episodic in any meaningful way. Sam & Max's timetable of about a month between episodes feels natural and fun. Of course, the production level that HL2 and Sin have set make this very difficult for them, but that's their decision. I don't think episodic content is going to have much impact until we can turn it around quickly. This panel was interesting to me because we're doing episodic content in Pirates of the Burning Sea. After launch, we have a major storyline that will be released in chapters of new missions on a regular schedule.
-John Scott Tynes - Producer, Pirates of the Burning Sea You can comment on this article here. |




