Tristanjohn
Posts: 3027
Joined: 5/1/2002 From: Daly City CA USA Status: offline
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[QUOTE=mdiehl]Not your presence here, TJ, just your rhetoric. I don't see the vast Billings-Grigsby-Mogami conspiracy here. To be sure, GGPW was all fubar, but it really seems to me like some substantive changes have been incorporated.[/QUOTE]Your word of choice is "conspiracy" while mine would be more like "process." In my mind it is the process of game development which hasn't changed much from PW, or rather if it has then this process has been degraded to a lower level still. Of course I don't know what influence Joel has these days over Gary's product, but that influence was very bad news ten years ago without a doubt.
As far as that goes I believe Gary would do much better on his own, though I don't know that to be true and also recognize that such a course would be much more difficult if not outright impossible for him to accomplish.
Mogami doesn't figure into this either way except insofar as he represents this new breed of playtester which isn't about to complain about anything but just dutifully test, like the "loyal" worker he often claims to be (and with blindfolders on at that), whatever version of product is sent his way. While there is something to be said for this sort of slavishness once a game goes beta there is no excuse whatsoever for a member of a development team of any capacity to not give voice to informed opinion of said product under development when that product is in alpha and thus still subject to redesign. If it's the case said member of the development team harbors no such informed opinion then he ought not be a member of development to start with, but if he does possess such opinion then I say he has an actual obligation to the author to share this opinion.
"Loyalty" might well be defined different ways, and helping someone to improve his product works for me in that sense.
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