Valve: Portal kept deliberately simple
Lombardi reveals how hit was 'fine-tuned'
Speaking to play.tm in London last week, Valve Software marketing boss Doug Lombardi revealed that Valve favour a polished and finely-tuned experience, beyond overly complex gameplay.
Talking about the development of the award-winning Portal, Lombardi revealed that the design was actually toned-down from what was originally a more complex and elaborate premise.
He offered: "I think sometimes people try to complicate. Portal is a good example of that. There was a whole bunch of other things we thought we should do with Portal. Art being one of them. They were high contrast, what have you. Then we tested it and people didn't know what they were doing. Don't confuse the player, that's the key, don't let them struggle to find out what to do - challenge them to do what they know they need to do."
"Monitoring difficulty is part of that, not getting too elabourate with the art is part of that, because people will get distracted. If everything is beautful in this room I don't know what to look at, give me a shiny object and four grey walls, I'm going to look at the shiny object," the big cheese continued.
In the new interview, Lombardi also talks about the state of the PC gaming platform, the magic of Left 4 Dead's AI Director, and even says that Valve might consider a micro-transactional game in the future.
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