Frontier's Braben Talks XBLA, PSN Crowding, Solutions

Author: by Brandon Boyer, Staff

As part of an in-depth new Gamasutra interview discussing his upcoming title The Outsider, Frontier's David Braben (Elite) has been discussing the console download services, hinting that the company may be supporting XBLA or PSN and expressing hope the services don't get "crowded with rubbish." While the rest of Braben's interview discusses his announced and previous projects, with the developer addressing directly the controversy of his "out of context" comments that BioShock's gameplay was "not next-gen", when asked about Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network possibilities, he commented: "There are things I can't talk about, but it would be mad for us not to embrace it, basically. I've heard some rumors that some people are going silly and doing stupid numbers of games for them. Xbox Live is already crowded and I'm sure PSN will become very crowded very quickly. What I'm hoping is that they don't get crowded with rubbish. I have faith in the platform holders to stop that, but I've already found it's difficult on Xbox Live to find a game. You scroll through a lot of lists, but I think that can change. The nice thing is both machines can be updated remotely so that's a step forward. I think Xbox Live and PSN will mature and they'll be really interesting platforms. The thing that I think is a tragedy is that you can't yet assume a hard drive on the 360. So, whether we will see whole [Xbox 360] games delivered that way, I think that will be a positive step forward." The complete interview with Braben is now available on Gamasutra, including much more detail on the fascinating narrative testing system for The Outsider, among a number of other topics.