Microsoft officially responded to questions about a series of posts that Adam Orth, a Creative Director at Microsoft Studios, made on Twitter regarding the rumored always online requirement of the next Xbox console.
“We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers. We are very sorry if this offended anyone, however we have not made any announcements about our product roadmap, and have no further comment on this matter.”
Orth had stated on Twitter that his exchange was part of regular informal lunchtime banter with Manveer Heir, a Senior Gameplay Designer at BioWare, but that didn’t stop gamers from using the posts as proof that Microsoft would require an internet connection to play games on the next console. The conversation included the following:
Adam Orth: Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an “always on” console. Every device now is “always on”. That’s the world we live in.
Manveer Heir: Did you learn nothing from Diablo III or SimCity? You know some people’s internet goes out right? Deal with it is a shitty reason.
Adam Orth: Electricity goes out too.
Manveer Heir: You’ve lived in LA, SF, Seattle… very connected places. Try living in Janesville, WI or Blacksburg, VA
Adam Orth: Why on earth would I live there?
Orth’s Twitter account has since been made private.
And the results are in for the Nemo’s War Tom vs Bruce, in which me and Bruce Geryk played a year in the life of Captain Nemo. The graphics (pictured) may not look like much, but the soundtrack is amazing. The game starts here.
When you die in Defiance, you can rez yourself every so often. If you’ve self-rezzed recently, then other players can rez you so you don’t lose any of your spacebucks. It’s very forgiving. Death is a non-event, partly because it happens so rarely and partly because it doesn’t matter one whit when it happens. Basically, if you have any questions about how Defiance works, just imagine Borderlands as an MMO without a subscription fee and without Gearbox’s loving care.
So there I am, doing one of the story missions alongside the creepy Grant Bowler character model (pictured), fighting more of those bugs — there are only about two or three kinds of things you shoot in the first 20 hours of Defiance — and I get killed. I’m crawling around on the ground, bleeding out, my vision fading. And there’s Grant Bowler. Grant Bowler played Richard Burton next to Lindsey Lohan’s Elizabeth Taylor. Grant Bowler played Randian hero slash steel baron Hank Rearden in the Atlas Shrugged movie that no one saw. Grant Bowler played someone named “Cooter” in True Blood. And now Grant Bowler is standing on top of me, plinking away at bugs, not rezzing me. I bleed out and die and have to pay 180 spacebucks to rez myself.
In Gears of War: Judgement, even Colonel Loomis, the a-hole officer who all but twirls his mustache as he court-martials the pluckily heroic gears, will rez you during the last mission. But Grant Bowler? He can’t be bothered. Thanks, Grant. I hope you’re more helpful to your companions on the Defiance TV show, which starts next week.
The more important thing I learned in the Defiance game is that you can make an entire open world around shooting a gun and not much else. As long as there’s enough shooter, and enough guns, you don’t really need anything else. Defiance is, in many ways, an absolutely miserable half-assed amateurish attempt at game design that I can’t stop playing.
In response to The Consumerist’s 2013 Worst Company in America poll, which appears to be on-track for an EA “win” for the second year in a row, Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore defends EA and points out that some of the poll responders may be uninformed or overstating their case. He concedes that EA “can do better” but suggests that EA catches more flak because of its enormous success.
Some of these complaints are 100 percent legitimate – like all large companies we are not perfect. But others just don’t hold water:
– Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period.
– Some claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam. 45 million registered users are proving that wrong.
– Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games.
– We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for EA because they disagree with the choice of the cover athlete on Madden NFL. Yes, really…
– In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.
EA is currently facing off against Ticketmaster in the bracket.
Warren Spector reflects on his time at Disney to GamesIndustry International and talks about Junction Point, Oswald, and what’s next for him now that he’s no longer in the Mickey Mouse Club.
Well, I’ve learned that I don’t play politics very well, that’s for sure, and I’m not great with bosses, generally. I’ve learned that anyone in the game business who thinks they understand how big, publicly traded companies work because they’ve worked for EA or something have NO CLUE. Disney’s a BIG company, and things change when you have that many divisions and employees. I spent a lot of time saying to myself, ‘There has to be a reason for this… There has to be a reason for this…’ I just didn’t get how a lot of decisions got made – but I think that was my problem, not Disney’s. Overall, the company’s pretty amazing.
The closure of the studio? I don’t know that I learned much from that, to tell the truth. I don’t really understand it, but it is what it is. Junction Point had a good eight year run. We built a great team. We worked on a bunch of cool stuff, even if a lot of it didn’t see the light of day (Sleeping Giants… Ninja Gold… some other stuff I can’t talk about). And we shipped two triple-A titles which, Metacritic notwithstanding, sold better than any games I’ve ever worked on and about which I received more – and more heartfelt – fan mail than I’ve ever received. I’m good with all that.
Congratulations, Blizzard! StarCraft beats the NHL. I guess that’s something, right? Mike Morhaime and Itzik Ben-Bassat told PC Gamer that they could see their eSport favorite support a full 24-hour broadcast channel five years from now.
We were just told the other day that by numbers, StarCraft is bigger than the NHL. If you look just as the last month, we had several live broadcasts, MLG Dallas with record breaking concurrent viewers. Even the Heart of the Swarm release was really successful, with high viewership numbers.
The numbers this year are double the numbers of last year, and we hope to see this trend continuing. If we’re able to double these numbers again next year, we’re getting into very interesting mass market entertainment numbers – especially in the US.
The remarkable thing about the Battleblock Theater trailer is that it does nothing to make me want to play the game — egad, that looks like a lot of pointless jumping about — but it’s nevertheless hilarious. It makes me want to get the game on goodwill for the trailer alone.
Of course, I already want to get the game because developer Behemoth amply proved themselves with Castle Crashers, so the trailer’s effectiveness is redundant.
Despite strides in the industry for equality and inclusiveness, the salary gap between the genders continues to be an issue according to an annual survey recently conducted by Game Developer Magazine. The data, reprinted by The Border House, shows a wide compensation gulf between the sexes.
Men earn more than women in the same jobs as artists, testers, designers, producers, audio techs, and as business professionals. The only area in which women earn slightly more is in programming, but they account for less than 5% of the positions. There are far less women than men working in the gaming industry at all levels.
It was noted that the data did not include how long the participants had been at their jobs, so it can be assumed that one of the likely factors for the disparity is that women have less tenure as their male counterparts.
Jonathan Blow, the outspoken designer of Braid, has some thoughts about Bioshock Infinite’s combat and regenerating shields in general. This is one of those longstanding debates in gaming like save anywhere or checkpoints, mouse & keyboard or controller, and Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. The fight between people that like regenerating health or shields and the people that like scrounging for health pickups has been going since Halo, but fighting in Columbia seems to have brought the discussion back in a way that I haven’t seen before.
Playing Infinite, I realize that Halo-style recharging shields are actually a huge mistake in shooter design. But all shooters use them now. Since people are going to ask: There are two problems; one is about emotional pacing, one is about gameplay crispness and fairness. With shields, you are always doing okay in the medium and long term. They low-pass filter the emotional high of surviving a tight situation. You can have a tight situation on the order of 10 seconds, but not on the order of 5 minutes, which matters more.
The crispness problem is: In order to provide difficulty, designers now have to overwhelm your shields all the time, which means designing situations that are spammy (get hit from all directions so you can’t process what is going on). These are confusing and not fun. These feel messy to play but they happen all the time because they have to. Or, like Infinite does, have super attacks that take away all your shields at once *and* 1/3 of your health, which feels steeply unfair.
Also, shields train the player to ignore getting hit most of the time, which becomes grating at the end when guys start hitting hard. (You trained the players for one thing but then gave them another!) I think shooters are much stronger experiences when it matters if you got hit. In shield games you get hit all the time, like flies buzzing.
(Credit to Kotaku for putting the tweets into a format humans can read.)
One of the reasons I love GDC is that it’s a forum for the most valuable voices and the least heard voices in the conversation about videogames: the developers who make them, who struggle with how to make them better, and who see first-hand the violence when ideas meet execution. For instance, this important observation about Bioshock Infinite’s opening comes from someone who makes videogames:
When I reach the second floor of the lighthouse, I am supposed to have a moment there. A moment of shock, I assume. A tortured man, apparently dead, is sitting in a chair. But my first thought is…
“Oooh shiny!”
Because when you enter the room with the corpse, two big shiny coins are winking at you from the nearby table. The table right next to the corpse.
Adrian Chmielarz neatly dissects how Bioshock Infinite is a brilliant exercise in storytelling, but a disappointing world design, especially compared to its predecessors. And it’s particularly apt coming from Mr. Chmielarz, whose Painkiller is a brilliant exercise in good game design, and an absolute non-entity when it comes to world design. You can — and should — read his comments here.
“I beg you, game,” he asks, “please do not reward me for not doing the right thing and for doing the silly thing of playing the game instead of behaving like I am in a different world.” When this happens in God of War: Ascension — walk to places the camera doesn’t show to find treasure — it’s no great loss. But when this happens in a narrative powerhouse like Bioshock Infinite, or Deus Ex, or Mass Effect, the damage done is considerable. Eating cotton candy out of the trash is no big deal in a Mario game. Doing it in front of Elizabeth just feels weird.
I wish more people who made videogames also talked publicly and frankly about videogames other than the ones they’re making.
Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, which might be one of the shrewdest indie stratey games I’ve played since Atom Zombie Smasher, comes out this Friday. The game was supposedly created by a Canadian studio. Supposedly.
Disney has closed LucasArts. Let that sink in for a minute. LucasArts, part of the old guard of videogaming is no more. Oh, it will live on in the same sad way Atari does. As a licensing enitity and copyright holder.
“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”
I could drop a smart one-liner here about the Force not being with them, or that they “did not choose wisely” but I’ll hold off and just say that at least I’ll always have my memories of flying for the Luftwaffe, stalking the walkways of Nar Shaddaa, and going to Atlantis.
Digital Foundry always has the craziest tech-heavy breakdowns of in-game graphics and console hardware. Take a gander at some of the technobabble in their latest article that covers the differences between the PS4 Unreal Engine 4 tech demo and the one created for the PC:
While the lack of real-time GI is a bit of a blow, we get the impression that this really heavy tech proved too much for the new console hardware (and bearing in mind the power of the PS4, an array of lower/mid-range PC graphics cards too) because it’s been replaced with an enhanced solution of the “baked”, pre-computed lighting system used in Unreal Engine 3: Lightmass. This works in combination with a form of real-time global illumination on objects – not exactly a new approach, as the same basic principles were in place on Halo 3.
That’s a serious paragraph that means a lot to people that care about these kinds of things. All I know is that my PS4 version of Gears of War 4 is going to look great!
Doom 4 and Id software’s future may be in serious trouble according to sources that spoke to Kotaku. Tales of mismanagement, publisher conflict, and neverending project churn are not new in the gaming industry, but Id Software is the grandaddy developer of shooting things so it would be a shame to see them shuttered like any number of upstart companies we’ve seen over the years.
Two sources told me that earlier this year, frustrated with the lack of progress on Doom 4, ZeniMax came to Id with an ultimatum: make something happen, or else. The specifics of the threat are unclear, but there are plenty of rumors floating around Dallas, Texas, where Id is based.
An upcoming 1.08 update for Diablo III — there’s no ETA yet, but it’s available now on the pubic test servers — will recalculate the value of co-op sessions by providing an incentive to team up with other players: extra experience points! This will presumably make up for the inherent inefficiency of multiple players not being able to get their acts together. From technical designer Wyatt Cheng’s developer journal entry:
We’re still working on the details of what that buff is going to be, but at the moment we’re looking at 10% more XP per extra player in the game for a maximum bonus of 30% more XP in a 4-player game. This bonus will be multiplicative with MP bonuses. For example: suppose you are playing on MP10 with an XP bonus in Inferno of 510%. This means a monster is worth 610% of its normal XP (510% more). If you are playing in a 4-player game the monster will be worth 793% as much XP as normal. On top of this, you will also earn a flat 10% Gold Find and 10% Magic Find for each additional player in the game, and this bonus can exceed the 300% Gold Find and Magic Find caps.
Furthermore, when I’ve found something worth attacking, folks will know even though they’re back in town breaking down their blues with Haedrig.
Starting in 1.0.8, when a player deals damage to or takes damage from an Elite pack or Treasure Goblin for the first time, a notification will be sent out to the entire party to let your teammates know what you’ve found. This will be accompanied by a “combat” icon on the mini-map so other players in your group can locate those enemies. On top of that, we’re also going to put a combat icon over your banner in town. This way, players who are in town will know that you’re fighting an Elite pack or Treasure Goblin and be able to quickly determine whose banner to take to get right into the action.
