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Sony London Studio chief talks 3D lessons, promises VR headsets
Haven't settled in to 3D PS3 gaming just yet? Too bad because Sony's ready to leapfrog that industry buzzword with another once-vaunted, immersive tech of yore -- virtual reality. Announced ahead of Sony London Studio chief Mick Hocking's Develop conference "3D post-mortem speech," comes word the Japanese electronics giant is underway with R&D testing for a head mounted display. Shown off at CES earlier this year, the unit incorporates twin-OLED screens that put you closer to the game, fried eyeballs and all. If any of this sounds familiar, that's because it's all very 1995. Still, Hocking seems pretty optimistic about the company's lessons learned dipping its toes into three-dimensional waters, and has even created a so-called "3D 10 Commandments" to ensure quality product output. Hit the source below for the UK division head's full 3D musings.
Joystiq interviews Unreal Tournament 3's Mark Rein
Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic, was kind enough to sit down and chat with us at the Develop Conference in Brighton. During this fairly lengthy talk we discuss, among other things, UT3's performance on the PS3 the Unreal Engine's development and how that relates to other licensees. Find the full interview after the break.How long will it be before a fully optimised PS3 version of Unreal Engine 3 is released to developers?It's constantly being released to developers. How it works is, when you license Unreal Engine 3 you get access to our development server where we do all of our source control. So you can see everything that we put into this server. It's completely transparent to licensees.What we do then is, and I'm guessing here as I'm not directly involved with this, but about once a month we'll put a build through quality assurance testing. This is then an approved build, or a "blessed" build as we call them. We advise our licensees that they might find a specific bug fix on our development server, but if you want something that's gone through testing you have to wait and use a "blessed" build.%Gallery-4830%
Joystiq interviews Loco Roco's Tsutomu Kouno
As big fans of Loco Roco we couldn't leave the Develop Conference in Brighton last week without having a natter with Tsutomu Kouno. Thankfully, we got the opportunity to sit down and, via his translator, Masaaki Doi, ask him about what he plans to do after Loco Roco PS3 is released. The full interview can be found after the break.How do you feel about the reception that Loco Roco received in Europe and America, considering it's such a Japanese style game?Originally my target was not only the Japanese market, but the entire world. So I really appreciate that people in other territories have accepted and enjoy my design.
Joystiq interviews Heavenly Sword's Rhianna Pratchett
While at the Develop Conference we had the opportunity to sit down with Rhianna Pratchett, script writer and story designer for Heavenly Sword. We discuss the story of the game, her inspiration, the role of storytelling in video games and, among other things, her dad's (author Terry Pratchett) influence on her work.Why are you writing for games, in particular?I've always been a gamer, since I was about six and I started playing Mazogs on the ZX81. My dad was very techy and into computers, electronics, robots and that kind of thing. He'd bring something that clicked and whirred home and I was an only child so, of course, I was fascinated with whatever my dad was doing. Games were only really becoming commercial then and maybe he thought it was quite cute to get his six year old daughter playing a game where she would run around with a sword killing giant bugs. I asked him about Mazogs the other day and he said that he remembers me being rather frightened of the bug creatures, at first. Although once I found I could kill them, I was much happier! I got hooked from that and I would get all his hand-me-down machines. We would play lots of games together, mainly isometric adventure games. Or rather, he would play them and I would sit beside him drawing all the maps for him. When I was around eleven years old, a girl called Katie moved next door to me and we would play adventure games together (there was precious little else to do in our tiny, one-road village!) but this time it was our adventure. We played games like Monkey Island, King's Quest, even things like the old Leisure Suit Larry games (we'd have to guess all the 'are you 18?' questions – which were mainly, and rather bizarrely, about the American political process!) I studied journalism at university. I didn't really think about games writing back then, so I started off being a games journalist, in about '98 on a magazine called PC Zone, which was (and still is) quite a hardcore PC magazine. I also did some work for The Guardian for a couple of years. Then about four years ago, I started going freelance and then I got my first gig as a story editor for a game and it took off from there as I started to get more and more projects.%Gallery-3174%
Develop 2007 dated, detailed: July 24 to 26 in Brighton
Develop Conference organizers Tandem Events have announced new information regarding the 2007 edition, which is taking place July 24 to 26 in Brighton, England. The conference, which is the British equivalent to US-based Game Developers Conference, will purportedly include 45 sessions and over 70 speakers. Currently known speakers include Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, movie special effects expert Peter Chiang and LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule, according to Gamasutra.The sessions are spread over seven tracks: design, production, coding, business, art, audio, and newcomer world vision. The latter category is intended to provide European developers an international perspective and give them the chance to learn from their global peers.Running alongside the conference is the Develop Expo, which will serve as a venue for hands-on demoing of the latest developer tools, technology and very likely a few games.The first day of Develop is being set aside for Develop Mobile, focusing on mobile development, and GAMES:EDU, focusing on serious and educational games.Registration is now open. Develop Mobile and GAMES:EDU is will take place Tuesday, July 24, and the Develop Conference and Expo will be July 25 and 26. Currently, there is no schedule of events set and the keynotes have not been announced. [Via Gamasutra]
Hype begins and ends with the gaming press
Wanna see a hype fest? Do you? You do?! Well just head over to Eurogamer, where the site decided to give Peter Molyneux a free license to hype up his unannounced projects. In an "interview" that in fifty years will be regarded by scholars as the definitive example of hype creation, Eurogamer asked Molyneux "what's your next game, and when are we going to find out about that?" The rest of the interview consists of Molyneux spouting hyped, fluffy nonsense about how he can't tell us what the game is about, but that it'll definitely be awesome+1 to the max! I just can't blame Molyneux for this mess -- if you give one of the game industry's most savvy game developers/marketers an open microphone, it's practically a law that he will use it to hype his product. Since Molyneux didn't actually say anything about his next game that might not be included in the game (like what happened with Fable) Molyneux is totally covered. The real blame lies with Eurogamer. This goes way beyond them failing to rein him in; they've gone out of their way to construct hype out of the interview. The accompanying article is dedicated to encouraging readers to guess the word that defines Molyneux's next project. Do they think that the average Eurogamer reader is five years old?! As Winston Smith says in 1984, "if there is hope, it lies in the proles gamers", so it's encouraging to see commentators calling Eurogamer out on this trash. Stoatboy says "Oh ffs - that was a terrible interview. Love him or loathe him - that interview said NOTHING above any beyond "it'll be GREAT", which is the very least anyone would say about any game they happened to be working on." See also: Joystiq's interview with Peter Molyneux
Joystiq interviews Rob Kay of Harmonix
In our second interview from the Develop Conference in Brighton this week, Jen and I sat down with Rob Kay of Harmonix. Rob was project lead on the cult classic Guitar Hero, a game which is part of a new wave of hyper accessible games that is all about catching the mindset of the mainstream, as well as addicting millions of hardcore gamers. We talked with Rob about song licensing, Konami's recent "Guitar Revolution" trademark and the possibility of a Trombone Hero.You talked about clones of Guitar Hero in your seminar. Specifically you talked about how other companies are being inspired by the premise of games like Guitar Hero. I don't know if you heard about Konami trademarking a Guitar Revolution game?Yeah, I read that on the internet. To give Konami props, they started this whole instrument simulation in games thing when they did games like GuitarFreaks which they released in Japan. We worked with Konami on Karaoke Revolution and Karaoke Stage as well. So, I think it's great actually. I'm kind of the opinion that whoever is making these games with us then we're exploring this new ground together. I've got friends who have played Karaoke Revolution, and they wanted more songs so they've gone out and bought SingStar. So I think great, more people are out there playing these types of games.
Joystiq interviews Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios
Yesterday at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Jennie and I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with the founder of Lionhead Studios, Peter Molyneux. We chatted about the issue of hype, frustrations surrounding PC gaming and Peter's early days in the industry, amongst other topics.Fable was pretty much portrayed as one of the most open games of all time, but in terms of hype, it failed to meet the high expectations that you gave the game. There was even a forum post where you apologized about this: why did it get to that level?Well, it started with this fatal line that I made and that was that I wanted to make Fable the greatest role playing game of all time. I kinda still defend that because I honestly don't see the point in making a game that you don't honestly believe has a chance of being the greatest game of all time. I meet the press quite a lot, every 6-8 weeks there's some sort of press interview. The way I work then is to get a system in, play around with it, polish it, make it better. Sometimes I leave it as it is and sometimes I throw it away.
Develop: Everything you know about MMOs is wrong - apparently
Thomas Bidaux of NCsoft Europe didn't pull any punches with his presentation at the UK's Develop conference. Instead, the MMO giant's director of product development outlined four major ways in which the MMO world will be turned on its head. Or, rather, the 'online' world -- rather than limit himself to MMOs, Thomas talked about online games as a whole.
Develop: Game design ideas worth stealing
Game development gets accused of stagnation on a near-daily basis, and yet recent games have all featured innovative steps that can appeal to a variety of players. From minor design choices which somehow redeemed a title, to major decisions shaping the entire nature of a game, it's easier than you might think to make a difference. Margaret Robertson of EDGE gave her top picks from the last year or so's crop of games at the Develop Conference; read on for the lowdown.
Xbox Live numbers just keep rising
At the Develop Conference in Brighton, England, Microsoft's Jeff Sullivan dropped the news that 60% of 360 users are connected to Xbox Live. The long and short of it: things look good for Live."'Every time I do this presentation I have to check what the new figures are,' Sullivan said, before rattling off up-to-date stats such as Xbox Live has hosted over two billion hours of gaming, including over 500 million games of Halo 2. It also handles over 900,000 voice and text messages per day. But there's plenty more where that came from, with Microsoft on-track to hit its target of six million Xbox Live accounts in 2007.On Xbox Live Arcade:". . .on Arcade (which is used by 65 percent of connected users), over five million games have been downloaded. Conversion rates between free content and paid for downloads currently averages around 21 percent, with top games such as Geometry Wars and Uno up at 50 percent, while the lowest conversion rate is around 10 percent."It should be noted that even %10 percent is a substantial improvement over casual PC games, which average 2%. Sullivan also covered many other topics including Live Anywhere, in-game ads, and XLSP -- a tool that allows third party developers to integrate their own servers with Xbox Live. I think this Xbox Live thing might be going somewhere.[Via Xbox-Scene]
Epic's Mark Rein: Intel is killing PC Gaming
A couple of hours ago, Epic Vice President Mark Rein opened the Develop Conference in Brighton with a keynote covering topics ranging from the economics of next-generation games, episodic content and middleware (which, incidentally, Epic makes a lot of its money from). The majority of the second half of his keynote took a critical look at Intel's place within gaming; specifically, Mark thinks "Intel is killing PC gaming".Over several slides on the topic, Mark laid out the reasons he thinks that PC gaming is being harmed by Intel. He pointed the finger at Intel's integrated graphics chips. Integrated chipsets are often incapable of playing the latest (and certainly next-generation) games at any kind of graphics settings. Despite this, they are wildly popular amongst retailers. According to Mark's figures, 80% of laptops and 55% of desktops (note: he failed to cite a source for these figures) feature integrated graphics. That's bad news for companies like Epic, which are investing heavily into extremely demanding next-generation games.If next-generation games don't run on the vast majority of computers, big-name and -money developers will lose (or have already lost) their bottom end. At the same time, the higher end is getting higher. The last year has produced widespread-SLI adoption within the hardcore PC gaming community and new technologies like Quad-SLI, Quad-CPUs, physics processors and $10,000+ PCs.Over the next couple of days we'll be exploring this keynote and other seminars from Develop in more depth, but for now we'll ask you the same questions that Mark asked the audience: Do games like The Sims, World of WarCraft and other low-budget Asian MMOs prove Mark's hypothesis, that PC gaming is going away because of Intel, wrong? Will console MMOs put the nail in the coffin of PC gaming? How come big publishers aren't placing big bets on PC gaming? (Mark says that he knows of at least two "major" developers that are considering moving exclusively to console based development, although he failed to elaborate on which ones). Will the PC market be relegated to only mass-market and casual games?
UK gaming events this summer
This summer is shaping up to be great one, at least in terms of the number of UK gaming trade shows and conferences coming up soon. The great gaming fiasco of 2004 resulted in both of the major gaming trade shows in the UK (Game Stars Live and ECTS) being canceled when they decided to take place at exactly the same time, so it's great to finally see that the industry has picked itself up.Click continue to see a round-up of some future gaming events within the United Kingdom. Joystiq's UK contingent (consisting of Jennie and I) hopes to be able to attend as many of these events as possible so if you're also planning on attending make sure to leave us a comment. If we've missed a show or conference, let us know and I'll add your tip to the table.
