GDC 2016

All 30 Oculus Rift launch games: our take on a strong launch lineup

28.03.2016

carousel_slot_3, GDC 2016, Oculus, Oculus Rift, virtual reality

Tim: I’ve seen a lot less of Lucky’s Tale over the game’s gestation than Wes has, so I was something close to dumbstruck by how polished it actually is. With a lot of VR stuff you expect compromises and rough edges,…

Urban Empire heats up city building with political infighting

24.03.2016

GDC 2016, sim, Urban Empire

City development happens organically and changes to reflect your composition of housing, commercial, and industrial buildings. I’ve never been a fan of the way many city builders ignore the exhaustive political process governing the construction of real cities. It’s easy…

Hard data on the major trends in PC gaming

23.03.2016

GDC 2016

Understanding the trends and demographics of gamers is a massive business. EEDAR (Electronic Entertainment Design and Research) is one of the goto sources for this information, with over 130,000 products observed and 176 million points of data to reference, these…

Obsidian's Tyranny explores what happens after the bad guys win

22.03.2016

GDC 2016, Obsidian, Paradox Interactive, RPG, Tyranny

In some ways, Obsidian’s next RPG feels like a sequel to a game we haven’t played or a story we’ve never read. Tyranny, which is built on a modified version of the tech used Pillars of Eternity, doesn’t depict the beginning of an epic…

How Overwatch uses sound to pinpoint threats you can't see

22.03.2016

Action, GDC 2016, Overwatch, Third Person Shooter

Scott Lawler and Tomas Neumann had a tough mission when designing the sound for Overwatch. “We were talking with our game director, Jeff Kaplan, and he gave us this lofty goal of, ‘I want to be able to play the game…

Evaluating VR performance and latency with Futuremark's VRMark

22.03.2016

benchmark, displays, Feature, Futuremark, GDC 2016, Hardware, virtual reality, vr, VRMark

VR is the talk of the town right now, with all the major players set to ship devices at the end of the month. Wander around GDC and you couldn’t swing a cat without smacking someone wearing a VR headset…

BioWare's new IP was “revealed” at GDC, but nobody noticed

21.03.2016

bioware, GDC 2016, News

A funny thing happened at the recently concluded 2016 edition of GDC. BioWare, the studio that gave us Mass Effect, Dragon Age, The Old Republic, and many others, revealed the new thing it’s working on. And nobody noticed. “Revealed” may…

How Early Access will shape Starpoint Gemini Warlords

20.03.2016

4X, GDC 2016, Little Green Men Games, RPG, Starpoint Gemini Warlords

I spent some time at GDC with developer Little Green Men Games, the team behind the upcoming Starpoint Gemini Warlords. While I got a brief look at the next entry in their space RPG series, we spent most of our time talking about Steam Early Access, how…

Most of The Witcher 3's dialogue scenes were animated by an algorithm

19.03.2016

GDC 2016, RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3 is a massive game. It packs in 35 hours of dialogue, each line of which was voice acted and motion captured. If I had been in charge of orchestrating all the moving parts of the game’s development, I would’ve had a breakdown a…

Diablo's Battle.net originally ran on a single PC

19.03.2016

Diablo, GDC 2016, News

One of the founders of Blizzard North, David Brevik, gave a postmortem of Diablo today at GDC in San Francisco, in which he shared an interesting tidbit about the nature of the ARPG forefather’s then-unique networking. “Battle.net ran on one computer,”…

GDC 2016

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