gunsmoke on 8/7/2011 at 09:30
You're fine, dude. We are all fans here and it would take quite a bit of restraint to not sound like a huge fan-boy for me too. Don't take it personally, it was a light-hearted comment. Sorry if it came off as harsh.
demagogue on 8/7/2011 at 16:38
I thought it was fine too.
The most important thing in interviewing someone IMO is just to be informed -- like the game itself & its era, what's in it, how it did in the market & for players/critics, its postmortem, the studio, where people worked & their titles, etc -- so you know what to ask them that's insightful, and when they bring up something you know what they're talking about and can go with it with more questions. And I thought on that front you did well. And Gunny's right; don't take what we say too seriously. We're all just backseat critics, lol, so our job is just to talk about the tone of voice or grammar to entertain ourselves. But seriously your interviewing style is just fine and does the job IMO.
If I had one comment, it's that I think the lion's share of his talk should really have been on his work on SS2, not Thief (as much as I love Thief), since that was a lot more his legacy. So I think having better time management and flow-control so he can get to things we want to hear would be good. I understand he was pressed for time, but that made your time-management role even more important. Also generally moving topics along so we hear about a number of different issues. (Though talking about SS2 might have been moving beyond your purpose since SS2 was led by Irrational and LGS IIRC was just a co-developer or something like that; but even that relationship would have been interesting to hear about, Irrational & LGS.)
jtr7 on 8/7/2011 at 21:39
That would've been fine for another interview or a longer interview, but this series is about Looking Glass, not Irrational or career paths, so Thief would get more time in that context, especially with Ken's vague credit on TDP. If these interviews were twice as long and dedicated to the interviewees' careers, it would still leave out so many interesting insights.
sajon77 on 9/7/2011 at 02:34
Quote Posted by demagogue
If I had one comment, it's that I think the lion's share of his talk should really have been on his work on SS2, not Thief (as much as I love Thief), since that was a lot more his legacy. So I think having better time management and flow-control so he can get to things we want to hear would be good. I understand he was pressed for time, but that made your time-management role even more important. Also generally moving topics along so we hear about a number of different issues. (Though talking about SS2 might have been moving beyond your purpose since SS2 was led by Irrational and LGS IIRC was just a co-developer or something like that; but even that relationship would have been interesting to hear about, Irrational & LGS.)
This is probably where my influence on the interview comes out. I don't personally consider SS2 much of a Looking Glass game. It feels much more like the first Irrational game to me, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is it seems born out of a different design philosophy.
Focusing almost entirely on Thief was intentional. I'm interested in Ken to the extent to which he function within Looking Glass's ensemble, since exploring how such an ensemble approach yielded such artistically focused and distinct results. Ken went on to be much more of an auteur on projects like SS2, and there's less of a mystery as to how and why those games turned out the way they did, which makes them somewhat less interesting to me.
demagogue on 9/7/2011 at 03:27
Fair enough. :)
Of course for a lot of us (that mod), we got to know SS2 most intimately later through the editor. So I at least always thought of it as very much an extension of Thief's Dark Engine just from that, and didn't they share the office space? But it's true it's not really a product of LGS, so that's totally fair.
Aja on 11/7/2011 at 05:22
I actually enjoyed this interview a lot. Thanks!
