Archive for the 'News' Category

Stardock CEO Returns to PC Gaming’s Complicated Basics

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on November 17, 2008
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Stardock CEO Brad Wardell is devoted to reviving the classic era of PC gaming in all its excess. Stardock is currently developing Elemental: War of Magic for a 2010 release, a turn-based fantasy strategy game intended as a spiritual successor to the 1995 game Master of Magic.

Wardell talked about upcoming Stardock projects in a recent interview with Gamasutra and commented on the responsibilities of companies who take on old franchises.

“If you’re making a game that ends with ‘3,’ or Something: The Sequel, it should be similar to the original game,” Wardell told Gamasutra. “Don’t go off and say, ‘I have my own artistic vision.’ Okay, good — so call it something else. Don’t ride the coattails of the people who came before you to launch your own artistic vision.”

In the interview, Wardell also expressed interest in revisiting Toys For Bob’s Star Control II and Simtex’s classic series Master of Orion, last updated in 2003.

The CEO told Gamasutra that Stardock is building up a second full internal development team, and is tossing around various project ideas. “We’d like to do a roleplaying game too,” he said, pointing to BioWare classics like Baldur’s Gate II and Knights of the Old Republic as examples of the route he would like to take.

It would be “the same style of isometric gameplay — not first person — where I have a party that I’m interacting with,” he explained.

“I think there are a lot of people who want that. They want to have a party again. They want to have a Minsc-type character in there. You can’t have that interesting banter if it’s just one guy running around.”

Stardock earned a benevolent reputation among PC faithful after developing the excellent Galactic Civilizations II and publishing Ironclad Games’ Sins of a Solar Empire, both without any form of controversial copy protection or DRM. Their next published game, Gas Powered Games’ Demigod, comes out in early 2009.

It’s good to see a growing publishing house stay true to its roots and out to serve a small but ravenous audience of old school PC gamers.

The elaborate gameplay, structure and length of games like Baldur’s Gate II and Master of Orion got left behind by modern developers intent on mass appeal, and revivals like Gas Powered Games’ Supreme Commander fail to produce significant numbers.

Yet there’s something absolutely immersive about incredibly complicated gameplay, as anyone who tried out Steel Battalion’s unique mech controller will say. The spell system and character dynamics of Baldur’s Gate II brought that world to life, and the complicated micromanagement of Master of Orion gave the game’s universe political and economic verisimilitude.

If Stardock is truly pledged to bring back this wrongly abandoned aspect of PC gaming, then we should all be excited to see what they come up with.

BioWare Pushes MMO Storytelling With ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’

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on November 13, 2008
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It came as no surprise that Electronic Arts, LucasArts, and BioWare put World of Warcraft on notice when they announced Star Wars: The Old Republic late last month.

Every MMO released this year has tried to distinguish itself from Blizzard’s monolith in some aspect, and with The Old Republic, BioWare is focusing on storytelling, their realm of expertise.

Developers from BioWare Austin talked about how they will address this chronically underserved aspect of the genre at a round-table discussion, covered by Joystiq. Most of all, they want to treat the player as seriously as if this were a single-player experience.

“You will never in the game go into a cantina and poke a random person to see if you can solve their problems and they’ll give you money,” said Lead Writer Daniel Erickson. “You will never have some stranger on the street ask you to save their cat. You do large, heroic things.

“I always tell my writers,” Erickson continued, “to imagine if the very first response you could ever choose to any quest they might pitch is, ‘Excuse me, I’m saving the world. Is this important?’”

According to BioWare, The Old Republic contains more dialog and content than all its past titles combined.

“If you roll a Jedi character and you play them from the first level to the last level, and then you roll a Sith and you play them from the first level to the last level, you will not see one repeated quest, line of dialogue, or piece of content,” said Erickson. “It is a 100% different story experience.”

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Site Update: New Features and Look

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on October 20, 2008
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The site has been granted an updated code and layout and new features. (Please notice the new site logo, which took all Sunday afternoon to Photoshop together.)

The new Calendar page displays upcoming releases that have storytelling potential along with information and links. Fallout 3 is the first entry and shows how game profiles will be laid out.

Despite featuring a very mainstream title right off the bat, I’d like to use the calendar to showcase smaller releases and mods. It should be up to date within a week.

The Resources page is a compendium of links, guides, and interviews for aspiring video game writers or journalists. This is a work in progress and so far has links on careers in game development and journalism.

Tags are in place, and the About page has a tag cloud for browsing pleasure. Enjoy.

Down the Wall Down for Site Upgrades

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on October 18, 2008
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. Closed

I’ll be updating the WordPress platform and the layout for this blog over the weekend. A new look and new features should be up on Monday.

MMO Players Love Underdog Role, Says Daedalus Project Poll

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on October 10, 2008
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Massively multiplayer online games are all about choosing a role for your character to fill in a complete and crowded world, and a new study at the always fascinating Daedalus Project asks MMO players eight questions about the roles they love to role-play.

The most interesting finding had to do with game factions.

“In many games where there are warring factions, disparities between the faction populations typically arise,” said the report. Rebels outnumbered Imperials in Star Wars Galaxies, there are more Alliance than Horde in World of Warcraft, and so far Destruction is destroying Order in Warhammer Online.

Yet the 80% of respondents in the Daedalus Project poll said they would prefer to take up arms for the minority side if given a choice. Who wouldn’t want to play the desperate partisan struggling against overwhelming odds? Or maybe they just want to avoid waiting in line for player vs player battlegrounds.

Another interesting conclusion came from gender choices in character creation. According to the poll, men are four times as likely as women to create a character of the opposite gender, with 26% of men admitting to gender-bending.

When it comes to character classes, things stayed pretty even between the four archetypes of warrior, cleric, mage and archer. “The stereotypical gender difference is also seen,” found the report. “Men prefer to be warriors while women prefer to be healers. There were no gender differences in the archer or mage classes.”

The poll also asked participants about their favorite settings and which roles they preferred in specific settings. It’s worth taking a look at, if just for the comparison between male and female players.

Award-Winning Developer Says Storytelling On the Rise

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on September 28, 2008
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Developer Dave Ellis sees a bright future for storytelling in gaming, he said in a Joystiq interview.

“Game writing is only going to get better as time goes on. Players are getting used to good writing, and soon they won’t settle for less,” said Ellis, the 2008 recipient of the WGA award for video game writing.

Ellis is a designer with Vicious Cycle, and his most recent project, Dead Head Fred for the PSP, earned him the Writer’s Guild of America award. He will be the keynote speaker at a Writer’s Guild Foundation workshop on game writing next month.

“Today, we’re looking at a couple of exciting developments. First, story-driven games are becoming more popular. Developers are realizing that writing needs just as much attention as the graphics and other gameplay elements, especially when the story and characters play a key role in the game,” Ellis said.

“Second, technology has reached the point where truly interactive storytelling is emerging. The story can evolve through the gameplay, and it can be affected by the player’s actions — at least to a certain extent.”

Ellis recognized the limitations of current storytelling techniques, which limit the player to established choices even in open world games.

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‘Heavy Rain’ Has Persistant Story, So Don’t Reload

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on September 24, 2008
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Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer promises a non-linear and cinematic which is intended to be play without any reloading according director David Cage, who spoke with CVG this week.

“There will be the opportunity for players to reply as much as they want from where they want, but we would really like to encourage them not to do so — to continue to play with one story bearing with the consequences of their actions,” Cage told CVG.

The story can even survive the deaths of its multiple player-controlled characters, accommodating all player choices, even fatal ones. Is this the end of the Game Over screen?

“This is what’s exciting about it,” said Cage. “This is a story that you told. It’s pretty unique. So why would you want to do everything perfect and change what you’ve done. You will be able to redo what you like but we recommend not to.”

Cage is the founder, CEO and auteur of French studio Quantic Dreams. His last effort was 2005’s Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), which also featured a non-linear story, told through bare-bones controls and heavily scripted quick time events.

Judging from these early previews, Heavy Rain is a definite improvement over Fahrenheit and may establish new conventions for interactivity in storytelling when it comes out for the Playstation 3 last next year.

Mistakes and pitfalls always break the mood in games. They pressure or outright force the player to flip back a few pages and rewrite the story correctly. Some recent games have broken from the trend of checkpoints and quick-save/quick-load.  BioShock allowed players to continue after dying by restoring the hero at the nearest Vita-Chamber — a kind of in-character checkpoint.

Heavy Rain will liberate players from the constraints of failure by offering in-game consequences rather than a forced reboot and maintaining immersion in the plot rather than ending it.

Impressive Top 15 List of RPG Characters

Published
on September 21, 2008
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Characters are the heart of any story, and twenty years of computer and console gaming have yielded plenty of memorable ones.

Last month Ian and Reid at ConfuseReviews.com compiled a list of their fifteen favorite RPG characters, with barely five slots going to BioWare’s ilk.

Part of [the depth of RPGs] comes through in the characters you meet in any adventurous stat-building type game; sometimes cheery, sometimes spooky, often dreadfully bland but occasionally intriguing characters who make the grunt work of RPGs and the fight after fight after fight seem worth it. The characters are what make the stories work — they’re the role part of role-playing.

It’s not bad as Top # lists go, including a good mix of nostalgia-inspiring heroes like Frog from Chrono Trigger, barely remembered niche weirdos like Cassius Curio of Morrowind, and a few unknowns like Stan the titular king from Okage Shadow King.

The game’s main character, a ludicrously trodden-upon boy with the worst parents in the world, ends up with evil king Stan possessing his shadow as part of a bargain to “save” his sister. The rest of the game unfolds as a quest to smite the lesser demons that have arisen since Stan’s banishment and taken sections of his former power, so in essence he becomes a whiny has-been of a demon lord trying desperately to be taken seriously as he slowly regains his former glory.

I’ll definitely have to play that one.

AGDC: ‘Tomb Raider: Underworld’ Developer Pushes Refined Storytelling

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on September 19, 2008
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In a presentation at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Eric Lindstrom, creative director of Tomb Raider: Underworld, pushed for new storytelling techniques and more emphasis on story during development, reports Gamasutra.

Lindstrom doesn’t mean to tackle the problem of innovative interactive storytelling — because others are working on that. He’s talking about using the basic tools that have been used in other media, which “are not being used at all, or not being used effectively, and there’s no reason why they can’t.”

Here’s his mini-manifesto:

Stop saying that storytelling is less important than game mechanics. “There are lots of people who say this, but they don’t really mean it.”

Start putting storytelling on par with other pillars of game creation. “There are plenty of people out there who say this is true, but when push comes to shove, it’s not true.”

Stop hiding behind the word “interactive”. “If there’s really one thing to take away today — it’s that ‘oh, but it’s interactive’ is used as an excuse for bad storytelling all the time, and it just doesn’t wash.”

Start training and employing storytelling experts. “Hollywood knows how to write dialogue more than anybody in the industry on average. The last 10 movies I saw, seven of them had pretty crappy dialogue — so it’s not going to be perfect on average. But you’re going to find more people who understand storytelling.”

These points are good ones, but, as Lindstrom admits, these goals are really only ways of perfecting current storytelling techniques rather, which have not advanced much since the big games of the 1990s, and they don’t progress new strategies. A good Hollywood writer could work out the plot holes and cliches and help put together a satisfying climax, but only someone with writing and game development experience can integrate story into gameplay, so the two work together rather than being seperated into the game and the ensuing cut scenes.

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AGDC: Sterling’s Keynote Address Calls For Creativity

Published
on September 16, 2008
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The Austin Game Developer’s Conference kicked off today with a future-thinking keynote address by author Bruce Sterling that urged creative, iconoclastic approaches to game design.

Sterling’s credentials as a writer of science fiction and one of the prime movers behind the cyberpunk genre lent themselves to his unusual speech, where he posed as a student of his 89-year-old self who had traveled back in time from 2043 to tell us where gaming was headed.

After showing off his nanotechnology and General Electric Pocket Mediator, Sterling described an intensely dystopian future for the video gaming industry, run by money, for money, and with no potential for risky ingenuity or real creative development among the factories of nameless developers. Games in 2043 are trite and consumer friendly with simple, boring gameplay lodged in the real world.

To prevent this future, said Sterling, the industry needs “creative disruption, radical innovations, provocative cultural change.”

Sterling called for visionaries, revolutionaries and auteurs from among the developers gathered in Austin. “This is your great struggle, and that is what you face,” he said. “That is what you owe to your predecessors and those who will come after you. You’ve got your place in the great parade and it’s all yours.”

Look forward to more news from the Austin GDC as it pertains to creative storytelling in games.