MindsEye has been positioned as a linear game. You are best known for creating open world games. What was behind the decision to make MindsEye a more linear, narrative-driven experience?
I think certain stories are more difficult to present to players in an open world setting. Open world gives you freedom – you don't necessarily want freedom to portray a story. For MindsEye, it's a very set time in a character, Jacob Diaz's, life. You pick up as Jacob when he arrives in Redrock, and then you leave Jacob at a certain point in the future.
And so, it'd be very difficult for us to have an open world in there. It's horses for courses: it depends what you're doing. But for Jacob's story, it had to be a linear game.
Having said that, there are open world experiences in there, and we can build them through Build.MindsEye. There is a free roam open world mode, where you play [as] a different character and you see his time, from the end of MindsEye, to the point of our next big planned launch.
Again, they're all connected through a narrative, and we really want to show the universe, show the stories that have taken place in the universe, the characters in that universe, and see how they've experienced the same experience but from different viewpoints.
Was there ever a discussion about creating a more traditional GTA competitor?
In design, you look at a lot of different options.
I'm not sure it would've been smart as a company to say, 'we are going to compete with the biggest game on the planet'. I'm not sure that would be the best business decision to make. We went through a bunch of different designs, and to tell our story, this is what we landed on.
Being who you are, it brings a certain level of expectation and attention. Do you find it a double-edged sword, launching a new studio and launching a new game, with your background?
Yes. There's always comparisons, and I think that's how humans work.
As kids, we're taught to put a triangle into a triangular hole, and a square into a square hole. I think we do that for the rest of our lives, and we like to describe something new as 'it's X plus Y, with a bit of Z in there'. It makes things easy for us. It's maybe humans optimising the way we communicate.
So there are comparisons. It serves us well in some ways, it doesn't serve us well in others. Dave Grohl said it well when he formed the Foo Fighters: nobody's interested in the Foo Fighters, all they were interested in was Nirvana.
The guys have built something very cool, and I just hope people can see it for what it's trying to be.
www.gamesindustry.biz
