Kevin Kelly
Articles by Kevin Kelly
Dustin Browder - Page 4
Well like you were saying earlier, does it now feel like to the team that these are three new games versus one really big game? I mean Wings of Liberty as a single player campaign feels pretty huge. The next two are going to be, if they are the same scope, really big games. Does it feel like three separate products at this point? We still kind of view it as one product with a couple of expansions because we are still going to be building so much on what we built before. We still kind of view it as one product with a couple of expansions because we are still going to be building so much on what we built before. But yeah, they are still pretty big products. We are still really beating on them and trying to make sure that they are going to be great. But really, at this point we haven't really thought that much about the next game. Like there hasn't been a lot of effort put into that. Back when we thought we were going to magically somehow do 90 missions or whatever, we had some thoughts put into it, but we really haven't gone back and revisited it. And basically you guys have sort of the story. You know what is going to happen. Some of it. Some of it. The big beats. Yeah, the big beats are covered. And there is definitely stuff that we know we want to hit as we go through. But there are definitely a lot of question marks, too, because at one point we just stopped development on those parts of the game, because we think, "Oh my God, just the Terrans are going to eat us alive." We focus on the Terrans and we put in a bunch of additional stuff that we haven't really ... well how will that carry through? Huh, be cool, don't worry about it, right? We'll have to get to that at some point down the road. Yeah, Andrew also said the same thing, like some people are thinking there's some sort of karma system based on the choices you've made. But, you're just making a choice, it's not affecting the players. Raynor doesn't start glowing red or anything. He doesn't grow devil horns and get things on his body. *laughter* Like you see games that do that, and that's their game. Like they build their whole game around that and everything feeds into those things, and it's awesome. I love those games, but our game is about real-time strategy. Yeah. Our game is about what happens on the battlefield and the kinds of toys you brought with you, and that's what our gameplay feeds on. Is this planned still to have a Beta sometime in the next, I don't know, whenever? Yes. Because we heard about the planned Beta earlier this summer and I'm like, well, it's August, so... [laughs] The next whenever, that's a good one. I mean, whenever. You can just put that, write that down... "whenever" I'll write that, I'll put that in quotes. As soon as we can. Has the Beta been delayed just because of the changes to Battle.Net and everything else? We want Beta and the game to be attached to each other by about a three to six month window. Battle.Net was a factor, performance is another factor. Yeah, and the other thing, too, that happens to us as well, is you know, we don't want to be in Beta for nine months. And we don't want to be in Beta and then take a break and then release the game. We want Beta and the game to be attached to each other by about a three to six month window. When Beta starts, three to six months later we are going to ship the game, right? And you know, if there becomes uncertainty in this state, then this state becomes really uncertain, too. I know that you guys don't ship until it's ready, but you're one of the few companies that have your own convention to bring fans in and show off stuff. Does that sort of become an internal date for you guys? Like, "Wow, if we can have this ready by BlizzCon, this will be awesome if we can show it off." Sure. Yeah, because you know, these guys pay a pretty substantial sum of money to take a flight, in many cases, from God knows where to come out to Anaheim to see us, so we take that pretty seriously. At that point, it drives me a little crazy, frankly, because that's a bunch of work for us, but we take it very seriously because we know that our fans and our hardest core people have put in some resources to come here. We've got to put on a show. So yeah, if we got stuff that we can put in front of them that we think would be cooler, we definitely make the extra effort to get it to them. Are you guys looking at having single player playable at BlizzCon? Yes, yes. Definitely. It will be a subset of what you've seen here. Just because there are so many people, we don't want them singing up the machines for two hours, so we show them a little less at one time. But yeah, they'll be able to see some of this. Blizzard has been really open about pulling back the veil on development. I remember at last BlizzCon they were showing us, "Here are the failed skill systems we didn't use for Diablo III." There was a ton of stuff that we saw. Most places won't say, "Here's the dumb stuff that we thought of that ended up not working." Are you guys going to pull back the curtain on stuff for Starcraft at this point? We don't have any plans to. I could. I don't know how fun that would be. I think the panel that we're going to talk about is sort of, show off some of the stuff we've done here. We could show off some of the missions and some of the mechanics on a little bit deeper level than they've seen before. We're going to talk about the editor, I think, and show how we use these things to create the things that we do. So give the fans an idea of the kinds of things they'll be able to create when the game launches. Or for fans who maybe aren't as technically minded but might want to be playing these things, it will give them a hint as to the types of game play experiences they're going to have online once the other fans make those things. I think that's probably what I'm going to be focusing on. I think Rob has a whole other one that he's going to do. #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } << BACK COMMENT NEXT >>
Dustin Browder - Page 3
I went into the graphics options screen for a second because I remember how bare bones it was in the old StarCraft which I have been playing a lot lately. There are so many more choices now. It is ridiculous: reflections, shadows, everything you can turn on and off. I don't know if people really understand how exponentially different this product is. What has been the most daunting thing for you guys on the design side? Did we walk the line? Is there enough new that you are enjoying it, but yet it still feels like StarCraft? Wow. So many choices. The biggest deal, I think, for us is how much to change, what change is enough change, and what change is too much change and trying to balance that out, because we want to create a new product that has got its own distinctive flavor and styling. Yet, we want to stay true to the original game and make sure that when you come to see it, this is StarCraft. This is the game I know and love, right? But it is also a different enough experience that as you are playing through it, there is actually stuff for you to learn, new challenges for you to overcome, new things for your to experience and enjoy instead of just a carbon copy of the original. So that has probably been the hardest thing, walking that line. I don't even know yet if we have done it or not. Many people have said that we have failed. Many people said that we succeeded. I guess we will see. That is not where I want to be. I don't want to be 50/50. A lot of that is going to be up to the fans, like when it gets into their hands and we see what they actually think when they are playing the game for real. When we bring people in to play, the response has generally been pretty positive as opposed to people who are just reading about it on the Internet and getting scared, which I understand. But it will be interesting to see, once we get the Beta out, to see what the real response is to see, "Did we walk the line? Is there enough new that you are enjoying it, but yet it still feels like StarCraft?" Were you saying in the theater this morning that originally or in some version of the game you are actually sort of free roaming the ship and walking from area to area versus instant travel? Yeah. We never actually had you physically walking. We never had you actually controlling the character with the arrow keys or anything like that. We definitely had more animations with him moving. We slowly chopped it all out, like, "Go!" as opposed to like a slow, "Here I go! It is fading to black! Oh, God. You are killing me, right? Get there already!" We have definitely done that. But there has definitely been sort of a joke we have been telling on the team that all of our feedback would be like, "I had to walk all the way to the armory." It is like, "Dude, it is one click! Oh my God!" Well it is two, technically. But yeah. It is definitely an interesting challenge in this space. RTS gamers are not always used to this kind of new experience. It has to be our own thing. We can't just say, "Oh, it is like a BioWare game," because it is not, right? We don't have the amount of content that they have. Our content is a lot more deep in some ways than theirs is. At some point, Mass Effect is me with a ray gun. At this point, when I go into battle I have nine units, and this map, and these objectives, and this lava, and like, "Woo!" Like it is really a different experience. At the same time, the kind of gamer that comes to our game is looking for a different experience as well. So it has got to have some of those elements, but it has also got to be a little lighter in some ways. We know about the destructible barriers like rocks, and now we have seen lava, which I am guessing is not going to be a component of multiplayer. Are there other things coming along those lines that are in the game? For solo play, yes. I think Chris may have told us the last time we were here that you may actually even play as one of the other races in the single player in this? Yes. If we were here for the rest of the week, would we be able to play through the full Wings of Liberty? All the missions are in there and everything? Well I wouldn't let you, but yeah. You could. *Laughter* Yeah, but you could theoretically. It gets a little uglier past the point where you are at. Like, characters start talking without moving their mouths. And you have some animations like, "I thought that guy was dead. What is he doing here?" You have a few bugs like that. So it definitely gets a little rougher. But yeah, all the missions are there to some level. There are two missions right now that are on my watch list. It is like, "We might need to redo those from scratch," which kind of blows. But you have got to do what you got to do. But I don't think that we have more than those two that need that kind of kick in the butt. Well that's not bad, considering there are 30 levels. Yeah, not too bad. I am not going to say they are all polished. Don't get me wrong. But there are things that don't feel right and are still a little bit nasty. But in terms of missions that might need a reboot...And even then, we might be OK. We have one being tweaked today. And if that tweak is good, then we can probably put that one in the bag and just tune and polish them now. What are you scared of the most reaction-wise from people who haven't seen this yet? You mean from the solo play stuff? Yeah. Are you afraid they are just going to completely not like the new single player system? The biggest concern I have is that people will look at it and assume immediately that it is Fallout 3. No. That has been pretty positive. The biggest concern I have is that people will look at it and assume immediately that it is Fallout 3. You know, like, "Well that must mean I can choose good or evil for Raynor. That must mean that I can have ... there are probably 700 missions out there that I can choose between and I will only get to play half of them." I get those questions pretty consistently. They are like, "It is Fallout, right?" I am like, "No. It is not like Fallout." I mean it looks like it a little bit I guess because there are 3D characters now and I say there is story, so you get confused. But it is not like Fallout. It is not like Mass Effect. It still is an iteration of the real time strategy genre where we have taken something cool and made it hopefully a lot cooler. And hopefully in some ways it is a little revolutionary in the sense that you get more choices about what you do. You are not just on the rail with the designers shoving a unit down your throat. But at the same time, it is still a real time strategy game. So you are going to begin where you begin. You are going to end where you end. And you are going to make some decisions along the way. But the fate of the StarCraft universe is not in your hands. That is still in ours, because we really want the universe to have a kind of continuity. We want to end in the same place we begin for the next one, and we want the books and the novels to go where they are going to go. We want to have a story here that is real and consistent as opposed to whatever, whatever. So that is, I guess, probably the biggest fear I have, is players look at it and misunderstand what we are trying to do. And then they get freaked out that we didn't fulfill their expectation. #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } << BACK COMMENT NEXT >>
Dustin Browder - Page 2
Is there any sort of new matchmaking system coming out? There are a couple. So first of all, we are going to have it matching you on maps that are anti-rush maps so that you can sort of get your feet wet and learn the game a little bit better. That isn't as fun ultimately, because the game is a lot more fun when you have to choose between attacking and defending. But still, we know players need this. When they first start, we know they are very afraid of being rushed. So we have maps that basically put giant rocks between you and the enemy that must be destroyed before you can get at each other. You can still get, I suppose, rushed at minute fifteen with a bunch of air units, but still, you would have had some time to get your stuff together. So that is one basic level of matchmaking. The other thing we are going to do is we are going to have a whole bunch of different divisions and stuff that sort of divide the player pool up into a variety of skill levels. We feel like RTS games are really fun as long as the match is fair. The minute the match becomes unfair, it is actually not that fun for anybody. I suppose there are a few guys who like pulling the wings of butterflies who think it is really fun to beat some noob. But even they will get bored after a while, right? Maybe a few of them. But for most humans, it is not that fun very long. They will do it for a couple minutes, but then they are like, "OK. I don't want to play them again." We had some really solid matchmaking actually in Warcraft 3 that was really good about that. There were some weaknesses to it. One of the biggest weaknesses was players could infinitely re-roll the characters. And when they infinitely re-rolled the characters, they reset their matchmaking status. So you would be minding your own business down there and having a good time, and here comes a re-roll through the ranks, just cutting everyone down that gets in its path like grass. After 10 games we should have you pretty well pegged, and you should be in a good place where you are going to win about half of your games. We have some systems we have planned to prevent that from occurring, sort of remembering your skill level when you reroll and stuff like this so that you can't just do this kind of destroying all the noobs. We think we have got most of the ways stamped out to prevent you from running into guys who are way more hardcore than you. After 10 games we should have you pretty well pegged, and you should be in a good place where you are going to win about half of your games. Most players would like to win about 60% or 70% of their games. I can't really do that for them, just by the basic math. At that point, someone else would be like losing more games. But we can hopefully get you into a place where you are winning about half of your games. And that will put you in a place where you don't feel like you are just going to get owned every time you play. And that is some sort of metric that will be tracked, like your rank or your level or something like that? Yeah. Some of it we track. The matchmaking we track sort of behind the scenes, and we can show you what it is. But just to tell you, it is like this is the pool that you are in. And if you get better, then we will promote you out of that pool. And at the same time, you will have a ranking within that pool so you can sort of see how you are doing against people of your skill level. Was the single player version of the game sort of always envisioned to be this big? It seems huge. It is a giant change from the last one. Well at one point we had hoped to do all three races in this big in one product. And then at one point we kind of woke up and said there is no way. If you want to have meaningful choices ... how many levels have you played at this point, like four or five? I am at the mining planet where you are working with a guy to harvest all the resources ... So at least five levels. That is the 2nd choice then. Imagine now that the Terran campaign only had five missions left. What the hell? I am just getting started. Like, this is so cool, right? Who would want it to end that soon? So when we were looking at doing the game and we had to make this difficult decision, we really thought, "Hey. You know what? By focusing on the Terrans in the first game, the players think it is 30 missions or thereabouts. Only now, he gets a really robust story with lots of choices and lots of chances to get used to these units and really experience them instead of rushing them through the experience." At this point, if we had 10 or 12 missions per campaign, we would be down to just the core, no fancy medics, no fun Spectres, no cool neutron bombs or whatever we have got coming later in the game. None of that would exist and you would have very few choices at all. You would get your couple introduction missions and then like one or two choices, and then, "Hey, we have to end the game. We have to wrap up the story now." So it just gives us a lot more space to really enjoy the whole experience. Is everyone focused on working on Wings of Liberty right now, or have any people started to branch off and say, "All right. Let's start working on the next installment." It seems like it will be a pretty decent amount of time between installments. No, it's all Wings of Liberty. Everyone is working on that. We will have to wait and see. If you look at our previous expansion packs, what have those been? They have been sometimes as little as nine months or a year. Sometimes longer, I think. Sometimes a year and a half. I would guess that is kind of what we would be at, but no real serious discussion has occurred. Yeah, because once you have finished Wings of Liberty, you almost have to go back to the drawing board, because what is the Zerg experience going to be like? What is the equivalent of this for the Zerg, or do we need an equivalent? What would it be? There is definitely a lot of work to do. It can't just be all like wet oozing orifices and stuff. The Terran one has the advantage of being fairly accessible. Like there are news reports. It makes sense to me. Like, what is the equivalent of this for the Zerg, or do we need an equivalent? What would it be? There is definitely a lot of work to do. The technology that you guys have added, the ability to upgrade units and stuff, is there any chance that would ever come to multiplayer? Multiplayer is a sport. Multiplayer is a competitive environment where I need to know what you have got potentially in your arsenal. And you need to know what I have got in my arsenal or it is not really fun. Like if it gets to be, "Oh, here is something zany!" OK. I guess I lose, right? So I don't really think that is a practical choice for us. At this point, we can barely balance the one game as well as we want it to. It can never be too good, right? And so to add a bunch more additional complexity like that would be unwise. That would just pretty much make the game unbalanced. I know it would be a cool feature. I know it would geek everybody out, like, "Imagine the power!" Yeah, but imagine the broken, too. Do you guys have a sense of how many missions there will be in the final Wings of Liberty set? I mean how many were in the first one, 10? For each campaign it was like 10 or 15? Yeah. 10-12. It is about 30. I think our actual number is 29, but that might vary a little bit as we get closer to the end. It may go up. It may go down. I was in the scenarios menu, which isn't fully fleshed out yet, but it feels like you guys going to do those sorts of chess scenarios where it is like, "OK. Here is the situation. Can you get yourself out of this?" Yeah. We have a bunch of those. I think we have got about 10 or 12 of those now, and we will probably add more as we go forward. And then there are the small skirmishes, which are just like mini-battles. The challenge is it really gets a chance to try to move you from solo player to multi. We kind of figured you are going to come in and you are going to play solo and have a good time. And then you are going to realize that multi is a completely different thing. And we kind of hope that you will put the challenges on and you will play some skirmish battles to sort of learn the tech. But I mean it is, "Hey, there are no medics here anymore!" You have to learn that stuff again. And then the challenge will hopefully really allow you to bridge the gap in terms of the kinds of game play that is expected of you. You don't ever have to use your workers to defend against an attack in solo. You just don't. But in multi you frequently do. Like, here comes four Zerglings. What do I do? Get the SCVs to kill them! They can fight?! And that is like news to a lot of players. So the challenges try to teach a lot of those basic lessons to sort of get players to make that jump. We never really felt like the solo player worked that well as a tutorial for multi in the original game in any of our RTS games, or any RTS games I have played for the most part. So we will like it will be a lot more fun to split them up, make them two totally different experiences, and then find other ways to bridge the gap. #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } << BACK COMMENT NEXT >>
Interview: Dustin Browder talks StarCraft 2 development and delays
Dustin Browder is the man in the hot seat as Blizzard's lead designer for StarCraft 2. Ultimately, he's the one you can heap the blame (or the praise) upon when the final product finally ships. At the time of this interview, we didn't officially know SC2 would be delayed, but given the sheer amount of things they'd shown us during our visit, it became clear that there was no way StarCraft 2 would make 2009. Still, Browder talks about the reasons for the delay, and ultimately gamers are going to be happy that they chose to make the game better, rather than rush it out for the holiday shopping frenzy. Read on for the full interview with him where we talk delays, easter eggs, the new matchmaking system, the single player experience, and hidden items in the game, including a fully playable Lost Viking arcade game with a data editor that will let you make your own scrolling shooters.%Gallery-69481%
Andy Chambers - Part 2
Given the advances in the speech, the characters now look like they're actually talking. Is there a lot more recorded dialogue for this game than for the last? Yeah, the running total is something like 4,000 lines of recorded dialogue. I don't know how that stacks up against Starcraft 1, but were talking about orders of magnitude more. Because there are so many lines in there to cover just basic conversation between characters, then the little cutscenes on top, then you go to the extra conversations to cover, "Oh, well what if I did this mission before that mission," then we actually get this conversation instead -- that sort of thing. So yeah, there's a lot of it. There's a lot of recorded dialogue. The guys down in recorded sound have been run ragged overall. Dustin (Browder) was saying this morning in the theater that eventually there are moments where you're faced with a choice and you have to do A or B. And once you decide that, that affects your game and B will no longer be available to you once you choose A. And I imagine that changes the story, although he did say there's a beginning and an end, but the middle part has a lot of multiple paths. "It has one origin point, it has one termination point, but that bit in the middle and how you get there is kind of up to you as the player." The way we always describe it is being football shaped. So it has one origin point, it has one termination point, but that bit in the middle and how you get there is kind of up to you as the player. You know, we'll present you with choices all the time, and excepting in that one instance when there's an A/B choice, we won't take those choices away. So if you have five missions and you leave one of them until doomsday, we wont take it off your plate. I'm sorry ... I've forgotten what the original question was. You were just explaining beginning/end/multiple paths. Yes. Yeah, one of the big details was that we wanted game play to come first so that there weren't right and wrong choices, there aren't light and dark, good and evil... Right, it's not a karma-based system. No, no. A lot of people try to overlay that onto it and say, "Ah, this is the evil Jim Raynor choice isn't it?" Its like, "No, that's just the choice you make if you believe this to be true." Because I've tried - we have tried - to write it so that it's far more like a moral grayness, kind of - what do you think is the case - that's what you should base your decision making on, not what you think the designers want you to do based on whether they want you to be good or evil. Did you guys build any jaw-dropping surprise moments into the story where the player will be completely shocked that something happened? I think there's probably at least three or four of those. Yeah, a lot of them sort of predicated around the choices and so on. Sort of like, "Well I didn't expect THAT to happen!" That kind of thing. So what happens if you abort a mission? Can you then go back and make the opposite decision? Well, we kind of work on the assumption a lot that people will just have a game save before they make the choice. In fact we'll probably put in an autosave before they make the choice so if you wanna go back and do the other one that's cool - that's fine by us. So you wont have to replay the whole thing. No. People would go a little crazy. We just want a situation where in your playthrough you have to make a choice at some point. We don't want to like completely burn that other choice if you don't take it, or come around and delete it off your hard drive and so forth ... stop you from ever talking to each other about it. It's fine. If you see both, it's fine. But in terms of like, your story -- your path through the game -- there come some junctures where you have to make some Raynor-esque choices, and guess what, they're morally hard decisions that you have to make. Ha, ha, ha! (evil laugh) There's a lot of attention to detail now that we never had in the first game. Like, in the bar, the bits on the bulletin board, when he's in the cantina, on the ship, the Hyperion -- lots of detailed stuff that we'd never seen before in the Starcraft universe. What was that like? Getting all that stuff together and fleshing out those characters? It was actually quite a lot of fun. A lot of those things are in there again for players who are coming into the universe fairly cold, so that they've got little artifacts they can pick up on and find a little bit more about. So some of it just came down to what would make interesting little objects, both in terms of what they were in themselves and what the characters might say or feel about them in particular. So, yeah that was quite a lot of fun. "There's been a few casualties along the way. It started out being a lot less character focused than it is now." There's been a few casualties along the way. It started out being a lot less character focused than it is now. But that's part of having done playthroughs and stuff and being responsive to, "Uh, I don't get this character, I need to know more about him." Alright, well we'll stick a wanted poster up about him, how's that? Actually, the wanted poster was in there from the start, but that is an example of the things where it's like, well, for the people who want to explore and find out more, then we can secrete all these little clues all over the place. It's been a lot of fun. So tell us what your background is, what else have you worked on here and how long have you been with the company? I've been with Blizzard for ... I officially started working for them in 2006, so a little over three years at this point. Prior to that I worked in the UK. I worked for Games Workshop, doing tabletop games and printed media in one description or another for fourteen years. Which was a lot of words. When I actually sat down to put my resume together I was like, "Oh, there's this and this and this ... and that monthly article in the magazine, for like fourteen years," and that's a large body of work. So very strongly rooted in that background enough to the point that people over here like Chris Metzen had heard of me. So when I sent my resume around they were like, "Oh yeah! Lets get him in! Get him in for an interview," and so forth. To my abiding surprise. Because I was literally, like, cold calling at that point. Um, so that grounding in developing a universe over a long period of time is I think one of the things that was appealing and is one of the sensibilities I've been able to bring to Starcraft. And in turn, I've been learning that PC games are at the same time very similar to tabletop on some level, and also completely different on others - the whole having to think about and tell a story purely through dialogue is blowing my brain overall. That's been an entirely new set of skills that I've had to learn, because I've gone from, "I can fill pages with text and you'll probably find it fairly interesting enough to keep reading it," to, "No, actually I have to have characters who tell this story, not by telling you either, but by talking to each other." Wow. That's a bit of an interesting challenge. It's almost like learning a whole new craft. Like screenwriting versus novel writing. Show it, don't say it. Exactly. And I think I was intellectually aware of how different that would be when I first came over here, but then the real practical ramifications have really come home to roost. But I've had a great mentor in Chris, he's done this before, an awful lot, and a great team who've been working on it as well, because the other thing I've found is that PC games are such a collaborative effort in comparison to table top games. I mean that's collaborative too, don't get me wrong, but its about three things; artwork, miniatures and writing. And PC games are like that, but its like, twelve things. And they all have to be strong, they all have to be able to talk to each other and work together. But yeah, that's what I was looking for. #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } << BACK COMMENT NEXT >>
Andy Chambers - Part 3
Was Starcraft what brought you over? Is that the project Blizzard hired you for? No. Originally I came over for Blizzard because I'd heard very good things about their games and they had a lot of respect as being a good place to work. So, no, they just sort of took me on. And then eventually they said, "Oh Starcraft 2 ... you'd be good for that wouldn't you? Oh, yeah, sci-fi, yes." I'd work quite well for that. So now there's already a Warhammer game out, there's a new one coming ... after being at Games Workshop for so long, is that a strange thing for you or is it interesting to see it move into that arena? It's interesting to see it move into that. It was always ... there was always some interest around the sides and they've been cutting deals over the years, it's a good IP, so it's good to see it out there in the world. When I was working there it was always something where it was like IP being licensed out to other companies, so there wasn't that much crossover and I was always really intrigued because I was kind of keen on PC games myself, but it was a different matter too, actually being inside the design house right from the get-go. True. And it's sort of weird because Blizzard does that in reverse -- like Fantasy Flight Games develops Blizzard's tabletop games, instead of having those done with an in-house developer. I wonder if they'll ever end up doing that. We tried to play the huge Warcraft board game not too long ago and ... Yes. (laughs) I'm told it's quite an undertaking. Yes, even some hardcore World of Warcraft players I was with said, "Eff that." It was just too much. It's huge! But we may try the Adventure game. I've heard it's a lot easier to get into. But still, people love that game. To be fair, it was at the tail end of Blizzcon. "There's an understanding that a game isn't just a game." Yes. Yeah. This is why I talk about IP, because increasingly, as we get into the 21st century, there's an understanding that a game isn't just a game, it's an expression of and part of an IP. And soon, bigger companies, or as companies grow, they look at how they can express their IP in numerous places -- novels, comics, t-shirts, baseball caps -- whatever it happens to be. So yeah, the opportunities ... it's really interesting to see it grow across the board. And, you know, we're interested in doing the same sort of things with our IP too. The three campaigns that are coming out, I know there's an undetermined gap of time between each one, ostensibly to work on it I guess... Yes, however long it takes us, basically. Is each one sort of self-contained, or will the story have open-ended questions that the next campaign will answer? Hmm, it is very hard for me to say at this point. Yeah, because you guys probably haven't even started much on the second one. "We want them -- I want them -- to be standalone stories." Well, we know what goes off in the second one. How much you could just pick up that second one and dive right in there and it will all make perfect sense, and it would all play through really well ... if we do our jobs well, then, yeah, that should absolutely be the case. We want them, I want them, to be standalone stories. But to what extent you could actually pick up chapter two out of a three-chapter story, and be able to just read it, play it, on its own, in a vacuum ... I don't know. In an ideal universe, yes, absolutely. But also the fact that the events are going to follow on from the first game means that, again ... well, I suppose if you had any idea what the high points of the first game you'd probably be well set up for the second one anyway. I just wondered if there'll be some kind of, "Previously in Starcraft 2..." catch-up video. Well we'll need to do something like that, yeah. Whether its something that's just there at the up-front of the game, or the loader or what have you tells you what the previous story was, or whether its just like, salted away somewhere and like, "Well if you want to find out what happened in the first episode, look here," sort of thing. I don't know. It's something we'll have to give consideration to. #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } << BACK COMMENT
Interview: Andy Chambers on writing StarCraft 2
Andy Chambers has a lot of industry work under his belt, having worked at Games Workshop for more than 14 years before joining Blizzard in 2006. He's currently the creative director on Starcraft 2, which makes him the perfect guy to quiz about the single-player aspect of the game. It's an enormously ambitious project, which still hasn't been entirely figured out yet -- and that's the main reason for the delay Blizzard announced recently.%Gallery-69481%
New Starcraft 2 videos: cinematic trailer and some single player gameplay
Consider yourself spoiler-warned: there's a very familiar face at the end of the cutscene above. But, if you played through Starcraft and the Brood War expansion, you had to know this particular person was still around. But the statute of limitations on that expired eons ago, so don't blame us. Feast your eyes on all of the Protoss kicking Zerg butt in the Starcraft 2 cutscene above (or download the massive 490MB high-def version here), and then head beyond the jump to see more than four minutes from the single-player version of the game. Sadly, it doesn't feature the fully-rendered Jim Raynor that you'll control throughout (read about that in our hands-on), but it does pimp out the unit upgrading and the new video screens. And plus ... it's Starcraft 2. Do we really need to say more?
Hands-on: Starcraft 2 - the single-player experience (finally!)
Don't you just love embargoes? So do we. Expect a ton of StarCraft 2 information today. Forget everything you know about StarCraft 2. Well, forget everything you know about the single-player campaign in StarCraft 2. Which at this point is pretty much ... nothing. We've told you all about the multiplayer and its upcoming changes, but the single-player experience has been one gigantic black hole. Until now. We recently spent a day at Blizzard's campus learning all about StarCraft 2's Wings of Liberty Terran campaign, the first in a series with the Zerg and Protoss expansions coming at a later date. One thing is for sure: this isn't anything like the old StarCraft single-player campaign. Read on to find out what you'll be doing with Jim Raynor throughout the 30 or so missions in StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty.%Gallery-69481%
JBO: Joystiq Box Office, August 10 - August 14
We can't be gaming all the time, despite our best efforts, and from time to time we'll actually take advantage of the movie-playing abilities on our gaming systems. JBO features our top picks for XBL, PSN, Netflix's Watch Instantly and Blu-ray each week.Recommendation of the Week: Metropolitan (Mac/PC or Xbox Live, subscription required: starts at $8.99 per month):Pretentious, talky, and without any action in it whatsoever. So what makes Whit Stillman's classic Metropolitan so good? He just has a way of making the upper crust of New York seem vapidly interesting. The characters seem extremely real, and even though it's a slow film, it doesn't seem like a long one. Although Stillman hasn't directed a movie since 1998's The Last Days of Disco, his writing and directing has influenced both Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach. Watch Metropolitan and you'll see why. Read for the full list on a system-by-system basis just after the break. As usual, we'll see you at the popcorn st ... well, actually we won't see you at all. But you catch our drift. Plus, be sure to tell us what you'll be watching, or what you've seen recently that bowled you over.
Steve Swasey interview - Part 2
Are new users coming to Xbox Live solely because of the ability to stream Netflix? I have a friend who isn't a gamer, but she bought an Xbox 360 just for Netflix. Is that astat you can track, new Xbox users coming just because of Netflix? I guess that might even be a question for Microsoft.It might be a question for Microsoft. It is kind of the same question you asked me earlier which I kind of ducked. You aren't releasing numbers, right.But we have heard anecdotally that people are doing that. Obviously, at $199 and then a $50 a year membership -- so for $250 you get not only the streaming instantly from Netflix but a great game console. If you are in the market for a new device to plug into your TV, you have the Roku which is $100 and plays Netflix and also has Amazon on it, or you have Blu-ray disc players that play discs, and then you have a game console in the Xbox 360.Some people choose the Blu-ray disc player because they want all Blu-ray. Some people choose the Roku because it is the low cost leader. And then some people choose the Xbox because it has the instant watching functionality form Netflix, but it also has the great games and all the other stuff that an Xbox comes with if you have the gold membership; you know, the marketplace, and you can download movies there, too.So it is really depending on what each individual consumer's tastes and desires are. Are Netflix films available in HD when you are streaming them?Some. We have several hundred available out of the 12,000 movies and TV episodes. But what is in HD, it is really brilliant. A lot of the TV shows like The Office is HD and other TV episodes that are filmed in HD. But we have not converted the whole catalogue to HD. That is a time consuming process that we just haven't taken on. But if the source material that we get is originally in HD, then we just stream them in HD.How long did it take when Netflix first started working with Microsoft before we first saw it available on the system? Was that a long period of time? Was it relatively quick?I am going to kind of duck that one Kevin. It is all relative. Netflix has been around for 10 years. We announced this functionality a little more than a year ago, so in that regard it was pretty quick. Did Netflix have to revisit all of your agreements with studios when you were like, "OK. We are going to start streaming on a game console," or was that already covered under the streaming agreement that you guys have with them? Because everything seems to have been available, but I remember, for a brief period some Sony films were not appearing on the service and then they were restored. "When we started streaming in January of 2007 on the PC only, we had about 1,800 titles. And now we have more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes." Each title is its own contract and its own negotiation. Netflix has more than 100,000 titles available on DVD. And the catalog for instant watching is more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes. So it is a smaller catalogue, but it is growing obviously. But then, remember this. When we started streaming in January of 2007 on the PC only, we had about 1,800 titles. And now we have more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes. And we have been at 12,000 for a number of months. So in about two years we have scaled from 1,800 to 12,000. And that is commensurate with the growth of DVD.When we started the subscription service at Netflix in September of 1999, we started it with 3,790 titles. So just less than 4,000 titles on DVD in 1999; now more than 100,000 titles. So we have incrementally cloned the title count on DVD year, after year, after year for 10 years up to 100,000.So it is not the same ratio exactly, but 1,800 titles to more than 12,000 in two years is pretty good growth. Now as I said, each negotiation is its own entity, so some titles come and go. It is part of the ebb and flow of title availability for streaming because it is a different license, as you know, to stream something and put it out over the Internet. It is more similar to a broadcast license than straight purchase of a DVD.Speaking of DVDs, the studios have been slightly worried because DVD sales have been dropping. Netflix obviously has seen how popular the streaming has become. Physical media just seems like it will eventually drop by the wayside. Does Netflix see it that way?The answer to your question is yes, but immediately amended by, "That is a long time from now." If you see Netflix as a three act play, right now we are in the early minutes of the 2nd act, act two being the bundles service of both DVDs by mail and Blu-ray by mail and instant watching. The first act was all DVDs and the third act will be all streaming. But the third act is a long time away, because we believe that the growth of DVD rental with Netflix will go on. We will continue growing the DVD rental business and Netflix for another 4-9 years at least. And then there is going to be another 10 years or so of continued adoption, albeit on a downward trend.So we are looking at maybe 20 years more of DVD rentals, which is really consistent with CDs. CDs peaked at retail in 2000. But they continued to grow in sales at Amazon until 2006. So CDs just peaked at Amazon about 2 ½ years ago, and yet people are still buying CDs. So the physical medium isn't dead. With iTunes, and MP3 players, and everything else, the CD medium is still alive and is still vibrant. But you don't see Sam Goody, and Tower, and Virgin. So you don't see the physical stores anymore, but you still see them being sold online nine years after the peak.So we think the same is going to hold true for DVDs. Now the reason the DVD sales are down is because we are in the worst economic recession that we have been in in our lifetime and maybe even in many of our parents' lifetimes. We kind of forget this notion of their being a recession going on.If you were at the grocery story eight months ago and there was Monty Python and the Holy Grail sitting there for $15.99, you nab it. If you are at the grocery story today and She's Gotta Have It is sitting there, you know, Spike Lee, great movie. But you know what? "My friend has been out of work for six months. I am not going to buy that." That is what is going on with DVD sales. It is not that people are not interested in the medium. It is that there is a recession.But movie studios have also been reporting a record year. And that has also been sort of attributed to the recession. People are like, "We want to get out of the house and not think about our problems."Entertainment has always done well in poor economic times. The Great Depression was one of the golden eras for Hollywood movies. My parents tell me about it. They lived through the Great Depression. They are in their 80's. For 25 cents they would go to a double feature on a Saturday afternoon and forget about being poor. "We think we are going to be sending physical goods until 2020-2030." So I am very bullish on the entertainment and film industry, and we are seeing great movies. The box office is up. Netflix is up. And I think that the DVD sales decline is mostly due to the recession. I think people are still interested in collecting the physical goods, and they will be, although on a downward trend, just like CDs are on a downward trend. But the rental of DVDs we believe is going to grow for up to another decade and then of course be prevalent as they go into decline. So we think we are going to be sending physical goods until 2020-2030.A couple of years from now we will be talking about being in the middle of Act 2. And then a decade from now we will be talking about being at the end of Act 2. And then sometime around ... I can't give a specific date, but you get the idea. We will be in Act 3 when we are streaming only and there is no physical disc.My kids will be cleaning out their attic and they will say, "What was this round silver disc? Did you go skeet shooting with it?"One thing that you can't bring really to the streaming experience is all the extra materials; the director's commentary, etc. Are there plans to try to offer that via streaming or is that just too big of a hurdle?The encoding process is time consuming and relatively costly for taking the source material, putting it on digital, and then streaming it. That is another benefit of the DVD. There hasn't been that much demand for it, because most people that watch that tend to watch it over and over. The people that watch the director's commentary, and the outtakes, and the subtitles and all that, not the subtitles for translation but the director's commentary overlaying of the film, like a trivia track, those tend to be the real movie buffs that will watch it over and over again. So they are happy with the DVDs. They can just keep plugging the DVD in.So there hasn't been very much interest expressed at all in streaming all the extra features. When you were talking about disc based movies, obviously disc based games are a big concern for gamers and they are expensive to purchase. The rental market is pretty robust. Gamefly has a similar model to Netflix. Has Netflix talked about getting into the game space at all or is it just going to focus on movies? "We are not interested in games. It is a whole different economic model." We are not interested in games. It is a whole different economic model. Games have a shorter shelf life. A great movie, like The Conversation from 1972, is still a great movie. But a video game from 10 years ago is toast. Having said that, I would love to see a game based on The Conversation where you have to eavesdrop on someone. That would be a great game.Yeah. It is one of my top favorite movies of all time. I am glad you appreciate it Kevin. It is a good one.It's a great movie. People seem to forget. It came out inbetween the Godfather movies, but it's still Francis Ford Coppola. That movie was nominated for Best Pictures and he lost to himself, with Godfather, Part II.Exactly. I don't know if you know David Leonhardt from the New York Times. He writes economic columns on Wednesdays. He did a story a number of years ago. He asked me to check into a movie from the early '70s that would not have any life if not for Netflix. So I did some research on one of my top five movies, which is The Conversation.Anyway, he led his column with an anecdote about The Conversation being one of Coppola's favorite movies that nobody heard about. And so Coppola called our CEO Reed Hastings and invited him to lunch. And I told Reed, "Did you tell him that I was the one that sent Leonhardt The Conversation as one of my top favorite movies? Can I come to lunch with Coppola?" Well, I will close this one out with that. And maybe he will at least send you a case of his wine or something like that.I'd buy it anyways. It is good wine. #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } << BACK COMMENT
Interview: Netflix on Xbox Live
Last month we spoke with Last.fm about the service coming to the Xbox 360, and what it would mean for users. Then we turned around to get the Xbox side of things as well. We've decided to talk to all of the social media that's making the leap to the Xbox: Last.fm, Netflix, Facebook, and Twitter. In this interview, we speak with Steve Swasey, vice president of marketing for Netflix. Although Netflix isn't in the business of releasing stats on individual devices, an industry source told us that the Xbox has been the biggest of all, over the Roku Box and other options. Over one million Xbox gold members have used the Netflix service on their consoles. Neither Roku nor the LG Blu-ray players with Netflix built-in have hit that number. With the new Netflix experience increasing the functionality by letting users add movies from the Xbox, and providing a new party mode, it will most likely continue to grow in popularity. We spoke with Swasey recently about the new experience on the Xbox 360, what other devices they're looking into, and the future of Netflix in both physical and streaming media. Read on for the full interview after the break.%Gallery-68686%
Watch gaming doc 'Second Skin' now, free
We've teased you with Second Skin before, but now you can watch the whole thing online for free. Word of warning: If you're a World of Warcraft player, or belong to any other obsessive MMO, the film doesn't paint a very flattering picture. But having said that, it does treat the subject matter with some respect by showing all facets: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza and Victor Piñeiro have put together a surprisingly good documentary that pulls back the cover on the other side of the screen. Until now, you couldn't see this work outside the film festival circuit, but thanks to Hulu, you can watch the entire movie after the break. Grab your popcorn and head on in!Additionally, Second Skin will be released on DVD on August 25.[Via Film School Rejects]
JBO: Joystiq Box Office, August 3 - August 7
We can't be gaming all the time, despite our best efforts, and from time to time we'll actually take advantage of the movie-playing abilities on our gaming systems. JBO features our top picks for XBL, PSN, Netflix's Watch Instantly and Blu-ray each week.With the sad passing of writer/director John Hughes yesterday, we're featuring an all-Hughes JBO. The man left a lasting impression on audiences and filmmakers throughout the 1980s, and his movies helped define that generation while providing them with numerous lines to quote.Recommendation of the Week: The Breakfast Club (PlayStation Store: $4.50 HD, $2.99 SD to rent, $9.99 to own SD):Nothing says the 1980s more loudly than The Breakfast Club, and the iconic Simple Minds song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" has been drilled into many heads as an anthem for Generation X. It's a near perfect film, although John Hughes' original cut was two and a half hours long. Universal trimmed it down to 97 minutes, and destroyed all of the negatives. Talk about boneheaded. Apparently Hughes himself had the only complete copy. Let's hope we can see it some day. Read for the full list on a system-by-system basis just after the break. As usual, we'll see you at the popcorn st ... well, actually we won't see you at all. But you catch our drift. Plus, be sure to tell us what you'll be watching, or what you've seen recently that bowled you over.
Risk: Halo Wars gets a bombastic, gameplay-free trailer
There's enough fanfare in this trailer to make Michael Bay proud. Actually, make that a pre-CGI Michael Bay. Probably a film school-era Michael Bay. It has all the bombast and fanfare of a Michael Bay movie, just without all of the extremely fast intercutting and multiple explosions. We talked about Risk: Halo Wars back in January, and it's slowly but surely becoming a reality.According to the game's website, it's due out in August 2009 -- which is right now, last time we checked the calendar. One word to the creators: give us a trailer showing some actual gameplay, and not just rotating views of the gamepieces and some concept art. Maybe you can even hire an aging celebrity to be in a commercial for the game, just like Milton Bradley did with Dark Tower back in the day.Just a thought.
Interview: Watchmen: The End is Nigh producer Andy Abramovici
We didn't exactly love Watchmen: The End is Nigh, Part 1 when it came out earlier this year, and now there's a sequel. Although it was always planned to be a two-parter in order to avoid the shoehorn effort of rushing a movie/game adaptation into development, how do you handle building the second half of a game that got raked across the coals by critics on its first outing? We spoke with Warner Bros Interactive producer Andy Abramovici about both halves of the game, the retail packages, and if we might ever see an actual Watchmen RPG, or indeed any other game at all. Watchmen purists and PS3 owners out there might want to pick up Watchmen: The End Is Nigh The Ultimate Experience to get the director's cut and both halves of the game. Read on for the interview, which does not include first-hand descriptions of WBIE employees reading our review and cursing our name.%Gallery-69401%
JBO: Joystiq Box Office, July 20 - July 31
We can't be gaming all the time, despite our best efforts, and from time to time we'll actually take advantage of the movie-playing abilities on our gaming systems. JBO features our top picks for XBL, PSN, Netflix's Watch Instantly and Blu-ray each week.We had to skip the Joystiq Box Office last week, due to the fact that Comic-Con took over this particular writer's duties (if interested, you can see some of what went on both here and over on Cinematical). Luckily, a lot of good stuff has come out in the meantime, and we're back!Recommendation of the Week: Watchmen: The End is Nigh The Complete Experience (Blu-ray: $49.99 SRP): You probably figured this one was coming. What you might not have figured on is the incredibly amazing Maximum Movie Mode that this Blu-ray brings to your player. It's a great way of presenting special features, with the director giving commentary on the screen, while the movie plays behind him on one panel, with the features unfolding on the other. Sensory overload, in the best possible way. Plus, you get 25 extra minutes of footage in the director's cut, and Parts 1 and 2 of the Watchmen: The End is Nigh game. Not a bad package. Read for the full list on a system-by-system basis just after the break. As usual, we'll see you at the popcorn st ... well, actually we won't see you at all. But you catch our drift. Plus, be sure to tell us what you'll be watching, or what you've seen recently that bowled you over.
Interview: Magic the Gathering -- Duels of the Planeswalkers
Duels of the Planeswalkers was released at the beginning of summer on Xbox Live Arcade, and it's a surprisingly competent take on the traditional Magic card game. The XBLA game is immediately familiar and also easy enough for first-timers to jump in and learn the ropes. There's a robust tutorial, all of the cards are real Magic cards, and the multiplayer features multiple modes of play, including four-on-four battles and "Two-Headed Giant," where a team of two faces off against another team of two. In short, it's addictive.We recently spoke with Worth Wollpert, senior business manager for Magic Online, and Mark Purvis, associate brand manager, both at Wizards of the Coast. The subject at hand was all things Duels of the Planeswalkers: there's some DLC on the way, and possibly other changes to the game -- but no deck customization (boo!). For now, the team is happy to let the game bring lapsed players back into the fold, and to introduce new players to the tapping and shuffling of Magic: The Gathering. Continue reading for the full interview.%Gallery-30916%
Interview: Magic the Gathering -- Page 2
One of the features that players really want in this game is the ability to build custom decks, especially since you unlock cards as you progress in the game. Why did you guys not include this feature? Is it going to be added in a future update?Worth: Well, I can't say a whole lot about it, but it was a distinct design decision to do it the way we did it. On the flip side, many people on our "Duel with Developers" event that we ran a few weeks ago -- a few of the people I played specifically told me that they were happy not to be able to have to mess with that kind of thing. Like Mark alluded to earlier, the audience for this game is lapsed players and new players mostly. We figured our hardcore players would buy it just because of the brand of Magic, but really we were trying to target some new players. "I would never expect that we are going to go full deck customization, full deck manager, and all that kind of thing." That is a pretty big barrier for a new player, especially one who is not familiar with TCGs at all. I think it is one of the things that will keep them in the game, at least to finish Duels and then have themselves be, in their own mind, a Magic player and to not have to worry about, "I am going to play some guy who has tweaked his deck and maybe played on the pro tour, and I am just going to get stomped. I have no chance." As I was giving a demo for my execs a couple of weeks ago, I was online playing a live match with a deck against another guy who was quite clearly pretty bad at Magic, but he was kicking my butt. I mean he was crushing me. That is because the decks are pretty fairly matched. So a lot of it is just deck on deck stuff rather than player on player. Really, the fun of Magic is being able to play a game and not get blown out, right? A lot of times people don't care if they lose. They just want to be able to cast stuff and attack and have fun.Mark: As a consumer of the game, because I have been playing it as I demoed it, I think there is still ... the fact that you can customize the cards that you unlock and still choose which deck you pilot through the campaign, there are still a lot of choices to be made in how you customize your experience in it, and I think that is definitely one of the appealing things to a franchised player. Worth: And as far as would we think about changing our mind later on, we have talked about it. I think there might be room for a little bit of slack. I would never expect that we are going to go full deck customization, full deck manager, and all that kind of thing. But I think we realize that maybe we could let people mess around with the sideboard a little bit more than we do. None of that stuff is set in stone or anything like that. But that is one of the main complaints on the threads and we definitely see that, and we take it into account when we are talking about future expansions and such.Xbox Live is perfect for features like tournaments and leaderboards. Have you guys thought about having any Planeswalkers tournaments? They are such a big part of the paper card game.Worth: We have definitely thought about it. The infrastructure is not quite there to do what we want to do from our standpoint with Duels of the Planeswalkers. But there are third party sites. I have seen a couple of threads that are setting up tournaments and their own ladders and things like that. I can't remember the names of the top of my head, but there are threads, front page probably, even on the Xbox forums where they talk about tournaments and such.Why can't you play Two-Headed Giant on two different Xbox consoles?Worth: Yeah. It is a question we have been getting a lot. It was really kind of a design decision. When you are designing software, I am not sure how familiar you are with it, there is some stuff that you would like to have, and then at the end of the day you realize, "We could have this now or we could have the thing we want six months from now." The conscious choice was to say, "We don't want this. We need to ship this. We feel like it is a good product without it. And if enough people say they want it, we can revisit on down the line." There is always this give and take with how much you put in to ship versus how much you put in later, you know what I mean? You could theoretically be on the drawing board forever. Has there ever been any sort of talk, on the paper side, about putting in unique online only cards? Like a token to unlock cards in Planeswalkers?Mark: I would say that from time to time we have discussions about that sort of thing, specifically with Magic Online, but it is not something that we have in the works at this time for paper Magic doing a direct crossover. We have been really excited about the way the community has embraced Duels of the Planeswalkers and the success of the game just in the couple of weeks that it has been launched. So we are talking about ways to tie that in more with the paper product, but nothing concrete at this time.Was the idea always, from the beginning, to make Planeswalkers simple in order to bring in people who had probably not played Magic before, but also to bring back old, paper players?Worth: I would say that is a fair statement. Magic Online lacks a sort of place where a new player can go and feel comfortable and not overwhelmed. Like I said, we knew that the penetration level amongst console owners was so high amongst our target audience, for the folks who haven't played before, they would have the same kind of comments, like "surprisingly addictive" and "a really good game."Magic has been around for fifteen years and we know it is a great game. It is one of the best strategy games ever and probably the best TCG ever. So we just wanted to make sure we delivered it in a way that was relevant to today's gaming consumer.What is happening on the paper end? What are you guys gearing up for?Mark: Well we are coming to the end of the Shards of Alara block, which has been a really successful. The last set of that was Alara Reborn where every single card, if you are a Magic player this will mean something to you, every single card in the entire set is gold. But as far as things on the horizon, we are just around the corner from the launch of our Magic 2010 core set. This is one of the reasons why I think it is such an exciting time to be a Magic player. The core sets are generally sets that we release very couple of years that are full of reprints. This time around we really reinvented the wheel with this core set. It harkens back to the very beginnings of Magic where every single card is very based in fantasy. The set is full of dragons, and vampires, and angels, and elves, and a lot of things that general fans of fantasy will be familiar with.The other big change throughout this core set is that it is not entirely reprints. Half the cards in the set are brand new cards. We are excited about all the people that are being re-exposed or exposed for the first time for Magic through Duels, and it is a great time for them to come over and take a look at paper Magic because of this core set that comes out on July 17.We completely changed how we are naming the editions. This, under the old naming convention, would be the eleventh edition. But because there are so many changes going on with this core set, we have completely re-titled the core set, so it is the Magic 2010 core set. Concerning the EA-Hasbro agreement: I'm guessing Planeswalkers falls outside since it is not published by Electronic Arts. Are you guys not under that umbrella agreement?We are. This game was specifically carved out when they were discussing that. It was certainly in development when that deal was being talked about. Given that Planeswalkers targets new players and people who haven't played in a while, how do you go about marketing the game? There's the simple presence of being on Xbox Live, but that doesn't hit everyone. What are you guys doing on your end? Do you advertise in magazines? Are you on the web virally? What is your strategy?Worth: It is a couple different pronged approaches. Mark alluded to the free Planeswalker promo cards, the codes that come with all the purchases. So there was that bit. It certainly was plastered all over our website. We have our product detail pages and games pages on Xbox.com on the threads in forums there.As far as external marketing from Wizards point of view, I don't have a site list in front of me, but I did see a PR plan that included some other sites. I can't think of them off the top of my head. But I know there has been marketing for Duels on external sites. Mark: And while we know that this game is bringing a lot of people into the brand or bringing them back into the brand, we also know that our enfranchised players are enjoying this game a lot and spreading the word and really evangelizing this game. So that has really helped in making us the number one game the first week it was released. Worth: First two weeks.Mark: Was it the first two weeks? That is awesome. It helps get the word out and spread the word when you have a game that is that successful. I think that the success right out of the gates is, in large part, owed to our enfranchised player base.Worth: For sure.Would you ever expand the single-player component? That's been a good way to jump in, especially for new players.Worth: Definitely in the works. It probably will come with any DLC announcement like an expansion announcement or whatever. It is nothing that I can talk about right now. I do want to mention something that I forgot to earlier, that the single player experience includes a bunch of puzzles which we have gotten tons of great feedback on, on both enfranchised players and new players alike. Some of the puzzles are fairly simple. As you get up the ladder they get pretty complex. I am not sure if you have played any of them.I have. Those are great -- and very frustrating when you get higher up the ladder. Worth: They all have solutions. I did them all last night.I would hope they all have solutions, or you guys would have some angry fans. So, if there was an announcement about DLC, do you think it would be something that would be coming this year, or would we look for it sometime in 2010?Worth: Definitely this year. You guys will have an announcement of what is coming up.Not to use Battlegrounds as a bad example, but it wasn't a game that was universally beloved. Planeswalkers has just really impressed.Worth: I should throw a shout out to our developer. They really did a great job. Stainless Games based over in the UK. They really hit the ball out of the park on this one. They live and breathe Magic, and that was obvious from their submission when we were looking for vendors. We chose the right vendor, no question.You mentioned Shandalar earlier. Would you guys ever do another game like that?Worth: It is a good question. There were a lot of things that were good about Shandalar, and there were some things I think that we, as a company, considered not so good. I don't know. I think the answer is maybe. That is not a very good answer, I know. We are definitely reevaluating how we take Magic into the digital space nowadays. That was a long time ago. There were some new learnings in the last 10 years and stuff still about that game that people love and was good.Is Magic Online fairly active or is it still in a stasis state right now?Worth: A lot of the people that are playing Duels are jumping into Magic Online, and we are looking into some ways that we can make that experience as smooth as possible for them as they get into Duels and they play through all of the content and they are looking for more. They can find it in Magic Online now and we are seeing that. #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } << BACK COMMENT
Interview: Ace Attorney Investigations producer Motohide Eshiro
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth will finally be legislating onto North American shelves in February of 2010, letting players take up the prosecuting side for the first time in the series. Luckily, you'll still be able to shout OBJECTION! in Phoenix Wright fashion as much as you want.Joystiq met up with game producer Motohide Eshiro at in Capcom's booth at Comic-Con, which featured playable versions of the game and some very sweet swag. We asked him what else we can expect from the game, when we'll be able to play as the judge, and what his thoughts were on all the crazy fans in San Diego. Read on for the full interview.Update! Be sure and check out the photo at the end of the interview where Eshiro-san meets up with a cosplaying Miles Edgeworth at Comic-Con.%Gallery-68609%