“In the beginning we talked about having things in Modern Warfare 2 like outbreaks, viruses, chemical warfare, and even outlandish things such as aliens and the living dead” says Jesse Stern, one of Modern Warfare 2’s writers.

“We worked our way through it before we finally ended up with a more grounded version of the real world as it’s depicted in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. And as we were kicking around scenarios for conflict, we kept stumbling into things that were happening in real life, which was honestly unintentional.”

The living dead? Where have we seen that before in a Call of Duty game…

The above quote was pulled from a longer interview over at GamePro. If you want to read more serious, thoughtful words from a man responsible for Russian paratroopers in a burger store in Virginia, hit the link below.

Modern Warfare 2 writer: “the airport level was a risk we had to take” [GamePro]

And they are. An LA Times report on the game’s launch says the game “cost $US40 million to $US50 million to produce”. That’s, uh, a lot. Gran Turismo 5 has cost $US60 million so far, but that game’s been in development for five years, not the two it took to get MW2 out the door.

So, yes, if you were wondering how Activision got so much detail, Fiddy and Keith David into the game, that’s how they did it. By throwing money at it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 video game gets Hollywood-scale launch [LA Times]

As reported by Gamasutra’s Chris Remo, Chris Hecker (formerly of Maxis, now an independent developer) addressed the International Game Developers Association’s Leadership Forum in San Francisco this past week. In the following excerpt, Remo digests Hecker’s remarks and their main point — that games remain fixated on narrow experiences, revenue and the easy appeal of proven forms of presentation — especially the “power fantasy”, with its attendant explosions and special effects.

“If we continue on our current path, we’ll end up in the pop cultural ghetto where [comic books] are,” Hecker said. “An alternative path is where film, books and music ended up.” Such media certainly have their low-brow offerings, but on the whole are “relatively bulletproof” as accepted forms of art, worth scholarship and refined criticism.

But even on four tests of popular culture acceptance — revenue, units sold, cultural impact and diversity of content – games succeed at only one, Hecker argues. Revenue. “We f—k it up on the other three,” showing that the medium is still an infant next to its supposed peers.

Here, in the words of Hecker as reported by Remo, is the bigger picture of how games, before aspiring to the old-money legitimacy of the fine arts, can first avoid a cultural ghetto.

IGDA Forum: Asking ‘Why’ Will Keep Games Out Of The Ghetto, Says Hecker [Gamasutra, November 13, 2009.]

Like literature, music, film and other forms, games offer their own intrinsic element to add to culture. For games, it’s interactivity. That uniqueness is necessary for a form to carve out its own cultural space, and it’s what will allow games to occupy such a space if the gaming community doesn’t wall it off.

But that means designers must strive to convey some kind of “why”, and when they do, it will ideally be conveyed through interactivity, not just cutscenes. Linear “theme park ride” games, as Hecker calls them — recently, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, et al. — can be great fun, and we have become quite skilled at making them, but they also represent something of a creative red herring: “The part that speaks to the human condition is in the cutscenes, not in the interactivity.”

Furthermore, while gamers are highly resistant to decreases in graphical fidelity, they seem on the whole un-bothered by regressions in interactivity, hence the flourishing of the theme park ride approach. And since, for technical reasons, it’s safer and cheaper to decrease interactivity as you increase realism, the latter may well continue to suffer.

The booming market of casual and social games, Hecker points out, has a different problem. “It’s great to have a game to play while you’re waiting for a bus,” he said, “but they’re not trying to say anything at all.”

That leaves the broad category of “systems games”, which are more intrinsically predicated on interactivity and player-driven choice. They contain the best candidates for creating unique, meaningful works in games, Hecker believes, but at the present moment, “these games aren’t really saying anything either, because we don’t know how to say things through interactivity, how an authorial voice works through a system.”

There’s no easy way out of this arguably slippery slope except for the dedication and intent of the people making the games. “I believe this is the big question for the next ten years of game design,” Hecker said. “We have so many opportunities.”

Mechanics and systems can be continually evolved, but designers would do well to keep the following questions in mind, he said: “What are you trying to say and why?” and “And are you trying to say it with interactivity?”

“If you can answer those,” Hecker concluded, “you’re on the right track.”

- Chris Remo

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears every Saturday. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

“We are very excited to see the uptake of UDK cross over the 50,000 mark in only one week, and we’re looking forward to seeing amazing games and applications come out of it,” said Mark Rein, the vice president of Epic Games.

Rein added Epic was “thrilled” to offer the kit to schools and students and that Unreal Engine 3 would be part of their education and training in games development.

GamesIndustry.biz reported that the training firm 3D Buzz, which has already made more than 100 Unreal Technology video tutorials, will release a free tutorial series specific to the UDK.

50,000 Grab Free Unreal SDK In One Week [GamesIndustry.biz]

When I first started talking about it with [producer Atsushi] Inaba, the only starting point we had for Okami was a game that depicted a lot of nature,” he told Famitsu. “I couldn’t say ‘I don’t know if this’ll be fun or not’ because than nobody on the dev team would be enthusiastic about it, so instead I was like ‘This is gonna be great! I know it will!’ So eventually the discussion shifted to a wolf running around, and we made this minute-long video depicting a wolf running through a field and trees sprouting up behind him and I told the team ‘See, isn’t that neat?’”

There was no story at the time and no gameplay system. There was an original concept — depicting the splendour of nature.

“Our first test run was incredibly boring to play,” he continued. “I was grinding my teeth at night, I was so worried. At one point, we were so far off-track that it had turned into a simulation game — you had hexes and trees sprouted on them. It was total garbage. A couple of devs said to me afterwards ‘Something was definitely wrong with you around that time, Kamiya!’”

Read more in the link below.

Platinum Games’ Kamiya Reflects on Bayonetta, Okami [1Up]

“I communicate with our Twitter followers the same way I’d communicate with my office buddies,” Bowling told Develop.

So if something happens I just throw it out there and opinions come in and we converse. Also during development, if we are sitting in a design meeting and we are arguing about something, no matter what it is I can just turn to what is now 60,000 people and post the same question.

Do we think will players like this? Well why don’t we ask 60,000 of them and get a good representation of what we think they may like. Twitter has been fantastic throughout development, and I would recommend many, many more people adapted that into their design schedule.

It’s not a carte-blanche relationship – the feedback Bowling pulls from Twitter must fit with Infinity Ward’s design philosophy. “Typically stuff like: ‘we want more gore.’ That’s against our design philosophy,” he says. “We don’t make gory games. It’s not that we can’t, but it’s not the experience we go for.”

Over the lifespan of this game’s development, tons of news has broken through Bowling over Twitter, so it’s no surprise that channel has affected the arc of Modern Warfare 2, prerelease. It shows Twitter’s not just a pass-through for trivia or hype, as some might dismiss it, but a useful way for both sides to stay in touch.

Infinity Ward Talks Twitter [Develop]

Whether Activision has a studio like Treyarch do a Wii port of Modern Warfare 2 remains to be seen, but developer Infinity Ward doesn’t seem interested in putting out Wii titles for future titles.

“If we felt like we could deliver the cinematic experience we were going for on other platforms, then we would gladly move to that platform,” said Infinity Ward community manager Robert Bowling. “Right now, we don’t think the Wii can deliver the exact experience that we’re doing. We like to be very equal across all platforms, and if it’s not equal then we won’t do it.”

Bowling also hinted that the studio could work on an original IP after Modern Warfare 2 — but that doesn’t mean Infinity Ward is done with Call of Duty games.

“If we do want to do something else, then we will do it,” says Bowling. “We don’t feel tied to making Call of Duty games.” Infinity Ward, Bowling says, makes Call of Duty games because the studio has fun doing them. “And when it stops being fun, we’ll move onto something else.” And that something else probably won’t be on the Wii.

Infinity Ward: Wii can’t deliver on our goals [Develop]

Indeed, the original vision was very much of a PC RPG in the vein of Baldur’s Gate. Fast forward over five years since it was first announced at E3 2004 and Dragon Age – now subtitled Origins – is launching this week on PC and Xbox 360, with the PS3 version following in a fortnight.

Bioware’s Greg Zeschuk told me his team actually had the game running fairly early on console, even before they had decided to release a console version.

“One of the things we presumed correctly,” says Zeschuk, “is that if you think you might ultimately do a console version then you always want to have some console work going on. Otherwise you could dead-end yourself in a really scary way.”

Co-developing Dragon Age on PC and console, as well as the experience Bioware accumulated thanks to the aforementioned Mass Effect, Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic, changed the way they develop their games. For the better, argues Zeschuk.

“The influence of the console versions has been beneficial on our PC development side,” he says. “Consoles have often had a higher level of expectation for accessibility than the PC has. I mean, the PC has been that platform where you could have an incredibly complicated interface and gameplay that would be embraced by a certain segment of the market.

“So we would always have this ability to not really refine or distill our systems down to their essence; instead you just do some really, really detailed and crazy stuff. The irony being that in certain places, like central or eastern Europe, they love that; it’d be their ultimate game.”

The purity of the console interface, to borrow Zeschuk’s own term, in the sense there a fewer buttons and potential inputs, has forced Bioware to go down that path of refinement and distillation. The result is that not only does Dragon Age: Origins play perfectly well with a PS3 or 360 controller, the PC interface is less fussy and convoluted than in previous titles.

Even so, Zeschuk believes Dragon Age is their most PC game since the Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights era.

“Our games still have PC roots and we sometimes find ourselves retrofitting,” he says. “Dragon Age is more retrofitted than Mass Effect, which was more of a core console game. Even KOTOR was more of a hybrid. But it’s what we’ve learned from those games that has allowed Dragon Age to be portable [to other platforms] at all.”

Which version of Dragon Age are you planning to pick up?

Acton says Insomniac’s community team took a look at the reviews of 47 top-notch games and found that while “there was a clear correlation between graphics scores in reviews and the final scores,” there’s no correlation between framerate and the graphics scores. In other words, good graphics make the game feel more fun to play, but whether it’s 30 fps or 60 fps doesn’t matter.

Take a look at his entire post; Acton gets into the studio’s philosophy of what is and what isn’t important, visually. And it’s clear that 60 fps, despite the fact “one of the long-standing sacred cows here at Insomniac is framerate,” is not going to be the holy grail of their development. In fact, it’ll probably be 30 fps from now on.

How Much Does Framerate Matter? [Insomniac Games Blog]

So what it like to be working on StarCraft II, which is not a WarCraft game?

“I don’t think it has anything to do with anything,” StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder tells Gamasutra. “It’s just all about scheduling and resources and what happened. World of Warcraft was not something this company expected to be this successful by far. They were hoping for a couple hundred thousand subscribers. That was what had been done in the past — “If we could equal those numbers, we’d be fine.”

Browder doesn’t believe there was any sort of conscious decision to focus on a particular — it was just a matter of the different teams at Blizzard (Diablo III, for example) getting to a point last year where they could show what they had been working on. Browder goes on to say he and Blizzard wishes they were shipping StarCraft II instead of still working on the title. “So, I think it’s just that these games are taking longer to make than we’d like,” he adds. The WarCraft team is working from an established toolset, so they are able to release expansion in a timely manner.

“Certainly, we’re hoping, as we’re developing this new engine [for StarCraft II], that once we get to that point, we’ll be able to maintain a higher rate of speed than we have in the past, but I think up until now it’s just the way it’s worked out.

The Design of StarCraft II [Gamasutra]