 |
|
|
| Chair Press |
 |
43 posts
|
|
IGN Interview with Donald Mustard
Donald Mustard talks more about Chair and Empire in an interview with IGN. You can check out the top story here:
http://insider.ign.com/articles/716/716138p1.html
|
Posted:
Wed Jul 05, 2006 7:26 pm
|
|
|
| Di$array |
 |
80 posts
|
|
Damn those insider interviews 
*Shakes fist*
|
Posted:
Wed Jul 05, 2006 7:32 pm
|
|
|
|
| Icelandic_Boy |
 |
44 posts
|
|
Booooo!!!
Does anyone know what they talked about?
|
Posted:
Thu Jul 06, 2006 1:15 am
|
|
|
|
| Ajjin |
 |
84 posts
|
|
I'm sure Mustard does,
Hey Donald!! What did you guys talk about?!
|
Posted:
Thu Jul 06, 2006 5:49 am
|
|
|
|
| Mireneye |
|
31 posts
|
|
Basically they talked about Narrative story telling, and how stories will need to be developed in the future, a bit surprisingly Donald thinks we will see more great stories coming from the FPS genre then the RPG genre in the coming years. Also how the world needs a new bad guy, and not just some smalltime (bad, bad guys). But like a big Nazi russhia or similar "Bad guy"... That aside they talked about how far they are in production, and also what has influenced Donald in the later years, that is... The series called Lost, and Shadow of the Collosus.
(Hehe, actually signed up to read that).
Cheers
|
Posted:
Thu Jul 13, 2006 11:30 am
|
|
|
|
| Di$array |
|
80 posts
|
|
| Mireneye wrote: |
Basically they talked about Narrative story telling, and how stories will need to be developed in the future, a bit surprisingly Donald thinks we will see more great stories coming from the FPS genre then the RPG genre in the coming years. Also how the world needs a new bad guy, and not just some smalltime (bad, bad guys). But like a big Nazi russhia or similar "Bad guy"... That aside they talked about how far they are in production, and also what has influenced Donald in the later years, that is... The series called Lost, and Shadow of the Collosus.
(Hehe, actually signed up to read that).
Cheers |
Wow thanks Mireneye. Cheers for the summary. I do agree that we need a new bad guy. But he’ll have to be very dark to compete with the Nazis. I smell a bad guy thread brewing.
|
Posted:
Thu Jul 13, 2006 2:30 pm
|
|
|
|
| Chair Press |
|
43 posts
|
|
More of the interview with Donald has been posted on some of IGN's public pages.
You can check it out here:
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/719/719717p1.html
|
Posted:
Mon Jul 24, 2006 4:41 pm
|
|
|
|
| Ajjin |
|
84 posts
|
|
GAHHHH!!! Someone wanna just compy and paste the interview on here or PM it to me, I'm a cheapskate I know it ;D
|
Posted:
Tue Jul 25, 2006 7:19 pm
|
|
|
|
| Chair Press |
|
43 posts
|
|
Full Interview Text
Here is the full interview....but you should subscribe to Insider soon so you don't miss out on any more great news!
Q&A: Chair Entertainment
We speak with Donald Mustard about his new company, new project and the evolution of storytelling in games.
June 30, 2006 - Xbox fans will recognize the names Donald and Geremy Mustard from their work on Advent Rising. The ambitious project was a partial collaboration with acclaimed science fiction author Orson Scott Card on an epic sci-fi adventure that was to span three games as well as a comic book series. Advent Rising never made is past the first game, but Mustard brother's view of projects that span multiple mediums was reformed into Chair Entertainment.
Their newly announced project once again joins the developers with Card on a project called Empire. The first piece of the puzzle is a novel by Card that will be available this November. Soon to follow is a game (first-person shooter), a comic book series, and a feature film. We had the opportunity to discuss the project with Donald Mustard, learn what makes Chair tick, and how storytelling in games will drastically change with the next generation.
IGN: Would you like to give a bit of background about how you entered into video games, Chair's business model, and your goals for the company?
Donald Mustard: After finishing Advent we really felt like we wanted to do things a little differently than we'd done in the past and we felt the best way to do that was to form a new company and to set things up from the ground level. The main goal of Chair is to create strong franchisees that are heavily story driven. I'm very interested in telling great stories and I want to tell them in as many viable forms of media as possible.
We very concerned with making stories or narratives that are approachable and accessible to as many people as possible. While we may have a really cool concept that will make a great game we also want to create stories that will translate well into other mediums. We want to make a story that is rich enough in atmosphere and character that it would make a good book or film and we think of that from day one.
The reason we want to do that is two-fold: One, we want to get our stories out to as many people as possible. While I may be able to get you to play the video game and see the movie, I'm not sure if I could get your mom to do that. But I might get your mom to read the book. The second reason is a more practical reason. You know as well as we do that making next-gen video games is certainly not a cheap endeavor and the more people that are aware of our product and know about the better chance we have at a successful franchise. For example, with the Empire novel, we know that Orson Scott Card books sell a lot of copies. We know, because we've read it that it's a really awesome book. Its going to be a big book for Card and that will just instantly create a lot of brand awareness that not a lot of video games have the advantage of having years before the games come out.
It's something we're trying and so far it's been really successful for us in allowing us to plan everything from the start. We know where the books are going, we know where the film is going, and we know where the games are going. Even down to when we're designing the characters and the vehicles and the weapons and we're like: Where do the ball joints go in the toys?
IGN: The standards of stories in video games never seem to be the same as the standards in literature, movies, or even graphic novels. Is this something you agree with and influenced your decision to work with Card and other authors and you work on future projects?
Donald Mustard: That's something we take very seriously. It's something we attempted with Advent to some level of success but I very much think that it's unfortunate that games aren't held to the same level that we hold a movie to. We go to movies all of the time and we're not ok with a movie that only delivers a great action sequence. It's got to have a solid foundation or we rip it to shreds. Games aren't close to that level yet and we'd like to be at the forefront of changing that perception.
I don't think we could point to many of the top games that are out there right now and find one that doesn't at least have some semblance of a story, but we certainly don't consider that a selling feature of a game and we want to change that. I'm interested in playing games that feature great gameplay, awesome AI, physics and allow us to do lots of cool stuff in the world. But that would really not mean much to me if that's not wrapped in a wonderful narrative, that's paced well that has emotive character development that has a story arc I care about and that has a thought out beginning middle and end and if it doesn't focus on narrative driven gameplay. That's something that you're going to hear us talk about from now on: narrative driven gameplay and what does that mean.
As designers and as gamers, when you design a game typically you say what kind of game are you making. You design your core feature set and then you wrap your story around that. I think that's a bad way to design games because you're basically limiting what you can do with your story. Your story can never deviate and characters can never do anything that's beyond the core set. We define our narrative first, and that defines our feature set. So if in our game we need the character to row a boat to an island then in our game one of the features has be a playable boat vehicle.
It's a pretty significant difference in the way we go about designing things. Those are some of the themes that we'll be tying in and hopefully we won't be alone in doing that.
IGN: Empire is about a nation divided. What was the catalyst for this project and what were the earliest conceptual stages like?
Donald Mustard: As a consumer I've been really disappointed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I think the fall of Russia got rid of our last cool bad guys. Terrorists just don't make good bad guys. They aren't like Communist Russia or the Nazis, they don't pose the same kind of enigmatic, world-wide threat. I think that's why James Bond movies have kind of sucked for the last fifteen years. I mean, even 24 is starting to get kind of stale in that Jack Bauer can only stop so many little groups of terrorists that aren't big and imposing. I think that's why World War II games are so popular. Nazis are fundamentally evil, it's the same reason we like Darth Vadar and Storm Troopers.
With Empire I really wanted to create a scenario, a world where we could create a new bad guy, a new superpower, and a new threat for our heroes or for America to fight. That was some of the initial thinking behind Empire. We've been thinking about it for awhile and it's been in the back of my head for a number of years.
Card and I loved working together on Advent, but because of some of the things that happened along the way we felt that we never had the opportunity to collaborate to the level that we really wanted to. Advent was pretty set in stone by the time Card came along and we didn't have the time for a good collaboration. When we started Empire I didn't know if Card would be interested in working on something like this because it's a bit more in the vain of Tom Clancy subject matter. We were considering who we wanted to work with I was talking with Scott and he wanted to know what we were thinking. We talked about some of the ideas in Empire and he just really liked some of the core stuff. Nothing was set in stone because the entire idea is just one sentence: How could America flip into a civil war again? From there we were able to flesh out a huge story. Some of the stuff that Card is doing with the book is awesome.
IGN: How does the collaboration work? Is there a give and take, do you and Card develop characters together?
Donald Mustard: Well, we'd have these large meetings and then he (Card) went away for a few months and just digested all of it. In that time he was also writing the script for the Enders Game movie. Then he came back and presented to us his take on a lot of the characters and their motivations. Once we established who these characters were, we made some overall adjustments to the plot and he sat down and started writing.
IGN: I know the game is very early in the development cycle, but how do you feel about the next generation coming up this fall? How far along are you, and how far along do you expect to be in the coming years?
We're just going into preproduction now and we're very aware of what is going on in the industry and what is being developed on different platforms. We've told people that the game is a first-person shooter running on the Unreal Engine. Advent was Unreal so we have a lot of experience. I think a lot of stuff that Epic is going with the engine is incredible. Without getting into details, we have some pretty cool stuff in store. We learned a lot with Advent which my first full game. With Advent I wanted to innovate on every single level I could imagine. I'm proud of Advent, and I think it did a lot of things really well, but I think one of the things I learned was that you shouldn't innovate in every single area all of the time.
In Empire we really want to focus on telling an awesome story without making the player learn an entirely new control scheme. We want to remove any control barriers to the players to allow them to get into our gameplay and our narrative. That's why with Empire we want it to be a first-person shooter, its a little more of a familiar control scheme to people so we can spend more of our time innovating in areas that we think are critical like storytelling.
I can't say too much more, but we have some really cool gameplay features. We're very interested in creating a strong visual and gameplay dichotomy in the world we're creating.
IGN: A lot of what I'm hearing is reminding me of themes that I hear when we talk with BioWare and discussions I've had about American RPGs. What is your take on how storytelling is going to expand with games like Empire? Will great stories start appearing in more genres?
Donald Mustard: Of course we all grew up playing RPGs like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy but I find that as I get a little bit older I don't necessarily have 80 hours to invest into a video game. I think that RPGs have traditionally been able to really take their time and not be forced to edit anything. They haven't been forced to learn some of the hard lessons that Hollywood has had to learn. When you have two hours to tell a story you have to boil it down to what really matters. If you're making an 80 hour game you can have expansive themes that go on and on, but that's not necessarily a good thing. I think that's why a lot of stories in games suck, because we haven't learned to edit and we haven't learned how to get to the heart of things quickly.
That's one of the reasons we like the first-person shooter because I'm certainly not going to take 20 minutes to develop a theme or a character. That's forcing us to approach story telling like a movie or like a really good Television show like Lost. We have to develop our characters quickly and through gameplay as opposed to through long uninteractive cut scenes.
I think the pioneering storytelling is gong to come from action games and first-person shooters as opposed to RPGs and turn based games. My aim is to never take play control away from the player. We need to grow up a little bit, learn from other mediums on how to deliver better stories quicker and pack more content in.
IGN: What have you been playing or watching recently that has influenced your work?
I think over the last two years the biggest impact I've seen on my work is Lost. What JJ Abrams has done on that television show is incredible: the way that they've developed characters and moved the plot along and tie it into everything. Within a huge story arc they have hundreds of little sub arcs that are all weaving together and I think that is so applicable to designing games. I think we get caught up in saying lets take 20 hours to pace out our first person shooter when what we should be saying is lets figure out the 20 hour arc but lets also figure out several sub arcs. So that ever four or five hours of gameplay you're getting big moments and revelations and then pull it back more and say lets design to get really playable chunks.
I would say the best game I've played in the six months or a year has been Shadow of the Colossus. I know a lot of people say that, but to me its still the only truly next-gen game I've played and it wasn't even on a next-gen system. It was the first game where the physics and the interactive world all came together the way I wanted as a gamer. The bosses, the puzzles, and the exploration were all contained in one awesome package.
IGN: Thanks for your time.
|
Posted:
Fri Aug 11, 2006 4:54 pm
|
|
|
|
| Whonoz |
 |
2 posts
|
|
Great Interview!
Thank you Chair Press! 
|
Posted:
Sat Aug 12, 2006 1:28 am
|
|
|
|
|
