Interview: Ken Levine on American history, racism in BioShock Infinite: “I’ve always believed that gamers were underestimated.”

In between gathering good and ungood impressions of BioShock Infinite during my hands-on last week, I had a chance to talk with creative director Ken Levine about the game’s interesting expression of American history and social issues like racism.

Ken Levine is creative director of BioShock Infinite.

PCG: In some ways it feels like Columbia, as a setting, lays bare the worst of American history. Do you or does BioShock have a cynical or a negative view of American history?
Ken Levine: As a student of American history, it is a much broader story than what’s shown in Columbia, but I don’t feel that it’s the purpose of the game or the responsibility of the game to be a survey of American history. Certainly there are many things that are in Columbia that were very prevalent at the time, whether it’s charismatic religious movements, whether it’s a sense of growing nationalism—which was very present at the time. I’ve talked about that before, so I won’t bore you with that again. Or the deeply institutionalized racism and classism, which were… It was so prevalent that when you go back and read the writings of known figures like Teddy Roosevelt, who was extremely progressive in so many ways… I’m not using “progressive” in the sort of “Fox News versus MSNBC” way. I’m just saying that he was involved in anti-trust, in splitting up large corporations like Standard Oil. He was also a champion of the rights of the poor. But he was also what you would call a neoconservative in a lot of ways. He was very keen on American expansion. When you read his writings as sort of what you would call, at the very least, an extremely compassionate conservative, he would refer to Jews and African-Americans in the most horrible of terms. He was a man of his time. Abraham Lincoln, if you read his writings now, you would ascribe him? Even though he’s the most important abolitionist of all time, and a great man, he was a man of his time. He viewed African-Americans as a lesser race. He just thought they should be free. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. George Washington owned slaves. People were men of their times, and this is a game that’s set in a time where, if you don’t have those elements in the game, it’s just dishonest, you know?

Columbia, the floating world of BioShock Infinite.

I realized, in BioShock, that we didn’t have any minority characters. Well, we had a lot of Jewish, Eastern European Jewish characters, which probably comes from my background. Whether it’s Ryan or Tenenbaum. And that game was suffused with the immigrant experience to some degree. But we didn’t have African-American characters. We didn’t have Chinese characters. It’s very important to us that we diversify. Not because… I’m not like, “Oh, we have to have diversity because it was unrepresentative of reality, and I want to be representative of reality.” I wanted to be representative of reality, but that reality was a particular reality to a level that most people don’t even understand. Most people don’t know how Catholics were viewed in this country, or how the Irish were viewed in this country. They were viewed as… I use this term obviously not from myself, but at the time they were viewed as subhuman by some people. When we had our first Catholic president in 1960, many people thought he was going to be an operative of the Pope. He had to publicly proclaim that he wasn’t. We’re fortunate to grow up in a time where a lot of that is behind us. But this game wouldn’t be honest if we didn’t have that.
Along those lines, how do you think the experience of someone that isn’t a US citizen playing BioShock Infinite will differ?
Levine: At the end of the day… It’s hard for me to talk about where all that element is going in the game. Not the element of “the foreign element,” but the thematic elements you’re talking about, where they’re going. Because they may not be going where you think they’re going. This may not be about, necessarily, what you think it’s about. In the same way I really think BioShock wasn’t truly about a critique of Objectivism. I think it was about something else. Trust me, I get tweets… When I started working on this game, relatives of mine were very offended, because they thought it was an attack on the Tea Party. Specifically an attack on the Tea Party, which they were very active in. Then, when we sort of exposed the Vox Populi people, I saw a lot more left-leaning websites being like, “This is trying to tear down the labor movement!” I remember that I saw postings, unfortunately, on a white supremacist website, Stormfront, where people literally said, “The Jew Ken Levine is making a white-person-killing simulator.”
Yikes.
Levine: And BioShock had the same thing, where you had Objectivists being infuriated by it, and people more on the left thinking that it was a love letter to Objectivism. I think these games are a bit of a Rorschach for people. It’s usually a negative Rorshach. It pisses them off, you know? But I’d way rather have that than to…These games are, to some degree… If they’re about anything they’re about not buying into a single point of view. About having a lack of confidence in anything. They’re not ever an attack on a single idea. It’s a bit of a plague on all your houses. The American experiment is insanely successful and positive. The notion of democracy is the most… There’s that saying that “it’s the worst political system in the world, except for all the others.” It’s transformed the entire world. The founders in this world, this city, were worshipped.

“I think these games are a bit of a Rorschach for people. It’s usually a negative Rorshach. It pisses them off, you know?”

But in a lot of ways, from where I’m sitting, Thomas Jefferson… How did people like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and George Washington come along, where you had these people who had the foresight to build… Rich, wealthy men who had the foresight to build a system of power that’s shared by design. And then a man like Washington. They offered him the kingship. Not only does he turn it down and become a president instead, he steps down out of power after his first term, setting the tone for the entire experiment. These are so assuring, then, that they almost are gods. But they were also men. Their feet were clay, you know? They were slaveholders. I’m sure they were what we would call at this point white supremacists, many of them. They did things that we would now view as abhorrent. Just as I’m sure a hundred years from now, people will look back at things we do… That’s what I always wonder. What is the thing that, a hundred years from now, that they will look on that we do and that people will find abhorrent? We evolve, but we are people of our time.

That “Rorschach response” you mentioned—people seeing the bad that they want to see in a BioShock game—does that make you wish that there were more games that addressed social or historical issues? Are enough games addressing those subjects?
Levine: No. I like… Look. Do you know Tom Stoppard? What I love about Tom Stoppard, who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead… I went and saw a play of his called Arcadia. It’s in two parts, and the first part takes place about 200 years ago or something in an English manor house. They are building their gardens. There’s a debate over whether the gardens are built in a very structured, organized, English garden way, or there’s a movement to make more organic, flowing, naturalistic gardens. The second half takes place in the same manor house today, but it’s about chaos theory. It’s a discussion of these times. It’s the same actors playing similar parts, and you realize it’s the same thing. Can you control… Do you really, at the end of the day, have control over anything? That there are so many variables that you can’t control anything. The organized garden versus the organic garden. And I walked away… When it first started, I’m like, “Oh my God, am I in for a three-hour play about fucking gardening?” And then you walk away like you’re not even of the same species as this guy, because to be able to construct a conceit like that, and have it be meaningful, is so brilliant. I do love those kinds of things, where there’s a lot going on at once.
We struggle, in games, a little bit, because just getting the technology working and getting a fun gameplay experience… He’s basically just writing a play, and he has to make it work within those lines. Games have so much going on in them, and the technology… However far as we’ve come along with technology, it’s still always a struggle. We’re always trying to squeeze that last ounce of juice out of something. No matter what platform it is, whether it’s PC or Xbox or PS3, we’re always trying to squeeze every last possible bit out of whichever configuration. That takes up so much of our energy. Like, Elizabeth is this invention—not just an aesthetic invention, but a technological invention—that is… She has no instincts. You put an actor on a stage and they come with some built-in software, right? They just know how to do a bunch of stuff. Even a bad actor knows how to go across a room and pick up a cup of coffee from a table, right? Elizabeth doesn’t know anything. Everything she does has to be taught and built.

“Take-Two is very supportive of experimental work.”

We have so much work to start with, I sort of expect that… Stories, building in metaphors, stuff like that, it’s hard. It’s especially hard. Take-Two is very supportive of experimental work, and experimental work that is big-budget experimental work. There’s not a lot of companies out there, whether it’s movies or… Cable TV is the closest thing in some ways. They’ll support very experimental work, like Mad Men. Who would think that would work? It’s risky, it’s expensive, it’s all those things, and I think it’s similar in some ways, that they support these things and they get behind them because they believe in quality. I always look back on BioShock and think, “I can’t believe they gave us all this money to make a game about failed Objectivist utopia,” you know? It’s insane.

Booker DeWitt, the private investigator you play as in Infinite.

Is that encouraging? Has your faith in the industry changed since BioShock?
Levine: I always believe that gamers, if you… I don’t want to say “raise the bar.” But I’ve always believed that gamers were underestimated. The great thing I felt when I got into the games industry was, “Oh my God, I’m surrounded by the smartest people I’ve ever known in my life.” Especially game developers, because it is… When I went to Looking Glass, there were all these MIT guys, guys who made me look like a moron. It was so thrilling to be around so much intelligence.

“I like thoughtful games. I like stupid games. I like things that explode. I like all of those things. The fun of working on BioShock is that I get to do all of them at once.”

I think part of the reason gamers, especially older gamers, got into gaming is because we didn’t fit in. We were interested in weird stuff that other people weren’t interested in. If you took gamers as an entertainment demographic, the intelligence level is probably pretty high. Yet the content level of what people think gamers like is actually skewed below, say, television, probably. Well, I don’t know. Watching afternoon television, the Kardashians and all that, not necessarily. But there’s not a lot of opportunities for a Mad Men or a Breaking Bad or an I, Claudius or something like that. BioShock was also a very visceral, frenetic experience in a lot of ways. It has its highbrow and it’s got its lowbrow. It’s cool to be on the Skyline… The process of combat is enjoyable. I’m not ashamed of being a gamer. I like thoughtful games. I like stupid games. I like things that explode. I like all of those things. The fun of working on BioShock is that I get to do all of them at once.

Code Hero creator responds to abandonware allegations

We first mentioned Code Hero‘s curious plan to teach code literacy with a gun that shoots JavaScript in our indie ideas roundup. Developer Primer Labs wrangled a successful Kickstarter campaign for Code Hero back in February and released an alpha version shortly after. Since then, Primer Labs has been quiet, and one backer claimed yesterday that the lack of communication was due to “reckless spending” by creator Alex Peake. Peake has since spoken up, and in a statement released on Primer Labs’ website, he gave firm assurance that Code Hero “isn’t dead.”
“I know the level of frustration some people have is high right now and that it’s my fault for not communicating about our ongoing progress, but I want to reassure everyone who has backed us not to panic: Code Hero is not dead and we will not let our supporters and Kickstarter backers down,” Peake wrote. “All our backer rewards will be delivered along with the game. It’s taking longer than we hoped, but the game is becoming more awesome than we planned to. I’ll post a more detailed update soon with the new alpha build and answer any questions and concerns people may have.”
So, it seems the Hero may live to code in the days ahead. Peake also said he’s directly reached out to Dustin Deckard, the backer who initially raised concerns over the game’s status, and also offered a direct contact line (alex@primerlabs.com) to address any questions from other backers and fans.

1000 Smite beta keys up for grabs – plus win ALL the gods

With the Mayan apocalypse imminent, we imagine you’re looking to your god to save you. Well, in a link so tenuous even Kevin Bacon would have trouble joining the dots, we’re giving away 1,000 codes for the closed Beta of Smite, an arena battler where you choose from a selection of gods as your champion.
Smite recently got a whopping update, which includes the addition of a Domination mode and loads of balancing tweaks. Interestingly, one god per game can be vetoed by the highest-ranked player, forcing teams to change tactics.
So, now really is the time to get involved (especially if a giant solar flare is about to wipe out humanity after all).
Grab yourself a key here – first come, first served. We’ll send out keys to the winners on Monday 17 December.
Enjoy playing god. You can even play as Mayan god – and winning Scrabble score – Xbalanque, if you think that’ll spare you from the apocalypse. Speaking of which, we’ve also got three Ultimate God Packs to give away to you lucky folks. They unlock all 26 Gods currently in-game, and another four leading up to release. They’re worth a decent chunk of cash ($30 each), so get involved.
All you need to do to be in with a shot of winning is leave us a comment below or drop us an email at pcgamer@futurenet.com with the subject line “Smite God Giveaway” telling us what you’d do if you were god for a day. Like Jim Carey in Bruce Almighty, only with less rubber-faced japery. Keep it clean-ish, please.

Intel’s Haswell i5 and i7 line-ups leaked

I’m actually rather excited about the next CPU to come from the Intel labs, especially after being bombarded with info at this year’s Intel Developer Forum. And now Chinese site, VR-Zone, has posted up a leaked datasheet purporting to display the full details of the upcoming Haswell i5 and i7 lineups.
The new chips will still be running on the same 22nm production process, but with a new architecture that should see the graphics performance of the HD 4600 graphics components doubling.
That should give us some rather tasty-performing Ultrabooks, and with the upgraded GT3E version of the HD graphics on the mobile side we should get some svelte gaming laptops too.
One of the interesting points is the increase in TDP from the 77W of the Ivy Bridge up to 84W in the new Haswell chips. I expect that’s mostly down to the beefier graphics components with higher clockspeeds.

Sadly there’s no boost in the general clockspeed of the CPUs themselves. We’re still limited to 3.5GHz for the top-end i7-4770K and 3.4GHz for the i5-4670K.
It’s not a surprise to see Intel isn’t upping the core count either – sticking to four cores/eight threads for the i7 series and four cores/four threads for the i5.
The VR-Zone story also goes on to say the dual-core i3 variants will likely tip up in the third quarter of 2013, with the server-based Ivy Bridge-E chips also set to make an eventual appearance around then too.
The Ivy Bridge-E CPUs are the massive chips set for the LGA 2011 X79 boards. We can pretty much ignore those, however, due to their likely £600+ cost and limited gaming performance. But still, that’s the only way you’re going to get six-core Intel CPUs in your gaming rig.

Arma 3 delayed after “an eventful year”

Bohemia Interactive have today announced that they will be postponing the release of Arma 3 after what they, as kings of understatement, describe as “an eventful year”.
They are, of course, referring to the arrest and detainment of Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar, Bohemia employees who were charged on suspicion of espionage while on holiday in Greece.
Joris-Jan van’t Land, who recently took over as Arma 3′s project lead, said in a press release, “We’ve been in the process of implementing changes that will help us innovate as a studio under unexpected circumstances – facing problems we simply couldn’t have imagined.”
“We’re still trying to make sense of the situation and hope that our colleagues will be released soon. Although their plight has certainly affected us on a personal level, we continue working on the tasks identified as key to the release of Arma 3.”
The studio had planned to enter closed beta with Arma 3 this month, but are now pursuing an unspecified “2013″ date. They expect to make a more complete statement at the beginning of next year.
Last week, the lawyer representing Ivan and Martin filed a second appeal, which is due to be processed in the new year. You can keep up with the community’s efforts to support the pair at the website helpivanmartin.org, which includes a recently released Arma machinima film explaining the situation.
Thanks, PCGamesN.

Windows 8 store now accepting PEGI 18 rated games

Back in October, Microsoft took some flak when it was discovered that the Windows 8 app certification requirements blocked games with a rating above PEGI 16 from being accepted onto the storefront. And rightfully so, because it was silly.
Today Microsoft have corrected that oversight with new guidelines that will allow mature games onto the Windows Store, provided they have a PEGI rating. The new requirement states: “Apps with a rating over PEGI 16, ESRB MATURE, or that contain content that would warrant such a rating, are not allowed, unless the app is a game, is rated by a third party ratings board, and otherwise complies with these certification requirements.”
Microsoft have also announced the first games that will take advantage of this new ruling. “We’re excited to be partnering with game publishers to bring great desktop game titles to Windows 8—including The Witcher, by CD Projekt, and Grand Theft Auto IV, by Take Two—with more games coming soon.”
I’d imagine most our Windows 8 using readers are already happily set up with a selection of 18 rated games through whatever digital distributor takes preference on the desktop. But while not exactly game-changing news for the OS, it’s a step in the direction of common sense.
Thanks, Kotaku

The Cave: plundering the depths of Ron Gilbert’s new adventure game

O chivalrous Knight, why dost thou make tiny children push thy boat?

The Cave is an old fashioned adventure game in disguise. The videos and screenshots show characters running, jumping over gaps and climbing, but these are momentary interludes. There’s no inventory, and you play as three characters instead of one, but The Cave is fundamentally about exploration, observation and methodical puzzle solving in the guts of a sentient, talking cavern.
The thought of a new adventure game from Ron Gilbert and Double Fine conjures up certain expectations, but The Cave isn’t founded on the nostalgia that inspired the Double Fine Adventure Game kickstarter. This is Gilbert’s attempt to modernise the genre for a new audience.
“We need to get out of the trope of point-and-click, massive inventories,” he told me at a preview event earlier this week, “we need to evolve a little bit and try to address what modern gamers like in adventure games.”
The clickable hotspots and characters that would normally occupy a couple of screens in a classic point-and-click adventure are stretched across several storeys of underground passages. You can switch control between your trio of team members at will and march them to different corners of the chatty catacomb. Characters, signs, stalls and switches based in one corner of the maze will provide the tools and details needed to progress each puzzle elsewhere.

Wall hangings contain useful clues.

As I explored the triple-tiered zone, criss-crossing relationships started to emerge. I found myself thinking this: “aha! I can ask the magician to make the dumbbell invisible and then carry it up to the scales of the guy who wants to guess my weight so I can fool him, get his golden ticket, buy the pink bear and give it to the woman blocking the exit.”
See, I told you it was an adventure game. You can only carry one item at a time, and there’s a bit of running and jumping between NPCs, but the bizarre logic sequences that make up the quirky double helix of adventure game DNA is present in every puzzle.
The thirty minute section I played was set in a carnivalesque section populated by talking cardboard cut-out characters. They ran stalls that would grant me golden tickets if I beat their challenges. There are multiple solutions to many of the puzzles, which can be exploited more speedily using your chosen characters’ unique abilities.
Let’s see if you can guess what each character’s power is by looking at them. These are the three characters I controlled during the preview. Highlight the hidden text next to each picture to see if you’re right.

The Hillbilly
Go on, you can guess what the Hillbilly’s power is. It’s something that ALL Hillbilllies can do. “BREATHE UNDERWATER FOREVER?” That’s right! Good job. Have a golden ticket.&nbsc;&nbsc;

The Twins
This pair can create a ghostly apparition of themselves. It’s ideal if you want to hold down a switch remotely. What’s that, why doesn’t one twin hold down the switch while the other completes the puzzle? I … er … look over there! A flying Octopus!


The Scientist
The scientist can … science at things. She strokes her chin, a bleepy bloopy machine giggle sound happens and glowing equations float around her head, hacking nearby machinery.
The powers may be weird, but they’re occasionally useful. I felt a bit special bypassing a puzzle with the scientist that would otherwise take longer, but it’s hard to see how The Cave will test these abilities in more complex scenarios. Almost all of the cave’s challenges are solvable by any combination of classes, which means there’s little room to stretch each individual character’s puzzling potential.
They’re also strangely mute. Double Fine’s artists have done a great job of characterising them through their movements and mannerisms, but they feel more like puzzle solving puppets then characters. Why are they there? What links them together? What’s the Cave’s motive in all this? If it’s going to be more than a tactile, roaming puzzle game, The Cave will have to explore these questions and add a bit of narrative thrust to all that spelunking.
My expectations are coloured by Gilbert’s prestigious history. When I think about why I enjoyed adventure games so much, it’s memories of Guybrush Threepwood and Manny Calavera that spring to mind, not the memory of the time I had to trap a rat in a box to give it to a sailor and get to the next screen.

Floating text pops up to highlight items you can interact with.

I asked Gilbert what he enjoys most about making games. “I really like telling stories, and that’s one of the reasons that adventure games appeal to me, so they’re primarily about stories and I kind of like that side of designing games. I love creating worlds.”
The Cave’s world is surreal, with a curiously creepy undertone and a welcome dash of morbid humour. Each of the seven characters has been drawn to the cave to realise their most cherished desires, and there will be sections of the catacombs dedicated to each character, but with little narrative framing and no dialogue to chew on, my first impressions were clouded by the perennial uncertainty of a Lost viewer. Is all of this going somewhere? I wondered.
There’s an interesting experiment in the works here, though, one that may yet surprise. “I’m trying a bunch of things in The Cave,” said Gilbert. “Hopefully a bunch of those will be successful, maybe some of them not so successful. And then as I make new ones I’ll just not do the unsuccessful ones, do more of this, try some new things.”

STALKER acquisition update: GSC responds, say they remain “sole owners”

It seems to be the day for companies making snide shots across the bow through official statements. In light of yesterday’s rather confusing announcement from bitComposer that they had acquired the rights to “the acclaimed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. [sic] brand from Boris Natanovich Strygatsky [sic],” GSC Game Worlds have posted on their website to say that actually, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. belongs to them.
Here’s their statement in full:
“In view of the rumors appearing in press, we find it necessary to inform that GSC Game World and Sergey Grigorovich remain to be the sole owners of all the intellectual property rights to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series and the brand overall, including all the trademarks, the game universe, the technology etc. This can be easily verified with the trademark services online.
“From time to time news on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. brand purchase by this or that company appear over the Internet. We relate such a keen interest in the brand to its exceptional popularity. Even the purchase of rights to create a “Roadside picnic” book-based game by a small publisher is presented as the continuation of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise. We have doubts regarding the mentioned product by bitComposer (the publisher of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat on some territories), since the latter has significant debts in terms of fulfilling the obligations under the existing contract between our companies.”
Leaving aside the dig about bitComposer’s debts, what’s going on? The confusion seems to have arisen from bitComposer’s original press release, and their use of the annoyingly acronymised S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. That specific punctuated quirk is distinct to GSC’s series, and doesn’t appear in the film/book/whatever, the rights to which are presumably in possession of the estate of Boris Strugatsky.
Which would mean the following:

• GSC, specifically Sergei Grigorovich, still have ownership of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. As stated, the trademark is still active in his name.
• bitComposer have actually obtained the rights to make a game based on Stalker, the non-punctuated film based on Strugatsky’s book, Roadside Picnic, which while also based in the Zone, would be free of any changes distinct to the GSC games.

Confusing, but it’s the most sensible reading of bitComposer’s obfuscating press release and GSC’s counter. We’ve reached out to bitComposer for a comment on GSC’s clarification.

Bientôt l’été, Tale of Tales’ latest, offers a virtual seaside, anonymous chess

A walk on the beach, a conversation in a café, a game of chess – you’ll find all these things in this virtual reality simulation/interactive computer progam/notgame/game from Tale of Tales, who previously brought us The Path, Fatale and The Graveyard. Bientôt l’été, or ‘It’s nearly summer’, has just been released for $10 (with an ‘extravagant’ edition going for $40), and in all likelihood it’s the most French game ever made.
“Smoke, drink, play music, play Chess™, speak French (to others!), walk along an Earth sea shore and discover its strangely absurd and picturesque secrets. All from the comfort of your orbital station’s polypurpose deck” is the quite extraordinary description on the website – or one of them, at least. I haven’t had a chance to play Bientôt l’été, but videos and screens show a lot of soulful beach-walking, drinking and smoking, conversations and of course chess. In this part – well, if you’re online – you play against another random person over the internet, who is “presumably playing your lover.”
Bientôt l’été can be purchased from the Tale of Tales website. I’ve included a couple of their explanatory videos below, though I’m not sure how explanatory they are.

Battlefield Heroes receives supply drop of Christmas treats

Yuletide carnage

Ever seen Santa roasting the chestnuts off a soldier while fighting for territory around a giant Christmas tree? In the darkest of cheese dreams, maybe. Well, this is a scene that will become boringly routine this year, as EA have created all kinds of festive-themed swag for Battlefield Heroes. And they’re releasing new stuff in store every day. If you want a look at the full range of Crimbo combat gear, you’ll find it all on the game’s forums and check out the war-themed advent calendar. No chocolates behind these doors – just war. Yes, the Santa outfits are ‘the classic’, but we like the look of the Misha and Ivan sets – they just feel more stylish.Today’s offering is a brand new flamethrower for both Royals and Nationals, to keep your enemies nice and warm on the snow-themed maps, and there’s a decent selection of balaclavas and hats available too. Normally, Christmas themed kit looks pretty awful in shooters, but Battlefield Heroes has the comedy swagger to pull it off.
There’s a video of the festive carnage here, if you remain unconvinced.

Gioteck offer £500k “dream job” to winners of their Design Challenge 2013

Peripheral maker Gioteck have launched their Gioteck Design Challenge 2013, offering participants the chance to a win a “dream job” worth up to £500,000, as well as a trip to Hong Kong and China.
The challenge, quite simply, is to design the ultimate gaming peripheral. Giotek Creative Director Andy Green says, “we believe the next pioneering idea will come from a gamer and we are looking for a unique idea that pushes the boundaries of what is considered achievable in the current market”
The top 12 ideas and concepts will be shortlisted to compete via a “Dragon’s Den” style pitch in front of top games industry figures.
The winner will have the chance to put their design into mass production, work with Gioteck on a year long apprenticeship and see the production facilities first hand. They’ll also earn royalties up to a maximum of £500,000 if the product is successful.
To enter, register at the Gioteck Design Challenge 2013 site. Entrants have until March 15th to submit their designs.

GameSpy denies shutting online servers without warning

On Monday, we brought news that a selection of games had found their GameSpy provided multiplayer matchmaking suddenly taken offline. Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, SWAT 4, Sniper Elite, Hidden and Dangerous 2, Wings of War and Star Wars: Battlefront were all affected, with Sniper Elite devs Rebellion writing that “this decision by Glu was not taken in consultation with us and was beyond our control.”
On their Facebook page, GameSpy have posted a statement in which they say… well, completely the opposite.
“Reports that GameSpy Technologies ‘shutdown servers without warning’ are simply inaccurate,” the middleware provider claims. “Each publisher contracting with GameSpy Technologies elects at its sole discretion whether or not to maintain support for its titles.”
“A number of our publisher partners elected to allow their contracts for GameSpy Technologies’ services to lapse by not continuing to pay for these services,” they continue. “In some cases this lapsing ranges back as much as four years. GameSpy Technologies has continued to provide months, and in some cases years, of service support for free. However we cannot be expected to provide a service free of charge to publishers who choose not to renew their service agreements and in some cases remain delinquent in delivering payment for past services.”
“In each case reported in the press where there was a discontinuation of GameSpy Technologies’ services, the applicable publisher was well aware that they had not made the required payments under their agreements with GameSpy Technologies.”
And an analogy to finish: “For the sake of clarity – the situation is identical to fans attributing fault to the hosting company of a popular website for ceasing hosting services, when the website owner refuses to pay its hosting bill.”
Clarity is certainly not what we have here as, while the other affected studios have remained silent, the remarks by the GLU mobile owned service are a stark contrast to Rebellion’s claims. According to them, “we have been talking to them since to try and get the servers turned back on. We have been informed that in order to do so would cost us tens of thousands of pounds a year – far in excess of how much we were paying previously.”

GOG.com sale offering 75% off Bullfrog Bundle, plus free Duke Nukem and other discounts

Oh lord, it’s really happening. The Christmas sales are here. First out of the gate is GOG.com, purveyors of classic PC games and newer indie releases. And The Witcher 2, which doesn’t quite fit either category.
For the next 22(-ish) hours, they’re offering 75% off their Bullfrog Favourites collection. For $11.92, you get three Populouses, two Dungeon Keepers, Theme Hospital, Syndicate and Magic Carpet. While you have to get all the games to qualify for the full 75% off, any you already own will helpfully count to the total, with the price adjusting accordingly.
Also! For the next two days the site is giving away Duke Nukem 3D for free. Now you can use the cheeky 16 year old FPS to wash away the bad taste of any sequels that may or may not have happened.
Also! The whole site is holding a 50% sale off the majority of its catalogue until January 3rd. Looking through, it seems to include just about everything that isn’t called Baldur’s Gate. It does, however, include the other Infinity Engine RPGs, with both Icewind Dales and Planescape: Torment now costing $4.99. You can also pick up The Witcher 2 at a 60% discount of $11.99 (just under £7.50 in real money).
You can browse the full list of discounted games in their catalogue. There’s some brilliant stuff in there. There’s also Myst.

Homeworld composer talks influences, changing soundscapes

Homeworld’s soundtrack was an expression of space’s serenity and chaos with its retro synth swells and Indian flair, the sort of songs hibernating astronauts would probably listen to. Composer Paul Ruskay’s haunting tracks helped solidify Homeworld as one of strategy gaming’s greats, and in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, he touched upon the influences and experiences he used in shaping a spacey soundscape.
“My big influence was, obviously, the Blade Runner score,” Ruskay explained. “And I was also a huge fan of Brian Eno. There was just something about that form of composition, like that moment in Blade Runner where [Harrison Ford] is walking up the stairwell and there’s that Arabic singing in it.
“The art director, Rob Cunningham, had spent some time growing up in India and he turned me onto DJ Cheb i Sabbah—that was the biggest influence, DJ Cheb,” he continued. “He was just doing this kind of DJ’ing but with traditional Indian instruments. You mix DJ Cheb with Vangelis and Eno and those are the main forces.”
Ruskay recently wrapped up a return to space after contributing compositions to Strike Suit Zero, Born Ready’s Kickstarted love letter to the colorful deadliness of space sim combat. Ruskay noted how music’s cultural growth and synthesis—especially in the context of science-fiction—changed dramatically via improved technology and an ever-changing paradigm.
“I was listening back to the Homeworld soundtrack recently and what struck me is it’s almost archival now,” he said. “People don’t even use that equipment that it was created on anymore. I did some of that Homeworld stuff in a MIDI-only version of a really old sequencer. When I listen to it now, so much of it was created based on the restrictions of the technology of the time. It’s like listening to recordings from the 1920s. So much of the quality of that music is wrapped up in how it was captured.
“It’s almost a brain chemistry thing where so much of music is an emotional response. There’s such a mystery to science-fiction in presenting a vision, and there’s also that sort of globalization thing with the world moving towards cultural fusion with that through-line of synthetic sounds.”
The rest of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s interview covers Ruskay’s journey from Radical to Relic and beyond.

Crysis 3 hands-on: lost in tall grass, no ammo, no arrows, please send help

Crysis 3′s hardest difficulty setting is described as “Post-Human.” I don’t appreciate having my species challenged—I mean, I think modern homo sapiens have been around long enough to handle a little extra damage in a first-person shooter. Get off my lawn, kid, I’m a veteran.
Crysis 3 shrugs and challenges me to reach its lawn: an overgrown field outside the dilapidated warehouse where my single-player demo starts. I tip-toe around the structure’s brittle, broken upper level with my nanosuit cloaked and my bow drawn. Then I run out of energy, but it’s no big deal, I don’t see anyon—brap brap brap! As soon as I’m visible, an army sticks its head out of the weeds and pelts me to death. I die and try again. I die and try again. I die and look around to make sure no one’s watching. I die and admit I’m just a regular human, apologize to the game, and drop the difficulty to normal.

Hunter gatherer

Now I’m navigating the warehouse without dying every twenty steps, using my cloak to sneak up on patrols and silently put arrows in their heads. It’s nice to have a reticle this time. It’s also nice, in that it keeps me alive, that the guards don’t seem to mind when their buddies suddenly collapse next to them, afflicted by what they must assume is a normal and harmless case of the pointy-rod-through-brain flu. What’s that thing they say? Feed a cold, starve an arrow in the head?

Concept art for light shafts, with a bit of warehouse visible somewhere in the background.

I’m much more durable now, but I’m still having trouble seeing my enemies. Everything is gorgeous, but the environment is astringently crisp, and while I have to lean into the display to pick out baddies from the rusted hunks of iron and unstoppable overgrowth, they have no problem putting their sights on me. I guess that’s what I get for wearing a giant black suit that screams, “I’m definitely the guy you’re looking for.”
I love the bow, though. The bow makes me powerful, and using it makes the soldiers look stupid. Look at them, walking around like tough guys with their big heavy guns. I’m an elegant hunter, not a brute. I can fire while cloaked, and use special arrow tips to electrocute and dismember without being seen. I’m a terribly cruel ninja. The bow is such an efficient tool for violence, I don’t even bother with my guns.
After traversing the warehouse, I find a convenient escape zipline which very conspicuously swoops me out of the building and into the field outside. The grass reaches over my head, and I can barely see anything, but I’ll be fine unless there’s an army of drooling, leaping alien beasts living in the brush.

Don’t worry, it’s actually leaping at the logo that’s been pasted over every carefully composed screenshot.

My zipline entrance was as subtle as that foreshadowing, so they spot me right away. I’m not an elegant hunter anymore. I’m being hunted. Go away, bow, you have no place handling grass monsters! I cloak, run, shoot, and repeat. When I cloak, the beasts wander away, but when I decloak, it’s like I’ve just shouted, “Hey everyone with huge sword arms, I cut like butter!”
They leap at me with enough force to knock me down, but my nanosuit’s armor function keeps me standing long enough to run my bullet machine across their faces. I can’t tell if I’m thinning their numbers. They keep coming. The squishy sounds they make are atrocious. I’m lost in the grass and I don’t know where to go. And then I run out of ammo.
I don’t even have any exploding arrows left—who only packs a handful of exploding arrows?—and I’m now aware that this has become a survival horror game, so I shift my focus to scurrying around in search of ammo and guns. They aren’t easy to find, and there’s never enough. I’m nearing frustration when I finally deplete the field’s purple alien supply, and now, on a concrete platform somewhere, I’m even more lost.

Lost in transit

My objective markers mysteriously disappeared—a bug, maybe, or I accidentally hit a key and disabled them. I glance at someone else’s screen and luck out: they’re at the same spot, and I can see where to go. I am to meet a surly bald fellow with a very big turret.
Survival horror time is over, and now I feel like I’d fit in alongside one of MechWarrior’s walking tanks. I blow up a wave of squishy-sounding beasts from the mounted gun, then detach it and twirl around, blowing the guts out of everything with my incredibly large supply of explosive ammo. This is much more fun than being lost, I think. And then I get lost again.

The grass is so crisp it impales careless birds.

My guide disappeared while I was on my revenge spree, but with more screen-looking I find him again. He’s standing at a completely unremarkable spot on the map. He isn’t moving or talking. I shoot him in the face. He doesn’t flinch. I jump around in front of him. I don’t know what I thought that would do after I already shot him in the face. I clearly missed some dialog, so I glance at my neighbor’s screen again.
Ah, I’m to give a rusty train a nano-powered shove and hop on top of it for a literal on-rails section. Baldy and I cling to the top of the runaway train, shooting, shooting, and shooting as the massive bullet accelerates through a tunnel. But as we pass by more and more surprised guards, I realize I’m not hitting anyone, so I stop shooting. I didn’t really need to be, apparently, so I just take the ride to the end of the demo. Booom! I knew we were going to crash into something.

Out of power

I had the most fun when I felt powerful. That was twice: first when I was stalking guards with the bow, and later when I was blowing up beasts with the turret. The rest of the time I was frantically darting around like a mouse in a busy kitchen, hoping to go unnoticed. There is, of course, a need for contrast—moments of weakness to be compared to triumphs.

Can you spot all the things that want to kill you in this picture? There are nine. I think. Wait no, ten.

I probably could have made better tactical decisions if I were quicker about identifying threats, but I wish I’d had a few more lulls in the action to plot my next moves. A perch where I could take a breath and decide how to proceed before executing. Keeping players moving and reacting isn’t necessarily a bad decision—it seems like the intentional pacing for this section—but the constant urgency was exhausting.
It’s not the “Go! Go! Go!” urgency of a Call of Duty level, where every objective is the most important thing you’ll ever do and half the screen is dedicated to setting the scene. My objectives were just places to go at my leisure. The urgency came from rapidly cycling, moment-to-moment survival reactions: run, hide, sneak, shoot, run out of ammo, hide, run away from Cephalopods, hide, and always kill or be killed. If that’s the goal if this section—and I don’t know exactly how it fits into the complete game—then it succeeds.

Club3D Radeon HD7990: Now this is what we call graphical overkill

Wanna see something cool? Course you do. This is the Club3D Radeon HD 7990. Ain’t she a beauty? This is Club3D’s answer to Nvidia’s GTX 690, and like the competition this is a dual-GPU card sporting the best GPUs of this generation in a frankly ludicrous configuration.
I mean, just look at it. That HD7990′s fricking vast.
But then it’s going to have to be to house the sort of cooling the Club3D engineers have to stick in this behemoth of a card to keep those hot and heavy Tahiti XT GPUs running at a temperature that wont turn the rest of your PC to so much molten slag.
From what those engineers say though their cooling array sounds like it’s doing an admirable job, keeping the GPUs chilled to the tune of around 65ºC under full load. That’s rather impressive when you consider there’s effectively a pair of HD 7970’s sharing a single slab of PCB and just three fans.

That’s a whole lot of fan action

As is the way with dual-GPU cards though the cores are slightly clocked down compared with the full single card versions. The Tahiti XT GPUs in Club3D’s HD 7990 are running at 900MHz compared with the 1GHz core speed of the HD 7970 GHz Edition.
If this still isn’t enough raw graphical grunt for you, however, Club3D has stuck in a dual bios switch with an ‘enthusiast’ setting. That’ll boost your GPUs up to 925MHz a piece. You mad fools…
Now at over £700 the HD 7990 is not going to be a cheap option, and in fact you’d arguably be better served opting to just buy two HD 7970 GHz Edition cards, but I’m going to wait to give my final verdict when my card arrives later today.

Unity of Command dreams of a red Christmas with its Soviet-focused Red Turn DLC

We described Unity of Command as “Wargame of the Year material” back in March, and as the year draws to a close that’s looking more and more likely. The cute unit graphics might lead you to believe this is more of a casual strategy game, but underneath the charming exterior lies the barely beating heart of a wargame. And it’s one that’s just received a major expansion. The Red Turn DLC offers, among other things, a huge new campaign focusing on the Soviets – full details lie suppressed beneath the break.
Set near the end of the Stalingrad campaign, Red Turn includes a “gigantic Soviet campaign featuring 17 scenarios”, as well as “two standalone Axis scenarios”, four PVP scenarios, and 39 new units including “Panther and T-34/85 armor”. I don’t know what that last one is, but my WWII-ignorant brain is now imagining the T-51b Power Armor from Fallout 3 and New Vegas – I’m probably way off the mark.
The Red Turn DLC is available from the Unity of Command site or from Steam for $10/roughly £7.

Routine: indie survival horror from the dark side of the Moon

Oh. I was looking for the toilet.

The Moon is a perfect setting for an exploration horror game. It’s remote, dark and hostile, but not entirely alien. We’ve seen it close up in ghostly archive footage of the Lunar landings. Nobody’s built a proper Moon Base yet, but we’re familiar with the utilitarian angles of Nasa architecture. Alien, Space: 1999 and 2001: A Space Odyssey have shown us the claustrophobic corridors and cluttered mess halls of the future.The Lunar base we’ll explore in Routine occupies fertile middle ground between the familiar and the unknowable – a perfect place to deliver some scares.
Greenlight voters seemed to agree. Routine was one of the first games to get the go-ahead from Valve after the release of the arresting Gamescom trailer. I called up art and design man Aaron Foster find out more about Lunar’s intriguing take on survival horror.
Routine is a first person horror game set on an abandoned (OR IS IT?) moon base. It’s as much about exploration as sudden scares. Lunar Software want to move away from the scripted frights of linear big-budget horror games like Dead Space and give players the opportunity to wander the base at their own discretion. An unknown AI-driven enemy will stalk the corridors, reacting to your movements to produce unpredictable encounters.
“Most horror games are extremely linear in their design because they need to set up these scenes for the player to get scared. There are a few exceptions, but the ones that are are very simple and streamlined, ” Said Aaron. He reckons that the anticipation that comes before the scare is as powerful as the moment of confrontation itself. “The scary thing about a horror movie or game is that not knowing, not knowing what’s going to happen, or who it is, or what it is and I really want to try and make sure that we don’t spoil too much.”

In space, no-one can help you if your visor fogs up.

For that reason, he sidesteps questions about exactly what we’ll be running away from in Routine. The trailer shows a humanoid robot marching through the base, but Aaron hints that there’s more to the tale than a race of out-of-control droids. Every confrontation with the beast/demon/ghost/dragon/space zombie will matter. Permadeath is an important part of Routine. If you’re killed, you’ll have to start anew.
That means we’ll spend a lot of time raiding the moon base in terrified silence, so it’s essential that the facility be interesting and deeply atmospheric. For the sake of immersion, there will be no HUD or health bar, and you won’t have many items to help you out. Aaron says there will be a risk reward element to every action. You have a tool that will make it easier to navigate the base’s complex layout, but you’ll lose access to your screen temporarily if you’re forced to use your weapon.
Foster’s greatest passion is in environmental art, an aspect of design that directly informs the mental state of the player in a horror game. You might be familiar with the uncanny valley. It’s a disturbing humanoid robotics phenomenon that describes the point at which the subtly warped features and movements of an android face incur more fear than empathy in human observers. There’s an uncanny valley to human living, too. In life, it can be seen in photos of the abandoned offices and schoolyards of Pripyat. In fiction, the spotless suburbia of the Stepford Wives has a similar effect.
Pripyat is rife with the filth and decrepitude of abandonment, The Stepford Wives keep their slice of civilization in a state of inhuman, shrink-wrapped perfection. It’s an opposition that runs throughout science fiction. It’s the grimy, cynical dystopia vs the glowing, wantless utopia. It’s Blade Runner vs. Star Trek. Aaron describes sci-fi films as “the most inspirational and influential things I had when growing up.” His family lived near a video store when he was younger. He describes how their friendship with the owner gave him access to a great range of sci-fi features and horror films well before his 18th birthday.

Mike’s powerpoint presentation has been cancelled due to horrorpocalypse.

“I was watching Alien, Aliens, The Thing, everything I could get my hands on,” he said, “but I rewatched Alien and Aliens. Those movies left such an impression that when I got a little bit older and a little bit more able to find things myself I went off and found all the other late 70s, early 80s sci-fi movies like Silent Running. Even Space 1999, it has a crap plot, but really interesting aesthetics. The design of the base was still really cool.”
Routine’s moon base will occupy a middle ground between the scummy warrens of an urban cyberpunk neo-pit and the shining idealism of the Federation. The moon base is a pragmatic construction. It’s a mix of cold boardrooms, futuristic hallways and ominous engine rooms. Imagine the gleaming white bulkheads of the U.S.S. Enterprise browned by age and sweat, scarred by overpopulation and thrown into disrepair by an unknown catastrophe.
“They’ve taken this really high-tech sci-fi design and then crammed a hundred people in a small, condensed area to live there for like, 20, 30 years. It’s dirty and horrible,” Aaron explained. “That’s the way I try to see things. There’s dirt stains everywhere, people lived in the corners of the floor, they’ve left lots of rubbish.”
“I like the old chunky, slightly dirty white design of all the interiors. Everything always had a haze, a musk, everything was always a bit lived in. I always felt that was so much more relatable.”

The corridors of the future are round to thwart lazy wall-leaners.

Routine is being developed by a team of four. Three are based in the front room of a Preston apartment and there’s also a sound chap based in Australia. Greenlight success came as a big surprise. They were inspired to enter Routine into the voting process after watching Indie Game: The Movie, and slipped in just before Valve introduced the £100 entry fee. Would Lunar Software have taken the plunge if they’d had to pay?

“It wouldn’t have been a barrier,” said Aaron. “I would’ve paid that if it was a few grand. To me, you’re making a game to not only get something out there that you are proud of, but you also, for all of us, we want enough return on that just to make the next game, right?
“We’re not aiming to get mass millions because we’d have to make something different from what we’re going, but we just want enough to be able to develop the next game, and I think Steam gives you the best opportunity of that. To us it was just a massive relief. Paying a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars, it doesn’t matter at the end of the day.”
Routine is due out next year. Soak up some of the atmosphere right now with the debut trailer.

STALKER license acquired by bitComposer [Updated]

For a while there, it seemed as if we’d seen the last of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and its pesky punctuation. Since STALKER 2′s cancellation at GSC, with employees from the developer forming Vostok Games and turning their attentions to the similarly post-apocalyptic Survarium, the Zone seemed forever closed. Now, though, word comes through from bitComposer Games that they’ve obtained the STALKER license for further titles in the franchise.
“bitComposer Entertainment AG has acquired the exclusive worldwide rights for future video game adaptations of the acclaimed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. brand from Boris Natanovich Strygatsky,” states the press release, curiously misspelling Boris Strugatsky’s name.
“S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a reputable brand with a long history of success. To date, the series has sold many millions of units worldwide. Naturally, we’d like to tap into the success of this series, and we see a great deal of potential for the future.”
BitComposer are already familiar with the series, having handled European publishing for STALKER: Call of Pripryat. They also published this year’s Jagged Alliance remake, Back in Action.
The studio claims they will be releasing further details “shortly”.
UPDATE: RPS have spoken to bitComposer, who slightly clarify what’s going on. The suggestion is that the rights are specifically for game adaptations of Strugatsky’s Stalker, presumably meaning the film/book based on Roadside Picnic, a book also by Strugatsky. That would mean that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games were still owned by former GSC head Sergei Grigorovich, despite bitComposer specifically using those games’ acronym affectation in their press release.

SPONSORED: Randy Pitchford on making a game within the influential Aliens universe

Interview by Nathan Ditum
Aliens has become a touchstone for every action film and game since its release. You can’t escape its influence – its in every hiss of steam above every metal catwalk, in every back-lit fan-blade throwing a flickering smoky beam in every deserted space station, in every slick proboscis intent on every act of body-horror. Perhaps more than all of these, the smart-mouthed military patter among Aliens’ motley crew of marines continues to echo through film and TV. We sat down with Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford, to find out how they approached the creation of Aliens: Colonial Marines and fit their ambitions within such a revered franchise.
How did you approach making a licensed game?
Randy Pitchford: I can’t believe they trusted us with it. 20th Century Fox gave us the keys to the Aliens brand – what a place to be. When we went into it, when we first started interacting with Fox, we had a plan, we had a goal. You think about a big movie studio with such an important brand, the expectations are there are going to be a lot of controls, a lot of limits on it. But it turns out these guys really get how to work with talent. I think there’s a reason why some of the most stubborn but incredible visionaries in storytelling, people like George Lucas with Star Wars, like James Cameron with everything from Avatar to Aliens, the reason these guys work with Fox is that Fox gets talent. Once they committed themselves to trusting us and the intent that we had, they’ve just been great. They know we love the brand, they know we care so much about Aliens that we would do nothing to hurt it, our intent is to make it stronger and better and add value to it.
How is it working with a property like the Alien films which have already inspired many other games?
RP: You know it’s funny, if you work with something as important and inspirational as the Aliens franchise. So many of us have been inspired by this, and you can see things that we’ve all borrowed or stolen in our games. I always joke, I’ve been stealing from Aliens my entire career. What’s odd about that is sometimes there are people, newer people in this world, that might be exposed to something for the first time with the derivative thing, not the original. For example, let’s imagine you never saw Aliens and you played, like, when we put Halo on the PC. And you’d see all the dropships, “Woah, those are really cool designs!” And you’d have no idea that all those dropships were basically borrowed and iterated from James Cameron’s designs in Aliens. Or you see the sergeant in Halo, the African-American dude with the cigar in the mouth, “Assholes and elbows, fall in!” That’s just a straight up copy of Sergeant Apone from Aliens. I remember when I played Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, and I’m walking through the ship on the very first level. There’s a character called Vasquez, which is of course a character from Aliens. And another character pulls out a shotgun and says “I like to keep this handy for close encounters.” That’s just a straight up line from the movie, we’ve all be inspired by this. To be able to jump into the source is a really interesting opportunity.

What kind of tone are you aiming for with the single-player game? The trailers have shown plenty of action, but there’s been some horror in there too.
RP: One of the neatest things about these movies is, if you think about Ridley Scott’s original film, Alien, it was really a survival horror film. It was a monster in the house scenario, where everybody’s trapped, and the bad guy’s going to get them one by one. When you contrast that with James Cameron’s take, in Aliens, that was all out war. The tag line for the first movie was “In space, no-one can hear you scream.” The tag line for the second film was “This time it’s war.” It was a hardcore action movie. What’s great about a videgame is that it’s not confined to just a 90-minute single arc, this videogame is an epic. We can span all of the different pacing, we can go from survival horror to hardcore action. Some of it’s more exploratory, with more tension, more “Oh, God, what’s around the corner?” If you’ve seen some of the trailers we’ve done for the game, or if you’ve had an opportunity to come to one of the trade shows and play the game, you might think “Oh God, are these guys focusing only on the action?” Well no of course. There are other sides to that coin.
It looks like you have the ship from the original Alien and Prometheus in the game. How does Prometheus fit with your game? Should we expect some crossover?
RP: It’s interesting you noticed that. We call that the Derelict. It was the original alien craft in the first film, and inside there was the room with the Space Jockey and the giant gun, and the egg chamber and all that. The story in Aliens: Colonial Marines culminates in that ship. And we saw that ship again recently in Prometheus, and we learned there’s more than one of them. And we don’t have to call them Space Jockeys any more, Ridley told us we can call them Engineers. What’s neat is that it all ties together, and Aliens: Colonial Marines has a part to play in this grander narrative, this grander fiction.

The action in Aliens: Colonial Marines takes place after Alien 3. Why choose that moment, after what was seen by some to be a less successful film?
RP: I really liked Alien 3. It was not the sequel I wished for from Aliens, but if I take Alien 3 as a standalone movie – you know it was David Fincher’s first film – it was actually a really good film and played back to Ridley Scott’s survival horror stuff. But if I go back to that itch I had after Aliens, that itch has never been scratched. The trick for us is scratching that itch, but doing it all in canon. We dove into the fiction, we thought about what took place in Alien 3 and the state of the universe at the end of Aliens. We imagined the motivations and decisions of Whelan-Yutani: Michael Whelan was there on Fury 161 there with Ripley when she martyred herself – what’s he going to do next? What’s Whelan-Yutani going to do next? What are the colonial marines going to do next? And what’s up with the aliens? That whole derelict ship is still there on LV 426 and it was a thousand kilometres away from the atmospheric processor that only had a 40 kilometre blast radius, right? So those eggs are probably still there, and Whelan-Yutani is there on Fury 161 where the Sulaco was – they could board that ship, they knew where it came from, they could go back. We figured out a way to bring it all together. If you love the films, and had different feelings about Alien 3 – after Aliens: Colonial Marines, Alien 3 is better movie. I can’t believe the way we cracked the nut on this, it’s really fun.
That sounds really detailed. Do you think you have to be familiar with the films to get the most out of the game?
RP: We designed the experience and the narrative such that you don’t have to have seen Aliens. I think there’s a few factors. I think the Aliens fan is probably in, right? Then there’s another customer that loves science fiction shooters, maybe Halo, Gears Of War, Borderlands. We wanted to make sure that even if they’d never seen Aliens, it still works. Now there’s a lot of fan service in the game, but it’s fan service done in a way where it doesn’t depend upon you having knowledge of the films to enjoy that moment. For example, let me illustrate a point. In the movie, there’s a moment in the hangar of the Sulaco next to the dropship where the alien queen appears. We thought the movie was over, that we’re all going to be safe, and the alien queen appears by punching her tail /through/ Bishop, through the synthetic. You see it burst through his chest, raise him up, and rip him in half. His legs are over there, his torso is over here, and because he’s a synthetic he survives, and is alive through this whole experience because he’s an android. It’s horrific. In Aliens: Colonial Marines, you board the Sulaco, and you’re going to walk into the hangar. Now if you’ve never seen an Aliens movie you’re doing to be like, “This room looks frigging awesome, that dropship looks cool.” You get on your headset, and you say “Captain, I see half of a dead synthetic here,” and the captain says “Which half?” And you say “Well, he ain’t saying much,” and the captain says “Well find me the half that does.” Even if you’ve not seen the movies that’s a really interesting exchange.

Gamasutra are reporting that 40 members of the Rift development team – around one third of the game’s staff – are being laid off. Trion Worlds have confirmed job cuts in a statement, but haven’t commented on how many roles are being lost, or which teams are affected. “As a response to market conditions, product timelines and the natural evolution of our company,” Trion writes, “we have made some organizational changes, which include a workforce reduction. This was a difficult decision and we wish the best for those affected by these changes. At Trion, we remain focused on delivering top quality online game experiences, and are committed to supporting RIFT and launching our highly anticipated new titles Defiance, Warface, and End of Nations in 2013.” Trion Worlds launched the ace Storm Legion expansion only last month. While the MMO has retained its subscription status, despite a free light edition covering levels 1-20 and a Storm Legion trial for returning players, the company has never divulged any information on how many subscribers it was serving. This news follows on from the 19 lay-offs at Petroglyph, who were working on End of Nations before Trion moved its development in-house.

In news that won’t be of much surprise to anyone who’s been following the game, The Secret World has dropped the need for a subscription fee. What is a bit different is how they’re going about it: instead of going free-to-play, they’re following in Guild Wars 2′s footsteps – a one-time purchase gives you access to the full story-heavy MMO.
Buying the game now gets you access to the complete range of launch content, as well as the four subsequent content packs (or Issues, as they’re known in TSW’s vernacular). Going forward, Issues will be sold as optional DLC, although the upcoming fifth update will be free for anyone who buys the game before the end of December.
The existing subscription will continue, now as an optional “membership,” and offers a selection of extra benefits. These include a Time Accelerator, which gives a 1-hour XP boost of 100%; $10 of bonus points per month; an item-of-the-month gift each month; and a 10% discount to items in the store. Members also get any future DLC as part of their subscription. The full range of options and benefits are explained on the TSW blog.
Overall it seems like a good move for the game. Still, I can’t help but wish this had been planned from the start. There’s a lot to like about The Secret World – it has some exceptional writing, great characters and tries interesting things with classes and skills. It also has an awful lot of quest churn once you progress out of the starting area of Kingsmouth, with the brilliant investigation missions becoming increasingly spaced out.
Has this subscription switch tempted anyone to take look?

Trion Worlds hit by lay-offs

Gamasutra are reporting that 40 members of the Rift development team – around one third of the game’s staff – are being laid off. Trion Worlds have confirmed job cuts in a statement, but haven’t commented on how many roles are being lost, or which teams are affected.
“As a response to market conditions, product timelines and the natural evolution of our company,” Trion writes, “we have made some organizational changes, which include a workforce reduction. This was a difficult decision and we wish the best for those affected by these changes. At Trion, we remain focused on delivering top quality online game experiences, and are committed to supporting RIFT and launching our highly anticipated new titles Defiance, Warface, and End of Nations in 2013.”
Trion Worlds launched the ace Storm Legion expansion only last month. While the MMO has retained its subscription status, despite a free light edition covering levels 1-20 and a Storm Legion trial for returning players, the company has never divulged any information on how many subscribers it was serving.
This news follows on from the 19 lay-offs at Petroglyph, who were working on End of Nations before Trion moved its development in-house.

Skyrim Requiem mod brings old school RPG sensibilities

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate again recently, and it’s reignited my appreciation for RPGs that can properly kick your ass. There’s nothing quite like the quickload abusing challenge of trying to take down a lone polar bear without it wiping out half your party, deranged Beserker and all.
That desire for brutal, unforgiving encounters seems to be at the heart of Requiem: The Oldschool Roleplaying Overhaul, which tweaks nearly every aspect of Skyrim to make it that much more punishing.
The changelog is huge. Races have been reworked to offer more varied inherent traits, sneaking has been nerfed to stop it being a crutch for people (i.e. me) to survive pretty much every encounter, all the spells have been adjusted and shopkeepers have been given an upgrade to stinginess. Naturally fast travel has been disabled, which is going to make the seven thousand steps a right bugger to ascend.
The biggest change though is to the combat. Enemy difficulty is determined by type, with even spiders now requiring more tactical thought than blindly slashing away. Encounters are also designed to be quicker. Humanoids with light armour can be dispatched quickly (even if that means you), but heavy armour comes at a huge cost to stamina unless you’re investing perks to negate their weight.
It all sounds rather tiring, to be honest. But no doubt there’ll be some out there more than happy to transform the game into an unyielding struggle for survival.
You can download Requiem from Skyrim Nexus. Unfortunately it’s not up on the Steam Workshop, so installation will require some effort. Nowhere near as much as actually playing the thing, admittedly.

Trion Worlds wants former players to try Rift: Storm Legion for free

If you’ve let your Rift account lapse even though the recent Storm Legion expansion has piqued your interest, well here’s good news: between December 14 and 18 former Rift players will be able to play Storm Legion for free. The bonus will be ushered in by the latest game update 2.1: Endless Eclipse, which goes live tomorrow. In their announcement Trion Worlds assured that “former subscribers can dive deep into Storm Legion with no restrictions, while anyone, including RIFT Lite players, can celebrate a huge new Fae Yule World Event and build in private or public, personal or guild Dimensions.”
It’s worth giving a go if you’ve got even the vaguest interest in Rift, with our review of the recent expansion promising that “the vast amount of content added makes it practically essential for Rift fans.”

The Walking Dead’s first season now available in boxed version

Telltale’s episodic Walking Dead series of drama-laced survival hit shelves today as a boxed edition compiling all five episodes of the first season. Retailing exclusively at Best Buy stores for $30, the collection charts the struggles of Lee, Clementine, Kenny, and other memorable characters as personalities clash and mesh during a widespread zombie outbreak.
Previously available as individual digital downloads through Steam and Telltale’s Season Pass, the boxed Walking Dead provides a means to scoop up the entirety of the first season’s cliffhangers, moral ambiguity, and bloodstained shovels. Seeing as the culminating fifth episode alone yanked enough on our heartstrings to include the series in our Game of the Year selections, it’s definitely a worthy buy for those seeking the entire experience.

Dishonored Dunwall City Trials DLC out now, sneak and kill for best times and scores

Dishonored’s mixture of stealth, swords, and the supernatural factors into the skills you’ll need to master in today’s release of the Dunwall City Trials DLC. Sneaking onto Steam for $5/£3, the pack of ten maps throws non-narrative challenges of freerunning, combat, assassination, and stealth in addition to furnishing a new set of achievements for completionists.
As you jump, slice, and crouch your way through the Trials’ jumbled courses, you’ll earn a spot on global leaderboards for comparison against your fellow disgraced-bodyguards-cum-athletes. Completing enough challenges unlocks a growing gallery of concept art images showcasing Dishonored’s urban decay and technology. If you haven’t yet experienced Corvo Attano’s journey of redemption in Arkane’s sneak-and-stabber, we recommend checking out the holiday sales or putting Dishonored on your Christmas list.

Peter Molyneux on GODUS: Co-op, Kickstarter, and being “a god with unbelievable prowess”

“So, it may be that we end up with a hand like in Black & White, which I think didn’t work terribly well.”

“I want to give them the feeling that they are a god with unbelievable prowess,” says an emphatic Peter Molyneux. “Some of these powers are going to be incredibly powerful and tactile while others are going to be incredibly creative and gentle.
“I want it to feel like it’s your hand—the hand that’s on the mouse or the touchscreen—that’s touching this tactile and reactive world, and making you an avatar in the world is something that can demote that.”
We’re talking about how player representation might work in Molyneux and 22cans’ Project GODUS, a nascent god game with brazen ambitions. GODUS is positioned as a messiah to the genre—the game that will reinvent it and evoke the sensations the original Populous once stirred in our chests. At least, that’s what the Kickstarter page indicates.
“So, it may be that we end up with a hand like in Black & White, which I think didn’t work terribly well,” says Molyneux, adding that he found the mechanic “terribly fiddly.” “We might make it more abstract. It’s all about you feeling like you’re presiding over this world, that there are these little worshipers that adore you, yes, and also a sense of powerful responsibility towards them.”

Tearing down and building up

Despite that responsibility, there’s room for those who don’t want to play the benevolent deity, too. “Whenever I play something like SimCity, I let out the dinosaurs and stuff—I’d destroy everything that took me hours and hours to create, but that is one of the core tenets of a god game. If you want to do it, fine. What am I to tell you what to do? I don’t want to be your judge, but I want there to be consequences.”

“I don’t want to be your judge, but I want there to be consequences.”

Molyneux doesn’t expand on what those possible consequences might be, but he does outline what godhood over the inhabitants of GODUS might be like. “At the start, everyone’s games will start with very few of these followers and there will be these tiny little settlements. Just one or two buildings. Too small to even be called villages. Then, with your ability to adapt the land around them, they’ll slowly spread out. Those settlements will turn into villages and those villages will turn into towns. From there, the towns will be become cities and metropolises.
“And let me tell you, Cassandra: that metropolis you’re growing is going to be amazing. It’s not just going to spread out, it’s going to spread up as well.”
All the way into the sky, or the nether reaches of the galaxy? Not quite that far. “I’d like to stop around the time when gunpowder came about and things became more complicated. It’s a fascinating part of history, really. When cannons were introduced in Europe, 400 castles were, in one year, destroyed by cannon fire. That was because, before then, the way wars used to work was: if someone were to start attacking, you’d run away into a castle and just start laughing.
“But then, in rolled the cannon and that ended it all.” He laughs.
Though nothing has been directly plucked from the annals of human history, Molyneux cited Greek and Nordic mythology as some of the inspiration. “We’re not modeling GODUS on any particular kind of pantheon. I wanted to make it more of a mixture of things. After all, our interpretation of religion has always been a mixture. If you look at the Greek gods and how they turned into the Roman gods and how that went on to influence modern-day Judeo-Christian beliefs, you’ll see that a lot of religions are a mixture of different legends and mythologies.”

Cooperative pantheons

While players won’t be able to cobble together an existing pantheon in the game, outside of the game they’ll be able to assemble a team of gods in the form of co-operative play, assuming joint de-facto rule over their various worshippers. “You and I can do anything together. Up to four of us—my tech people say we might be able to support up to eight people—can do anything together in real-time. We can help each other in real-time, we can even do it in single-player. Our cults or ‘clans,’ if you will, can all help each other in a slightly non-real time way as well.”
Non-real time?
“Non-real time,” Molyneux confirms. “The problem is that if we require everyone to be online at the same, it’s not going to be very realistic. Lots of people come online and play at very, very different times for varying lengths—you have to support this ability to let people support each other when they’re online.”
I ask if what he’s describing bears any similarity to asynchronous play in Facebook games, and Molyneux’s enthusiasm doesn’t falter. “Kind of, yes, but I want to take it even further. I want to be able to go and help you out, and I want to be able to help you with a problem and I want there to be a sensation that you’ve helped me out. There’s a lot of criticism that these games get that I don’t really get.”

Molyneux plans to enable both real-time and non-real time cooperative play.

Kicking and dreaming

With just over a week left before the end of Project GODUS’s Kickstarter campaign, Molyneux has a more pressing problem than figuring out how to achieve his ambitious design plans. Currently, Project GODUS is barely over the halfway mark for its funding goal. If it fails to reach the target figure, 22cans will not receive anything. Nonetheless, Molyneux doesn’t seem regretful about using the crowdsourcing platform.
“Why Kickstarter? The first reason, and it is the main reason, is that the way to make, I think, a great game is to play the game and to play it for weeks and weeks and refine it and play it some more. I wondered if we were going to re-invent something from the ground-up, this something that is almost dead: could we use Kickstarter to find enough people to back the project and be involved in its development?
“So, if you look at our pledges on Kickstarter, a lot of them are about how you can get to play the game early. We’re going to use the feedback from that and the analytics on the PC to refine the experience. Thus, when we finally finish the game towards the end of next year, it’d have been played lots and lots of times. The thing about Kickstarter that you have to remember is that if someone has pledged money, you know they’re going to care about the experience—it’s why I want to use it in the design process.”