I was supposed to be in LA in mid-afternoon, but thanks to Southwest making me swap flights in Phoenix, I only arrived in my hotel room a few minutes ago. Which means I did not get to register today, so it will be an early morning rush to beat the rush.
Good news is that the shuttles from this place seem to run pretty frequently in the mornings.
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I leave for E3 soon. I’ll be running around seeing stuff and then frantically trying to write up my impressions so my boss doesn’t fire me.
I will try to blog stuff from time to time. Things I overhead, people I meet, conservations I have as well as my perspectives on what I actually see. Gameshark has assigned me to cover Empire: Total War, Spore, Halo Wars, Dragon Age and over a dozen other games that aren’t at the top my list. That coverage should go up at Gameshark pretty quickly, but a lot of stuff depends on the turnover of other articles. I’m sure. There are three Gameshark people this, a three-fold increase from last year which I think is a good sign.
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I’ve been tapped to see a lot of cool stuff at E3, but Empire: Total War is near the top of my own list of curiosities. We now have a release window of February 2009 (sigh) and a movie trailer that tells us nothing about the game, showing no gameplay at all.
I sort of get why companies put out movie trailers for their games, but I’d much rather see a screenshot of something I can use or expect than ten seconds of a naval battle and some vague allusions to the French revolution.
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Today, Brandon Sheffield and Chris Remo interview Soren Johnson at Gamasutra. They mostly focus on Spore, but also there is some general commentary about strategy gaming, publisher expectations and designing without a core audience in mind.
Some snippets:
For example, we have a super-weapon system, which is something that came along maybe six months ago, that gives you some high-level stuff like nukes and EMPs. You can heal your units or give them a building, or whatever, and there’s all these high-level things you can do. And we just kind of decided flat-out that these shouldn’t be available to the AI.
I would say the RTS genre in general has a big problem, in that it’s one of the most ghettoized.
you know, strategy is in a bit of trouble now, because the genre’s gotten very complicated.
In many ways, [Civ Revolution is] the first true sequel to Civilization, because various other designers have done the other iterations in the series. People will really find things in the game that hearken back to the first one, because in many ways, that’s what [Meier]’s building off of.
I think your classic triple-A RTS game is going to become less and less meaningful to most gamers, and when we look back in fifteen or twenty years in the future, aren’t going to be the games that helped move the strategy genre forward.
As an actual publisher, I think there’s always a little bit of machismo about what games you’re making. Turn-based is not the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re at the forefront of the industry.
I would not want to be in one of the classic triple-A franchise battles right now. I think that’s just a very bad place to be, whether that’s fighting games, RTSes, FPSes. Those categories are very overcrowded, the press knows exactly what they want and what they expect, and that’s just a very difficult area.
He’s always so quoteable.
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For some reason, a lot of not-spam comments are getting caught in my spam filter. A real pain, especially when regular commenters get caught and I have to check my spam list to see what gets stuck.
If you register on the site (there’s a form on the right sidebar), you shouldn’t have any trouble getting comments approved. But that’s a nuisance for some people, so I won’t force you to do it.
But if you make a comment and it doesn’t pop up automatically, let me know with an email – I don’t moderate comments before they get posted. If you let me know, I can train Askimet to recognize your IP and user name as appropriate.
Now there is a blacklist of terms that get the comment nuked automatically, but I don’t think anyone here would ever use words like that.
EDIT: I think I found the problem, and it was mostly an error on my part that led to Gmail addresses getting targeted as spam. There shouldn’t be any more problems.
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Good Old Games is a new game download system that will focus on delivering the games from yesteryear to your hard drive, all for between five and ten bucks.
I suppose it’s not a bad idea, but we already have Gametap, right? Competition is good, of course, but a lot will depend on the ease of use and size of the library.
There will be no DRM, either, if you care about that sort of thing.
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