© 1999 Brad Wardell

Let me go ahead and get it out of the way, I was pretty disappointed with E3 this year and the game industry in general. Last year I thought there was a lot of consolidation but that was nothing compared to this year. I talked to a lot of companies and one of the main themes I got was that writing and publishing games is not very profitable for most companies. A few are making money hand over fist but the average developer or publisher is struggling along.

The game industry seems obsessed with making games that cost millions to make but suck to play. Everything there it seemed like was forced into being 3D no matter how tedious it was to play.

Despite rumors to the contrary, there were quite a few adventure games, but most of them were based on licensed products or played more like action games. I saw a Star Trek adventure game that looked incredible but didn’t play nearly as nicely because it was using a 3D engine and controlling it was very awkward.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some great games coming out…

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t like consoles. I don’t own any consoles and I have never owned a console since an Atari 2600. I have felt that PCs are the way to go. I can afford the latest hardware on the PC so I don’t really care about "Bang for the buck" arguments about the console.

Then I saw the Playstation 2. You really have to see it to believe it otherwise you’ll likely feel like I did before I saw it, that it’ll be more of the same but with somewhat better graphics. When I think console, I think of 500 Mortal Combat clones that don’t interest me at all. That’s because consoles are so limited normally to just having a few types of action games.

The Playstation 2, in contrast, has really taken things to the next level. The graphics are greater than the difference between going from Wolfenstein 3D to Quake 3 in my opinion. Imagine racing games that look like they’re real. Imagine adventure games where the characters in them that you move and talk to look better than what’s been pre-rendered in a Blizzard cutscene. The last time I felt anything like this was when I was happy with my Commodore 64 and saw those first Amiga demos. I can’t even imagine what a first person shooter on a Playstation 2 could be like.

Of course, as a developer at a small game company, I was also a bit depressed. Because the expense in doing games that will compete with the high end games that will use this technology will be massive. Luckily I focus on strategy games but in a couple years, people are going to expect that diplomacy screens and units look exactly like they would in real life and not like a bunch of polygons thrown together like they do now. A moving talking face in real time on a playstation looked like better than people talking in the Starcraft cut scenes.

And speaking of Blizzard, another big winner at the show was Blizzard with Diablo II. Diablo II is actually much more impressive than I thought it would be thanks to one of their developers getting the bright idea to use some of the Direct3D features and making the world look a lot more 3D. It was pretty impressive. The game itself is beautiful to look at and it should be out by the end of this year.

The best cutscene this year has to go to our friends at Hasbro who have an incredible mini-movie of Mech Warrior 3. I must have watched that thing 10 times during the show. Another incredible cutscene is thanks to Activision via Star Trek: Armada. Their pre-rendered battles were much better than what we saw in Star Trek: First Contact (the movie) though not as good as the real time rendering I saw on a Playstation 2.

I was at E3 for 3 reasons.

Small developers would have to lead the race here. The days of seeing several thousand games coming out to choose from are drawing to a close I think. By next year, I suspect a AAA title will have a $5 million or more budget to it with it growing more.

Gameplay though would have to be the biggest loser this time. The industry seems more concerned about making something look and sound cool and then cramming bits of gameplay into the middle of it. You have to "standardize" nowadays on a first person shooter since they’ve gotten so complex. I used to have LAN parties with friends to play Duke Nukem or DOOM here. Forget that now, the days of being able to use the cursor keys on the keyboard to control your guy are over. Now you need to know how to use the mouse, all 3 buttons and several keys on the keyboard at once to even remotely compete. Yea, like Bob from accounting is really going to do that.

But 3D mania is creeping into strategy games too. There were numerous games that boasted how you could spin the world in every direction, zoom in to the actual unit, look at the battle field from every direction. But was the game fun? Many of these games didn’t seem very fun to me. I liked Myth and Populous but they knew when it made sense and when it didn’t make sense to over do it on the 3D and even those games could get awkward to control at times. People slammed Starcraft for being merely 2D but it sure is a fun game and easy to pick up.

Tip to game developers: Use 3D when it makes sense or wait until we have holographic displays. My monitor is quite 2D and controlling units and such when I don’t know their "depth" is tedious.

The Sega Dreamcast has better graphics than the Nintendo 64 and comes with a modem for easy multiplayer play. The question is, will anyone care? The graphics are quite good but when you see the Playstation 2, which promises all these same things, it’s hard to imagine a world where the Dreamcast is more than a niche.

I’m not a journalist as you can probably tell by my horrible writing style. I’m an engineer so the fact that I even can write words on paper is a miracle in itself. I wandered the show floor like most any attendee. Since I’m not a journalist, I didn’t have a "list" of games I had to cover.

This year’s show was in LA instead of Atlanta. There were several rooms which housed the various game publishers and developers. The main room I spent time in was the one where most of the PC game publishers were.

Blizzard was showing off Diablo 2 which looked fantastic. Sierra had a bunch of stuff showing such as their various sports titles but I didn’t get a very good look at those.

Diablo 2 should be out at the end of the year and will definitely be something most gamers will want.

I probably spent more time at this booth than at any specific booth. Primarily because they had Total Annihilation: Kingdoms there and I’m a big fan of Total Annihilation. In fact, the game I’m working on, Monopolization (www.stardock.com/products/monopolization), is arguably a bit behind schedule because we play TA so much even though it’s going on 2 years old. TA: Kingdoms is very different from the other real time games. I played it for about 3 hours during the show and it should be out by the end of June.

I haven’t decided whether I liked it as much as TA, TA had great balance thanks to 2 years of new units. Kingdoms has 4 unique sides (ala Starcraft) and their sides really have some great ideas. One side has no buildings really, just units that summon other units. In practice, I had some trouble keeping track of all of them (there are keyboard hotkeys to get to them though). My only gripe was that there’s an artificial limit on the number of "Dragons" (their "big" unit). You can only have 1 and even though my dragon was level 8, I was not able to easily overwhelm a well fortified player despite the fact I controlled 80% of the map. One solution before they release it would be to make units a bit more expensive. My opponent was able to keep cranking out cheap units despite having hardly any resources while I was bumping up against the unit limit (250 by default). So they could either allow me to build more dragons or make regular units cost more so that I would be able to more easily overwhelm them (since there’s really no "nuke" unit in the game) and keep the end game from being a 30 minute mop up operation.

Still, I’ll be first in line to get it when it comes out, the game looks and plays very well and the graphics are outstanding. And unlike other games of this genre, they resisted going overboard on the 3D. It uses 3dfx’s Glide and OpenGL to give effects and better smoothing throughout the game but the map is easy to navigate.

The best improvement over Total Annihilation is the eliminate of "metal makers". That is, there is only one resource – mana and the only real way to get to it is to control these special areas of the map. This means that if I control most of these special areas, I’m going to win the game. As opposed in Total Annihilation where someone can fortify a tiny area of the map and build all the resources they want by building special buildings.

Quake Arena seems to get a lot of attention but Unreal Tournament, to me, looks more impressive. Quake and Unreal are too similar and we already know what they’re about to write much about them. One suggestion I have before release is to have the world be damageable. After playing Halflife for many hours, I am not sure I could go back to playing a game where I shoot a wall with a missile and there’s not even a scorch mark. If you’ve ever played Halflife on-line, you know what I mean when I say that at the end of a level, it looks like you were playing in a slaughterhouse. The walls are covered with blood and gore and bullet holes. An Unreal level looks the same as when you started and I really think that’ll be a turn off. Especially since Quake Arena seems to have this sort of thing (though their blast marks disappear a bit too quickly for my taste).

Didn’t really play this but it looked really cool.

I couldn’t find it on the show floor.

When it came to quantity and quality of titles, I think Hasbro walks away with best of show. People scoff at Hasbro because they make toys and such but anyone visiting their booth couldn’t walk away unimpressed.

Due out this Fall, this new version of Civilization may actually be what some were looking for in Call to Power. Civilization 2 with new graphics, new technologies, new units. This looked very impressive. I also should mention that Sid M and Brian Reynolds have agreed to write Civilization 3 for Microprose via Firaxis which I took to be some of the best news of the show (given I played Civ2 on the plane back, you can imagine how happy I was to hear that I’d be able to have a Civ3 eventually).

Here’s a game that’s gotten little coverage despite the fact that it could be one of the greatest games ever created. I won’t give my opinion of those in the media who would choose to give Prey article after article despite the fact it may actually never come out now, while ignoring games of more substance press. Diplomacy is one of the best board games in history and it’s finally come to the PC in a pretty impressive form. No, it doesn’t have a 3D map and it doesn’t have cut scenes voiced by celebrities but what it does have is solid game play and it appears pretty well designed.

One of the highlights of the Hasbro booth was Mech Warrior 3 which looks just incredible.

There were various other titles at the Hasbro booth, they really need to have more divisions or something because it can be a bit awkward seeing Diplomacy in one spot and then going over and seeing a remake of some ancient arcade game.

The evil empire was of course busy trying to dominate the world. But one thing can’t be denied, they publish some pretty good games. If I may be mistaken on who makes some of these games so if I get the company mixed up with the title please forgive me).

It appears that Microsoft has just outright acquired Access Software as opposed to trying to keep moving forward with their own golf game. Links, as usual, still looks awesome. BTW, Stardock publishes the OS/2 version of Links golf which is pretty ironic given that kind of makes Microsoft an OS/2 ISV now.

I don’t have much more to say about this game than what has already been reported. It looks nice.

I’m not sure if Microsoft is publishing this or not but I will say that this game looks extremely fun. It apparently won’t be out for awhile but I want it now! It’s a 3D space combat game where you control fleets of ships and have them battle it out. It looked and played really well.

The game I wanted to see most wasn’t available to see on the show floor – Black and White. But they did have a few games besides their sports titles that were interesting.

Some of you may remember "Little computer people". This takes that concept to the next level. You control a particular person in a simulated world and can watch how his/her life changes as you make decisions for him. The game looks very interesting and it will be interesting to see how much variation occurs. My only reservation about the game is that the Sim does not grow old. He’s always a young adult and there’s really no way you mess up the Sim’s life (you can always recover because your Sim lives forever). Still that might have been overly ambitous, perhaps The Sims II will have that.

Activision might be getting a little too gung-ho on the retro titles. I believe they are the ones coming out with a 3D space invaders for instance.

A real time space combat game looked pretty impressive to me. They also had a 1^st person game using the Quake 3 engine that took place on Voyager that also looked very impressive. And finally they had a Star Trek adventure game.

Activision was also showing off Battle Zone II and Dark Reign 2. Both games look very impressive. I’ll reserve judgement for now on how fun they’ll be when they’re completed. They are both very ambitious efforts.

Please don’t kill me for saying this but I was not at all impressed with C&C: Tiberium Sun. It looked like a 2 year old game to me except it’s coming out soon. It wasn’t clear whether they had finally added unit queues to it or not. What was clear was that they still had that permanent line of site thing and the goofy building system from the original (where you build something off screen and then when it’s done you can just plop it down – I hate that). The graphics were particularly unexceptional for a modern game from arguably the founder of the RTS genre.

On the other hand, there was a game there that Westwood is publishing called Nox that looked absolutely fantastic. Sort of like a more action oriented Diablo with excellent line of site features (maybe the C&C team could get some tutoring from the Nox developers). The only question is when this game will come out. As good as the game is, and believe me, this game is going to likely rival Diablo II in the quality department, it won’t be able to compete with it in the marketing department. Here at Stardock, Diablo I is still spoken of as a pseudo-religion. When Diablo II comes out, odds are that parts of our company will shut down for some "research gaming" (though we don’t make RPG’s mind you) for a few days. Nox just doesn’t have that kind of build up. So if they can’t come out a good month before Diablo II, they should wait until a full quarter afterwards in my opinion.

I didn’t really follow the original Rainbow Six but I am definitely, after seeing a demo of the sequel, interested now. I didn’t get to see as much as I would have liked but it was very impressive.