ZEAL

JANUARY 2014

ISSUE #1

ZE AL

NO ARROWS TO THE KNEE

Will It Live U to the H

01

e

13 14

Boss Fight:

David C ra ne

The Starter Guide Designer

01

:Becoming a Game

01

GREATEST INNOVATIONS IN GAMING 01

THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE WILL HAVE FAR-REACHING IMPLICATIONS. THIS ISN’T JUST ONE OF THE FEW NEW MMOS TO CHARGE A MONTHLY FEE - A BUSINESS MODEL THAT’S POPULARLY CONSIDERED TO BE AT DEATH’S DOOR. It’s also the first ever Elder Scrolls title to embrace

multiplayer, and as Bethesda’s marketing boss Pete Hines explained to OXM only this April, prior to announcement, the franchise has gotten by just fine as a single player only affair.

We caught up with Hines and lead gameplay designer Nick Konkle over the summer to discuss the ins, outs, whys and wherefores.

The full transcript is a garbled mess worthy of Sheogorath himself, so I’ve taken the liberty of chopping it up into relatively coherent morsels. Enjoy.

william higinbotham

1. On the choice of a subscription model What’s cool about having a subscription model for us, is that firstly we don’t have any gates on the content - Elder Scrolls is very much a game about going wherever you want to, and if you’re randomly running into artificial [obstacles] where you have to pay, it just doesn’t feel right. The other thing is to do with maintaining a team, that can offer super service and put out content at a very high clip.

If you want to do that, you really need to plan for it in advance and also maintain a really large team of people.

And I think when we say content, we mean substantial, meaningful content. There are lots of different ways to support a game that you can look at. When we say content, we mean meaningful stuff, like new areas of the world, new factions, bigger meatier stuff. Not a couple of new weapons, or some new outfits, though we can do that too! We can do all of that stuff plus a lot more, stuff that’s more Elder Scrollsy, and not trivial.

We could do it daily if we just wanted to throw a dagger out the door, we could just say “here’s today’s update”, but that’s not what Elder Scrolls is about. It’s more meaningful stuff that adds to your experience.

2. What to expect from Elder Scrolls Online expansions We’re doing the kinds of things that with other games you’d associate with DLC - for us it would be, if you’re subscribing to the game you’ll get it [as part of the package]. Here’s another high-end zone, here’s another guild, adding significant story elements as well as new weapon types.

We recently planned out one of the first ten updates we’re going to be doing, and honestly these are subject to change as the game comes out and evolves, but each of them is kind of a story package, like the key thing we’re adding is this, and here’s all the stuff that we’re going to do to support that. Like, we’re adding a Thieves’ Guild but we’re also adding a justice system, or whatever, you know, that sort of thing.

How frequent will DLC be?

We don’t have any official plans but the plan is fast. In order to do that we basically, you need to have multiple things queued up and ready to go even as the game is coming out, which is why we’re starting now. We’ve moved some of the teams off of that and onto the next thing to ensure we’re hitting it at a very regular clip.

But in a general sense I think monthly is a pretty good goal. It might be four weeks, it might be five weeks, it might be six, but in a perfect world, monthly - every four weeks you’re getting a new significant bit of content. Not just for the first month or first two months; we want just non-stop, all the time, new stuff to go and play and do

04

3. On the difficulty of making an MMO work with console controllers It’s certainly a challenge. Getting it on a controller, and in particular UI windows and elements that were originally built with the PC in mind, and ensuring that there’s a scrolling system for them which doesn’t exist, or ways to move around [that make sense on a controller]. Those are the sorts of problems we’re working on, a lot of the technical challenges of getting the game to work. 4. On the likelihood of Kinect support It’s safe to say there are a number of things that we would like to do. But priority one is obviously just getting it up and running, getting it playing so that it feels right on the controller and runs correctly and is the same game experience. And then we’ll talk about ways we can take advantage of the other features.

Skyrim is a good example in terms of, it’s possible to do any of these things but what do we need? What do you have to have in order to have the game and play it well? That has to be the focal point exclusive to everything else. Once you get that really good and done, you can widen the focus and say OK, well, here are some other features specific to this platform and this platform that you could roll in - that becomes a little easier.

5. Leadership.

In most party-based RPGs and shooters like Ghost Recon, you can control any of the characters individually, but that’s not really leadership. The true challenge of leadership is delegating to others who might disobey you, especially when you have to take over an existing team without any choice about who’s in it. The strengths and weaknesses of your people determine how well they succeed at the tasks you give them, so judging their characters and abilities becomes a critical skill. A little-known but excellent example is King of Dragon Pass, 1999. Best-known early example: Close Combat, 1996. First use: unknown.

6. Diplomacy.

Not new with computer games—the board game Diplomacy was first published in 1959. The big problem for computers has always been making credible AI for computer opponents, but we’re starting to get this right. As with leadership, diplomacy is more about judgment of character than counting hit points.

Best-known early example: Civilization, 1991. Probable first use: Balance of Power, 1986.7. Mod support.

Modding is a form of gameplay; it’s creative play with the metagame. The earliest games weren’t just moddable, they were opensource, since their source code was printed in magazines like Creative Computing. When we began to sell computer games, their code naturally became a trade secret. Opening commercial games up to modding was a brilliant move, as it extended the demand for a game engine far beyond what it would have been if players were limited to the content that came in the box.

Best-known early example: Doom, 1993. Probable first use: The Arcade Machine, 1982, which was a construction set for arcadelike games. Purists may debate whether construction set products count as moddable games, but the key point is that they enlisted the player to build content—long before “Web 2.0” or indeed the Web itself.

8. Smart NPCs with brains and senses.

In an early 2D turn-based game called Chase, you were trapped in a cage filled with electric fences and some robots trying to kill you. All the robots did was move towards you. If you could get behind an electric fence, they’d walk into it and fry—and that was the sum total of NPC intelligence for about ten years. Then we began to implement characters with vision and hearing and limits to both. We also gave them rudimentary brainpower in the form of finite state machines and, eventually, the ability to cooperate.

Some of the most sophisticated NPC AI is now in sports games, where athletes have to work in concert to achieve a

05

collective goal. I consider this a design feature, as it’s something designers asked for and programmers figured out how to implement. First use: unknown. ordinary speech (“Hey, mister, do you know anybody around here who can sell me an Amulet of Improved Dentistry+5?”). With a dialog tree the game gives you a choice of pre-written lines to say, and the character you’re talking to responds appropriately. If the game allows it, you can role-play a bit by choosing the lines that most closely match the attitude you want to express. Written well, scripted conversations read like natural dialog and can be funny, dramatic, and even moving. The hilarious insult-driven sword fights in the Monkey Island games are sterling examples of the form. First use: unknown.

10. Multi-level gameplay.

With a board game everything usually takes place on the same board, as in Monopoly or Risk. Computer games (and tabletop RPGs) often let you switch between two modes, from highlevel strategy to low-level tactics. And only a computer can let you zoom in and out to any level you want—as Spore apparently will do. Are you a micromanager or a master of strategy who doesn’t sweat the small stuff? Different games demand different approaches. Best-known early example: Archon: The Light and the Dark, 1983. First use: unknown.

11. Mini-games.

A small game within a big game, usually optional, sometimes not. Not the same as multi-level gameplay; a mini-game feels very different from its parent. WarioWare consists of nothing but mini-games. Mini-games often destroy the player’s immersion, but offer a different set of challenges from those in the overall game.

Sometimes the mini-game is actually better than the overall game.

First use: unknown.

12. Multiple difficulty levels.

Designer John Harris has observed that older games, especially coin-ops, were intended to measure the player’s skill, while the newer approach is to provide the player with an experience regardless of his skill level. The old-fashioned school of thought is that the player is the designer’s opponent; the new school is that the player is your audience. By offering multiple difficulty levels, we make games available to larger audiences, which also includes handicapped players. First use: unknown.

13. Reversible time.

Saving and reloading is one thing, but sometimes what you really want is what as kids we used to call a “do-over”-a chance to correct an error without the hassle of a reload or going back a long way in the game world. Best-known example: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, 2003. When you made a mistake, you could reverse time for ten seconds. To prevent you from using it continually, each usage costs you a certain amount of sand, which has to be replenished by defeating enemies. The game also let the player see into the future to help with upcoming puzzles, another clever innovation. Possible first use: Blinx: The Time Sweeper, 2002, in which collecting up crystals in various combinations gives the player a variety of one-shot time control commands.

14. Coupled avatars.

In this slightly oddball innovation, you play an action or action-adventure game using two quite different avatars with complementary abilities. Sometimes they work together as one; at other times you have to choose which to use, or are required to use one or the other. Not the same as two separate avatars like Sonic and Tails. Possible first use: Banjo-Kazooie, 1998 15. Sandbox modes.

The term refers to a mode of play in which you can fool around in a game’s world without being required to meet a particular objective. By far the best-known sandbox modes are in the later Grand Theft Auto games, contributing greatly to their popularity.

Sandbox mode is normally used to describe special modes within

otherwise goal-oriented games, not open-ended games like SimCity. Sandbox modes also sometimes afford emergent behavior, events arising in a game’s world that were not planned or predicted by the designer. First use: unknown.

16. Physics puzzles.

Many real-world games involve physics, but they’re usually tests of skill. The computer lets us create physics puzzles, in which you try to figure out how to accomplish a task using the physical properties of simulated objects. They’re about brainpower, not hand-eye coordination. Possible first use: The Incredible Machine, 1992.

17. Interactive drama.

There’s only one of these, but someday its descendants will change the world. Façade is a first-person 3D game released in 2005. In Façade you play the friend of a couple whose marriage is in trouble. You visit their apartment for an evening and converse with them by typing real English sentences; they respond with recorded audio. Depending on what you say, you can influence their relationship—get them to reconcile, cause one or the other to leave, or even anger them so much that they throw you out. It’s role-playing in the real meaning of the term: no stats, no combat, no treasure, just dramatic interactions—with a couple’s future happiness at stake. Many designers consider the “holonovels” from Star Trek: The Next Generation to be the holy grail of interactive storytelling; Façade is an important advance on the quest.

Input Innovations Interactivity is the essence of gaming, and in a videogame, some device has to translate the player’s intentions into action. We’ve always had buttons, knobs (aka spinners or paddles), joysticks, sliders, triggers, steering wheels and pedals. But recently our options for input devices have exploded, and a good designer gives careful thought to them before choosing an approach to use.

18. Independent movement and aiming.

Early games restricted the avatar to shooting in the direction that it was facing—as in Asteroids, for example. Separating movement from aiming requires a second joystick, which substantially increases the physical coordination required of the player, but offers more freedom for both player and designer. Probable first use: Robotron: 2084 coin-op, 1982.

19. Point-and-click.

The mouse changed the way players interact with spaces and the objects within them. Although now considered dated, point-andclick made adventure games much more accessible than the older “guess the verb” parser-based system. Best-known early example: Maniac Mansion, 1987; the SCUMM engine devised for it is still in use by independent developers. Probable first use: Enchanted Scepters for the Macintosh, 1984. The Mac was the first personal computer to routinely ship with a mouse.

20. Mouse+WASD keys for 3D first-person movement.

This is so much the best way to move a first-person avatar in a 3D space that, until we get virtual reality gear that really works, there is no reason to consider anything else. Dual-joystick setups on controllers can’t match it for precision. First use: unknown.

21. Speech recognition (and other microphone support).

Which is the more exciting: yelling “Company A, charge!” or drawing a box with your mouse around Company A, then clicking a menu item labeled CHARGE? I rest my case. And hollering at your buddies (or at your enemies)—or singing with them— can be a big part of the fun too. Probable first use: Echelon for Commodore 64, 1987.

22. Specialized I/O devices for music (not counting MIDI keyboards).

Part technology, part design, advancements in I/O devices have changed the way we play, especially in musical games. Making music and dancing to it is an intensely physical activity that

doesn’t easily translate to joysticks and typewriter keyboards.

Maracas, conga drums, the Guitar Hero controller—all great fun. Possible first use: dance mats in Dance Dance Revolution, 1998.23. Gestural interfaces. Many cultures imbue gestures with supernatural or symbolic power, from Catholics crossing themselves to the mudras of Hindu and Buddhist iconography.

Magic is often invoked with gestures, too—that’s part of what magic wands are for. The problem with a lot of videogame magic is that clicking icons and pushing buttons feels more technical than magical. The gestural interface is a comparatively recent invention that gives us a non-verbal, non-technical way to express ourselves. Best-known example: Wii controller. Probable first use: Black & White, 2001.

24. Reconfigurable controls and other accessibility features.

When you get used to a certain controller or keyboard setup, you want to be able to use it in every analogous game. PC games now routinely allow players to remap the commands on their input devices, but this is not yet as common as it should be on console machines. For people with hand problems it can be vital.

Unfortunately, game developers have almost completely ignored the needs of the handicapped—to our lasting shame. We’re finally starting to get a clue. Among the other useful innovations here are: subtitles for the hearing-impaired; separate volume controls for music and sound effects; adjustable brightness and contrast controls; alternative color palettes to help the color-blind; settable game speed. The slogan of accessible game design is there’s no such thing as “too slow.”

Presentational Innovations Innovations in what the player sees and hears may depend heavily on technological advances, but I still consider them design innovations as well, features the designer can choose to use in their game—or not. I take static and scrolling 2D screens for granted; they already existed in mechanical coin-ops.

25. Isometric perspective, also sometimes called “three-quarters perspective.”

After years of side-view or top-view videogames, the isometric perspective provoked gasps of astonishment when it first appeared.

It created a sense of three-dimensionality that had been sorely lacking from games to that point. For the first time, players could see both the tops and the sides of objects in a natural way, rather than through awkward “cheated” sprites, and could even move around objects to see them from the other side, if the designer had provided that feature. Best-known early example: Populous, 1989. Probable first use: Zaxxon coin-op, 1982.

26. First person perspective.

First person lends immediacy like no other point of view. When an enemy points a gun at you, it’s really at you—right in your face.

The big tradeoff is that you don’t get to see your avatar, so visually dramatic activities such as traversing hand-over-hand along a telephone wire lose their impact. First person doesn’t have to mean true 3D; the earliest examples didn’t allow fully 3D movement or tilting up and down. Best-known early example: Battlezone coinop, 1980. Probable first use: Maze Wars, developed at NASA on the Imlac minicomputer, 1973. .

06

game art battles europe vs.japan vs. usa lucas m. thomas

Video games have always been global chameleons. They assume one identity when they’re first released, then often change their look entirely when shipped to a different region around the world. They’re almost always the same games on the inside, but the outer packaging presenting them is frequently redrawn or renamed by marketing departments trying to tap into the specific tastes of local audiences.

The result? Well, some box arts -- for the same games -- just end up better than others.

It’s a trend you can trace back all the way to classic examples like Mega Man’s disfigured human appearance in his American NES debut or the old banjo-playing redneck inexplicably adorning the box of SNES shooter Phalanx in the States, but today we’re leaving the past alone and focusing on the here and now. What follows are 20 modern examples of games getting different box arts in different regions.

Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Readers of IGN’s Nintendo channels should recall our first installment in this series from last September, as we pitted 10 of Nintendo’s American Kirby packages against their Japanese equivalents. The running gag here is that Kirby is always altered to look pissed off when he comes to the USA, but he’s allowed to retain his happy-go-lucky personality elsewhere. Another example has arrived in the interim, along with a name change -- while we in America got the Angry Kirby in “Return to Dream Land,” Europe received a Happy Kirby in “Adventure Wii.” (And this same trend is starting to affect other franchises too, as next month will see Pit similarly altered to anger on the American box for Kid Icarus: Uprising.)

Gears of War 3 Not to be undone by Ubisoft, Microsoft and Epic made sure their big 2011 release also offered a little something extra for the Euro crowd beyond even the Epic and Limited Editions. Though the art of Marcus Fenix standing with folded hands and grim expression was used as the global standard, the Europe-only Steelbox Edition zoomed in on his brooding visage, dropped out the background in favor of basic black and printed the whole thing on a special metal case. (Marcus also took off his armor, for some reason.)

07

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword The Wii’s other notable release from this past holiday season demonstrated the region divide to a lesser extent.

Japan announced its Skyward Sword box art first, showing off a package design that emphasized the “sky” part of the game’s name. America got a golden version instead, along with extra embellishments like a small 25th Anniversary logo and a reminder that a bonus music CD was waiting on the inside of the box. (Japan ultimately switched over and decided to present a gold box as well.)

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Nintendo’s not the only company offering up altered artwork in different regions, of course -- Square Enix is another long-time proponent of the practice. Its Final Fantasy series almost always presents a simple logo on a white background for Japanese boxes, while the company’s American arm pairs the logo with large character art.

The recent release of XIII-2 kept that trend going, though gamers who sprung for the Collector’s Edition in the States scored the more subtle logo-only style for themselves.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations Speaking of Collector’s Editions, that special category of more expensive game versions has helped perpetuate the box art battles between regions with several other games recently. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is another good example, as it shipped with tons of different editions -while the biggest visual difference was probably between the standard release of the game that used similar art of Ezio and Altair across the globe and the European Collector’s Edition.

Mass Effect 3 Europe doesn’t have the exclusive on exclusive Collector’s Edition art, though, as the upcoming Mass Effect 3 illustrates the opposite situation -- Americans getting the choice of packaging. Here in the States you’ll be able to opt for the “N7” Edition if you like, while Europeans will all be getting the standard art of Male Shepard.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim And here’s the last of the Collector’s Edition examples, as we couldn’t ignore a game as huge as Skyrim. The simple logo centered on a dark, book-cover-esque background is standard fare for the game nearly everywhere, but some American Dragonborns took home an image of Skyrim’s wintry landscape instead, courtesy of the States-exclusive Collector’s Edition.

Child of EdenHere’s a look at a more traditional split between Japan’s box art stylings and those seen in the rest of the world. Child of Eden got an action-emphasizing image in America, showing off a silhouette interacting with the game world. Japan’s Child of Eden, on the other hand, got a box featuring an actual child.

Dead Island Dead Island’s another drastic example of vastly different approaches to box art in different regions, as America’s packaging gives us a fairly predictable rendered scene of zombified tourists while Japan’s version is much more artsy and subdued with its red-on-black array of grasping undead arms. Take a look at the logo, too -- Japan’s uses a hanging man for the “I” in Island, while that detail was deemed too extreme for the States and replaced by a simple shambler silhouette. (Americans who went for the Special Edition got artwork close to Japan’s, but with the logo still edited.)

Killzone 3 Here’s something a little bit different -- a three-way battle.

While most of our other examples have used the same art for two out of three of the major regions around the world, the PlayStation 3’s Killzone 3 shipped in three different styles.

America got a pulled-back shot of a Helghast soldier in the snow. Japan, a zoomed-in close-up on his face with a black background (which again served as the basis for American and European Special Editions). And Europe? A fusion of the two previous, with the mask image surrounded by a windblown snowfall.

08

g n u o y g n i start gh

dr. ellen cavanau

That

was it. No additional classes. No suggestions to perfect the game for competition or portfolio. My fourteen year old took a game design class in his school this year, one semester long, that introduced him to Multi Media Fusion 2. He had fun, worked on independent projects and ended up with something that reminded me of Commander Keen. A grade and nothing more.

The teacher had a degree in business and was learning the curriculum two lessons ahead of the kids.

He had no knowledge to share of where to go once the curriculum was used up.

Rather than being inspired and curious to pursue more, my son’s reaction was “Been there, done that.” Is Gabe Zichermann correct about the coming wave of Gamification, where over 50% of our industries, even education, will be integratinggames to engage, educate and motivate students, costumers, and employees? If he is, we have a shortage of software engineers and designers to meet the need. Monty Sharma, the managing director of the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute says the global game sector is worth $56 billion and is expected to top $80 billion by 2015.

This will drive employment in all parts of the sector.

09

Part II of my series on Designing Video Games focuses on the type of training and classes recommended by those in the field. Joining me this week are two more co-authors: Monty Sharma, Managing Director of the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDiGI) (a statewide center, designated by the Commonwealth, for academic cooperation, economic development and job creation across the Massachusetts digital and video games ecosystem) What type of training would a student interested in designing video games enroll in?

Overwhelmingly, our authors pointed to the need for a 4 year gamerelated program, focusing on developing a diverse portfolio, and specializing in at least two of the game-related professional backgrounds.

Training is obviously dependent upon what part of game development someonewants to do….

Programmers (also referred to as engineers by some of the authors and considered in high demand) write the code that makes a game work. A 4 year degree in computer science, mathematics or a game development specific degree is pretty much a requirement now. It used to be that you could get into the industry with just a high school diploma and proof that you can actually make games, but now CVs without a 4 year degree are just ignored.Artists create every aspect of the visuals, whether that’s numbers and buttons for the user interface (UI), character art, environments, backgrounds, textures, lighting, animations. Designers are on the concept side (designing every aspect of the user experience or UX).

Writers create dialogue, narrative, descriptions of everything in the virtual world, tutorials, lore, etc. Producers are people-wranglers who track tasks and budget items, set up meetings with clients and focus groups, arrange, run, record, interpret playtests. Producers are usually people who have at some point been programmers, artists or designers first.QA (Quality Assurance) mostly playtest the game, trying to break it and find bugs. These are often entry level positions with temporary assignments without benefits. analysts, managers, even a few economists and psychologists. their own game or by being activein a game’s community.

This experience will give them a sense of what it takes to put all of the elements of a game together and the difference between a cool idea and a game that will sell. Next week’s blog, My Child Wants to Design Video Games Part Three: What are the best opportunities to practice? will discuss where to find the best opportunities to gain experience.The next suggestion is to look for summer programs through places like CCAC and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Many introduce students to freeware that teaches children about animation and game design, specifically, Carnegie Mellon’s ALICE program and GameMaker, skills they can continue to develop.

High School Game Design Programs: The first priority is, again, to study hard in the areas of math/science/ creative writing (English)/programming/art with an emphasis on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. Refer to the later discussion on what to look for in game design classes to evaluate your high schools programs. One experienced game designer recommended that this is a good time to learn Adobe Flash in and out because many games and apps are Flash-based.

Another suggested camps at the high school level students that provide and introduction to programming. Regardless of a student’s interest in being a programmer in the long term, they should learn the basics of writing software. This will give them a much better understanding of what is involved in animating or lighting the art that they draw. An exciting Video Game Development Online Certificate Program has been created by Zulama. Developed in conjunction with the Entertainment and Technology Center of CMU, they created a program that teaches cutting-edge-game-creation technology to groups of high school students over the course of several years. Parents and school board members can advocate for their school to adopt the curriculum.

Technical school Programs.

Traditional 4 year degrees are valued above the two year certificates.

The programs that were recommended by the co-authors who were those that prepared transferable (to 4 year colleges) skills in visual arts and animation.

Community College programs that develop a game design program connected to a four year program were also recommended. For example,students inBunker HillCommunity CollegeinMassachusetts can enter Becker College as a The gaming sector is relatively new and is open to people with junior.Becker Collegehas an award winning four year degree in game design.

One designer mentioned that Pittsburgh Technical Institute has a good program for visual arts and animation which teaches good transferable skills for gaming. Another suggested that artists can consider the Art Institute of Pittsburgh or a 4 year college art degree are great starting points. Students in technical schools or community colleges are advised to focus on working with the fan community for the games they care about.

This is the best way to learn by doing and to showcase their skills. They need to develop experiences broader than the course work. Students at this level should engage with the local game development community and attend as many events as they can to gain perspective needed.

College and Graduate Work The Princeton Review lists the best game schools in the nation every year – check the list!

There are currently not any undergrad classes in game design in the Pittsburgh Higher Education Consortium. At the Masters level there is the Entertainment Technology Program at Carnegie Mellon, which is worldrenowned, excellent, and extremely expensive.

It is recommended that you specialize in two fields. Undergraduate programs that can help you apply for game design jobs include; Art: Fine Art, Figure Drawing, 3D modeling, 2D digital painting, Animation (2D/3D), Digital sculpting (z-brush/mudbox), Photoshop Math: Calculus, Linear algebra, Differential equations, Physics, Discreet mathematics, Probability and Statistics Programming (emphasized!), Graphics, C, C++ (by far the most used programming language in game development), scripting languages such as lua/python/c#, artificial intelligence, data structures, network programming.

Liberal Arts: English, Psychology, Sociology, History, Language, Literature, and Philosophy Critical! When looking at colleges inquire about connections to industry and other groups that will help students connect with professionals.

Critical! Game students who graduate with art degrees will need absolutely killer digital portfolios to be noticed in the field. Again, unless we are talking about an individual with the talent of a Leonardo, there must be shipped games or demo reels to show.

Recommended: Business and Entrepreneur classes. There are more lowcost tools and development kits now than ever before. A college degree that includes business and entrepreneurship classes is very important since starting your own game company and making your own indie games is most definitely a viable option (especially if you can live with your folks for a few years after graduation).

Advice for Recent Graduates: you will get better and more varied experience at smaller companies/studios. Your pay will be commensurately less and you may not have benefits, than what you could get at a larger company. Don’t discount the independent game market. Don’t be married to the entertainment Adult/second career One of the designers responded: “This is exactly how I got in. I went to school at age 39. I obtained a paid internship at Schell Games (which just turned full-time/permanent for me), having no prior gaming experience.

What I had was that I am a gamer who could discuss games intelligently, including what I like and don’t like about certain games and why. I was able to discuss current developments in the industry (reading blogs and articles as above), knew the release dates of the hot games coming up.

10

I had twelve years experience as a freelance writer, for online and print periodicals. Part of it, I recognize, was timing; I was looking to do game writing at the same time they happened to need one on a specific project. I tell people all the time it was 20% pester and 80% luck.” Another responded: “I’d recommend targeted classes for the discipline of interest or a grad school course such as the CMU entertainment technology center.

Trouble is that these may be more of a $$$ investment than is strictly necessary. Keep in mind that entry level positions in game development are relatively low paying. There are substantial amounts of material online of adults to get a sense of what is involved in game development and to try their hand. Companies like Unity 3D provide free access to tools and training material. Other products like Game Maker or Game Salad let adults try their hand at making games without much programming.

In many cases some basic familiarity and strong skills in other areas are enough to get a job in game development.

Things to look for in game design classes and programs: Look for instructors who have practical knowledge rather than purely theoretical.

Do they have any titles on their resume that released? What were they?

Look at classes not just in design theory and mechanics, but also in level design because level design itself is branching out into its own career path right now.

If you’re looking to be an artist, definitely learn Adobe Flash, Adobe PhotoShop and AutoDesk Maya, and Z-Brush; learn these as well as you can.

Look for classes that teach the fundamentals of game design. You need a vast understanding of the basic components and the better classes teach these rather than, say, how to make a first-person shooter. The game design class I was enrolled in taught concepts through dice, board games, cards, and even physical activities. This gave me a wide range of understanding in crafting fun experiences, regardless of the platform. Trying to learn game programming on top of the fundamentals isn’t recommended.

These are relatively new animals. Historically, game designers came from other game development disciplines and were not a separate thing.

This remains true in a lot of companies but some companies are shifting to hiring people specifically for “game design”. I would look for schools that dissect existing successful games, focus a bit on psychology of the player and also make you create things.

An emphasis on game concepts, not technology. Game mechanics and principles are much faster and easier to test with things like dice, pencil and paper, imagination, and the like. Making good software, by contrast, takes HUGE amounts of time; if you haven’t done it already, you probably have no concept of what goes into it and will underestimate the time and cost involved by a couple orders of magnitude.

The key element is the mixture of theory and practice. Game design is one of the fastest moving industries in the world – every game has to be better than the last one, each new innovation is absorbed, tested and enhanced in real time. For students this means connecting with industry and working on games not just parts of games. The experience of taking a game to shipping is one of the most important questions hiring managers ask “What have you shipped?”

Look for game programs that are focused on the leading edge of development, in today’s market that is mobile development using Unity or HTML 5. If a game program is teaching these things (as part of the curriculum not the entire curriculum) then it is up to date.

Look for a program that offers internships, reverse sabbaticals, instructors with game industry experience.

Fun! Things to avoid in game designer classes and programs: A good game design course will organize students into teams. In practical terms, there are very few people who can perform the entire game creation pipeline themselves. I’d stay well away from any game design glass that is done individually. May be played anywhere on anything–think big! Be wary of schools that are tied to a specific technology such as Unity or Unreal engine. Concepts are more important than implementation details, but you do learn a lot from actually building stuff in any engine. It’s best to do work in a couple of different technologies to be well rounded.

11

0 3 5 , $90

per yea

# of jobs as of

913,1

Avoid a course that tries to do too much. A game design class needs to presuppose that you know how to code, or draw, or write, or whatever–or it needs to be a writing course which happens to use a video game project to supply context.

Develop a Portfolio A unanimous sentiment of our the co-authors is “The biggest, most important piece of advise I can give anyone interested in making games for a living is to start making games now.” A college degree is important, but that degree has to accompanied by a portfolio to the interview question: What games have you worked on that have shipped?

Nothing will educate you better than actually making games, and those games are often what differentiates candidates during interviews. The best way to gain skills is by doing – go ahead and develop games, whether they are board games, digital games, iPad apps, no matter. Your portfolio will open more doors for you than any “training program”. The game design employers always ask about what potential employees are researching/doing in their spare time. Passion for game development is key.

There’s simply no substitute for actually designing games, which means playing a lot and then just trying to do it. A portfolio accompanies you to college admissions interviews, job interviews, and business plan presentations for investors in your video game business. It should be

0

0 jo

b

ar

ou

30%

tl oo

00

k

2010

divided into three parts: 1) what would you build with unlimited funds, 2) mods (modifications of current games on the market), and 3) what have you worked on that has shipped (been completed).

Read The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses by Jesse Schell, work your way through Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber. Both books will familiarize your child with mechanics and help develop a porfolio.

Heidi McDonald, one of this blog’s co-authors wrote, “Instead of a thank-you note after the interview, I sent a portfolio that included: a sample quest for my favorite game, with dialogue trees; a sample mini-game for one of the company’s titles (including flow-charts and content); and a companion deck I’d written, for fun, for a card deck that my family enjoys. Look for ways your portfolio demonstrates the game design skills of collaboration, production, creativity, handling deadlines, programming, graphic design, music, and purpose.

Collaboration Skills The ability to work in groups and to constructively listen to and apply criticism are necessary to work in a competitive field filled with extremely talented people who have taken years to hone their craft. Where do they learn to collaborate?

Teachers, parents, or a motivated student can provide the structure of a video game design club. I am reminded of the Homebrew Computer Club

featured in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley and the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer. It was not merely the club where Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs began to develop the first personal computers. Another notable alumnus was Jerry Lawson, creator of the first cartridge-based video game system.

My son, at eleven, learned how to play Dungeons and Dragons. He grew enamored and started his own game, writing the campaign, inviting friends who had never played, developing characters, organizing schedules, and eventually coming up with a core group that plays every week. In a conversation with him, I asked what it would take to move the group toward becoming a video game design group. He is just beginning to learn programming and did one class in Multimedia Fusion 2. He equated video game designer as somehow who can single handedly produce Skyrim and felt his graphic design and programming skills are woefully inadequate to be a game designer. It takes a Zulama class to teach him to think in terms of play and games, to see his D&D campaign development as game design, and to desire to slowly build components collaboratively with others with something just one step more sophisticated. It takes a video game contest to put him and his friends on a deadline to actually produce something besides ideas.

Parents looking to start a video game design group in the school, with access to computer labs and facilities, may want to consult the Grow a Generation handbook When Being A Homeroom Parent is Not Enough: Opportunity Proposals from Parents to Schools. The handbook is for parents seeking to approach their schools and start a after school program (like a video game design club). The pages walk you through possible projects, help you identify resources of your child’s school, outline safe environment concerns, provide tools to help you recruit other children and their parents, consider funding options, seek coach’s training and trained mentors, prevent meeting space problems, provide ideas for team building and conflict resolution, inspire success on competition day, consider liability and photographic legal release paperwork, format evaluations and end of year reports, and cultivate the skills of innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, emotional intelligence, resilience, leadership, and vision in the young people in your life.

Heidi McDonald is a Game Designer at Schell Games LLC. She is graduating in May with a Bachelor of Arts in Film and Digital Technology and Professional Writing fromChathamUniversity.

Keith Leonard is a 15 year veteran of professional video game developer.

He is a graphics programmer with a Bachelor of Science in computer science from theUniversityofPittsburgh.

Justin Sabo is a Game Designer at Schell Games and a Masters of Entertainment Technology 2012 Candidate from CMU Entertainment and Technology Program.

Phil Light is the co-founder of Electric Owl Studios and comes from a programming background.

Nikki Navta, the CEO of Zulama, is a graduate of CMU’s Education andTechnologyCenter.

12

i n t h e steamer w h at ’ s u p va lv e ’ s s l e v e ? t. c . s o t t e k a n d t o m wa r r e n

We just sat down for a rare and wide-ranging interview with Valve CEO Gabe Newell, who opened up to The Verge with details about the company’s upcoming “Steam Box” gaming hardware, the future of the Steam digital distribution platform, and even gaming itself. For starters, Valve isn’t just attacking the living room; the Steam Box will be designed to work across multiple screens in the home using networking standards like Miracast, ideally allowing users to effortlessly transition between rooms and monitors to enjoy gaming and other content. But Valve’s goal isn’t just to put a box into everyone’s living room, it’s to help build an ecosystem of content developers — including the gamers themselves.

So you’re working on your own Steam Box hardware.

Why work with so many partners when you have your own ideal design in mind?

What we see is you’ve got this sort of struggle going on between closed proprietary systems and open systems. We think that there are pluses and minuses to open systems that could make things a little messier, it’s much more like herding cats, so we try to take the pieces where we’re going to add the best value and then encourage other people to do it. So it tends to mean that a lot of people get involved. We’re not imposing a lot of restrictions on people on how they’re getting involved.

We’ve heard lots of rumors about the Steam Box, including that Valve’s own hardware would be “tightly controlled.” Can you tell us more about Valve’s own hardware effort?

The way we sort of think of it is sort of “Good, Better,” or “Best.” So, Good are like these very low-cost streaming solutions that you’re going to see that are using Miracast or Grid. I think we’re talking about in-home solutions where you’ve got low latency. “Better” is to have a dedicated CPU and GPU and that’s the one that’s going to be controlled. Not because our goal is to control it; it’s been surprisingly difficult when we say to people “don’t put an optical media drive in there” and they put an optical media drive in there and you’re like “that makes it hotter, that makes it more expensive, and it makes the box bigger.” Go ahead.

You can always sell the Best box, and those are just whatever those guys want to manufacture. [Valve’s position is]: let’s build a thing that’s quiet and focuses on high performance and appropriate form factors.

“WE’LL COME OUT WITH OUR OWN STEAM BOX AND SELL IT TO CONSUMERS BY OURSELVES. THAT’LL BE A LINUX BOX.” So are most of these going to be Linux-based Steam Boxes?

We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to installWindows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latencyis another interesting thing to have. Windows you can.

We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting

13

thing to have. Speaking of controllers, what kind of creative inputs are you withworking on? Valve has already confessed its dissatisfaction existing controllers and the kinds of inputs available. Kinect? available. Kinect? Motion?

We’ve struggled for a long time to try to think of ways to use motion input and we really haven’t [found any]. Wii Sports is still kind of the pinnacle of that. We look at that, and for us at least, as a games developer, we can’t see how it makes games fundamentally better. On the controller side, the stuff we’re thinking of is kind of super boring stuff all around latency and precision. There’s no magic there, everybody understands when you say “I want something that’s more precise and is less laggy.” We think that, unlike motion input where we kind of struggled to come up with ideas, [there’s potential in] biometrics.We have lots of ideas.

“I THINK YOU’LL SEE CONTROLLERS COMING FROM US THAT USE LOT OF BIOMETRIC DATA.” I think you’ll see controllers coming from usthat use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method.

Motion just seems to be a way of [thinking] of your body as a set of communication channels.

Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest Forbes/ Rick Dahms bandwidth — so to trying to talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying “oh we’re going to stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud dial-up.”

Maybe there are other ways to think of that. There’s more engagement when you’re using larger skeletal muscles, but whenever we go down [that path] we sort of come away unconvinced. Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important.

The hardware side of Valve is new, but you’ve obviously got a huge platform with Steam. What’s the future of Steam like? Will it change as you begin to release Steam-based hardware?

We tend to think of Steam as tools for content developers and tools for producers. We’re just always thinking: how do we want to make content developers’ lives better and users’ lives a lot better? With Big Picture Mode we’re trying to answer the question: “how can we maximize a content developers’ investment?” It’s not a lot easier for me to build content that spans running on a laptop, running in a living room, and running on the desktop, as opposed to completely re-writing your game.

spore ins and outs will wright

When I was a kid, I attended Montessori school up to sixth grade in Atlanta, Georgia. And at the time I didn’t think much about it, but then later, I realized that that was the high point of my education. From that point on, everything else was pretty much downhill. And it wasn’t until later, as I started making games, that -- I really actually think of them more as toys. People call me a game designer, but I really think of these things more as toys. But I started getting very interested in Maria Montessori and her methods, and the way she went about things, and the way she thought it very valuable for kids to kind of discover things on their own rather than being taught these things overtly. And she would design these toys, where kids in playing with the toys would actually come to understand these deep principles of life and nature through play. And since they discovered those things, it really stuck with them so much more, and also they would experience their own failures; there was a failure-based aspect to learning there. It was very important. And so, the games that I do, I think of really more as modern Montessori toys. And I really kind of want them to be presented in a way to where kids can kind of explore and discover their own principles.

So a few years ago, I actually started getting very interested in the SETI program. And that’s the way I work. I get interested in different kinds of subjects, I dive in, I research them, and then I try to figure out how to craft a toy around that, so that other people can kind of experience the same sense of discovery as I did as I was learning that subject. And it kind of led me to astrobiology, which is the study of possible life in the universe. And then Drake’s Equation, which is looking at the probability of life arising on planets, how long it might last, how many planets are out there, stuff like that. And I started looking at how interesting Drake’s Equation was, because it spanned all these different subjects -- physics, chemistry, sociology, economics, astronomy. And another thing that really impressed me a long time ago was “Powers of Ten,” Charles and Ray Eames’ film. And I started putting those two together and wondering, could I build a toy where kids would kind of trip across all these interesting principles of life,as it exists and as it might go in the future. Things where you might trip across things like the Copernican Principle, the Fermi Paradox, the Anthropic Principle, the origin of life. And so I’m going to show you a toy today that I’ve been working on, that I think of more than anything else as kind of a philosophy toy. In playing this toy, you kind of -- this will bring up philosophical questions in you.

This game’s called “Spore.” I’ve been working on it for several years. It’s getting pretty close to finished now. It occurs at all these different scales, first of all, from very, very small to very, very large. I’m just going to pop in at the start of the game. And you actually start this game in a drop of water, as a very, very small single-cell creature, and right off the bat you basically just have to live, survive, reproduce. So here we are, at a verymicroscopic scale, swimming around. And I actually realize that cells don’t have eyes, but it helps to make it cute.

The players are going to play through every generation of this species, and as you play the game the creature is actually growing bit by bit. And as we start growing the camera will actually start zooming out, and things that you see in the background there will actually start slowly pulling into the foreground, showing you a little bit of what you’ll be interacting with as you grow. So as we eat, the camera starts pulling out, and then we start interacting with kind of larger and larger organisms.

Now, we actually play through many generations here, at the cellular scale. I’m going to skip ahead here. At some point we get larger, and we actually get to a macro-evolution scale. Now at this point we’re leaving the water, and one thing that’s kind of important about this game is that, at every level, the player is designing their creature, and that’s a fundamental aspect of this. Now, in the evolution game here, the creature scale, basically you have to eat, survive, and then reproduce. You know, very Darwinian. One thing we noticed with “The Sims,” which is a game I did earlier, is that players love making stuff. When they were able to make stuff in the game they had a tremendous amount of empathy in connection to it. Even if it wasn’t as pretty as what other people would make it -- as a professional artist would make for games -- it really stuck with them and they really cared about what would happen to it.

So at this point, we’ve left the water, and now with this little creature -- we could bring up the volume a little bit -- and now we might try to eat. We might sneak up on this little guy over here maybe, and try and eat him. OK, well, we fight. OK, we got him.

Now we get a meal. So really, at this part of the game, what we’re doing is we’re running around and surviving, and also getting to the next generation, because we’re going to play through every generation of this creature. We can mate, so I’m going to see if one of these creatures wants to mate with me. Yeah.

We didn’t want to replay actual evolution with humans and all that, because it’s almost more interesting to look at alternate possibilities in evolution. Evolution is usually presented as this one path that we took through, but really it represents this huge set of possibilities. Now once we mate, we click on the egg and this is where the game starts getting interesting, because one of the things we really focused on here was giving the players very high-leverage tools, so that for a very small amount of effort the player can make something very cool. And it involves a lot of intelligence on the tool side.

Source: Wallpaper Abyss

14

top

10 v i d e o g a m e s of all time

01

MATT BRADFORD

NO ONE WANTS TO BE THAT GIFT-GIVER. You know the type. The one who hears, through a friend of a friend of a friend, that you’re

into books, or movies, and instead of accounting for popularity or your particular taste, gleefully hands you a Dean Koontz novel or a DVD of “Ishtar.”

“Why, yes! This is exactly what I wanted,” you exclaim – dreading the line at the returns

counter and masking your distaste with a stretched smile that would make a used car salesman shift uncomfortably in his seat.

Gamers have it the worst. If you know nothing about the gaming industry, it’s all too easy to

be overwhelmed by the misleading advertising, the multitude of platforms to take into account and the sheer amount of poor software on the market. Going in blind, you stand a very high chance of buying your gift’s recipient an absolute lemon of a game.

So don’t go in blind. This year’s list of best-selling video games boasts a surprisingly well-

rounded array of titles, each with its own merits and solid reviews. There’s the visceral zombie-

themed epic The Last of Us, the anachronistic dystopian shooter Bioshock Infinite, and of course, the record-breaking Grand Theft Auto V. All have racked up sales in the millions, and that’s no accident.

Playing the numbers It’s been a massive decade for interactive entertainment, with the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, 3DS,

and DS delivering games that have shattered records and attracted swaths of new gamers to

the fold. And while sales stats aren’t the most important indicator of success (let alone 100%

reliable), they’re a good indicator of what franchises and characters we’ll be seeing more of in

01

10. Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) Total worldwide sales: 26.8M How’d they do it? As the seventh addition to the unflappably popular Call of Duty series, few were surprised when Activision announced that Call of Duty: Black Ops was on track to becoming the biggest product ever released by mankind shortly after its release. In its first 24 hours on shelves, it sold over 5.6 million copies worldwide, besting the pace set by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and setting a new world record for largest entertainment launch (which, as you’ll see, has a habit of getting topped every year). The game went on to earn $1 billion by December 2010, all but securing the series’ development for years (even decades) to come.

So how was it? Pretty good, according to critics who gave it a cumulative review score of 85 on Metacritic and 88% on GameRankings. Lending to its score was its cold war locale (a first for the series), combat tweaks, and a strong multiplayer component. But let’s be honest here, it was the zombies that kept pulling people back in.

Source: Wallpaper Abyss

9. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) Total worldwide sales: 27.5M How’d they do it? Arriving midway through the PS2’s lifespan, and later released as a download for the PS3 and mobile devices (hence its inclusion in our list), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas rode in on the GTA namesake with promises of a larger sandbox and a more serious take on the franchise. Fans were treated to new gameplay features like gang wars, car modding, and RPG elements that affected the player’s appearance, skills, and even waist-size. Many of these would later be dropped from future GTA titles, but for the time being they proof of Rockstar’s refusal to rest on past successes.

Within less than half a year of its release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sold 12 million copies for the PlayStation 2, netting it the honor of being the console’s highest-selling title. The game won an abundance of “Game of the Year” nods, and its legendary “Hot Coffee Mod” (aka hidden, awkward polygonal sex game) is regarded as one of the most controversial mods in the history of gaming, briefly earning a rare Adults Only (AO) rating before calmer heads bumped it back to its current Mature (M) listing.

Source: Rockstar Games

Source: Gamestop

17

8. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009) Total worldwide sales: 27.88 How’d they do it? New Super Mario Bros. Wii had a lot going for it when it twirled its way into the Wii catalog. It represented the first traditional Super Mario title on the Nintendo Wii and a return to Mario’s retro-platforming style made popular by the Nintendo DS’s New Super Mario Bros. Perhaps the largest selling factor, however, was that it was the first title in the Super Mario Bros. series to accommodate up to four players on the screen, infusing the franchise with a new level of multiplayer innovation (or frustration, depending on who you played with).

Combined with Nintendo’s “super guide” feature and a heap of new power-ups, secrets, and moves, New Super Mario Bros.

Wii appealed to Mario fans across all generations. Anticipating its popularity, Nintendo gave it unique red packaging and bundled the game with the Wii following its arrival. And this showed that the casual audience that bought the Wii was still interested in “real” games too. Nintendo may not make the “best” gaming consoles on the market, but the company knows how to market its games. It landed a goldmine with the Mario stable of games and has continued to ride the cash cow all the way to the bank. This title clocks in at 27.8 million copies sold worldwide–proving that Mario is still everyone’s favorite mascot.

New Super Mario Bros. was built for the handheld DS system, and promised to showcase the new platform’s capabilities as well as provide a lure for fans of Mario who might not otherwise have bought a DS. The biggest innovations for this version of Mario were improved 3D renderings of Mario and his cohorts, as well as a better physics engine. In New Super Mario Bros., when Mario swings on a rope it bends.

Source: Nintendo

7. Wii Play (2006) Total worldwide sales: 28.02M How’d they do it? Like one other Nintendo title on this list, Wii Play had the benefit of being a Wii launch game for gamers in Europe, Australia, and Japan. Released a few months later for North America, the game offered nine motion-controlled party games, some of which had been trotted out as Nintendo Wii tech demos during E3 2006. And more importantly, it came with an extra controller.

Like Wii Sports, Wii Play’s success was also owed to its massmarket appeal and the fact it was one of the first Nintendo Wii games available in global markets. It wasn’t that great, but it held up as a gateway game for Nintendo fans and curious non-gamers nonetheless. As Wii-mania took hold of the world, people eeded more controllers, and if it came with Wii Play, all the better. A sequel, Wii Play: Motion, was released in 2011 and bundled with a Wii Remote Plus controller, though it didn’t see nearly the same success. Checking in at 28.2 million copies sold, Wii Play is one of the highest-grossing “boxed-in” games ever. Nintendo was brilliant in its thoughts to place this game inside the box of every new Wii system sold.

6. Grand Theft Auto V (2013) Total worldwide sales: 29M (and still climbing) How’d they do it? Having a solid reputation helps. Grand Theft Auto is recognized by Guinness World Records as the best-selling action series of all time, moving over 108 million copies between all entries (15 if you’re counting). So by the time GTA V appeared (a whole four years after GTA IV, no less), gamers were more than ready to slap down their hard-earned dollars to jump back into Rockstar’s sandbox franchise--so much so that estimates put GTA V preorders in the record-breaking range of nearly 7 million.

The hype for GTA V translated into huge sales for the sequel when it arrived in September 2013. Just three days after its launch, GTA V became the fastest entertainment product to hit the $1B sales mark, clobbering The Avengers film’s previous 10-day record. Astronomical numbers notwithstanding, GTA V was also pretty good. Even if you don’t believe our five star review (and really, you should), it’s currently ranks as the second best reviewed game for both PS3 and Xbox 360 games on Metacritic and GameRankings. Not bad for a series lawyer Jack Thompson once called the “the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio.” Oh, Jack. Rockstar Games’ GTA series makes yet another appearance on the charts at number seven. This title comes in at 29 million copies sold. It is the highest grossing game that Rockstar has ever put out. Even with games like Red Dead Redemption and other GTA titles and marginally successful games like L.A. Noire--GTA V managed to top them all and pretty much crush anything else released near its shelf date.

No other video game franchise has generated the kind of backlash from parents than Take-Two Interactive’s (TTWO) Grand Theft Auto video games. The Grand Theft Auto games let players raise every kind of hell imaginable — including gunning down police, torturing enemies and (of course) stealing cars.

Despite what parents think, gamers can’t seem to get enough GTA, and they lined up for the 2013 Grand Theft Auto Vrelease, earning $1 billion in the first three days. That contributed to the estimated 157 million Grand Theft Auto video games sold to date.

5. New Super Mario Bros. (2006) Total worldwide sales: 30.38M How’d they do it? Drawing on its roots certainly helped. As the first Mario-led 2D platformer to grace the franchise since 1992’s Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, New Super Mario Bros. gifted fans a mushroom-sized dose of Mario nostalgia while also playing to the Nintendo DS’s strengths. The game offered a perfect blend of old-school platforming with modern frills such as rich, 2.5D environments, minigames, super-sized power-ups, and an all-round style reminiscent of the plumber’s early adventures.

Critics lauded the game for rejuvenating Mario’s old school reputation at a time when he was more known for 3D action, party titles, and an endless stream of Nintendo sports games. Its popularity would kickstart a new era of retro-inspired Mario games including the Wii sequel, New Super Mario Bros. Wii; and the Nintendo 3DS sequel, New Super Mario Bros. 2, released in 2012.

One of two handheld titles to make it onto the list, this Mario game blew the projected sales numbers away in most markets. It racked up a solid 30.4 million copies sold worldwide for the Nintendo DS. The only other games to even come close to these numbers are in the Pokémon franchise. Knowing this, it is clear that Mario is an unstoppable force–no matter what system his games are released on.

The platforming game that started it all hit the sales mark of 40.2 million copies worldwide. The little plumber clad in red set the standard for all other platforming games to come on the NES. And he has continued to do so even into the current generation of gaming. But his first outing on the NES routed the gameplay styles of games, such as the original Donkey Kong, and became something that felt familiar, but brought something new to the table at the same time.

Source: Nintendo

Source: Wallpaper Abyss

Source: Nintendo

4. Wii Sports Resort (2009) Total worldwide sales: 31.89M How’d they do it? As the sequel to ridiculously successful Wii Sports (we’ll get to that soon enough), Wii Sports Resort had an eager audience lining up for its arrival in the summer of 2009.

Once again, its sales were helped by being bundled with Wii consoles from that point onwards, and the fact it shipped with Nintendo’s Wii MotionPlus add-on, a snap-on peripheral that promised a more accurate motion-gaming experience.

The game featured more activities, more control, and more... everything. Each of the 12 events showed off the Wii MotionPlus’s strengths in various ways, from adding a greater level of finesse to sword fighting, allowing for a greater range of movements in table tennis, or simply making it easier to land a bullseye in archery. It highlighted the Wii’s true potential, and won a well-earned place amongst gamers and non-gamers alike for its efforts. True, Wii Sports Resorts only sold half as many copies as its predecessor, but went on to score higher marks with gaming judges, earning an aggregate review score of 80 and 82% on Metacritic and GameRankings, respectively;

18

compared to Wii Sports’s scores of 76 on both. With the release of Wii’s motion plus controls and a host of games that supported it, Nintendo once again decided to play the smart card and box a game with its new flagship system that not only allowed gamers, again, to get used to the tighter and more agile controls–it gave them some fun games to play and to challenge their friends on as well. Wii Sports Resort grabbed 31.9 million in overall sales.

Records Gamer’s Edition declared it the best-selling racing video game of all time in its 2010 edition. Nearly everyone has loved or played a Mario game at one time or another. But no single Mario title has garnered a bigger following than the Mario Kart series of games. From its inception on the Super Nintendo, Mario Kart has made gamers want to fire up their kart, grab their favorite question-block weapon, and trounce their friends. This just goes to show that Mario doesn’t even have to be in a platforming title to still put up huge numbers…like 34.3 million huge.

Source: Rockstar Games

3. Minecraft (2009 alpha / 2011 official) Total worldwide sales: 33M How’d they do it? Blood, sweat, and bricks (but mostly bricks).

Released in its alpha state by a (then) unknown coder named Markus Persson in May 2009, the indie title found an immediate following amongst its PC crowd who fell in love with its lowres style and deep, build-a-world mechanics. Their support helped Minecraft sales skyrocket, granting Persson the funds and popularity to quit his day job and develop Minecraft full time.

Soon after, he founded Mojang Studios alongside partner Jakob Porser and released Minecraft’s official “we’re-done-testing-thisthing-out” commercial version in November 2011.

Markus Persson (aka “Notch”) has since left Mojang in the care of Jens Bergensten to pursue other projects, but that hasn’t slowed Minecraft’s march to world domination. By late 2013, the original PC version had sold close to 12 million copies, while the combined sales of mobile versions (2011), an Xbox 360 version (2012), and PS3 version (2013), elevated its total franchise sales to 33 million and climbing. With Xbox One and PS4 versions on the horizon, expect that number to to grow even more nuts.

Source: Nintendo, Wallpaper Abyss

2. Mario Kart Wii (2008) Total worldwide sales: 35.26M How’d they do it? It was a Mario Kart game, for one. More importantly, it was the first Mario Kart entry for the Nintendo Wii which, for those who could remember spending a bulk of their childhood chucking bananas and popping balloons with friends in Mario Kart SNES, was a big deal at the time of its release.

Sporting 32 tracks (half of which paid tribute to past Mario Kart locations), Mario Kart Wii deftly balanced traditional Mario Kart gameplay with modern flourishes like the ability to race competitors around the world via the Mario Kart Channel and Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection. As an added perk, each Mario Kart Wii came with a Wii Wheel peripheral, which housed the Wii Remote and gave players the feeling of controlling an actual Kart wheel (albeit, a floating wheel with no physical grounding and slippery tilt controls). All these elements made Mario Kart a hit with critics, and boosted sales to the point where Guinness World

19

Source: Nintendo

1 . Wii Sports Total worldwide sales: 81.99M How’d they do it? Wii Sports’s record-breaking success is owed in no small part to the fact it was bundled with the Wii console in every region but Japan when it launched in 2006. It also helps that it offered the first taste of Nintendo’s then-revolutionary motion controlled gaming console and its new Mii online avatar feature, making it a hot commodity for Nintendo fans who had been chomping at the bit for the Wii’s arrival.

Born of Nintendo’s desire to dominate the casual market, and delivered on the wings of media hype, Wii Sports bridged the gap between traditional gamers and the so-called “non-gaming public” in a way no title had done before. It presented fun-loving consumers of every age a family-friendly experience that could be picked up and played by anyone with a living room and reasonable mobility. This mass appeal earned it an endorsement amongst critics and a starring role in living rooms, dorms, rec centers, and senior citizen homes across the globe. It’s lasting popularity led to a 2009 sequel, Wii Sports Resorts; and a 2013 Wii U remake, Wii Sports Club, featuring HD versions of the five original sports: baseball, bowling, boxing, golf, and tennis. No, the number one selling game of all time is not Call of Duty this or that. It is actually Wii Sports. No, we’re not kidding. Wii Sports is the fun little title that was released early in the system’s tenure. It gives you the option of playing baseball, bowling, golf, boxing, and even tennis. Then Nintendo gave you the option to level up your skills by completing training games. And for whatever reason, Wii Sports (both the packed-in version and the off-the-shelf version) has sold a total of 82.9 million copies worldwide since its release.

It’s not a numbers game...

Sales aren’t the end-all-be-all judge of a game’s value, but they are a pretty good indicator. After all, hype and expensive marketing can only carry a stinker so far, so if a game can manage to crack the 10 million sales mark, it’s safe to assume it has something to offer somebody (even if its not specifically for you). Data for this article was collected through the most recent sales reports and press releases we could find, and some good ole fashioned sleuthing.

l.a noire from the real world tom pakinkis

Over the coming weeks and months leading up to the game’s May release, we’ll be lifting the veil to show you different aspects of how L.A. Noire was created by the talented folks down at Team Bondi. This week, we offer just a few glimpses of the detailed wardrobe and set research that went into the production design of this very unique game – often the last step for most major motion pictures before principal photography, these were among the earliest steps taken towards creating L.A. Noire’s realistically authentic digital world of 1947 Los Angeles. Read on for some detailed info and behind the scenes pics, including some insight directly from Team Bondi Production Designer Simon Wood on the creation of the game’s locations and characters.

Games have improved dramatically from their once 8-bit pixelated state, to the quasi-realism seen today. It’s well know among enthusiasts that developers can make cars and environments as close to the real thing, however, there’s always been a bit of trouble when it comes to the face. Lip-syncing, expressions, and movement in video games have always given graphic artists trouble—i.e. getting the nuances and little ticks down.

Enter MotionScan from Brendan McNamara and Team Bondi, a motion capture technology that is bringing realism to gaming characters. The first game featuring this tech is “L.A. Noire,” a crime drama set in 1947 Los Angeles. Actor Aaron Staton (Mad Men), playing lead Cole Phelps, is lending not only his voice, but his facial expressions and body movements as well.

“As we were working on [‘L.A. Noire’] it became more and more crucial if we wanted to make a detective game work, because in TV the thing that’s key is that there are those moments when you interrogate somebody and you kind of push peoples buttons to see if you can push them one way or another to make them confess,” McNamara said. “So the reason why you couldn’t ever do that in games before is ‘cause you couldn’t really pull off those design elements. So that’s why we came up with the technology solution for that, so we could pull off those moments, because we couldn’t otherwise do it conventionally.”

“When you see the outcome you don’t realize that these actors were just in a white room talking to themselves,” joked McNamara. Though what he says isn’t far from the truth, actors would go into a white room that’s acoustically flat to sit in a chair directly in front of a camera to act. One of the press reps described the experience as “intimidating” and “you feel like you’re being downloaded when you’re inside it.”

When asked about how the actors were able to adjust to the alien setting, McNamara said they “were able to adapt well to it. Actors are great, they have a lot of imagination, it’s kind of a bit like theater where you don’t have any props you just have to manage it all in your head.”

The outcome, I can personally say, has made for a huge step in gaming development. When I went to go preview the “Fallen Idol” chapter of “L.A. Noire” I was able to see that the twitches in the face and the lip syncing, a constant issue for developers, was spot on. Their motions looked more fluid, rather than the body parts seeming like they were moving according to pre-set hinges.

PART ONE - LOCATIONS & SET DESIGN The team at Bondi traveled to L.A. to tour all sorts of historical locations, relics of old Los Angeles still standing more or less as they were over 60 years ago – collecting countless reference photos in a shoot that informed many places you will visit in your tour of duty as LAPD Detective Cole Phelps. From glamorous restaurants to the dingiest skid row hotels, Simon Wood and Team Bondi Lead Artist Ben Brudenell found reference locations perfect for the game. A great example being the run down apartment building that appears in the Traffic desk case “The Driver’s Seat” - the in-game setting being an almost perfect replica of the Barclay Hotel in L.A. which has been used as a location in many Hollywood films. “Sometimes there’s no better substitute than real life,” says Wood. “Ben photographed every square inch of that hotel.” The final product of in-game locations, both interior and exterior, wound up an amalgam of carefully researched reference material and artful inspiration. Wood explains, “Some were designed from the ground up as we couldn’t find what truly matched the needs of the gameplay or the original script by Brendan (McNamara, Team Bondi Studio Head). But other locations are interiors that we inserted into wonderful existing buildings. The Art guys in the team did an amazing job, as you really can’t tell what was made up by us and what was an original fabrication.” Additional reference material that wasn’t photographed was sourced from rare items such as vintage magazines from the time. “I bought from eBay old House & Garden magazines, along with Architectural Digest, Sears catalogues and Interior Decorating guides from the 40’s. These were invaluable as not only did it show you the best of how they styled their homes, but it showed you how they lived.”We created ‘Production Bibles’ which are like production design style guides for all the locations in the game,” said Wood, “The bibles have floorplans, material, dressing, graphics and signage, lighting details, and any other reference images that are needed to create the locations in the game. We made over 140 of them altogether.” This was particularly challenging considering the sheer amount of locations and the need to keep each one unique, yet accessible to explore and investigate. “I had a checklist of which styles of architecture and colour palettes would work well with the characters Brendan was writing, so that their persona was reflected in their personal surroundings.”

Source: Wallpaper Abyss

20

boss fight

d av i d c r a n e jeffrey fleming

When David Crane joined Atari in 1977, the company was maturing from a feisty Silicon Valley start-up to a mass-market entertainment company. “Nolan Bushnell had recently sold to Warner but he was still around offering creative guidance. Most of the drug culture was a thing of the past and the days of hottubbing in the office were over,” Crane recalled.

The sale to Warner Communications had given Atari the muchneeded financial stability required to push into the home market with its new VCS console. Despite an uncertain start, the VCS soon became a retail sensation, bringing in hundreds of millions in profits for Atari. “It was a great place to work because we were creating cutting-edge home video games, and helping to define a new industry,” Crane remembered.

“But it wasn’t all roses as the California culture of creativity was being pushed out in favor of traditional corporate structure,” Crane noted. Bushnell clashed with Warner’s board of directors and in 1978 he was forced out of the company that he had founded. To replace Bushnell, Warner installed former Burlington executive Ray Kassar as the company’s new CEO, a man who had little in common with the creative programmers at Atari. “In spite of Warner’s management, Atari was still doing very well financially, and middle management made promises of profit sharing and other bonuses.

Unfortunately, when it came time to distribute these windfalls, senior management denied ever making such promises,” Crane remembered. “Creative people don’t like to be lied to, and there was a revolt with many people leaving and others threatening to go. Job satisfaction in the whole engineering department was at an all time low,” he said. “At the same time, a memo was circulated from the marketing department showing the prior year’s cartridge sales, broken down by game as a percentage of sales. The intent of the memo was to alert the game development staff to what types of games were selling well,” Crane recalled.

“This memo backfired however, as it demonstrated the value of the game designer individually. Video game design in those days was a one-man process with one person doing the creative design, the storyboards, the graphics, the music, the sound effects, every line of programming, and final play testing. So when I saw a memo that the games for which I was 100 percent responsible had generated over $20 million in revenues, I was one of the people wondering why I was working in complete anonymity for a $20,000 salary,” Crane said.

THE GANG OF FOUR Crane wasn’t the only programmer who was dissatisfied with Atari’s management. Alan Miller had approached Atari’s executives with a contract proposal that would provide programmers with design credit and royalties on games only to be rejected by management. Larry Kaplan and Bob Whitehead were also looking for more recognition and fair compensation. Together they became known as the “Gang of Four”. “When we looked closely at that memo, we saw that as a group we were responsible for 60 percent of their $100 million in cartridge sales for a single year,”

21

Source: SF Gate

Crane recalled. “With concrete evidence that our contribution to the company was of great value, we went to the president of Atari to ask for a little recognition and fair compensation. Ray Kassar looked us in the eye and said, ‘You are no more important to Atari than the person on the assembly line who puts the cartridges in the box.’ After that it was a pretty easy decision to leave.”

START UP At the time, several programmers had already left Atari only to turn around and become independent contractors for the company, still producing games, but for double the money. The Gang of Four decided on an ambitious and much riskier move.

They would start an independent development and publishing company producing games for Atari’s VCS console, something no one had attempted before.

“To address company start-up issues we met with an attorney who, after hearing our story and our plans, suggested we meet with his friend [Jim Levy] who was ‘doing the same thing’,” Crane recalled. “Jim had been working at GRT Records and was in the process of raising VC money to go into business making cassette tape software for early computers like the Radio Shack TRS80.” As Crane remembered, “We met with him over a barbecue at his house, and eventually became convinced that he had the marketing savvy and the business skills to run the company we had in mind. And it didn’t hurt that he was well into the VC fund raising process.”

“Sutter Hill ventures found the exploding video game business of more interest than the slowly building home computer market, and Jim put together a business plan and funding package in relatively short order,” Crane explained. “At the time, VC firms didn’t invest in software. It was only the fact that cartridges for the Atari game system were physical, electronic components that made it understandable. They invested less than $1 million for controlling interest in a company that grew to $300 million in three years. Pretty good deal!” Crane said.

Crane and Miller left Atari in August of 1979 and Activision was born. They quickly began programming a development system for Activision, working out of Crane’s apartment. Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan stayed at Atari for a short while longer before handing in their notices to join Activision.

Atari soon realized their error in letting prime talent walk out the door. However, their first response was to try and sue the fledgling company out of existence, accusing them of copyright and patent infringement in a 1980 lawsuit. “Atari bought full-page magazine ads to try to paint us as criminals, when all we were doing was pursuing our chosen craft,” Crane remembered. Atari’s lawyers would continue to dog Activision over the next two years before their complaint was finally thrown out.

starter g u i d e game designer rya n s h way d e r

Game Designer is one of those mythical positions everyone wants to fill. What isn’t cool about getting to actually make the games you love so much? What isn’t cool about being able to brag to all of your old-school gaming buddies that you are a real live game designer? What isn’t cool about getting to come up with awesome ideas and having the programmers and artists implement them?

Well, there isn’t anything uncool about any of that. Unfortunately, reality is a bit different.

You do get to make the games you love so much, and you do get to brag to all your buddies, but you actually have to implement all those cool ideas, and you may not have the freedom to implement all the cool ideas you come up with until you’ve been a designer for quite some time.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves just a little bit, aren’t we?

The first step in becoming a game designer is deciding you want to become a game designer.

A game designer doesn’t get paid as much as someone with his equivalent skills in the business world. In reality, a game designer works long hours, relentlessly pursuing to improve himself and his designs, hoping for a little recognition from his superiors.

But there’s a bright side. After all, you really do get to make games. Office hours are generally set up so you can show up to work as late as 10:00 a.m. You even get to leave whenever you want, as long as it’s after core hours. I personally show up around 8:00 a.m. so I can head home pretty early (and so I can get a lot of work done while the office is still quiet). And a game designer’s dress code is “clothes.”

So let’s assume you’ve decided you want to become a game designer, despite the cold reality that it’s still a job. Where do you begin? Chances are, you’re already in the right place to get started on the road to becoming a game designer - you play a lot of games.

You have to play games - even those you don’t like. I decided a long time ago that I wanted to become a massively multiplayer online game designer, so I started playing a ton of them. I didn’t limit myself to good MMOGs, nor did I limit myself to North American ones; I played them all.

Keep playing those games. But, instead of simply playing them for fun, start analyzing them. What did the game do right? What did it do wrong? What did it do differently from most games, and why? Start looking for all of the little quirks you never would have noticed without looking for them in the first place. If the game is good, discover what makes it good. Many times, it’s not just polish and it’s not just cool features, but it is instead aconcrete idea working cohesively to produce something magnificent, even if it’s not the type of game you would normally enjoy.

The next step in your journey to becoming a game designer is to learn even more. Pick up every decent looking book you can find about game design. Don’t just read game design books, either; you’ll want to pick up general development books, production books, storytelling books and anything else you might imagine could apply. Every game design book has at least one valuable lesson, and you’ll eventually start putting together what those

lessons are after reading enough of them. While you’re learning from books, check out every resource you can about game design.

There are some great blogs, forums and now even schools that will teach you about game design. Another wonderful learning tool in the world of game design is modding games like HalfLife, Quake, Unreal, Never winter Nights or the Elder Scrolls. Each of these games provides a scripting language and tools to help you mod, which can teach you a thing or two about scripting, an invaluable skill to pick up.

Congratulations. You’re a lean, mean designing machine.

Now it’s time to get a job! But it’s probably not going to be as a game designer. The best way to begin your trek is to start in another department, such as quality assurance, customer service or technical support. It’s generally not too difficult to get your first job in one of these departments. What, there aren’t any game developers in your area? Ah, yes. I forgot to mention, you’ll need to be willing to relocate. Game development is still relatively focused, with concentrations in places like southern California, Austin, Seattle, Boston and a few other areas in the U.S. Now that you have that first industry job, you are well on your way. All you have to do now is prove you are better than the 50plus other people who want that same design position, and they’ve all been at the company longer than you. But don’t despair.

All you really need to know are a few things: Get over yourself.

Work your ass off. Don’t complain.

You aren’t a better designer than the designers on the project you’re testing. You aren’t more knowledgeable about games than everyone else at the company. You aren’t the only person being underpaid and overworked. You don’t deserve that coveted game design position more than the next guy.

Those first three points are really the most important. You need to work extremely hard at whatever job you managed to pick up.

Try hard, don’t slack off and focus on quality. If you’re writing bug reports, make sure they’re concise and detailed. If you think something sucks, send along a suggestion about how it might be even better. But, remember, get over yourself. Never speak in a negative tone about someone else’s work. Always be constructive.

Don’t patronize.

22

01

Source: Elder Scrolls Online

elder scrolls online

The success or failure of The Elder Scrolls Online will have far-reaching implications. This isn’t just one of the few new MMOs to charge a monthly fee - a business model that’s popularly considered to be at death’s door. It’s also the first ever Elder Scrolls title to embrace multiplayer, and as Bethesda’s marketing boss Pete Hines explained to OXM only this April, prior to announcement, the franchise has gotten by just fine as a single player only affair.

We caught up with Hines and lead gameplay designer Nick Konkle over the summer to discuss the ins, outs, whys and wherefores. The full transcript is a garbled mess worthy of Sheogorath himself, so I’ve taken the liberty of chopping it up into relatively coherent morsels. Enjoy.

1. On the choice of a subscription model What’s cool about having a subscription model for us, is that firstly we don’t have any gates on the content - Elder Scrolls is very much a game about going wherever you want to, and if you’re randomly running into artificial [obstacles] where you have to pay, it just doesn’t feel right. The other thing is to do with maintaining a team, that can offer super service and put out content at a very high clip. If you want to do that, you really need to plan for it in advance and also maintain a really large team of people.

And I think when we say content, we mean substantial, meaningful content. There are lots of different ways to support a game that you can look at. When we say content, we mean meaningful stuff, like new areas of the world, new factions, bigger meatier stuff. Not a couple of new weapons, or some new outfits, though we can do that too!

We can do all of that stuff plus a lot more, stuff that’s more Elder Scrollsy, and not trivial.

We could do it daily if we just wanted to throw a dagger out the door, we could just say “here’s today’s update”, but that’s not what Elder Scrolls is about. It’s more meaningful stuff that adds to your experience.

Disagree? Read more of Hines’s thoughts on subscriptions versus free-to-play here 2. What to expect from Elder Scrolls Online expansions We’re doing the kinds of things that with other games you’d associate with DLC - for us it would be, if you’re subscribing to the game you’ll get it [as part of the package]. Here’s another high-end zone, here’s another guild, adding significant story elements as well as new weapon types.

I would think of it as hours of gameplay. When we think about our additional content, we think about, how many hours of gameplay is it going to add to the experience? How frequent will DLC be?

We don’t have any official plans but the plan is fast. In order to do that we basically, you need to have multiple things queued up and ready to go even as the game is coming out, which is why we’re starting now. We’ve moved some of the teams off of that and onto the next thing to ensure we’re hitting it at a very regular clip.

But in a general sense I think monthly is a pretty good goal. It might be four weeks, it might be five weeks, it might be six, but in a perfect world, monthly - every four weeks you’re getting a new significant bit of content. Not just for the firstmonth or first two months; we want just non-stop, all the time, new stuff to go and play and do 3. On the difficulty of making an MMO work with console controllers It’s certainly a challenge. Getting it on a controller, and in particular UI windows and elements that were originally built with the PC in mind, and ensuring that there’s a scrolling system for them which doesn’t exist, or ways to move around [that make sense on a controller]. Those are the sorts of problems we’re working on, a lot of the technical challenges of getting the game to work.

4. On the likelihood of Kinect support It’s safe to say there are a number of things that we would like to do. But priority one is obviously just getting it up and running, getting it playing so that it feels right on the controller and runs correctly and is the same game experience. And then we’ll talk about ways we can take advantage of the other features.

Skyrim is a good example in terms of, it’s possible to do any of these things but what do we need? What do you have to have in order to have the game and play it well? That has to be the focal point exclusive to everything else. Once you get that really good and done, you can widen the focus and say OK, well, here are some other features specific to this platform and this platform that you could roll in - that becomes a little easier.

But if you start really wide and say we want to do all of these things, then you turn out and none of them are done really well and then you’ve got a big problem. The UI and the controls, that is the bread and butter - you’ve got to nail that so that when you have it in your hands it feels like an Elder Scrolls game....

What about voice control?

Maybe voice control is part of that, maybe we cannot do what we need to do with an MMO without these kind of Kinect additions. We’ll start with that - we’re still sorting through.

5. On finding the balance between Skyrim-style play and MMO mechanics I think the compromises we have to make

are more in service of the social restrictions. I think probably the best one, the best example of something that would be considered a compromise is that when you kill someone they don’t have their entire loot profile available every time because that would be just savage an MMO economy, which is something that has been in previous Elder Scrolls games.

But we do have a looting system which is extremely friendly to MMOs that makes sure people don’t compete so, in so much as those are features that you can’t really support, we’ve found equivalents that we think really make more sense. But certainly not anything like v/o or the ability to use any weapon or you know, first person mode, things that people really associate with the franchise are certainly not going anywhere.

6. On auction systems and player trading We have a fair number of systems that work that way. You can always trade with other players.

The way that looting works at its core is, anyone who participated in a fight gets a chance to loot independently of everyone else and so it really actually encourages tradingbecause a lot of the time people will get something that they don’t really want and say “hey, I don’t need this, you want it?” “eh, sure”. And everyone is actively engaged.

We also have a guild store system which is more or less an auction system. There isn’t an auction, you just put it up for a price and they buy it or don’t, but other than that it’s basically where you can post things and there’s a certain amount of time before people can buy it, XX potential buyers, so there are systems where people can move items around if they want to.

7. On looting So loot is basically instanced to everybody who participated in a fight. So when you see loot, that is your loot. What the other players see is completely independent of what you see. So it’s not just we’re all looking at the same sword and we’re going to try and pick it up at the same time. It’s literally to the individual and not like this thing drops this thing and there’s only one. You each get that thing.

8. On exploration This is going to get a little into content level design philosophy but that’s where we’re going, so! As you say, it’s an important aspect of an Elder Scrolls game that you can just go wherever you want to.... Ours works a little bit differently, ours is more like there’s a pocket of stuff here, there’s a pocket of stuff there, andeverything is self-contained [but] you can just kind of wander anywhere.

will it live up to the hype? edwin evans thirlwell

24

25

something that you could just get the letter and get the quest from the letter and it’d be like give this to its owner.

And then you can go back and do that. So as much as possible we try to ensure that you can do the content in any order but, there are certain things that you know, “get me down to the bottom of that” that there’s not really any other way you can do it. That’s happened to me a few times where I’m like ahh man, I wish I had done that then but, so it goes.

Perhaps you happily poured hundreds of hours into Skyrim without ever pining for company. Or maybe you plodded along, smiting as you went, but could never quite shake that niggling feeling that it could all have been so much better with a few friends in tow. I’m firmly in the former camp, but it’s hard to disagree that nowadays most developers ignore multiplayer and all its guises at their peril.

During their candid chat with Bethesda VP Pete Hines for the OXM Podcast, Ed and Jonty broached the topic of multiplayer in Skyrim. Whether it was ever considered and if Hines thinks there’s hope for multiplayer in Tamriel’s future.

“Every time we make an Elder Scrolls game we always, on some level, talk about multiplayer,” Hines explained. “But I think what we continue to come back to is: one, that it’s not necessary because clearly we’ve done okay without it and two: is it adding anything that’s missing to the game or the experience we’re trying to create?”

Fair points both, you might agree. To elaborate on their hesitancy further, Hines listed off just a few of the issues his team would have to consider before a multiplayer option in Skyrim could ever become a reality.

For example, how would quests be shared or accepted? How would conversations with NPCs work? How many enemies would need to be in any one area to provide a sufficient challenge to a band of merry adventurers? How good can those enemies look, considering how much information must be on screen at any one time? My head hurts just contemplating that kind of logistical nightmare.

But, if a straight up multiplayer mode is out of the question for now, how about some kind of inventive online augmentation - where online aspects enhance the at-its-heart single player experience? Ed suggested something like the pawn system in Dragon’s Dogma, in which players can create and personalise AI characters, then send them off to fight in other player’s worlds - after which they return with knowledge of previously unexplored areas or tips on how to bring down more challenging monsters.

“I see what you’re saying,” said Hines, “and obviously that is a different kind of thing, something that we have talked about and that we have looked at a lot. Not specifically for Elder Scrolls, but actually across everything [we do] - the notion that you create an avatar, or can you bring in an avatar that another player has created, and they’re a boss character that you’ve got to fight, and you see how you fare in an arena battle against your buddy.”

The ubiquity of social connectivity across multiple platforms nowadays hasn’t gone unnoticed at Bethesda HQ. “This world is becoming so much more socially connected through Twitter, through Facebook and all the different social applications, that it only makes sense to continue to look at ways you can bring those connections into the game, in ways that are cool and additive and not disruptive to the core game that you’re making.

“It’s something that we continue to look at,” Hines reflected. “And I’m curious to see how much of that get talked about this year, not just by us but by and as to where that’s headed.”

As revealed elsewhere in the chat, we can expect “exciting” announcements from Bethesda this year. In light of the above, we’re paying particular attention to the chaps and chapettes at Battlecry Studios, who appear to be working on a free-toplay MMO for consoles. something that you could just get the letter and get the quest from the letter and it’d be like give this to its

owner And then you can go back and do that. So as much as possible we try to ensure that you can do the content in any order but, there are certain things that you know, “get me down to the bottom of that” that there’s not really any other way you can do it. That’s happened to me a few times where I’m like ahh man, I wish I had done that then but, so it goes.

Perhaps you happily poured hundreds of hours into Skyrim without ever pining for company. Or maybe you plodded along, smiting as you went, but could never quite shake that niggling feeling that it could all have been so much better with a few friends in tow. I’m firmly in the former camp, but it’s hard to disagree that nowadays most developers ignore multiplayer and all its guises at their peril.

During their candid chat with Bethesda VP Pete Hines for the OXM Podcast, Ed and Jonty broached the topic of multiplayer in Skyrim. Whether it was ever considered and if Hines thinks there’s hope for multiplayer in Tamriel’s future.

“Every time we make an Elder Scrolls game we always, on some level, talk about multiplayer,” Hines explained. “But I think what we continue to come back to is: one, that it’s not necessary because clearly we’ve done okay without it and two: is it adding anything that’s missing to the game or the experience we’re trying to create?”

Fair points both, you might agree. To elaborate on their hesitancy further, Hines listed off just a few of the issues his team would have to consider before a multiplayer option in Skyrim could ever become a reality. For example, how would quests be shared or accepted? How would conversations with NPCs work? How many enemies would need to be in any one area to provide a sufficient challenge to a band of merry adventurers? How good can those enemies look, considering how much information must be on screen at any one time? My head hurts just contemplating that kind of logistical nightmare.

But, if a straight up multiplayer mode is out of the question for now, how about some kind of inventive online augmentation - where online aspects enhance the at-its-heart single player experience? Ed suggested something like the pawn system in Dragon’s Dogma, in which players can create and personalise AI characters, then send them off to fight in other player’s worlds - after which they return with knowledge of previously unexplored areas or tips on how to bring down more challenging monsters.

“I see what you’re saying,” said Hines, “and obviously that is a different kind of thing, something that we have talked about and that we have looked at a lot.

Not specifically for Elder Scrolls, but actually across everything [we do] - the notion that you create an avatar, or can you bring in an avatar that another player has created, and they’re a boss character that you’ve got to fight, and you see how you fare in an arena battle against your buddy.”

The ubiquity of social connectivity across multiple platforms nowadays hasn’t gone unnoticed at Bethesda HQ. “This world is becoming so much more socially connected through Twitter, through Facebook and all the different social applications, that it only makes sense to continue to look at ways you can bring those connections into the game, in ways that are cool and additive and not disruptive to the core game that you’re making.

“It’s something that we continue to look at,” Hines reflected. “And I’m curious to see how much of that get talked about this year, not just by us but by and as to where that’s headed.”

As revealed elsewhere in the chat, we can expect “exciting” announcements from Bethesda this year.

In light of the above, we’re paying particular attention to the chaps and chapettes at Battlecry Studios, who appear to be working on a free-to-play MMO for consoles.

01

26

Arisia Ends

OlliOlli