CT说以后要走免费模式

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http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/2 … -from-free-to-play/

Chris Taylor on why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play

Tom Francis at 04:00pm May 25 2011 Tweet

Chris Taylor designed two of the world’s cleverest strategy games: Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic.

But far from being a stopgap between full-priced games, Chris says that working with the free-to-play model has convinced him it’s the future of the entire real-time strategy genre, and gaming in general. He says whatever he makes next will inevitably end up using it too. I tackled him to the ground in London recently, and demanded to know why.

PC Gamer: Are you just totally sold on that
model now?

Chris Taylor: I am so sold on that model! I am so ready to tell you that this is the future. Games will never be the same again now that we’re onto this way of approaching it.

And it changes, believe it or not, the way we design from the beginning. Not just the way we think about the game after, it changes the way we build the game to start with.

PC Gamer: So if you were making the next game in the logical sequence from Total Annihilation to Supreme Commander, you would do it as a free to play thing?
如果你要做TA或者最高指挥官的续作，你也会搞成免费模式吗？

Chris Taylor: No matter what I tried to do, I would end up here. Because it’s the right way to go. I mean, people would be so crushed to hear they can’t play co-operative quests, to hear they couldn’t play all these modes we’ve got. They’re just going to ask for them. They’re just going to flat-out say, “Where are they?”
不论我尝试做什么，I would end up here。因为这是正确的道路。我是说，人们会抱怨他们不能玩合作任务，不能玩所有这些模式。他们只是说想要那些。他们只会 flat-out say，“Where are they?”

You play a quest – let’s say you don’t win. It happens. But you got all the stuff you collected, all the experience points you get, you get it all. So it’s cumulative. So the more you play, the more stuff you get.

It’s a great experience, very rewarding. I saw that model emerging in other places, it was popping up here and there, it was bursting through. It’s like nature, it’s just coming through all the cracks and crevices. But to see it full on now, it’s pretty clear. I don’t want to play a game and set the game down and have nothing to show for it. I have to have accumulated something for all that investment of time.

PC Gamer: So is AoEO what Gas Powered are doing for the next X years?
未来几年都打算做AOEO吗？

Chris Taylor: Yeah. We have other things, smaller things but other things going on. The great bulk of the company is working on Age of Empires Online, and we will be for, hopefully, years and years to come. There’s no telling, there’s no seeing totally into the future, but that’s the plan.
是的，我们还有其他事情，小事情不过其他事情要做。公司的优秀员工在做AOEO，我们希望会一年接着一年做。未来是看不见，听不着的，但这就是我们的计划。

We’ll have Chris’s thoughts on the state of PC gaming tomorrow.

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http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/26/chris-taylor-on-why-pc-gaming-is-bigger-than-ever/

Chris Taylor on why PC gaming is bigger than ever
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Tom Francis at 04:00pm May 26 2011 Tweet

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I spoke to Chris Taylor recently, and asked him how he feels about the state of PC gaming. ‘Good’ would be an understatement. Chris designed two of the world’s cleverest strategy games: Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.

More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. Here are his thoughts on why the platform has never been stronger.

PC Gamer: I’d like to ask you how you feel about the general state of PC gaming. We’re kind of at a weird time where sometimes it’s all doom-and-gloom and piracy is ruining everything, but then we’ve also got stuff like Steam, and it’s getting much easier for new developers to get something out there. Is this an exciting time for PC gaming, or a scary time?

Chris Taylor: It’s pure excitement, there’s no question. That’s an easy one.

PC gaming had one problem. We had a retail presence problem because we started to get into this transition, we lost retail space, so there was this reaction to that, so less product went into development. But I don’t know who was taking stock, because between The Sims, and World of Warcraft, and what’s happened in China with PC gaming, what’s happened in terms of PC games being played in the social and casual space, it’s all around us.

I think PC gaming went from a “Huh, is there a problem here?” To “Oh, not only is there not a problem, but PC gaming is bigger than ever.” It just had to go through a little bit of a reinvention.

The piracy problem is gonna be all but solved as we emerge here, and I think the new question is – which I love – is “What’s the future of console gaming?”

And I used to joke about that last year, when people were interviewing me. Off the record, I was going “You know, they should really be asking about the future of console gaming.”

Now people are. This question is starting to come up. And I was like “Ah, I don’t know – but that’s your problem. Don’t look at me.” I don’t have to answer that question, because I know what the answer for PC gaming is now, and I have a PC gaming company, right? I make PC games. And I’m about as happy about where we’re at as an industry and as a platform than I’ve ever been.

Yesterday we heard why Chris couldn’t go back from free-to-play now, and tomorrow we’ll have his thoughts on Steam and the future of digital distribution.

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http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/2 … he-next-five-years/

Chris Taylor: Steam’s dominance will ‘shift’ in the next five years
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Tom Francis at 04:00pm May 27 2011 Tweet

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When I got the chance to interview Chris Taylor recently, I asked him what he thought of Steam. Then, off his blank look, I asked specifically how he felt about its dominance of the digital distribution market for PC games.

Chris designed two of the world’s cleverest strategy games: Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. He thinks Steam’s dominance will shift before long.

PC Gamer: What do you think of Steam? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Digital distribution generally seems to be a good thing, but is it bad that Steam has something close to a monopoly?

Chris Taylor: I have games on Steam, I have an account, I buy games there. I have three different digital distribution platforms on my PC, it’s driven mostly from the game I want to play. If it’s on there, if it’s exclusive, it narrows the field. I actually don’t generally have to do a whole lot of soul-searching.

Your question though was what do I think of the fact that it’s taken a footing? It’s obviously extremely popular. Kudos go to the Valve guys for having the vision to build it. And they made a big bet – they made a big, scary bet, and they get rewarded for that.

Ask me the question about where they are in the market five years from now: I think it’s gonna shift. I think the playing field’s gonna level out. Because exclusive content drives it. I mean once upon a time we had a Sega console. There was a company called Atari that had a big market position. It changes and it shifts based on the way the company continues to evolve and interact with its customers, the service it delivers.

I think that now we’re seeing so many new players come, they have to come to the market with their first party games. And if they deliver really outstanding games, the platform follows. So I think it’s all gonna work out in the end. But like I said, you’ve got to give kudos to those guys for jumping in and being first and doing a really good job, and taking a chance.

Previously Chris told us why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever. Tomorrow we’ll have his thoughts on Total Annihilation, and why his priorities changed as he moved on to Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander 2.

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五月分时说的，那时AOEOL还没有发售，不知道现在AOEOL发售以后让CT放弃了这个想法还是加强了。

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用户的反应在一般情况下是很没可能改变人的主意的啊

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http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/3 … an-davis-interview/

广播录音下载

PC Gamer UK Podcast 56 – Chris Taylor and Danan Davis interview

I chatted to Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor and Microsoft Games’ Danan Davis about their new free-to-play game Age of Empires Online. Chris also talks about making Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, and Danan about making Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends. And everyone has a lot to say about the future of PC gaming.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our other podcasts here.

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http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/28/chris-taylor-total-annihilation-was-a-game-i-designed-for-myself/

Chris Taylor: “Total Annihilation was a game I designed for myself”

Total Annihilation was one of the PC’s most forward-thinking strategy games – it threw out all the arbitrary conventions of the genre and created something more like a simulation. The result was a game plenty of PC gamers still consider unsurpassed. More recently, its creator Chris Taylor took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. When I got to chat to him recently, I asked about the unconventional economy model TA used, and why he didn’t stick with it.

PC Gamer: That structure was something you moved away from in SupCom 2, I wondered if you considered it a mistake, or just something you hadn’t perfected yet.

Chris Taylor: One of the things that at first I thought was kinda novel, and then wondered if that was the right approach, was designing a game for myself. So Total Annihilation was a game I designed for myself. It was like everything I wanted in an RTS game, I put into Total Annihilation. Units could shoot while they moved, real physics, the fact that stuff was more emergent – based on rule system rather than hardcoded. So there’s a lot of things that I really wanted to do.

But as I went along and as the stakes got higher and as the games got more complex and the teams got bigger, I started thinking to myself: well, maybe I should be designing this game more for the people who are playing it, and not myself. Which I think actually works well. I mean if you talk to some very successful developers and teams, they say “Oh yeah, we sit around for hours and days, and we try out all these different ideas and gather all this feedback, and we do a lot more of that kind of research.”

And so I went more in that direction. And what happens is you get games that can actually sell more. So Supreme Commander sold more units with its somewhat less surprising and quirky game design than Total Annihilation did. So it was kind of true; if you wanted to make a game that people enjoy and wanted to play, you had to pay more attention to what they thought, what they wanted to do. So it works.

But you do lose some of that crazy artistic stuff. Game design is an art. It’s a real challenge. So what we’re doing with AoEO is we’re trying to make sure people are comfortable, and they can jump in and they can play, but then there’s some modes, some boosters, some content that has fresh ideas in it.

Just the fact that we have the Defense of Crete, for example, where you’re playing co-operatively/competitively, you actually have to explain it to someone a few times before they understand exactly what that is. You’re like “No no, you’re playing with a buddy against the computer, which is a comp-stomp, and then you’re going to turn around and you’re going to compete with your other friends – single or in pairs – to beat their score.

So that’s where we’re taking it to some places where people might [say], “Oh yeah, really? That’s an interesting idea.”

So let me answer your question by saying that it’s a mix of both, it’s a mix of doing some fresh things that are kind of interesting and new, and doing some things that are comfortable. So you have one foot in each camp, as you push a design forward.

Previously Chris told us why he thinks Steam’s dominance will shift, why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever.

On Tuesday we’ll have a podcast of this interview – with both Chris Taylor and Danan Davis of Microsoft Games, so you can hear what else they had to say about PC gaming, Age of Empires Online, Rise of Nations and the future.

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