Post-mortem by Peter Howell

[Ashtoreth]

I'm sorry, but...

Did Peter Howell and Dan Pinchbeck actually work together on this project?

"The disagreements between TCR and FG regarding how challenging the game should be, both in terms of enemy encounters and in terms of puzzle-solving, resulted in the difficulty of the final game being much too easy."

"[...] unlike in the final game, players were consistently hunted in this area [the Tunnels level] by enemies, combining enemy threats with cognitive puzzle solving. The size and complexity of this area were eventually reduced drastically as the initial version did not meet FG's approval."

"[...] FG reverting enemy encounters back to a state resembling much closer the behavior of The Dark Descent with enemies despawning if they successfully kill a player. This dramatically reduced both the difficulty of these encounters and the anxiety and fear that should have accompanied them."

"[...] some of the game's puzzle scenarios suffered from being simplified in order to meet FG's requests."

versus

"It's an easier game. There's no question about it. When we first started making it, it started off in this status where it was much more difficult. The puzzles were more obtuse, there were more enemies. There were maze sections in there originally."

So why scale it back? It's a complicated process of decisions that led to this conclusion, but the short answer is that Pinchbeck's main priority was for players to actually finish the game, something most didn't with its predecessor. "We really wanted to tell a story in A Machine For Pigs."

"The immediate problem is that if you really want to tell a complete story, and you want to get as many people through to the end of that story, then there's a massive contradiction. Because every time you do something that is really, really terrifying you lose a bunch of players."

"We definitely made the decision that we wanted as many players as possible to make it to the end of this game, and if you make that decision your goal, then it does radiate backwards about the decisions you make about the difficulty of different sections of it."