This Polygon E3 video a bit scattershot in terms of quality so I’d recommend just skipping to the 1:49 mark. Adam Sessler (former editor-in-chief of gaming network G4) rants for a few minutes on Microsoft’s SmartGlass, Ubisoft’s strong showing and Nintendo’s lack of direction. I agree with almost everything he says.
Gamasutra editor-in-chief Kris Graft:
If you witnessed E3 as an intelligent enthusiast of video games, you realized the sad truth: The joy is dead, delight is gone. Joy and delight just aren’t worth the monetary investment anymore for big-budget games. Joy and delight are replaced by “I fucked your shit up, and I’m a bad-ass, let’s crack open a Dew.” It took all of these games in one place for me to finally, reluctantly, admit that this is what triple-A video games are now. At least that’s how E3 and triple-A game publishers apparently want to portray the world of video games. Are you not entertained?
In the midst of all these quick E3 news snippets this week, I appreciated this longer Wired story on Epic Games and the revolutionary effect of the Unreal Engine on modern gaming:
Then something surprising happened: Kismet [a simplified event scripting tool] democratized programming. “There were people who weren’t programmers but who still wanted to create and script things,” says James Golding, senior engine programmer. In other words, some artists weren’t content simply to draw the monsters; they wanted to define how they acted as well. Kismet let them do that. “When we got them a visual system,” Golding says, “they just went completely bananas with it.” This was off-label usage, though; while it was a great secondary benefit, Kismet hadn’t been designed for this task, so it was kludgy and slow.
And thus was born Kismet 2, which again converts tedious lines of code into an interactive flowchart, complete with pulldown menus that control almost every conceivable aspect of behavior for a given in-game object. Need to determine how many bullets it will take to shatter that reinforced glass? Kismet 2 is your tool. Once behaviors are set, they can be executed immediately and edited on the fly. With Kismet 2, Epic empowers level designers—the people responsible for conceptualizing the world—to breathe life into that world directly, rather than relying on programmers to do it on their behalf.
I knew gaming engines were crazy, but not that crazy.
Kyle Orland over at Ars Technica played NintendoLand, one of the main launch titles for the Wii U. It has some nice touches, but there’s a learning curve:
The main problem with the five NintendoLand mini-games the company is showing at E3 is that they tend to require quite a bit of explanation to understand. Take Animal Crossing: Sweet Day, a slightly tweaked version of the hide-and-seek tech demo Nintendo showed off at last year’s E3. Before we got going, a PR rep had to spend about a minute explaining how the four players with Wii Remotes are working together to collect candy, how carrying more candy slows a player down, and how to drop candy when the antagonists (controlled by the GamePad) got too close. It’s not too complicated by video game standards, but it’s far from the five-second “swing it like a tennis racquet” explanation of Wii Sports, and it’s likely enough to scare away anyone not already versed in how games work.
The short version: there’s no Wii Sports equivalent when this thing launches.
Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett recapped the winners and losers from day two of E3. Nintendo’s Wii U hardware came out as a clear loser:
It’s got some promise, but we’ve also got some concerns. The battery on the controllers only lasts for 3-5 hours. At most. Use two pads at once and the framerate for games drops by half. Throw in the fact that nothing shown this week looks anything remotely like a “next gen” game and the Wii U as a piece of hardware isn’t off to the brightest start. At least some of the games are coming along.
Graphics that barely match the current gen XBox 360 and PS3. 3-5 hours on a charge. Not good.
E3 news coverage grows at a seemingly exponential rate each year but much of it amounts to little more than regurgitated press releases. At this point there’s only a few sources I’d personally recommend. On Twitter I’ll follow analysis by Giant Bomb’s Patrick Klepek (level headed, great reporting depth) and Polygon’s Arthur Gies (highly opinionated). I’m counting on stellar video reports and recaps on Giant Bomb.
For more traditional gaming news I’m giving Polygon a try this year. I really dig the Verge style “story stream” – a bunch of related articles are thrown together in a single thread – and their heavy usage of full bleed, high resolution imagery. I have high hopes but it is their first year; if their coverage starts to lag I’ll jump to Joystiq, a mainstay of previous years.
For live blogs of the big pre-E3 press conferences (EA, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony) I’m going to start with Ars Technica. Ars has a no-nonsense, “just the facts” house style that should suit the play by play well.
Note that all of this news source speculation may be overkill: according to many experts this year’s E3 won’t generate huge news. The assumption is we’re a year before Microsoft and Sony release their next game console iterations. That translates into conservative behavior by game studios as they tackle the programming hurdles necessary for next-gen hardware. But who’s to say there won’t be some surprises?
Unique little design stories like these totally make my day.
Today’s console games push computing to the limit. But as fidelity and realism improve, the gaming industry demands higher quality voice acting. Troy Baker is one such voice actor heavily in demand and Joystiq looks into how he got his start. It’s an interesting read:
Around 2004, Baker “stumbled” into doing car commercials, which led to a chance encounter that would shift his entire career focus. “Since we were doing album work at the same studio, it was just right place right time. So I started doing commercial work, and met Christopher Sabat who plays Vegeta in Dragonball Z.” Soon he was cast in a slew of minor roles throughout the anime and video game world: various iterations of Dragonball Z, bit parts in Lupin III, roles in One Piece, Bloodrayne 2 and Mega Man X: Command Mission. Things started to explode, and did so with a sonic boom when he was cast as the memorable Frank Archer in Fullmetal Alchemist.
Keith Stuart at The Guardian writes on plot problems in Max Payne 3:
But here’s a problem. Throughout the game’s beautifully constructed narrative sequences, we see Payne going through agonies of recrimination and remorse…When the game begins he’s effectively drinking himself to death in his filthy New Jersey apartment. He desperately seeks some form of salvation.
…Yet he is also an accomplished killer, capable of gunning down a room full of “enemies” in a matter of seconds.
Much like an article I linked to several weeks ago, Stuart identifies an issue running through many modern games: You craft a complex, conflicted or “good” character in the main storyline cutscenes, but have no trouble murdering thousands of bad guys during the action. How do we reconcile these issues?
The Gameological Society, a new gaming spinoff of The A.V. Club, interviews game designers on the challenges of establishing setting. There’s analysis here of three different games, each with widely different aesthetic and mood: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Yakuza and Final Fantasy XII.
I especially liked the breakdown of Deux Ex’s futuristic Detroit setting, on setting the right balance of freedom for the player character:
The goal, then, isn’t to make the city big, but to make it seem big. It’s all about how you wrestle out that illusion of urbanity. “The player must feel like he has freedom of exploration, that he can be creative with the environment,” Jacques-Belletête said. “At the same time, we need to set limits and boundaries in the world and these boundaries must feel ‘natural.’ We think a lot about what these boundaries will be.”
The boundaries can be superficial. A police barricade, a boarded up door, a chain link fence that’s just too high to jump. Those boundaries can be masked, though, by any number of perceptual means. “A great trick to make the city feel bigger and livelier than it actually is with the sound. Having dogs bark in the distance, the echoes of police sirens, and people talking and babies crying when you get near windows of apartment buildings. The streets of our game don’t have cars moving in them. But with each opportunity we had, you can see moving cars in the distance—on overpasses, on the other side of fences, and other such places.”