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Tim Schafer (Double Fine): "Last week I wrote my final line of dialog for Psychonauts 2."
- Thread starter FarSight XR-20
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Depending on the game you can be writing up to a couple of months before shipping, maybe even closer to the wire if it's urgent. This isn't weird or unusual :)
OP
OP
Game has likely entered the polishing stage.
Psychonauts 2 Content Lock Is Happening This Month
Psychonauts 2 can be played from start to finish and will no longer accept any new content in December, according to Double Fine.
www.thegamer.com
They are still writing Dialog? Jesus. Thought this is finally around the corner and not another 2 years away.
Pretty common to be doing writes/rewrites as close some months before going gold.
Lines of banter that play over gameplay can come in very late. They're typically easy to implement. I doubt he's still revising and writing the game's cutscenes or key narrative moments.
Neat! I always thought writing was amongst the first things completed and almost everything else followed.
A bit selfish on my end, but nah. I mean about the last part lol.
I hope this is it for Psychonauts. I want DF to work on something new.
Interesting, just sounds weird when you first read such a posting, cause my mind was immediately at " isn't it bug fixing only in the last months?".
i don't mean their next project, they can definitely give it a rest. i just mean i hope it's not the end of the series.
Tim has said that whatever he makes next, he wants it to be a new thing and not a sequel or a throwback. So I wouldn't expect Psychonauts 3 or at least, wouldn't expect it soon
nah
sometimes you're doing fixes to the content... like imagine if you cut something because you don't have the time and it breaks dialog so you need to rewrite the dialog to account for that change
even though engineering is usually the thing that wraps up last, sometimes it isn't.
Man, I'm stoked.
For another example, Eiji Aonuma was still writing BotW dialogue in 2016, in the final year before the game's release for a title that ostensibly only released the following year because its launch was coordinated with the Switch. He suggested that finalizing dialogue and game text is something that takes place in the "end stages of development."
Double Fine/Tim Schafer have been very vocal in being deliberate on not doing sequels and with the amount of creative folks they have in the team, giving different teams a wide variety of projects, it's for the better. This is why I hope Psychonauts 2 is pretty special and worth the exception.
This is something that keeps making my hope glands flare up. Hopefully it wasn't just "this will sell" and was born of the team having too many cool ideas they need to get out into the universe.
The biggest thing that excites me is how far technology has come and what we've already seen them do. Games have utilised the capabilty for truly impossible visuals far too rarely and Psychonauts will definitely have some fun pushing them to extremes.
Well the first Psychonauts was a massive commercial bomb despite getting great reviews and becoming a cult classic. So I don't think we need to be worried about them being purely motivated by sales potential.
Well yeah, but the cult classic did eventually turn into many many sales and big word of mouth. 1.7M by the end of things (with the .7M largely being the humble bundle sales). Sequels just conceptually always draw in more of a crowd as well.
I'm not saying it was a pure greed motivator because for the reasons you said that's silly, but I hope that it was birthed mostly via "we want to" and less via "we have to because best shot at money"
Yeah I think it's reaction dialogue when the player returns to the stages after finishing them. Tim mentioned something like that in the latest Psychonauts dev update video.
Great news can't wait to play the game.
Just imagine what it's like when level 6 and 9 get cut (which are key plot point levels) and then level 3 becomes level 10 and you have to rewrite a bunch of portions of the script (and/or repurpose, edit, and rearrange VO to make everything make sense even though key locations, events, or plot points no longer exist in the game) to make it all work. 4 months before you ship.
Game development!