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Sony’s Move motion controller has been described by Sony CEO Jack Tretton as “an extension of what already exists, not a replacement.” Speaking to G4, Tretton said that while Sony has the “most immersive” motion control system, it doesn’t want to “force motion gaming down [users’] throats.”
He said that some users will say “well, I like motion gaming but I prefer my DualShock” and that Sony views it as add-on rather than the core control scheme like it is on the Wii. He also downplayed the Wii’s importance in creating motion gaming, suggesting that Sony’s EyeToy “ushered… in” motion control rather than the Wii’s WiiMote controller.
I caught up with designer/producer/one-man-army Eskil Steenberg at GDC this year, and interviewed him on his incredible one-man-project: Love. Check out the video below then read on for part one of our interview.
Speaking at the final day of GDC, PlayStation Home director Jack Buser told developers that 12 million people currently populate Sony’s Home service. He said that the number was double what it was in June last year and had increased by two million since December.
He said that 85% of users had visited more than once, spending on average an hour per session in the virtual world. Who knows what they’re doing for that one hour, but it probably isn’t worth knowing. He told the devs that Sony’s focus was to create a service that embraces “total game integration” and that we can expect to see more minigames and other content, making Home “an incredibly important part of [Sony’s] strategy.”
What would be more interesting would be to find out the male/female player ratio. Although you would probably find more “women” than men in game, I’d suspect that 90% of them are actually male players looking for some “attention”. This is the internet, after all.
After receiving the Pioneer honour at the GDC awards, Valve boss Gabe Newell has said that “Digital Rights Management problems… make your entertainment products worth less by wrapping those negatives around them.”
Newell said that developers should constantly be asking themselves “what have I done for my customers today?” and that once they do, devs can avoid issues such as overly aggressive DRM. He also spoke about Valve seeing “entertainment as a service” rather than just shipping discs and forgetting about the users.
Newell’s comments, which were greeted by cheers from the assembled crowd, come as Ubisoft recently implemented its DRM which requires users to constantly be connected to the internet. The issue was aggravated more when Ubisoft’s servers went down; resulting in players unable to play the games they’d paid for through no fault of their own. Ubisoft claim that only 5% of players experienced problems, but that figure remains unproven.
A GDC panel that included Valve’s Jason Holtman and Blizzard executive Rob Pardo delved into the PC vs. console debate from a developers’ point of view.
Both men spoke about the rigidness that consoles offer developers, especially when it comes to patching titles or editing them. Holtman referenced the recent Portal 2 easter egg that Valve pushed to the PC version of Portal, which he said is something “we can do on the PC” but not on a console.
Pardo expressed scepticism about bringing World of Warcraft to consoles because “you have to go through all sorts of [certification] processes” with Microsoft or Sony.
Details of Fable III are beginning to trickle out. We’ve seen screenshots, received clues as to setting and artistic direction and been promised Basil Fawlty as a wardrobe assistant. In a talk this afternoon at GDC ‘10, Peter “bold claims” Molyneux touched upon the previously teased system of “followers”, comparing its implementation in Fable III to Twitter’s spiralling network of sandwich updates.
“I Twitter now and, you know, I’ve got followers on Twitter”, said the Lionhead boss, sparking awful rumours net-wide of ham-fisted automatic updates informing friend lists as to the density and pungency of each Albion crowd-pleasing bum-whistle. Despite Molyneux’s misleading compliments for the social networking site’s “interesting mechanic”, Microsoft themselves were quick to reassure gamers that “Peter meant [...] he was inspired by the ‘followers’ mechanic on Twitter, and its influence can be seen specifically in the ‘Follower’ feature”.
Personally, the further we keep games from extending their meta-tendrils into Twitter and Facebook, the better. This year’s heavenly removal of Mafia Wars and Farmville notifications may just have been unbalanced had Molyneux’s flapping gums really meant that real world, spamming popularity was the key point of innovation in the upcoming iteration of Lionhead’s dog walking simulation.
Via: Joystiq
OnLive, the streaming gaming service has scheduled its US launch for June 17th. The service, which lets users stream games from a server, requiring little work from the local PC/Mac, will launch on at the start of summer in the US (apart from Alaska and Hawaii) for the monthly cost of $14.95.
This cost gives you access to the service but not any of its games which are, according to its website, “to be purchased or rented separately”. No word on game pricing has come out. This lack of detail has led to questions about what happens to purchased titles if you leave the service, as well as concerns over what you’re paying $15 a month for.
Who knows if this will work or not, but at $15 a month it’d better be a damn good system to warrant the cost. If you have to shell out $60 a game on top of that, it might not look like such a great deal. The system launches around E3 so expect a truckload of hype around then. For now, just expect a stupid business model to destroy this potentially awesome idea.
[Editor's note: Dan's been getting his hands on all the cool toys at GDC this week. Earlier today he chatted to Josh Bays, Product Evangelist for Sixense and Scott Szyjewicz who is the Manager of their support group to talk about their PC TrueMotion controller]
Negative Gamer: Ok, so give me a rundown on this.
Josh Bays: So this is the Sixense TrueMotion dev kit. This is a wireless, magnetic tracking system motion controller. It is a magnetic base, plugged into the computer via USB, power and data. Generates a magnetic field six feet out, a twelve foot sphere, or “play area”. Anywhere within that area is where you’re going to get high fidelity, precise, motion controls.
So you can see on screen my movements of my hands on the controller are going to be reflected very precisely in the game. So my hand is now holding the crow-bar, instead of the Sixense controller. If I tilt it a little bit, or move it a little bit it’ll be reflected, it’s 1mm of position position precision and one degree of orientation. Read more →
We’re kicking off our GDC 2010 coverage with what likely is the most unusual lecture this year – a session entitled “Abusing Your Players Just For Fun” by John “Cactus” Soderstrom. This was one of my most anticipated panels this year as I really wanted to sit down and watch some hilarious examples of how to troll players in the future. As it turns out, it looks like the entire session should have been called “How to Abuse Negative Gamer Editors Just For Fun By Trolling Them Into Thinking This Panel Will Be Relevant Somehow To Games”.
Instead of talking about games like Demon Souls, where the extreme difficulty is intended to frustrate you, the panel started off with a 20 minute discussion of Cactus’ favorite movie producers and how they make trippy movies where you don’t understand the point.
Read more →
The Annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is gearing up for the Moscone Convention Centre for March 9-13 and Negative Gamer will be nowhere in sight (apart from Dan Rosenthal). However, we will be watching from afar and filtering the news coming from larger, more established sites who have sexy and trendy staff in attendance. Not that we don’t have sexy and trendy staff here at Negative Gamer. Those of you who have seen Sam Jordan sporting an ascot with a t-shirt and muddy jeans know exactly what I’m talking about.
Though the conference is specifically for game developers there are usually a few announcements and interesting tidbits that come out of GDC. Highlights of this year’s conference will likely include John Carmac’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a presentation by acclaimed game writer Susan O’Connor who has worked on Bioshock and Gears of War among others, and of course Sid Meier’s much anticipated presentation “The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know is Wrong)”.
Check back on the site throughout the week for stories and discussion of the week’s developments. Also, don’t forget about the forums. The first livestream looks to be G4tv’s coverage of Sony’s GDC Press Conference at 7pm Est on March 10th.
Forget the new Zelda game, or that teaser for Modern Warfare 2. The biggest news out of GDC ‘09 is that apparently video games are not “mature”. Yes this comment was made by Heather Chaplin, author of the book Smartbomb and a video game “journalist”.
I just have to say, calling video game developers “fucking adolescents” to their face, in a convention that was made for them, that takes balls. While Chaplin went around accusing people left and right, without backing them up with actual proof, it raised interesting questions. One of which being that if the video game developers aren’t doing their job, are the video game “journalists” doing theirs? Read more →
Though some of you may never guess it with the way I’m always obnoxiously negative regarding the Wii, I was a faithful believer in Nintendo for a long period of time. With my first console being the NES, I had no choice but to get an early start. The years passed. I enjoyed my Mario, my Pokémon, and my various Zeldas and Metroids, though I wasn’t by any means a Nintendo fangirl. I gave my paramours some love, as well, getting in some Sonic and Tempo and then later on even some Mystic Midway. Now, these days I’m more embarrassed than anything when I see the iconic logo.
Satoru Iwata’s keynote “rocked” some lucky attendees to GDC’s worlds, and I have to be honest here – there wasn’t a thing about any of the announcements that tickled my fancy whatsoever. Instead, I kept thinking – “This is what everyone’s been waiting for? These announcements are what everyone is scrambling to report?” Then again, if an image of Shigsy wiping his ass with the insane amounts of money he’s made were flashed onscreen to visitors, then I’m sure that would receive mondo coverage as well.
If you aren’t one of those overzealous gamers who researches every single little tidbit of news that surfaces regarding major conventions, let me sum some of the ZOMGHUEGANNOUNCEMENTS up for you. Brace yourselves – they’re freaking SWEET.
I wasn’t at GDC. I’ve been too busy being lazy, adolescent and bad at writing. I, like the entirety of the game’s industry, am a bastard and don’t deserve even an ounce of respect for my leeching, degrading, derogatory, un-skilled and bias work. Read more →
He keeps putting the bag on his head. That’s awesome.
Be honest, was anybody not expecting a new Zelda game?
IGN has a video showcasing some of the things that the latest iteration of the engine that brought us Crysis is capable of. Watch it. Ok, now pick your jaw up off the ground and calm down a touch. This is an engine that can only truly be appreciated on monster PCs and it’s going to be a while yet before the likes of you and I will be able to afford such things. That said, it’s nice to see Crytek working on the technology of the future, today.
CryENGINE 3 will be on display this week during GDC. Unfortunately, since the Atlantic ocean is between us; thus I shall not be there to drool over every voluptuous pixel and provocative polygon.
God damn, that’s sexy.
Overlord producer, Dean Scott, has had a few choice words to offer to developers porting their games over to the Wii. Talking at last month’s GDC, Scott discussed some of the issues surrounding porting a game to the Wii.
He himself is in charge of putting the highly successful Overlord game franchise onto everyone’s favourite waggle machine, so is no stranger to the problems faced with creating a Wii game. His main criticism comes with companies trying to ride on the huge success of the console, and creating crap games in the process.
At this moment in time, because the installed userbase on Wii is so high, it’s the Wii gold rush, [s]o publishers are like ‘shit, what can we get out on Wii really quickly? What that means is people end up porting games from other platforms, and they don’t fit the console because [the Wii remote] has to be the absolute starting point. The controller is point one. You can’t retrofit a load of shit and expect it to work with this controller.
It may be painfully obvious he is correct to most gamers out there, but to hear these words from somebody who is actually making a game for the Wii is very comforting. When talking about how Overlord: Dark Legend fits into the equation, Scott said that Codemasters was “conscious that we had to build something that played to the strengths of that platform.”
As a fan of the original game, I’m just hoping Scott can stick to his words. If not, I have a feeling this quote might be re-surfacing.
Via: Dtoid
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