Being at once repellent and compelling is some kind of criterion for Real Art Status, and Horses - developed by Saturnalia developers Santa Ragione and directed by Andrea Lucco Borlera - certainly earns that accolade. Out later in 2024, this first-person horror game takes inspiration from the Surrealism art movement and from silent cinema, with monochrome visuals, speech cards in place of spoken dialogue, and rickety live-action footage for certain animations and transitions. But it's also, I think, a meditation on the unique kinds of grotesque only videogames can produce, one that goes beyond the mere portrayal of squalor and bloodshed to explore particular generations and traditions of videogame graphics that are intrinsically cursed. It stood out amid the breezy action games and cosy life sims of this year's Day Of The Devs expo in San Francisco like a bell-tolling plaguebearer in a crowd of Tellytubbies.
]]>Larian Studios, the makers of the enormously successful and multi-"so-many-awards-they-probably-need-ten-new-trophy-cases-to-house-them-all"-winning Baldur's Gate 3, will not be making Baldur's Gate 4, founder and CEO Swen Vincke has announced. Nor will they be making any DLC or expansions for Baldur's Gate 3, for that matter - a stance I 100% respect as the studio starts to think about what's next for them.
]]>The winners of the 2024 Independant Games Festival were announced at GDC last night, and it was Visai Games' Venba that came home with the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The cooking adventure was up for four IGF awards in total, including nominations for Excellence in Audio, Narrative and Visual Art. But there was no runaway winner at this year's IGF Awards, with all prizes going to completely different indie games. Come and celebrate the full list of winners below.
]]>This article's headline is the characterisation of Everdeep Aurora given to me by publisher Ysbryd Games, but bizarrely enough, it reminded me initially of Bloodborne. A 2D platformer from Nautilus Games, Everdeep Aurora begins on the surface, where a ruptured crimson moon fills the sky with blazing meteors. That menacing moon is the first hint of Bloodborne, obviously. The second is the lamp-lit, locked-up house to one side, whose unseen occupant tells you to get lost, adding that they don’t believe all this crazy talk about the apocalypse.
I thought at once of the wealthier residents of Yharnam, feasting and laughing hysterically behind the shutters of their fancy townhouses on the night of the Hunt. There are no pitchfork-wielding mobs or werewolves stalking the vicinity, however. But there is a frog by a campfire, who tells you that everybody else has sought shelter underground, and hands you a drill so you can follow them.
]]>It's GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they've had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It's the usual pitch. "Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?", asks Ubi's official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is "Erm, probably no, actually?"
Still, the internet made good hay from the prototype image Ubisoft shared on Xitter, as many people took the opportunity to make fun of the dialogue from Bloom, a prototype man in a prototype beanie who wants to be your friend.
]]>I didn't have any particular expectations for Heart Machine's open world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker, but I wasn't expecting it to feel so... broken-up, I guess. In this sequel to 2016's alternately wistful and frenzied action-RPG, you are a debonair-looking sod with a hoverboard, paraglider, blades and guns, sent out into the procedurally generated realms of the Overgrowth to kill Abyss Kings, eat stat boosts and extract with loot.
The aforesaid hoverboard and glider, together with the streaking neon visual direction, suggest a game of fluid acrobatics, akin to the studio's last release Solar Ash, which, to quote Ed's review, "has you rollerblade around shattered worlds like a post apocalyptic gazelle on wheels". Perhaps that game exists deeper within Hyper Light Breaker, but during my 20 minutes with the game at GDC, I found myself stopping and starting and struggling to build momentum using a combat system that felt both deliberately challenging and stilted.
]]>A heaving expo floor is not a great place to sample a first-person open world hunting game that wants you to monitor your own heartbeat, but The Axis Unseen manages to be pretty atmospheric regardless. It helps that I'm hunting Bigfoot. Hefting my magical bow, I peer around a tree trunk at the creature as he wanders down a slope of vivid orange grass sprinkled with pale blue rock. I only have a couple of arrows in my quiver, which doesn't feel like nearly enough, so I edge across the hillside to another tree trunk, where I can hopefully line up a headshot.
]]>About 20 years ago, a travel company declared this Monday just gone, the 15th, to be the most depressing day of the year. They call it Blue January. Enter yet more studio layoffs. 2023's trend continues with Dead By Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive getting rid of about 45 staff, per Kotaku, while CI Games has laid off 10% of its workforce, including from Lords Of The Fallen studio Hexworks and Sniper Ghost Warrior studio Underdog (via GI.Biz).
]]>The Independent Games Festival awards - aka: the only awards that are actually worth paying attention to - have announced the finalists for their 2024 cohort, and wouldn't you know it, there are lots of RPS-endorsed games in there, lemme tell ya. Cooking adventure Venba leads the pack with a total of four nominations, but it's closely followed by Cocoon, A Highland Song, Mediterranea Inferno and 1000xResist, all of which have scooped three noms apiece.
]]>The next game from Sun Dogs designer Nic Tringali ticks a lot of boxes for me. Like Alice0 wrote when The Banished Vault was first announced seven months ago, the idea of exploring space in "an interstellar gothic monastery" is obviously an instant yes, but I'm also drawn to its neat, grid-like maps of its procedurally generated solar systems, as well as the haunting monochrome portraits of your band of exiled survivors. It looks stunning, and happily the wait for it is almost over, as Tringali and publishers Bithell Games have announced it will be coming to PC on July 25th.
]]>In the ever-heaving genre that is cool-looking Metroid-likes, it's always a delight to see one that's doing something new and surprising. Worldless, which was revealed at last night's ID@Xbox Showcase, is one such Metroidy platformer that's hoping to shake things up with its rhythmic, turn-based battling. I had a sneak peak at its freshly released Steam demo back in March at GDC, and I came away impressed by both its abstract visuals and fluid, dance-like scraps with its angular enemies. The demo is only 30 minutes or so, so why not give it a go for yourself?
]]>For the past three months, I've been gasping to tell someone about the next game from the makers of Mutazione. I got to see a sneak peak of it back in March at GDC, but I've been sworn to secrecy ever since. But at long last, Saltsea Chronicles has made its debut at tonight's Day Of The Devs stream, and I can finally unburden myself and let out 90 days' worth of fizz pop excitement for this gorgeous new adventure game.
Set on a flooded, post-apocalyptic Earth, creative director Hannah Nicklin described it to me like this: "What if you were watching Star Trek, but you get to choose where they go, who's on the adventure and what they get to say?" It's a tantalising premise, especially when it's all packaged up in the same crisp, pastel colour palette as the perpetually stunning Mutazione. The Star Trek reference isn't just for show, either. You might only be visiting different islands rather than whole planets during the course of Saltsea Chronicles, but it does have a natty, Alexander Courage-grade theme tune that plays between its chapters. The most exciting thing about this oceanic trek, however, is its incredibly cool save system that lets you dip in and out of different story branches to explore different paths and opportunities as you see fit. Let me tell you all about it.
]]>Tunic developer Andrew Shouldice has made no secret about his love of The Legend Of Zelda over the years. He's not only spoken at length about how playing the original pair of Zelda games on the NES provided ample inspiration for his crafty hack and slasher, but you can also see it right there in the game itself, from your fox hero's bright green outfit to the beautifully illustrated in-game manual you piece together to unravel the world's mysteries.
But speaking with Shouldice at GDC this year, I wanted to talk to him another other potential source of inspiration. Before he struck out on his own to make Tunic, Shouldice cut his teeth making hidden object games, ranging from globe-trotting mystery adventures to Atlantean-themed detective stories. On paper, this earlier work would appear to provide the perfect proving ground for Tunic, as we all know by now that it holds plenty of secrets of its own. For Shouldice, though, it was more of a reaction against his earlier work that fuelled his approach to Tunic, as he gradually came to realise his hidden object games "weren't tapping into this very specific type of mystery and discovery and player agency and true exploration that I was interested in," he says.
]]>Take one look at Luna Abyss and you'll probably go, 'Wait a minute, this looks like first-person Returnal!' And having played the first mission of the game at GDC, I can confirm that yes, this is very much in the vein of first-person Returnal. It's a fast-paced, bullet hell shooter set on a strange alien moon where everything's out to get you, but the shift in perspective makes everything in its titular abyss feel closer and more intimate, calling to mind the frantic, confined gun fights of Doom and Quake more than Housemarque's seminal roguelike - games that creative director Benni Hill tells me were formative experiences for him growing up.
There's also a greater emphasis on story-telling in Luna Abyss, with Hill also citing Nier: Automata and Bioshock as other key influences. It's a compelling mix, based on the first chunk I played, and arguably one of my surprise GDC favourite demos alongside The Thaumaturge and The Lamplighters League. Indeed, Hill tells me they started working on Luna Abyss a year before Returnal was even announced, and when they first saw it during Sony's PlayStation 5 reveal stream in the summer of 2020, he and his team did a collective double-take.
]]>As you might expect from a roster of 12 Marvel superheroes (or 17, if you count the four extra DLC supes and its original, player-designed protagonist The Hunter), the lycra-clad buds of Marvel's Midnight Suns all look and feel substantially different from one another when it comes to combat. When Firaxis were designing the moveset for each hero, creative director Jake Solomon says he and fellow lead game designer Joe Weinhoffer would take turns being "point designers" for certain characters. "Joe was point designer on one hero, I was point designer on another hero," Solomon says, highlighting Magic and Iron Man as two of his own favourite heroes that he designed.
Both are what I'd call quite technical heroes, with Magic relying on careful battlefield placement to boot enemies into nifty magical portals, while Iron Man's most powerful abilities often only come from discarding other cards. But when I ask Solomon at GDC if he thinks he has a particular design 'style' that unites his crop of Marvel heroes, he says he loves being "bombastic".
]]>Marvel's Midnight Suns may be a turn-based tactics game first and foremost, but it also has a substantial RPG element that drives both the story and the interpersonal dramas of its superhero teams between missions. When you and your squad head back to your Abbey HQ, there are side stories and quests to investigate around the Abbey grounds, items to find, and more. It's a sizable part of the game, but at one point it was even bigger, creative director Jake Solomon tells me at GDC.
"It's crazy, if you go online, you can see all the Midnight Suns cutscenes and they're three hours long. That's as long as a movie," he says. But during the last year of development Solomon reveals "we cut 30 conversations from the game, like 30 scenes. We cut a ton, because we realised this is just simply too much."
]]>When Firaxis first unveiled their new tactical superhero RPG Marvel's Midnight Suns in August of 2021, its card-based battle system proved to be a point of contention among its audience, so much so that when the game was delayed a short while later, rumours started flying that the studio was going back to the drawing board on the game's combat and dropping the cards entirely.
"Hah, that was wishful thinking for some people!" laughs creative director Jake Solomon when I ask him at GDC how he felt about those rumours at the time. It's well-known now that the delay was simply about polishing the game rather than anything more drastic, but to Solomon's credit he does also concede that he was perhaps "a little naïve" at the time for thinking it would go down without question.
]]>When I meet Jake Solomon at GDC, it's his third day of unemployment. The XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns director and designer announced he was leaving Firaxis back in February, but his final day at the studio where he made his name and worked for more than twenty years was still very fresh in his memory. "It's surreal," he says. "For probably the next ten years, I'll refer to it as 'we' when we talk about Firaxis, and it's sad to think it's not the right pronoun anymore. It's exciting, but a little terrifying."
On the face of it, that panic might seem unfounded. Over the last decade, Solomon has become one of the most revered names in turn-based strategy games. Having cut his teeth on many of Sid Meier's Civilization games in his early years at Firaxis, he went on to become the designer who spearheaded the revival of XCOM with Enemy Unknown in 2012, before going on to direct its even more beloved sequel XCOM 2 and its War Of The Chosen expansion a few years later. Most recently, he was creative director on Marvel's Midnight Suns, which allowed him to marry his life-long love of Marvel comic books with the thrilling tactical combat he's so well known for.
Solomon's next adventure, though, won't have the certainty of Midnight Suns' supercharged attack cards, or even the tease of an XCOM hit percentage backing him up. For not only is it Solomon's third day of unemployment when we speak; it's also the day after he revealed his plans to leave turn-based tactics games behind altogether. Instead, his sights are now set on the life simulation genre, a move that, at first glance, seems at odds with his career as a strategy designer. But over the course of our hour-long chat, it becomes increasingly clear that life sims have been a life-long obsession for Solomon, and he might have even made one by now had the development of XCOM 2 gone a little differently.
]]>When The Witcher Remake devs Fool's Theory and 11 bit studios announced their new RPG The Thaumaturge at the very end of February, I'll admit that the premise didn't immediately grab me. The announcement trailer was little more than an enigmatic pan through the streets of historic Warsaw, and its climactic reveal of a shadowy man performing some Naruto finger magic to conjure a Soulsian monster from the gloom made it seem like yet another supernatural yarn in the vein of Frogwares' The Sinking City and Cyanide's Call Of Cthulhu. The gameplay trailer (embedded below) that followed a few days later revealed a teeny glimmer of what its monster fights actually look like in the flesh, but I still wasn't quite convinced this supernatural tale of demon tamers and interdimensional rifts would end up doing enough to make it stand out.
But actually clapping eyes on it in person at GDC? The Thaumaturge had my full attention. Set in Warsaw in 1905 - a period where Poland didn't exist on any real-life map due to it being under occupation by Russia, Germany and Austria at the time - this dark fantasy RPG sees its titular paranormal 'miracle worker' delve deep into the city's political tensions, conducting isometric detective investigations that pull from Fool's Theory's support work on Larian's Divinity: Original Sin games, while also engaging in striking turn-based battles to root out the corruption plaguing its citizens. Plus, with its hard lean into Slavic, rather than Lovecraftian, folklore for its ungodly ghoulies, The Thaumaturge has shot right to the top of my 'keep an eye on this maybe surprise hit' list.
]]>A belated apology to anyone who was assaulted by a sudden burst of upbeat bagpipes in the GDC press room the other week. I was having an early sneak peak at Inkle's new game A Highland Song in an appointment booth with paper-thin walls and no ceiling. The speakers on my Steam Deck demo unit were really going "full pipe" that day, so I'd like to say a big awkward sorry to any of my neighbours in there who were trying to conduct actual serious business interviews.
But also: A Highland Song is 100% a game that deserves to have its music cranked up to full, whether it's returning Heaven's Vault composer Laurence Chapman's soaring orchestral score, or Scottish bands Talisk and Fourth Moon's aforementioned folk music. The clue's in the name, after all, and after a spirited 30 minutes with it, I'm certain this will have Inkle fans singing from the hilltops.
]]>When Marek Markuszewski had finished working on The Witcher 3's Blood And Wine expansion, he wanted to go back to basics and make something by himself, Starward Industries' chief marketing officer Maciej Dobrowolski tells me at GDC. Something that would capture the same kind of cultural Polish heritage as The Witcher - originally adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski's six-strong series of novels - but that would take him on a new, more introspective kind of development journey. It took a while to find, but after a fateful encounter with an investor who'd just sailed across the Atlantic with only a copy of Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible for company, the signs were too good to ignore, Dobrowolski says. And after spending the best part of a year convincing Stanislaw Lem's son (and current rights holder) of the same thing, Markuszewski finally had his something - and a new partner to help him realise it.
"People tell us, 'Don't fuck it up, this guy's important,'" Dobrowolski continues, and no wonder. During the course of our conversation, Lem is described as both a "national treasure" and "mandatory reading in high school" for Polish students, and his hallowed cultural status is something the team's "had to deal with" in bringing the book to life. Despite all this, though, Dobrowolski insists this "isn't a one-to-one adaptation" of Lem's interstellar rescue story gone wrong, and that fans of the book will still find some surprises on the surface of Regis III as they explore its strange canyons, caves and crash sites.
]]>Alt.Ctrl.GDC is a regular fixture at the Game Developers Conference, and this year I spotted some properly incredible creations from its largely student-led group of exhibitors. There was a big focus on co-op games and time trial demos in this year's cohort, with nearly every stand having some sort of whiteboard pinned up that was constantly being scrubbed out with new fastest lap times and corresponding visitor names. There was also lots of friendly hooting emanating from them as well, as mates and strangers attempted to co-ordinate their gaggles of limbs to steer various game characters in the right direction.
It was excellent fun, and I sampled a bunch of games that used toasters, intricate pulley systems, papier-mache tree stumps, bike wheels and more in place of your typical controllers and mice and keyboard. There were also plenty more I didn't get to try out, mainly due to time, and you can see the full list over on GDC's website. For now, though, here are some personal highlights of what I saw, including the largest bowler hat I think I've ever seen in my life.
]]>As is so often the case in systemic turn-based tactics games, things started to go wrong in my preview session for The Lamplighters League when a nearby torch met a cunningly placed oil slick and erupted into flames. A load of enemies were instantly enveloped in its hot sea of death, as intended, but one of our heroes - the tank-like bruiser Fedir - also ended up getting burned by mistake. As an ex-mob enforcer, he's certainly built to take a few punches, and his abilities are all focused on making him the centre of attention, his attacks growing more powerful as his rage levels continue to grow. "You want him to get attacked," game director Chris Rogers tells me, calling on the phrase 'you wouldn't like him when he's angry' as the basis for Fedir's ability set. But with that extra fire damage he receives, it's just a little too much all at once. He gets knocked down, and the tide of battle quickly goes south.
In truth, I played no part in this downfall. Rogers was in the control cockpit for this one, showing me exactly how Harebrained Schemes' latest game actually works. It's quite a different proposition from their last game, Battletech, and in this quite literal trial by fire, studio head and co-founder Mitch Gitelman actually pulled a dollar out of his pocket at one point and put a bet on whether Rogers would make it out alive. He certainly had his work cut out for him. Rogers won that dollar, and here's how the game's emphasis on deep, customisable character builds set him up for success.
]]>Rod Humble has his son to thank for his upcoming life sim Life By You. After finishing up work on two successful mobile games around four years ago, Humble was itching for something new. But he wasn't quite sure what. "I was in the kitchen talking to my son about, 'Oh, what should I do? I don't know what opportunities there are,' and he was like, 'Why don't you just pick the company you want to work at and ask them?'" And as a life-long Crusader Kings player, the answer was clear. "Okay!?" Humble says incredulously. "I can do that, I guess. So I did. I wrote to [PR manager] Troy [Goodfellow], and he knew Fred [Wester, CEO], and that was it. It was two weeks later and I met him in San Francisco and said, hey, I'd like to start a studio, and here's the way I'd like to run it. And he was like, sure, let's go for it."
So began Humble's journey to creating Life By You, his upcoming life simulator that's set to give his former pet project, The Sims, a run for its money. With The Sims 5, or Project Rene as it's currently known, still some way off, Life By You seems poised to finally give life sim fans the game they've always wanted. "I wanted to make an open world life simulator where the core tenant was freedom," says Humble. "Where players could freely play and tell their stories with minimal friction." And what was standing in the way of that freedom? Loading screens, says Humble.
]]>Ubisoft revealed Ghostwriter yesterday, marketed as an AI development tool (really just machine learning) that generates first drafts of NPC barks, which are the offhand remarks you might hear when running past NPCs. Skyrim’s “I used to be an adventurer like you” is probably the most famous example of a bark. Ubisoft Ghostwriter has been met with passionately negative responses from some narrative designers, while others have been arguing for its use cases.
]]>Devs seem to think that Epic Games' whirlwind of pop cultural cross-pollination Fortnite is the game best positioned to deliver the vision of the metaverse to us, the Game Developers Conference have revealed. The results of the GDC’s 11th annual State Of The Industry survey were released this week. The survey checked in with more than 2,300 developers to pick their brains on contentious issues facing gaming, ranging from unionisation and harassment to, erm, blockchain.
]]>As we've already seen several instances of so far, attitudes about remote work have been shifting in the games industry since the Covid-19 pandemic forced a work from home lifestyle last year. Multiple companies have since instituted permanent work from home policies, such as Square Enix and Hi-Rez Studios, after finding that the setup was working well for them.
According to this year's GDC survey, many developers personally feel that they're doing well working from home. A total of 67% of the more than 3,000 developers surveyed feel that their productivity has been the same or better since working remotely.
]]>The organisers of the Game Developers Conference have released a report on the results of their latest "state of the industry" survey. Their usual annual survey happened in March, but this extra one was solely about the impact of the ongoing pandemic.
The results are on the face of it rather grim, with some job losses and game delays and lots of struggling people. But they're not half as bad as you might think, and some are even getting on relatively well as they adapt. Let's have a look.
]]>When this year's Game Developer's Conference was unceremoniously postponed over coronavirus outbreak fears, it threw a lot of wrenches at people's calendars. But the postponement also meant the loss of GDC's most valuable assets - hours and hours of lengthy sessions from some of the biggest names in the biz. But losing the Moscone Centre doesn't mean those talks need to be gone for good. This week, GDC announced GDC Virtual Talks - a live-streamed line-up of developer sessions free to view from your own home.
]]>GDC may be cancelled for now, but that isn't stopping Microsoft from releasing all the talks they had planned for the event. On March 17th and 18th they'll be streaming all the sessions they had ready for the Game Developers Conference over on Mixer, meaning those who wouldn't have made it their in the first place will be able to listen in, too.
The developer-focused sessions include a bunch of talks on accessibility in games (like Gears 5), some info on Project xCloud, and there's even a talk from Rare about Sea Of Thieves (which, naturally, I'm unreasonably excited about).
]]>Last Friday, after multiple large publishers cancelled their appearances at the event, the yearly Game Developers Conference was postponed. Originally scheduled for March 16-20 in San Francisco, the conference has been postponed to "later in the summer" due to concerns about potential spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. GDC say they will refund the cost of passes to the conference to attendees but tickets to the event itself are hardly the only lost investment for smaller developers. Many may be unable to refund the cost of plane tickets, lodging, and other personal or business costs associated with preparing for a large industry event. Wings, in collaboration with several other indie game publishers, have opened applications to their relief fund for developers, which they say will be assessed based on "estimated impact."
]]>This year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been postponed, the organisers announced tonight. GDC 2020 was was due to run March 16-20 in San Francisco with hundreds of sessions and tens of thousands attending. The organisers say it is postponed, not cancelled, and they "fully intend to host a GDC event later in the summer." This is not a big surprise. Companies including Blizzard, Microsoft, Epic Games, Sony, Unity, Amazon, and Facebook/Oculus had already pulled out of GDC as a precautionary measure against the new coronavirus going round. The mayor of San Francisco has (unrelated to GDC) declared a local emergency too. GDC pass refunds are on offer, and a grassroots effort is forming to help marginalised developers who've blown precious money on attending.
]]>Update: Blizzard have now announced that they are also cancelling their GDC attendance, saying "the health and well-being of our teams is our highest priority."
The list of developers and tech companies dropping out of GDC is growing, as Microsoft, Epic Games and Unity confirm they're pulling out due to health risks presented by coronavirus (COVID-19). This is a big blow for the physical conference, but both Microsoft and Unity have mentioned sharing their GDC presentations digitally, so we'll still have a chance to see the behind-the-scenes info they had prepared.
]]>The Game Developers Conference website has been updated to assure attendees that the event is "moving forward as planned," despite new preventative health measures issued by the city of San Francisco related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).
]]>As GDC's yearly survey of developers says in their report "unionisation and labor practices remain hot topics in the game industry." The last several years have seen many reports of game developers being overworked—that thing we call crunch—to finish the biggest games each year. If not stories of crunch, it's reports of major layoffs instead. No surprise then that talk of unionising continues to grow.
]]>The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is an annual showcase of the most interesting and outlandish ideas in game design, presented at the end of the Game Developers Conference every year. This year that included everything from an adaptation of an Eminem video to a game that's trying to trick you into quitting. Here are some of the highlights:
]]>Game development conferences are a great way for creators to share information, vision and push the medium just a little bit further, if you can get to them. International travel isn't cheap, immigration authorities are increasingly suspicious, and it's time-consuming, too.
Being organised by Rami Ismail (Vlambeer), Sarah Elmaleh, and a crew of independent and international creators, Gamedev World is a new 'virtual' conference and will be broadcasting free and worldwide in eight different languages. Its inaugural show goes live on June 21st through to June 23rd, and they're looking for speakers. Check out their official page here.
]]>“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Steve Kaplan was in GDC to take part in a roundtable discussion about the pros and cons of unionisation in the games industry. He works in the entertainment industry and had travelled from Los Angeles, where he organises unions for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, to be the union rep in the room during the talk. He gave the impression he wanted everyone to be at the table, even the one person in a room of between 150 and 200 people who tried to put across anti-union arguments.
The room was noisy, with applause, appreciative clicking of fingers, and some mocking laughter alongside the occasional raised voice, but the corridor outside had been quiet. The roundtable was removed from the expo’s usual bustle but it was one of the most important events of the show.
]]>“That’s the Ancient word for ‘writer’,” says Jon Ingold, pointing to some indecipherable symbols on his business card. “What it breaks down to is ‘Person-who-speaks-without-speaking.’”
Ingold is the writer for Heaven’s Vault, an upcoming sci-fi adventure from Inkle (the folks behind 80 Days and Sorcery!) You play an archaeologist investigating the remains of an ancient civilisation in an otherworldly “Nebula”. He and some others from Inkle Studios have been watching me waddle around a garden of strange monuments, trying to discern meaning from the faded words I find carved into trees, walls, rocks and reliefs. In creating this game, they've constructed a fictional language of over 1000 words. They’re so proud of this new language, they’ve even used it on their business cards.
Ingold examines a card from Joseph Humfrey, the studio’s co-founder and programmer who is sitting nearby. He thumbs over the pseudo-ancient script.
“Joe’s means: ‘Person-who-controls-robots’.”
]]>A man in black scrambles through the overgrowth, looking lost. So I shoot him. Puffs of bloody air erupt from his body, but he runs on. Behind him something explodes from a stray bullet – my bulet or somebody else’s? I don’t know. But the man in black keeps moving, dodging behind some trees, over a ridge. Behind me, a wall of wobbly energy closes in. I give chase to the man in black, and we come face to face in a dirt glade with a tall, odd structure that might be a radio tower. I lift my MP5 submachine gun and mow him down. Soon afterwards, the game ends. I’ve won. I won’t claim my performance in the upcoming 400-person battle royale game Mavericks: Proving Grounds was a heroic victory. Because there were only 5 people playing. It also lasted less than 5 minutes, and the man in black was the lead devleoper. He definitely let me win.
]]>Into the Breach is one of the most perfect games I’ve ever played. It’s tactical warfare with every sliver of fat trimmed away and I’d put it up there with Chess and Invisible, Inc. in the pantheon of turn-based games.
Bad North will not be entering that pantheon. Not because it doesn’t seem capable of reaching lofty heights – it absolutely does – but because its own take on micro-tactics takes place in real-time. It’s a game of positional play, providing a handful of units and gorgeous, tiny, procedural islands to defend.
]]>There's always gonna be another mountain I'm always gonna wanna make it move Always gonna be an uphill battle Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose Ain't about how fast I get there Ain't about what's waiting on the other side It's the climb – Miley Cyrus, 2009
One of the most promising VR experiences I had at GDC came courtesy of Crytek's rock climbing Oculus Rift project, The Climb [official site].
]]>While attending GDC I was thinking a lot about how "outdoors" works in videogames and speaking to artists and designers about how they had approached those environments. I was relatively early on in my experience of The Witness [official site] but I was intrigued by how many biomes were crammed onto a small island space without it ever feeling overcrowded. With that in mind I sat down with artist Luis Antonio to talk geography, architectural decay and why a simple handrail needs an entire backstory...
]]>Tooth and Tail [official site] is to Command and Conquer what Monaco was to an actual bank heist. If you took an RTS and threw it into a pot then burned off all the fat, you'd be left with something that looked a little like the latest from Andy Schatz and his team at Pocketwatch Games. But would you lose some of the flavour as well? I played the game at GDC (Pip beat me, as usual) and spoke to the team about its design, artistic and mechanical.
]]>While over at GDC a preview opportunity for Mirage: Arcane Warfare [official site] gave me a chance to check out Chivalry's spiritual successor while ALSO enjoying respite from the Californian warmth (I'm ginger and pale and British – we wilt). The game offers up a very different colour palette and setting than Chivalry's keep-n-countryside but once Torn Banner's president, Steven Piggott, and senior brand manager, Alex Hayter, start showing me what's happening in a pre-recorded match, Mirage's Chivalric roots are obvious.
I didn't get a hands-on with the game so I can't tell you how it *feels* and whether the thunk and the heft of Chiv are maintained BUT I can tell you how it looks, how the modes work and where the team are aiming with the project:
]]>They had to drag me away from Gonner [official site] in the end. Well, truth be told, they were far too polite to drag me away but they came close to turning out the lights.
'They' are two members of Art in Heart, creators of the game, and half of Raw Fury, a new publisher made up of industry veterans. I was playing the game in a rented loft near the heart of GDC in San Francisco and I thought then – and maintain now – that it was the best pure action game I saw at the show.
]]>Part RPG, part adventure game, Unavowed is the next project from Wadjet Eye Games founder Dave Gilbert and even though it features entirely new characters, it takes place in the same world as the wonderful Blackwell series. I met with Gilbert at GDC and he explained the game's origins and intricacies, as well as talking about his love of urban fantasy, and his development as a game designer and storyteller.
]]>As I try to detach a pipe on the virtual International Space Station, which I've been scrambling across, I'm suddenly thrown backwards into space. I don't flinch but apparently most people who play the Earthlight [official site] demo do – it then makes sense to me why one of the team had offered to take pictures of me playing. Earthlight is a virtual reality experience which is aiming to recreate experiences aboard the International Space Station, which sits in low Earth orbit and acts as a research laboratory. The developers are working in collaboration with NASA to shape the experience.
I am flagging up the fact I was unfazed by being thrown off into space in case anyone from NASA is reading this and wants to recruit me as a cool astronaut space reporter, but while I still have a terrestrial job I should probably tell you about Earthlight and the conversation I had with its creative lead, Emre Deniz.
]]>I've deflected blaster shots using a lightsaber, standing in the shadow of the Millennium Falcon, fought off shambling horrors in the ruins of a city at night, and constructed fantastic contraptions, suspended on a grassy plain in a bright and breezy abstract world. No attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion yet, but VR has taken me to some wild and wonderful places.
And yet, the game that convinced me of the immersive qualities of the Vive's roomscale and touch technology dropped me into a pub, in front of a pool table. Pool Nation, in replicating an experience that I'm familiar with, came closest to fooling my senses completely.
]]>P.A.M.E.L.A. [official site] was one of the most exciting games I saw at GDC last week. I watched around twenty minutes of live play, showing off the construction of a safe haven as night fell on the beautifully rendered sci-fi city in which the game's particular brand of survival horror takes place. It's an open world game, but it isn't quite like anything else in the genre. This is a claustrophobic open world and the game in question is an intelligent and bold exploration of the core concepts found in System Shock and Bioshock. Hell, if this were carrying the title System Shock 3, I'd be delighted.
]]>I'm standing in a shadow cast by the Millennium Falcon, which just parked up next to me. I can't hop on board but when a ramp unfolds to let an R2 unit trundle onto the small patch of Tatooine that is my home for the duration of this brief demo, I can hear Chewbacca roaring supportively somewhere inside. Han Solo is there as well, providing directions as I patch together the ship's junky systems from the outside.
As I finished my playtime with Valve's The Lab, Lucasfilm and Star Wars provided the outro sting. It's a superb fanfare.
]]>Our Vive hands-on experience with The Lab took place in Valve's GDC booth. Actually, 'booth' isn't the right word at all. Valve had transformed a large chunk of the Moscone North hall into a suite of sleek, white virtual reality chambers. The setting itself is a statement of intent, clean and minimalist in comparison to the usual attention-grabbing showfloor stalls, and quietly but efficiently guarded. As Pip and I sat in the waiting area on the final day of the show, the 'Demos Full' sign out front had two stickynotes attached: “No, really.” “Really, really, really.”
We were there to see The Lab, which I understood to be a Portal-themed collection of minigames (I suspect you'll be reading about a lot of minigames in these early stages of VR). They turned out to be four small demos that took us back to the world of Portal and explored the possibilities of the Vive's virtual spaces and impressive motion controls.
]]>While lurking in the upstairs lobby of one of the enormous Moscone buildings I managed to get some time with Everest VR [official site], a virtual reality project which aims to recreate the experience of ascending Everest. I try not to go into virtual reality with particular expectations but I'll admit that Everest VR was the experience where I was most expecting to feel disorientated. I'm not afraid of heights, but I have previously felt that stomach-lurch in VR that I get in real life when I'm close to the edge of a massive drop and there's nothing that would break my fall.
]]>If there is one complaint I have about the original Mirror's Edge, aside from the "combat is terrible" refrain, is that I'd have liked to see the city explored more, almost as a character of its own. The story is set in an authoritarian dystopia, but we don't actually get to see much of it outside of the first cutscene of the game. There is a lot of promising worldbuilding hinted at throughout the levels, but it's not nearly as developed as it could have been.
So this new page that just appeared on Mirror's Edge Catalyst's website, detailing the city's districts and factions, with wonderful pictures, is getting my hopes up. I know I shouldn't, I know it's against my better judgement and I'll be sorely disappointed, so help me out here. Let's keep the hype to a minimum and let's all look at the negatives. Here's a great start: the city is called "Glass."
]]>Sword & Sworcery is one of my favourite games ever, and Super Time Force was great fun, so I'm terribly excited for Capy's next project, the dark and mysterious explore-em-up Below. [official site] Jim Guthrie (Sword & Sworcery, Indie game: The Movie) providing the soundtrack is really just the icing on this delicious cake.
And a new trailer reveals we're going to be able to taste it this summer. I can already smell its procedural generation and the rotten corpses of Dark-souls-like permadeath. Everyone beat me to all the bad jokes already, so please just follow me below for some more details and a few minutes of gameplay.
]]>Yer actual breaking news (by which I mean I currently have few details but wanted to inform you as soon as possible because I am very excited). Julian Gollop, legendary co-creator of the X-COM series, plus Laser Squad, Chaos and most recently Chaos Reborn, just revealed the next game from his Snapshot Studios. We only have a name, Phoenix Point, and the following description:
"Turn based tactical combat - world based strategy."
Please tell me that means what I think it means. Is Mister X-COM doing a new, if unofficial, X-COM? Have approximately 37 Christmases all come at once?
]]>I haven't been back to Star Wars Battlefront [official site] since release, which is partly because it left me a little cold after I'd grown accustomed to the lovely, dad-pleasing graphics and partly because the nostalgia bubble I'd spent a couple of months in burst after finally seeing The Force Awakens. (It was Quite Good But). If they ever introduce a playable Jawa mode, I will be back faster than Han Solo telling porkies about the Kessel Run. Utini, babies. This seems sadly unlikely; for now, EA/DICE seem focused on more maps and, though beloved, C-list characters that no-one in their right mind would call Heroes.
]]>No Nexus platform, fewer microtransactions, and fewer colours: these were the main points of the GDC panel held by Cliff Bleszinski and his Boss Key Productions about their multiplayer shooter LawBreakers [official site].
The game will be released exclusively on Steam, with an upfront purchase and their latest screenshots showcase a change in visual direction away from the colourful and cartoony look of some of its competitors. But boy, do we need some new marketing lingo in gaming. Come raise your eyebrows with me.
]]>Pip and Adam are out in the wilds of GDC, hunting the grounds of the convention centre and the streets around for the most interesting people and games in the world today. In one dark room, in an unassuming building on a busy street, they found a crowd of virtual worlds.
This was the Oculus Rift Game Day, in which the VR devices were on display along with selected launch titles. From sport to slaughter and strategy to stealth-horror, here are our thoughts on the first wave of VR games. And our first verdict on the launch window and the all-important Touch controllers.
]]>With Her Story [official site] sweeping up 3 awards at GDC, more than any other game, you may be wondering what Sam Barlow is going to do next. (You could almost say: what his story is going to be.)
He teased Her Story 2 in the past, in a wonderfully tantalizing tweet, but he has also decided to join Interlude as Executive Creative Director. If you have never heard of them, that's alright, most of us hadn't. To put it simply, Interlude make interactive videos, which at the end of the day are not that different from FMV games.
]]>It may not look especially like the Doom [official site] we're familiar with, but the latest 43-second trailer for the incoming reboot offers a brief glimpse of the nine multiplayer maps we'll be running and gunning around in in a couple of month's time. Come see that in motion, as well as some related words after the drop.
]]>The Witcher 3 took home two awards last night at the 16th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, including the coveted Game of the Year prize. Her Story, after winning big at the IGF Awards hours earlier, captured a further three trophies. Comes see the full list of winners and nominees below.
]]>Ninja Theory must have thought the old title really wasn't cutting it, and I can't really blame them for it. Hellblade does sound like a Ninja Theory game, but it didn't reflect the new direction they were going for with this one.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice [official site] should more accurately reflect the two souls of their work-in-progress, pairing their typical hack-and-slash action with an uncommon attention spent on accurate portrayal and characterization of mental health issues. The new trailers lets us listen in on Senua's inner monologue.
]]>Imagine what GDC looks like this year: hundreds of grown-ups living out their childhood VR dreams, feeling all cool and special on the inside, and looking extremely silly on the outside. And what better way to fulfill those dreams and forget how silly this all is, than with a Star Wars game?
Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine is a small VR experience that should hopefully lead to an actual game in the future. For now it's little more than a proof of concept; but what a concept it is, to wield a lightsaber and reflect lasers and not care about what it actually looks like in Real Reality.
]]>Over the last year or so, you might've spotted Crytek's lovely Back to Dinosaur Island VR demos. The Climb [official site] is the Crysis devs' latest project - a virtual reality climbing simulator that charges players with scaling treacherous cliff faces in idyllic locales scattered across the world. The latest trailer visits the Alps.
]]>The 18th Annual Independent Games Festival Awards have just wrapped up, with the 16th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards to follow shortly. I was at the ceremony, which took place in a preposterously large ballroom within the conference centre in San Francisco. You can find a full list of the winners, nominees and my thoughts on the outcome below.
]]>With each passing day, the Oculus Rift [official site] edges ever closer to its March 28 release date and I bet there are still a fair few of you sat firmly on the fence. Not just with regards to the incoming virtual reality headset, but also with the entire concept of VR itself. Will it be worth my money? Can I even afford it? Will it change my life? Will I look like a pure numpty prancing about my living room when I use it? What games will I be able to play at launch?
Well, dear reader, I can only answer the latter of your questions (although there's one I could certainly hazard a guess at) because Oculus have now revealed the 30 games that'll be available to buy for the Rift when it arrives. Let's have a gander, shall we?
]]>While preparing for this year's Game Developers Conference I decided I wanted to learn more about how "outside" works in videogames. By that I mean I wanted to find out how different studios create a sense of space or place that's natural or expansive. Firewatch is not an open world game, but is has these beautiful, expansive vistas, gorgeous trees and a very definite sense of being outdoors. Senior environment artist, Jane Ng, told me more about how the world actually works and how she hides the technical side from players:
]]>The future historians at Owlchemy Labs have painstakingly researched a fourth profession for their 2050-set virtual reality Job Simulator [official site]; that of Automotive Mechanic. I once had to fix the tyre on my bike* so I feel like I'm well qualified to judge how faithfully they've managed to recreate the experience. I'm going to say it's pretty faithful, right down to the throwing things and the sriracha:
]]>The trend of splitting games into two continues. ARK: Survival Evolved is carving off its competitive, Battle Royale-inspired Survival of the Fittest mode into a standalone free-to-play spin-off game of the same name. ARK: Survival of the Fittest [official site] challenges 72 players (or 200 on unofficial servers) to be the last person or team standing in an ever-shrinking arena. It's out now on Early Access.
]]>Update: There's a trailer below now.
When Obsidian partnered with Paradox to release 2015's best RPG, Pillars of Eternity, I hoped there might be further collaborations. Obsidian's major releases, Pillars aside, have been spread between six publishers and the studio turned to Kickstarter knowing that a "day of doom" was approaching. Perhaps the relationship with Paradox and the success of Pillars has brought some stability because moments ago, Obsidian announced their next game at Paradox's GDC press conference. It's called Tyranny and it starts where you might expect a game over screen.
]]>Update: There's an in-game trailer below now too.
The game that excited me most, at announcement, in 2015 will be out sooner than you might have expected. With Stellaris, Paradox are heading away from the historical grand strategy that they're known for and making the leap into space. And into the unknown. The game is a hybrid 4X/grand strategy game and its most intriguing feature is the procedural generation of everything from the galaxy itself to every alien species you'll find there. I'm at Paradox's GDC press conference and they just told us that the game will be out May 9th.
]]>If you happen to be awake and free from work at 5PM Pacific Standard time, you'll be able to watch a live stream of the Paradox GDC press conference, which is taking place over in San Francisco as part of GDC. I'll be there and I'm excited to hear the latest about lovely Stellaris but even more excited to hear from Obsidian.
Over on their Instagram account, Paradox just announced that they'll be revealing details of a new project in collaboration with the studio behind Pillars, Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol. EXCITEMENT.
]]>Yesterday, I spent forty five minutes with influential adventure game designer of yore Ron Gilbert. We played a portion of his point and click revival Thimbleweed Park and discussed adventure game design in depth. Many of my questions were inspired by Gilbert’s 1989 statement of intent, Why Adventure Games Suck. As Thimbleweed Park looks back to that time, it seemed appropriate to ask what has changed for the better. And for the worse.
A clown is scrubbing and clawing at his face, attempting to remove the pasty makeup and honking red nose that are the tools of his trade. He can’t. The clowning is no longer a costume, it has become his reality. Long live the new flesh.
]]>Are you sold on VR yet? While there are a few upcoming games I think look spectacular - such as Universe Sandbox 2 - not to mention a few that I've played and have enjoyed, I'm not completely there yet myself. Valve's in-development SteamVR Desktop Theatre Mode isn't quite the golden ticket to bypassing my skepticism, however it does seem pretty interesting. Essentially, it's a virtual theater that lets you play standard, non-VR games on an enlarged, encompassing display.
]]>Warhammer understands how to do vampires: not with glittering skin, conditioned hair and smart high street dress sense, but with unwieldy jagged armour, sharp weapons and general all-round evilness. The latest Total War: Warhammer [official site] in-engine cinematic unveils the Vampire Counts, the final and as-yet unseen playable race in The Creative Assembly's adaptation of Games Workshop's war-a-thon, which is due for release in May.
]]>Microsoft have announced a new cross-network feature that'll be championed by Psyonix's cage-ball-goal 'em up Rocket League [official site] in the coming months. Although at the discretion of developers, the new initiative means, in theory, Xbox Live users will be able join other players in the same games but on different networks, such as, say, PSN or Steam.
]]>If there's one thing virtual reality conveys well, it's scale. That's useful when it comes to educational glimpses at outerspace, which is also what Universe Sandbox 2 is good for. The tool let's you open solar systems, galaxies, and other celestial bodies and then tinker with them in order to see how they work. Or to see how it would work if you spawned an enormous sun next to them and watched them all be gobbled up.
You can now do that in VR, too. The game, which is currently in early access, now has a beta VR mode you can access through Steam.
]]>Oh no, some of RPS's secret favourite game developers have teamed up to form a videogame collective. Their power to make delightful, colourful, physics-animated games, toys and joys will be too great for any of us to handle.
They're called Sokpop and they consist of Aran Koning, Tijmen Tio, Tom van den Boogaart and rubna. They've made a trailer of their work, which you can watch below, if you have space for so much levity inside of you.
]]>Oddworld Inhabitants have revealed Oddworld: Soulstorm [official site], a new Oddworld series entry and follow-up to last year's New 'N' Tasty. It's due for release in 2017, where we'll see "Abe as you've never seen him before," so says the game's website. Which makes me picture the Mudokon slave worker with his napkin tucked into his shirt, all prim and proper and, you know, not burping and farting.
]]>The first game I played at GDC was Digital Bird Playground. It was on a big screen in the Mild Rumpus area so I collapsed into a beanbag and started guiding a seagull around a play area, hopping on and off a little yellow bicycle and throwing frogs through basketball hoops.
]]>When the creator of the Forgotten Realms is writing your story, it's probably fair to say that your third-person action-adventure stands out from the crowd. This is the case for the just revealed Mages Of Mystralia (not entirely sure how Cyan Inc. will feel about the name), which apparently comes from a Montreal team made up of escapees from Ubisoft projects.
]]>AMD are making a virtual reality headset of their own. The Sulon Q [official site] is an "all-in-one" headset designed for virtual reality and augmented reality, and is "tether-free" as it doesn't need to be plugged in to a PC in order to use. There's a video introducing it below.
]]>The Game Developers Conference 2016 [official site] has started. It's the 30th year of the event, at which game developers gather to discuss how they made the protagonist's hair waft around in their last game and how they're going to make it waft around even better in their next game. It's a cool show, there will probably be a bunch of announcements this week, and we'll also learn a lot more about the launch line-up for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
If you already sensed that something was happening, it might be because you noticed all the empty chairs today. Alice, Adam and Pip have all left RPS Towers to travel to San Francisco and attend the show. That means that while they're interviewing developers, unearthing scoops, exploring new virtual worlds, and eating really large omelettes, the rest of us are here scurrying around and trying to work out how to write news. Where did Alice leave the old box full of headlines? The stationery cupboard is out of 'Read More' links.
Oh wait, I found one.
]]>I've yet to break the seal on Fallout 4's wrapper, so the thought that the game is getting even bigger is as much intimidating to me as it is exciting. Still, it is exciting, since the first DLC, Automatron, adds the ability to build and modify your robot companions to suit your taste and play style. The first trailer for Fallout 4: Automatron has just been released and you can watch it below ahead of its release, which we now know is March 22nd.
]]>I spent the weekend doing two things, building furniture and mucking about with Vive games such as Fantastic Contraption. It's a remake of an old browser game in which you must transport a ball towards a goal by building a vehicle to carry or push it there. I was pretty sore after bending and twisting at odd angles to put screws in my furniture and, sometime on Sunday, as I bent and twisted to attach a balloon part to an elongated contraption chassis, I realised that really I'd only spent my weekend doing one thing.
"I wish I could play this while sitting down, I thought." Lo and behold, a video showing a very early version of the game at "seated scale" is below.
]]>Here at RPS, we are not shy about our support for gender equality in the gaming industry, both in terms of the representation in the games we play and at the various companies that make them. It's a tremendously important matter from just about every standpoint imaginable, from so-called "practicality" (read: business) to common human decency. Nothing, however, beats a firsthand account of the problem at hand - not even a cheeky gallery of StarCraft II's most cheek-ridden bits. And so, I highly, highly, highly recommend GDC's absolutely excellent #1ReasonToBe panel. You can now view the entire thing online for free, and even in itsy bitsy box-shaped form, it's a truly moving, important thing. The experiences Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Leigh Alexander, and co outline - alienation, sadness, rage, doubt, loneliness, discomfort, fear - are why equality matters, and their continued love of gaming becomes all the more powerful in light of that. This is, in my opinion, required viewing. I very much hope you'll agree.
]]>....Cart Life, which scooped up an an impressive triple-whammy of Nuovo Award, Excellence in Narrative and the coveted Seamus McNally Grand Prize at last night's Independent Games Festival 2013 awards. The warmest of all congratulations to Richard Hofmeier, whose affecting, brave game is well overdue for this kind of attention.
]]>2012's IGF Awards caused not a small amount of consternation behind the scenes. A good deal of this was bad sportsmanship, with developers claiming it was rigged against them in various ways that it absolutely was not. But other issues like games that had already won being re-entered did become a more serious issue. However, even before this year's awards, IGF bossman Brandon Boyer has said that this shall no longer be allowed, with any finalists disqualified for another go. And he scraps the mobile category. And yet, even now, still bloody well ignores writing.
]]>Hello! I'm currently out at GDC Europe, skipping around businessy talks to cover for my day job, but I ended up sat in on BIoware's laidback and fascinating retrospective on the making of their breakthrough game, Baldur's Gate. It's a landmark title, and fascinatingly critical to what modern RPGs and MMOs are, but one we've surprisingly not talked about much on RPS. Thanks to my magic (and now rather broken) hands of transcripting +1, let's change that...
]]>Don't tell anyone, but the real reason I wrote this story was purely so I could use that headline.
Yes, King Of Immersive Sims Warren Spector is to hold a keynote speech at GDC later this month. I'll be in the crowd, which'll be exciting. Maybe not as exciting as when I had a wee next to him at E3 once, though. Obviously Warren has broken our fragile little hearts and gone on to make some Mickey Mouse platformer for the Wii, but the theme of his speech is something we're all likely to thrill to/howl at.
]]>A Lifetime Achievement award, that is! Just my little joke there. Sorry. You hate me now, don't you? It's late and the punning part of my brain has been asleep for hours.
Yes, the idmeister general is be honored with said accolade at the upcoming Game Developers Choice Awards (I swear that should have an apostrophe somewhere), for his "his contributions to the art and science of games". Which is a rather lovely way of putting it, to my mind. He follows in the gong-grabbing footprints of Will Wright, Sid Meier and that Mario bloke, and can bask in the warm glow of knowing a panel of his esteemed peers - from the likes of Bioware, DICE and Popcap - nominated him for it. Well done, big John. Now go and make sure Rage is brilliant, please.
Details of the award and a spot of Carmackian backstory below...
]]>The 190 student entries to the IGF awards have been whittled down to the finalists. Or the "winners" as the IGF rather sweetly calls them, before later telling all but one of them that in fact they weren't quite as winnery as the one that gets the IGF Student Showcase Award. The list and links are below. Congrats to all.
]]>This is really neat. Picked up from Indie Games. They had Jim Munroe go to GDC with a press-pass and write up his experiences in the form of a text adventure. It's actually more of a text-based game than a text adventure (i.e. you shouldn't be having any problems with the parser as long as you REMEMBER the instructions at the start), and actually somewhat splendid. You can play it online in Java here, for the java-hating here and for those who use an IF interpreter, its actual code is here. And some more explanation follows...
]]>At the last GDC the industry big brains were sat around telling us how games would one day be remotely rendered on big computing clusters and then streamed to our TVs. The big unveil at this year's GDC has proved them to be correct. Maybe. OnLive is a service on which you use superfast broadband (1.5mbps minimum) to play games on a remote server. You just plug it in to any "entry level" PC or Mac, or hook it up to your TV, and play. It doesn't matter if you don't have the latest 3D card: because the remote server does the rendering and streams the result to you. That's the theory anyway, and it's a theory a bunch of big name publishers have signed up to. Watch the OnLive spokesman Steve Perlman make his big claims after the jump.
]]>A few months ago Mythic's Creative Director Paul Barnett and myself went into a London bar, set a tape rolling and got mildly smashed. Only now do I dare return to these hours of tape to transcribe a series of topic-by-topic interviews. We pick up where we left off last time, with Paul about to explain why he went to Futurism-festival LIFT rather than this industry's mecca, the Game Developer's Conference. And it's much more fun than him hating San Francisco.
]]>Could this be the future of PC gaming? Battlefield Heroes has the potential to be one of the most important games the PC has ever seen. Free to play, funded by advertising, super-accessible, playable on a low-spec PC, and still attempting to capture some of what makes a classic PC title so entertaining to play: it's one of the smartest things EA/DICE have ever done. And it's funny, too.
Past the jump: my impressions from the GDC demo, the trailer, and the some screenshots.
]]>All award ceremonies, apart from those occasional horror sessions that are conducted completely in earnest, have something of a raised eyebrow about them. This was never truer than in the case of the Independent Game Festival Awards and the Game Choice Awards that followed. The IGF awards managed to take the piss out the pretensions of indie gamers, attack the credibility of their sponsors, and still leave room for a dig at the big mainstream publishers. It was exactly right. The Game Choice presentation that followed basically validated what everyone had said about Portal being awesome, and gave Bioshock a pat on the back too, presumably because Erik Wolpaw couldn't be made to collect all the awards without suffering heart failure.
]]>One of the most impressive sessions I was able to attend at GDC was the discussion of Open Worlds in the context of the development of Prototype, as hosted by Tim Bennison and Eric Holmes of Radical Entertainment. Much of the presentation was focused around the nature of developing open world environments and the way in which systems interconnect to provide options for players within those kinds of game worlds. Interesting stuff, if spider-diagrams of game systems and possible player actions are the kind of thing that draw you in.
The showpiece of the session, however, and the reason many of us were there, was to watch Holmes play through a large slice of the game. And, well, I think my interest in this game has now been validated.
]]>Rather than simply delivering tight, hard news, we at RPS like to provide you with rambling, impressionistic wittering found nowhere else on the web. What follows is a record of my GDC 2008 trip, in all its self-indulgent detail. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin.
]]>
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