Tag Archives: chris taylor

Square Enix has released the debut trailer of Dungeon Siege III. Not much is given away, mind. It’s after the break.

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Update: Shots added below.

Original: Square Enix has announced Dungeon Siege III for PC, PS3 and 360, bring the RPG series to consoles for the first time.

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Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games and Epic president Mike Capps both revealed during DICE that it’s getting harder for development studios like theirs to remain independent of big publishers.

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Gas Powered Games is set to announce its next project on Monday, February 15 according to the studio’s Chris Taylor.

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Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor has told IGN that there will be no map modding for Supreme Commander 2 when it releases in the spring.

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Square just confirmed the PAL version of Supreme Commander 2 for a spring release, with GPG boss Chris Taylor calling the partnership with the publisher a “highlight” of his career.

“I couldn’t be more proud of what the team has accomplished, as the game has continually exceeded all of my expectations throughout its development,” said the developer.

PR after the break.

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RTS is still finding its place on consoles, Gas Powered Games CEO Chris Taylor told VG247 at GamesCom last week, but at one time so were shooters.

The developer, currently hard at work on Supreme Commander 2 for both PC and 360, told us that not all gamers wish to go out and purchase a gaming rig just to play an RTS: therefore, the genre must come to them.

“Think about GoldenEye on the N64. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. Like, I didn’t die for it,” said Taylor.

“It’s like, I thought, ‘This is pretty OK’, but I fought with the controls a little bit. Nobody at that time would have said, ‘Shooters? On consoles?’ Now, some shooters do better on the console than they do on the PC. Halo, for example. Wow, we’ve come a long way.

“I keep remembering that if you can go into that market, and you can solve it, there is an upside there.”

Back in June, Taylor assured fans that more development time and more resources were being poured into Supreme Commander 2 on 360 after the first port received such a lukewarm reception.

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences said today that the DICE Summit – thus far restricted to Las Vegas – is to get an Asian version this year.

The new event will take place at Singapore’s Suntec Center, the same venue used for Games Convention Asia, on September 17.

GPG’s Chris Taylor and NanaON-Sha boss Masaya Matsuura are both to “feature,” apparently.

There’s a press release here. Thanks, Joystiq.

Gas Powered Games CEO Chris Taylor has assured fans that more development time and more resources were being poured into the Supreme Commander 360 sequel after the first port got panned.

“We’re doing it [the port] in-house and giving it a lot more time and a lot more resources,” Taylor said.

“I would be very surprised if it didn’t do as well as the PC version.”

Look back at the first game Taylor told Joystiq at E3: “I felt bad [for] the developer who did the Xbox 360 version just did not have the time or the resources.

“It was a hair on fire mission.”

The initial reception for Supreme Commander 2 has been mostly positive. Here’s hoping it lives up to the early promise.

According to this GamersHell story, the beta’s gone live for GPG’s Demigod.

There’s more through there. The PC strategy thing releases next February.

Leipziger Messe’s announced that Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor is to keynote GCDC this year with a talk about upcoming RPG/RTS, Demigod.

“Our goal is to present keynote speakers that inspire our attendees, while providing valuable insight into the changing landscape of the games industry,” said GCDC boss Frank Sliwka. “Chris Taylor’s participation takes the already content rich conference program to a higher level and makes GCDC an absolute must-attend event.”

Taylor’s keynote will be given on August 20, ahead of the Leipzig Games Convention.

Over at GamersHell. It looks very much like a PC strategy title to us, which is good, because that’s what it is.

The game was pushed back to Feb 2009 recently, but it’s going to be worth it from the look of it.

Go see.

By Mike Bowden

Speaking to CVG, Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor has said that comments he made last week about Dungeon Siege 3 being a single-character affair doesn’t mean he’s working on the game itself.

“We have not made any official announcements, or have any official plans, but we are kicking ideas around, and that’s no secret,” he said.

“It would be a long time before another DS game was finished and saw the light of day.”

Taylor added: “When asked if we were considering taking lessons learned from Space Siege back into the Dungeon Siege series, the answer was yes.

“The example I gave was the multi-character parties… saying I was done with the big parties, because it really took the focus away from the main hero. In fact, in Dungeon Siege, it was hard to really have a ‘main’ hero, so-to-speak.”

So there we are.

Eurogamer.de’s dropped a nice exclusive this morning, carrying a quote from Chris Taylor in which he both confirms Dungeon Siege 3 and says the game will be based on a single character instead of a party.

“There will be some things that are very much like the original Dungeon Siege [games] but only some things will be simplified,” Taylor told the site. “I am done with multi-character parties. I really think that its all going to be about a single hero. Its just too much to manage. I want a single hero to get all the focus.”

The move is likely to be in line with the development of upcoming Gas Powered Games spin-off Space Siege, which centres on a single character instead of a group.

More through the link. Assuming you can read German, obviously. There are no details in there about date, etc.

Stardock will publish Gas Powered Games’ Demigod, according to a press release you can find after the link, which will now hit in February 2009 as opposed to “late 2008″.

Aside from the slip, great news arrives in the fact that the game will ship with no DRM at all. From the announcement:

To fully support a public beta that will launch this summer, the launch date for Demigod has been moved to February 2009. This will give the development team sufficient time to incorporate feedback from the beta players while polishing the game. Like Stardock’s other games, Demigod will be released without any on-disc copy protection and has been budgeted to receive many months of free post-release feature updates.

Read the rest after the break.

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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.

Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor has said that team-based strategy PC title Demigod is likely to end up on consoles after it releases later this year.

“That is actually up in the air,” said Taylor with regards to Demigod’s PC exclusivity. “You could easily see that on the console. That’s got a very high likelihood of going to console.”

He also backed up comments made by Sega at CES that upcoming PC action-RPG Space Siege is also in discussions for console versions, refusing to rule out versions other than the PC game.

“There’s been no official word,” Taylor said. “No definite there… Anything can happen of course, in the future.”

According to this, Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor said that piracy is a lead factor in moving games like Supreme Commander onto consoles.

“Well one of the key things that is really affecting the economics and the success of gaming in general is piracy on the PC,” he said, talking at GDC. “So one of the reasons we’ll see RTSs on the console is because people can’t pirate it. That’s why we’re going to see a lot more of everything on the console. When you look at the sales of really hardcore games like Crysis and you think, ‘Wow, those games should have sold a lot more,’ you realize that’s probably due in large part to piracy. And you realize that a game like Crysis would have done its true numbers if it had launched on console first.”

Taylor’s intricate RTS, Supreme Commander, will make its way to Xbox 360 later this year.

Here. Take a look and wonder how the hell you’re ever going to make Gas Powered Games’ insanely hardcore RTS work on a 360 pad.

Shawn Green, associate producer of Space Siege for publisher Sega, has told VG247 that the Gas Powered Games-developed action RPG is currently under consideration for a console version, but that nothing’s been signed off as yet.

“We’re talking with them about it,” said Green. “We don’t want to let any cats out of the bag too early but definitely a console version is something that’s being considered right now. But currently it’s not confirmed.”

The game, billed as the spiritual successor to fantasy outing Dungeon Siege, was shown running at CES in Las Vegas last month. Built on a new engine from Dungeon Siege 2, it looks to bring a more casual element to PC RPGs.

“We’re seeing on console that a lot of gamers are appreciating the short and sweet experience, where you can play through and really like it and enjoy it, and I think that’s where a lot of Chris [Taylor – Ed]’s motivation comes from, taking that to the PC and creating a game that you can beat,” Green added.

Space Siege will release for PC in “September 2008”, Green said.