Larian publishing director Michael Douse, never shy about sharing his opinions on the videogame business, did so again over the weekend with thoughts on why the big-budget game industry isn't able to drive innovation and is thus becoming "perversely fascinated by indie," which operates much more by gut instinct.
The whole thing arose from some comments about Mafia: The Old Country, which Douse really liked (much more than we did), saying its smaller scale "feels more polished, mechanically richer and narratively stronger than any previous Mafia game." That led one of his followers on X to observe that "choosing something specific and doing it well seems to be a lost art in game design ... You'd think after the success of Dark Souls and Undertale the industry would have picked up on it."
