If it’d been any other member of Arkane Studios, the team behind the upcoming Dishonored, people wouldn’t have paid his comments heed. However, it’s Viktor Antonov – the man behind Half-Life 2’s breath-taking City 17.
It may have been a good couple of years since the release of Valve’s opus, but Antonov feels the industry has fallen behind in that time.
It’s been a poor, poor five years for fiction in the video game industry. There have been too many sequels, and too many established IPs that have been ruling the market. And a lot of them are war games. And they’re great projects and great entertainment, but there’s a lack of variety today.
Artists and art directors should make their own life a little bit harder by pushing management to take more artistic risks, and use the technology to a better, higher level.
He also felt developers “shouldn’t try to please everybody at the same time and try to make easy, diluted projects.”