Category Archives: VG247

“There’s just south of 300 maybe in the Providence studio, which is the core of the [Copernicus] MMO team. I’s set in the same universe [as Amalur], so it will become obvious over the next, I don’t know how many months and years of time. This game exists in the same world. In a small way, if you think of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and World of Warcraft, those were tied together because they were in the same IP, but there will be story connectivity between what we’re doing in the games. In the MMO, there will be races that you can play are monsters in the RPG. Things like that. Same locations, there will be cities and places, there will be a familiarity to it that… Nobody else, I think, has gone in with the intent to do that like this.” – 38 Studios head Curt Schilling to VentureBeat regarding the Kingdoms of Amalur-based MMO Copernicus.

“I thought turning around the PlayStation business was going to be the toughest challenge of my career, but I guess not. It’s one issue after another. I feel like ‘Holy shit, now what?’ We can’t just continue to be a great purveyor of hardware products, even though some people expect us to do that. We really need to buckle down and be realistic. I don’t think everybody is on board, but I think people are coming around to the idea that if we don’t turn this around, we could be sitting in some serious trouble.” – Sony CEO Kaz Hirai on fixing the firm’s hardware business to The Wall Street Journal.

“We’re talking with Sony games now. We are really trying to take it in areas that haven’t been done before and have stayed out of the marketplace because the ideas simply weren’t exciting enough. So while the gaming world is waiting for the KISS games that are going to explode, we’re busy taking the brand to places where no band has gone before. We’re talking with Angry Birds, KISS and Angry Birds, which will become a deal. It’s just endless what we can do, but we only do things when it’s right. Just because there are games, and just because there’s this or that out there, unless the deal is right and unless the content is exciting to our fans, we don’t do it.” – Gene Simmons on extending the KISS brand to video games and Angry Birds. Thanks, IndustryGamers.

“We are disappointed that NCsoft is attempting to mar the launch of TERA. Unfortunately we can’t discuss much publicly due to the sensitivity of legal actions, but we do outright reject the NCsoft claims, and we are going to do everything in our power to defend and protect ourselves. To all our supporters who have been anticipating the arrival of TERA – please know that this situation has no impact on our continuing efforts to realize the vision we have for our game. We are committed to making TERA awesome and delivering the game to you on time on May 1. Thank you for your patience and support.” – En Masse VP of publishing Chris Lee responding to NCsoft’s allegations that BlueHole Studios stole software and artwork from the studio to create TERA. Thanks, TenTonHammer.

“Sometimes you’re stuck in a situation where you can only choose between two really bad outcomes. Looking back I’m not sure what I could have done. We’re changing our QA processes based on this game, and we’re changing the whole model of how we make games with third-parties. We’ve added amendments to existing contracts to prepare, to try and stop it from happening again. But it was bad, and I’m the first to admit it was my fault and we’re doing our best to fix it.” – Paradox CEO Fredrick Wester on Sword of the Stars 2′s release which was buggy, and had missing features.

“Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft [won't] disappear from the gaming market; quite the opposite. They are now, and will be for many years, a driving force in our market; however, the way they operate will probably evolve into a somewhat different role. I strongly believe the big console makers of today will have a big impact on the games industry tomorrow, but it will not take a piece of hardware between the gamer and the screen for them to do so. Maybe we’ll see a Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft “hub” integrated in TVs or their own OS included in the TV; let’s not forget the Google TVs that have already seen their first generation and the oft-rumored Apple television set (not to be confused with Apple TV). As a content producer, I am really excited to see what happens on the hardware market in the coming years.” – Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester clarifying his remarks about the future of consoles. [pic]

“There is a place for subscription-based games and if you’re going to build a subscription-based game it’s got to be huge in scope. People have to feel that it’s worth paying a subscription fee every month, so the scope of the game has to be much bigger than the free-to-play games. The quality, the polish has to be very, very high, and then you need to have a plan to continue to deliver free content on a regular basis. If you do those things, I think you can succeed as a subscription-based game. Obviously, there can only be a few subscription-based games. There is a limited MMO audience and not a ton of that audience is playing more than one MMO, but I still think there’s room for more than just one really successful online game. I think Star Wars: The Old Republic can coexist with World of Warcraft and other successful games like Rift. You can have multiple MMOs with a subscription being successful as long as those games fulfill the requirements of high quality, good polish, lots of content, and continuing to do high value updates on a regular basis.” – SWTOR director James Ohlen to IGN.

“It’s big. Really, really big. And perhaps more importantly, it’s incredibly dense. I couldn’t tell you the exact square footage of the overworld map, but I can tell you that it takes over half an hour to sprint at full [speed] across the map, even if you somehow avoid all combat. As for dungeons, there are around 130 of them in the game, and each one is hand-crafted in several different art styles, from crystal caverns to the organic innards of an ancient tree, so there’s an awful lot of variety to experience there.” – Big Huge Games’ Ian Frazier to 360 Magazine on the size of the game world in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

“I understand people may think it is a silly game and even though we put serious work into gameplay too it is difficult to communicate that. Bryce [the main character] doesn’t need to evade or avoid [attacks]. If you get shot, it’s OK. It’s also hard to show this to the audience because it would change the way they play the game. It’s complicated just like trying to explain the story. It might be my fault, I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you honestly I tried to make the E3 trailer show Bryce’s true personality. I’m not sure if [it was] a success, but in the middle of the story it becomes more serious. He comes back to his young self, in his mind. NeverDead, when you look at it, is a story of vengeance. I need to make more effort to communicate this – I want people to know it’s a serious game with a guy who has a lot of bad luck.” – NeverDead director Shinta Nojiri to Siliconera.

“Despite the fact that RPGs have made such deep and passionate inroads into the mainstream market, I still feel they are slow-paced, abstract, and awkward. Reckoning reflects my hunger for a faster pace of action and combat drama, and a desire for simpler, easier-to-use interfaces. RPGs are naturally the deepest, longest, and most complicated kinds of videogame entertainment… that’s what makes them great. But making them just a tiny bit less clumsy in the interface, and just a big, fat, huge amount more physical and exciting in combat, gives them more fun-per-unit-time. Me? I want All-Fun, All-the-Time, Right-Now, thank-you-very-much.” – Ken Rolston to GameFront on how the current state of RPGS affected the design of Kindoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

“We felt it deserved to be bigger than the 4.3 inch screen on PSP. It’s almost as if we settled on five inches in order to really maximise the same impact that we felt when we first saw it. There was a great deal of discussion and we even talked about using a 5.5 inch screen, but that had a negative impact on the operability of the device. There is always a battle between engineers and designers and I’m not just talking about PlayStation Vita when I say that. I was pushing through this idea of ‘thinner is better’ but I had to be reminded of things like the feature set, processing power, battery life… the overall package. I actually wanted PS Vita to be entirely made of metal but then it was pointed out that this was impossible due to the internal Wi/Fi, 3G and GPRS antennae.” – Vita designer Tokashi Sogabe on the differing perspectives between designing and engineering the handheld.

“I’ve never experienced a game like it before, and that’s been the difficulty of talking about this game. It’s an RPG with good combat, and people have a hard time figuring out what that means in their own heads, because there’s no example of it, really. Now we’re in this age where we have all these action games that have RPG elements, that right there has just destroyed to me what an RPG means because we’re talking about RPG elements. There are all these different ways we can spread out, and these are all valid representations of RPGs. But you ask any different person what an RPG is and they’ll give you a different answer.” – Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’s lead combat designer Joe Quadara to Gamespot.

“Piracy is not a solution to anything,” says Minecraft creator Notch. The Swedish developer has never really hidden his views on piracy. Summarised, the Minecraft creator considers software theft a “minor offense” overall, something on par with jaywalking or littering.

It’s not really surprising then, that when a fan commented that he loved the game but couldn’t afford a copy for himself, the creator suggested that he “just pirate it“. Almost as an afterthought, “don’t forget to feel bad.”
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“What I find at SCE is that we’ve lots of passionate and committed people. But there’s definitely an opportunity to up the pace of our competitiveness. We still have a bit of a hangover – at least in the UK company – from the days of being market dominant [with PS2]. I don’t think we are as sharp as we can be. There’s room for improvement there. So it’s not change everything, but it is turn up the dial, and learn to compete.” – SCE UK’s new boss Fergal Gara to MCV.

“The idea of giving people constant incremental playable content and making it so you’re never more than a few weeks away from the next new experience within the Call of Duty universe is part of what we’re experimenting with. This franchise doesn’t really behave like most franchises. It’s become something of a year-round activity for a large percentage of our player population. One of the things that was most appealing when we were researching these ideas with consumers is the idea of breaking up the DLC so that it comes more often and more regularly. We want to provide DLC to people more often and also experiment with more of a variety in the forms of playable content. The nature of this kind of service requires constant iteration. There are things [in development] that consumers don’t yet know they want… because they can’t imagine it.” – Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg to Wired.

“I’d love for [Akira Yamaoka] to be involved. Unfortunately, he left Konami, and can’t do the music for the new games [which is] a Japanese business politics sort of thing. We’d like for him to be there, but he’s not. So we took seriously finding a replacement, because you can’t throw in just any old sound guy. So we found Dan Licht, who does the music on Dexter. He was actually our top choice, so we were fortunate that he was willing to jump in.” – Silent Hill: Downpour producer Tomm Hullet to GameFront.

“It was a long, painful process, but making games is like making films in that it’s a marathon, not a sprint – and some people come into the process not knowing that – I’d love to spend more time at home with my family and kids. We run things differently now – we have flexi-hours, for example. But everybody has their view on who’s the worst boss in the world, and maybe that’s me. I’ve read some amazing things about Steve Jobs in his biography, and I’ve never seen him get as vilified any way as much as I have. Sam Peckinpah [’70s film director] fired [plenty of] people off one movie, and nobody said a thing. Werner Herzog pulled a gun on Klaus Kinski to get him to finish a movie! Obviously I don’t compare myself to any of those people…” – Team Bondi boss Brendan McNamara to OPM.

It should still be quite fresh in your mind, but let’s seal the deal and wrap up our 2011 retrospective by recapping December, or, to give it its more common name, “Star Wars Month”.

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Christmas didn’t kill us. It made us stronger for the 2012 news apocalypse. Get a round-up of all the “other stuff” that happened over the break below.

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Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, Uncharted 3, Skyward Sword, Assassin’s Creed Revelations and Saints Row: The Third all released in November, making for the year’s most intense ship period. Here’s what happened.

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