لقاء خاص مع دين كارتر,كبير مبرمجي الأسطورة FABLE
اليوم في موقع ign وحصريا للمشتركين,عرض الموقع مقابلة مع دين كارتر كبير المبرمجين في استوديوهات بيغ بلو بوكس على لعبة فايبل,وقد قمت بنسخ المقابلة ولصقها هنا,واعذروني على عدم قدرتي على ترجمتها,لكن أهم النقاط في المقابلة سأذكرها في موضوعي الاسبوعي:) ,تفضلوا:
February 07, 2003 - At some point in the infinite future, we won't have to read anymore about Fable, the title formerly known as Project Ego, because we'll be playing it. Since developer Big Blue Box is so closely aligned with Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios, we don't expect that to be any time soon. In the world of videogame publishing, the word "soon" carries about at much meaning as "later" since both refer to periods of time after now. To make now, a time period in which we're not playing Fable, more sufferable we present our in-depth interview with Dene Carter, one of the co-founders of Big Blue Box and one of a handful of fellas who actually knows all about this game.
It only took a few questions to get things rolling with Mr. Carter, so drink in the details of Fable, the game that's already been billed by Molyneux as "the greatest role playing game of all time." Believe it or not, that's not an indication of how long it will take to develop the game, it's a promise of quality and Carter has all of the details on the potential greatness of Fable below.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IGN: You've intrigued Xbox owners everywhere with the amount of freedom you're giving us in Fable. What are the limits of this freedom going to be?
Dene Carter: The thing is, we started off with a very PC-type of gameplay mentality. We were going to allow you to do everything, or at least bits of everything. We started heading in a very Morrwind-y direction. And something we realized very early on, especially once we started getting all kinds of coverage on it, was that we were trying to produce a console game. And that has a very very different ethic to it. Suddenly, you find yourself in a situation where you were going to be vague about something, be subtle about something, hint at something, you suddenly couldn't do that anymore. Otherwise people would assume that it wasn't there, that it didn't exist. So, for example, let's say we're talking about renown in the game; the fact that you can build up your renown and people react to you in a certain way. That's something, normally you'd handle in a very simple, statistical manner: a certain percentage of people would react a certain percentage more friendly to you. Suddenly when you're doing a console game, it's not really feasible to do that anymore because this is a medium where people really want to sit down after work on a Friday night with a beer in their hand on a big fat cushion in front of the TV and knock back a few while having some fun. I mean, all subtlety goes out the window.
It wasn't so much a case of reducing freedom or anything of the sort. It was about, whenever we were trying to allow you to do something, we had to put in ten times more work than we expected to allow you to do that. Before we were allowing people to wander all over from place to place and sort of freely explore and whatever else. The thing we found first of all was that when people were faced with this question "What would you like to do," the first thing they'd throw back at us would be "Well, what should I do?" We found that frustrating. In fact in Black & White, there was a long long time in development before the advisers came into play, because people were looking at the game and saying "You tell me I can be good or evil, but how can I be good or evil?" rather than using their own imaginations. In the first instance, the designers of the various missions were saying "Just do what the hell you want" and the advisers were saying "Uh, right. You can be evil doing this, this, this and this." Because frankly people don't really want to have to think very much and that's really where we've had to be very clever to make sure people notice stuff.
We've also had to do things like make sure people understand when they're in a safe region or a region which is potentially dangerous because you end up with situations where people don't quite know when they can breathe and relax via musical cues and things like that. It's been, in many ways, a case of looking at a set of very human concepts and boiling them down into very clear well defined rule systems, which are sometimes less than realistic.
IGN: So how do you solve the problem of nudging people in the right direction? Are there missions in the traditional sense to compel people to do the cool stuff the game has to offer?
DC: Absolutely, and we have to have that. The way I describe it is "bubbles of gameplay." You're given an overall, overarching mission goal, which is usually something very very vague, which can be attempted in a million and one ways and we don't care when you complete it. And within that you're given opportunity to react to little, what we call vignettes, during that time. So let's say you're wandering along and you might see somebody being mugged by somebody else. And that's a situation where you can choose to react however you wish. We're not saying it's good or bad to do whatever but if you're sitting there and you say "I'm gonna pile onto the poor trader as well, because that's a nice bit of loot," that's an evil act. But we haven't come out and said "This is mission four, go and protect the trader." But on top of that the game is about one-upmanship, the culture of celebrity and trying to make sure you secure your ultimate aim which is to become the best and most well renowned hero in the entire world -- which you may or may not succeed in and yet still be able to finish the game. So that's your overall goal, to become the most memorable hero anybody has ever heard of. That sort of opens up the world to you, opens up people since they'll respect you one way or the other, whether you're good or evil.
IGN: We're sensing that subtle cues and other non-traditional means of conveying information are going to be the trend with Xbox games moving forward. Fable is doing this with the way characters will physically change their appearance over time. Is this going to be a theme throughout the game, where you'll have to read what's going on in the game world to know how you're progressing?
DC: As we like to say in the biz "horses for causes (or courses, depending on your familiarity with British accents)" for something we've got to make sure you absolutely has or has not happened. For example, you've just cleared a region of monsters. You've killed every living thing that happens to be wandering in this area and we want to draw your attention that and go "Ding! Ding! You've cleared this area of monsters!" It's unrealistic, but we don't give a rat's ass because people have got to understand what's going on.
Likewise, when it comes to things like renown, you need to know that your renown has raised and there are a number of things we can do to let you know that. We haven't resorted to numbers yet anywhere. In the stats screen, if you really want to look at them there is a stat screen for you, and you can have a peek at all the individual stats in the game if you really really want to even though it's not necessary to complete the game. What is necessary, for example, if you thwack a bunch of baddies, is you need to know your renown has gone up by a certain amount. You need to know that thwacking a bunny is not going to be that awesome to most people and you're not necessarily always going to have people around you so we can't rely on you getting feedback from NPCs. However, there are graphical ways to do this, which aren't realistic, but provide a clear messaging system. So the answer is: most of the stats are hidden, other stats aren't quite as well hidden because you'll get people going "Well, I can't tell what's going on." Each time that happens we try to find different ways that are a little more contrived, but if we can we'll try to do it with nothing.
IGN: Can you describe how time is going to work in a game? We've heard there will be a specific amount of minutes corresponding to a year of the character's life.
DC: No not at all. At the moment it's variable for many different reasons. Sometimes we have full-on real-time going, sometimes we pause time, some times we skip time ahead quite a lot based on story elements. So basically time is doing all sorts of weird and interesting stuff in the same way it would do in a film. So don't expect time to go one standard way throughout the entire game, because you'll be very very surprised.
IGN: So there's never going to be any pressure for me to hurry up and do something before the year is up or any other deadline pressure like that?
DC: Only when we want there to be. That's a very open ended answer but it's true. I find that when you're playing certain games, say Grand Theft Auto, for example, the missions I enjoyed least were those that had time pressures.
Here's a good example that we had to deal with recently. Somebody is in a shop buying something and it came to closing time, and the guy is saying "Could you get out of my shop because it's closing time?" What basically happened was, the hero refused to get out and you had this shopkeeper getting more and more irate at this guy just standing in his shop pissing him off. That's a nice way of having things happen. There are other examples of that where the fact that time is moving forward is a real pain in the rear. Let's say you're wandering through the forests and you've been told this town's being attacked by these particularly unpleasant creatures. If you don't get there in time, then you're going to feel like you've done something wrong and you're going to want to reload. And we don't want people doing that, we never want them to feel like they've screwed up. We want people to feel like they've made choices or that they've made decisions that have had an effect on the world in ways they choose. And we don't want them to feel as if we've forced them into a situation where they couldn't possibly win. Otherwise they'd just get frustrated and reload again. So this is an example where we'd make sure the mission wasn't time critical or we'd screw around with time when they got to the place. So time is handled a lot of different ways throughout the game.
IGN: So in that example you're using suppose I get distracted and go off and do something else instead of helping that town under attack. How will you account for people still having free will to do what they want even though you've given them something to do?
DC: We'll make sure the day last a really damn long time. That's the general point of the game. What we're trying to do here is show you this is what you can do with ultimate freedom. So then the questions become "Where does it get wooly" such as when people don't understand what the rule system is; "Where does it get unclear and people don't know what they're supposed to be doing"; and then lastly and most importantly really "What's more fun?"
We had a situation recently with crime and punishment. If you wander out of town and thwack people obviously the town guards get very pissed off at this. Because we want you to develop relationships in town and we don't want situations where you'll never be allowed into any town because you've been an idiot and you've ruined the entire game and you just wander around killing people all over the place, we have to make sure that the town itself has a slightly fuzzy memory of you. So you'll wander into town after having committed some terrible deeds and they'll remember that you did something absolutely horrible and the individuals you've dealt with will remember exactly what it is, but the town guards will just remember that you're a troublemaker so they'll be very cautious with you but they won't instantly pile into you and kill you as soon as they see you. Otherwise we'll end up with a situation where somebody can effectively screw up the game for themselves and be like "Dammit, I can't buy anything anymore because I killed some kids and stuff."
IGN: But isn't that a decision they made that they'll just have to live with?
DC: It is, but the point is, if you're allowing decisions that will cause people to be able to screw up the game for themselves long term, then we have to be really really careful. I think that's where we've probably had to do the most additional work, stuff we didn't ever expect to do. We realized people can screw up the game for themselves quite badly. At first we didn't care, you know, if you've wandered around, pissed off everybody in the entire world and now you can't buy anything and you're going to starve in the wilderness by yourself, well then fair enough, whatever. But we found that isn't very much fun and people want to redeem themselves at some point.
If you thought Dene Carter was flowing with the answers in this interview, be sure to check out the second installment when the Big Blue Boxer gives us the meaning of life and tells us why we're here.*
*Mr. Carter doesn't really give us the meaning of life, but he does give up a lot of extra info on Fable.
-- Aaron Boulding
===========================================================================
حرية جراند ثيفت أوتو+قصة وعالم فانتازي+لمسة العبقري بيتر مولينيكس=أفضل لعبة ار بي جي في عالم الفيديو جيمز(قول مولينيكس المأثور)
سلاموف:-)
