Recently, Bungie Studios community director Brian Jarrard - better known to Halo fans as "Sketch" - took some time to clear up a few lingering questions about Halo 3: Recon and Halo 3's upcoming Mythic Map Pack as well as some general Bungie topics.
From our informal chat, we learn that Halo 3: Recon will stay relatively true to Halo 3's formula, meaning that we won't be seeing any game engine improvements or added features. But Jarrard did confirm that (at minimum) one new weapon will make an appearance in Recon and a new soundtrack will debut. We also touch on the topic of Recon's Forge, learning what it is not and discuss why Bungie chose to not make it as feature-rich as a map editor like, say, what Far Cry 2 has to offer. There's Vidmaster achievement and Mythic Map Pack talk as well and the conversation somehow leads to the topic of global domination and pie.
The big announcement at BlizzCon yesterday was the morphing of StarCraft II into a trilogy. I had the opportunity to sit down with one of the people instrumental behind this change, StarCraft II Lead Producer Chris Sigaty. I spoke with him right after the announcement was made, and we talked about how this will impact SC2, what it will mean for multiplayer games, and what challenges the developers are facing in making SC2 the best game it can be.
Everyone loves pie, and this year's IndieCade International Festival made our favorite delicious pastry even better, marrying it with time travel in The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, one of the event's more interesting finalists. A product of late night brainstorming and drawing more than a little inspiration from silent film, the game offers an unique blend of platforming and puzzle solving as players guide the mischievous Winterbottom on his single-minded quest for more pie. We recently jumped at the opportunity to speak with the game's creator, Matt Korba, and over the course of the interview we picked his brain on a variety of topics, from the title's origin as a thesis project to similarities with fellow indie time travel experiment, Braid. And of course, pie.
One of the more unique finalists in this year's IndieCade International Festival, Dark Room Sex Game was a student project from the IT University of Copenhagen that require players to cooperatively "reach climax" by finding a mutual rhythm (by shaking a Wii remote) and speeding it up. We had a chance to speak with with developers Douglas Wilson and Dajana Dimovska about the origins of the game (and some its more humorous promotional material):
Douglas Wilson: So let me introduce myself more formally - I'm Doug
Tommy Tallarico has been working in the video game industry since 1991, and has worked on the audio and music for over 250 games, which sounds exhausting enough. He also ocassionally co-hosts Reviews on the Run (formerly Judgement Day on G4), he's a co-founder of the Game Audio Network Guild, serves on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference, and somewhere amidst that schedule he found time to co-create (with game composer Jack Wall) the live-action game music experience that is Video Games Live.
Video Games Live has been bringing the rocking tunes of games to audiences around the world for three years now. Whereas Jack Wall provides the baton-waving, classy dress portion of the show, Tallarico is the tennis-shoe wearing, Spider-Man guitar-wielding rock element. Check out our full interview with Tommy after the break, and check the VGL schedule to see if there's a show near you -- because everyone should hear the Mario Bros. theme played live at least once. If you can't make it to one, enter our Joyswag Video Games Live giveaway.
One of the biggest things we missed at E3 this year was the upcoming Vigil Games / THQ title, Darksiders: Wrath of War. How we managed to miss this one is still unclear -- we can only assume that it was in our blind spot the entire time. So, during our recent jaunt down to Austin for the Game Developer's Conference, we made time to stop by Vigil and take an in-depth look at the the team's debut title and two-year labor. Luckily, they weren't holding any grudges against our non-existent E3 coverage and were nice enough to give us a huge chunk of time with the game and the designers.
Concept artist and Vigil founder Joe Madureira and lead designer Hadyn Dalton sat down with us for two hours, taking us through the game and showing us levels that haven't been released to the public just yet. We got to take control of protagonist War and do battle with enemies, solve puzzles, and even take his massive warhorse Ruin for a spin. Check out the full writeup after the break, and be sure to check out the gallery, full of exclusive images from the game, just below. If you've been itching for a Joe Madureira Battle Chasers fix, this might be about as close as you can get.
Writing in games has come a long way since players were asked if they were bad enough dudes to rescue the president from ninjas. It's a growing area of game development that Vicious Cycle senior game designer Dave Ellis has certainly taken to heart, having won the 2008 Writers Guild award for writing for his work on the PSP action horror title, Dead Head Fred.
Now Ellis plans to impart some of his wisdom on other aspiring game writers as the keynote speaker for the Writers Guild Foundation's workshop on video game writing, which is set to take place in Los Angeles on October 18. In the run up to the event, however, we had the opportunity to pick his brain on a number of game writing-related topics, including the state of writing in the industry, storytelling's role in game design, and the potential for games like Heavy Rain to push the industry forward. We also took a second to touch on Ellis' passion for collecting classic arcade cabs, all of which you can check out after the break.
When the Joystiq Network last spoke with Warhammer Online executive producer Jeff Hickman, the experience left us rolling on the floor in laughter. During a guest appearance on the Big Download podcast, Hickman and company were noticeably tired from a tour in Leipzig and PAX promoting the massively multiplayer title, and decided to kick back with a few drinks and have fun.
While still entertaining, this time it's all business. Today, signifying Warhammer Online's one-week retail anniversary, Hickman returns to discuss the launch, future add-on content and address some of the issues with the game.
Listen to the entire interview now or jump in if you like your interviews in ye olde style wall-of-text format. We're all about options here.
One thing that regular readers of Joystiq know is that we don't tend to delve too deeply into the mechanics behind the games, mostly because we're far too busy getting the news out. However, we got to sit down with games writer Susan O'Connor at Austin GDC and she provided an excellent insight into games from the writer's point of view.
Click through for the full interview with Susan to find out why she thinks short games are better than epic ones, why the cinematic model isn't the best for games, and what she did on BioShock.
AMD today launched the Fusion Gaming Utility, the first in what the company is calling a major push in rebranding (Cinema 2.0 is part of that), complementary to the AMD Game! Initiative it launched earlier this year. We had a chance to talk with AMD Gaming Strategist Brent Barry and PR representative Matt Davis, to grill them on the odds and ends of the new software and AMD's push to capitalize on the mainstream core gamer.
Earlier this week, EA announced that the three developers (Jack Matthews, Mark Pacini, and Todd Keller) who jumped ship from the Nintendo-owned Retro Studios back in April would be forming their own development house, Armature Studios. They were courted by several big companies (read: as big as EA, and/or bigger) and finally signed a long-term publishing deal with EA to develop games for all consoles. Pacini said, "What really gets me going is that now, no platform is off limit. That is just something we didn't have the ability to do before."
Both Retro and Armature are located in Austin, TX, so the timing of the press release was meant to be a part of the Austin GDC. Even though this same team worked on the Metroid Prime series, it's itching for more knuckle-blasting, thumbstick-twiddling, button-mashing fare. After the jump you can read our interview with Jack Mathews and find out what sort of platforms the new studio will be developing for. One thing we did learn: they're not making any MMOs.
Home's Central Plaza now looks altogether different from this early, mall-like setting.
Since its impressive unveiling at GDC '07, the virtual community of PlayStation Home has gone from being Sony's most ambitious software undertaking as a console manufacturer to something just shy of vaporware. We hear that more members of the gaming populace are being cherry-picked to test it, but despite this – and a spattering of showings at industry events – it nevertheless seems no closer to realization.
With the October release of Fable 2 fast approaching, we sat down for a chat with Lionhead founder Peter Molyneux to talk about how his latest game has shaped up. Also, does he still think the first game was all that bad? And what does he really think about a game he's recently found himself associated with, Too Human? It all starts off – as we all do – in childhood ...
Playing Fable 2, we noticed that, early on, there seems to be a fair amount of very obvious temptation to do something "good" or "bad."
Yes, well, I wanted childhood to contain some fairly easy choices. Once you go through your first real challenge, you'll find that it gets a lot more sophisticated. I want you to just experiment, to just see what happens. What I love is the aspect of, "I wonder if I do this what will happen?" If you do that enough, then you find that the game delivers.
Despite keeping players salivating over Castle Crashers' eventual price and release date, The Behemoth's hand-drawn epic nonetheless remained near the top of a short list of 2008's most anticipated titles right up until the game's recent XBLA debut. Since then, Castle Crashers has more or less delivered on its promises of manic 2D brawling, though a near-crippled online experience threatened to send us stomping off to our rooms in contempt. Nevertheless, at the end of the day Castle Crashers is still a heck of a lot of fun to play.
Fun as it is, however, we recently managed to put the controllers down long enough to speak with The Behemoth's Emil Ayoubkhan and Dan Paladin to discuss their game's price, what took the game so long and what the team has planned now that Castle Crashers is out the door.
A quick addendum: This interview was conducted just before its release on XBLA but, due to Wednesday's Large Hadron Collider test, got lost in a black hole. Read on little soldiers! And for more, be sure to check out our PAX interview with The Behemoth as well.
Between all the hip nerdrock concerts and multifaceted gaming marathons, it was easy to forget that PAX 2008 was a pretty sweet place for developers to show off their big titles. Not that Epic really needs to spread the word about their sequel to 2006's chainsaw-wielding bestseller, Gears of War 2 -- regardless, our Bleszinski-loving sister site, Xbox 360 Fanboy, recently got a chance to sit down with the lead artist and writer for the Locust massacring simulator to ask about some of the finer points of sequeling. If you find yourself hungry for details about the story and art direction for Gears the Second, we suggest hopping over to X3F and skimming through the twin interviews (or, if we may be so bold, the twinterviews).
