SiN

Yeah, I'm crazy excited, but there's no real indication as to what they're going to do (yet). That said, a lot of "remastering" going around, and not "re-releasing" so that seems encouraging. My guess as to what's going to happen: Gameplay bugfixes. Redesigned controls and "modernized" interface: Relative-to-the-screen (not character) based movement, and contextual use/examine popups for the objects. Of course, there will be an the option to turn these off. Newly modelled and animated characters. Re-rendered cutscenes at higher resolution and better compression. Here's the big one: re-rendered, widescreen background art. Assuming they have the original assets, and they're in a reasonable state, this doesn't seem unreasonable. It would be crazy to release a non-widescreen game with upscaled 640x480 backgrounds on a modern console. Things I don't think will happen: Any kind of changes to voiceovers, storyline, puzzle design, etc. Making the backgrounds real-time. I imagine a lot of the background art was created to be viewed from a fixed perspective, so a lot of set design-esque tricks were likely used.

You know, like: "as much as I am loathe to admit it because Apple sucks" I'm a software developer. Everyone I've ever worked with has hated Apple. It used to be annoying/frustrating, but after years of dealing with it, I just find it kinda amusing. Didn't mean to offend/insult, or anything.

Haha, I expected the typical techie/gamer Apple hate. I love it. I actually think Nintendo has top class hardware and UX design, you just need to skew your perspective a bit. Think about their UX in games, not software. Mario 64 (and Zelda OoT) defined the template for controlling and navigating 3D games. The initial line up of DS games showed the possibilities for touch. Wii Sports for gesture-based games. Etc. And just in general, Nintendo games layer concepts on top of each other in a well-paced, intuitive way. (As in: here's idea X. Here's Y. Now use X+Y) One of the things that has disappointed me in recent times is Nintendo's over-reliance on tutorials, videos, message boxes, etc. They're so good at "show, don't tell" ... SMB World 1-1 is a classic example of this. On hardware, Nintendo's primary goals are price and durability. So sure, the DS is no iPhone (or whatever, modern smartphone), but it's not trying to be. Instead, Nintendo have their own design aesthetic, that's elegant but toy-like. I think the DSi is a *beautiful* piece of hardware, but in a way that's unlike any other tech on the market today. The 2DS is a triumph of design too, but in the classic "solve this business problem" sense. I imagine the directive was literally "redesign the 3DS in a way that allows deep cost cutting", and they solved it in an innovative way. That said, yes, for whatever reason they can't design a simple "app" (or menu) style interface if their lives depended on it. :/

It's always been plainly obvious to me that Nintendo are the Apple of the Video game industry. Their hardware informs their Video game design, and their video games feedback into the hardware design. They are neither a hardware or software company, they are both in equal measure.

"Xbox delivering what every other platform already does" Thanks, Xbox.

Robotron 2048, the granddaddy of twin-stick shooters, is my favourite arcade game ever. It's a single player game, but it uses a two-player cabinet because of the whole twin sticks thing.

"Aye, and it reminds me ... of a song!" I think it was Infogrames. Ohh yeah: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2007/09/sing-along-with/ ... Oh man, it's *sooo* bad.

I grew up reading PC Gamer UK, and the journalists I love to read reflect that. By far and away, Kieron Gillen is my fave. He always struck the right balance of deeply analyzing game mechanics, while throwing in (seemingly) irrelevant anecdotes, and generally being hilarious. He's never lead my astray, even with the games that weren't necessarily "my thing". (aside: one of the highlights of my game development career was forever ago, when he reviewed one of my games and gave it the proper Gillen treatment) When he "retired" I naturally gravitated toward the journalists who followed his style: Quintin Smith and, more recently, Cara Ellison. Apart from them, Leigh Alexander has a distinct writing style that's a joy to read. This is especially noticeable on Gamasutra, where her analysis of the industry is thoughtful and spot on, without the typical dryness or (conversely) hyperbole. Finally, the long form journalist Simon Parkin has been working on lately has been consistently engaging. I love stories about creative people doing their thing (in any medium, really) and Parkin has been finding the right people, asking the right questions and framing the narrative in a compelling manner.

I think has a not-hardcore Thief fan I'll enjoy it... but I'm not exactly rushing out to get the game. It's disappointing when you consider it came out of Eidos Montreal though. I never got into Deus Ex back in the day, I was an inexperienced FPS player, and it was just a little too clunky. DX:HR did exactly what I wanted: it captured the essence and appeal of the original, added the right amount of hand-holding and modern conveniences, but didn't go overboard and lose its identity. From all the reviews, I get the sense that Thief has gone too far overboard. Which doesn't make it a bad game per se, but a missed opportunity.

Indeed, Walker is legit in my books. I don't always agree with him, but I appreciate that he picks difficult subjects to debate. (Also, I get the feeling people miss the humorous intent of his grumpiness.) His Thief review had a *tonne* of caveats, but none of which bothered me so much. Which I think is kind of the point. I'm probably going to play the game at some point.

I'm saying he ran the company that produced those titles. And are we looking at the same credits? http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,6832/ Lead Design on the Shock titles and SWAT 4. Freedom Force just says "Freedom Force Team", but I'm pretty sure he did design and writing on it. Honestly (and again I *really* didn't like Binfinite) that's a pretty legit track record.

Here's another fact: the dude in charge ran the company for 13 years, where he was in charge of 7 critically acclaimed titles. There are some very competent industry leaders who would be envious of that track record.

I had a whole thing written out, but basically what aperson said. This: I think that the process failed on Binfinite, but I don't think one can assign that failure to Ken Levine alone. Binfinite obviously had buy-in from the business folks at 2K, and the entire management structure, both from 2K *and* Irrational. The best laid plans can go astray. Further, Ken/Irrational/2K acknowledged that the process failed through their actions. Shutting down Irrational, while it's totally a crappy thing to do, is also the right thing to do. The alternative would be to have this massive team repeat the same mistakes over another 5 year period, or make the kind of video games that nobody at Irrational would want to make anyway. It's clear to me that Levine is remorseful over the whole situation, even from the letter alone. I don't think anyone comes out of this looking good, or being entirely satisfied, but (from our limited knowledge) it genuinely seems like the best thing that could come out of the situation. Of course, if anyone could have predicted Binfinite's outcome this could have all been avoided. That's really the part I'm sympathetic (and yeah, a little defensive) toward. In hindsight, it's *so* 20/20, but in software (and *especially* video games) these outcomes are so hard to predict that it frustrates me when someone goes "why didn't they do x, y & z it's so obvious."

I've made indie video games and apps. When I work on games I'm like "OMG, apps are *so* much easier! The design is functional and straight forward! No framerate issues to worry about! Content is so much harder and expensive for games!" When I work on apps I'm like, "OMG, games are *so* much easier! It's easy to scope a game, and things don't need to necessarily be *correct* just *feel right*. No forward/backwards-compatible document formats!" In short, both are difficult in their own unique way. (Reading that over, I guess that's pretty much what osmosisch said.)

Software. Honestly, just software. I've been reading along this thread, tempted to comment (but not wanting to get sucked into it), so I'll try to keep this brief. It's easy to blame Ken Levine for being "irresponsible" for Infinite going over time and over budget. But the truth is software programming and interaction design are unpredictable and difficult professions. This is not a problem unique to games. I've never worked in the games industry, but I work in the software industry (on projects both larger and smaller than Binfinite) and have seen the same thing happen time and again. Binfinite is an especially hard project to work on because so much of it was new. Look, it's "easy" to create the next Call of Duty on time and on budget* because a majority of the work is "understood" problems with only a few risky areas, and lots of content creation. Binfinite is pretty much the opposite of that (except the content creation part). Games like it, where the devs are trying a lot of new things follow a similar fate... I can't think of too many recent examples (probably because publishers stopped funding them), but Black & White comes to mind (4 years), Half-Life 2 (forever), Ico, Shadow of the Colossus (both 4 years each I believe), etc. * and actually, I'm pretty sure they've failed at that too. That's how hard software is. Given Binfinite's scope and ambitions, I'm not sure anyone could have managed it to be on-time and on-budget. I wouldn't call Ken Levine a bad project manager, "ignorant" or whatever, based on this. That said, I'm sure Irrational is a difficult place to work, but then again that's not surprising to me considering the scope and ambition of the game. And for the record, I didn't even like Bioshock Infinite.

PCF is a coin-toss... maybe they'll spin them off, but I think they're valuable as a second-tier development team. I mean, Judgement wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. Chair, on the other hand, is *insanely* important to Epic. They're a premier mobile studio, and Epic are moving fairly aggressively into targeting mobile development along side their well established console/PC space. Epic really don't want to lose out to Unity in mobile.

Epic will keep making games. Their engine development workflow benefits greatly from the eat your own dogfood nature of the company.

Both examples you guys brought up (Guild Wars, Mass Effect) have one thing in common: feedback occurred late in the /creative/ process. (I'm guessing during beta or post-release.) As you said Merus, "GW2 has a very clear idea of its design principles" and regarding ME3, it's the third game in a series. These fall under "playtesting and player feedback" in my books. And yeah, I'm mostly* cool with that. (*I'd elaborate, but that's really a whole other discussion) My problem lies more in the earlier stages of development, when the core ideas for the game are materializing. Tim Schafer talked about this in one of the earlier documentary episodes, but here's a quote from Jony Ive: "While ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished." The difficulties in crowd development (as opposed to the "normal" creative process) are in control & scale. As the quote above suggests, you need to carefully control how your ideas take shape. Personally, I start playtesting with a few close friends, take their feedback into consideration, and then widen my circle of testers. I get fresh, richer feedback over time. Crowd developement is more of a firehose, it's either on or off. A *lot* of people will play your builds all at once (even if your tiers are carefully managed). Scale gets into that amorpheous blob thing. I'm not really worried about Double Fine and the like. Big companies with experienced developers, and dedicated community managers will do alright. But what about smaller devs? Two-person teams with less experience? At some point the ratio of developers-to-backers doesn't scale, and it does essentially become a amorpheous blob. Hyper Light Drifter is a great example. 3 devs : 25,000 backers. (btw, I didn't know about the lumberjack thing, thanks for correcting me!) Here's a thought: gamers generally think that publishers meddling with the creative process is, more often than not, a bad thing, right? Fundamentally, the idea that an entity not involved in the creative process having the power to manipulate create and design aspects of a game is wrong. So why isn't crowd development perceived in a similarly skeptical manner? What makes the crowd so much better? Aren't we also driven by our biases and risk-aversion?

Also, examples of open development not working out. Again, it's still early days so these are a bit of a stretch, but they're worth noting from a trend perspective. Mass Effect 3 might be a good example. (I'm not really a fan of the series, so I'm not sure) Bioware made a pretty cool/bold ending, fans didn't like it, Bioware are "forced" to release DLC which cheapens the ending. It's worth noting here* that EA were the ones who were cool with Bioware doing the bold/risky ending, and the fans were the ones who wanted them to "play it safe". * if my understanding of the situation is correct Another example, from Broken Age. Remember in the early days, when Double Fine posted the first test scene was the hipster lumberjack? The boards quickly lit up with backers not really liking the style/character at all. Double Fine were like, "don't worry, it's just a test scene!" But they ended up using it in the game and lumberjack dude turned out great, and so did the forest area.

A little early to tell (crowdsourced games are really just becoming a "thing"), but I agree with John for the most part. I oh-so-desperately wanted to back Wasteland 2, but after watching the pitch a few times, it was clear there wasn't much interest in moving the genre forward, just rehashing "the good ol' days" of the late-90s. Crowdfunding encourages this because people generally only back what they know, UNLESS you can show them something new and exciting. But the thing about new and exciting games is that they're really crap for a really long time. Things take a while to develop, for the design to come together, and there's a heavy amount of experimentation. The wisdom of the crowd *really* doesn't work, and can be actively harmful in the early days. I've shown many an early prototype to friends, and there's normally skepticism toward the more out there/innovative ideas. Eventually, these ideas work out, but there's a whole lot of trail & error to get to an "obvious" solution. I couldn't imagine doing the same thing with thousands of skeptical strangers watching me work. There'd be so much pressure to show something that *works*, that I'd probably fall back to better understood mechanics and tech. Oh hey, wait-a-minute, that's how annualized Call Of Dutys happened! Playtesting and player feedback are insanely important though, but they don't really fall under the same categorization.

Yeah, losing the touchscreen in favour of more logically placed buttons is a wise choice. I'm not concerned about back-compat, but the old button placement was just plain awkward. Plus, it'll do wonders for battery life. I'd like the left set of buttons to be a proper d-pad, but honestly, I think this design is a blunt admission that developers haven't used the d-pad as a proper d-pad in years. And the added bonus of a symmetric/ambidextrous design is pretty neat. However, I hope they add a touchpad in the empty space. (As in, touch sensitive area, sans screen) Like Nachimir says, it'd be worth it for text input alone.* * Reasons I'd like to get my hands on a PS4 devkit: 1) write a sweet UI/menu system, replete with bouncy scrolling, intuitive gestures and painless text input. 2) oh, probably make a game or whatever.

???? ?!?!?!?!?!?!? .... ... !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Storyteller? http://www.storyteller-game.com

I don't want to get drawn into this tin-foil hat discussion, but: The difference is that you can close your blinds, curtains, etc. If Steam (or Kinect, or your smartphone, etc) wanted to spy on you without asking first, or the option to turn it off, that would *totally* be possible, and pretty unethical. Of course, people would figure it out eventually (security folks sniffing incoming/outgoing internet traffic) but it's likely that a majority of customers wouldn't care or do much about it. Personally, I don't mind developers collecting analytics/metrics, but I want to be asked first and (ideally) I'd like to see the data being sent back in plain-text.

This is probably too last-minute, but whatever: I'm not at PAX this year, but I will be showing my latest game WE ARE DOOMED at the Seattle Indies Expo. SIX is happening tomorrow, it's free to attend, and it's right next to PAX, so you guys should stop by. More info. If you do come, please find my table, play, pick up a snazzy card, and definitely say "hi!" and let me know your a Thumb! I'll be the guy in the magenta Noby Noby Boy t-shirt.