Sam Charchian is a video game industry veteran with 10 years of service at Microsoft and five more at Sony. This interview is an excerpt from Charchian’s interview in the December 2020 episode of the Outside is Overrated Podcast.
What were some of your favorite games from the Playstation 4 and Xbox One generation of gaming?
There were so many great games this gen. I feel like with this generation, we’ve really come so far. The image quality of the games and just the gameplay – there’s so much variety out there. There are indies that are really thriving. This generation has just been phenomenal for gamers, the industry, for everybody. It’s just been a great time for the industry.
For me, I love so many games, but if I had to boil it down to my top five for this gen, not in any particular order:
For me, Diablo III really stands out as a standout for this gen for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s great to see Blizzard making console games. What a great transition. They are such a phenomenal world-class developer. They bring the best products. They don’t ship anything unless it’s like the best game ever made. Their track record is unbeatable. So getting that whole ethos into the console world has just been a huge win for us.
I personally had a lot to do with bringing Diablo to consoles….it’s a pretty cool story. I just hope we don’t have to wait another 10 or 12 years to get another Diablo like we did from two to three.
Next up for me would be Destiny 2. I love co-op games, Destiny is really tuned as a co-op game and I think it’s great. I’m a long-time Bungie fan, I worked with Bungie for years. I love Halo. For me, Destiny is Halo. Halo is no longer Halo, Destiny is Halo. If you loved Halo, you should be playing Destiny. 343 has done an ok job with the franchise, it’s just not the same magic that Bungie brings to the table, in my opinion.
The main one that I absolutely love for this generation, I think is probably the best game of all time, and I say that with a little bit of hesitation because of all the great competition, but the game I love and logged the most hours on and still play after five years nearly every day is The Binding of Isaac. I think it’s the best game ever made. I really think it’s that good of a game.
The reason it doesn’t have as big of a following as it probably deserves, and it does have a huge following of really hardcore fans, is because it’s a really weird game. The magic of the game doesn’t reveal itself to you until you’ve put about a good two to three hours in, and then suddenly it clicks and it’s like, “Oh my God, this game is so much more than it appears to be.”
At first glance it appears to be this sort of twin stick shooter sort of Robotron-style, with some Legend of Zelda sort of mechanics and feel to it. But it has like 500 different items that you can pick up and they all do crazy things and interact with each other. So every time you play it you end up with a really different game practically. The whole rules of the gameplay are sort of turned upside down every time you pick up an item.
It’s got a really weird theme and that’s actually kind of a turnoff. You play as a baby that’s sort of hiding from his mom in the basement. It’s got really crude stuff, there’s piles of poop, that whole theme is a little bit weird and off-putting. That’s not my favorite thing about the game at all, but the gameplay is fantastic. What you do is you shoot tears. You’re actually crying and shooting tears as you play but you can pick up items that will turn your tears into lasers. Then you’ll pick up another item that’ll make them homing lasers. You can drop bombs and find hidden rooms. The whole thing just turns itself upside down. It’s crazy half the time you play it, it’s just a blast. It’s super, super fun because it’s so unpredictable and every run is so unique from the next.
Binding of Isaac is relatively inexpensive and it’s on every platform including the switch, and it’s just a masterpiece. It’s an indie game basically made by just one guy, Edmund McMillen, he also made Super Meat Boy and he’s put out a few other games since then. The Binding of Isaac is truly his masterpiece and it is a true work of art in gameplay.
I love Neon Chrome, another twin-stick co-op game and the other one I’m still playing all the time is Slay the Spire, I love that game. I’m hundreds of hours into it and it’s just brilliant.
Microsoft stumbled with the launch of the Xbox One, do you think they ever recovered from those missteps?
They recovered about as well as they could. It took them really turning over some executive staff and really changing how they think about it. I think Phil Spencer really deserves a lot of credit for that because he came in and really refocused on games. And he came up from Microsoft Game Studios. When I worked at Microsoft Game Studios he was basically running all the studios and he was in charge of all the games. He’s a game guy in his heart. I think he did the right things as best as he could to try and recover.
Having been both with the original Xbox, with us being in second place behind Sony and then on 360 with us leading, it’s really hard to go from second place and come back out on top. That uphill battle with trying to get developers to care about your console, trying to get agreements with them to do exclusive content with you is really hard because they don’t want to give up sales on the leading console to do something exclusively for you. They are going to build their game and tune it specifically for whoever’s leading.
I’d walk into a developers studio….and in the early days they were all leading their development on Playstation. Because that was their audience. And on 360, we’d walk in and every developer has a 360 dev kit at their desk. That’s what you want to see and it’s hard to come back if you’re in second place. It’s really, really hard to get the momentum back in your favor and shift the industry.
I think they did a really great job. I think it’s really sad because the missteps they made leading up to the launch of the Xbox One were just so obviously wrong. Everyone in the industry was telling us when we would talk to them, “You guys are really fumbling this generation. Sony’s just going to kick your butts . You need a different GPU, you need to get that Kinect out of the box and you need to drop your price.”
They were absolutely right and it became really apparent that they were right. We had too much ego and hubris to really hear that feedback coming off of 360. Boy did that bite us hard.
What are you excited about with the next gen hardware?
Image quality, I feel like we are [seeing] diminishing returns. Ray Tracing is great and it’s really cool tech, but I don’t know if it’s really worth it yet this gen to turn that on. I think we’re going to learn really quickly whether that’s something that’s worth having in the game or not. Because it is extraordinarily expensive on the GPU. You’re going to have to give up something. You’re not going to get Ray Tracing for anything near free. We’ll see if it’s worth it or not. I think next gen, the PlayStation 6 or whatever, we’re going to see some Ray Tracing happen there in every game.
For now, I don’t know about that, and I don’t know if I really care that much. Again, the games look so, so great. I think the biggest change this gen is going to be the streaming, the capability for it to stream off the super fast hard drives they are putting in these boxes.
We’ve been fighting load times forever and it’s been a huge, huge thorn in our side. With the original Xbox, it would take 30 seconds to a minute to get a game loaded and ready to play. We had to force developers, basically through our certification requirements, to make those load times as fast as they could. And they had to come in under certain time limits or else we literally wouldn’t let them ship on the console. We had requirements that were like the game has to be at an interactive state, from the moment they put the disc in until the user has an interactive state, that has to be under like 30 seconds.
Developers had to really fight it because back then the CD media, or DVD media, just wasn’t that fast. On the flip side, we only had a few megs of memory to fill, so you didn’t have that much data to stream in. But still getting it down to 30 seconds even could be a real challenge.
With 360 it was kind of the same thing. It was like, ‘Ok the media was a lot faster, but we’ve got way more memory to fill. You ended up with the same kind of load times. The speed of the drive and the amount of the memory scaled, so again you’re at that 30 seconds and developers have to fight really hard to get in at 30 seconds.
Here we are at this gen and we’ve got a bit more memory but man the media is so fast that what used to take a minute might now take two seconds. It’s almost instantaneous. It’s a bit of a game changer.
On the other side of that, it’s not just load times, it’s all the streaming content. We have so many games that are just streaming content as you move through the world. I think probably every gamer has run into the experience where you outrun the game’s ability to stream content. The game will literally either halt in front of you or all of your assets will de-res to the point to where buildings are just these chunky blocks. I think that’s going to be gone, you’re going to be able to rip through worlds really really fast if you want to. Rockstar I’m sure will make absolute great use of this kind of feature. Anyone doing open world games as well. We’re going to see some really different experiences in those kinds of open world games.
Check out the podcast for the complete interview, with stories from Sam’s time in the industry; including the rise and fall of Infinity Ward and how Diablo III came to consoles. You can also learn more about Sam’s time with Microsoft and Sony from his previous interview.