DEAR ESTHER YOUTUBE MOD
DEAR ESTHER YOUTUBE FULL

So I looked at his portfolio and wasn't about to argue - the fact he was on the Mirror's Edge team, which is one of the most beautiful games of recent years helped too! I think he's an exceptional talent and I feel really lucky and proud to have made something that someone of Rob's ability was into enough to want to spent a year of his life working on. He wrote to me out of the blue and asked if I had a problem with him remaking it.

and then on a more content level, this attempt to tell a completely different type and style of story than had been attempted in a game before. I guess the driving force behind it was, on a structural level, that games offer an unprecedented and totally unique space to explore what stories can be. Which also relates to what kinds of stories you can tell, and how, and the range of those stories in terms of emotional, mood, character.

Because I'm a writer, I love text and words, and didn't want to go fully down the Ueda route, but was trying to fuse that kind of sense with a more traditional approach to how you deliver story in a game. And I wanted to know if you could do that in a game, but a game that had quite a traditional voice-over approach to story.

DEAR ESTHER YOUTUBE FULL

So it's all about the feel, the flow, the mood and actually it's full of holes and contradictions and abstract ideas and symbols, and you don't even understand a load of it, but it somehow all still hangs together and creates a really extraordinary experience. So we can apply a similar thing to story, and stop giving as much away.Īnd I'm really interested in stuff like William Burroughs and the Strugatsky brothers, and was reading a lot of big, dark romantic poetry, and listening to a lot of quite odd but very beautiful music and wanted to make a game story like that. Games are like films in that regard - you have these cardboard cutout sets and no-one worries about that, we focus on the front, not the back. It came from this idea that you could do more with storytelling in games if you stopped worrying about everything making sense and adding up, and that when you read a book or watch a film, you are filling in a lot of those details yourself. So Esther is basically about ambiguity in game stories. We're doing something that has actual, absolute relevance to industry, and we're proving it has value, not in some obscure journal, but out there, in the marketplace.ĭear Esther is an unusual concept. Which is massive - it's a completely new thing for the UK. And if that works, then it means we are generating income we can use to underwrite the next experiment, and we're moving towards sustainable, practice-led research in games. Commercialising Dear Esther just extends that, so we started off saying 'will this kind of thing work as a game?', and the answer was pretty resolutely 'yes', so the next question is 'what happens if you commercialise that?'. I think games researchers and academics have this amazing opportunity to explore high-risk areas of game design and development, and we have almost an obligation to run with ideas and push them as far as we can. Underlying this is my wider research agenda. It was always really, really strong, but I just thought with Rob's work, it deserved a facelift too. And I also knew if we went to indie, I could leverage some funds to rebuild all the audio, which I was keen to do.

DEAR ESTHER YOUTUBE MOD

I love the mod scene, but it is limited in terms of reach, and I also knew quite a few people who really wanted Esther but for a bunch of reasons either didn't want Half Life 2, or weren't exactly technical in terms of mucking about with SourceMod folders and all that.

So my reasoning behind it was that Rob was creating something so extraordinary with the remake, it deserved a wider audience than we could give it as a mod.

Dear esther youtube