By Brad Wardell
I work for a software company called Stardock (www.stardock.com). So my views and opinions might be biased though I will try not to be too biased!
This is my third consecutive report on the events at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Like last year, it is in Los Angelas CA.
The French have invaded. Over the past couple of years those of you who have followed the game industry have read occasionally about some French company purchasing a US game publisher. This year, the affects really came home. Allegedly, the French government has actually be subsidizing French firms to acquire US “interactive entertainment” firms in an effort for France to become a major player in mainstream pop culture.
Taking a quick inventory:
Havas, the company that owns Blizzard and Sierra amongst others is a French company. Infogrames bought out what’s left of GT Interactive and Ubisoft has begun making inroads in the PC game arena. Some of the best games are coming from these subsidiaries – Diablo 2, Empire Earth, Duke Nukem Forever, Unreal Tournament, Warcraft 3, etc. Even Stardock’s Business Tycoon is technically being published by Ubisoft.
And of course, on the console side, Japanese giants like Sony, Nintendo, and Sega dominate.
Should Americans be concerned? I think not as long as they are making good games. And based on what I saw at E3, this year was the best year since I’ve been doing for the game industry in terms of cool games but amongst the worst in originality.
Let’s put this in perspective. Some of the coolest new games I saw there were basically upgrades to existing games. Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Return to Wolfenstein, Sim Village, Zeus, and the several hundred Star Trek games, etc. were all just basically sequels or updates to existing games. But boy do many of these games look great. It’s hard not to play Diablo 2 and not immediately forgive it for being basically a better Diablo 1.
Black and White was hands down the most exciting thing I saw at the show. Peter M. personally demoed it to a frenzied crowd. Personally, I’d probably like to see him do a finished Power Monger based on his original concept but Black and White is not only an incredible looking game but also amazingly original. In it, the player is a god of a particular village. The village can have up to 5000 people in it. The physical representative of you on the world is a creature you raise, teach and train. I have some concerns on the multiplayer aspect of the game and longevity of it for strategy games (it looks like much of the multiplayer will come down to fighting other creates in a console style way) but I have great confidence in Peter M’s designs. He’s got basically a 100% good game record.
Other cool things I saw I mention now without referring to my notes since they are therefore cool enough to be remembered are:
Return to Wolfenstein. It’s Wolf3D on the Quake 3 engine with incredible graphics. This will be the first person shooter to beat I suspect when it arrives. It’s being published by Activision. Good enemy AI (the Nazis will actually run and throw the grenade you lobbed at them back as you if they can), and the best graphics I’ve ever seen in a first person shooter put it high on my must-play list.
Empire Earth. Sierra has snagged the Age of Empire designer and allowed him to create the true real time Civilization game. Empire Earth is likely to come out Christmas 2001 (they say 1Q2001 but let’s be realistic). This will be the strategy game of the year I suspect in 2001 barring something really messing up. It truly felt a lot like how one would combine Warcraft and Civilization. From cavemen all the way to mechs in a truly 3D map with 3D units rendered in real time. It was still early in development but it looks stunning. Hopefully Galactic Civilizations will be out by then so that I don’t have to choose between playing the two.
Startopia. Haven’t heard of this? I hadn’t. But it looks and sounded really cool. Some of the former Bullfrog guys went over and created a new company and their game is being published by Eidos. Very similar to Dungeon Keeper but now you run a space station and the game’s engine is phenomenal. One trend I noticed was the level of zoom in many of these games. From very far away down to seeing a wart on a person’s face practically.
Diablo 2. This is going to be the Year 2000 game of the year assuming that The Sims doesn’t qualify. It looks cool but everyone knows about this game so I won’t go on.
Warcraft 3. Okay, I wasn’t sure what to make of this. The game world might technically be 3D, it was only 3D in the same sense that C&C 2 is 3D. It looked pretty much like 3D units on the Diablo engine. It is possible that they did this just to have something to show at the show. Either way is fine with me, I’m personally a little jaded with games that are 3D for the sake of 3D. I want to play these games, not spend my time adjusting my perspective which is why WC3 is on my list of super cool games I saw. Blizzard is good about putting substance over style. This game will probably be a Christmas 2001 release.
Redstorm’s booth had several games in there that overall gave me the impression that they really have their act together.
Microsoft also seems to have their act together. Love them or hate them, you have to admit they know a good game when they see one. Mech Warrior 4 looks to be the true sequel to Mech Warrior 1 in my opinion. It just looked and felt right, something that Mech 2, and 3 didn’t provide.
Those are the gets that particularly stuck out in my mind. Having talked to other people at the show, games that they thought looked awesome included:
Pool of Radiance, a Baldur’s Gate style game. That new Bungie game (name here). Sim Village, Freelancer (which won best of the show last year and still hasn’t shipped), Sacrifice, one of the few games that really uses the T&L in the new Geforce cards..
Don’t flame me for this as I fully admit that I am probably in the minority but the Play Station 2 was a huge disappointment for me. I felt a little deceived. Let me explain. If read my E399 report, I lavished praise on the Playstation 2 based on their demos. Well, it looks to me now they they ran their demo at a far higher resolution than TV resolution and as a result, their racing demo and other demos looked far less pixilated and far crisper than the reality.
Here’s the deal: A gazillion polygons per second have really brought diminishing returns in what I actually saw in real life games. That’s because at TV resolution (something like 512x384) you don’t need a gazillion polygons per second to achieve pretty cool games. I mean, great, the racing games now have cars with slightly more detail than the Dreamcast (which is arguable). But in reality, they just look like pixilated messes to me. They should have implemented full screen anti-alias, that would have made them look much better. So as a result, when it comes down to purchasing a new game system, it will come down to whether you’re buying a game machine or a DVD player. Because right now it looks like Sega’s dreamcast is a far better game machine. The graphical difference to me, as a PC gamer, between the two is insignificant – they both have great, realistic graphics but are too low resolution for me to bother with. But the PS2 plays DVD movies so that might matter to some people. But I’ve gone from planning to buy a PS2 to not planning to buy one.
Closed booths or lines to see things. I’m sorry but I’m not willing to wait in line to see a video game, at least not a very long one. Microsoft had huge lines to see a video of their upcoming x-Box. I wasn’t willing to stand for 30 minutes to see a video of what is essentially a mock-up. And having already learned my lesson from last year’s PS2 demo, I know that any video presentation is likely to be a bit unlike reality. So MS showing some super high resolution robot mimicking the moves of a human would be impressive if the X-Box was going to run at 1024x768 and higher. But the fact is, when the time comes it’s going to be running at TV resolution which means to a PC gamer, it’s going to look like crap.
Bungie and Interplay also did this. So I can’t tell you about Balder’s Gate 2 because I didn’t see it because it was in a closed room that non press people couldn’t see and I didn’t want to wait in line to see a Bungie game that is at least a year or more away (Halo).
Hyping of vaporware. Last year there was a ton of hype over a Planet of the Apes game. This year they were back and unlike last year there is actually a game one can see. It looks pretty cool but it struck me as a Tomb Raider style game with a Apes license and they said it was still very early (20% done was the words used). I won’t even start on Duke Nukem Forever who’s demo was down when I went by.
Unfairness of Geography. We Americans are so lucky. If Blizzard’s or Ensemble’s founders had simply been born in say Korea, we would never have heard of them. I saw several games from Korean developers that in many respects matched or surpassed things I saw from the “big guys” except that these games were created on a fraction of the budget and have no chance of ever becoming mainstream simply because there’s little way for a Korean developer/publisher to overcome the advantages of developers based in the US (or publishers based in Europe).
Game development has become a manufacturing process. Once upon a time, great game designers would come up with a fantastic little game and them and a few friends would create it on their own and it would be a modest hit. Then the developers would get a big publishing deal and their second game would be really great and sell a zillion copies.
Today, you have a great game idea? Tough. You’re out of luck unless you’ve already done a great game and even then you may not be able to do it. Why did Brian Reynolds (lead on Civilization 2) leave Firaxis? Why did Lord British leave Origin, the company he founded? Odds are it’s because they were told that every game they would do forever had to be some conservative update to what they were already doing. I suspect Lord British didn’t want to spend the rest of his life doing games based on profitability projections created by bean counters. So these guys end up leaving. Those that choose not to end up creating a bunch of derivative games based on a slightly updated engine (no way I’m going to be doing a Business Tycoon sequel any time soon).
So what happens is that many of the best game ideas never get made now. That’s why all the new games are tending to be formulaic but well executed (in general) games. I just to buy a dozen or more games per year. But last year I only bought a few. I still love to play games but the newer games haven’t been appealing enough to me. They’re too overblown and too derivative. The classic development team of 3 developers and a couple artists has gone away but you can find them wandering the show floor with their prototype looking for a publisher who is likely to tell them that their neat game concept is too risky to be funded or not large enough to survive at retail at a AAA price.
With that said, I want to stress that this particular E3 was the best one I’ve been to yet. The declining originality has been a pervasive problem but this time around, there was a considerable amount of originality and those that are derivatives look to be extremely well executed. And afterall, the point of a game is to have fun.
Before we get to the show floor portion, I should probably explain what the heck we were even doing there. In a nutshell, we were there to announce two things: Galactic Civilizations has begun coding development and the development of a new kind of on-line gaming network called The Drengin Network (www.drengin.net).
The Galactic Civilizations home page is at http://www.stardock.com/products/galciv
The Drengin Network is harder to explain. But briefly, as anyone who hangs out a lot of Usenet knows from talking and listening to others, the game industry has really consolidated over the past few years. It is not very difficult to create new and original games because to really make money on a game, you have to either make a $20 mass market game like Deer Hunter or a thoroughly massive game that sells at around $50 like Half Life. There are exceptions such as Roller Coaster Tycoon, an original game that has been a big hit but usually, high quality original games just aren’t made. A great game like MULE, or Boulderdash or Paradroid or Tetris would never be made today if the idea were to have been thought of in present times. Many a great game idea is floating out there but never comes to market because of the barriers. The classic development team of 2 or 3 developers and 2 artists is long gone, replaced with teams with dozens of people typically.
Worse, once popular genres such as adventure games, war games, political games, etc. are now considered “niche games”. You would be hard pressed to find a true adventure game (I saw a couple but that was it). And most new strategy games are just more of the same.
There is also, thanks to the Internet, an opportunity to create episodic games. When I finished Baldur’s Gate, I would have paid real money to subscribe to BlackIsle.net or something to get a new Chapter a month to play. But by the time the add-ons for these games come out, I’ve moved on to other things.
That’s where The Drengin Network comes in. Stardock was at E3 meeting with small teams of developers who are creating great software but recognize that their cool idea isn’t going to be picked up by an Activision or Hasbro because their game is too “risky” or a “niche game”. I was joking to my co-worker that if someone had come up with a Balance of Power style game today they would never be able to get it published by a mainstream publisher.
Stardock’s goal is to provide a way for game developers who are interested in making cool games that aren’t “more of the same” a way to get them into the hands of users. Or for developers who are creating games that might take 2 years to create a way to afford to finish the game by making it episodic (for instance, Diablo 2 was basically done a year ago but the massive amount of levels, content, character graphics, etc. had to be created – in other words, it would have been a great example of an episodic game).
We’re going to make Galactic Civilizations part of The Drengin Network so for thousands of gamers, they’ll basically be buying Galactic Civilizations and getting The Drengin Network as a bonus.
So anyway, that’s why we were there. You can find out more about The Drengin Network at http://www.drengin.net.
Now on to the show floor!
This is where most of the PC games were. As you walked in, Infogrames and Electronic Arts greeted you. I didn’t see too much at Infogrames that interested me (Duke Nuke Forever from 3D Realms which was part of GT Interactive that was purchased by InfoGrames was nowhere to be found but I did see a monitor for it that was down when I went by a few times).
Electronic Arts was showing Black and White from Lionhead. The rest of the booth was mostly showing their EA Sports stuff which I personally am not into but it did look much more realistic than in years past.
Microsoft was showing off their Age of Empires II add-on which adds several new civilizations to the mix. If you liked AOE 2, you’ll like this and given that there aren’t realistically going to be very many new RTS games this year, even if you’re not a huge AOE fan, you still might want to pick this up. Mech Commander 2 was also in the Microsoft booth. It looked a lot better than the first one which I actually liked quite a bit. They also had Links golf 2001 which to me looked a lot like Links 2000 which looked a lot like Links 98. But it’s probably more of a diminishing returns thing, it already looks so incredible that it’s hard to improve it further. They also had the aforementioned Mech Warrior 4, probably the highlight of their booth but they also had a really cool combat flight simulator called Crimson skies. I’ll probably regret this next year but I think Crimson Skies may be one of the hot titles for next year. Anyone remember Battle over Britain from Lucas Arts? This game reminded me a lot of that but in a fantasy alternative universe time setup. It just looked like a blast to play.
Fox games was showing off their Planet of the Apes game. It was really cool seeing the gorilla costumes. Gone this year was the scantily clad female slavelings which I thought was kind of cruel to us – hey I’m from Michigan, if you’ve been here, you would understand.
Hasbro had a bunch of games that would take too long to talk about. They were mostly old arcade games updated to modern age.
The most crowded booth at the show was of course the Havas booth. Havas houses primarily Blizzard and Sierra. Blizzard has two things going for them. The first thing is that they make great games. But the second thing about them is that they are truly very friendly people. They are people who really like to play games, like to make games and like to show other people their games. And believe me, their positive attitude about the gaming industry is not as universal as one might think. Some of the other booths I attended had developers with a strikingly different view (which I won’t get into since I’m not going to be negative about any company). But you have to be there to understand really, the Blizzard booth just has this addictive feeling to it. It’s as if the Blizzard folks went out and gathered up a bunch of cool nice people to work there or something. That said, Diablo 2, while a derivative of Diablo 1, looks really cool. But the bigger surprise was Warcraft 3 which looked to me as if they just took the Diablo 2 engine and stuck what they had done so far for Warcraft 3 on it (the units mainly) to have something to show for E3. The terrain did not strike me as “3D” in the most vague sense. This doesn’t bother me, btw, but it didn’t look anything like the screenshots I’d seen in the magazines.
Sierra, in the same booth had a really kick butt game called Empire Earth. Again, like the Blizzard folks, the people on the Empire Earth team really struck me as really nice guys. People who love to play games and like to talk to fellow gamers. Empire Earth, for me, looks to me like the game that might possibly replace Total Annihilation as my RTS game of choice (other than maybe Galactic Civilizations but that’s a biased choice).
Red Storm has been the hot company for a couple of years. Every “Indie” company I know of secretly roots for these guys because they just came out of nowhere and have taken chances on their games. Most of their games have been highly original games. Sure, a few have bombed but not because they were bad but because they took a chance and it turned out there wasn’t enough of a market for that particular game concept. I won’t spend time talking about their traditional titles, they had two particularly cool new games that I think a lot of people will like – Bang! Which is basically a space version of Crimson skies and Freedom based on Anne McCaffrey’s novel. Normally I avoid licensed titles like the plague but this one had a really nice look and good gameplay together.
At this point, my feet were killing me so I ran over to the Creative Labs booth where they were showing off the Annihilator 2 (Geforce 2) card (I bought one) running Sacrifice, a new game that heavily uses T&L. Then I decided that Creative had the greatest booth in human history. They had a bunch of really really comfortable couches for watching Sony 2 DVD with their 3D sound. I don’t know what movies they were playing but boy were those couches good.
About 20 minutes later I checked out the Activision booth. They’re still way into doing the Star Trek games which they had several of but they are doing the Return to Castle Wolfenstein game which as I mentioned earlier, looks great. They also had Dark Reign 2 playing. They’re kind of taking a risk with it. It looks great and it’s truly 3D but I’m not sure how it will actually play. There is something to be said about having the RTS be somewhat simplistic (top down view only for instance). But it does look really cool.
Ubisoft was showing a lot of console games running on the Playstation 2. They also had Capitalism 2 (due mid 2001) running on a machine. It looked really good. Much of the effort is being put into making it more user friendly. It reminded me of Simcity 3000. It was an early version so it could change a lot. They were not showing Stardock’s upcoming Business Tycoon since it was deemed too much of a “niche game” (Business Tycoon is a business strategy game which apparently is a niche smaller than business simulation, I won’t comment any further than that). But Business Tycoon, which is a game in which you start your own company and must conquer the world is the sequel to Stardock’s popular Entrepreneur strategy game. It is also probably the only multiplayer business game out there presently. It’ll be available this summer in the US (go to http://www.stardock.com/products/btycoon to check it out).
While not games per se, I did spend time at the GamesDomain/Happy Puppy/CDMag booth. There I compared notes with some of the guys there so that I didn’t miss out on anything. I would have missed Pool of Radiance if they hadn’t mentioned it.
There were lots of other booths in the South Hall but they were mostly not my cup of tea (though I do want to point out that Poptop’s Tropico I think is going to really put this innovative company even further into people’s imagination. I think they were in the Take 2 booth.
Okay, the first hall is the PC games mostly. The West hall is where mostly the console games are (Sega, Sony, Nintendo).
Microsoft’s Xbox video was in the East Hall but given that it was just a video…
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, the Play Station 2 was a disappointment graphically. I now know why. Whey they demoed it last year, they were showing what it was capable of – 1024x768 resolution graphics. Technically, the machine can do that. However, actual TVs in the US can only do 512x386 so naturally, the actual games, being made for actual people look very pixilated and grainy. None of the Play Station 2 games struck me as particularly interesting (of if they did, they had a PC version that had much better graphics today). And I seriously looked for what I would consider even a single “killer game”. Mario 64 on Nintendo 64’s launch was a killer game. The Sega guys may not have as killer of a hardware platform but they seemed to have much better games.
As for Nintendo, I didn’t spend much time over there. They didn’t announce the Dolphin or have any demos that I could see.
Bungie was in this hall too showing off Oni (which has a Playstation 2 version). Oni looks reasonably cool. Halo was in a closed room requiring one to wait in line to see it so I skipped that.
Over in this smaller hall were a few cool things but the main thing I would have been interested in seeing was Interplay’s booth but it was closed to the public. So no Baldur’s Gate II impressions. But let’s face it, unless they totally mess it up, it’s going to be great.
Any would be game developer needs only to step into Kentia Hall to get a reality check. Every year, tens of thousands of twenty-something game developers decide that they could magically do a “better than Blizzard” game. They get their friends together, quit their jobs and prepare to create a AAA game on their first try. In their mind, all they have to do is create a great game or game demo and show it to Sierra or Activision or Hasbro and off they go into the big leagues with a huge booth at E3, cool t-shirts and the admiration of their peers. Now, Kentia hall brings reality shooting in. For every Blizzard and every Activision there are a dozen tiny little publishers you’ve never heard of. Heck, be honest, how many of you reading this have heard of Stardock? And we’re one of the “Indie success stories”.
Each year, thousands of games are released. A hard core gamer might be familiar with a few hundred of them. The remaining 80% are ones you never hear about with 3/4ths of them totally dying. The 1/4th that you’ve never heard of survives enough to get shown at some booth in Kentia Hall at E3. If Stardock had its own booth this year, this is where it would have been.
Many of the coolest game concepts done on a shoe string budget are shown here. Jowood Productions had a number of cool games. Their best known game is a traffic simulator that has better graphics than Simcity 3000. It is called “The Traffic Giant”. Have you heard of it? No? Well, Jowood was one of the biggest players in Kentia Hall and their game was a great looking game with lots of original game ideas. (www.jowood.com).
South Korea had a booth full of some really cool titles including an impressive golf game that plays on the PocketPC. There was also what amounts to a Warcraft III clone showing there. Other games were of similar quality – maybe not terribly original games here but well executed.
Monte Cristo was showing off their new business sim, “Start-up”. It looks pretty cool actually. If you are into this type of game, I suggest visiting their website (http://www.montecristo-multi.com).
But there were literally thousands and thousands of games in this hall being sold by small companies from around the world. I did see one game in particular that looked interesting. It was a stunt car game that had outstanding graphics. I will try to find out the website of this company for a follow-up.
I also so a game from HeksPlex Entertainment called “The Boss” that looked really cool. http://www.heksplex.com/.
Someone finally got true 3D working pretty well. VR Standard (www.vrstandard.com). Basically, you hook their glasses up to their card which connects to your video card and your 3D games truly look 3D. I’m not kidding, it really looked 3D. I was very skeptical but when I tried them on sure enough, driving games seemed much more realistic and 3D shooters had some depth to them. If you can picture yourself wearing glasses while playing, it does improve the gaming experience.
This year’s E3 was far better than previous years for me. While originality lacked for the most part, execution on what they were working on has improved. With game companies becoming better at providing what their customers want, I think this year will be a better year for gamers.
I was pretty disappointed with E3 ’99 and it held out for the rest of the year with only a few really good games being released. But this year, we can look forward to Diablo 2 in July (i.e. August) and Black and White in September (i.e. December) and lots of other cool games in between, it’s going to be a great gaming year.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me at bwardell@stardock.com. You can also visit our news group news://news.stardock.com/stardock.games. Feel free to repost and reproduce this material. Just drop me a note that you are using it so that I know about it.
See you next year!
Brad Wardell
Product Manager
Stardock – http://www.stardock.com
Brad Wardell is a game player turned developer. In 1994, he designed and developed Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. Between 1994-1997 Wardell developed or helped produce several more OS/2 games. In 1998, Wardell’s first Windows game, Entrepreneur, was released. This year, Wardell is working on Galactic Civilizations for Windows. He is also the Product Manager of the popular WindowBlinds GUI changing product as well as Object Desktop which WindowBlinds is part of.