Disclaimer:
I work for a software company that
develops games (Stardock) which was why I was at the show. My opinions
represent only my own personal views on the things I saw at the show and
not of my employer.
Copyright:
Anyone may repost this or republish
this as they wish as long as they do so in its entirety. As a courtesy,
please email bwardell@stardock.com
so that I can check it out too.
Summary…
A really fun show. It’s particularly
fun for the small developer because we don’t have to worry about any rivalries
with anyone. I could fully enjoy the Blizzard booth while also admiring
the cool stuff at the GT Interactive booth without feeling competitive.
The attendance was significantly lower than previous years as the consolidation
of the industry continues.
The required plug…
I was there to help show off Entrepreneur
and Stellar Frontier (go to http://www.stardock.com for more details).
Entrepreneur is a real time strategy game in which you build up a corporate
empire while trying to crush your opponents using common sense and a touch
of ruthlessness. I used the words "SimBillGates" when I tried to describe
it quickly. It’s not a business simulation, it’s a strategy game which
tends to play a lot like the game MULE with some touches of Lords of Conquest
and Magic the Gathering. You can play against the computer (which has been
reviewed by many as having a very good AI) or against human players on
a LAN or on the Internet. Entrepreneur is at most major retailers now with
a street price of around $40.
Stellar Frontier is tougher to describe. It is kind of a cross between Star Control Melee and Ultima On-Line. That is the game play feels a lot like Star Control but you are building up your "Character" all the while you do this in a galaxy filled with thousands of other players (up to 64 on a given server). Some people may have heard of a game called "Star Fleet Battles". Stellar Frontier plays a lot like a computerized version of that. You can play it single player against a really good AI set of ships but it’s at its best when the other ships are controlled by people. Stellar Frontier won’t be out until this Fall.
Stardock is also doing the official Starcraft add-on for GT Interactive (Starcraft: Retaliation). Our add-on development team (to brag for them) has managed to get the AI to fight each other (i.e. you’re human, you’re attacking a Zerg base and they’re already in the middle of a mega battle with the Protos and suddenly it’s a 3 way free for all). That was being shown at the GT Interactive booth.
With that out of the way…
There were two main halls at E3. The
"Cool" hall where all the really really mega booths were and the hall I
was in. To put it in perspective, you have the Nintendo booth in the big
hall which takes several minutes to walk across, cost millions of dollars
to build (let alone the cost of the space) and then you have the Stardock
booth I was in which was $8k and part of the Micro Central booth (which
is the distributor that carries Entrepreneur). We literally had the smallest
booth at E3 and Nintendo had the largest.
Some of the cool companies in our hall included Cendant – parent company to Blizzard, Sierra, and Sierra Sports (Papyrus). Blizzard made me very very mad. They were showing Diablo II. Let me put it this way, Diablo II is so cool looking, so fun playing in what they already had that I was jumping up and down in anticipation for them to hurrying it up. They’ve addressed every minor complaint one could have had with Diablo I, added incredible new graphics, improved the sound so that it has a great feel (the original had great sound but this D2 is over the top). Unfortunately, it won’t be out until early 1999. I predict D2 will be game of the year in 1999. I kept teasing a friend of mine at Blizzard about the ship date. Eventually he was forced to have me escorted out of the building (just kidding).
The guys at Papyrus, makers of the Nascar series had some really cool racing stuff of course. I didn’t get much of a chance to look at most of it unfortunately but what I saw looked really cool.
Sierra had two games that looked very interesting. The first one was Half-Life which had very impressive character interaction. This could be a great single player game, and it is good to see the FPS getting back to having good single player action. If I could name a single theme about the first person shooters (FPS) it would be the lesson of having decent single player play again. Sierra was showing the new Kings Quest which, not to be too critical of a game I didn’t really get to play long, reminded me of a Tomb Raider type game. I always thought the appeal of the Kings Quest games was the relatively simple interface and game play that allowed the players to solve interesting and creative puzzles. I struggled for several seconds to just walk through a door for instance and my character was quite quick in being able to pull out his dagger/sword which made me sad when Kings Quest games weren’t about stabbing things. That’s not to say it didn’t look like a good game, I just wish they would have called it something else. But this departure from the past was nothing in comparison to Ultima Ascension which I’ll get to soon…
Also in our hall was Myth 2 from Bungie. I’m more familiar with Bungie than I am with most of the other companies we both use the same retail representatives (i.e. the people who help get us into the stores) so I spent considerable time going back and forth from the Bungie booth to the Stardock booth. Myth 2 adds some pretty cool new features which include being able to go inside buildings, protecting castles and improved graphics. Anyone who liked Myth 1 will surely want this.
Our building had the hardware vendors. From Creative Labs to Matrox to Orchid. I failed at convincing them that I needed a Voodoo 2 based card for my 2D strategy game development. Even my threats of crying hysterically in front of their booth by saying "But you are my father dammit!" had no effect. Needless to say, I was (again) escorted out of the booth by security. Bob (I was on a first name basis with security at this point) said I sounded like his 4 year old daughter…
But it was cool to see the hardware improvements in 3D being show. I got to see and play Unreal running on a P2-400, two Voodoo 2 cards in SLI mode at 1024x768. I’ll get flamed for saying this but I have a P400 with a Voodoo 1 so I run Unreal at 640x480. Unreal really looks incredible and smooth at 1024x768, but not enough improvement for me to upgrade from a Voodoo 1 to a Voodoo 2 (if I didn’t have a Monster 3D already I’d recommend going right to the Voodoo 2 though).
The rest of our building was filled with smaller companies like Stardock showing off their games. First thing’s first, if you are a small developer reading this and you are working on a "cool new racing game", my advice: STOP NOW! I counted no less than 11 different racing games (all using 3D hardware support) just in our building – not counting what I saw in the big hall. These games ranged in quality of course but on casual glance looked pretty much the same.
The other thing I concluded, and I shouldn’t say this since I’m really at the mercy of the media but if you guys think the media has under-covered Entrepreneur, heck, at least it’s gotten mentioned. I saw a ton of really really cool looking games (many of them very unoriginal but well executed) that have probably never even had a metion in a magazine. These games ranged from Diablo-type games with incredible graphics to Total Annihilation clones to a game that I swear was Warcraft with true color graphics (i.e. total clone). Many don’t really merit much coverage (i.e. a 24bit color version of Warcraft clone doesn’t really need too much coverage) but man, some of these games were pretty impressive. They all just had one thing in common, they were from tiny developer/publishers, many were from overseas. Starcraft is probably the strategy game I’ve played the most this year so I can safely say I like it. But I wonder, if one of these little no-name companies had released a game that was almost identical to Starcraft but had come out a month earlier, would it have received any coverage? If it got reviewed, what kind of rating would it have gotten?
Of course, that is precisely why marketing and distribution muscle are so important. Quality of the game is really secondary to the publisher’s ability to gain buzz about the product and make sure it’s in everyone’s hands.
Of course, I’m not innocent of giving equal coverage either. Our booth was close to the booths of these wannabees and it was only because of that that I happened to notice all these neat little games that no one has probably ever heard of.
Bang Zoom Kaboom…
As I had mentioned, the show was divided
into two halls. The East hall was where our little booth was and the atmosphere
is similar to a typical trade show like Comdex or whatever. The West hall
is like being on another planet. This is where one big vendor after another
tries to outdo each other. We're talking people dressed up for World War
III escorted by scantiliy clad female models. Anyone who has ever considered
going into modeling should do themselves a favor and come to one of these
trade shows first. Because having to stand around for days at a time being
little more than the object of desire for tens of thousands of nerdlings
has got to be pretty discouraging. Imagine having to make the same 30 word
announcement over a microphone over and over for 10 hours straight?
The booths were certainly very impressive. Some of them had "guards" walking around with mock-M-16's. There were fog generators everywhere and each booth competed with their neighbor to see who could make the most noise. As with the East hall, almost everyone had their own racing game and so you would have competing announcers, mere meters apart, trying to get people to play their game.
My first stop on my visit to the West hall was to GT Interactive's booth. There they were showing Unreal, several racing games, Deer Hunter, StarCraft: Retaliation, Total Annihilation and add-ons for it, Duke Nukem Forever, and various other games.
Let me first speak out on Unreal. Unreal is graphically and technologically superior to Quake 2 in most respects. But let's keep in mind that it's not because Epic is "smarter" than ID, it's because of the release date. Almost any of these companies could crank out the most incredible first person shooter you've ever seen to the point where they could practically make you feel like you are there. The question comes down to what percentage of people, if any, could run it based on today's hardware. Having a 32bit color palette, more polygons, and such is really more of a function of the speed of hardware than of technological innovation. With that said though, as someone with a P2-400, Unreal just blows me away and as a single player game, nothing since Duke Nukem 3D can really touch it. It'll be much better when the Internet support gets better which could be a few months.
I also slithered my way in to seeing Prey. Prey really represents the "next" generation of First Person Shooters. They use "skeletal" models to do their objects which I am not really certain what that brings except probably much more detailed objects and creatures. Prey looked so good that it was like playing Myst but in real time. But the hardware requirements for it will undoubtedly be incredible. Some people have complained about this but in technological driven games such as First Person Shooters, I really want to see the hardware pushed to the limit. Prey should be out this Fall.
It's no secret that I'm a Total Annihilation junkie. I had to literally delete it from my system because I was so addicted that it was interfering with my work. As a developer, I have to work at least 10 hours a day and so I can't be distracted by playing other games for many hours a day. The new add-ons look extremely cool. I already have Core Contingency and really like it. No doubt as hardware improves they will be able to make their units look even better looking which will bring us to TA: Kingdoms.
My previous addiction was to Duke Nukem 3D. Stardock was a Duke3D shop for a long time. Every Wednesday we'd stop working at 5pm (which is very early for us) and start playing Duke3D. Duke Nukem Forever uses the Quake 2 engine but a heavily modified version of it at that. The sky in DNF looks much better and the light sourcing is much better. It was also obvious that you could do damage to the world which you cannot do in Quake 2 very much. However, I didn't get the feeling that this game was on the verge of release so there could be a wait still.
The Starcraft add-on "Starcraft: Retaliation" as I mentioned previously is being written by us (Stardock) and published by GT Interactive's Wizard Works division. We've really gone out of our way to work very very closely with Blizzard to ensure that our story line meshes very well with the Starcraft universe and indeed, our story line is officially part of the Starcraft universe now. The aforementioned AI tweaks we did to make the AI fight each other will undoubtedly be one of the more popular features.
And the Game of the year will be…
The next booth I stopped on by was
Electronic Arts. There I found what I predict will be "Game of the Year"
for 1998 and that is Populous 3. I was starting to get pessimistic about
that game after I heard that you could control the units directly and build
things. I wasn't looking forward to seeing my beloved Populous game turned
into a C&C type game. But it doesn't play that way at all and the game
mechanics work beautifully. The idea here is that this actually takes place
before Populous 1 and that you are not yet a god. You control the leader
of your tribe and you can still raise and flatten and lower land and do
all sorts of nasty things to your opponents. The graphics and game play
are just beautiful and the feeling of depth just adds to the entire experience.
It should be out by Fall as well.
Also at the booth was Ultima Ascension which looks great but I was a little saddened that they have moved away from the traditional look. I myself would be happy with an Ultima VII (without the bugs) with better graphics. You control a single character, there is no party anymore and this has been the biggest delay. Apparently the path finding was just not up to what they wanted and so the party was eliminated which greatly altered the story which added a delay to the game. You can probably picture the types of problems they ran into. You have 4 or 5 characters with you, you're walking straight ahead and suddenly you want to turn around and go back, you have those 4 or 5 guys standing there who have to get out of your way. That could get to be a pain in a real hurry from a game play point of view. The graphics were pretty spectacular and it doesn't play like a Tomb Raider or a first person shooter at all, it has a very unique feel to it. I'm just not sure how the combat will turn out. First person non-missile combat hasn't been very successful yet.
EA also had a lot of sports titles of course but I'm not as into sports games as I used to. I'll tell you why though, because the gameplay of the sports games isn't nearly as fun as they used to be for me. The whole multimedia experience has gotten in the way of the actual game play. Try to play a baseball or hockey game when the camera view changes 20 times a minute is too distracting. Give me an updated version of the classic Intellivision football and I'd be happy.
I did walk over the the console makers' booths but I didn't get much out of them. I can't bear playing something on a TV at this point. I did see one console game though that really intrigued me and it was called Heavy Gear Solid or something like that. Basically, it reminds me of the old Wolfenstein games (not the ones from ID) where sneaking around is valued more than blasting everyone you see.
Of babes and Bill…
Eidos was showing off Daikatana, various
other games, and naturally Tomb Raider. I didn't get much out of Tomb Raider
since I've played it before but they did have a virtual Lara Croft which
was kind of interesting. That is, someone with a bunch of sensors connected
to her which was fed to a computer and then when she talked, a rendered
image of Lara Croft would talk. Neat effect. Ion Storm also used E3 as
an opportunity to start talking about Daikatana 2. That’s right, TWO as
in the sequel to the unreleased game. One can’t help but admire and in
my case envy the marketing machine Ion Storm must have to get so much coverage
for what really is another first person shooter using a licensed game engine
that hasn’t even been released (let alone the coverage the announced sequel
to the unreleased game will get). One can’t be angry with the genius and
marketing savvy of John Romero. One can be annoyed at the hypocrisy of
the game magazines that reward such extensive coverage while complaining
about the lack of innovation in the industry (which is really due to them
simply not covering the innovative games that do come out).
I didn't pay a lot of attention to what Microsoft was showing but I did check out Age of Empires 2 and it looks quite impressive. It now has way points, build queues, and other Total Annihilation-like features that were very impressive. The graphics are outstanding of course and it had a very nice feel. This should be out this Fall but you never know.
I also saw SIN and Half Life which both use the Quake 2 engine which after playing Unreal isn't quite as neat from a graphics stand point. But the AI in half-life really knocked my socks off. Both of these games, especially SIN allowed you to damage the world. One of the two, and I forget which, had a puzzle where you have to blow out the wall to let the water rush in and then let the water float you up to the top so that you could flick a lever. Very clever.
I came away from the show feeling pretty good about the industry. There really is a lot of innovative things happening. When you see something cool like Populous 3 or the great details being put into Diablo 2 or a glimpse at things like Prey, you know that the future looks pretty good. Perhaps not all the game ideas are fresh and original but I think this year, above previous years, the execution of game designs has gotten much greater. I hate to sound too biased but I think 3dfx and their Voodoo chipset really deserve some credit here. While many games are using 3D when they really shouldn’t have, titles like Populous 3, Myth 2, and even Ultima Ascension really show what can be done with a 3D card on conventional game designs.
A copy of this article and other articles is at: http://www.stardock.com.
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Feel free to copy this article and use it how you like, just keep it whole.
-Brad Wardell