I am not going to write a misleading title that will get you excited for nothing

[elmuerte]

yes, but it sold 900.000 in Europe when it came out six months later.

[Roderick]

Wait a minute, that would mean the game actually made some money! That can't be right.

Psychonaughtier

[thorn]

It sold out the entire first print for the NTSC market. I've tried to find the Doublefine Action News page where Tim mentioned that and how many it represents but their website's archive is kinda terrible these days. Memory hints that it may have been 500k but don't quote me on that.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yeah, me too. I have it on Xbox and PC-Steam.

I just wish they'd put in a bit of effort to debuggify the PC version. The main thing that irked me was that if I was playing in widescreen resolution, the videos would be stretched to 16:9 instead of staying 4:3 with black boxes on the sides.

Also there are issues with ATI graphics cards like freezing (which was mostly stopped by turning off shadows, which makes some of the platforming very difficult) and painfully low framerate in some levels (unfixable, had to go to my mum's place and use her computer).

There's also instances of lines being skipped or not played correctly... Last time I played it, I put the subtitles on... woah! More dialogue! Then it crashed and I lost my progress and I gave up

[ThunderPeel2001]

yes, but it sold 900.000 in Europe when it came out six months later.

Brutal Legend was release worldwide around the same time (yes, I know you were joking), but it DID sell approx 1 million+ units...

PS3 = 530,000 units : http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/12323/brutal-legend/

360 = 690,000 units : http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/12324/brutal-legend/

How that adds up in terms of profit, I don't know. Here's what I imagine went down:

Activision funded the game. They went behind schedule and the game didn't look great, so they dropped it... but they forgot that the deal they made meant Double Fine owned the game. DF said, "Hey everybody, we've got this almost complete game going really cheap! Come buy it!". EA said, "Haha, stupid Activision, we can pay a little to finish this game off and get a bargain!".

Activison sues. Double Fine counter sues. They all settle out of court.

EA releases the game. They make a small profit, based on the fact that they paid so little for it (although they did promote it like crazy). Everybody wins, but narrowly.

I wonder if my little fantasy is close to the truth?

------------------

Either way, I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Tim Schafer's talent is in his writing, he's NOT a wonderfully gifted game maker. He's not Miyamoto. Even the other "big name" game designers tend to specialise in specific genres... you don't see Sid Meier making a Mario clones. You don't see Hideo Kojima making Call of Duty clones. You don't see Cliffy B making episodic adventure games. If Shafer must insist on making a game-games (and not just a graphic adventures that requires much less balancing and tweaking), then he should team up with someone who's actually good at it, and flesh out the world, storyline and characters.

I feel that with Psychonauts they got by by the skin of their teeth, and for many people "Meat Circus" is synonymous with bad level design/poor gameplay balancing. (Although I didn't find it all that hard ) And of course Brutal Legend felt like two separate games...

Oh to have something as fun to play as Gears of War, but with a Tim Schafer script!

Edited November 14, 2010 by ThunderPeel2001

[elmuerte]

Brutal Legend was release worldwide around the same time (yes, I know you were joking), but it DID sell approx 1 million+ units...

I thought we were talking about Psychonauts

[vimes]

I used to think like Thunderpeel - mainly because of the action phase of Full Throttle - but if I noticed that the weak gameplay points of Psychonauts and Brutal Legend comes from the level design than game design.

Anyway, it might be interesting to know how much of Schafer is involved in this side of things when his games ventures out of the adventure genre , since Erik Robson seems to have taken the helm of that on Psychonauts and Brutal Legend (apparently now working at Valve ?!).

[thorn]

BI feel that with Psychonauts they got by by the skin of their teeth, and for many people "Meat Circus" is synonymous with bad level design/poor gameplay balancing. (Although I didn't find it all that hard )

From what I've read of interviews with Tim, that had more to do with running out of time and not having enough playtesting rather than poor design from the outset.

But then I don't think that Meat Circus is that hard, so perhaps I'm not the best judge.

[syntheticgerbil]

No one is going to pay him to do pyschonauts 2 when brutal legend was such a commercial flop

Everybody knows Tim Schafer makes flops. Just like Terry Gilliam.

I think what happens is neither's works sell as expected and then they get the big angry god finger pushed at them and scorned for not selling enough.

Also, I get the feeling Gilliam makes a lot off those DVD sales, while retail game industry refuses to put anything on the shelf older than 6 months unless used, so Schafer is at a clear disadvantage.

Tim Schafer's talent is in his writing, he's NOT a wonderfully gifted game maker. He's not Miyamoto. Even the other "big name" game designers tend to specialise in specific genres... you don't see Sid Meier making a Mario clones. You don't see Hideo Kojima making Call of Duty clones. You don't see Cliffy B making episodic adventure games. If Shafer must insist on making a game-games (and not just a graphic adventures that requires much less balancing and tweaking), then he should team up with someone who's actually good at it, and flesh out the world, storyline and characters.

Aww, that's probably true to an extent, but I feel like he really knew what he was doing for good adventure game design. I guess most people feel that adventures are all poor design at this point (new ones and retroactively damning old ones that were once considered good) and a ridiculous way to ask someone to play a game.

He was probably never confident to fully design anything other than an adventure, hence the lead design roles being taken by Erik Robson for the Double Fine games.

Either way, I think I agree with Vimes, where the concepts are golden, but maybe the execution on those last two games was poor or disjointed. I think Psychonauts did a much better job of balance, but I can see how some might be upset with the changing gameplay styles from level to level. I felt like that was part of the charm. But I'm also one of the apparent few who did not have a hard time at all on the Meat Circus.

Brutal Legend's campaign mode was all screwy. The story came off unsatisfying, rushed, and prematurely ended while the RTS stuff was just thrown at you halfway through the game with little help. Like I said in the Brutal Legend thread, after playing like 30 online battles and reading a few guides, I really started to appreciate and have fun with the set up (as well as see the ingenuity of all the characters you could control), it was still way too hard of a nut to crack. The payoff for being good or understanding the RTS part was weak, since no one was playing online anyway and none of my friends in real life were at all interested.

Edited November 16, 2010 by syntheticgerbil

[brkl]

I still haven't beaten the second fight with Ophelia. To be fair I didn't even try after the first time. RTS is not fun.

[baconian]

I like the frustration that all Tim Schafer games inevitably involve at some stage. You can't be a fan and still not get that, too?!? There's always a payoff, that's the thing. Team Meat have really honed the concept of banging your head against a wall down to utter perfection, but I love the sort of raw frustrating evil genius that I always feel playing every one of TS's games.

EGs

- stuck on MI2 for a month until CU amiga came out with a walkthrough back in the day. Monkey wrench!? gah!

- Day of the tentacle; not so much one particular puzzle, but the head trip of getting how changing something hundreds of years ago makes a difference now was fucking amazing. It was never spelled out. Not spelling things out is one of Tim's game design gifts.

- Meat circus. If you found it that hard, you probably didn't come back to it on reflection. The best platforming puzzles are like adventure game puzzles in that you can think about the best approach to them while waiting for the bus, and have an a-ha moment.

In Brutal, this stuff is there too. The bravery of creating a brand new game genre and introducing the sort of intentional frustration I'm talking about is immense. This guy has more balls than anyone else in the industry.

I hated the RTSy stuff at first, but I gave it a chance, I had to, and I ended up really enjoying it. The thing was, because the end of the game was shortened due to [...blah blah blah Kotick can eat shit...] you never got much reinforcement of the proper tactics to take in each stage battle. Each one seemed to require a new approach and figuring out new ways to use the units, all of which would have been more gradually and explicitly taught to the player if it were, say, Valve, publishing the game. I think that's the source of the frustration, but if you can get past that, and not turn it down to easy mode, the stage battle game has a lot of satisfaction on offer.

Basically, I don't think it's fair to say that Schafer is all about writing and not design, I personally put him up there with Miyamoto regarding design, at least in terms of vision.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think the frustration from not figuring out what to do in an adventure game is much less stressful than the frustration created in Brutal Legend where you just spent 20 minutes on a stage battle, thinking you nearly won, only to die and have to start again.

Then again, I had the PS3 bug where I could not go back to the game after finishing it, so I had to start around 80% and plow through until the end of the game, which only really took an hour or two. The stage battles suddenly got very quick after I knew what I was doing and could easily call on what I needed when I needed while multitasking and fighting the guys on the ground with those double teams.

Really it just sucks because virtually no strategy is explained in Brutal Legend, and since the game is so short, after your first stage battle you are dropped into these really intense ones soon after the first, making you feel lost.

And as far as the Meat Circus, still no comment, 'cause I didn't find it hard. Maybe I've played more than enough 3D platformers in the past to not be bugged at that point?

[thorn]

Jeez, the spambots really are getting good these days.

[elmuerte]

they're not, quite often they copy text from an earlier post

[ThunderPeel2001]

Is Kolzig a... spambot?

[Tanukitsune]

Is Kolzig a... spambot?

No, he just likes the game a lot? I imported the US version that came with that ugly shirt and I bought it again when it came out in Europe... I'll probably buy the Xbox version from Live Marketplace when my backlog clears up a bit...

[Kolzig]

I want to sell the t-shirt by the way, it's still in almost new condition as I've only worn it once years ago, propably will put it to auction in eBay or a local site like Huuto.net.

Edited November 17, 2010 by Kolzig

[Ben X]

No, he just likes the game a lot?

You need to read the previous few posts to understand Thunderpeel's joke...

[ThunderPeel2001]

I want to sell the t-shirt by the way, it's still in almost new condition as I've only worn it once years ago, propably will put it to auction in eBay or a local site like Huuto.net.

But do you sell WoW Gold?

[Thrik]

Man, maybe I'll get to wipe the dust off Psychonauts.net some day! Although in all honesty I reckon I'd prefer an original IP from Schafer rather than more of what's proven. Kind of like how Pixar sequels are always probably going to be good, but I'll always wonder what crazy idea they'd have come up with if they did something entirely new. (Fortunately that's exactly what Pixar usually does.)

[syntheticgerbil]

If he franchised Psychonauts into a deluxe series of games, then everyone could stop ragging on him for being so supposedly unsuccessful.

[ThunderPeel2001]

More Psychonauts definitely gets my vote, I'm afraid. I would love to see more of that universe. Episodic Psychonauts FTW!