Interview: Dyack addresses Too Human complaints
by Ross Miller 
{ Aug 27th 2008 at 11:30AM }
Continuing with their week-long series, nos amis at X3F talked with Silicon Knights President Denis Dyack over some of Too Human's biggest perceived faults. Part 1 of today's video interview is embedded above. Some highlights:
Check out all of our coverage of Too Human, including X3F's five-part video series with Denis Dyack, at our Too Human game page.
- On the community's early judgment: "People are trying to understand a game that's inherently interactive [by watching a video] ... All I can say is try the demo."
- On clipping and texture issues: "There's glitches in all games. It's really interesting to me because, as an example, there's gonna be things you can always improve. To me, framerate's not really that essential in cutscenes and it never has been for us ... I don't think Too Human's inconsistent from any of our previous games ... So there's clipping. Oh noes. Bottom line is, does it affect gameplay and by how much? Are there ways to improve Too Human? For sure, but the overall big picture? Happy, extremely happy."
- On the Valkyrie death scene: Dyack estimated it was a 15 and a 1/2 second scene. "If it's a sign that people love the game so much that they just want to get back in and play, could we make it skippable? Sure, it's an easy change. Is it something we ever would have anticipated since we thought it was faster than going to get your body or losing experience [which does not happen in Too Human] ... is that a change we can make in the future? Sure."
- On comparisons to Diablo: "There's this tactical element. People think, 'oh, this is like Diablo with a bit of action. In Diablo I can just go up to an enemy and pound him away [until it dies] and move on to the next one, if you had the better loot, you usually win. In Too Human, if you don't use your tactics, it is a new kind of genre-bender, you're gonna die. And we're looking at some of the feedback and a lot of people are dying. [laughs]"
- On future downloadable content: "I think that's gonna be unique to people who pre-order it, that's a one-time thing. But we've got tons of ideas that will far exceed the pre-order bonus."
Check out all of our coverage of Too Human, including X3F's five-part video series with Denis Dyack, at our Too Human game page.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Dirty @ Aug 27th 2008 11:37AM
Im not a fan of the dark elves they piss me off.
Am I the only one having problems getting this game online. I think its time to fix my NAT settings.
The death screen is a great time to itch your face or grab a drink.
juju187 @ Aug 27th 2008 12:11PM
dark elves air combos work well,
about death scene i grab a drink, smoke, or put skill points in place.
I'm getting same issue on not connecting but GTA 4 and other games work fine for me.
Boffo the Sock @ Aug 27th 2008 2:02PM
Usually your router is in charge of the NAT settings, and not all routers let you configure those settings (none that I have bought anyway). If you're having problems with NAT settings, then there are a few workarounds, such as port forwarding or setting up a DMZ (demilitarized zone) that will help you if your router doesn't allow you to diddle the NAT settings.
There are specific ports you can forward to your Xbox 360, and I believe www.portforward.com has walkthroughs on how to do it for pretty much every router on the market. As far as setting up a DMZ, you'd have to do some research on that either online or in your router's manual.
If none of that works, then it might be time for a new router. Microsoft maintains a list of compatible routers/gateways/etc. at http://www.xbox.com/en-us/support/connecttolive/xbox360/homenetworking/equipment.htm
xGeneral DEATHx @ Aug 27th 2008 2:29PM
Also, some routers will open up your NAT simply by enabling UPnP, although this can sometimes be considered a security loophole.
Top Cat @ Aug 27th 2008 11:39AM
Molyneux - We screwed up with our game and we're sorry
Dyack - You screwed up playing our game and you should be sorry
Duke @ Aug 27th 2008 11:40AM
...and cue the folks who haven't played the game wanting to tell us all how bad it sucks and how much they hate Dyack.
finaldarklord @ Aug 27th 2008 11:53AM
This whole thing would be a non-issue if Dyack would just shut his fucking mouth, something he STILL has trouble doing for christ sakes.
The games a solid 7 out of 10. The Diablo-esque loot driven gameplay is fun and the bosses are cool. But this ain't the be-all-end-all game we were led to believe and in no way justifies a 10 fucking year dev cycle.
Dirty @ Aug 27th 2008 12:10PM
Also cue the "10 years in development" people... oh too late
Dale @ Aug 27th 2008 12:48PM
I completed it, I still think it sucks.
I wonder if he even played the game. Players aren't dying constantly due to a lack of strategy. The game overwhelms you with enemies with ridiculously high damage thresholds, and no amount of using space, mixing up weapons to get around different resistances, dodging or otherwise helps.
Surely if you're getting a lot of feedback that users are dying far too frequently (and then having to sit through 15.5 seconds of pointless wanky animation every time), you must realise your own design is at fault? I mean, they clearly did, given that you have infinite lives... but that complete destroys any form of game balance as everything is just a case of persevering anyway.
That's not all.
In some areas, I could stand in a doorway and pick off enemies who mysteriously deigned not to approach or attack me unless I moved a few pixels forward. The AI was shoddy throughout. Normal enemies just had a swarm mentality (when they weren't just standing around), and bosses had very repetitive attack patterns. The aforementioned high damage thresholds were the only challenging part about any of them.
Why could you roll and jump freely in some sections of the game, but suddenly forgot how to roll in the hub section? It doesn't affect the game, but it seemed very bizarre.
And another thing about the hub (and virtual reality sections) - how pointless? You basically run over large distances to either set off a cutscene or press the A button. There was little to no NPC interaction, and the vastness of the hub was pointless with only a handful of possibilities for interaction.
MDK did this game with more class eleven years ago.
I know it's cool to jump on the Too Human hate train, especially given the hype, company pedigree and gestation period, but there have been so many great games that simply updating a '90s design with a little graphical polish is not enough.
This game needs serious work to be anywhere near as great as Dyack thinks it is, and I hope he gets off his pedestal long enough to ensure this work is done for the sequel.
Vidikron (FU) @ Aug 27th 2008 1:09PM
@Dale
Hah.. I know what you mean about the damage thresholds and near certain deaths. Did you have a chance to try out any co-op? It's far, far worse than even the single player. For example, there was one section in the ice caverns that I played in both single player and co-op. In single player there was a bunch of the goblins, a couple of rocket guys, and one of those spider looking guys (I forget the name).
But in co-op there were a bunch of goblins, 2-3x as many rocket guys, and FOUR trolls... each with a different status effect on their attacks. FUCK ME. It's like what you would expect to see in 4-player co-op, not 2-player. And it's like that over and over. Co-op is brutal. You really need 3-4 players in co-op with one being a bio-engineer.
KiraXD @ Aug 27th 2008 1:27PM
(On the community's early judgment: "People are trying to understand a game that's inherently interactive [by watching a video] ... All I can say is try the demo." }
except that he wants us to try his POS demo and make our judgement... epic fail right there... the demo was terrible...
The guy needs to shut his mouth... is he serious about this?.. He thinks the demo is that good that he wants people to make their judgement based on that instead of crappy videos? bad call.
his excuses for glitches seems really really stupid... of course theres glitches in all games... most developers fix major ones before release though... and even more through updates... dont make excuses... just fix it. people are complaining about it for a reason... it ruins their personal gameplay experience...
MC Double Def DP @ Aug 27th 2008 11:45AM
This game is definately getting a bad rap for being over hyped. This isn't a stellar A+ masterpiece but it's fun. And it's true about the very annoying and boring death sequence. I hate it, it blows, and that's why it's punishment for dieing. Next time I'll try not to die
knowthyself @ Aug 27th 2008 11:47AM
Seems like those who've played it like it. Then again I saw plenty of love for Lair and Haze when those were released. So its hard to gauge how much is denial and how much is truly a cult following for what ultimately is an average game. Now as far as clipping and frame rate goes...sure Dyack it doesn't get in the way of gameplay...but Bungie, Konami, and Naughty Dog don't seem to have that same problem in their biggest games..what's your excuse?
Dirty @ Aug 27th 2008 11:55AM
Building a new engine too far into development.
Zertoss @ Aug 27th 2008 11:47AM
Well, I don't think he has ever actually played Diablo if he thinks you just click a monster until it dies and that's it.
Also, in Diablo 2, it's pretty easy to get your body back after you die in under 15 seconds, plus there's the interactivity.
sinergy @ Aug 27th 2008 12:00PM
Dude.....that avatar....it's just wrong!
DredTatum @ Aug 27th 2008 12:02PM
Only played hardcore in Diablo 2 so ya, getting my body back wasn't an issue for me either.
Zertoss @ Aug 27th 2008 12:20PM
@sinergy
What do you mean it's wrong? It looks oh so right to me!
Mr.ESC @ Aug 27th 2008 12:25PM
Except for those times you died in Hell or in the Cow Portal and you forgot to open a town portal just in case.
Dirty @ Aug 27th 2008 12:27PM
Yea, that av is kinda disturbing. Its like looking into the mind of a buffalo bill nintendo fanboy.
Shmil @ Aug 27th 2008 12:30PM
but you never go into the cow level alone. you try to have at least 4 people in there so you can get more exp
Kael @ Aug 27th 2008 12:56PM
His response to the Valkyrie scene gets me. This is a good example of how Dennis and I diverge as designers. I wouldn't have had the thought process of "this 15.5 second, unskippable, non-interactive boredom is a lot better than corpse running or exp loss." While that's totally true, that's also irrelevant. As designer, you're not choosing between prefabricated death penalties like shopping at a grocery store and asking yourself "do I want the corpse running solution, or the 15.5-second Valkyrie?". You get to have a lot more control than that. Control enough to not have any excuses for annoying bits to appear in your game. As someone who has spent probably a week of cumulative time staring at the Valkyrie animation over the years, I would have expected Dennis to notice it was an issue and do something about it.
...Not to be too antagonistic or anything. The guy gets enough hate.
JoseMiguel @ Aug 27th 2008 11:52AM
Wow. First time I see a developer whining so much about how people don't understand his game. Seriously Dyack, time to throw in the towel and admit your game kinda sucks.
TheKingInYellow @ Aug 27th 2008 11:56AM
Have you played it? It's not a bad game at all, and the world/concept is pretty fantastic.
I'm enjoying it immensely.
Kizzle @ Aug 27th 2008 12:12PM
Nonsense. The game is completely average at best. Christ, every video game has apologists now.
atrimus @ Aug 27th 2008 12:13PM
not necessarily true. the people at Factor 5 complained that Lair was getting a bad rap, though in all fairness they did eventually come clean and say the game was sorta doomed from the start. plus, they relesed a patch that many say made the game tremendously more accessible.
still, i sorta think Too Human's bad rap is a little ill-deserved. true, i myself didn't like it, but i'm not so sure i'd call it the worst game every made.
Vidikron (FU) @ Aug 27th 2008 12:51PM
@Kizzle
"Nonsense. The game is completely average at best. Christ, every video game has apologists now."
Well, most games are going to have at least a few people that really enjoy them. And how much have you actually played? The game may be very average in many ways, but some aspects are very goood and enjoyable. I think the game also benefits from being a hack-n-slash dungeon crawler. It's not like Haze where there are a hundred better options available. There simply aren't that many good games of this type to choose from and Too Human isn't as bad as its made out to be. I'd say it's easily a solid 7, and could have been an 8 or better if the camera wasn't to crappy. So for those of us that enjoy this type of game, Too Human is actually very enjoyable.
skakillers @ Aug 27th 2008 10:34PM
I really like the setting, although some of the gameplay elements are really annoying. I have to admit it is really fun plowing through a swarm of the 1 hit kill goblins, though.
Residentevil72501 @ Aug 27th 2008 11:50AM
Well in World of Warcraft it can take several minutes to run back to your body lol. And i still play that all the damn time!
MC Double Def DP @ Aug 27th 2008 12:30PM
You ever drunk Bailey's from a shoe?
DXEndar @ Aug 27th 2008 12:00PM
"...and cue the folks who haven't played the game wanting to tell us all how bad it sucks and how much they hate Dyack. "
::cough::
Is that my cue then ?
K . . .
"This Game Sucks and I hate Dyack."
"Turns and leaves roo" . . . oh, I'm supopse to DO that . . . I see
Psyclerk @ Aug 27th 2008 11:52AM
Those Diablo tactics DO work...in the first mission. Which is why I read so many complaints about how hard the later missions are. The demo did a good job of showing how badass combat could LOOK, but it did not do a good job of showing how normal combat would play in retail. If you don't master juggles, air melee and fierce attacks, you'll spend a lot of time looking at that Valkyrie.
Too Human: another lesson in why you shouldn't bother with game previews until the game is a month from release. If this game hadn't been hyped to hell and back, I bet you'd see not even a tenth of the complaints.
Ryan Brown @ Aug 27th 2008 11:53AM
Hey Dyack the "It's not a bug its a feature" line is the sign of a bad programmer justifying their own ineptitude. I played the Demo, hell I was excited for the demo, and what I got was a clippy clicker fest with controls that were too loose. The gameplay felt like a bad rip off of Prince of Persia, and the story felt over acted and forced. If the player doesn't like something about a game it's NOT your place to tell us WE are wrong. Admit that the game has problems, work on fixing them, or get out of the business. Your not in the business of pleasuring yourself
Vidikron (FU) @ Aug 27th 2008 12:54PM
The game feels absolutely nothing like Prince of Persia. How did you come to that conclusion?
Ryan Brown @ Aug 27th 2008 3:28PM
Maybe I'm thinking more God of War. It's the highly stylized combat of swinging around hitting everything in fancy arching moves, when all your doing is pressing 1 button. Feels more like the game has decided your boring and has decided to have fun by itself.
knowthyself @ Aug 27th 2008 11:55AM
You know I don't think its that Too Human sucks. I just think expectations were too high.
atrimus @ Aug 27th 2008 11:55AM
well, i played the demo and didn't like it much. just wasn't my cup of tea. i kinda wish Dyack would move away from Too Human discussions and onto his next project, which i hope turns out to be a much better experience.
Maverick Saturn @ Aug 27th 2008 11:55AM
Yeah, uh huh, right...
What you should do sir is send everyone an instruction manual just to rub it in our faces that we are dumb as shit and its our own plain incapability stopping us from enjoying the game :)
knowthyself @ Aug 27th 2008 12:00PM
Anyone here actually BUY the game and hate it?
atrimus @ Aug 27th 2008 12:09PM
why spend $60 on a game you hated the demo to?
Duke @ Aug 27th 2008 1:35PM
Yeah, but the question is, did anyone who bought & played the full game actually hate it? Having people talk about the game because of trying the demo is a little weak.
I have the game, and I think its pretty fun. Yeah, there are issues and its not amazing, but its pretty fun overall.
Dale @ Aug 27th 2008 1:46PM
Scroll up. Bought and completed it. Got the achievements to prove it, too. :)
ComicShaman @ Aug 27th 2008 11:59AM
Whether your a game designer, writer, artist, or what have you, your work has to stand on its own once you put it out into the world. The more you rush to defend it against every criticism and attack, the worse you look. Dyack needs to realize this and let people make up their own minds about Too Human.
Obviously, there are plenty of people who enjoyed it. But if you didn't? Listening to Denis Dyack's endless string of excuses and rationalizations is not going to make you go back and say, "Whoah, I didn't realize I liked that game after all. Thanks, Denis!"
RiccochetJ @ Aug 27th 2008 12:20PM
I'm sorry, but that's the biggest piece of naive bullshit I've ever read. Have you ever had to do a thesis defense? That's your work that you've put your heart and soul into and you're expected to rationalize and explain all decisions that you've made over the course of your project, and why you feel they were the right ones.
I've listened to and watched a lot of these interviews with Dyack and most times he's explaining SK's design decisions based on the questions he's asked.
And for you people that are telling him to shut up, how bout telling the journalists to stop asking him for interviews?
ComicShaman @ Aug 27th 2008 12:37PM
"Thesis defense." Ah. I see.
RiccochetJ, a game is not a "thesis." It is a product in the marketplace. In the marketplace, you are not debating with other academics. You are dealing with customers who are using your product -- in this case, playing a game.
Dyack's customers will not have the benefit of him sitting in their living room explaining the reasoning behind his design decisions or making excuses for the flaws. He can't fly from house to house and present his defense to players who will ultimately decide the success or failure of his game.
The game has to survive on its own. That's not naive, my friend, that is the way the marketplace functions. In the real world. Outside of academia.
"Thesis defense." Saints preserve us.
Yourself @ Aug 27th 2008 12:55PM
There's a difference between an intellectual composition and a video game, though. While a thesis exists conceptually, art is purposed functionally, i.e., there is a desired standard reaction for art, in the case of video games, it's enjoyment.
When it comes to a thesis debate, if someone makes a counterpoint to your argument, it involves their finding a flaw in what you've done, so you respond by fixing that flaw with another argument, where arguments are already the substance of your work. Without wording it so poorly, that is to say: a thesis defense is nothing more than an expansion of you original work.
What Denis Dyack is doing adds nothing to his original work. It is the equivalent of the thesis-writer responding to criticisms with "no, you read it wrong." He keeps saying "That's not important to us", "how could we have known...", etc. That doesn't fix or change the original work, it just suggests that he doesn't realize he's developing games for an audience, i.e., someone that isn't him. Saying "It's not like Diablo" doesn't make it any less like Diablo in the eyes of people who thought that in the first place, and if they didn't like it because of that, why would they change their minds now?
I have to admit I haven't played Too Human, but that doesn't changed the above stated facts that a finished product needs to stand on its own two legs, and no amount of justification from the creator can change that.
RiccochetJ @ Aug 27th 2008 1:04PM
Oh Jesus, I was using the thesis as an example against just letting your work speak for itself. There are times when you have to justify the decisions that you've made against critics that are asking you specific questions. But thank you for taking my argument literally.
And if you've never seen an interview with a company about one of their products where they address specific criticisms, and the design decisions that were made, then I still stand by my 'naive' statement.
And no I don't expect Denis to fly around from home to home explaining his design decisions. That's why *gasp* he's doing interviews!
RiccochetJ @ Aug 27th 2008 1:21PM
@Yourself: Those are excellent points. When I used that as an example, I was thinking of where a committee member points out a area of inadequacy, and you have to respond. I suppose a proposal process would be a better example, and more fitting to the topic at hand.
ComicShaman @ Aug 27th 2008 1:22PM
Understand something, RiccochetJ. The press can be a tool for promoting your product, and interviews can be used skillfully for that purpose. As a designer, unless you know how to use interviews and other press tools skillfully, you should stay away.
Because another thing the press loves to do is feed you rope until you hang yourself.
Is Dyack being skillful here? I would argue he is not, no more than Factor 5 was in their insipid defenses of Lair. His simplistic portrayal of Diablo hurts him more than it helps. His insinuation that people who criticize the game are just suck is a defense you'd expect from a fanboy, not a top-tier developer.
He's hurting himself here, not making a convincing case for the game.
Yourself @ Aug 27th 2008 1:47PM
To extend my already unnecessarily long argument a little bit, and tie it in with ComicShaman's, comparison is a terrible form of defense. Saying, "People like WoW, and WoW makes you get your corpse, and we don't do that, so, our game should be better, right?" doesn't make a lot of sense, and simply exposes him as an incredibly short-sighted developer. A game designer shouldn't set his goal as "making a game better and different than everyone elses", it should be "making a game that is awesome, no matter what the rest of the market is - and in the process, blow everything else out of the water." Obviously, many games are developed with the former in mind, the market being as competitive as it is. But someone who handles himself the way Denis Dyack does should be above that.
He should probably also be embracing the comparisons to Diablo, as I'm sure a large group of Too Human fans (or those interested in the game) are/were Diablo players - not to mention it's a hugely acclaimed game. Like I said above, if people think your game is like Diablo, let them think that - and better yet - encourage them. "If you liked ________, you'll love __________" is a pretty standard marketing technique.