Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce has said the monster-developer’s merger with Activision is “cool” from a business perspective and has affected each side’s money men rather than their game-creators.

“I think from a corporate family perspective it’s cool, right? The leadership of Activision has a lot of experience in the industry,” he told VG247.

“You know, there’s definitely lots of opportunities for us to learn from them and them to learn from us. They also recognise the value of what we’ve achieved and how we’ve achieved it, and they don’t want to impose anything on us, so it’s really up to us to figure if or how we want to leverage their experience, and up to them to determine if or how they want to leverage our experience.”

Pearce added that games like StarCraft II had been unaffected by the merger, with development continuing as planned.

“The StarCraft II team operates pretty independently and autonomously, and nothing related to the Activision merger really affected that,” he said.

“The type of folks at Blizzard that are affected by the merger are people working in finance, human resources and stuff like that. Development teams aren’t affected, really.”

Pearce was speaking at Games Convention in Germany. There’s still no date on StarCraft II.

Speaking in a Games Convention presentation, Quantic Dream boss David Cage confirmed that the Heavy Rain scenario shown at the event – with a journalist being chased through a house by a taxidermist murderer – hasn’t got anything to do with the thriller’s main story arc.

“It’s really a bonus scene,” said Cage. “It’s not part of the main plot.”

The level showed a woman investigating a series of appearances by breaking into a house and finding a room upstairs full of dead, stuffed ladies. Normal, average day.

Cage said the scene is likely to be included on the title’s retail version, however.

“It will probably be on the game [disc], yeah,” he added. “As a bonus scene.”

Heavy Rain’s been pegged by SCEE president David Reeves as PS3’s “most important title for next year”, and certainly did a good job of knocking out the crowds in Germany last month.

No date, though.

Speaking to EG, WipEout HD director Tony Buckley has expressed frustration at the game failing a routine epilepsy test.

Not passing resulted in the racer being delayed.

“[It was] frustrating more than anything, because it’s quite subjective the whole test,” he said.

“But we certainly weren’t going to take it lightly. We had to think long and hard about how we approached it, because there were ways and means of doing it, but in the end we managed to actually solve any issues without any detriment to the game.

“That was our worry, that the game would suddenly look poorer as a result of it, but no, it’s all gone really well.”

More through there.

Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has told VG247 that Sony looked at Microsoft’s choice to make Xbox 360′s hard drive optional and decided against it in an effort to be able to provide “seamless gameplay” and solid digital distribution.

“It’s one of the things we really supported when the hardware specification was decided for PS3,” he said when asked if having increased hard drive space made a difference to PS3′s development plans.

“Like Microsoft did, we could have had an optional hard drive and settled for cheaper combinations of hardware, but if we had done that – from a [development] standpoint – we cannot rely on every consumer to have a hard drive.

“So that really helps us to focus on [the fact that] every consumer has a hard drive. Now we can cache data so that gameplay is seamless.”

Yoshida pointed at one game specifically that relies on PS3′s hard drive to cut down on loading times.

“One example is the Uncharted game we did last year,” he said. “You don’t this, but the game is constantly caching the data in the hard drive so that you don’t have to wait for loading.”

The exec also pointed out that a compulsory hard drive was important for the firm’s PSN plans.

“Also having the space for consumers to download stuff allows us to create games only for digital distribution that are a couple of gigabytes in size,” he added.

Yoshida was speaking at Games Convention last month.

Speaking to IGN at Games Convention, Sony Worldwide Studio boss Shuhei Yoshida’s admitted he’s not happy at the lack of PSP games on the horizon.

“Yeah, it’s really, really disappointing and it’s a lost opportunity for the third-parties,” he said.

“They should look at what the PSP can do for their titles and the potential for the business that their IP has.”

Leading from the front is the way forward, said the exec.

“We have to show by examples,” he added. “What’s happening in Japan is interesting – because of the massive success of Monster Hunter, Japanese publishers realise, ‘here’s a resource’.

“Lots of people are playing PSP in groups of fours and when you go to Japan it’s hard to find a train or a bar where you don’t see some people playing a PSP. So other publishers in Japan are seeing these consumers, and thinking, ‘Wow, we can make games for those consumers’.”

Loads more through there.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Quantic Dream boss David Cage said a single walk through of top drawer PS3 thriller Heavy Rain is likely to take no more than 12 hours.

“We’re still in the middle of production, so I can’t really tell you the exact time of the game, but we’re targeting a game between eight and 12 hours in gameplay for one walk through,” he said.

Seen for the first time in Germany last month, the game showed what appeared to be unparalleled plot-branching, a fact, Cage said, likely to keep the hardcore coming back for much more.

“It’s impossible in one walk through to see everything there is to see,” he added.

“And that’s going to be OK. For most gamers, they’re going to play it once, and really enjoy it and have a great journey, but some hardcore gamers will want to come back and see everything, and all possible options.”

Heavy Rain has been branded PS3′s “most important title for next year” by SCEE boss David Reeves.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce said that Diablo III’s requirements from the major Battle.Net upgrade currently being worked on at the firm will be specific to the game itself.

“Diablo III will have its own unique needs in terms of what Battle.Net provides,” he said.

Pearce also revealed that the team working on the new Battle.Net is a separate division within Blizzard.

“The Battle.Net team is actually a separate group of engineers working on that functionality,” he added. “So, they’re working with the StarCraft II team and they’ll be working pretty integrally with the Diablo III team as well.”

No date’s been set for the release of the Battle.Net 2 upgrade as yet, but we do know it’s going to ship alongside StarCraft II. So that’s probably next year.

We thought we imagined this at the time, but Quantic Dream’s David Cage did definitely confirm at Games Convention that if you get the main character killed, you carry on playing the game’s central plot.

The protagonist is the girl showed in the SCEE press conference at the show (pictured), a journalist investigating some disappearances.

“I can’t really tell you too much about what the story’s about or how it’s going to work with the characters, all I can tell you that your character – the main character – can die, and the story will continue,” said Cage in a back-room demo the day after the conference.

“You can continue to play, without this character, of course.”

Cage was asked if this meant the player would move into a side-story if the leading character died.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s one big story.”

The thriller was the star of Games Convention, showing what looked to be a vaguely adult product. Fancy.

Just because Blizzard isn’t screaming about another million milestone for World of Warcraft every ten minutes doesn’t mean the subs numbers have stopped rising: they’re still going up, Blizzard told us at Games Convention.

“It’s actually still growing,” said Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton. “It’s certainly not in a reverse trend, or anything like that.”

While the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, the MMO’s next expansion, Chilton reckons the game will experience another boost.

“I do expect that with the launch of Lich King [it will] probably affect the subscription numbers,” he said.

World of Warcraft hit 10 million subscribers in January this year.

There’s no date on Lich King’s release as yet.

It’s all happening. Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida said that Jack Tretton’s claim that 2008 would be the “year of PlayStation 3″ is coming to fruition.

“All the things are now coming together in terms of the right hardware, cost and pricing, and we are increasing our hard disc space as we are increasing the content we’re offering through the network and the big titles we’re working on, coming out this Christmas,” he said. “All that is coming together this year.”

And, obviously, next year’s plans are continuing apace.

“I definitely hope so,” said the dev chief when we asked if he believed 2009 would be another “PS3 year.”

“We are feeling very comfortable about the momentum we have on all PlayStation platforms, and especially the way things are going in Europe. It’s very, very encouraging.”

Yoshida wouldn’t be drawn on unannounced product for 2009, but assured there’s plenty we haven’t seen yet.

“That’s not to say we’re not working on product for next year,” he added. “We have some titles that we have announced this year for release next year, like Heavy Rain and MAG, our big 256-player online title.

“Also there are some titles that we are targeting to launch next year that we have not announced yet. We still have a lot to come.”

Sony stole the show in Germany this year with SKU announcements for both PS3 and PSP and a first showing of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain.

More soon.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton confirmed that plans are already in place to introduce further landmasses to the MMO, despite the fact the latest expansion is yet to launch.

“We actually already have ideas on how we’re going to expand on that in the future,” Chilton told us when asked if more land was going to be added to the game.

“Certainly, [a lot of] the major landmasses that we talked about heavily in previous WarCraft game have already come to fruition, although there are still areas of the game that we’ve talked about and set up story-wise that we haven’t revealed yet. So there’s definitely more to go.”

Wrath of the Link King will introduce the continent of Northrend to the game.

No date as yet.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Far Cry 2 narrative head confirmed that losing your NPC buddies in fire-fights means not being able to see all the game’s missions.

“That buddy, Joseph, he’s still around,” said Redding after Joseph came and rescued him from the bush after taking hits.

“He’s out there autonomously fighting guys, and the thing of it is that even though that’s a very useful tool for me to have – a guy like that that’s able to look after these things and keep the heat off me – the reality is that it puts him in danger. He’s now in jeopardy, and he could be killed.

“That’s the price you pay for having buddies. When I unlock a buddy like that and then use him, either by getting involved in one of his missions… or by allowing him to come and rescue me, there’s always a risk that he could be killed. If he’s killed, he’s gone forever and the content associated with that character is no long available to me. So for example, any side quests that he’d be able to give me are no longer available.”

So be careful out there, African mercenary types. You wouldn’t want to miss anything.

Far Cry 2′s now confirmed for an October 24 release.

Bethesda’s Peter Hines has admitted that showing RPGs like Fallout 3 at tradeshows like E3 and Games Convention can be a frustrating business.

“Sometimes, yeah,” he told VG247, when asked if showing such a large game to people in such a short space of time was problematic.

“We had a lot of discussions about E3. Todd Howard and I sat and talked about what to show… Anything we do is just one thing, and we’re not about, ‘Here’s one quest.’ It’s more about, ‘What do you want to do?’ Do you just want to run around and shoot stuff and combat’s fun for you [then that's fine]. Our games are about not forcing you to do anything, and having a demo that makes you do that cuts against it.

“To your point, it does make it a bit like, ‘Well, what are you doing at E3?’ versus, ‘What are you doing at Leipzig?’ Go do what you want. If you played it at E3, go in a different direction this time. That’s what we do well.”

Fallout 3 did come under some fire after E3, where journalists were allowed to play the game for 30 minutes.

“You play the game and you see what you think,” Hines said previously on the matter.

“At E3 we let people play the game for a half hour, and if in a half hour you can make up your mind one way or the other, OK. I don’t really get into judging the rightness or wrongness of it. I just give people a chance to play it and they draw their own conclusions.”

Fallout 3 launches in both the US and Europe at the end of October.

Peter Hines has described Fallout 3′s open-world gameplay as “organised chaos,” saying the player is free to do what he or she likes but can always be easily sucked back into the post apocalyptic RPG’s main quest.

“It’s sort of like organised chaos,” the Bethesda man told VG247 at Games Convention.

“In order for the player to be able to go wherever they want, they have to know they can get back to whatever it is that they wanted to be doing, or were supposed to be doing, which for most folks is the main quest.

“By making sure they know where to go next to get into that they feel much more free say, ‘Yeah, I’m just going to go over here and see what this is,’ and they get sucked into that for an hour and it’s fun, and then they go back into where they were before.”

The game’s out on October 28 in the States and October 31 in the US.

Far Cry 2 narrative chap Patrick Redding confirmed to VG247 at Games Convention that predatory animals may be added to the game after it launches.

“We’re definitely talking about the types of predatory animals we might include at some point, and we’re going to investigate that,” he said.

“But I don’t want to say too much about it because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

There was not other detail, and it’s feasible the addition may come with a sequel as opposed to being added to FC2 with DLC. For the record, you’re not going to find crocodiles and lions roaming around in the shooter’s depiction of Africa at launch.

“We don’t have any predatory animals,” we were told. “We made a decision early on that because the AI requirements for doing an open world game were fairly challenging just with the human enemies, we wanted to have animals but we focused mainly on grazing animals, on quadrupeds like goats and livestock.”

Far Cry 2′s out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 before the end of the year.

And that’s it. Read more on ThreeSpeech.

Sony’s released the video of Heavy Rain shown in the firm’s Games Convention press conference last month.

It’s all direct feed, and very lovely. This is exactly the same footage shown to the press, which is a montage of gameplay from one of the thriller’s 60 “scenes.”

You can read our impressions of the behind closed doors demo given to journalists at the show here.

Game’s out next year. Watch the trailer after the break.

Bethesda’s Peter Hines reckons Games Convention’s just as important as E3 for games like Fallout 3. He told us so in Germany.

“It’s hugely important to ‘do well’ here… to get a lot of people to see it and get excited about it,” he said.

“It’s just as important as E3 was. E3 was important for a different reason because it has the distinction of being first. That sort of sets the tone going forward for ‘how did you do?’ We had… many hundreds of people come through and play the game.”

E3 hasn’t had the best year, and Hines certainly isn’t the first to say E3′s dominance is well over.

Let’s hope gamescom can pick up where Games Convention left off, eh?

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that the impending increase to level 80 in the expansion is necessary to provide a content for all.

“Ultimately, increasing the level cap is about giving players more of the content they’ve come to love,” he said.

“A lot of the players out there are very casual and the core experience for them is going through new zones, going on quests, levelling up, getting abilities, talents, etc. So if we’re going to deliver new content for everybody, for all of our player-base, that that, in the large part, has to be part of the formula.”

There’s still no date on Lich King’s release, but Chilton did also say at GC that the level cap in the beta was to be raised to 80 “very soon.”

Take a look.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Bethesda’s Peter Hines has indicated that you may not just be seeing one more Fallout from the publisher: you should be thinking along the lines of EA and FIFA.

“That’s why we bought it,” he said when we asked him to expand on recent comments that Bethesda was going to continue with the series past Fallout 3.

“We didn’t buy it just to do one and then to never anything again. So it’s sort of like confirming there might be another FIFA next year. It’s their franchise and they’re going to do another one. We bought it for the purposes of doing another one. If we were just going to do one, there’s any number of things we probably could have done differently.”

Fallout 3′s out in October in the US and Europe, and December in Japan. After that there’s going to be the 360-only DLC announced at E3, then we’re going to be waiting for the next full game, from the sound of it. Just don’t call it, “Fallout 09,” OK?

It can’t be Far Cry without a hang glider, right? Apparently not.

Showing off Far Cry 2 at Games Convention, dev narrative man Patrick Redding said the powerless flying thing was an essential addition to the game.

“There are about 14 vehicles in total, including various armed pick-up trucks, rovers, dune buggies and, of course, the inevitable hang glider we have to have for it to be truly a Far Cry game,” he told VG247.

We didn’t get to see the hang glider in action, unfortunately. We saw Patrick using a boat, if that’s any consolation.

Game’s out for PC, PS3 and 360 before the end of the year.

Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce reckons you might be getting a fourth StarCraft II race “in the event” of an expansion to the RTS sequel.

“We don’t have the resources or time to add a fourth race to the launch of StarCraft II, but I’m sure in the event that we decide to do an expansion set it’s a feature that’ll come up for discussion,” the company boss told VG247.

StarCraft II will feature the three races from the first game – the Terrans, the Zerg and the Protoss – but a fourth had been considered early on in development.

“We talked about the possibility of a fourth race early on, but we felt like we had a finite amount of great ideas and wanted to make sure we focused all the cool, best ideas on the existing three races rather than diluting those ideas across four races,” Pearce added.

StarCraft II currently has no release date, but is looking likely for 2009.

“It almost feels like a zombie at this point; it’s the walking dead,” said Wright.

“It’s such an abrupt end to what was E3, which had been this huge escalating arms race.”

He added: “I understand why they really pulled the plug on the big E3. Looking at the amount of money a company like EA would spend on it, it was ridiculous amounts of money just to be present and competitive with everyone else, so I think they were looking for a way to sign the arms treaty and de-escalate the whole thing.”

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden

“We’re looking to do… a Lego Batman series,” he said.

“I think they’re looking at doing a one-off initially,” he went on. “And they’re basically able to utilise the assets, because our team has brought Lego characters to life.”

The cartoon “will use the [game] engine” and is “being done by a separate studio in the States,” confirmed Earl, who also revealed the initial episode will be 20 minutes long.

Full thing through the link.

By Mike Bowden

WoW: Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton has defended Blizzard’s decision to reduce the time it takes players to reach level 70 once the expansion is launched, saying that the game mustn’t become intimidating for new users.

Wrath of the Lich King will see the game’s level cap increased to 80.

“I think what really matters to us is that the game doesn’t become more and more intimidating for new players to take on,” said Chilton.

“We feel like that if we were to constantly increase the level cap and never go back and address the total time it takes to get from the beginning to the end, then we would see the game become a bigger obstacle for new players to start up and play with their friends.”

He added: “I think a lot of our player base actively creates new characters so these kinds of changes benefit those players also.”

Chilton was speaking at Games Convention last week. There’s no date fixed for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King as yet.

Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce has refused to commit hugely anticipated RTS StarCraft II to a 2008 release, saying simply that the company still has “too much work to do” on the game.

“This year? Like, 2008? Too much work to do,” Pearce told VG247.

He added: “We don’t have a specific release date in mind yet. We still have too much work to do.”

And that was very much that. Frank’s one of the Blizzard super bosses (lvl 71) so you probably shouldn’t be expecting much in the way of new Zerg action this side of Christmas.

Of course it did. Open world death game set in the African outback assumes narrative cues from odd DS puzzle thing. Stands to reason.

“You see the blocks of text there,” Far Cry 2 narrative designer Patrick Redding said, pointing at the screen during a demo of the game at Games Convention last week.

“We kind of took a page from Professor Layton’s game on DS, to give the player a recap in text of what he’s been up to up to this point.”

The text aspect of Far Cry 2 isn’t finished yet, however, as Redding explained.

“You’ll notice these weird kind of weird little text strings that seem a bit broken,” he said. “That’s just because they’re not hooked up to the final text database.

“We talk a lot about the fact that our game’s story is dynamic, that we assemble the narrative on the fly, so what we’re doing is slotting in the names of characters the player has interacted with – like the different factions that he’s dealt with – and we dynamically update those text blocks in order to give him a description up to this point.”

Nintendo should charge Ubi Montreal, or something. Blatant theft.

Sony worldwide studio head Shuhei Yoshida has given the clearest indication yet that the firm is ramping up to the announcement of Fumito Ueda’s next game, confirming to VG247 that the PS3 project will be shown “soon.”

“I cannot tell,” said the exec was asked specifically if the new Team ICO game will be shown at Tokyo Game Show this year.

“But I can say that they’ve been working very hard since the release of Shadow of the Colossus.

“Soon you’ll see.”

Yoshida said that Sony’s plans for the Japanese event are yet to be finalised.

“Tokyo’s more focused on consumers so we’re still working on the intricacies,” he said. “Games Convention is unique of consumers and trade.”

The Ueda project has been consistently in the press recently, despite the fact no one knows a blind thing about it.

Ueda himself said in a recent interview that the game was still out of “critical” production, and Yoshida has also said previously that he’s excited by the title.

Go on. TGS. You know you want to.

“We like to provide as many services as possible for free – we already provide our network access for gameplay for free – and the interesting thing about the network side and the Internet business is that there’s a variety of revenue sources,” he said. “Not necessarily getting people to pay, but with advertising and so on.

“Those are things we’re looking at, and learning how we can provide a service without people having to pay – but we still get our operation running with funding from somewhere so that we can maintain the level of quality we want.”

More through the link. There’s a full interview here.