austin-gdc-2009
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Listen to Blizzard's "Universe Behind World of Warcraft" keynote from Austin GDC
If you're wondering what the internal goings-on at Blizzard consist of, grab yourself something to eat and kick back. We've got the entire hour-long keynote speech at the Austin Game Developer's Conference down below. Blizzard's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce were on-hand to walk a slightly hungover crowd through the way they make things work and how their teams are organized.Click below for the full audio, or for those of you on the go, download it here.
A look at Blizzard's canceled squad-based sci-fi RPG: Nomad
At this morning's Austin Game Developer's Conference keynote, J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce of Blizzard took the stage to talk about the inner workings of Blizzard. Most of what they covered was stats and trvia. Did you know the Blizzard bug team is currently tracking over 179,484 bugs? Now you do. There are 7,650 quests in WoW since Wrath of the Lich King! Consider yourself informed. Some of the trivia was actually pretty interesting, like the fact that when Blizzard releases a patch, almost half of that data is audio. Pearce also mentioned that BlizzCon is operated "at a substantial loss for Blizzard," but the value is that it's a huge marketing/PR opportunity for them. Considering how many tickets they sell (in only eight minutes), that's around $3.5 million that's written off. Plus whatever Blizzard spends above and beyond that. No wonder Blizzard employees have to buy their own tickets.However, the most interesting part of the keynote was when they briefly spoke about Nomad, the canceled squad-based sci-fi game. Ten years ago, Blizzard put a lot of work in on the game, but eventually looked at it and said "Is this really the game we want to be working on right now? The answer ended up being "no," and the team went on to start work on World of Warcraft. Here we are ten years later with WoW going strong, and no Nomad in sight.They'd mentioned this canceled game, along with a slew of others, at last year's DICE summit, but without any other information. Sadly, the only thing they had to show were pieces of concept art, including some by "The Bourbon Cowboy," Chris Metzen. The art itself isn't that exciting (the best one is above and there's a couple more in the gallery below), but the words "squad-based sci-fi RPG" are exciting. Could this be Blizzard's next game? Possibly mutated into MMO form? Who knows when we'll find out, since one of the stats they flashed onscreen this morning was "Number of Unannounced MMOs: 1." %Gallery-73341%
PSP minis lack network features for fast approval time
Speaking at Austin GDC, Justin Cooney from Sony Computer Entertainment spoke about the upcoming PSP minis program to a crowd of developers eager to start creating games and applications for the system. They promise an extremely fast process to get onto the PlayStation Network: no stage one or two approvals, and very light Q&A. They're hoping to average three to five days for approvals, which contrasts with up to two weeks for normal-sized PSP games.The minis program is also fairly limited. You can't develop network or online features for it (goodbye multiplayer), it doesn't support DLC, and you can't use it to work with peripherals. Developers will also have to have their game approved by the ESRB, which costs money. You can also release your titles in all three territories, but you need to sign agreements with each territory (North America, Japan, Europe) in order to do so.Sony is definitely taking an iPhone App Store approach to this process, and Cooney himself dropped the iPhone name a few times. We're wondering if they've considered that there are over 20k games now on the App Store, and if they've prepared themselves for the onslaught and how they'll be devoting a lot of time to minis approvals. So, look for PSPFart to be available for download sometime soon.%Gallery-73355%
Blizzard is tracking 180,000 bugs in WoW
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/World_of_Warcraft_has_180_000_bugs'; During the keynote today at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Executive Vice President Frank Pearce and Production Director J. Allen Brack spoke at length about the internal workings of the WoW team and how they get their jobs done. One of the more stunning things to come out of the keynote, which we'll have fully written up for you later today, is the fact that there are just under 180k bugs Blizzard is tracking in WoW. That means their bug database has 180,000 entries which are in some stage of being fixed (have been fixed, have not been fixed, or being worked on).To me this number seems very large for a video game. I can understand an operating system like Windows 7 having an unreasonably large number of bugs in it like this, but for a video game -- even one as complex as WoW -- that number is quite astounding.It does raise the inevitable question: what is Blizzard doing to fix all these? And how does this relate to the extremely long wait times for GM contact in game? We also learned that Blizzard only employs 2500 worldwide in Customer Service. That includes things like phone bank operators, GMs, forum mods, etc...
Smedley calls The Agency cancellation rumors 'ridiculous'
We cornered Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley after his Austin GDC keynote (literally -- he was backed into a corner and could not escape us. Sorry, John!) to get some kind of status update on the PS3/PC MMO action game, The Agency. While we didn't get the firm release date we hoped for, Smedley reassured us that the game's in no danger of not coming out. "Next year" was as closely as Smedley could approximate the release date. "Can't get -- because I've been wrong like three times with that game. And we're not going to release it until it's right. But there's this rumor going around that we're going to cancel it -- that's ridiculous." It's worth noting that a cancellation rumor was debunked by SOE in November, but it's been ten months since then! Seems like a good time to assert once again that the game is still in development. "No," Smedley continued, "we're going full-bore towards it. We're simply keeping it under wraps more because we want to make it the best possible game we can. I'm an FPS player first and foremost, so we're going to get that game right, period." Smedley firmly denied that the departure of staff would affect the game's development. %Gallery-3830%
Austin GDC 2009: Phil Fish offers first public demo of Fez
Capping off the "The New Indie Hotness" panel at Austin GDC, Polytron's Phil Fish played an early version of the multidimensional XBLA platformer, Fez, for the audience. Though there were a few issues related to the pre-release state of the game -- specifically, Fish claimed that some platforms were disappearing -- we saw enough to know that this is something to continue following!Fez plays sort of like Super Paper Mario, but with more of an emphasis on optical illusions. It appears as a 2D sidescrolling platformer most of the time, but at any time the player can rotate the entire world 90 degrees along a vertical axis. This allows the player to use optical illusions to navigate the game world. For example, Fish climbed a ladder up the side of one platform, and then rotated the world to reveal another identical platform several yards away. By rotating again, the perspective shifted such that it looked like the ladder was connected to the second platform -- and so it was, and Fish emerged atop the once-distant platform.In another example, Fish tossed a bomb onto a moving platform to expose the entrance to a cave. He walked to the entrance, and then rotated the world 180 degrees to reveal the other side of the rock structure into which the cave had been cut, granting him immediate access to the other side.When Fish paused, we noticed a "leaderboards" item in the pause menu. We don't know as yet what the leaderboards will compare, but at least they'll be there.
