Watch the trailer for Fumito Ueda’s next game for a while and you’ll be left with questions. His team’s new game is an enigma, a PlayStation 3-exclusive successor to Ueda’s pair of PS2 games, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Those games were quiet, softly-lit adventures in crumbled castles and open fields. This one appears to follow suit, posibly — Ueda won’t confirm more than what our eyes can see — following the adventures of boy and his large, furry creature companion.

The creature has proved to be captivating to those getting excited about the game.

“The idea behind the creature, for me, it is based on a cat,” Ueda said through a translator during a sit-down chat with Kotaku in a meeting room at this year’s Tokyo Game Show. “Whether it looks like it or not is up to the viewers of the game. But to me it looks like a cat, mixing in other elements from household pets like birds and dogs, mixing in some of the cute aspects of those types of animals.” Gamers could be forgiven from seeing a lot of bird in it. The creature is called Torico in Japanese. “Tori” is the Japanese word for bird.

Torico, or Trico as it is being called in English, is, nevertheless, a cat to him. What Ueda thinks it is is important, of course. But the fact that its creator seems unbothered that other people might see it differently is an Ueda signature. His games are not made to declare, but to suggest. Maybe the boy hunting colossal giants is a hero. Maybe he is a villain. The lines of definition are soft, the sunlight on the scene grayed.

During our interview in Tokyo, Ueda himself defined just general aspects of The Last Guardian, offering the shapes of his ideas but not the details within them.

The new game will be single-player, he said. Its title will mean a lot of things, none of which he is ready to reveal. Despite the fact that its star creature is called Trico (an allusion to “third Ico”), the new game is not necessarily closely linked to its predecessors. “Narratively there is no initial connection there,” Ueda said, “But there might end up being some connection there.”

The game has been anticipated by games since the 2005 release of Shadow of the Colossus. Long awaited, this project’s debut nevertheless proved awkward. On the eve of its official trailer unveiling by Sony at this year’s E3 trade show, a similar trailer featuring more primitive art, leaked online.

That trailer leak was a hurtful moment for Ueda, who still doesn’t know how it happened. “We were really working hard to make the movie on time for E3,” he said. “I had slept in the office the day before. I woke up, and, in the morning, we saw this information on the Internet. It really felt like a nightmare, because we were just waking up.”

Earlier than expected, the leaked trailer had forced Ueda to process the anxiety he had about the game’s debut. “Because Shadow of the Colossus was more of a combat-focused game and Last Guardian, from the trailer, looked more like Ico — and had a more of a subdued tone to it — I thought maybe there would be some negative feedback to that,” he said. “But there wasn’t really much of that… I was happy because there were generally good comments about it.”

The trailer’s echoes of Ico implied that the new game would share with the old game themes of companionship and exploration, moving at a slower pace. “It wouldn’t be wrong to interpret it like that, but with Ico we had some technical limitations to what we could do with the PS2. There’s a lot more we can do with the PS3 so there can be more dynamic developments in the game.”

Many game designers talk about the opportunity for this generation’s gaming hardware to make their games look better. Ueda believes that his team’s first foray on the PS3 can the improvement in visuals his team can attain on the machine will improve a key aspect to his games. “I think with the added capabilities of the PS3 can increase the feeling of something[in the game] really existing,” he said. “I think you can create more emotion with the story as well as with the characters.”

While the PS3 may help his game feel more alive, there’s something else, of about the same size as Sony’s console, that might also help The Last Guardian feel more alive: His cat.

“I started to own a cat around the same time as starting Torico and it’s been kind of a sample reference creature for me,” Ueda said. His cat’s named Royce, and while she likes to be petted when she wants food, she’s otherwise content to leave Ueda alone.

Ueda apologised for not being able to say more about the game. Who knows what his cat even knows about it? He promised more information for the future, but at TGS, it was just his presence and vision that may convince gamers that The Last Guardian is on the right path.

See that Batman shot at the top of this post? I took it with my camera this morning. That’s the view I get of Batman during most of my time playing the Dark Knight’s new game, Batman Arkham Asylum. Patrice Desilets told me earlier this month during an interview at the Penny Arcade Expo, that he’s also been playing the game—Good game, he tells me, but Assassin’s Creed 2 will be better—so I thought he might have something to say about staring at the backs of characters.

Desilets is the kind of developer who would dwell on such things. He likes surmounting game design cliches or at least smoothing out their awkward aspects. In the first Assassin’s Creed, he grappled with explaining in the game’s fiction why a game character is controlled with a controller and why a game might be presented in levels. The explanation of both involved an in-game device that enabled a modern-day character to explore his memories—the bulk of the playable game.

Back to Batman’s back—and to the backs of the lead characters in Assassin’s Creed games: I like the Batman game, too. And I’m impressed by how Batman’s cape billows. I do spend a lot of time looking at his back, though. When I played Assassin’s Creed, I spent a lot of time staring at the back of that game’s hero, Altair.

So, I asked Desilets about this issue—call it a “problem” if it bothers you.

It’s not really a problem for him, he said. Because he won’t let it be. His answer to my “back problem” question introduced me to… “The Patrice Mode Camera.”

People who don’t use the Patrice Mode Camera, regular gamers like you and I, typically stare at the backs of characters. Not Patrice.

He doesn’t wind up staring at his character’s back that much when he plays Assassin’s Creed, he said. His development team has freed him of such rear-watching plight by programming a camera mode that runs the way he wants it to. It lets him switch off the game’s default camera and have it never snap back into a computer-selected position until he gives it permission to.

“As soon as I touch the camera, I don’t want anyone to change it,” he explained to me. “I lock it on a guard and a guard will pass by. The camera will flip.” The Patrice Mode Camera won’t stay centred behind the Assassin’s Creed hero. It will follow the guard, maybe putting the front of his own character now in the shot, but never—ever—snapping back to a default, programmed camera position. “Don’t put it back to the way it’s ’supposed to be,’” Desilets explained to me. He wants to be the cameraman. He wants to set up the shots.

I like this idea of doing one’s own camera work in games. I’ve tried it in Mario platformers, lining up jumps better by switching to side views. But I tried Assassin’s Creed again this morning, and even using its lock-on camera I was not able to engineer the effect Desilets described.

Perhaps Patrice Mode Camera will be in the sequel. Perhaps I’m just not skilled enough to use it yet. But if this frees us from looking at the wrong end of more video game characters, then I’m willing to learn something new. Bring on Patrice Mode, Patrice. I’m ready.

Ozzy is not exactly known for his clarity, so you’ll have to forgive us if we cannot tell you exactly which game he was talking about being addicted to during Saturday night’s interview. I’ll go ahead and give you what he said, as best as I can make it out. Then you folks can help us fill in the blanks.

“The only one I ever played is that f–king (unintelligible) I got addicted to that instantly years ago was that f–king video game where the f–king guy jumps off the f–king cliff. Sort of this old (well, or whale?). I was playing all f–king night.”

You can see where we might be confused. So far we’ve come up with several good suggestions. Owen suggested Jungle Hunt. Luke thought it might be World Games, with the cliff diving. Some of the members of the press I talked to after the interview thought it might be Super Mario Bros. or maybe even Lemmings.

I would have asked for clarification, but he then launched into a story about Sharon playing Tetris.

“Tetris – my wife got addicted to it. I remember lying in bed and saying, ‘Shit. Are you playing that f–king game?’ And she’d say, ‘No.’ And then I’d hear ‘Bastard! F–king asshole!’ And then the exploded one (exploding sound effect) in her f–king hands!”

That didn’t help anything, did it? I sure hope her hands were okay.

So what are your thoughts? What cliff jumping video game was powerful enough to fell the prince of darkness? The f–king comments section is yours.

Carmack, ever the programmer, didn’t immediately tell me what his sunset would be. Instead, after I described Kojima’s desire, the legendary Doom programmer responded as follows:

“You could totally do a good job of that today,” he said. “You could do all the post-processing effects and the colour biasing, and you could run through all of that and it would be a bunch of work. But, if somebody said: ‘Go give me a glorious, evocative sunset,’ I might say, ‘Nah, we’ve got more important things to be working on.’ But we could totally do it.”

My conversation with Kojima had taken place in April of 2006 in his Tokyo work apartment, a couple of blocks from Kojima Productions’ offices. He was still making Metal Gear Solid IV then and recalled, through a translator, the limitations of early game consoles. The more primitive machines had challenged him to achieve his goals.

“How can we give users a feeling of walking [by a] beautiful sunset with 16 colours?” Kojima remembered wondering. “That was what we were trying to aim for as designers at that time…a couple of years from now, maybe games will have an implementation of scent or touch or feeling. And then I’ll want to probably implement that in to meet my final goal. So I think this will be a never-ending story. And, well, I think that’s OK, because that’s what creation is all about.”

Ever since that interview, I wondered if other video game creators had their own sunsets, their own goals that they hoped their talent and the world’s technology would enable them to attain.

During our conversation in Texas a couple of Thursdays ago, I asked Carmack a second time if he did have a sunset. “I really don’t think there’s something I look at in my mind and say: ‘This is what we’re striving for,’” he said. “There is lots of stuff that I know are not done particularly well, with different levels of ambient occlusion and distributed light sources … I went through a phase of this at the beginning of [id's next big game,] Rage — the graphics geeky stuff of “‘Oh, I’m doing shaped highlights.” Or, you know, I’m doing parallax mapping. I’m doing this or that.’”

Carmack’s lighting experiments didn’t motivate him to do more, he explained. But I was worried Carmack was still taking my question too literally. I feared he thought I only wanted to know about actual sunsets rather than metaphorical ones. But he wasn’t just talking about sunsets after all, as he proved to me right before we wrapped up our conversation about this stuff.

“I did some demos [of those lighting technologies in Rage] and it’s just not that big of a deal,” he said. “Maybe if you put them together, lump them all together, you get something that comes out and makes you say: ‘This is a big step above.’ But there’s not many little things that matter that much any more in terms of a game. If you’re trying to do a simulation, there’s tons of stuff that you can continue to do better … in terms of what’s going to matter to a person playing a game, there’s not massive stuff to be done. We’re going to continue going; we’re going to continue making it. But it’s past the v of the curve. The more important stuff is making sure that it’s going to be easier and faster to do better stuff like this.”

If John Carmack has a Kojima sunset in his mind, it’s one that involves speedier processes for creating video games. But there’s no thing, no object, no emotion the veteran game creator seems burning to create.

I left the interview wondering: What are the sunsets for the rest of the industry’s video game creators?

[Amazing sunset pic]

Among all of the changes coming in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, raising the level cap to 85 instead of following the pattern set by the game’s previous two expansions is one of the strangest. Blizzard lead developer Tom Chilton took a little time during BlizzCon this past weekend to explain the smaller jump.

“It’s certainly different. More than anything else it’s a question of what we thought was the best use of our development time and what we thought the players really want the most. With this expansion we’re delivering more total level up content than we have before—it’s just not all post current max level.”

But don’t the players enjoy the rush to level up?

“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from players that don’t necessarily like it when an expansion comes out and they feel that they have to level up to the new max level as quickly as possible and then go back to their endgame activities. There are players out there who enjoy the level up experience, but by no means is it all of our players.”

The decision all comes down to the goals of the expansion. With a brand new 1-60 experience on hand, the team really didn’t need to put the endgame that much further out of reach for the influx of new Goblin and Worgen characters.

“In this case, we’re trying to better balance the time and development effort we put into the different areas of the game. We’re trying to make sure we get a little bit more endgame content while still appeasing the level up crowd with five more levels.”

Diablo III’s rune system, as we explained last year, is an ambitious feature in which every skill for every character can be modified using various runes, changing the way the skill affects enemies. One rune might simply add an additional attack to a skill, while others have more profound effects.

“We can’t really do any runes for a skill until we’ve locked a skill down, and we’re notorious for redoing things. When we do finally decide to lock a skill down, that’s the point where we say, ‘Okay, now we can develop the runes for this.’ So we design out the runes for it, and we do those last.”

So the system, itself involving a massive amount of brainstorming and design work, is dependent on having skills set in stone. With four characters revealed and a fifth and final one still waiting in the wings, it feels as if a fully-realised Diablo III is a long way off, no matter how polished the demos were at the show.

Jay continued, giving us a status on each character. “The wizard and the barbarian both have runes—the wizard has the most, and the barbarian has some. The witch doctor has a few as well.”

After running into confusion with internal testers over why some powers had runes and others didn’t, the team decided to turn the feature off until they could deliver a more complete version of the rune system.

“It was a big disappointment that we couldn’t show the runes off in their entirety, but hopefully the next time we do a big unveiling of the game they’ll be there.”

Don’t worry if you are baffled at times. Series creator Hideo Kojima gets baffled, too, scratching his noggin while figuring out plot points.

“I personally get confused too about the whole timeline and saga of Metal Gear Solid,” Kojima told game site Eurogamer. “This is especially tricky when you create the future first and then go back in time to create something new. There are a lot of small aspects where sometimes it doesn’t match completely.”

Konami’s Hideo Kojima Interview [Eurogamer]

“I have a son who’s 30, so he’s a big gamer, he gamed through a lot of the early stuff,” McCartney told Game Informer. “I was thinking the other day, ‘God, that’s a long way from ping pong.’”

“But his generation went through stuff like—I like Pilotwings and stuff like that,” he continued. “I liked the way you used to crash on purpose: ‘No!’”

“So those are great, and I say I played a bunch of that along with them, so I know the excitement of it. I just never got into it as much as the guys did, because I was doing other stuff.” Ha, yeah, other stuff.

Still, Paul McCartney playing through Pilotwings? The mind boggles.

Paul McCartney Talks The Beatles: Rock Band [Game Informer] [Pic]

In an August 13 profile run by the respected news magazine, Kotick responded to a reporter’s question about milking IPs with:

A small segment of very vocal gamers say everything has to be new and different every year. Actually, people are happy with existing franchises, provided you innovate within them.

It’s the kind of response that makes both Kotick’s position and the criticism pretty fair. Call of Duty? Modern Warfare absolutely was innovative, and has earned its shot for another go around. Guitar Hero? Re-skinning the game with a new band every quarter, more or less, is gonna be called for what it is.

But Activision, and other publishers, do face a Catch-22 of sorts. Create the game of the year, or close? Not only would you be foolish not to consider a sequel, the same hardcore complaining about sequels will be right in line to snap it up. And then you get beaten over the head for having a bunch of 2s and 3s and 4s in your catalogue. But, that’s why they pay you the big bucks.

Activision: People Prefer Sequels to Original IPs [Game Stooge]

The game is “getting closer” the Fallout and Oblivion game director told me during our interview at QuakeCon in Dallas.

“I put some of that on hold, because I knew we would be doing some stuff with id.” That “stuff” was Bethesda parent company ZeniMax’s June purchase of the renowned first-person shooter development studio. id co-founder John Carmack has been aggressively working on the iPhone platform, now promising an iPhone game just about every other month. He remembers thinking, “I’ll wait and see what John has to say about it.”

The game is not a personal Todd Howard project. Think of it as a Bethesda game, though Howard wouldn’t offer gameplay details or subject matter. I asked if it would be a Fallout or Elder Scrolls project, but he’d only remind me that “those are things we really like.”

Carmack willing, it seems, the game will proceed. “It’s one of those things where I wish it would happen sooner,” Howard said, “But we’re definitely going to do some stuff.”