But it seems like a lot of people who try to do the Diablo stuff might miss the core and the essence of what made that whole game fun. Other than Torchlight, which came out about a year ago. That's a really good question because it seems like a game that has been wildly successful.
It's quite a complicated thing to really sit down and look at.ĭespite the massive success of Diablo, why do you think there are so few games like this? It must be easy!"īut then you really get down to it, and you realize, "Okay, this is a little bit harder than I thought." There was a lot of stuff - balancing stats of all the weapons and how things all interact with each other. But there are things that look great on paper - "Ah, this is how Diablo does it. I'd played the games a lot I was very familiar with it. Having never made a game in this genre before, did it feel like a learning experience? You whittle things down to something that's good and works. Something just isn't working at all." It's just a lot of playing and a lot of talking. You can map out your stats, and you can map out the interactions and all these things, but it really is sitting down with it, playing with it, and realizing, "You know what? You need to slow this combat down," or, "We need to speed this combat up," or, "We really need different types of weapons," or maybe, "We need to regenerate health faster. You can only take something so far on paper. It doesn't seem as fully understood as, say, the FPS. There are very few good top-down hack-and-slash Diablo-style games most of them never quite hit that right feel. I would think that, particularly in this genre, a lot would come out over the course of development. You think, "Hey, you know what? They did this in that game, and it worked really well it would work really nicely here." You change a little bit and put it in. So, a lot of the things that you mentioned are part of the core vision, but there are other things that just pop up here and there. We tried that out, and it worked really well. So when we started playing around and mocking up prototypes in Maya, we kind of hit on that idea of the rolling world, which I had seen in Animal Crossing. I always wanted to meld this 2D art with a 3D world that was all really neat. RG: Well, the rolling world that you mentioned, which is in Animal Crossing, is a good example of that kind of stuff. How conscious was the inclusion of those elements? You've always talked a lot about Animal Crossing as well, and the physical vibe of this game's world evokes that to me as well, and there's also a bit of Maximo, which you've mentioned in previous interviews we've done. It's got the nice action-RPG element that I really like from Diablo. It's got a lot of the humor and the dialogue the way it tells story is from Monkey Island. Because, yeah, games really do change a lot, but my original vision for this game - and it's been in my head for five years or so - was " Monkey Island meets Diablo." That was really the catch-phrase for it, and I think it did that. Now that DeathSpank is done and you can look back, how similar is it to what you initially intended to make? I think they've done an absolutely fabulous job with that stuff. I think Telltale does a really good job with the episodic stuff they've really nailed that whole format well, and they're extremely good at getting things out on time and not taking forever to get episodes. Did you end up playing them after they came out? I know you consulted with Telltale on the Tales of Monkey Island games. I play a lot of them, and they're neat because then you can do two- or three-people teams to make those things. A lot of things are very interesting iPhone games are very interesting to me right now. I don't have anything locked down right now.ĭo you think you will return to that kind of studio role any time in the near future, or are you planning on doing something more on your own? I've got a lot of ideas just rolling around in my head, figuring out what to do. RG: Yeah, I'm taking a couple months off. Have you figured out what those things are yet, or are you taking some time right now? Basic production was all done, and it seemed like a good time to go do other things. That was basically the reason I went there: to get that game made. RG: Just that I came there to make DeathSpank.
What was behind your decision to leave Hothead?
Ron Gilbert: It's been about two years up there, working on it, fluctuating somewhere between 10 and 30 people depending upon what phase it was in.
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