Most developers tend towards being a little on the quiet side. Chris Taylor is a glorious extrovert, trading obscene jokes with the worst of them, carelessly mentioning games he hasn't announced yet and casually trusting no one will abuse his confidence.
He's also been involved with some of the most interesting games of recent years: Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander. He contains contradictions: in my half-hour with him, he both expressed the opinion that the need for constant total reinvention is something we have to move past while rapturously extolling The New.
Two things are clear. Chris is fun to be around. Chris thinks a lot. At the moment, he's thinking about the newly released expansion pack to Supreme Commander, Forged Alliance.
Expansion packs and semi-standalone sequels - the 1.5 thing - are an odd phenomenon. You don't see that in any other medium, do you?
Chris Taylor: You see, one of the problems with a full sequel is people want a brand new game. But these days... well, I was playing BioShock. To be honest with you, I got all the way through BioShock and I don't want Ken Levine and the gang at Irrational to go away for four years to create another one. It's too long.
I'd rather have something in 18 months or a year, like Valve are doing with their episodes. It really is one of those things: do we have to go off an reinvent a brand new game, or do something closer to what is an old school expansion pack but with new units and content?
For example, if we did Supreme Commander 2, would we throw away all of the factions, and create a new story with four new factions you've never seen before?
You're a lot like the games you make, aren't you? I'm not trying to reach for something like Auteur Theory, but...
Taylor: First of all, I'm very hyper. Always have been, since I was very young. My parents worried about me when I was young - worried whether something was wrong. But I'm also very cerebral. I tend to think deeply about everything - which is why I appreciate your questions where you're searching for a much more complex answer than a number or a quick sentence.
The games reflect a chunk of that. The games are high energy. There's a lot going on. I'm pushing to go somewhere new. I mean, if you and I were going out for a drive for four hours, I don't want to tell you all the same shit you've heard from me for all my life.
You want to hear something new. I'm going to try and find stories you never heard. I'm going to try and shock you by creating scenarios with clowns and midgets you've never heard before.
I'm going to try and take you some place new. The stuff which we haven't announced is very much taking each of these traditional experiences somewhere radically new, as I'm getting tired of recycling the same old core games.
I think we pushed Supreme Commander as far as we could, and there's so much we changed... but this is a pretty fantastic art form, and we're really just getting started in ways of pushing the boundaries.
Have you read anything I wrote about punishment systems? We shouldn't be punishing our players. Punishment is not cool. I don't get punished when I watch a DVD or read a book... Why should I be punished playing interactive entertainment? It doesn't make sense.
Do you know Jonathan Smith? He's the Giant Entertainment guy who worked with Traveller's Tales on Lego Star Wars. He described watching kids' reactions to failing at games as almost like child abuse.
Taylor: [Lego Star Wars] is one of the best game designs. I refer to it in all my meetings with designers. I always refer to it. I don't know the guys at Traveller's Tales, but it's genius.
When you have design that radically reforms traditional gameplay like that, it's the stuff of genius. I love it and my kids love it, and have logged more hours on that than any other game. I never said to them they should. That's what happens when you create stuff that's great.
It's was so radical, and people didn't even notice it. It wasn't like Molyneux making a speech about redefining the boundaries... they just went ahead and did it.
Taylor: They can do any game - Indiana Jones, and what's the other one?
Batman.
Taylor: [laughs] Batman! Just awesome. These are going to be super successful games, and they are the future, these designs, this philosophy.
What's interesting is that Supreme Commander is completely the other way. I'm exhausted when I play it.
Taylor: It's a game for people who have energy to expend. There's another type of game where you recharge. Then there's what I consider the height of design, which allows you to expend then recharge, cycling your energy. If you're watching TV, it's pure recharge. How many people fall asleep when watching TV? Because you're not doing anything, it's a mental massage.
Gaming traditionally - which we've witnessed for the last 20 or 25 years - is where you drain your batteries. Really, you get away and finally get up and go. RTS, FPS, you name it. Now our industry has started to explore relaxing games. The analogy I use is mowing the lawn.
When I ride the lawnmower, I put my son on it, he falls asleep and when I'm mowing, I don't think about steering and gas and cutting grass... I think about life. I think about work. I think about things I have to do. I recharge. I re-create. Not recreate. RE-create. I charge my batteries up.
When I finish mowing the lawn, I haven't done a chore - I'm actually ready to take on something. I'm sitting on my ass on a lawnmower, so there's not a lot of physical energy there. That's what I think gaming needs to be. Look at your Saturday. Do you want your entire Saturday to be laying around or do you want your whole Saturday to be about working, or would you rather a combination of both?
You do some chores, you do some errands. You lie, you sit, you enjoy. It's a balance. I'm striving for that in my next designs. To create a balance of energy output and energy input. [Pauses, worried he's gone too far] That's not too much?
No, it's great.
Taylor: We're getting to a place where we're talking about games in brand new ways, which we've never talked about before.
Can you remember where you had the ideas for your games? I have most of my best ideas on the toilet.
Taylor: Toilet is great for me. Shower is the best. I get most of my ideas in the shower, because I'm relaxed. In all fairness, I don't come up with entire ideas per se, because ideas are derivative in a way. Total Annihilation was my attempt to build a game like Command & Conquer, where I would do a whole bunch of things differently which I would think were improvements.
What I didn't have was a brand, an art style or many of the things they had. But I had many game mechanic improvements. You know what it is? When I travel through Europe, I look around and get inspired by architecture, by history, by television and film... it all goes into my head.
But the little things like the full strategic zoom in Supreme Commander was me playing Railroad Tycoon 3, I think, and being frustrated it wouldn't zoom to my cursor, but it would zoom to the middle of the screen. But the idea came to me in that moment. I wasn't working - I was playing someone else's game.
Think about music - when you listen to music, the styles, even the singer's voices. The way they control their voice-box. You get Dave Matthews or the guy from Pearl Jam [Eddie Vedder] where they were singing... using the throat. And then 50 bands come out, and [mimics grunge's bass-heavy singing style] they're all singing like that.
Then you get a new guy or woman, who sings in a completely different style, and everyone else copies it... but it was still was an evolution from something else over here. Art, painted, drawn, sung, filmed... is almost all evolving from a previous work. Every once in a while you get somebody who takes a big jump, and they're a genius artist. Which I find fascinating.
There's a concept by musician Brian Eno called 'Scenius', where a group of people trying to work towards a similar end cross-pollinate ideas between each other. Someone makes a tiny advance in a drumbeat pattern, and that's taken by everyone...
Taylor: We have that in games all over the place. I look at BioShock and I go... see! Look how fun this particular thing is. I'm going to try and do something like that, but in an action platformer.
Lego Star Wars has to be credited with the most number of singular bits of design genius in one place. And that's why I give those guys a LOT of credit.
Great interview. Is there more of it somewhere. I like what he has to say about the mixture of relaxation and energy expenditure in games. The only game that I recall that I found relaxing was Beyond Good and Evil, and even then it was more pleasant that relaxing.
And I've been saying what he said about releasing games every year or so, and not needing to find new engines or totally new settings for a while. If I enjoyed the first game then I want more of your storytelling, more of your design, more of your world. I don't nescissarily want new graphics or a huge departure.
Supreme Commander isn't for me, but what else has he made?
I've never been a massive fan of RTS games, mainly because I can't multi-task, but I loved TA and have only heard good things about SC so Taylor has a big tick in my book.
I like his way of thinking, he seems like a pretty cool guy.
But personally I'd rather wait a little longer for a longer story than get it in little pieces. It's not all that immersive if all you get is a couple of hours with a year or something in between - you forget who the characters are and you lose touch with what you're doing and why you're doing it. I loved the HL2 story because you could relate to the characters, but with the Episodes 18 months (and then some!) apart I can't even remember where I am in the story. So why should I continue the fight if I can't remember the reasons for it?
Gas Powered haven't done that many games - it's really just the ones mentioned in the interview - Dungeon Siege, SupCom and Space Siege.
I belive we once had a perfect solution for this - the FMV cutscene.
It provided a reprive from a tense, exhausting experience, yet continued the story and experience seamlessly.
People raved at Half life's (and it's bastard sibling 2) use of never taking control from the player. But I think that's wrong, i think it goes against what Chris was talking about here - you need moments of relaxation. In games where you never stop being in control, you're always pumped. Even when people are talking, because you know at any moment you may have to do something.
To me the cutscenes in C&C felt rewarding, and I think part of that is because it gave me time to relax after expending energy. it kept me going for that 'one more' cutscene.
So yeah, to me the FMV cutscene provided the perfect way of combining relax-expend. I'm sure there are other things we can do, but I don't think the way Half life, FEAR, etc do it is very good in terms of making games perfect experiences. Mybe something more like Cyrsis or CoD, or Gears of War, where after a lot of effort, we often get control taken away, perhaps as getting in an escape vehicle, to watch the next minute or so of action unfold.
Supreme Commander can be a pretty punishing game, especially the add-on. Completing an objective, only to have waves of bads thrown at you from a point on the map that was previously blank, isn't a walk in the park.
I think Chris Taylor's games' weakest point is the storytelling and, by extension, experience. Contrasting SupCom with World in Conflict, while both stories could be seen as comedic, WiC is much better at drawing you into the conflict, giving the suffering caused by war a human element. In contrast, SupCom almost deliberately makes the war an abstract thing, giving you no grounding in the scale of the conflict - the zoom, while excellent, just makes this more so. While it's no Nexus, or even (the horror...) Haegemonia, the writing and backstory is competent but doesn't really add to the experience, unlike WiC, which really takes you on an emotional journey if you play it in large enough clumps.
Of course, SupCom is all about game design, which is admirably done, if you like the 'big war' thing.
Honest, non-polemic/sarcastic/ironic question: what's so great about Lego Star Wars and its design?
Yep can someone answer me that as well (and not just its charming ) if someone comes up with one great thing about it that i can get down with, i'll go buy it.
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) if someone comes up with one great thing about it that i can get down with, i'll go buy it.
