Bastion Interview

With the game releasing tomorrow on Xbox Live and the first reviews surfacing on the net right now, you may be interested in reading this in-depth interview with Supergiant Games’ creative director Greg Kasavin from the folks at Splitkick. The team’s expectations for the Summer of Arcade event, how Bastion should perform for the team to consider it successful, game review scores and more all get covered in this interesting piece. Here’s an excerpt:

SK: What is your barometer for success for Bastion? Do you have a sales number in your head? Is there a Metacritic review number you want to meet?

GK: Aww man.. no it’s a good question, I’m reacting because it’s a much more intuitive thing for me personally. There is a sales number we need, where if we go below that number we go out of business, or if we’re above that sales number we can make our next game. So there is a very real metric like that, but that number isn’t super high. The number of copies we have to sell isn’t astronomical because we’re a team of 7 people. Our costs were not super high in the production of this game in that sense. To the end user, hopefully the production value of the game will seem very very high, but we’re a startup company that tightened our belts a lot in the making of this game, so we run pretty lean.

And then, yeah, we have high hopes for what the response of the game is going to be, but we’ve never approached it as a Metacritic we were shooting for. There was a lot of that at EA where we used to work, and we didn’t buy into that idea because I think Metacritic is a shorthand for talking about quality for people who don’t understand what quality is and have no other way to articulate it than a number.

For me, I’ve wanted to make games since I was a little kid. This felt like the one big shot to do the kind of thing I’ve wanted to do all my life, so I have a high standard for how I want it to be accepted. But I don’t really know what to expect from the response.

SK: There are all these ways people come up with review scores, and there’s a longstanding discussion about whether games should or shouldn’t be scored. It’s shorthand, but some people need that. What’s you opinion on scoring in general?

GK: Some folks, I suppose, may be surprised to learn I greatly value scores. When I was at Gamespot, the scoring was a very important part of our process and we took it very seriously. Some people would challenge us and say (Is there really a difference between an 8.7 and an 8.5?) and I would say (Yes, absolutely.) To me that granularity was very important because I played hundreds of games, and I liked to be able to distinguish between them.

Scoring is a complicated issue; I see both sides of the argument. I think as long as you’re reviewing games in the service of your audience, some portion of your audience is going to appreciate having a score. They may not have time to read 3 pages about a game and just want your base level recommendation. I think a score can be valuable in that regard, otherwise people wouldn’t put them on reviews.

The other thing I would say is that was the method that seemed right at the time I was working there, and things definitely change over time. I think the way things have evolved is that the individual personal opinion is more meaningful to people now than just the dictatorial (this is what the organization says is true) sort of thing. I think people just want to know who to trust about games; who personally. I think my own background in game reviewing was around this sense of objectivity and clarity in reviewing, but I do think these days subjectivity is more valuable.