Jaffe working on free-to-play shooter
God of War and Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe has confirmed his next project will be a free-to-play third-person shooter.
Jaffe, who left Eat Sleep Play after development on the Twisted Metal reboot wrapped up, admitted to GI International at one stage he had ten concepts planned for what he wanted to do next.
"From that spectrum of games I had [in mind], I had people saying, 'Hey Jaffe, we want you to come work on this big triple- or quadruple-A next-gen thing' and the kind of team you need for that is very different from what we're ultimately doing, which is a free-to-play, browser-based, third-person shooter," he said.
He added: "I hate free-to-play but I love aspects of it. I love the instant-on, I love the low to no barrier of entry to get all kinds of people to jump in and play, I love the fact that you're sitting there at lunch and can play for five minutes or you can get sucked in and play for three hours."
But then, there was the other side of free-to-play that Jaffe touched upon.
"I hate how it's like the tail wagging the dog and it's the business model and all about getting people to pay [with more micro-transactions]. You can listen to developers all day long tell you it's not pay to win, but you know, it kind of is pay to win," he said.
"I'm not saying they're evil or they're lying - but one of the things they like to say is pay with your time or pay with your money. Well both of those are really shitty."
He continued: "Let's take a shooter - if you think about what's happened with shooters, so much of what makes shooters today work (and it's unfortunate that sometimes it's the only thing that makes them work besides graphics and spectacle) is sort of the morphine drip of powering up and leveling up.
"So if you're saying pay with your time, you're saying have sort of a crappy time because we're stretching out those morphine drips really long because we want to motivate you to pay.
And if you pay immediately and get the really cool stuff, then suddenly you don't have that meta desire for a while to go back to it and to want to keep playing."
There's a lot more at the link.