Archive for February 24th, 2008
February 24, 2008
cli_rules! writes “DailyTech has reported that Jack Thompson has been ordered to explain himself. ‘Therefore, it is ordered that you shall show cause on or before March 5, 2008, why this Court should not find that you have abused the legal system process and impose upon you a sanction for abusing the legal system, including, but not limited to directing the Clerk of this Court to reject for filing any future pleadings, petitions, motions, letters, documents, or other filings submitted to this Court by you unless signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than yourself.’”.
February 24, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO–The tail end of 2007 offered gamers a veritable ocean of first-person shooters in which to frolic in, not the least of which being Valve’s The Orange Box, Crytek’s Crysis, and 2K Boston/Australia’s BioShock. While it would have in all likelihood dominated the competition in most any other year, one title to barely surface among the flotsam and jetsam was Gears of War developer Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament III.
In a Game Developers Conference session earlier today titled “ULTRAKILL! An Unreal Tournament III Postmortem,” Epic Games president Mike Capps alongside UTIII senior producer Jeff Morris addressed the game’s fortunes in what they called the “FPS Christmas of All Time.”
Kicking the presentation off, Capps first laid out what goals Epic had for the shooter, which began its life as a proof-of-concept tech demonstration to gain licensees for the company’s highly popular middleware service Unreal Engine 3. For new features, the team was most excited about the new game type warfare, which had a heavy focus on vehicles and open environments. Vehicles, which were first introduced to the series with Unreal Tournament 2004, were also expanded with the project, with Epic upping the included number from six to nine. Epic also had a mind to create a fully fleshed out single-player campaign for the first time, as well as place a heavier emphasis on character customization. Lastly, the publisher wanted to maintain its mod-friendly position, as well as extend the ability to make high-quality mods to consoles.
So how did they fare? As is the case for most games, there were both marked successes and disappointing failures. Addressing the successes, Capps said that because the team knows the first-person shooter genre so well, Epic was able to deliver UT’s best fast-paced, signature gameplay ever. Several factors aided in this, including an extensive focus on playtesting, easy access to a wealth of assets in their content pipeline, and a focus on first getting the gameplay right before fleshing out the visuals through a process Capps called gameplay previsualization.
Capps was also pleased by the unified look and feel of the game, saying that for the first time, the game didn’t have a hodge-podge aesthetic of disparate elements and visual designs. Mod support also turned out well, according to Capps, saying that Sony–and not so much Microsoft–has been extremely receptive to the idea of letting users create content and easily share it with others. Capps beamed that Epic was the first to offer this kind of functionality to users, and said it turned out to be a great promotional tool.
As for what didn’t turn out so well, the jovial Capps turned the presentation over to a not entirely morose Morris. One of the biggest problems with UTIII, said Morris, was the game’s user interface. Originally the UI design was driven by an artistic aesthetic. Though it had an appealing look, and would have worked well on consoles, the team decided that it would have been nightmarish to navigate the menus on a PC. Consequently, the team did a last minute reboot to implement a system that worked better on PCs, which didn’t allow for enough time to iterate and polish.
The second issue with UTIII was character customization, or lack thereof, that made its way to the final product. Here, the problem was that despite an extremely complicated and involved process to get the different textures for characters in the game, the varied models didn’t add the diversity Epic was looking for and paled in comparison to Realtime Worlds APB, referencing Dave Jones’ session from yesterday. The gameplay having the fast-paced nature that it does, Epic also found that players really didn’t care what the customization looked like since the game moved so quickly.
The game’s single-player campaign also didn’t quite pan out to expectations, said Morris. As with character customization, Epic felt its campaign was coarse in comparison, with Morris saying, “It was good, but it wasn’t BioShock.” Morris also noted that though the game had high quality cinematics–”Certainly better than Gears,” Capps piped in–they took a lot of time to get right, and their spacing was too far apart to have an indelible impact on the player.
Lastly, Morris called out problems on the production side of things, namely scheduling and promotion. Temporary console exclusivity on the PlayStation 3, as well as stringing out the releases across regions, turned out to be a major headache for Epic. Not only was this because it poorly maximized marketing efforts, but also because it wasn’t conducive to attaining the critical mass of players that is essential for a multiplayer-oriented game. It also didn’t help, Capps noted, that the game walked into the “FPS Christmas of All Time,” continuing that there are only so many ways to slice the FPS pie.
Prefacing by saying there were no qualms with Midway’s public relations, Morris also said it was extremely difficult to maintain player interest having announced the game in 2005. Announcing the game so early was a product of being in the engine licensing business, as the game was already well known even due to it being sent to various developers as a way to sell the Unreal Engine 3. Such a long period of promotion also led to several lacking gameplay features that were heavily promoted, but ultimately cut from the final product. Lastly, Morris said that it wasn’t exactly the best of business moves to change the name of the product well after the game was officially announced, and the early announcement also required a premature lockdown of the game’s overall look.
Wrapping up, Capps said that despite the challenges, the game both sold and reviewed well. He primarily attributed this to the fact that Epic knows the genre extremely well, and that they have such a well-established content pipeline. Adding a cautionary tale, Capps said that developers need to not be lured by opportunities that would drive marketing before the product is ready to be shown.
February 24, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO–On Wednesday night, Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw were basking in the adulation of their peers, taking home top honors for innovation, game design, and game of the year in the 2007 Game Developers Choice Awards. On Friday afternoon, however, the pair was forced to critically assess their contribution to The Orange Box compilation, detailing all the things that went right–and wrong–in a post-mortem session.
“Don’t hurt me! I love you!”
As one would expect given the game’s success, the presentation was jam-packed with attendees, who filled every seat and bit of standing room in the hopes of gleaning some nugget of insight into Portal’s development. Swift and Wolpaw provided nuggets a-plenty in a half-hour lecture and a roughly 40-minute audience Q&A session. To start with, Wolpaw and Swift described their “delta theory” of integrating story and gameplay.
“By itself, our story wouldn’t make a great novel,” Swift said. “And the gameplay is all right, but a little on the dry side. Honestly, it would be a race to see which one would fail the fastest on its own. But because we had a really tight integration between the story and the gameplay, it really seemed to resonate with people.”
The key then is to keep the difference between the “story story” and the “gameplay story” as little as possible, because wide disparities stick out to gamers. Wolpaw gave the 2001 shooter Clive Barker’s Undying as an example of a game with big disparities. The gameplay consisted of a World War I hero frantically gunning his way through a haunted castle, with occasional pauses while he calmly interrogates level-headed butlers, maids, and other servants about the horrors unleashed around them. According to Wolpaw, the team was ruthless about not allowing the “story story” to ever intrude on the “gameplay story” as it did in Undying.
Wolpaw also mentioned how the constraints the team was put under actually fostered their creativity. For most of the game, the computerized antagonist GLaDOS is present only as a guiding, encouraging, menacing, or taunting disembodied voice. While that built tension to the game’s final boss battle unveiling of GLaDOS “in the flesh,” Wolpaw said that presentation–and several other design elements–had more to do with the team’s constraints than anything else. With only a handful of people working on Portal and a limited budget, the time and money demanded to implement other human characters (what with their animation and voice work) was unrealistic.
However, there was another purpose to having the player navigate the world of Portal utterly alone. Wolpaw had read some US Secret Service documents on interrogation techniques, and he discovered that when people are isolated for extended periods of time, they tend to develop affinities for inanimate objects. That was one reason the Weighted Companion Cube worked as a “character” in Portal, but not the only one.
The cube, and its fiery end at the hands of the player, served as a perfect training sequence before the player headed into the final boss battle with GLaDOS, where various parts of the supercomputer need to be tossed in an incinerator. The demise of the Cube made for a more satisfying level ending than simply having made it through an obstacle course while carrying a random box, or leaving the box behind to get to the next obstacle course. Swift also said that players learn better when they’re not stressed by incoming fire or a strict time limit, making the whenever-you’re-ready forced murder of the Cube stick in players’ minds better. Finally, the Cube’s demise offers a pleasant symmetry of revenge to the final boss battle, which sees the player burn GLaDOS the way GLaDOS made the player burn the Cube.
Above all, the advice Wolpaw and Swift wanted the audience to walk away from the session keeping in mind was that developers need to embrace their restraints and treat them as fuel for creativity. They also need to have faith in themselves, their writing, and their team. Finally, playtest, playtest, playtest, and then playtest some more.
From the first week the development team had something to show, Portal was being playtested regularly. It not only helped them find out what players wanted from the gameplay (and adjust accordingly), but it also helped them discover what players were feeling from the story part of the game, and work on better reinforcing those parts of the game.
February 24, 2008
TheLondonPaper which is reportedly read by hundreds of thousands of Londoner\’s each and ever day recently posted up a review of Unreal Tournament 3 for the Xbox 360 and even put a picture of the Xbox 360 version. As we all know, nothing has been said about an Xbox 360 version so this is obviously a big mistake or they get their hands on some very early code. The reviewer criticised the game for being flat offer some pointers such as making the game more realistic and lose the sci-fi setting.
February 24, 2008
Variety has confirmed that Gears of War 2 will indeed include ChainSaw battles. In talking to guys close enough to the development team at Epic, Variety learned that this will be a mechanic in a game: when someone tries to chainsaw you, you can push back and even make them into a pile of flesh chunks.
February 24, 2008
According to Xbox marketeer John Porcaro\’s gamerscore blog, Microsoft is planing to withdraw from HD DVD following recent decisions made by Toshiba, Hollywood studios and retailers. \”Xbox will no longer manufacture new HD DVD players for the Xbox 360, but we will continue to provide standard product and warranty support for all Xbox 360 HD DVD Players in the market.\” said Porcaro. Microsoft have stated that they do not believe this decision will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform.
February 24, 2008
UK retailer GAME is now offering the Xbox 360 version of Unreal Tournament III on a pre-order basis. Unfortunately no ETA is given, but it is encouraging to see the pre-order scheme in any case.
February 24, 2008
AP - Alabama football fans can buy pens, ties, video games, phones and socks that play the Crimson Tide’s fight song, and a New York company is humming the tune all the way to the bank.
February 24, 2008
Speaking in an interview, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, the producer of Devil May Cry 4 has revealed that a lot of people have been asking if DMC will hit the Wii. But the answer is most likely no. The producer doesn\’t feel it is possible to do the game justice (with awesome graphics and control) on the Wii so therefore a release for the franchise on the Wii looks incredibly unlikely.
February 24, 2008
Some new Mario Kart Wii footage as well as some scenes of people enjoying a good play with the official wheel peripheral!
February 24, 2008
Nintendo project leader Takashi Aoyama said at GDC that Wii owners will be able to use their Wii Points to purchase downloadable content for games in the near future. He said the DLC would also be available for disc-based games and WiiWare titles. Users would be able to buy the add-on content for disc games from within the game.
February 24, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO–In recent months, the PlayStation 3 versions of many multiplatform games have been released after their Xbox 360 counterparts–or canceled outright. Others, like Grand Theft Auto IV, have seen both versions delayed because, having optimized the game first on the 360, the developers encountered difficulties with the PS3 edition.
This week at the 2008 Game Developers Conference, a major studio laid bare the pitfalls of cross-platform development on the current crop of consoles–and talked about how it plans to deal with it in the future. In an expansive and informative lecture, Haden Blackman, project lead for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, discussed which platform the company’s “built from scratch” development team began work on in 2005.
“Multiplatform development was one of our biggest challenges,” he told the jam-packed hall in the basement of the Moscone Center. After George Lucas famously urged the studio to “go build that game” upon seeing the first test reels from TFU, they began work straight away on Xbox 360 dev kits in late summer 2005–because that was all the studio had.
“It took a very long time for us to reach a multiplatform mentality,” said Blackman. The reason? “Until early 2006,” LucasArts had no PS3 dev kits whatsoever and, for the sheer sake of moving the project forward, focused on Microsoft’s console. “It took months to get enough dev kits to everyone,” rued the developer.
The problem was, once LucasArts finally had enough PS3 dev kits to supply the staff members that required them, 360 development of The Force Unleashed was months ahead. Worse still, the 360-optimized early version of the game “didn’t translate well” when ported onto the PS3, given the differences between the hardware architecture of the two consoles and the complexity of PS3 development. This led to more complications and pushed the simultaneous launch of The Force Unleashed back further.
Now, however, the impressive-looking game is on track, and Blackman says that, after some hard-learned lessons, LucasArts now has a strategy for future multiplatform titles–develop the PS3 version first. “Our next project will use the PS3 as the baseline, and then apply that to the Xbox 360,” he said. He made no mention of the other versions of The Force Unleashed, which are being developed externally.
Scott Steinberg, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s vice president of product marketing, stated that virtually every third-party publisher is now developing for the PS3 first. “They all are now, since it’s just easier that way,” he told If Its Games. He then referenced his long tenure at Sega of America, saying, “Having recently dealt with this myself from a third-party background, I know this is the case.” As of press time, Microsoft had not responded to Steinberg’s comments.
The Force Unleashed
While Blackman’s discussion of dual-platform development was insightful, it was only a small part of his presentation titled “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: How LucasArts is Building a Game, a Development Team and a Technology Pipeline…At the Same Time.” As the title suggests, the developer cast his oratory net wide, detailing how in 2004, he and others were tasked with the “rebooting” of LucasArts’ internal development studio. To further complicate matters, this had to be done during a console transition–and at the same time the entire organization was, along with Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, relocating to a brand-new San Francisco campus.
As it turns out, having ILM in the same building proved to be a boon for LucasArts. It allowed LucasArts to adapt to the celebrated special-effect house’s programming and development framework, code-named Zeno. In fact, the overall goal is for LucasArts, Lucasfilm, and ILM to begin sharing digital art assets, development processes, and effects and animation technology as games approach film in terms of realism.
To make The Force Unleashed as realistic as possible, LucasArts created a new engine code-named Ronin. But while the majority of its technology is proprietary, LucasArts had no hesitation about licensing third-party technology. It acquired Havok’s physics engines; NaturalMotion’s Euphoria for realistic, AI-driven character animations; and Pixelux’s Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), for spectacularly destructible environments.
TFU’s first public demo
To show off the technology, LucasArts staged what it asserted was the first live public real-time demo of The Force Unleashed, which will be released this summer. Though Blackman preemptively apologized for bugs, there was no nitpicking by the captivated audience during the next five-odd minutes of gameplay.
Earlier in the presentation, Blackman had said that after much focus-testing the most appealing scenario to gamers was to play as a Jedi Knight. From the TFU demo, it was easy to see why. It begins with the game’s protagonist, a secret Jedi apprentice to Darth Vader, being dispatched to kill a Jedi who has taken over a TIE fighter production facility. Vader’s instructions are simple: Bring back the Jedi’s light saber, and leave no witness.
With carte blanche to wreak destruction, Vader’s apprentice entered the bay and immediately began tossing boxes at hapless stormtroopers. Then he cut out the middleman by picking up the white-armor-clad soldiers with his Force Grip power and then tossing them into walls and off ledges with Force Push. Whenever a stormtrooper was hurled particularly far, the camera would zoom in to watch the trooper’s realistic struggle, since the Euphoria technology instills them with a futile sense of self-preservation.
The results were often hilarious, with troopers clutching onto anything within arm’s length to fend off the inevitable. At the denouement of the final battle with the errant Jedi, Vader’s apprentice picked up and tossed the battered warrior into the void below the hangar. He flew toward and then away from the camera, with his death screams bouncing around the hall’s sound system.
To display DMM’s brawn, Blackman had Vader’s apprentice smash open steel doors, which gave off a cloud of dusty smoke as they buckled realistically. Then, it was on to a veritable TIE fighter skeet shoot, with the dark Jedi taking out a half-dozen of the spacecraft with boxes and other heavy objects.
What might have been…
A while after the thunderous post-demo applause had died down, Blackman showed a cinematic from the game, in which Vader’s apprentice presents his lord with the defeated Jedi’s weapon. “Cinematic” was the operative word, with the scene feeling like it was taken from one of the better installments in the six-part Star Wars film franchise.
Indeed, The Force Unleashed is meant to be a seventh installment in the series, falling between the last of the prequels, Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith (2005), and the first of the original films, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). To that end, LucasArts is pulling out the stops to make it feel like a blockbuster movie, including recording a two-hour soundtrack with the full San Francisco Symphony at Skywalker Ranch. The developers also recorded dialogue using stage actors acting out scenes together while wearing facial and motion-capture rigs to re-create their performances.
The result looked nearly as realistic as the dialogue scenes in Mass Effect, the recent sci-fi game from BioWare, developer of the celebrated Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series. Ironically, The Force Unleashed almost was a third KOTOR game. Though Blackman never mentioned the forthcoming BioWare/LucasArts mystery project, he did say that during the conceptual stage, he and his team had considered setting their next project in the KOTOR universe. They had also considered making a smuggling game centered around a Han Solo-like character and even an action game with a Wookie protagonist.
That last idea didn’t last long, however. “When we presented that, George [Lucas] just stared at us,” said Blackman, before setting up one of the biggest laugh lines of the presentation. “He then said, ‘I tell you guys about the importance of dialogue, and you pitch me a game with a hero that can’t talk?!”
February 24, 2008
UT 3 Senior Producer Jeff Morris has pointed to the inclusion of a console port (for the PS3) and the strict deadlines as reasons why the game lacks a good deal of sparkling polish.
February 24, 2008
According to GameSpot, the new baseline for LucasArts will be the PS3 now developer support has finally caught up to a decent level, and the Force Unleashed has been demoed for the first time by the publisher which nearly made KOTOR3 instead.
February 24, 2008
A Playstation HOME beta tester e-mailed us in a copy of an e-mail he received from the Playstation team regarding a Home gathering scheduled for Wednesday 27th February from 7PM until 9PM PST. Some of the Key HOME features include a new user interface, new Home Square, New Summer House and video feeds firectly from Crackle.com.
;)