Gaming > interview > console games > e for all
Civilization Revolution producer, Barry Caudill
Barry Caudill, Senior Producer of 'Sid Meier's Civilization'.
Dante Maddox, CraveOnline
October 19, 2007
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The first day of E for All is in the books. With three more days of gaming floor shows, demos, and industry elbow rubbing yet to go, we’ll start off our coverage of the event wih an interview with one of the masterminds (aka Senior Producer) behind Firaxis Games latest version of its epic game series Civilization, Mr. Barry Barry Caudill. Mr. Caudill was gracious enough to take a few moments to share his thoughts on Civilizations jump to the next-gen console marketplace.
CraveOnline: What are your expectations concerning the first next-gen console version of Civilization?
Barry Caudill: 2 million in sales [laughs] but I mean what we’re really hoping to establish, is a strategy on the consoles, because we feel like, not so humbly, we do strategy as well or better than anyone out there, and we feel like there is a market for our kind of games in this new marketplace. We want to establish strategy as a viable genre on the consoles, we also want to establish ourselves as a viable console developer, and prove that we can make stuff—look when we make stuff for PC sometimes we have to go to the lowest common denominator, because you don’t know what video cards are out there, there’s direct x 9 now, or direct x 7 or 8 I mean there’s a lot of stuff out there and you have to make it for the most people like, “What’s the sweet spot?” But with these consoles, we know that they can handle this [indecipherable], we know that they have this much ram, we know that they have all these things tghat we can take advantage off, with it built in. We know it has broadband, there’s nobody out there with a modem on their X-Box 360. It helps us to actually push the limits and it’s refreshing for us to make something that is a little more current, it doesn’t feel like it was made a couple of years ago.
CraveOnline: What were the major issues barring the series from the consoles until now?
Barry Caudill: Um, it actually had come on the console once before, and some of our other games as well. Pirates! Came out on NES, and the Genesis, actually a really good version on the Genesis, and Civilization 2 had come out on the PS1, when it was done by a Japanese company that was working for Activision, and the problem was that literally it was a straight up port of Civ 2 with very little attempt to make the controls work well, the game plays OK, it plays surprisingly well when you consider that they made very little attempt to really fix it. So, our games have been around but at the same time we were thinking that we coulod have made a game like this for the PC but we would have confused our marketplace, because all of the Civ fans would have been expecting Civ 5 and they would have gotten Civ Revolution, it would have confused some it would have made some guys mad, and made some people pull away from the series. By bringing it over to the console, we can make a clean break and start fresh. That was really appealing to us, its actually been a very liberating process, we came up with new design ideas that couls make their way back into the PC version, because we were able to identify what about this game is truly fun, and things that we could probably get rid of, getting to the essence of Civilization.
This screen shot doesn't do the game justice, It's simply beautiful to watch.
CraveOnline: Will the increasing sophistication of the home consoles eventually put an end to PC gaming?
Barry Caudill: I don’r think so, because lets say the console will jump out every five years and it will set the bench mark and for that brief period of time the console is the end all be all and its better than the PC and everybody goes, “Oh the PC is dead.” But, within that interim five years the PC catches up and surpasses them. So, I think theres always going to be both markets because there are certain things about the console that are great, since you know the hardware, you can take full advantage of the hardware, because farther and farther into the lifespan of a console, people know more and more about how to get more horsepower out of it, so the games that come out at the end of the consoles cycle are amazing compared to what they were in the beginning. But on the PC, it’s always about the processors getting faster all the time, graphics cards get better, you can add more RAM easily. So I think that that makes them viable, and I also think because its easier to develop for the PC that’s going to be the home of like, independent games and casual games and smaller games. So no matter what, even if the hardcore games left the PC, which I don’t think they will, even then you’ll still have a market there, its easy to build for, games like Gears of War on the PC will have moding tools that you can’t find on the console, so we’ll see or like the Quake 4 engine, people can make stuff in that engine cheaply and easily in their garage or whatever with a couple people and put it out and get noticed in the industry, were as you can’t necessarily do that on the console right now. Even though Microsoft is addressing that with the XNA and all that type of stuff.
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