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Sunday Comics: Dead Island Last year’s GC Developers Conference was a pretty big deal, drawing over 650 participants from all over the world. This year blew last year out of the water, with more than 900 attendees from over 35 countries converging on Leipzig to exchange thoughts and ideas about the industry, winding things up with a keynote on creativity from Double Fine’s Tim Schaefer. “The attendance at the conference and packed sessions showed the clear value of the program to attendees,” said Wolfgang Marzin, president and CEO of the Leipzig Trade Fair. “The conference was a major success.”
The format of the whole Games Convention is just perfect for everyone involved. It combines the industry sharing focus of GDC with the pomp and spectacle of E3′s past to create an environment that offers something for consumers and professionals alike. Hit the jump for the official GCDC windup press release.
There is a distinct contradiction in Lionhead at the moment. Because there is not one gaming company in the world right now studying Hollywood with greater scrutiny. Yet their goal is to find the unique language of videogames.
Peter Molyneux could not attend his keynote today titled, “Life, Love and Death: Drama & Story Experience in Video Games.” So instead, Staging Designer Georg Backer presented Lionhead’s thesis on how games need to change.
At the GC Developers Conference, both Mark Rein from Epic Games and Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights, who just happen to be involved in lawsuits filed against each other, have carefully addressed issues related to the development of the each party’s products involved. Silicon Knights claims the Unreal Engine didn’t deliver on promised technology. Epic responded that it refused to endorse the “suitability” of UE3 for Too Human’s needs.
Today, Rein underscored that claim with a clarification on Epic’s engine building policy.
This morning at the GC Developers Conference, a panel of game developers—Don Daglow from Stormfront Studios, Mike Capps from Epic Games, Julian Eggebrecht from Factor 5, and George Backer from Lionhead Studios—spoke on the subject of “top selling games” and the methods and philosophies involved in designing them. When asked how influential the enthusiast press and the forum dwelling hardcore were on the final outcome of their games, the developers were surprisingly frank about the impact both groups truly had.
Capps was first to respond, saying “We absolutely love the press. Everything they say we immediately put into our game.” Joking, of course, but it’s actually not that far from the truth.
Factor Five’s Julian Eggebrecht, following what’s started as a shaky response to Lair, has reassessed his position on licensing IPs. Addressing a crowd in roundtable discussion, here was his experiential advice.
Factor 5′s Julian Eggebrecht opened the GC Developers Conference with a bold keynote titled “No Sex, No Drugs and Little Rock & Roll” in which he expressed his concern over the self-enforced ratings system on video games, specifically certain events surrounding “bizarre” ESRB decisions.
Eggebrecht revealed his independent studio’s difficulties trying to secure a Sony requested Teen rating for its PLAYSTATION 3 dragon game Lair. With a heavy amount of blood and gore, the game was altered to conform to the ESRB’s sometimes impolitic ratings criteria. Even though the player can burn scores of human infantry to death, showing blood spraying from dragon wounds resulted in a Mature rating.
Similarly, gory moments of airborne creatures exploding in chunks was met with disapproval, forcing more compromising “hugely problematic” changes to Lair.
We haven’t gone hands-on with Halo 3: The Ride yet—it’s still in private beta—but our estimation of development progress indicates we’ll be testing the single and multiplayer portions within a day or two. If the artwork we’ve seen on the partially constructed version of Halo 3: The Ride shares any art assets with the game its promoting at the Leipzig Games Convention, you’ll be taking Master Chief and pals through a fantastic German castle and rescuing a mysterious “Sparkle Princess.” If I’m right, I think we’ve got a huge scoop on our hands here.
Watch for impressions on Halo 3: The Ride later this week.
Comcast’s Jennifer MacLean gave an eager presentation to developers today as McWhertor snuck in some more time with Picross listened intently and took notes. The long and short of it: Comcast wants a piece of the sweet digital honey pot that is videogaming. And they’d like to partner developers for…uhh…anything they might have in mind.
In honour of the talk, were going to play a game called Spot the Evil Quote!
Just in case everyone missed our earlier post, we are here, in Germany (Europe). And Katie Holmes was right all along, the paparazzi is a bitch. We’re pretty much taking her word on everything from here on out.
