So I'm not entirely sure if this is the right forum for this but whatever.

Me and a few friends have been working on resetting up a gaming journalism website called N7Gaming, its surprisingly not named after Mass Effect. About a year ago we ended up getting all our stuff wiped by someone who has yet to fess up; not the point though. We are starting up again this June and we already have an exclusive interview with Robert Bowling lined up. For those of you who don't know, he was the creative director at Infinity Ward up until about a month or two ago, now he is starting up his own development studio Robotoki.

So while we already have quite a few questions lined up to ask him, I was wondering if DLP had anything they wanted to ask one of the people behind the Call of Duty franchise. Since DLP has some of the most opinionated people I have ever had the pleasure to meet I figured something interesting might come up we haven't thought of before.

 

You don't have to ask him that, though. I was wondering, are you guys looking for columnists? I could write some stuff for you, if you'd like.

 

Will Call of Duty ever resemble a legitimate competitive First Person Shooter again?

 

It might help if we knew what questions you were going to ask already.

 

Eh, I figure he probably won't want to be fielding questions solely about Call of Duty the whole interview. He is doing indy stuff at the moment right? Ask him what he thinks about EA publishing their own indie pack - Notch just ripped them a new one over that.

Also, ask him what the hell happened with Final Stand being in MW3. Did he know it would be in the game when he went on stage saying "Fuck you Last Stand!", or along those lines what actual say he had over actual development.

Another interesting thing you could talk about would be about how he spoke about how gamers shouldn't have to pay for map remakes from older games, due to the low amount of work involved.

Anyway, hope the interview goes well and good luck with your site. I'll definitely have to check it out sometime.

 

So we have a couple of topics already to ask him, these are listed below. Fatality, I think I might just steal those questions there. You as well Oz, if only to see his reaction and how he actually feels about the extremely mixed feelings aimed at a game he made.

At the moment Robotoki is working on an unnamed project that only has a few pictures out as details. So it may be an FPS and it may not be.

Sorry Enembee, trying to avoid asking about the future of CoD, even though its a question we all know the answer to.

Redshell, I'm not sure but I can ask Denny and get back to you.

1. ask about the difficulty of trying to design a game to be played on the next generation of consoles. (I'm not certain if developers have been given more information about the new consoles or not)

2. Is the business model he has planned for Robotoki a reflection of the frustrations he had working on the Call of Duty franchise at infinity ward and activision. He talked about how he will only work with investors that are willing to have the developer be the only creative influence.

3. He mentioned he wanted to mix both singleplayer and multiplayer experiences in his games during an interview on the 23rd of April with Gameinformer. I'm kind of curious as to what he meant by that and how he sees the nature of gaming change with the growing access people have to the internet.

4. Obviously ask about his new currently untitled game

5. Ask him what the chances are he would be willing to partner with activision and infinity ward and if he will still have any contact with the Call of Duty franchise.

6. What kind of experiences he intends to apply to his new studio after working on both the Call of Duty franchise and working with infinity ward.

7. When he plans to begin hiring developers for his new studio and how he sees the composition of his team looking, will it be mostly veterans in the industry or is he aiming for a more inexperienced team. (He had said in a recent interview that his studio Robotoki was going to be a developer development studio with an emphasis on making better developers instead of games)

Thank you everyone for the help so far, I'm not sure when the interview is scheduled but I hopefully will soon.

 

I am distinctly reminded of Journey.


As far as legitimate, not-Cowadooty questions go, I'd like an answer to this question.

To be honest I have more respect for companies that self-publish, because they have full control over their product. Choosing a company to publish for you might fuck you over in the long run.

 

Maybe how he feels about the current kickstarter phase for funding games? It would be interesting to see how a more mainstream developer might feel about it.

 

"To be honest I have more respect for companies that go into a project with a hideous amount of money set aside for after the fact expenses."

While you do raise a point I typically agree with, the fact of the matter is that self-publishing under the traditional model was choosing to go, "Y'know, this might sink us and bankrupt the company even if we do everything right." The idea that self-publishing is something you /expect/ to make your money back on for a first project is pretty new, and that's solely due to the distribution models of the industry changing.

 

How do they keep coming up with such unique, revolutionary, and game-changing features?