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Battlefield Logistics: A Bad Company 2 Interview
The Battlefield series seemed like a strange fit for consoles, given its rich heritage on the PC side — that is, it did seem like a strange fit, until Battlefield: Bad Company came out and became one of Electronic Arts’ larger hits of this generation.
Here, senior producer for the series at EA’s Stockholm-based DICE studio, Patrick Bach, discusses how the philosophy behind the series has evolved as it has made the transition to consoles — and how that transition has fundamentally shifted the way the developers think of the series as a whole.
Read the story here.
Leave ’em in the Dust: CCP Asia on Chinese Collaboration
Though many developers look at Shanghai as a great location to find cheap art outsourcing solutions, some companies have founded studios there to fully develop titles for the Western market. Notably, Ubisoft pioneered in this area — and now, many of its experienced developers, both Westerners and Chinese, have put down roots in the Shanghai scene.
Two examples of that are Larry Herring and Jing Yu Zhu. Herring, who worked at Ion Storm in the ’90s before moving to Ubisoft, is now environment director for the Iceland-headquartered CCP. He’s at work on CCP’s first console project, Dust 514 — a fascinating console shooter announced at GDC Europe last year which actually affects in-game territory wars in its popular MMO, EVE Online. Jing Yu Zhu is the game’s lead level designer. He also has a Ubisoft background.
Here, the two developers — one a seasoned veteran of the U.S. market and the other a home-grown talent — discuss what it takes to make Western-targeted games in China, and what the scope of the local development scene looks like.
Read the story here and discuss it in the forum.
Interview: Star Trek Online’s Christine Thompson
Star Trek Online’s Christine Thompson answer Jon Wood’s questions about the lore in Star Trek Online and how the STO team managed to keep up with so many different sources of information.
Read the story here and discuss it in the forum.
CME Answers Stargate Resistance Questions
Things certainly look good so far, with development already in the final stages and investors supporting (and indeed, pushing for) the game’s release. But what sort of game will it be? Where does the story fit into the SG-1 timeline? Is it accessible to casual gamers, who may pick up the title as Stargate fans first and gamers second? And what does the demands Stargate Resistance placed on the studio’s resources mean for Worlds?
We took our questions to Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, where reps were extremely straight-forward and candid.
Read the story here and discuss it in the forum.
BioWare Co-founder Says JRPGs Not Evolving
While up at BioWare’s headquarters in Edmonton, I had the opportunity to throw some questions at company co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. I was curious about how the duo felt about the current RPG landscape in general, and why we’re seeing more and more western-style RPGs while JRPGs have, at least among North American audiences, fallen somewhat to the wayside.
“The fall of the JRPG in large part is due to a lack of evolution, a lack of progression,” Zeschuk said. “They kept delivering the same thing over and over. They make the dressing better, they look prettier, but it’s still the same experience.”
Read the story here and discuss it in the forum.
Fifteen Years of Warcraft: The Interview
With massively successful PC MMO World of Warcraft celebrating its fifth anniversary, and the overarching Warcraft real-time strategy game series its 15th anniversary, there’s plenty to talk about. Of course, Blizzard’s series of games has always been beloved by gamers, but matching the success that WoW has found in the marketplace is a task that few franchises are up to.
It’s difficult to remember at times, but Blizzard had humbler beginnings. To chart a course all the way back to the company’s origins, back when it published console game titles for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, Gamasutra spoke to Samwise Didier, the senior director of StarCraft II and art director of the first three Warcraft games, and J. Allen Brack, production director for World of Warcraft.
Read the story here and discuss it in the forum.
Interview: Jon Belliss on Rising Tide
To get a sense of just what the new expansion brings to the table, we cornered Jon Belliss, Product Manager for Perfect World International. He gives us a rundown of all the new features found in the Rising Tide expansion, and what it all means to hardcore players of Perfect World International.
See the story here and discuss it in the forum.
Interview: Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada
Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada has overseen the business responsible for the likes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest since the start of the decade.
He’s overseen three key mergers that have grown his firm considerably, with Square growing to include the publishers Enix, Taito and Eidos.
And now, with the advent of social games, the rise of MMOs and introduction of new cloud-based gaming services, Wada’s focus is on global expansion and online gaming.
See the story here and discuss it in the forum.
Interview: Blizzard’s Frank Pearce
Blizzard’s Frank Pearce has been with the company since co-founding it in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse, along with Michael Morhaime and Allen Adham. Today, he’s the senior vice president and serves as the executive producer of World of Warcraft, which probably includes the duty of swimming in pools filled with gold coins, a la Scrooge McDuck.
We talked to Frank about the milestones that Warcraft recently hit: 15 years for Warcraft and five for World of Warcraft, and how those games have changed the company.
See the story here and discuss it in the forum.
Interview: Jack Degnan, Game Inventor
Jack Degnan, a regular at Games, Guys & Grub – The San Diego LGBT Community Center’s monthly men’s game night – loved playing board games as a kid, but it wasn’t until five year’s ago, when he took a course in game design, that he turned his passion for games into a part-time career. Since then, Degnan began designing board games and has published three of them so far: Word on The Street, It Fits, and Funny Business.