Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. These old game design decisions that the designers make have a profound impact on what players think of the game and see in the game. Fortnite, Battle Royale, always had a sense of mystery to it. You're on this island, but you're not sure exactly what's happening here. There are all these houses. They're abandoned. Why? And, you know, I'm not the secret holder.
I'm, you know, I'm not on the design team. I experienced Fortnite as a player, but it really exudes a lot of that and a good spiritedness as well. Because even when you're eliminated in Fortnite, you know, there's not like
blood spurts and there's not good jobs you're just you know teleported out of the simulation and often you know you end up losing the game in a way that's hilarious enough that like actually you're laughing at it or you're like respect to that player who just won because that was clever um and you know it creates a very different dynamic than these other games where players tend to be very very positive towards each other um
And one of the things I like to do in Fortnite, just to kind of gauge how the game is going, is I play fill squads, a match made with three other random players and play a game together. Sometimes they have voice chat, sometimes they don't.
And back when our matchmaking regions were bigger, I learned a little bit of Battlefield Spanish so I could speak with the people who are down as far south as Mexico City.
And, you know, the positivity of the interactions there among every kind of person you might ever meet online were really quite impressive and completely unlike what you would see in a game like Call of Duty where it's always, you know, everybody's got to be an edgelord.
Making games is very hard, and especially when you're pushing the boundaries of something. With Grand Theft Auto, it's just the realism and feeling that you're in this huge city, and anything can happen, and it's all living and breathing, and you're just a part of it. The level with which Rockstar has brought quality to that genre is astonishing.
And when you're building something at a level of quality and detail that's never been achieved before, you can't predict how long it will take. Whatever problems you're solving today, to get to the next iteration of quality on it, you don't know what new problems that will unlock.
And often, you fix one thing and make it super realistic, and that just highlights the unrealism of other things that you need to fix. I think the thing that always comes to mind is that shipping a game is easy if you don't have a high quality standard. You also won't have much success. What we've seen from Rockstar is they take a long time, but they ship amazing games.
And it's worth it in the end, right? A bad game is bad forever. A late good game eventually is released and is good forever.
We certainly do. We, uh... everybody's often working very much to the last minute to make something excellent. And it's really hard with these fast delivery timeframes because you really have to get a lot of stuff up and running before you can judge a new Fortnite season holistically. It's not until the last month or so that you really know what you've built and you really understand it.
And if any late-breaking problems emerge in balance or anything else, it's usually towards the end. And that usually leads to a rapid push to... to fix it. And then other lessons you can only learn live from experience. And that means accepting a game that it's a live experience and it's also an experiment and it's going to continually be improving.
At any time, there's some things that some people don't like and you learn from it and you improve it and you move on.
You know, I see two contrasting worlds that have been brought about in the digital age. One is the world of social networks and people typing at each other and just, you know, massive negativity and politics and, you know, hucksterism and, you know, Engagement, curation by engagement often promoting negativity and toxicity. That's a harsh world that I think is a step backwards in many ways.
I think the foundation of the world is actually a little bit shaky because of just the social dynamic that those platforms have brought on. But then I compare that with the good spiritedness of what's happening online when you're connected to real people.
Like actually playing Fortnite, playing Fortnite fill squads with people you've never met before, never talked to, and just judging what, you know, human connections develop there and whether they're positive. I found those to be really, really excellent and endearing.
I think the lesson from all of that is that humans talking to humans and being together in a simulated world, the real world or virtual world, is a naturally empathetic medium, which naturally leads to bonding. And though conflict sometimes occurs, it's just generally so much more promoting of our social norms and good
good interactions between people and positivity promoting, whereas kind of the typing angry messages thing at each other as a self-reinforcing negative dynamic that's negative. I think you look at social media and you look at gaming that is increasingly social, and I couldn't see a bigger divide between any two mediums as I see there in terms of the actual social dynamics.
One super positive, one super toxic at times.
Oh, thank you very much. It's been fun.
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