Filed under: Interviews | Tags: Bioshock Infinite, Dead Space 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Josh Sawyer, marvel-vs-capcom-3, Seth Killian, Steve Papoutsis, Timothy Gerritsen
Back in August I visited Cologne, for Gamescom 2010. The first big trade show I’ve ever attended, Gamescom was a blur of appointments, ad-hoc interviews, amazing games and lovely people. It was both a massive priviledge and utterly exhausting.
But the real work didn’t start until I got home. I had to write about it all. By the time I was finished I had knocked out 22 previews, 4 big interviews and a whole bunch of news stories. In total it all came to around 30,000 words.
So, because Collect is for collecting, it’s all going up here. But rather do individual posts for each article, I’m consolidating them. Below you’ll find links to all the interviews I conducted for Gaming Union, along with some flavoursome snippets.
I’ve put the Gaming Union previews and the Play.tm previews up separately.
Josh Sawyer: “One, ignore some people. I mean flat out, there are people that are reasonable and people who are unreasonable.”
Seth Killian: “Do you want him thrown out of here? He’s done in this business!”
Timothy Gerritsen: “They took scientific approaches to popularise racism.”
Steve Papoutsis: “As far as going away from horror, that is absolutely not what we want to do. We wouldn’t want to do that.”
The grid is full, the engines are roaring and it’s almost time for the lights to go green on F1 2010. Representing Codemasters’ first HD attempt at a Formula One game since they pipped Sony to the license a couple of years ago, F1 2010 has a lot riding on it, with a podium finish required to ensure the racer becomes a champagne-drenched yearly franchise. They clearly have high hopes.
So, with just a few short days before release, we sat down with senior producer Paul Jeal and chief game designer Steven Hood to talk about development, DLC and why F1 2010 will sell more copies than Gran Turismo… on the Xbox 360.
So, you are all done now and preparing to ship the game later this week. Was there anything that didn’t quite make the cut? Anything you had to leave out?
Steven Hood: Always…
Paul Jeal: When we came up with the game design, we came up with what we want as F1 fans to be in the ultimate F1 game. So there’s so much more that we want to expand on, to be honest.
We obviously spent most of our development effort on the driver’s side; the weather, the handling, the A.I, the damage – there’s room for improvement with all of them, but I think the biggest room for improvement is in the Live the Life’ aspect. That was, rightly so, the secondary focus of this one, you have to get the on-track stuff right before you can even consider doing this.
The multiplayer options as well. Not just in terms of ideas that were left on paper. We had to leave things out that were taken on fairly well through the development cycle. There was stuff that we tried to introduce too late into the development cycle that just didn’t work, too many bugs.
It’s always difficult when you’re working on a game, because you’re always mindful of the things that just missed it by a week or two. We haven’t deliberately left anything out, we’ve really, really, tried to squeeze in as much as possible.
(Read more at Play.tm)
Filed under: Interviews | Tags: Brian Jarrard, Bungie, Niles Sankey, Play.TM
With just a few short weeks to go before Halo: Reach hits shelves, Bungie are gearing up to wave goodbye to the series they toiled over for the best part of a decade. They plan on going out in style. We sat down with Bungie’s Community Director Brian Jarrard, and Campaign Designer Niles Sankey in a roundtable interview to find out how they are feeling, what to expect from Reach, and future downloadable content.
You guys have been working on this franchise for a long long time, and this is obviously your swan song – what’s the overriding emotion? Sadness, relief? Its a big thing to carry on your shoulders…
Niles Sankey: I’d say bittersweet, it’s an easy answer but it’s actually true. Obviously it’s really sweet to see the response of fans, and we’re really excited right now to release the game to the public, and just see how they react to everything.
The customization for example – what will they come up with? What are they going to build in Forge? What game modes will they invent? But on the other hand we’re sad to part ways with Halo and hand off the series, but we’re also excited to be moving on to other things.
Campaign wise, how much were you affected by Halo: ODST? A lot of people liked the in-depth emotional single-player experience. Will we be seeing more of that?
Niles Sankey: Yeah, I mean to a extent. Obviously ODST was a different story, and a different way of telling a story as you had a squad of ODSTs that tell the story, and inReach it’s fairly similar – you have a squad of Spartans. The way you play the game is more like Halo’s 1 to 3, to say it’s more of a linear progression of missions but certainly with Noble team we could tell more grounded story, get the story of Noble team during the fall of Reach and the loss and tragedy that they feel.
(Read more at Play.TM)
Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: Gamasutra, GameSetWatch, Jamin Brophy Warren, Kill Screen Magazine, TVGB
“We’re so concerned about the minutia that we’ve missed the much more interesting question of ‘how does this game make me feel?’”
Kill Screen is the ambitious new magazine from ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Jamin Brophy-Warren. Launching in January, it’s a project that promises a fresh approach to games journalism. Rejecting the established cycle of news, previews and reviews, Kill Screen aims instead to provide literate, thoughtful pieces on the people, culture and meaning of the medium.
In Brophy-Warren’s own words, “We want to be what early Rolling Stone was to rock n’ roll or Wired was to tech. We want to look like the Fader and walk like the Believer.” It’s an enticing prospect.
Filed under: Interviews | Tags: Beatnik Games, Plain Sight, Robin Lacey, TVGB
Making games is a tricky business, regardless of the size of the studio. UK-based indies Beatnik Games know this all too well. They’ve had a rough couple of years creating Plain Sight, their multiplayer robot-ninja-em-up. It’s a title with a fascinating premise, in which you gain points and power by destroying your enemies, but only bank those points when you destroy yourself and return to your original state.
With such intriguing set-up it would have been terrible if the game had never seen the light of day. Thankfully, after a couple of setbacks Plain Sight is back on track, better than ever and gearing up for release. We dragged producer Robin Lacey away from his booth at the Eurogamer Expo to talk development hell, accessibility and shitting rainbows.
That VideoGame Blog (TVGB): You showed the game at the Eurogamer Expo last year. Tell us a little about the game’s journey since then.
Robin Lacey (RL): Well last year was pretty much an Alpha build, it was just the basic gameplay concept. What we were trying to judge whether people thought the idea fun and if they found it visually interesting – it was basically a prototype. The response was fantastic and we were like, ‘This is great!’ So we went and spent about 3 months or so just working away on it and we thought, ‘Great we’re in Beta stage.’
So around Christmas last year we launched our open beta, which we thought would be fine – we thought maybe 10 people would download it and we’d get a bit of forum feedback. But 50,000 people downloaded it and everything burst into flames and went horribly wrong.
We realized that the game mechanics were broken and it was an absolute nightmare. So over the last 12 months what we’ve done is take the feedback and all of the harsh lessons we learned and tried to make the most refined game we possible can. It’s certainly been interesting.
