Game, Set, Watch has posted a summary of Jonathan Blow’s GDC talk about how we think about game design, and, more importantly, how what we think affects the challenges that face designers.
Read it. I haven’t fully absorbed what exactly Blow is getting at or what the take-away should be for critics and analysts, let alone designers. But it has some really nice categories.
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Today’s Games for Windows GDC podcast (2/20) has Relic’s Josh Mosqueira and Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor as guests. Lots of time is spent on the present and future of real time strategy and PC gaming in general.
The usual ground is covered. Will RTS games push themselves into a hardcore ghetto? How can you get new people to play the game? Where do narrative and graphics fit as the genre pushes forward?
EDIT: Since this post, I’ve started my own strategy game themed podcast – Three Moves Ahead. Give us a listen.
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In an interview with IGN, Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games makes it clear that he is not optimistic about the future of the PC as a gaming platform, even for such dyed-in-the-wool PC genres like real time strategy.
It’s just a good business decision to have your game of any kind on a console where you can’t pirate it. When you start to refine the control system and you start to take away the barrier of the control system and you start to make that a non-issue, just like we did with first-person shooters, and it becomes more about the game experience and less about the interface, you start to go to the platform where the economics of where the gaming base is.
He also thinks that the upcoming 360 version of Supreme Commander has cracked the interface barrier that has made so many RTS games unappealing on consoles.
We’ve done tests with Supreme Commander where we took the 360 controller interface and plugged it into the PC and played people with the 360 controller against people with the keyboard and mouse. People did remarkably well, so we don’t think the UI is going to be the gating factor in the future of who comes out on top.
What IGN did not ask, but probably should have, was “What have you done that EA did not do? Because Command and Conquer 3 and Battle for Middle Earth II weren’t exactly great console experiences.”
That piracy has some impact on PC sales is indisputable. The only question is the extent of the cost. I have a hunch that the cost is pretty high, but nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to back that hunch up. Console gaming is successful for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with piracy, from ease of use to better QA limits to hardware consistency. As someone who still games on his PC more than his consoles, it’s still hard to imagine making the shift full time.
I do find it hard to believe that an RTS gamer on a 360 could possibly compete with an experienced PC user because hotkeys, control groups and precision mouse control are a huge advantage. Maybe GPG has solved the puzzle, but I’d love to see how. The 360 controller is not exactly an elegant input device.
Taylor gets it right though when he talks about the design implications for RTS in a declining PC market. Using shooters as an analogy, he states:
You’re not going to be your projections and thinking about your market as your PC. You’re going to be thinking about your market on the console. So you’re going to focus all of your creativity around your control scheme of your console, your audience of your console, the age group that you’re going after on your console and what features they want. You’re going to cater to that audience…It’s going to be market driven.
This is why Ensemble’s Halo Wars is so important. It will be, I think, the first traditional RTS designed specifically with a console in mind.
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My review of the expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2 is now up at Crispy Gamer. I liked it much better than I thought I would. I guess practice makes perfect for Obsidian.
If you’d rather, you can sign up for the Crispy sweepstakes. Lots of big, big prizes which I am not allowed to compete for. The grand prize is some insane gaming nerdvana package.
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I’m skipping the Game Developer’s Conference this year, even though more people I know will be there and there are lots of parties. After a lean 2007, I simply couldn’t justify the hotel cost (even as a business expense) so I didn’t bother trying to angle press credentials.
I love the conference myself, even in spite of last year’s shocking conclusion. I’ve heard some people refer to GDC as taking the place of E3 in some people’s minds, which I think would be a huge mistake. Last year I saw some of the bloat, with dozens of solicitations for me to come by booths and take a look at new gee-whiz hardware, where the con has traditionally been about designers and developers sharing best practices and theories about how to reach gamers. As a veteran of academia, I liked the nerdiness of the whole thing and I sincerely hope that CMP can resist the urge to make the conference one centered on big news announcements.
Ironically, the fact I am not attending will probably mean I can blog more heavily about it since I won’t have to carry around my monster laptop and find a way to comment about stuff as it happens while rushing to make the next panel on AI or diversity or journalism. Since this has never been a blog focused on news or press releases, I’ll have some time to digest stuff and write about the goings on with some thoroughness.
In other news, I was surprised to read on Scott Krol’s blog that GenCon LLC, the company behind one of the big nerd events of the year, has declared bankruptcy following a lawsuit over failure to forward proceeds of a Star Wars charity auction. Not cool, dudes. The 2008 convention in Indianapolis will go ahead.
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It looks like this was the week that Maxis showed off Spore to some of the local press. The Games For Windows 2/13 podcast discusses the game near the beginning, immediately after one of their typical shaggy dog stories.
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