Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be. You know, I think there was always… There was a bit at the start of RDR where he’d had a baby who just died in Red Dead 2, and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision. It was too tough in some ways. But I think it gave him real… And he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who’d had the baby. So, it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting. He was not a likable character at the start, and that was one… And we ended up making him slightly more like… He was still sort of tough and nasty, but he’s slightly more likable early on. That was the right decision commercially. It’s better that way. But I did, you know, but I still like that little bit. It spoke to me personally. There… And just his inability to access his emotions I thought was really strong because then later in the game he’s getting very emotional. But there are also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed. You know, and don’t… Or missions that just are not going to work technically. Usually, it’s like, “This mission’s not going to work technically. Oh God, we’ve got to cut it. Okay, how do we glue the story back together?” And we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks. You get late in the game, and it’s just something, you know, some big challenging moment just is going to look rubbish, so you just get rid of it. I think editing, editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down is an art form, but it’s also just… It feels like torture because you’re letting go of things you put so much love into. Yeah, it could be changes. If you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, “Let’s change it,” that could be, of course, that could be upsetting in some ways. Otherwise, you can care about it. But, you know, if I was involved in the big creative thing and you go, “Okay, it’s the right decision,” I can probably live with that fine. I think sometimes for designers when they’re only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut, that must be really… … Really hard.…

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