Steven Masters lead designer of Splinter Cell: Conviction has revealed that Ubisoft ‘could absolutely’ execute the upcoming stealth romp for Sony’s PlayStation 3, Game’s Xbox 360 console exclusivity was purely a business decision. Read more…
The Xbox 360 demo for Capcom’s shooter sequel Lost Planet 2, first introduced on the show floor at this year’s E3, will be released to the public “soon” according to producer Jun Takeuchi. Read more…
Team Ninja has told Kikizo that Ninja Gaiden will almost certainly be continued as a series.
“What the gamers are looking for is going to be the next chapter – the future of an outstanding series. We feel that we’re in a position of being able to make that call… That calling is already there – we feel it”.
Tomonobu Itagaki, the previous Ninja Gaiden dev head, said in May 2008 that the second game would finish the IP.
Apparently not. It gets better: next time it’s going to be multi-format:
“We’re going to have to push ourselves to the next level, and we are better off giving both audiences an entirely new game,” Hayashi added.
Full interview here
Think upcoming action title Bayonetta looks a bit like Devil May Cry? Not surprising as Platinum Games producer Hideki Kamiya was the director for Devil May Cry while at Capcom.
While the hero’s gender in each game is different, there are obvious stylistic similarities. Don’t think of Bayonetta just as a Devil May Cry in heels. (Well, at least until you play it.) Kamiya explains the game’s relationship to DMC:
It sounds silly to be ‘influenced’ by your own creation which is Devil May Cry, but I can say that you may find quite a few common features, as my faith towards action games has never changed. However, I did not play DMC1 not even once while developing Bayonetta (I have played about half of DMC4 as part of my research study though). I have deliberately created Bayonetta from scratch and tried to make the game as original as possible, although there will be some similar elements to my previous games in there I’m sure, such is my unchanged faith in developing action games. Anyway, it’s been eight years since DMC1, so of course I wouldn’t create a game that hadn’t progressed from those days! Of course, if there hadn’t have been DMC, there wouldn’t be Bayonetta, which has evolved from DMC.
Implying that EA’s Dead Space blatantly borrowed from Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 may sound like a bad thing. It’s not. Because, as senior producer Chuck Beaver said, there are dangers to doing “too much new.”
That’s been a common theme at some of the GDC talks we attended this week, as published developers caution their peers to be selective about the amount of innovation they try to pack in to a single video game.
“Don’t reinvent literally everything,” Beaver warned, noting that the EA Redwood Shores team picked about five new things they wanted to do in Dead Space. That, in itself, was a challenge, as the EARS team was hungry to innovate. Since it had been working on licensed properties like The Simpsons and James Bond for more than fifteen years—its last new IP was Road Rash from 1991—the desire to pile on the “new” was fierce.
Beaver said that developers should start with a template, looking at a published game for lessons on what has been tested. “They’re like a giant present with a bow on top of it,” Beaver said. “It’s a great place to start.”
In the case of Dead Space, EA Redwood Shores started with Resident Evil 4. But it first had to come to grips with the fact that it had nothing to build upon, with some team members excited about the possibility of creating a new genre, a la Grand Theft Auto, with new characters, new camera systems and new technology.
“If too much is new, people will get lost,” the producer contends. He cited another Capcom game, the Clover Studios developed Okami, as a cautionary tale. “Okami was a great game, but maybe there was too much new about that game.”
Beaver talked about various aspects of Resident Evil 4’s game design that was proven, saying that “yesterday’s innovation is today’s standard.” There are “accepted aiming and firing mechanics” that gamers understand, systems like health packs and life bars that are established game design facets.
However, “once you have your game skinned, you need to put some distance between you and your template,” he said.
The Dead Space team’s distance was influenced by its setting. It’s in the future. And it’s in space. That lead to the team redesigning things with the concept of “in the future.”
“What’s the pistol of the future? It’s a plasma cutter,” he said, referring to Dead Space protagonist Isaac Clarke’s mining tools. “What’s the flamethrower of the future? It’s a flamethrower, strangely.”
Beaver also gave his take on the seeming lack of advancement on the very game series that inspired the team.
“If you look at [the reception of] Resident Evil 5, you’ll see that they’re getting a lot of guff for their control scheme,” he said, citing the now accepted mechanics established or refined by games like Call of Duty and Gears of War as sources of potential innovation. “It feels like they might have been able to move forward on that and gotten less criticism for it.”
Pro tip: when two Japanese video game designers are your co-panelists, mind your references to the atomic bombing of Japan. It makes talking about future game development… weird.
Unfortunately, Fallout 3 designer Emil Pagliarulo from Bethesda Softworks unintentionally referenced that very subject during today’s “Evolving Game Design: Today and Tomorrow, Eastern and Western Game Design” panel at GDC. It was an innocent poor choice of words, of course, an unintended flub that was both instantly cringe-worthy and darkly comedic.
After sarcastically revealing that he drinks cold medicine to find game design inspiration, Goichi Suda asked Pagliarulo whether Bethesda was planning on “a Japanese version of Fallout” to which the Fallout 3 designer said, “Well, what can we destroy in Japan?”
After processing that post nuclear destruction and an awkwardly long pause, Suda simply said “Wow…”
“I just realized how stupid it was of me to say that!” Pagliarulo said, surprisingly understandable with foot in mouth. Obviously, he didn’t mean it that way, but it made the room a bit more ill at ease.
As Fallout 3 is already available in Japan and sold relatively well for a Western-style RPG, Suda wasn’t asking for a localization, but one in a more Japanese style setting apparently.
Matt Hazard. It’s a famous name that every gamer should know. Whether you’re four or twenty-five years old, Hazard has probably indirectly changed your life without you even knowing. He is a myth, a legend, but most importantly, as he demonstrated to us, still a man. Thankfully, we had the chance to discuss this next step in gaming history, not only with Hazard, but with Brian Etheridge (Producer) and Dave Ellis (Senior Game Designer) of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard.
Below is the discussion we shared regarding the upcoming Eat Lead game. For those of you who don’t want to know the secrecy behind the development of Eat Lead and its upcoming brilliance, do not read past this point. If you’re thinking “exactly who is Matt Hazard?”, continue reading, but feel shame for not already knowing.
Read full InterView here
Though The Creative Assembly is known for its PC strategy and prides itself in driving the platform’s technology, the studio’s Kieran Brigden admits that “it’d be silly to ignore the business realities” and the install base of consoles.
Prior to its acquisition by Sega in 2005, the UK-based studio strictly shipped PC titles, such as its popular Total War series. Following the buyout, however, Creative Assembly released a couple console-exclusive titles, Spartan: Total Warrior and Viking: Battle for Asgard, and has plans to release Stormrise later this year for both PC and consoles.
Read more…
