With the release of MindsEye just days away, the game’s director, Leslie Benzies, paid a visit to IGN Live today to discuss the new third-person action-adventure game.
MindsEye is not an open world game and Benzies said he felt, “It’s often hard in an open world to keep the story clean,” before joking that “It might be strange to go and bowl for two days when you need to save the world.” However, he added, the game does include “an open world system through the Build MindsEye system.”
Benzies elaborated that a crucial component of the game for he and his collaborators was the ability it includes to add user-generated content, explaining “As you’re playing any mission, if you like a spot on the map, you can immediately start to create anything you want [right there].”
He said they’d purposely made it an uncomplicated system. “We want to keep this as simple as possible… So you can have something half-decent within a minute and a half. It’s putting the power of building into the hands of players.” He said that a general thought for the approach to MindsEye included “pushing it towards people who want to make games.”
Asked how they will curate these builds for other players to best find them, he explained “At launch, we will curate and pick the cream of the crop on a featured menu.” However, he added, “Eventually, we want players to choose what they want. We don’t want to dictate eventually how you earn money in the game or how you decide to play the game.”
The building tool that will be used by players was also used by those making the game, with Benzies saying “A lot of what you see now was built within the tool. A lot of the ambience… Anything we could build using the tool we would.” He also noted, “Our next game, we’ll use it more.” At the same time, he promised “Every tool we use to build the game we’ll give to players so they can use.”
Benzies indicated they had grand plans for MindsEye follow ups, stating “The MindsEye story, it’s a small part of a very big story that we intend to tell over however many years it takes.” He compared the larger world they were formulating to something like Star Wars, in that “We have many stories that take place over different time periods in the same universe.”
The game director also noted that “multiplayer will come at the end of this year and then we have a huge multiplayer world add on that will come next year.”
Circling back to the user generated content, Benzies said he was excited to see what becomes of it because he thinks when you give the tools to the public, they’ll often find “More interesting ways to use the tools and almost hack the tools.”
