Interviews

Just a few years ago Microsoft was one of the most prolific first and third party publishers for PC games, releasing titles like the Age of Empires/Mythology series, the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, the Mechwarrior series, Freelancer, Impossible Creatures, Rise of Nations and many more. However Microsoft has been doing some cost cutting in the past 18 months as they have shut down a number of their internal PC developers such as ACES Studio and Ensemble Studios while cutting back their third party PC game publishing lineup.

At the same time, Microsoft has tried to work with third party publishers on their Games For Windows marketing push for PC games, They have also tried to improve their Games For Windows Live online service which got off to a rocky start just over two years ago but has made improvements since then. Big Download got a chance to chat with Michael Wolf, the Senior Marketing Manager for Games for Windows Live, to get an update on their PC game development and publishing plans and their future plans for Games For Windows Live.

The launch of the free multiplayer first person shooter America's Army 3 has been a success at least it terms of widespread interest and numbers of players downloading and signing onto the game's servers. However the game, developed and funded by the US Army, has run into some first week launch problems and most of them deal with the massive amount of players that have overloaded America's Army 3's authentication servers. In addition, the US Army has admitted that it has decided to close down one of the game's development studios located in Emeryville, CA.

Big Download contacted the public relations representative for America's Army 3 to get some answers about both the shutdown of the Emeryville office and the technical issues that have cropped up for the game. The PR rep promptly sent over the US Army's official answers to these questions.

(Full disclosure: Big Download is the exclusive site for the America's Army 3 Deploy Client)

By John Gaudiosi

When he's not battling CGI Decepticons, actor Shia Labeouf can be found playing PC games or Xbox 360 online. With his $200 million movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, opening June 24, LaBeouf pulled double duty, working with Activision to fine-tune the second Transformers videogame experience. In addition to adding his voice work and likeness to the new game (co-star Megan Fox also went virtual), LaBeouf told the game makers what he did and did not like about the original game. One new feature that resulted from these conversations was the new online gameplay. LaBeouf talks about his love of videogames, what he played on set, and why he prefers Civ IV to Wii in this exclusive interview.

Gallery: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

With E3 2009 officially just three days away (pre-E3 press events take place on Monday) the press buzz for the annual US PC-video game trade show in Los Angeles has hit much higher levels than the previous two years when the show was a much smaller invite only event. The new show is a return of sorts to the big exhibit trade show version that launched E3 until 2006 (although this year's version is still projected to be about 33 percent smaller in terms of attendance than the pre-2006 trade shows).

The Entertainment Software Association continues to own E3 (the actual day-to-day operations at the show are handled by the IDG Expo company). Big Download got the ESA's Dan Hewiit, their senior director of communications, to answer some questions for us about E3 2009.

It's rare to read an interview with Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney that isn't all about the latest Unreal Engine 3 features. Yet that's what Gamasutra gives us in a new chat with the man. Indeed the vast majority of the lengthy chat is about Sweeney's early days as he co-founded Epic, early game programming, their first games like ZZT and more.

In fact it's only the last page of the Interview where the tone shifts to more present day matters such as the topic of when PC game graphics will look 100 percent photo realistic. Sweeney states that in terms of just looks, "Probably 10-15 years for that stuff, which isn't far at all. " However there are other factors such as animation and AI that are much further away. Sweeney states, "We simulate character facial animation using tens of bones and facial controls, but in the body, you have thousands. It turns out we've evolved to recognize those things with extraordinary detail, so we're far short of being able to simulate that." Maybe one day . . .

Many racing game fans know the name Papyrus Design Group (also known as Papyrus Software). Founded in the late 1980's the game developer had a huge success on the PC with the NASCAR Racing series of racing simulations. The games, published by the now defunct Sierra, were highly accurate simulations of driving NASCAR rides on the tracks and even some real NASCAR racers (most notably Dale Earnhardt Jr.) were both fans of the game and used it to train for the real thing.

When the NASCAR game rights were sold to Electronic Arts in 2004, Sierra/Vivendi Games shut down the developer for budget reasons. However many of Papyrus' team decided to launch a new venture, an online PC racing simulation service called iRacing. The actual online service launched in August with little fanfare. However this week iRacing announced that it had brokered a deal with NASCAR to launch a full-saction online NASCAR racing series. It will be the first time the NASCAR franchise will be made available to play on the PC platform in over five years.

While the series won't begin until early 2010, Big Download wanted to get more info on iRacing's plans and got its co-founder David Kaemmer (also the co-founder of the original Papyrus) to answer our questions about this new online-only racing series.

Last month Stardock released Demigod, the highly anticipated multiplayer oriented RTS game from developer Gas Powered Games. It was a game that most everyone before its release though would be a slam dunk for success. Indeed reviews of the title, including our own, have said the core gameplay is a lot of fun.

However no one anticipated that the multiplayer network set up for Demigod would turn out to be the game's Achilles heel. Thanks to a combination of factors, including an early release by the retailer Gamestop, tons of pirated copies trying to sign onto the game's multiplayer servers and issues with the network itself have kept the game from being the big multiplayer success that many thought it would be. Indeed, over two weeks after its release (three weeks if you count the early Gamestop leak) Stardock are still trying to correct issues in the multiplayer network.

However, Stardock's CEO Brad Wardell doesn't hide from the game's issues. Quite the opposite in fact. He has made constant updates on the game's message boards on their progress in fixing the network code and admitted that they did not anticipate these problems when the game was in beta. Big Download contacted Wardell to get an update on Demigod's post-release plans along with more info on the company's future game releases.

Few games in recent memory have generated as much critical comment as Six Days in Fallujah. The upcoming third person military shooter from Atomic Games and Konami is based on the real 2004 battle in the Iraq city where a number of US soldiers lost their lives. Konami recently held a press event for a number of their upcoming games and our sister site Joystiq got a chance to see a very brief gameplay video of Six Days in Fallujah.

However it's their interview with Atomic Games president Peter Tamte, creative director Juan Benito and one of the game military consultants, US Marine Corps Corporal Michael Ergo, that's very enlightening. Tamte claims that in addition to US military and Iraq civilians, they have also gotten input on the game from the insurgents that were involved in the battle. Tamte didn't reveal any more info on exactly how the insurgents were "contributing" to Six Days in Fallujah, saying, " I need to be careful about the specifics that I give." Tamte added that the game doesn't take sides on whether or not the US should have started the Iraq war, saying, "We're focused now on what actually happened on the ground."

id Software may no longer be a member of the Entertainment Software Association but the developer does plan to have a presence at the ESA's annual shindig that we all call E3 (well, they call it by the same name but you get the idea). A new Gamespot Q&A with id Software's Todd Hollenshead confirms that the developer will have something up its sleeve for the show that will be held in early June.

Hollenshead did say they will likely be showing off Wolfenstein at the show (their co-production with Raven Software and Activision that's due out later this summer). However he also said, "I expect that we'll have some new stuff at E3 that we haven't announced yet." id does have two internal games in development: Rage and the next Doom game. When ask to get more specific about their E3 plans, Hollenshead said, "I'll leave that as a tease."

Wednesday EA and Will Wright shocked the gaming industry when it was announced that the creator of so many acclaimed and best selling PC game titles was leaving EA to work full time at Stupid Fun Club. The "entertainment think tank" is a company Wright founded back in 2001 but will now run full time (with some financial backing from EA). The idea is that Wright and his team will create new entertainment properties that could branch out into other areas besides games.

In a new chat at Gamespot, Wright states we will have to wait a little while before they announce the first Stupid Fun Club projects. EA will have first crack at developing any ideas Wright's company comes up with into games. And what about Wright's last game for EA, Spore? He admits, "I think it was probably over-hyped, like a lot of games end up being, primarily because the development time was so long." However he is still pleased at the reaction the game got, especially among young gamers, Wright states, "We never expected a 3-year-old to be playing with their parents."

Ever since the official unveiling at GDC a couple of weeks ago, the OnLive PC game streaming service has generated tons of buzz on the Internet. Some people are excited at the prospect of playing games with extremely detailed graphics on a low end PC. Others have flat out condemned OnLive, saying the technology to do what OnLive claims to do doesn't exist. At least one person (Dave Perry) is saying his upcoming streaming game service will be better than OnLive.

Big Download attended the OnLive GDC press event but we still had some questions about the service, which is slated to launch this winter. We got a chance to ask question to the company's vice-president of games and media, John Spinale.

During GDC last month the PC Gaming Alliance offered up their latest report on the state of the PC gaming industry, claiming that over $11 billion in worldwide revenue was generated by PC games in 2008. You can check out the entire report (in PDF format) at the organization's web site.

Big Download went over the report and decided to do yet another interview with the organization's president Randy Stude (you can check out some earlier interviews with Stude here and here). Our main objective was to go over some topics that were brought up in the report as well as get some feedback on other issues that were not discussed.

First the report comes down pretty hard on Windows Vista's launch and its problems in terms of running PC games at peak performance. In your opinion did the launch of Windows Vista hamper some aspects of the PC gaming industry and if so how?

It is not the PC Gaming Alliance's opinion that Vista specifically hampered aspects of the PC gaming industry. It might be more accurate to state that Vista's challenges that were highlighted in the report contributed to PC gamers deciding not to upgrade their operating system.

Three years ago a Austin, Texas based company called Bigfoot Networks released their Killer NIC PC network card. With features like an on-board processor that helped to improve latency in even fast broadband connections the product got solid reviews. Still the original price of the card at $249.99 might have kept many from giving the Killer NIC a shot. (Bigfoot released a lower priced version of the card a year later, priced at $149.99).

Last month, Bigfoot Networks announced the next generation of their Killer network card family. The Killer Xeno not only has improvements over the original but it also will launch with a lower price point compared to the launch of the first Killer NIC card ($129.99 for the Pro version and $179.99 for the Ultra version). But is the network card still worth getting? Big Download got more info from Bigfoot Network's founder Harlan Beverly ahead of the product's release later this month.

One of the most acclaimed game developers in the business is BioWare and the EA-owned company already has three announced projects in various stages of completion. One is Dragon Age: Origins, the fantasy RPG that's due out later this year. Another is Mass Effect 2, the sci-fi action-RPG sequel that's due out in the first quarter of 2010. Finally there's Star Wars: The Old Republic, their first MMO game that doesn't have a release date yet.

But as with all game development teams BiowWare also has projects in the works that have not yet been announced. In a GDC chat with BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, IGN got Muzyka to say, "I think one of them might be pretty soon, then maybe a little later, then possibly some other stuff a little later." He added that, "Maybe one of them" might be revealed sometime this year.

In fact they gave some hints that one or more of their next projects might take place in a different setting. Zeschuk stating, "A horror RPG you could do a whole kind of different ways, it's been done before by some folks but we'd probably put our own fingerprints on it. There's lots of places you could tell a story."

"A robust party system is now a must-have feature for today's triple-A multiplayer games, and the solution now bundled into UE3 represents man-years of development effort – and has received millions of player-hours of validation," said Sweeney.

Unreal MCP includes a set of tools for visualizing gameplay, including such features as heat maps displaying regions of player activity within a level. This allows developers to collect game-flow statistics, enabling design teams to analyze player behavior, including positional data. During a demo of the Day One map from Gears of War 2, "heat maps" showed how players used a mortar in a hallway to strategically take out enemies. This technology allows game designers to physically see how even the little changes they make in a level can impact gameplay and can aid with balancing out a map or level. A designer can even zoom in close to the action and filter how much data is gathered. It can be used in both single-player and multiplayer game design during and after a game's release.

" Using Unreal MCP's data visualization tool, you can view game stats as heat maps overlaid on a 2D view of a level, seeing where players were most frequently active," said Sweeney. "Such visual tools are essential both in spotting flow problems and tweaking games during development, and in enhancing the multiplayer experience post-release."

Sweeney added that client-side support for Unreal MCP is built into UE3 through a collection of interfaces to allow flexible data exchange using standard HTTP protocol or custom protocols using TCP sockets. Unreal MCP supports secure communication between PC and Xbox 360 using Microsoft's LIVE Server Platform (LSP); direct communication to central servers on the network; and communication with PlayStation 3 and PC games.
Speaking of PS3, UE3 now supports downloadable games on Sony's platform. By taking advantage of the console's new Game Content Utility, PS3 games are now able to run as retail disc games, downloaded from the PlayStation Store, or even a patch, all without even recompiling the code.

A new content browser and search engine, powered by a back-end database, enables designers to find game assets near-instantly among large amounts of source content. With thumbnail previews, support for content tagging, and asset collection management, Sweeney said the Unreal Content Browser frees artists from the need to manually open files to look for game assets.

"We looked at how easy it was to search the net with Google, and find photos on Flickr, and redesigned Unreal Engine 3's content searching and tagging along those lines," said Sweeney,. "The result was a productivity boon for artists and designers. New support for creating and sharing collections of assets enables artists to manage groups of game assets independent of file location."

During the demo, a search for a "pillar" pulled up all pillars in the data base, which could then be dragged and dropped into a personal collection. Any content within a collection can be shared with other members of the team Each night everyone on a team has tagged added to their collection during the sync process. The demo showed how a rock could be placed right into a game level and then have additional textures and materials added to it within minutes. The whole process, including the ability to scale and manipulate the object in the collection or in the gameworld, was seamless. The technology brings a Web 2.0 feel to the process of browsing, searching, and creating game assets, greatly enhancing artist and designer workflow.

Rounding out the new features for UE3 2009 is a new artificial intelligence system that now supports the automatic creation and use of navigation meshes. Sweeney said this gives AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of the world around them and enabling them to make smarter movement decisions.
"Navigation meshes further optimize the performance and memory usage of AI relative to traditional node-based navigation systems, thanks to a more efficient representation and less reliance on collision-detection for movement," said Sweeney.

Epic Games will be showing these new features to press and game developers later today in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference.