This writeup will cover the sessions I attended on Thursday of GDC (Day One of the main conference)…. or at least those ones I can talk about. My writeup will go a little long so I’ll set up a jump, which may also be useful if you don’t want any potentially spoiler information about Metroid, Other M or Fable 3. It’s somewhat novel for me to be writing about games that haven’t come out yet considering my focus on games at least a few months old, but GDC lends itself to this sort of thought.
If you just want a cover of what was said, the major game outlets have most of these talks discussed in depth or blow-by-blow, and I can link to those coverages as needed. This will be a slightly more personal flavored account than a news outlet blog would deliver.
I attended two other talks today, a Pixar talk I can’t talk about as he asked people not to blog it, and Chris Hecker’s talk on the psychology of Achievements. I want to talk about the Achievements talk more in depth but he gave out a lot of supplemental link material about that talk and I really want to let my thoughts settle before I review it in depth. Hecker’s talk said basically that Achievements might make a fun game less fun… maybe… but psychology is hard…
Below the jump, talks on Fable 3, and the work of Yoshio Sakamoto.
If you bought and played Fable 2, but didn’t finish it, Peter Molyneux (jokingly) thinks you’re a bastard. I thought this opinion was pretty fun, really. After all, I bought the game and paid full price, so he’s got my money, but the fact that he cares whether or not I finished the work, not that I paid for it, says to me he really is about the vision, as it goes.
Major media outlets also aren’t likely to report that his slides had some funny typos. “Players love to choice,” claim the Powerpoint wizards at Lionhead Studios.
So here is the thought process behind the design choices for Fable 3 – RPGs, such as they are, are niche. They’re about numbers that go up and lots of crunchy stats. Action games, on the other hand, sell really well, and so, there’s a push to make Fable less RPG, and more action game. Fable 2 sold 3.5 million copies. They want to sell 5 million of Fable 3. To make this happen, they need to make it more accessible.
A cynic would call this dumbing it down. But this seems to be more about the choices made with the game interface, which are accessibility features. The combat seems to remain the same as Fable 2, more or less, though Atkins acknowledges that it’s too easy. And that’s on purpose. Since the game is supposed to be story-driven and provide an experience, making the combat very challenging wasn’t part of the experience they wanted to craft. It’s more about feeling like a badass and a strong feeling of power, which follows from having a lot of guys surround you who are individually fairly easy to take down.
The interface for Fable 3 will be – at least in part – a 3D “room” where you can go to change your clothes and view a 3D map. It looks fairly slick, and media outlets are already thrilled to report that your personal butler will be voiced by John Cleese. The health bar is also going away, which… may or may not be easy to figure out, though I suppose it didn’t matter that much in Fable 2 anyway.
Molyneux says that more than 60 percent of Fable (I assume 2) players understood less than 50 percent of the features. A big difficulty people had was the character customization interface, hence, the idea of having a virtual closet for your character, with a butler that makes suggestions, rather than just a 2D menu for customizing outfit. I can empathize with this in part, since I was confused by how one changed their hairstyle, until the midway point of Fable 2 where I was shaved bald and had to finally wander around town looking for the barber so I could put some hair back on my head. I am a little uncertain that everyone actually cared about how to customize their character, whether or not they understood it. I’ve read a lot of opinion blogs by people who simply didn’t care about things like outfit dyes or scars, independent of whether or not they understood how these things worked.
On the other hand, I’m kind of a geek for character customization. Linked here is Joystiq’s coverage of the talk. Here’s what my character looked like, Peter’s “1970s Russian Shotputter.” My exact character, no, but that was her pretty much, including the halo and the “wearing a corset in a desperate attempt to retain some femininity.” It’s basically what any female character would look like in the game after leveling up all three combat specializations evenly. I wasn’t a huge fan of this, because, well, it looks weird, and it’s not very pretty. So I asked (if you were there or reading the other blogs about this, that person is me) if I was going to be able to make a girly character in Fable 3 or not. The answer to that question seems to be, via how the morph system works, “Don’t use a sword. Ever.” I’m not entirely a fan of this because it doesn’t allow me to mesh my preferred playstyle with how I’d like to see my avatar. I’m gonna have to choose myself whether it matters to me to have a pretty character, such that I’ll attempt a magic-only run, or, whether I should say, to hell with it and play with the bladed weapons, or, whether I should just play a male character since he’ll look more attractive using my preferred more direct play style.
Phrased differently, Molyneux said that the morph system was simplified, because people in Fable 2 wouldn’t be able to understand how to, for example, make a thief-like character, or a ninja like character, in the game with the XP-based leveling system the morphing for characters used. I understood that system just fine, but, with the direct correlation between weapons/skills use and body type that is apparently in Fable 3, I…. can’t make a ninja or a thief in that game, either. Best I think I can do is use only guns and be very skinny and tall.
In other appearance news, the character grows ethereal “wings” in this version of Fable to show their good or evil acts, which seemed pretty cool on the other hand. The talk also demoed an Ico-inspired touch system where you can drag characters around by the hand. I love this idea, since I think touching a character improves personality and escort systems immensely and Ico was unmatched in this sense. The handling on the character grabbing still looked a little in-progress to me, with the hands detaching slightly when characters were dragged, but I can appreciate that being able to grab any character and animate it well is a bit harder to execute than being able to grab only one specific character as Ico does.
The overall story of the game will be a standard “Hero’s Journey” in the front half, but in the second half you will become King, and see if you are capable of keeping all the promises that you made when you were attempting your rise to power. I can already predict that I will probably interact with this game by being the People’s Hero for the first half, then doing an awesome 180 and being a horrible tyrant in the second. I think that would be, like, rad.
So…. then there’s Other M, which Sakamoto did a great job of selling me on, as if I wasn’t going to buy it anyway. He showed a cinematic that blended the footage from the Super Metroid “Baby Metroid” scene (one of the most profound of 16 bit scenes) with a full FMV from Other M retelling the sequence. Gave me chills. Actually a good portion of my notes here devolve in to “I can’t believe I am listening to a talk by the person who did that baby Metroid scene holy shit”. Albiet a talk simul-translated from Japanese.
Sakamoto’s actual topic was about contrast in design, as he works both on the “serious” Metroid games, and “comedic” games Wario Ware and Tomodachi Collection (“Friend Collection,” though it’s not likely to see a state-side release). All of his games are “niche” in some respect – in Japan, Metroid is niche as it appeals primarily to Americans.
He discussed his influence from cinema and directors that have inspired him. Read more about that there. But other than fannish gushing, here is my big takeaway from this talk…
In order to create horror, one needs four things: Mood, Timing, Foreshadowing, and Contrast.
Here is an important point that I’m so glad he said: Contrast. I agree with this completely. There is no horror without contrast. You can’t have a tragic moment without a strong happy moment to make it more meaningful in context. You can’t have dark spaces without light ones. I recently watched a horrible indy horror film that did this awesomely wrong, where every single shot was full of so much foreboding and darkness that it all washed out in to blandness.
But here’s the other cool thing from the talk: what you need to create comedy, is… Mood, Timing, Foreshadowing, and Contrast.
In other words the approaches for these two diametrically opposite feelings are exactly the same in some respects. You just need to understand what mood you are going for and how apply the four principles.
Near the end of the talk he said the following about the creative process that got a good laugh but is a great statement. “Take off your underwear.” In other words, let it all hang out. In other, other words, don’t hold back in anything that you do!
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