Jonathan Blow talks The Witness World and his work with Sony
Imagine an entire island full of puzzles that you can work through at any pace and in any order. This is exactly how Jonathan Blow, the creator of the now legendary Indie hit Braid, describes his upcoming game The Witness in a recent post on the official Playstation blog.
This design is a vast departure from the level-based design of most puzzle games. Its world is massive and open for players to traverse and play a wide range of games. Blow commented on the size of the world by saying of the development team’s detailing process:
What we learned in this process is that the island is in fact very big, for a place where you carefully visit every location during gameplay! Correspondingly, for a small independent team like ours, detailing this huge space is a lot of work!
In fact, the sheer size of The Witness world has expanded what was originally meant to be an 8 hour game into a 25-40 hour game according to Blow’s test runs
One of the newest released screenshots from The Witness.
The bigger news for the games industry in general, though, is Blow’s choice to not work with Microsoft to release The Witness. His previous game Braid was a highlight of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade‘s Indie collection and was not released on the PS3 until over a year after release. In sharp contrast to this strategy, Blow will release The Witness as a timed PS4 exclusive. Afterwards it will release on iOS and PC, but no mention of an Xbox One version has been made.
Blow commented on this choice:
I’ve had a bad time working with Microsoft in the past. Maybe not super bad, but a moderately bad time in terms of business relationships. Other developers who are friends of mine have had a horrible time, so the idea of signing up again with Microsoft isn’t something I’d have ruled out, but there’s a certain amount of dread I have about doing that again.
Jonathan Blow speaks at a Sony event.
Despite some apprehension, Blow is optimistic about his work with Sony:
I don’t have that with Sony. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out to be just as bad at the end! But I don’t think so. The people we’re talking to on a daily basis there are just really good people, and we’re happy to work with them. We’ll see how it goes.
Blow joins other Indie developers jumping from earlier work with Microsoft and the Xbox Live Arcade to Sony’s Playstation Network, in large part due to Sony’s extensive efforts to attract independent developers. As we enter the next console generation, it will be interesting to see how well Microsoft can recover its share of the independent market.
