![]() Were they the right kind of interactions for the kind of game Thatgamecompany was seeking to make? "It was not leading to that feeling of connection," Santiago says. "It seems obvious that the more people you have, the number of interactions you can have as a group increases." Interactions between players sound like just the kind of things that multiplayer game designers are interested in, but with Journey it was never so simple. "There were just a lot of dynamics with four ," explains Kellee Santiago, co-founder of Thatgamecompany and the studio head during the production of Journey. And they were already revealing interesting things about the ways that multiplayer games work. The prototype she saw was fairly basic, but playtests were already on the way. "When I went to visit, people were working on a top-down 2D version of a little game which four people could play at once," remembers Robin Hunicke, who would soon join the team as a producer. And the answer, surprisingly, has more to do with what you take out than what you put in. ![]() So how do you get people to engage emotionally with other players in a multiplayer game? This would be the defining question for Journey, from the prototype through to the final release. Can we do a Thatgamecompany spin - change the emotional feel - of a multiplayer game? That's how we started." "I wanted to show the world that it's possible to have a game where you are truly emotionally engaged and connected to another person," explains Chen. You go to your friend's farm to click something, but so what?Īnd what about Journey? How was a game so sparse - and yet somehow so luxurious - born from a desire to make an MMO in the first place? How did its simple narrative of a desert crossing - enlivened, if you are lucky, by the random players who join your game for one section or another - emerge from the busy factions and cities and battle-plains of Azeroth? "Everyone was saying that the future was social games, but the games weren't really social." Chen had seen a few Zynga money-spinners, for example, but while he grasped the game part, the social aspect of something like Farmville didn't seem to move beyond the purely mechanical. "What we were taught in school is to push the boundary," says Chen. Scale is only one aspect of an MMO, though. These games are beautiful, but, they remain compact - nothing like the sprawl of a Warcraft. In Flower, you are a handful of petals riding the winds. ![]() In Flow, you are a tiny amoeba or some such, swimming about in the watery deep. And he always knew that he wanted to make an MMO one day - a form of games that are synonymous, rightly or wrongly, with scope and scale.Īnd yet when Chen started to make games, the games his studio turned out tended to be small - or at least they seemed small, before you got properly into them. Jenova Chen, the co-founder of Thatgamecompany and creative director of Journey, played a lot of World of Warcraft during grad school.
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