DeathSpank Preview – Ron Gilbert interviewed

With all these throwbacks to classic game styles, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Ron Gilbert is a natural innovator – his work on Monkey Island, in particular, designed to eliminate many of the inherent flaws of the genre at that time. And while DeathSpank probably won’t be a revolutionary videogame, it’s encouraging to hear that Gilbert is trying to push the medium forward in a number of subtle ways.

The first of these ways is one we actually noticed on DeathSpank’s official website – a bullet point that reads: “A real story… not a crappy videogame story!” “Don’t make me regret writing that,” Gilbert exclaims before composing an admittedly convincing justification. “I think stories in most games are just not that interesting. They’re stock and clichéd and poorly told. Stories are fundamental to who we are as people and, second only to watching someone getting eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, they are the earliest form of entertainment. One of my big pet peeves with videogame stories is that they tell the first act in the opening cut-scene. The first act of a story is incredibly important and it should be played, not watched.” Even elements that initially seem to reverse the good work done by Monkey Island soon prove to be more innovative than we first thought when Gilbert is given the chance to explain them. The designer worked hard to outlaw player death while at LucasArts, for example, but DeathSpank’s eponymous hero is very much a mortal character. “While DeathSpank can die, his death is wrapped in the world and story fiction in such a way that it’s only a small setback,” we’re told. “The game doesn’t grind to a halt and the player doesn’t have to load up a save game. They just keep on playing. That was my main beef with death in adventure games – they were used as arbitrary punishment that pulled you out of the fantasy.” Of equal frustration to adventure players was the risk of becoming stuck on a puzzle, effectively halting progress through the story, but it’s a problem that Gilbert is quick to dismiss. “I don’t think bottlenecking the game is such a bad thing, as long as it’s done within the story framework and feels right to the player,” he says. “We’ve made a very open and completely loadless world that you can roam with as much recklessness as you want, but the story-based puzzles provide focus and occasionally present themselves as an obstacle to overcome in order to open up the world even more.”

Despite all these reassurances, we still know very little about what sort of game DeathSpank really is. Sure, we know that it will blend adventure game and RPG tropes. But to what extent? Which way will the balance eventually lean? Until we’ve actually played it we’ll never really know. Until then, we’ll just have to pore over the screenshots – something that does at least highlight a rather unique pop-up book kind of art style that allows Gilbert to combine the best of both 2D and 3D level design. “That’s mainly because I love 2D art,” he adds. “It’s fun and charming in a way that 3D has yet to match. But… I wanted to have a real world for the player to explore, and for that you need 3D. I wanted players to be able to run around and get a true sense of the scope and continuity of the world. Doing 2D art in a 3D world provided the perfect solution.”

Lack of hands-on time aside, the biggest fear surrounding DeathSpank is arguably the heritage of its designer himself. With fellow LucasArts alumni Tim Schafer failing to successfully make the leap from adventure to action, you’d be well in your rights to question whether Gilbert may repeat the same mistakes or not. “I think [DeathSpank] is an evolution of adventure games,” Gilbert eventually says, as if sensing our fears. “They got a little static as the art of games really started to explode in the early Nineties. A lot of genres came into their own, but adventure games failed to evolve. I see DeathSpank as that evolution. It’s still a good solid adventure game, but it combines it with other play mechanics. Also, you can attribute some of that to my personal tastes. I started playing a lot of RPGs and RTSs. Designing those types of games became very interesting to me, but I’ll always love adventure games and how they tell stories. I guess I just wanted to combine them. I don’t have time to play two games, so I just wanted to play one.”

And since DeathSpank marks the return of a designer long withdrawn from the public eye, should we expect him to disappear once more upon the game’s publication, or is there franchise potential in this “hero to the downtrodden”? Gilbert’s answer is obviously a joke (we hope), but one that also hints that he may have learnt a thing or two from a certain divisive decision in his past. “DeathSpank will feature a strange and bizarre mystery that will almost be explained in the second game, then I’ll quit and never make the third. It’s a proven formula”.

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