Each year I travel to E3 as a sort of pilgrimage, family reunion and business trip. For as long as I can remember, each year has brought bigger and better games and faster hardware to play them on. This year though, the environment was different. Video, sound and CPU hardware has reached a point where there is no clear direction to innovate, and existing technology is so advanced that programmers, designers and artists have only scratched the surface of what can be created with it. As a result, games this year were driven by two factors: Cheap, powerful hardware, and more importantly, connectivity.
The first sign that the tech race had slowed was that hardware vendors like nVIDIA and ATI were not focusing on the minute details of their hottest new technology. As both companies are relatively equal technology wise, they chose to focus on their development partners and what could be created with technology that exists today.
This pattern extended across the rest of the show floor as well. Because technology is no longer the center of attention, publishers and marketing gurus who traditionally focused their pitches on a game’s revolutionary graphics or even AI, physics or lighting effects had to find something else.
Not once did I hear an overexcited product manager shout, “This game runs at over 60 FPS!” or, “These characters feature over 5,000 polygons!” It was clear from the graphical splendor displayed at virtually every booth that the industry had reached a point where artists and designers, not hardware, were now the limiting factors in graphics.
This issue of where to go next is an issue that is splitting the industry. It was clear at this year’s show that the vast majority of publishers chose to take the safe road and focus on profitable (hopefully) sequels, and games based on licenses. In fact almost every TV or movie seems to have been licensed by some company now, from Spy vs. Spy to He Man and Futurama, as well as every hit film slated for release this year. Even veteran publishers with a history of thinking independently and producing high quality titles like Bethesda Softworks have fallen prey to this trend by choosing to turn their eagerly anticipated Sea Dogs 2 into a licensed game based on a movie, based on a ride at Disneyland, Pirates of the Caribbean.
Despite this stifling reliance on sequels and licenses, some of the games and products at the show truly stood out, because they embraced this new age of cheap powerful hardware and more importantly, connectivity, instead of playing it safe.
With this in mind, I have created the following awards:
Best Game: Savage
The PC games space was pretty thin this year except for FPS games and MMOs, even less games supported platforms other than Windows and still fewer were innovative. Savage, though, is all of these, and it has re-energized my appreciation for both the shooter and RTS genres.
At the show, they opened up a new genre, the RTSS or Real Time Strategy Shooter. The game combines the classic RTS gameplay of gathering resources, developing technologies, building bases and directing armies with the classic online FPS gameplay seen in titles like Battlefield 1942 and Tribes 2.
In Savage, the commander plays the game similar to how one would in an RTS, except that instead of leading legions of AI-driven soldiers into battle, the soldiers are actually the other players in the game. Those players, when playing as humans, begin with a simple melee weapon and bow, but as the commander builds the base and develops new technologies, weaponry will advance to include chemical and electrical based weapons as well.
When asked about what inspired them to create a game like this, Jon Shiring, Programmer at S2 Games said, “We started thinking about how we wanted to improve team-based games by adding a commander to help coordinate the overall strategy, but we didn’t want to leave the commander with a half-role to play. Once we decided to merge the RTS and Action gameplay types, the details all sort of naturally fell into place.”
Not only was the game innovative and more important, fun, but they also hope to ship a Linux version in the same box as the Windows version when it is released later this year.
Jon explained, “Porting the server code was necessary since so many dedicated game servers run on Linux, but we decided to port the client code over while we were at it. I’ve been a Linux user for many years, so I wanted to do it purely to support the Linux gaming community, but it has turned out to be quite helpful in finding bugs. Since we use OpenGL and have been careful to separate platform-specific code, porting the entire engine, level editor, and game took only a few days.”
NOTE: photos of their booth can be found here: http://www.slothy.com/e3-001.jpg
Best Console Product: Xbox Live/XSN
Last year Microsoft promised to change the way we viewed online gaming. That year has come and gone with only a few minor examples of how wonderful Xbox Live might be. During the upcoming year, Microsoft hopes to prove that it is 100% behind the Xbox Live concept by showing a solid collection of Xbox Live games and a new label, XSN Sports, which at launch will feature NFL Fever, NBA Inside Drive, and NHL Rivals, as well as Amped 2, Top Spin, and Links. Other games will then join the XSN family as it matures.
While many PC based services offer matchmaking and stats tracking of online games, they have been focused on FPS games like Quake and Unreal. XSN takes this concept to the next level by applying it to sports games and letting players create their own leagues in cyberspace. Future plans include letting players track other teams via email and alerts sent to mobile phones, as well as some real life tournaments where players will be able to face off against each other in the same room.
Outside of sports games, Xbox Live continues to rock, and they are finally bringing out a variety of titles to support the network, including Dead or Alive Online, Capcom vs SNK, Midnight Club II, and Midtown Madness III. In fact, from an informal survey of the Xbox booth, it seems as though nearly every major new title for the Xbox will support Xbox Live in some manner.
Most Saturated Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Massively Multiplayer Online Games were everywhere this year, and though the genre is more than six years old it is just now beginning to mature. Unfortunately, as people see it as a bona fide genre, it is rapidly becoming saturated. It seems that every publisher and developer at this year’s show was working on an MMO, now referred to as MOG (Massive Online Game). In development right now are more than 100 MOGs from developers of all sizes, not to mention the dozen or so top tier titles like Horizons, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Matrix Online, Lineage II and EverQuest II.
As these new games come online this year it will be interesting to see the market’s reaction. Currently these developers are chasing the riches seen in games like Lineage and EverQuest, which each boast hundred and hundreds of thousands of players and are able to sustain those numbers for years at a time. In the future though, as a new MOG comes online every week, will the market expand to accommodate the new members of the genre or are we looking at a bubble, just like the dot-com one a few years ago?
In a traditional game form like FPS or RTS it isn’t a big deal to have a constant stream of new games, because each is expected to last 20-40 hours and a gamer can just buy a new game every month. However, it is almost intrinsic to the MOG genre that players make an investment in a single game as characters will mature in the game, and players are expected to pay $30-$50 up front and $10-$15 per month. This makes it much harder to just move on and try the next game. After all, who wants to just play a Level 3 mage their whole life?
Of note, though, were a few stand-out titles at the show that were doing something unique. These include A Tale In The Desert, which focuses on social puzzles and can be compared to a civilization building game where the player is the individual unit, not the emperor; and Sims Online, which also focuses on non-violence and socialization. But both of these titles were almost hidden and didn’t receive the exposure that the dozens and dozens of violent RPG cookie cutter games did.
Best Concept with Least Likelihood of Seeing a Store Shelf: Phantom
Every few years a company sees the riches that await if they could just produce a console that everyone loved, so they decide to jump in the fray. Over the years these companies have included 3DO, Indrema, Nokia, and now we have Phantom from Infinium Labs.
Like Nokia and Indrema, the Phantom will leverage the Internet instead of the retail channel to let gamers not only buy but also rent and try demos of new titles. The console will also support a “seamless” patching system for both the console and games, and it is also rumored to support the ability to upgrade both the hard drive and RAM. Infinium Labs also claims that it will be the fastest console on the market when it ships later this year or in Q1 2004. Unlike Nokia and Indrema though, Phantom will be a single function box, just games, no PVR, DVD player, or other set-top-box functions.
Other details are currently hidden, including who the content partners will be. However, with a little investigation I did learn that Infinium Labs is actively working with several developers ranging in size from small startups to well-established publishers.
While some of those I talked with are skeptical of the system’s potential for success, they are supportive of the concept. It seems that the main draw of Phantom that was cited by the people I talked with was that the system will be flexible and relatively open compared to the traditional console market.
Only time will tell if Phantom will succeed or if it is just another well-intentioned, VC-driven company with little reality to back it up.
Underground Movement that Will Change the Industry: Indie Games
Seething just below the surface of the corporately driven game development epitomized by the lack of creativity and reliance on licenses, is the “indie games” movement. At E3 a few independent developers like S2 Games, Savage, were seen on the show floor, but most of these “indie” developers and games were found at the hotel bars and sharing stories at various parties around town. These developers along who those cited above are in the second half of the industry that recognizes the surplus of technology available and wants to mold it and shape it into their own vision of what a game should be.
Once again, the Internet is playing a key role in this trend. In the past, independent developers needed to rely on packaging and shipping their games themselves or needed to have deep financial resources to pay for boxes and then have a distributor distribute them. Now, online sales and marketing is becoming more secure, stable and reliable.
GarageGames’s evangelist Jay Moore, one of the speakers at “Use the Web to Publish, Market, and Protect Your Game,” shares his perspective:
“We’re still in the early days of online game development and marketing and while the sales continue to increase it is the independent developer that can innovate and make a good living building games for what is still a predominately casual game market.
“The exciting innovations that we will see in the coming year with more multiplayer and quality 3D games promises to keep move the bar on both quality and innovation.”
Over the past several years, this movement has made the transformation from a single festival at Game Developers Conference to a rapidly growing sub-industry which is attracting veteran game developers and is creating new stars as well. Even more important is that the publishers, including Real Arcade, Wild Tangent and GarageGames are now, all able to provide success stories.
While there have always been “independent” developers, this new breed is working to utilize the lessons learned in the dot-com era to not just sell and distribute their games online, but they are also using the Internet to develop their games collaboratively and because of their size and the value of marginal sales they are also more likely to produce games for Mac and Linux as well as Windows.
James writes for
washingtonpost.com’s entertainment guide and runs CyPR
Media, a PR agency
dedicated to spotlighting independent developers and
“Promoting the Soul of PC Gaming.”
Category:
- Games
