Warren Spector on Returning to Game Development and System Shock 3

The editors at GameCareerGuide recently chatted up industry veteran Warren Spector about his return to video game development, the current state of the industry as a whole, and the initial work that is going into the creation of System Shock 3. Here’s a little something to get you started:

Let’s dig into design, for a minute. How has the field of game design changed in the last few years, from your perspective, and where do you hope to take it?

I can’t believe I’m about to say this — I’ll never work in this industry again — but in the mainstream space I really haven’t seen a whole lot of progress. It seems like we’re getting more finely-tuned, prettier versions of games we’ve been playing for years.

Thank god for the indie space, there are people trying interesting things there. What I want to do, is I see a variety of places where we could make some strides that would help take games to the next level. The biggest one, for me, is more robust characters and character AI. We’ve gotten very good at combat AI, we’ve made great strides there, but I don’t think we’ve done much in the world of non-combat AI and interacting with people — human or otherwise. We haven’t done a lot with conversation, and establishing emotional relationships with characters in games. So I’d very much like to play with that.

Also, while I’ve seen some efforts, especially from the guys at Arkane, to sort of extend the design philosophy of Origin and Looking Glass — that whole “immersive simulation” and its philosophy of empowering players to tell their own stories. I’d like to go further with that. It’s nice to see more people trying, but I think there’s a ways we could go as well, in terms of empowering players to tell their own stories. Those are the directions I’m going to try to go in. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

Any other notable examples of non-combat AI design that have influenced you?

I don’t want to get into specific projects, either positively or negatively, because that gets me in trouble. But one thing I will say, is that every time I talk about non-combat AI, someone starts flaming me because everybody wants to do the right thing, but…it’s hard to get publishers and game designers onboard.

I don’t understand why. Apparently, and I can’t say that I’ve seen this with mine own eyes, but apparently there are lots of folks in AI who agree with me and are actively working on cool things, but you don’t actually see that getting into games. As I start working on System Shock 3, maybe I’ll have to get some of those guys onboard and show off some of their work.