GDC 2010 Coverage

Thursday, March 11

20:48 PST / 04:48 GMT (Phil): ...Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Congratulations again to Naughty Dog - another stack of endorsements for Nathan Drake and friends.

But that's not it - show host Warren Spector announces that there's another Deus Ex being made... Deus Ex: Human Revolution, followed by a trailer. Definitely a nice surprise to end the night!

20:45 PST / 04:45 GMT (Phil): So this is the big one - Game of the Year. The nominations for this one are:

• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Dragon Age Origins
• Demon's Souls
• Assassin's Creed II

Yep, that's right - no place for the biggest videogame release of all time. Not really been the best few weeks for Infinity Ward, you'd have to say. Anyway, the winner of the Game of the Year Award is...

20:43 PST / 04:43 GMT (Phil): And the final high five is the Lifetime Achievement Award, which this year is being given to id Software founder John Carmack. Again, no introduction needed.

The award was present by Will Wright - himself the first recipient of this award - who added one of his brilliant trademark Powerpoint presentations. Brave, considering Gabe's bad luck with technology a few minutes ago - but all was well.

A standing ovation greeted Carmack himself: "It really has been an amazing couple of decades that I've been working in here," he said, revealing that he still writes lines of code every day.

"The truth is, the best is yet to come," he promised, speaking not just of himself, but of the entire games business, adding that he's more proud to be working in the industry now than at any point in the past.

He's also going to tackle nuclear fusion once his aerospace company has cracked space flight.

20:29 PST / 04:29 GMT (Phil): The next honourable mention is the Pioneer Award, and it's been handed to Valve's Gabe Newell. I don't think I need to explain who he is.

"This really is an award for everyone at the company," he said. "That's how we work, we're a collaboration." He went on to give a little presentation, cut short - tragicomically - by a Windows blue screen of death. He used to work at Microsoft, you know.

20:16 PST / 04:16 GMT (Phil): But before that - some honourable mentions. The Ambassador Award is given to people who "advance the art of making videogames" - this year the award was given to three people: Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik and Robert Khoo - the people behind Penny Arcade and PAX.

They also set up the Child's Play charity, which raised $1.78 million alone in 2009 from the gaming community. Worthy recipients, for sure. "Thanks for not giving it to Uncharted 2" - quote of the night?

20:12 PST / 04:12 GMT (Phil): Okay - the last collection of award winners before the big one. Best Technology award was another shiny prize for Uncharted 2, Best Downloadable Game went to Flower, Best Visual Arts was given to Uncharted 2 while the Innovation Award was presented to Scribblenauts.

So... bets on Game of the Year? I think my money's on Uncharted 2 - a few weeks ago I sat at the AIAS Awards as part of the DICE Summit and saw the Naughty Dogs grab an unprecedented collection of prizes. It's up against some big-hitters though - nominations to follow.

19:54 PST / 03:54 GMT (Phil): Another batch of gongs! Best Writing was handed out to... Uncharted 2, while a new category called Best New Social/Online Game went to Farmville. Best Handheld Game was awarded to Scribblenauts.

19:43 PST / 03:43 GMT (Phil): So the first few Choice Awards have been handed out - Best Debut went to Torchlight, Best Audio to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (the first of many?) and Best Game Design to Batman: Arkham Asylum.

19:19 PST / 03:19 GMT (Phil): The IGF Awards have just taken place, with the Game Developer Choice Awards are next - but first a mention (and congratulations) to the winners of the main award: The Seumas McNally Grand Prize, which also brings with it $20,000 in cash.

The nominees were Joe Danger, Monaco, Rocketbirds: Revolution!, Super Meat Boy! and Trauma, but the winner was...

Monaco.

15:39 PST / 23:39 GMT (Phil): One of today's best-attended sessions was - unsurprisingly - a design session by Blizzard's Rob Pardo, in which he outlines some of the company's key design principles, plus a selection of examples when they'd been successful, or not.

Among the interesting highlights were the friction between lore and practicality - in Warcraft III lore the only class and gender that could be a druid was a Night Elf male. But in order to have Druid as a class in World of Warcraft, it needed to be opened up - Chris Metzen (Blizzard lorekeeper) was resistant, but in the end practicality won out, and it was extended to Tauren and Night Elves, both male and female.

Another snippet involved player expectation for what a character would be able to do, based on what it looked like. Would a race and class combination make a player feel good? Interestingly, Blizzard's a big fan of making everything feel overpowered, so that a player feels unstoppable when playing. Of course, that feeling has to be consistent across classes, but rather than make the differences between classes careful, Pardo extolled the virtue of celebrating those differences and making them feel unique as a result.

Pardo linked his thoughts to dozens of examples from Blizzard's back catalogue - probably the design 'failure' that resonated with the audience the most was WoW's Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest, which involves collecting numerous pages to combine into chapters, then a book.

The intention was that players would collect pages while completing other quests in the zone, but in practice people just went right to the Auction House and picked them up there - not a great way to explore the story behind it, but an interesting learning experience... one I can certainly relate to...

"Players will find the path of least resistance" was a phrase that Pardo used in the GamesIndustry.biz retrospective published earlier this year, and a phrase that he used again today - crucially, he says, that path needs also to be the most fun path.

12:50 PST / 20:50 GMT (Kath):Peter Molyneux has said that drama and emotion in games is more important than ever, and that action adventure games or more drama-led RPGs such as Heavy Rain are much easier to market than the traditional type. In his GDC keynote entitled Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design, Molyenux discussed the design decisions made for the upcoming Fable 3.

He praised Microsoft's user research for its usefulness, saying that it was how Lionhead made the “disastrous” discovery than 60 per cent of the players of Fable 2 understood less than 50 per cent of the features. As a result, Fable 3 has been vastly simplified – a direction Molyneux said he believes the whole industry is now moving toward.

The days are gone when players needed a 1-2 hour tutorial or instruction manual to play a game, he said. Players want to put the game disc in their console and be instantly transported into a world – hence how important the drive to simplicity is. He revealed several new features for Fable 3. The first – which he admitted was inspired by PS2 title Ico – was touch. Instead of pressing the A or B buttons to carry out a decision, players now physically carry them out, a system which adds an emotional connection to actions, he said.

In a demo, he showed his character playing with his daughter, then leading her by the hand through the town, before grabbing a protesting beggar and dragging him to the workhouse. The dog in Fable 2 was a huge success, he said, and Fable 3 would further extend that bond between characters in the game. The original Fable sold 3 million copies, he revealed and Fable 2 sold 3 and a half million. If a franchise doesn't grow it dies, he said. In the industry at present, games need to sell 5 million or more to be judged a blockbuster success.

When the team sat down and began to create Fable 3's story, they realised they could create another hero's journey where the main character starts weak, a bad guy does something to them then they spend the entire game levelling up to become powerful enough to beat him. But instead they decided to make the end of the hero's journey the halfway point, so that the player can enjoy actually being powerful. That feeling of power is what's important to gamers, he said. It's what he used to enjoy when he first started playing RPGs.

So once the player has defeated the king, they will get to become king. Inspired by Obama's journey since becoming president, he said that the player will make promises to their followers to increase popularity then have to try to keep those promises, which won't always be possible, adding a new direction to the game's choice and consequence mechanic.

In order to fully imagine the game's story before beginning work on it, Molyneux said he hired a film studio and actors to act out the story – a technique that was cheaper and faster than storyboarding and which worked well.

Molyneux also broke the news that John Cleese is onboard with the project as the game's butler – a sarcastic character. And responding to questions from the audience, he declined to answer whether the game would appear on PC – saying only that he loved the PC and what's happening with it and would love to see the game on the platform. He didn't talk about Natal compatibility, but did say the control system has been “wonderfully additive” to the experience.

12:35 PST / 20:35 GMT (Kath): David Edery of Fuzbi has said that digital distribution is not an all-out win for independent developers and that, in fact, those independent developers are contributing to the platform holder's bottom line in more instances than they are making good money for themselves.

You only have to look at book and film sales from digital retailers for evidence, said Edery, citing research which shows 75 per cent of Amazon's book sales come from 2.7 per cent of its titles and in music, 0.4 per cent of songs generate 80 per cent of revenue.

One of the reasons for that is user reviews, he said. Blockbusters have been shown to generate better user reviews – which is thought to be because consumers of blockbusters consume less of that media, so are less picky.

Edery also advised developers making games for digital platforms such as XBLA to keep in regular contact with the platform holder. In his time as worldwide portfolio manager for Microsoft he saw seven group re-organisations and five management changes, he said, which means that if you get approval from a platform holder then simply go away and make your game and present it nine months later, changes might have taken place which mean your game isn't green lit. He added that when avatars were introduced to games by Microsoft, it was the studios who found out about it and acted early that were promoted and became huge successes.

09:41 PST / 17:41 GMT (Phil): In a talk entitled "The Art of War," discussing the battle against real-money traders (RMT) in Eve Online, CCP chief economist Eyolfur Gudmonsson discussed the tactics the company has been using for the past year, and the results they've seen.

The main thrust of 'Operation Unholy Rage' focused on selling game time codes officially through game systems, allowing players to either buy game time with in-game currency (ISK), or to effectively allow cash-rich, time-poor players to spend real money in return for in-game money.

Once the systems were in place, the company banned 3000 RMT accounts on March 10 last year, and a further 6200 accounts in June. The immediate impact of the June actions saw an average CPU usage per user fall by 30 per cent, despite only 2 per cent of accounts being banned.

Gudmonsson did stress that such activity requires dedicated and ongoing action to stem the unofficial currency trading - the only drawback is that RMTs seem to have turned to hacking instead of running bots and macros, but that's something CCP is very focused on fighting too.

Other MMOs have looked at various systems to defeat 'gold-sellers' but the biggest Western game - World of Warcraft - has always resisted allowing something like game code selling from taking place. It will be interesting to see if any future MMO from Blizzard incorporated such thoughts from the ground up.

01:53 PST / 09:53 GMT (Matt): There seems to be plenty of third-party support for PlayStation Move at this (admittedly) early stage, with a mixture of big publishers, budget outfits and Japanese specialists who's titles probably won't see a proper release in the West.

Buried in the big list are some interesting companies. Q Entertainment, developer of Rez and Lumines stand out – perhaps we'll see something of "QJ", a music title that had originally been announced for the Wii at the end of 2008? And the Eve Online team at CCP are working on Move, the obvious guess would be it's going to be incorporated into DUST 514, which is another reason to keep eyes on the developer's first console shooter.

Sony demoed a few new titles last night at GDC – mini-games, new IP and Move in established franchises – but these were really just token efforts. The real meat is likely to get announced at E3, when we'll get a proper look at the next stage of motion control gaming.

01:03 PST / 09:03 GMT (Matt): With PlayStation Move now out in the open, journalists at GDC have been able to go hands-on with the motion device – including the team over at Eurogamer. Inevitably the site's report on the first batch of games draws comparisons to the Nintendo Wii, and although there are a couple of titles that suffer under scrutiny, the overall impressions of Sony's rival are positive.

Mini-game compilation Sports Champions is "by far the most impressive demonstration of the capabilities of Sony's device", according to writer Oli Welsh, adding "with no sensation of lag at all and proper three-dimensional tracking in full song, Sports Champions shows Sony's motion controller at its best."

The recently announced SOCOM 4 also makes good use of the device's sub-controller according to Oli, who adds that the Move peripheral is a viable and credible alternative control method for the hardcore shooter. The full report can be read here.