EA Montreal's Reid Schneider

Really what I wanted to talk about was our approach to making games. The market is expanding with more casual players coming up, so we're starting to see a decline in terms of hardcore sales based on NPD data. So as developers, how do we think about making games that our customers want? The people I always look to are Valve, who I think are brilliant at it. Valve is super smart about it. When you hear them speak it's about connecting with their customers and making games that are focused on the customers and making a better experience for your audience. One of the things I'm trying to look at now with our team is that when we're building games and deciding what the features are going to be we've got to make sure that we make games that are really audience-focused. Because games are changing. I talk to Clint Hocking (creative director at Ubisoft Montreal) a lot and what he says is when Ubisoft started development on Far Cry 2 in 2003 tastes were really different. If you think about what's successful now and what was successful in 2003 before the market changed. It's incumbent on us a lot, whether you're a developer or a journalist, you've got to think about where game are going and how they connect with the audience in a deep and meaningful way.

It's a massive challenge and it comes down to a couple of things. You have to have some type of way of predicting where the market is going and at the same time you have to think about how to make a game accessible. At the core of it if you think about the average age of players, it's growing. And the average age of those developers making the games is increasing as well. In light of that, that changes the way games should be built because it changes what the audience wants. Look at Modern Warfare 2, it's clearly amazing, but games in 2003 were even more hardcore than that. I love this industry and I feel lucky to be part of it but if we want to continue to be successful and take mindshare away from other forms of media than it's really incumbent on us to make products that are more accessible. That's doesn't mean dumbing something down because that's not the right way to do it, but how do you make accessibility that really resonates with customers, brings people into the fold, but not at the cost of dumbing things down? We have an amazing opportunity to make something of this medium, it's interactive and you can almost touch it, but we should continue to make intelligent and meaningful games that are experiences for people that they can't get from other forms of media.

We had to make the control scheme easily accessible from the start. There's becoming a standard third-person control scheme, so we looked at that a lot. But then there's a number of other things we can do. We really designed the game from the ground up to be a co-op game until the very end. If we're playing together over Xbox Live or PSN, we can both have different difficulty settings, which is a start. You might be a hardcore gamer, but I don't consider myself a very good player at all, I'm probably one of the worst on the team, I like playing on normal or even casual difficulty. By putting features in like that you allow users to customise their experience and it doesn't dumb it down in anyway but it still makes it more accessible.

Exactly, it's a bad experience and it pushes people out of the market. It's no fun to just die 30 times and go home. If we can customise an experience but make it more accessible but not at the cost of the product, then as an industry we'll be better for it.

I actually really believe that you learn a lot more from failure than you do from success. What I learned form those is that you really have to make games that you believe in, you have to be really passionate about the content. At this point I don't want to work on a game that's rushed out to market. As a developer there used to be honour badges for achievements - “yeah, I shipped a game in eight weeks!” Those days are over, and with the rise of real serious journalism, and bloggers, the customer is really knowledgeable. We shouldn't be in the business of putting out bad stuff. And hopefully I can continue to work on games that are meaningful and can expand the audience and market. What rounds you out as a developer are the things that don't go according to plan. As a developer you need to look at the games you've worked on that weren't so good and learn from those experiences. You learn what not to do.

I think it is a problem. I actually think diversity in the workplace is really, really good. Not so you can tick a box off and say we have diversity, but because when you get together people who aren't influenced by the same things, it really forces you to think in a different way. We have a female level designer on the team, and she was thinking about these cooperative choices in the new Army of Two . We have moral and cooperative decisions where one person makes a choice for both players and give the users a flash-forward to see the consequence of those actions. That wasn't something we had thought of on the team before and just by having people on the team who are influenced by different types of media and different styles of art really helps us bring games into a place where we hadn't gone before.

We had this whole market in the US that thought the tone was cool, but in Europe everyone thought it was ridiculous and tasteless and a bunch of frat guys running around. One of the things we learned was that we're never going to be able to please both. So the way you interact with your partner and decisions you make – if you're doing a lot of fist bumps – these influence the tone and the dialogue of your character. If your taking it on a more serious level then the game reacts seriously. What we're trying to do – we'll find out in January if people think we're successful or not – is that players can tell their experience by their play style. It's really important for us tonally to appeal to the European audience because with the core audience in that territory, the game really turned them off so deeply that they couldn't get to the game underneath. In a movie you're distanced from those characters and you're watching them, but in a game you are those characters and if they say something you find bothersome it rips you right out of the experience. We wanted to change the overall dialogue but also let the player tell their own a story a little bit more.

We like to tweak until the very end. One of the things is the final controls should be really, really good. And we find some texture tweaks to give that extra bit of pop to the graphics. And looking at polishing the experience so people aren't getting stuck and that the AI isn't doing anything stupid. The funny thing with AI is the moment a character on screen does something stupid the illusion is broken. We're trying to iron out all that stuff and not rush it through. My hope is that people, when they play the game, they're really able to enjoy it and have a great time with it.