We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I knew about the RTS aspects from the beginning, so I wasn't surprised per se, and I was even kind of looking forward to them, but they felt awkward and the controls weren't great (though maybe that's a using-the-keyboard issue) and they suffered from a kind of weirdness of scale that plagued the game on the whole. They felt too small and too big at the same time.

Basically they got chain-yanked by publishers way more than they cared for on that project (that includes legal trouble during the critical last-minute-panic stage of game development known as crunch).

That’s a big factor in why they’ve taken pains to start self-publishing of late. As the old saying goes, “Fool me——you can't get fooled again.”

To be fair, from what I've heard of Schafer (particularly with how Broken Age is going), he doesn't seem to be super great at managing time and money in general, so I think Double Fine getting ahead of themselves was a major problem. But yeah, the whole Activision-suing-EA thing certainly didn't help anyone.

I still don't fucking know how I felt about the game as a whole, to be honest. It's deeply flawed, but there are also some aspects I love? I guess I'd put it in the same category as Deadly Premonition, i.e. "the gameplay isn't great but it wouldn't really work in any other medium and the aspects that do work were probably worth it I suppose."