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, but this Technicolor platformer starring a cartoon fox is slick, responsive, and crucially, really good...
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 to feel like a skyscraper-erecting god, and that can be fun, but I’d also like to see...
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 people know how things are changing. During a panel at GDC last week, Geoffrey Zatkin,...
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 struggle between good and evil. Instead, it takes place in the aftermath of such a conflict,...
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 with the monitor practically turned off,” explains Lawlor, senior sound designer on the project. “Of course,...
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 in the noggin. With multiple VR options showing up, one of the questions we inevitably...
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 be putting it a bit strongly, as no official announcements were made. But Alistair McNally,...
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 it defined Starpoint Gemini 2 (our review is here), and how it will shape Warlords...
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 month in and the dialogue system would’ve ended up more like Facade. Thankfully, the much...
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,” said Brevik. “Mike O’Brien [now president and co-founder of ArenaNet] is a networking super-genius. That...
