Category Archives: GDC 2008

Last week’s GDC was a strange affair that threw up more questions than answers. While it carried the predicted unveiling of Gears of War 2 and a Microsoft keynote holding traditional big hitters such as Fable 2 and Ninja Gaiden II, the event’s main speech’s message was by no means “the norm”. Yes, the blood, swords and guns were all where they were supposed to be, but at the core of John Sheppard’s keynote was a theme of radical change that permeated the entire conference, and one that left both developers and platform holders alike chewing their nails.

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According to this, Nintendo isn’t planning on releasing big-name Wii fighter Super Smash Bros. Brawl in Europe until the autumn this year. Reggie gave the game away, so to speak, at a breakfast at GDC last week. The news will go down extremely unwell with those looking forward to the game over here, as both Japan and America will have been playing it for months by then. It may do well to remember that we’re going to get Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii earlier than the US, OK?

According to this, Valve’s Doug Lombardi has confirmed that console versions of the Orange Box have sold over 1.5 million copies to date, with PC sales of the multi-game title coming in as “significantly stronger”.

“I think the Xbox 360 version did just over a million, while the PS3 [released later in December] version did a few hundred thousand copies,” he said. “So I think when all is said and done, The Orange Box will have sold about 1.5 million copies on the console, which is great. But the game’s PC sales were much stronger… at least a two-digit percentage increase over the console sales. And that includes Steam sales, retail sales, and now individual sales of Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. So when you take the PC numbers for The Orange Box a la carte, they’re significantly higher.”

GDC was a busy time for Valve, having seemingly confirmed Portal 2, explained why Left 4 Dead won’t be coming to PS3 and hinted that Wii development may be a possibility.

This is the sort of thing worth reporting only because Final Fantasy’s involved: the White Engine – the tech behind FFXIII – has been renamed Crystal Tools, according to this. Apparently the dev suite has been in use in its new form since September last year.

According to this, Nintendo network administration manager Takashi Aoyama announced something called “Pay to Play” at GDC yesterday, which will apparently mean that it’ll cost money to play certain Wii games online.

Wii games that incur charges for network play are going to be branded with a red WiFi sticker, Aoyama said. Predictably, the internet’s having a bit of a hernia about this, but for now there are no more details on when the new charging system’s going to launch, how much play will cost, and so on.

GDC 2009 will take place on March 23-27 next year, according to this. The Moscone Center, yet again, will be the setting for the show.

Dan Boutros, our mate Dan Boutros, has won the first ever American Street Fighter IV tournament at GDC. With him still giddy from victory, we got him on the phone.

videogaming247: What did you win, Dan?

“A shit trophy.”

Who did you play as?

“I played Blanka, Dhalsim and I played as Ken. That was about it. It’s a really good game. I played the fuck out of it. It was funny. I played the producer and beat him as well. The Japanese dude in his 40s. Very happy. Lovely guy. I beat everyone and then he came on and said, ‘Boss level!’ Quite amusing.”

How does it feel to crowned King of America?

“It’s all right, you know. I haven’t really got anything for it apart from some fucking generic wrestling trophy with Street Fighter IV GDC shite along the bottom of it.”

We love you, Boutros.

This isn’t going down well. A supposed Live demo of Ninja Gaiden II has turned out to be a movie of someone playing code, not the code itself.

The action title was shown during Microsoft’s GDC keynote and is scheduled for worldwide release in early June.

Something worth pulling out of the blogger breakfast Microsoft held yesterday. According to this, Microsoft said the exclusive DLC for GTA IV will be huge, similar in scope to Vice City or San Andreas compared to GTA III. We haven’t listened to the audio from the event, and if we’re being honest it sounds a little squiffy for us, but according to this:

• When MS says exclusive, it means that no other system can have DLC content for GTA IV.
• It will be bigger than a lot of people think. Vice City and San Andreas were basically expansions of GTA3. Think of the DLC that way. We are talking major expansion for GTA IV.
• No price has been discussed yet. It’s up to Rockstar on whether or not they will charge for it.
• If successful, DLC may be the new way to deliver GTA expansions.

Based on the votes of 26,000 gamers, Hudson’s Bomberman Live was voted as best game in the Xbox Live Arcade Awards at GDC today. Other games won other stuff. Here’s the list:

Xbox Live Arcade Awards – 2007 Winners

• Best Overall Arcade Game: Bomberman Live (Hudson Entertainment)
• Best Classic Game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Konami Digital Entertainment)
• Best Original Game: Pac-Man: Championship Edition (Namco Bandai Games)
• Best Family-Friendly Game: Pac-Man: Championship Edition (Namco Bandai Games)
• Best Competitive Multiplayer Game: Bomberman Live (Hudson Entertainment)
• Best Cooperative Multiplayer Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Ubisoft Entertainment)
• Best-Selling Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Ubisoft Entertainment)
• Most-Played Game: Worms (Team17 Software Limited)
• Highest-Rated Game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Konami Digital Entertainment)
• Xbox Live Arcade Staff Choice: Pac-Man: Championship Edition (Namco Bandai Games)

Just got this from Tom Eurogamer. Guess we won’t be seeing anything from Mr Jaffe this evening. The Eat Sleep Play boss was supposed to be speaking at 6.30pm GMT at GDC.

OMG. JAFFE HAS FUCKING PULLED OUT.

“Oops.”

Eurogamer’s liveblogging David Jaffe’s session at GDC in a little over half an hour, so be sure to take a look here for some swearing and insight. Jaff’es now known to be working on a PS3 version of Twisted Metal, as well as other projects at Eat Sleep Play, and it’s still unknown whether or not he’s going to be participating on God of War III now he’s left Sony.

God of War III. Be awesome if that was shown, wouldn’t it?

In this interview, Microsoft’s John Schappert has claimed that more than 18 million Xbox 360s have now been sold worldwide.

“I think that we’ve sold 18 million, the last time I’ve checked,” he said. “18 million hardware units worldwide.”

In a wide-ranging chat, Schappert also talks about the speed at which Microsoft has reached 10 million Live subs, what he’s going to do about southern Europe (and the fact Xbox 360′s not selling well there) and how much he loves Wii.

Take a look.

According to this, Bionic Commando: Rearmed producer Ben Judd has been telling people at GDC that the XBox 360 version of Bionic Commando: Rearmed won’t be as good looking as the PS3 version because of the 150Mb file-size limit placed on Xbox Live content.

Microsoft responded today.

“That’s surprising to hear,” says John Schappert, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Xbox Live, Software, and Services, when we asked him about Capcom’s issues later in the day. “Last I checked it was Capcom that had an exception to our file size with Street Fighter II [Hyper Fighting]…. We raised our limit to 150 megs, which seems pretty darn great…. I don’t think it has limited our games in any way. Look at Rez HD. Look at Poker Smash. Look at Undertow. These are very, very, very good games.”

More through the link.

According to this, an Indiana Jones game has just gone into production.

Apparently, the game has been in pre-production for about two years, but found itself sidelined by Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

Obviously, this is a different beast to Lego – sorry, LEGO – Indiana Jones, which releases in June.

Epic dev lead Cliff Bleszinski has said that the narrative for Gears of War 2 will be beefed up over the original game, and pointed to the newly released teaser trailer for clues as to what to expect.

“Narrative is one of those things that is incredibly important in a video game,” he said. “The teaser that we released alludes to an even more interesting narrative set-up for Gears 2.”

The trailer contains the line, “If something happens to me, promise me you’ll look for Maria.” This may allude to some love interest, but considering Marcus is built like a bull, we doubt he’s capable of the “other” physical thing, you know, than killing people. It sounds as though the voice in the trailer isn’t Marcus’s, anyway, so it’s probably something to do with Marcus looking for someone else’s wife/girlfriend/dog.

Or something. We don’t know. It’s Friday and we haven’t slept for a week. Read the rest of that interview for ramblings about the artist formally called Prince and fire marshals “nixing” things.

“Do gamers want better experiences, or more?” That was the question posed by Prototype producer Tim Bennison as he showed off the game to a GDC audience. “We wanted to provide more, and see if that led to new experiences.”

“A lot of games are doing the same thing better,” said Bennison, who wanted his game to offer a wider scope of possible actions for gamers. He saw FPS games as not making much ground now that graphics were at such a high point. “Open World Gaming” was held up by Bennison has being “the medium” in which the Radical team was working.

It wasn’t until the demo of the game, as played by designer Alex Holmes, that showed us what Bennison meant by all this. The game was The Hulk meets GTA, dosed up with ultra-violence and Parkour running. The lead character could rip the lid off tanks and pulverise the passengers, run up the side of buildings, knock over trucks and cars, or even use bio-weapons to cause flesh spikes to burst out of the ground. The demo ended with the character fighting helicopters, mutants, commandos and out-of-control vehicles in a maelstrom of carnage in the centre of downtown New York. The room exploded into applause.

The movement engine, which allows the super-powered shape-shifter protagonist to leap and skip his way across New York city, showed it’s full potential when the character managed to run up the slope of a truck that had been knocked into the side of a building and then bounce from that onto the roof of a nearby building. Breathtaking, and framed with shocking violence against helicopters and the people in them.

“It’s Tom Clancy meets Stephen King,” said Bennison.

Didn’t see this coming. Crackdown developer Realtime Worlds has shown off its next project at GDC, a “multiplayer online game” called APB that seemingly has a shot at reinventing the entire MMO “thing”.

From the sound of this gushing 1UP report, the game is a PC action title in which teams of cops and robbers – all players, natch – are matched through a system of APBs, which are issued when people commit crimes. The setting’s contemporary, from the look of it, with play being third-person, in a similar style to a powered-down Crackdown.

There’s details of a character creation system that “doesn’t just rival the celebrated detail of say, City of Heroes… It surpasses it by an order of magnitude,” and other stuff, such as being able to dynamically stream music via LastFM.

There’ll be no grinding against NPCs in the game, with play instead taking on a form similar to Counter-Strike’s structure.

Take a look at that article right now. It’s got videos and screens as well as words.

Speaking to videogaming247 after his Wednesday GDC keynote, John Schappert – “Corporate Vice President LIVE, Software and Services for the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft” – said that he believes downloadable content is now an accepted part of the gamer experience, and a precursor to the advent of “community gaming”.

“No, not in any way,” he said, when asked if accruing cash through Live micropayments was more important for Microsoft than expanding the general demographic for gaming. “What I think you should take away from the 20 million [Microsoft] Points spent to date is how successful Marketplace is; that it is a real Marketplace for content, and a big driver for that this past holiday in North America was Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I think just like we saw a year ago at Christmas 2006, Arcade kind of came to fruition and it just broke the doors down. It’s doing better than ever right now, but now all of a sudden downloadable content has come of age, and now we’ve got community gaming coming. I think people want to be able to extend their gameplay and experience, so I think it’s a great thing.”

Schappert’s keynote focused heavily on community features through Live and the now “democratised” XNA, including the launching of a service to allow bedroom coders to get content out to the Live community. Some of the numbers he through around for Live were impressive, including 1 billion Achievements unlocked so far and 3 million tracks downloaded for Rock Band in the US.

The ongoing success of the service, said Schappert, is down to the previous work of “shepherds” such as Peter Moore and J Allard.

“I think the shepherds that came before me that crafted that box and created the Live service did a phenomenal job,” he said. “I have to say that I think that they were visionary and that we are all pleasantly surprised at how well [it turned out]. We certainly had high hopes and expectations, but to hit 10 million members six months ahead of schedule – that’s just good stuff.”

Dave “Shiny” Perry decided to arrange lunch at a posh San Francisco hotel for some industry luminaries, and let us sit in on it. The session, which was hosted by ex-PC Gamer editor Gary Whitta, was attended by Sony’s Phil Harrison, EA’s Neil Young, Peter Molyneux, Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor, Mr Perry himself, and MMO visionary Raph Koster.

The lunch began on the topic of what “next generation” actually meant, taking its cue from recent discussions of the term by David Braben, who had argued it had been devalued by the latest hardware failing to deliver actual next generation gaming experiences. The diners decided that what was truly next-generation was, as Phil Harrison put it, what was “in the spaces between what we do,” with the community, with networking, and with user-generated content.

Koster summed it up most succinctly, saying “It’s not the graphics, right? Xbox Live is the next-gen game you play on 360. It’s the connectivity and the meta-games. Next-next-gen will cut across more platforms.”

Koster said that things like achievements across a number of games, and connectivity between them represented genuine innovation for the gaming platforms.

Harrison also highlighted the ideas of what Wii had been capable of in shifting the emphasis of how games are played to social, family gaming, the kind of stuff he’s long been talking about with the SingStar and dance games. Harrison noted that there was something informative in the fact that “the Wii adverts were all from the perspective of the TV, looking at the players”, rather than being focused on impressive game footage.

Molyneux, meanwhile, wanted to maintain respect for other advances, such as those in graphical fidelity. He argued that while the industry heads might call meta-gaming and Wii control systems “next-gen” a consumer was just as likely to tag Call Of Duty 4′s incremental improvement to the FPS as next-gen. “Call Of Duty 4 is about how much you experience, and I think that is next-gen,” said the veteran Brit.

Perry chimed in agreement, saying “the games I want to play aren’t on the Wii.” Molyneux did concede that the Wii was too valuable to ignore, saying “the numbers for Wii are massive, we have to bring games out for it.”

The discussion moved on, with Neil Young (the EA one, not the singer) saying that because of the cost of Wii game development was slightly less the big companies could “afford to be a little more experimental.” He argued that the development community needed to learn to utilise the specific features of what made the Wii appealing such as “family play”, rather than simply porting PlayStation 2 games over. Young highlighted action-quizzer SmartyPants as an example of how this could be done effectively.

This led Phil Harrison to point out that games are taking too long to make. “The speed of iteration has to change,” said the Sony giant. Koster argued that games were shamed by the web, whose speed of iteration of web-sites was lightening fast. “Flickr patches ever half hour!” he exclaimed.

All this talk of the status of traditional game development segued neatly into the second topic, which was the status of simplicity in gaming. Gas Powered’s Chris Taylor argued that “people want simple and deep”. He cited WoW, saying “When WoW starts out the screen is clear, when it’s level 70 it looks like a helicopter. That’s exactly right, and we know its right because of the numbers WoW has done.”

The discussion then moved rapidly into discussion of casual games, piracy, and all the other bugbears that terrify the classic large-scale development companies. Koster, ever the fact-machine, noted that PopCap’s casual gaming surveys had suggested that there were around 20 million people playing casual games like Peggle. Molyneux was aghast and didn’t seem to believe the figure: “200 million? It’s inconceivable!”

“There are 500 million phones going to be sold with games on in the next year,” offered Harrison. Again Molyneux was incredulous, only this time at the idea that people would really use those phones for gaming.

Returning, via love for the iPhone, to the notion of simplicity as a driving principle for game design, Neil Young argued that older generations, who had played the early arcade games and then been out off by difficulty and complexity, were now returning to gaming in droves. “The Wii is bringing people back to gaming,” he said. Harrison took it further: “It’s not just the Wii, it’s the web, and everything else.”

Perry agreed, telling a tale so many gamers have told about non-gaming friends picking up the plastic guitar and then wanting to go right out and buy a PlayStation. “The cost of making a peripheral is not too much,” said Perry, who argued that hardware costs should be accepted when developers can come up with such impressive design as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Hardware interfaces, he said, should not be a problem.

Molyneux agreed, saying that he wanted the new Fable game to be picked up by newbies: “We’re just using one button for Fable 2. For us there are too many buttons on the controller.” Koster had another fact, saying that there were “eighteen dimensions” of control across the 360 controller. “I counted,” he affirmed.

Harrison too wondered if the controller was the biggest stumbling block for accessible game design. He said that handing a non-gamer a gamepad was like “handing them a loaded gun, or a grenade with the pin pulled out.” He waved his hands about the emphasize the point in comedic fashion.

This brought the discussion full circle, with the lunch gang seeming to agree that next-generation interfaces would have to be simpler. Koster delivered a provocative tangent to this idea, saying that “Flash is the next gen console.” He illustrated this by citing the fact that he could play a Flash game at home on his PC, or with a stylus on his pocket PC, or even on his phone. “There are more Flash installs that there are consoles in the last two generations,” Raph pointed out. And it’s a technology that is evolving exponentially, as GDC keynote speaker Ray Kurzweil (who was referenced several times in the discussion) had highlighted. Koster also said that Flash will have 3D polygon transforms in Flash10, and OpenGL in the canvas tag was something that was being worked on for Firefox.

“Good luck making money on a Flash game,” said Neil Young. He saw the current trends as simply dispersing how and where games were played. Flash games might be ubiquitous, but they were not the future for the man from EA, who argued that the proliferation of platforms and interfaces simply served different needs for different games. He did have some suggestions about what that might mean for hardware, however. “Maybe there doesn’t need to be a device in the home,” he suggested. “Can it be rendered on a server and delivered via the network?”

Harrison said that the speed of light might have something to say about such undertakings, but journalist turned developer Gary Penn, sat in the background, said that it was already happening.

Chris Taylor seemed to think that something like that was close to the nature of where he wanted to go with gaming. “Secure PC gaming is the future,” he said. “All server based.”

At this point Whitta chimed in, paraphrasing something Harrison had said in a previous session. “Is this the last generation where physical media has any relevance?”

The group seemed unsure, but Harrison was admitted that “it’s moving away from the disc as a business model.” Was Whitta’s Blu-Ray collecting the behaviour of a dinosaur? Yes, they joked, but the reality seemed to be that no one saw physical media has having much traction in the coming years. Koster underlined he point by recalling a student recently asking, “What’s a CD player?”

Finally Molyneux made us all turn off our dictaphones so he could talk off the record about Fable 2. And… we can’t talk about that just yet, but obviously that was next-generation too.