gamescom-2012
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Blade & Soul is headed west
Gamescom 2012 was not a show of many big surprises. Fans and press alike were mostly given in-depth looks at things to come for existing franchises and games that were announced at E3 or even before that. But that doesn't mean that there were no exciting little bits of information to be scrounged up here and there. In Cologne, we sat down for a chat with NCsoft's Stephen Levy as he spilled the beans on Korean martial arts MMO Blade & Soul, but we haven't been allowed to talk about it until today. The best part? Blade & Soul is headed west.
James Bond meets Virtua Cop: The development of Rare's GoldenEye 007
During GDC Europe 2012, former Rare developer Martin Hollis recounted his experience directing GoldenEye 007, one of the most fondly remembered games of its time and a landmark title in the history of console first-person shooters. Hollis had only worked on one game for Rare at the time, the arcade version of Killer Instinct. When the opportunity arose to pursue a James Bond game in early 1995, Hollis jumped at the chance; as the video above demonstrates, he was a pretty big fan.The rest is gaming history. Hollis went over far too much for us to condense into a single piece (in fact, we've already written two others), but we've compiled some of the highlights after the break. Read on to discover how one of GoldenEye's primary influences was actually Sega's Virtua Cop. In the gallery below, you'll find images of some of GoldenEye's original design documents and some behind the scenes stories from the original team. %Gallery-164095%
Gamescom 2012: District 187, Hounds, and Monarch
During this year's Gamescom, we met with the folks of CJ Games for a coffee near Cologne's central station, away from the hectic crowds of the show floors, to talk about what the Korean giant has in store for us in the near future. Earlier this year, CJ Games opened its North American subsidiary, which is tasked with bringing some of the company's most popular games to western audiences, and we were curious as to what it's got cooking. Jon-Enée Merriex, producer at CJ Games, talked us through three of the studio's upcoming titles: District 187: Sin Streets, Monarch, and Hounds.
Gamescom 2012: Talking Firefall with David Williams
Firefall has undergone quite a few changes over time just like most betas. As the size of the testing base slowly grows to massive proportions, more and more input fuels the ideas-machine at Red 5 Studios as it improves an already-impressive game. The immense booth at this year's Gamescom was testament to the amount of ambition the developers have for this free-to-play MMOTPS, and the sheer number of convention-goers in, up, and around the booth revealed no shortage of interest in the game. We were led into a small, air-conditioned room in the undercrofts of this behemoth of a booth so that we could have an intimate chat with Firefall's Lead Class Designer, David Williams, away from the noise of the show floor crowd.
Seen@Gamescom: Gran Turismo 5's Audi R8 controller
The city of Cologne, Germany, home to the country's annual Gamescom convention, is full of beautiful cars (proof!). During our week-long stay, I counted at least six Audi R8s in the wild. That includes this one, used to casually control a game of Gran Turismo 5 (by an underage driver, no less).As you might imagine, a line held steady around the massive, moving Audi R8 shell. It certainly didn't hurt that the device was smack in the middle of a street fair many blocks away from Gamescom's enormous facilities on the other side of the Rhine. We can only imagine the line had it been anywhere near the hundreds of thousands of Gamescom attendees!
Gamescom 2012: Behind closed doors with Trion Worlds
Germany is crazy about MMOs. Proof of this was the Gamescom attendance of almost all major players in the genre, showing off what they had in store. Trion Worlds -- known well to fans of RIFT, Defiance, and End of Nations -- was no exception. The studio gave us a closer look at some of what it's got in store for us: RIFT's first real expansion, Storm Legion, and brand-new third-person sci-fi shooter Defiance. Jump past the break to read all about them.
Enter at Your Own Rift: RIFT's upcoming housing boom
Have no doubt, it's been an absolutely barnburner of a week or so for RIFT. As Trion Worlds chugs toward the unknown release date for Storm Legion, we've seen the reveal of the first new soul (the Harbinger), a special annual subscription offer, a tour of several areas of the expansion from Gamescom, and oh yeah, news that Trion's all but eliminating factional barriers. And with all that, do you know what everyone's jabbering on about in the forums? Housing. Housing, housing, housing! It doesn't surprise me; as a long-time proponent of player housing, I know full well the powerful attraction and appeal housing has when done right (emphasis on the last three words there). Housing gives players a sense of attachment to the game world, an outlet for creativity, and a personalized place to socialize. And finally we've heard the first concrete details (with video footage!) of RIFT's dimensions. There's no avoiding it; there's going to be a huge housing boom in RIFT come this fall. So what will it look like?
Gamescom 2012: Cryptic's Neverwinter
Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 are games that live vividly in memories of gamers around the globe, especially those with a passion for Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy RPGs. If you are one of them, rejoice because the next instalment in the series, developed by Cryptic Studios and published by Perfect World, will go massively multiplayer. We were at Gamescom this year to take a closer look at this upcoming free-to-play title, and Craig Zinkievich, Cryptic's COO and executive producer of Neverwinter, was on hand to fill us in on the details.
Solving the League of Legends community problem one player at a time
As any of its millions of players will tell you, League of Legends is a fun game. Those same players will likely also tell you that the game has a tremendously steep learning curve. With more than 100 playable champions, a dizzying array of items and demanding gameplay, getting to know the ropes is no easy feat. Speaking with senior producer Travis George at Gamescom, I asked how developer Riot Games was going to address the issue of easing players into League of Legends.The game already features bot training and a spectator mode, but what other systems could Riot implement to acclimate new players? His answer surprised me: The problem isn't the learning curve, it's the community.%Gallery-163142%
Larian Studios' Gamescom still a success despite having two PCs stolen
Divinity franchise dev Larian Studios had a successful trip to Gamescom, even though two of the company's PCs were stolen containing early builds of Divinity: Dragon Commander and Divinity: Original Sin. "The team is using backup PCs, so no issues there," Larian said in a statement issued during the show. A video montaging Larian's antics at Gamescom also captures Larian president Swen Vincke reacting to the burglary in real time."How do you feel about somebody physically stealing your games?" he's asked. "I feel very bad bad about it. I feel like I've been raped actually. It wasn't only my games that were on there, there were also personal documents on there. So I hate it. I think the person should be crucified," Vincke said, clearly still upset."There's very little I can do, I'll keep on smiling. I'll give $5,000 to whoever gets me my PC back," Vincke added. As of now, Larian tells us it hasn't gotten its hardware back, nor have any builds of the two stolen games surfaced online (at least that Larian's seen). Nor has Larian heard from the culprits. If you'd like to get in contact with the studio to offer information, shoot the devs an email right here.
15 minutes of Ni no Kuni footage straight from Gamescom (bonus: British hosts!)
The Gamescom demo of Ni no Kuni was hands-on and, as expected, full of adorable moments. GameSpot UK's editor supreme Guy Cocker narrates the proceedings alongside Namco's Hollie Bennett, which can be seen above.
CD Projekt Red on killing your favorite features
Adding a feature to a game might seem like a fairly straightforward process, but even a simple one can have much bigger ramifications than you might think at first glance. During GDC Europe 2012, CD Projekt Red gameplay producer Marek Ziemak and lead gameplay designer Maciej Szczesnik detailed the process that the developer uses to evaluate any features that could make their way into a project.CD Projekt Red uses a set of internal documents that the studio's employees all have access to. Using these documents, developers can describe their features and the rest of the staff evaluates them. In some cases, staffers even apply numerical values to a proposed feature, with the final "score" affecting the likelihood that a feature will make it into the game. The overarching idea is to fully analyze the risk of a feature and the consequences of implementing it.%Gallery-163035%
Gamescom 2012: Hands on with LotRO's Riders of Rohan
In a small room at the center of WB Games' business headquarters at Gamescom, Lord of the Rings Online Live Producer Aaron Campbell is sitting with a broad smile behind his 27-inch screen. "I love those orange skies," he says, excited. "It's something new we've put in this expansion. It looks beautiful!" He takes visible pride in his work. It's a contagious cheerfulness that would dominate our entire Gamescom sit-down with Turbine this year as we took a look at LotRO's upcoming fourth expansion, Riders of Rohan.
How do you make a raid?
Over at this year's Gamescom, I was lucky enough to be among a small group invited to a Blizzard round table on Raids and Dungeons, where we sat down with Blizzard's Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas and Lead Game Producer John Lagrave. These two high-end content creators opened the round table by talking the audience through the process of how the Blizzard team goes about making a raid and the trials and tribulations they encounter along the way. This was fascinating to listen to, so I thought I'd share the insights with WoW Insider readers. This is not verbatim quoting throughout, as I simply can't write that fast, but it covers the raid-making process as they described it. How do you make a raid? You start with the lore. Ion and John talked us through the process of making the Firelands raid, so they began from a set of conditions. As Ion put it, "We consider what the idea is. What is this raid going to be about?" So they sit down with the encounter design team as well as the game producers in a meeting room and talk it out.
EA putting 'a lot of resources' toward preventing another 'FIFA hack' season
Electronic Arts made over $39 million in just three months off FIFA 12's Ultimate Team DLC last year – a 69 percent increase from the same period the year before – but it also created a lot of headaches for consumers (and us) with what came to be known as the "FIFA hack.""We learned a lot from the experience. A lot of companies are suffering from this right now. There's a lot of sophisticated hacking happening in the gaming industry and it's a continuous battle," EA Games president Frank Gibeau told us during Gamescom. "We take it very seriously, put a lot of resources on it. The learning from the FIFA example last year has been incorporated this year. There's some incremental and additional things. I don't want to get too detailed because I don't want to tip our hand. Rest assured, we take it very seriously."Gibeau said that EA did hire someone from Microsoft to add layers of security precautions and other anti-hack methods inside the publisher's products."You're never going to win this battle," said Gibeau, recognizing the company can only go so far. "The moment you declare victory, somebody will walk in and show you didn't. So you have to continuously stay on top of it and, most importantly, keep account integrity the first and foremost issue."So, should consumers feel more confident this year that they won't be hacked?"I hope that they do, and I think our performance will have to make them feel that way." He concluded, "We can promise it, but we have to actually show it."
Hitman: Absolution 'Contracts' can't cross platforms, but community can work around it
Due to "political" issues, Hitman: Absolution's "contracts" won't be transferable across platforms for developer IO Interactive to feature, but there is a way for the community to do it. The recently revealed contracts mode is a major part of Absolution's package – receiving co-billing on the title screen with the campaign – but we wanted to know if IO could help promote prominent challenges accomplished by the community on one platform for another."We'll have to deal with something within the political rules that allow us to do that," Torben Ellert, game designer on Hitman: Absolution told us. "We're interested in featuring community contracts so that we avoid that whole wasp's nest."The way to do that will be for the community to decode the file numbers of contracts after the game's launch. Contract IDs begin with a two-digit number, determining their platform (currently 03- PC, 05- Xbox, 07- PS3), with the following set of digits expressing rules of the scenario."[Contracts] was built in a way for people to asynchronously share things," said Ellert. "The trick is you have to do it yourself. You have to be able to pull it off yourself."Update: To stress, codes can't simply be swapped across platforms. Players on separate platforms will need to complete the aspects of a contract to make it live on that platform. The contract ID simply gives the blueprints for a scenario's rules.%Gallery-162335%
Joe Danger 2: The Movie - the Nintendo-flavored XBLA game with jetpacks
The only place Joe Danger hasn't ended up is on a Nintendo console. Which made Hello Games founder Sean Murray's statement on the game's inspirations distinctly confusing when he told me this last week during Gamescom: "What we always talk about is a kind of 'Nintendo-y' feel. The Nintendo thing for me is they make it look effortless – they just throw in things. If you're playing Mario Galaxy, you're like, 'That one five minutes, most people would make that an entire game.' That's what I really want so badly for people to play unicycle – or any of those ... we've got skis and it's only like two levels – you want someone to play that and think, 'This could've been a whole game and I would've played it. You know what I mean? But I've just had this one little nugget, and it's left me wanting more. And they move on to the next thing, and the next thing, and they feel like – when they unlock a level – 'I wonder what this one's gonna be.' So we've really stuck to that."Like Mario Galaxy, Joe Danger 2: The Movie is pocked by one-off (or perhaps "one or two-off") gameplay vignettes. "The unicycle has that unique lean thing to stay upright, and it's a really fun vehicle. But we just use it once, don't put it anywhere else, and it's a really cool thing when you find that," Murray said. Of course, if you're just way into the unicycle, you can always create levels just for it in the game's revamped, online sharing-enabled level editor.%Gallery-162157%
Co-opinion: XCOM: Enemy Unknown multiplayer
.portal-left { padding: 10px; background: #CCC; margin: 20px 0; min-height: 85px; } .portal-right { padding: 10px; margin: 20px 0; min-height: 85px; } .portal-right img { padding-left: 5px; } .portal-left img { padding-right: 5px; } Richard Mitchell: So Alexander and I got a chance to try out the XCOM: Enemy Unknown multiplayer mode at Gamescom. Both of us played single-player before, so we had some idea of what we were getting into – but multiplayer is an entirely different beast. Using a pool of points, players "purchase" the units that will comprise their team: XCOM soldiers, aliens, or a mix of both. The standard match has a pool of 10,000 points and a turn time of 90 seconds. For this press demo, we had a whopping 20,000 points and 120 seconds. It sounds like a lot of time, but it wasn't – more on that in a bit. What units did you pick? (Keep in mind, folks, I had no idea what I was going to face on the field, and neither did Alexander.) Alexander Sliwinski: I believe in the power of humanity! Actually, no, it's mostly that I'd never played an XCOM game prior to the E3 demo, and I had no idea about each race's powers. So, I went with three human soldiers, two Thin Men and then spent a massive 7,300 points on an assault gunner with an alloy cannon. I figured I'd wipe out any alien scum you threw at me.%Gallery-162799%
Gamescom, GDC EU dates announced for 2013
The more than 275,000 attendees of this year's Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, were the first to see the planned date for the 2013 convention -- if they noticed the large banner hanging overhead, that is. Folks wanting to get a headstart on planning for the event can mark their calendars: The fifth annual Gamescom will be held August 21st through the 25th, 2013. To get in on GDC Europe, plan to get to Cologne a few days earlier as this convention will run August 19th through the 21st, 2013. The 2012 Gamescom saw the introduction of mobile and social titles to the usual line-up of console and PC gaming. Organizers noted that 83 different countries were represented between the exhibitors and trade visitors of the con. GDC EU 2012 broke previous attendance records with over 2,100 game industry professionals attending the event. For more about this year's conventions that just wrapped up, check out Massively's 2012 Gamescom and 2012 GDC Europe coverage.
Joe Danger 2: The Movie flipping to XBLA 'probably in the next month or so'
Joe Danger 2: The Movie from UK dev Hello Games is leaping to your Xbox 360 in the not-too-distant future. "We're pretty much complete," Hello Games head Sean Murray told us at Gamescom during a demo of the upcoming 2D Xbox Live Arcade racer. "We're showing the full game here, and hopefully people like it. Hopefully that means we're nearly finished," he said with a smile.Thankfully for fans excited for the new game, reception at Gamescom was very positive. "It's been good, so the game is actually probably gonna come out in the next month or so. Something like that," Murray said. There's only one thing standing between Joe Danger 2: The Movie and launch – certification. "That's where we're heading into now. We're doing the final, 'We shouldn't be changing anything, but we are.' Don't tell our QA!" And what about PlayStation 3 or PC versions? "At the moment, we're just showing and talking about 360. We kind of haven't made any other announcements or anything like that," Murray said. But? "But obviously the original came out on PS3 and 360, so ...," he trailed off. Take that as you will!You'll also be glad to hear that the game is a load of fun – expect a full writeup from Gamescom 2012 later today.
