I'm always exceedingly hyped for coop in games like this. It needs to be full campaign coop though, not just a tacked-on mode, so it might not be the best "addon".
I can say with 100% certainty that if Ori had full coop you'd have sold 2 more copies already
I recently broke up with my girlfriend of 3 years. I've been a little more tender than usual.
This game's intro hit me harder than I expected. Very sad.
I recently broke up with my girlfriend of 3 years. I've been a little more tender than usual.
This game's intro hit me harder than I expected. Very sad.
)I've been playing a big part of Ori this weekend and my fiancée was complaining that I played the game while she was in the room because the intro was so sad she had to cry. Also she was mad at me whenever Ori got hurt. We both love the music and the visuals btw.
Overall, I'm surprised by the game, I wasn't too happy about the Gamescom demo and I still think that Ori lacks momentum in air and jumps too far and not high enough to feel good, making more difficult platforming sections a bit troublesome. However, the world design is great and I am really happy to see a developer with a game that at first glance seems like "one of those artsy indie games" really put a lot of thought into the actual gameplay aspect of the level design, lovely! The highlight for me are the various clever moves. Oftentimes it's quite obvious what you will get in the area if you've played some platformers before, but other times, you get more creative moves likeorshooting yourself off projectilesand I loved that. I'll leave one more comment: This week I had to play this game, FF Type-0, Slender, Toukiden Kuwami and Oddworld New 'N' Tasty for review and Ori easily stole all other games the show, best one of the bunch by a huge margin.the feather (Yoshi's Story's umbrella says hello
Some other people just came back from their well-deserved vacations, so I think it's all good 
Most of our Tech guys were still super busy on the patch and the design team is busy testing the current builds - There's a lot of good stuff happening there and the patch should be released very, very soon.
Apart from interviews, post mortems, etc., I'm also dabbling around with a few prototypes. There are 5 potential things we have in the oven right now (spanning from smaller to _huge_ projects) and I'd love to talk about these games, but as usual, we have to keep things secret for a while longer. We like a good secret as much as the next guy
We also started acquiring some new talent and I'm super excited to see them do work for us. I think a lot of people are really interested in our way of working, the 'virtual office' kinda thing, etc. - and I think a lot of people are just super hungry to work on passion projects instead of doing work on the, without trying to sound disrespectful, 'factory games'.
Business-wise, Ori was already profitable a week after release and Microsoft is super happy, so we'll see about Ori's future
@prophecy0: That save bug was difficult to reproduce (and it also only affected a super small minority of people for that reason...), but our tech guys found out about it and fixed it - will be all good when the next patch ships!
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..Business-wise, Ori was already profitable a week after release and Microsoft is super happy, so we'll see about Ori's future
Business-wise, Ori was already profitable a week after release and Microsoft is super happy, so we'll see about Ori's future
Business-wise, Ori was already profitable a week after release and Microsoft is super happy, so we'll see about Ori's future
Business-wise, Ori was already profitable a week after release and Microsoft is super happy, so we'll see about Ori's future
There were a few reasons for that... One, we had to make some tough design choices, take the Misty Woods as an example: The idea was that we give the player the feeling that he's lost in a forest that constantly changes around him. Now, after we designed the area, we knew there'd really be no proper way for the player to go back in and re-traverse the entire area, so we could have either not put any 'valuable' items in the area or assume that people are okay with playing through the game again.
Two, there are story-events happening in the game that sort of prevented us from having the player go back to a certain location... The Ginso Tree is flooded with water after Act1, so we dabbled with the idea of having the player being able to re-enter the now flooded Ginso Tree, but it also wasn't really designed for underwater gameplay and I always wanted to ensure that if a player has to re-traverse, the area should still contain enough interesting, new things for the player to discover... And we just didn't have the time to iterate over everything again after we wrapped the main designs.
Since a hell of a lot of people are still playing games like Super Metroid to this day, I thought it was an okay decision to make. I understand that a lot of people want to get absolutely everything on their first run, but Ori is designed in a similar way to Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, etc.: On your first run-through, it takes the average player 10-15 hours to complete the game. But when you're on your second run, you can probably cut that time down in half or even more, since you know exactly where to go. So really, I just didn't think it's that big of a deal if people have to play through it again, especially since it's super fun to play Ori
Having said that, we got a LOT of requests from players who want to be able to get absolutely 100% on their first run, so we might look into how we can accommodate you guys with future updates
For such areas you could just have a place where Ori can "remember his time" in a specific location, so for instance a sleeping spot where Ori was brought up, so that he can revisit the misty woods or the ginso tree "in a dream" and find the remaining stuff. I'm not sure if this would hurt your vision of what kind of feeling you wanted to convey with Ori, but this seems to be not too disruptive and you could potentially use this also to put timed challenges into the areas (how fast can you get through misty woods?) if you feel like it.
Anyway, thank you for your answer, it's nice to have some insight into the process that lead to some decisions
Definitely not. I always have some prototypes in the making at the same time and I had 3 of these going on while we were working on Ori. I work on them in my free-time and sometimes it's just nice to work on something else for a bit on the weekend, only to come back refreshed on Monday
There's always the scare of scaling up too quickly and adding too many people to the team, etc., we're absolutely aware of that. I think looking forward, we'll probably always have one main product and one sub-product in development and resources are switched based on the projects needs.
Business-wise, Ori was already profitable a week after release and Microsoft is super happy, so we'll see about Ori's future
