Dead Space 3 trailer shows story setup, slimy monster throat

It's bedlam in Dead Space 3.

It's bedlam in Dead Space 3. Besides magical space rocksdriving everyone crazy, we have to contend with freaking out our buddies with fits of hysteriaand ex-Genesis drummers. And, as this latest trailer for Visceral's survival-shooter shows, our reasons for descending to Tau Volantis go out the airlock the moment the first squelching croak is heard from a Necromorph abomination.

Also, getting shoved down the stinking gullet of a giant pile of flesh and tentacles is a perfect opportunity for hero Isaac Clarke to reflect on the life choices he's made to reach this point.

Dead Space 3 is out on February 5. We don't yet know how it'll run on PC, but don't expect much in the way of platform-specific features.

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EVE Online dev raises $30 million to create more VR titles

Newsbrief: EVE Online developer CCP Games has raised $30 million to bolster its development of virtual reality games.

The cash will be used to better position the studio in an attempt to "drive innovation" in the VR sector.

CCP already has two VR titles in the works: EVE: Valkyrie , which will launch on the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR early next year, and Gunjack , an arcade shooter that will make its debut on Gear VR later this month.

"We believe VR will revolutionize not just video games, but the wider technology and media industry as a whole," said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP.

"We were there at the beginning, and this investment will give us strength to maintain our leading development efforts."

A Western Developed Final Fantasy May Be A Possibility, According to Square Enix Staff

A Western Developed Final Fantasy May Be A Possibility, According to Square Enix Staff In an interview with OXM , Abe noted that the buyout of Eidos Interactive a couple of years ago opened up the possibility of a Western developed Final Fantasy game. According to Abe, the possibility of allowing the franchise to see development outside of Japan has been “internally discussed”, but at what level we

GOLD! We chat exclusively to the man who has already won the Olympics

If you live in the green and pleasant land of England Town (or anywhere in the world really) then you will be acutely aware that the Olympics are going to officially start happening today. To celebrate this momentous occasion we decided to sit down at our desks and exchange emails with a man on the other side of the office who has already won the Olympics. Not the actual Olympics but Sega's official

How Uncharted 4 was made accessible to more players

Overwatch sets out to dominate the FPS in games™ 171

Overwatch sets out to dominate the FPS in games™ 171 Find out how Overwatch could be the FPS to conquer the world this year as we speak with Blizzard Entertainment, play the game and break down what makes it great. Plus, our final verdict on The Division, hands-on with Hitman, behind the scenes of Dangerous Golf and much more. Overwatch Blizzard reveals its plans to conquer the FPS world as we get

Dead Space 3's executive producer defends PC's "straight port"

The news that the PC version of Dead Space 3 would be a straight port from the consoles - lacking any fancy PC-specific bells 'n whistles - was not received warmly.

- lacking any fancy PC-specific bells 'n whistles - was not received warmly. Speaking to Shack News, Visceral Games' executive producer Steve Papoutsis talked about the backlash. Turns out he's a bit miffed.

"It's confusing to me that this question even comes up," Papoutsis said, when asked about the lack of PC optimisation. "It's by no means any less important to us; it gets a lot of attention. The PC is a very different platform. As developers, you want to deliver an experience that's as similar as possible on different platforms."

"In Dead Space 2, I felt we made some great strides in terms of controls, responsiveness and even the visual improvements we got into it. We continue to evolve our games as we develop them, but we certainly don't target PC as something that's going to be significantly different. We aren't trying to create disparity in the experience that our gamers enjoy; we want to make sure everyone's having that same experience."

Surely he's missing point. Dead Space 3's PC version will exist in a market where developers regularly put at least the bare minimum of effort into playing to the system's strengths - and that includes EA titles. Just look at Battlefield 3 with its expanded maps and fine selection of graphics options. The pre-order price for Dead Space 3 is £40, putting it at the top-end of new release price points. To hear that people are troubled to find it won't support DirectX 11 - a feature offered by most AAA "ports" - shouldn't be cause for confusion.

"At our studio, we've always made console games," Papoutsis continued. "The biggest thing is we want to make sure the quality of the experience is consistent across all platforms so we don't have one userbase saying it's better on their system."

"The fact that we're allowing you to control the game with a mouse and keyboard immediately makes the game feel different. Working with the community, we found some people wanted to map the controls a little differently because of disabilities and we supported that [in Dead Space 2]. It's a confusing question and I hope my answer brings a little bit of light to it. We seem a little bit discredited for the amount of effort that goes into it, quite honestly."

"We want it to be great on all systems, that's our approach."

I suspect part of the problem is what's not being said. Yes, missing higher-res textures and DirectX 11 support is a bit galling, but the real concern is that platform parity often translates to a terrible PC user experience. Offering rebindable keys is great. But will Dead Space 3 run at a capped framerate? Will it offer any real meaningful graphics options? Will alt-tabbing out of it cause the game to throw a tantrum?

Port has become a bit of a dirty word in PC gaming. Dead Space 3 could well avoid all these pitfalls, but without knowing specifics, it's understandable if people are assuming the worst. We've been burnt before.

Thanks, VG247.

EA shuts down Donald Trump video that steals from Mass Effect universe

Image via Esquire.

Earlier today a Twitter user posted a fan-made campaign videofor US Republican candidate Donald Trump. A vague riff on the Mass Effect universe, it was a fairly amateuristic piece of Trump worship that no one would have paid much attention to, had Trump not retweeted it himself.

That naturally lead to the video going viral and, eventually, staff at studio Bioware and publisher EA catching wind of it. Mass Effect 3 designer Manveer Heir was among the first to speak out about the video, claiming it was " gross as hell".

"I love the idea that Trump may think he's the Illusive Man, who is verifiably the bad guy in the game," Heir addedlater.

EA eventually intervened, and the offending tweet from Trump was removed (though it remains available on the creator's account). In a statement sent to Game Informer, the publisher was curt. "The video was an unauthorized use of our IP," a rep told the website. "We do not support our assets being used in political campaigns."

It's well within EA's rights: the video heavily featured music from the series, as well as voice work contributed by Martin Sheen to Mass Effect 2. There's no proof that Trump or his people had any hand in the creation of the video either. Indeed, it's highly unlikely given its content.

Wii U sales top 3 million, Nintendo cuts full-year forecast

Software sales for the system totalled 11.7 million during the same period, with Nintendo Land hitting two million and New Super Mario Bros. U 2.3 million, the company said today. For the business year ending March 31, Nintendo cut its Wii U sales forecast from 5.5 million units to four million, and its software sales target from 24 million units to 16 million. The firm also said it now expects to

Video: Understanding how analytics help you make better games

If you make games for a large company or a publisher, someone is eventually going to come to you with analytics data, and you're going to need to be able to understand it to act on it.

Student and indie developers aren't exempt, either: at some point you'll find yourself looking over data in reports, in industry news, and in feedback from your fans and your playtests. Understanding the basic framework of analytics empowers you to determine for yourself what the value of this information really is, and how it can be used improve your design process.

Luckily, Epic Games senior designer Jim Brown walked through that process and offered an easy-to-grasp rundown of what analytics data is valuable to a game designer in an excellent talk given at GDC Europe earlier this year.

It's a remarkably informative talk peppered with actual examples from Epic's work on Fortnite that should prove informative for all developers, at companies large and small. The free video (embedded above) of 'The Importance of Everything: A Crash Course in Design-Related Analytics' is now available to watch hereon the GDC Vault.
About the GDC VaultIn addition to this presentation, the GDC Vaultoffers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech

Skyrim’s Dragon Shouts

Many aspects of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will feel familiar to longtime fans.

Many aspects of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will feel familiar to longtime fans. The exploration of a vast open world, first-person combat, and interacting systems of melee, magic, and stealth are all tent pole ideas within the franchise. However, Skyrim introduces something new into the gameplay mix: dragon shouts. This special new set of powers stand apart from the existing magic system, offering a broad range of powerful effects. The ability to attain these abilities is unique to your hero in the world, and the path to attaining them is a quest in itself within the larger tale that unfolds over the course of the game. Dragon shouts give the player the same overwhelming might that drives the resurgent dragon population, and the same source of power that launched the last line of emperors.

“It’s in the lore,” declares game director Todd Howard. “It was like the classic barbarian battle cry. I’m not sure if it showed up in a book in Daggerfall, but it’s definitely mentioned in this pocket guide to the empire that we did for Redguard. It was the idea that the Nords had these battle cries, and they would shout at their enemies.” As the team at Bethesda began to design The Elder Scrolls V, they latched onto this little piece of mythology, and the way it could tie back to the dragons – powerful creatures that had been absent from the world for thousands of years.

Quickly, elements of the fiction began to fall into place around the dragon shouts, much of which was already firmly entrenched from previous games. The dragonborn are a unique group of mortals, gifted by the gods with the same power as the dragons. To be trained in the art of the dragon shouts, also called the Voice, dragonborn individuals travel to Skyrim in order to climb a great mountain called the Throat of the World. At its peak they reach High Hrothgar, where an ancient sect of powerful Voice users named the Greybeards train them in their art.

“In the lore, Tiber Septim was the first main emperor. He could shout. His way of the Voice was unmatched,” Howard explains. “He is the original guy who walks the seven thousand steps and talks to the Greybeards. And the idea is, at that time, that they were so powerful they had to have all the villages flee for miles. This little kid is walking up this snowy mountain, and all these people are packed up and they’re walking down and away. Because they know the kid is going up to talk to these guys, and when they talk there’s going to be avalanches.”

The ability to use the dragon language already exists in the fiction, called “Thu’um.” The concept roughly translates as “The Voice.”

Tiber Septim would use the dragon shouts to lead his troops into battle and unite Tamriel under one empire. Hundreds of years later, the Septim line has died out, and no other dragonborn have been seen for many years. That is, until the hero of Skyrim arrives on the scene. “There are other people in the world who can use the dragon shouts, but it’s very rare. It’s like arcane knowledge. It used to be done more in the past,” Howard explains. “The Greybeards know it. But your ability to absorb the dragon souls and do the shouts on the level that you can is beyond them.”

In the game, players will guide their hero to learn ever more powerful dragon shouts, and then use these arcane powers to supplement other combat and magic skills. Upon defeating a dragon, Skyrim’s hero absorbs the soul of the fallen creature, which fuels his ability to learn a new shout. Later, players can search out long lost walls covered in dragon script. Upon these walls, individual runes stand out to the hero because he or she is dragonborn. “There are these words of power, and if you learn how to say them right, they have a powerful effect,” Howard says.

Over time, players will build a vast arsenal of shouts: over 20 complete shouts in all, each with multiple words that must be gathered from different places around the world. “There are three words for each shout, and there are three levels to them. The amount of time you hold down the shout button is how many words come out,” Howard continues. “It becomes a bit of a collection mechanic – to collect all the words.”

Next up: Creating the language behind the dragon shouts

Mass Effect "4D" movie coming to California amusement park

California's Great America, a roller coaster-based amusement park in the San Francisco Bay Area, is launching a Mass Effect –themed "4D holographic" movie show.

–themed "4D holographic" movie show. Far from conventional understandings of four-dimensional Euclidean space or spacetime, 4D is the theme park term for crowd-facing special effects: wind and water effects and rumbling seats, perhaps. Though we don't know exactly what this show will entail.

"This exciting guest experience involves cutting edge technology customized for Great America and delivers 4D effects combined with a live performer and incredible special effects," the theme park wrote in a press releasetoday. "Great America guests will be taken on a thrilling adventure across the galaxy where they will travel through awe-inspiring landscapes, face off against bigger than life adversaries and ultimately help save the day."

Having been to a few too many 4D shows in my time, I'd just as soon watch a Mass Effect movie without a nozzle shooting lukewarm water in my face and curious smells wafting by, or whatever they have planned. It might be worth putting up with for a big dose of new Mass Effect lore, though, so I'll be keeping my eye on the as-yet unnamed movie, coming in 2016.

Exploring The Fictional World Of Medici In Just Cause 3

A lot of developers will buy photo books or travel videos based on the locations they're designing a game around; Avalanche Studios collects vacation photos.

A lot of developers will buy photo books or travel videos based on the locations they're designing a game around; Avalanche Studios collects vacation photos. Anytime someone on staff gets back from a trip to the Mediterranean they send over their photos to Avalanche's art team and writes it off as a travel expense. Avalanche has used this database of photos to create the fictional world of Medici, the setting for Just Cause 3. To get a better understanding of this new world, we spoke with art director Zach Schlappi who walked us through the game's entire ecosphere.

Click on the images below to expand them:

"For Just Cause 3, we wanted a sort of new location, and no one has tackled the Mediterranean in the way we saw it. Of course, Assassin's Creed had Florence and Italy, but we were looking at Monaco and the central/southern Mediterranean. It's such a good area because it's a little bit of everything. Everyone's done South America. Everyone has done Eastern Russia, but we thought that the Mediterranean was an untapped resource. I looked at a span of places from Sicily to Northern Africa to Greece to Albania, which gave us a nice quilt to work with. There are some great dusty environments, and you get some of that hot hazy feeling, those beautiful emerald waters, and those great big skies. It seems like a great area to lay waste to, because it was so beautiful."

"A deep world has to have some culture,
it has to have a lot of meaning, it can't be something that's
throw-away or disposable. Medici is believable and yet very approachable.
It's a place you might want to go on vacation, yet it has trouble. It has
a dictatorship. After that, I wanted to ask ourselves, 'How do you play with that language in the
environment?' So, I created a system of colors: grey, yellow, and red are
the colors of oppression. While the pristine world is full of more
natural colors. If you look at any picture of the Mediterranean you see
blue skies, wheat fields, and a lot of lavender. If you look at all our concept
art there is a constant color theme of golden ochre
versus teal blue. It's always those two complementary colors bouncing
around."

"We have five different biomes and they all have there own palette feel. Each one has an identity. There is an air of exploration and expanse as people travel the world. We have two different coasts. One that is brutal with jagged rocks and deep sea cliffs, and the other is very smooth and sandy were all the tourist go. As you wander further inland you have the pastoral areas, which are full of fields of lavender and sunflowers like in Italy or Spain. That adds a sense of the human element to the game; this is a place where people live. It also creates a contrast for the scrublands which is like the Mediterranean wild west, which is full of industry and deforestation. Beyond that you have the forest, which are full of mystery and have a smokey atmosphere. Finally, players will approach the icy mountains. So players have this full sense of progression of all representations of water, from mountain snow to watery coasts."

For more details on Avalanche's upcoming open-world title be sure to check out our
cover hub, which is filled with exclusive content such as hands-on impressions and a video history of the studio.

EA Acquires SpellForce Developer Phenomic

Why Overwatch is the FPS we need

Why Overwatch is the FPS we need As Blizzard takes on the FPS, should you be fearful for the state of your spare time? It’s really important for us to be listening to the community, because with Overwatch, as soon as it launches, it belongs to them just as much as it belongs to us. We want to make sure Overwatch is a cool environment that they enjoy hanging out in. We don’t want to do anything that

Grand Theft Auto 5 mod puts a Mass Effect Reaper over the skies of Los Santos

Some game mods are practical in nature: They add features, boost performance, or restore content that was cut prior to release.

Some game mods are practical in nature: They add features, boost performance, or restore content that was cut prior to release. The GTA5 Reaper modis not one of those. It's b etter .

Unfortunately, it's not a real Reaper, which is to say that it can't turn the city of Los Santos into a smoldering pile of rubble. Mod creator JJxOracle explains that it "replaces the blimp," but in reality, as this video (via GamesRadar) makes clear at around the 2:45 mark, it's still there, stuffed inside a big, floating space-lobster shell.

The Reaper skin will sometimes disappear, he said, and collision detection still needs to be added, but he's still working on it. And even just as it is, it looks fantastic. Enjoy!

Twisted Pixel Unveils Ms. Splosion Man

When artificial intelligence in video games becomes...artificially intelligent

Artificial intelligence in video games helps bring virtual worlds to life; it lurks beneath the surface, determining the way a player interacts with a game.

Artificial intelligence in video games helps bring virtual worlds to life; it lurks beneath the surface, determining the way a player interacts with a game. As the brains of a game, AI engages our brains.

Often, we think of AI in terms of obvious AI agents like NPCs or enemies that duck and roll away from gunfire. But speaking with numerous AI developers inside and outside of game development over recent weeks, the potential for AI goes far beyond making "smarter" enemies or more convincing NPCs. As game AI slowly converges with general AI concepts and techniques, AI can change the way games are played, and even the way they're developed.

Artificially barely-intelligent

At a GDC 2013 panelabout the next big leap in game AI, AiGameDev.comeditor-in-chief and nuclai Conferenceorganizer Alex J. Champandard quipped, "My prediction is a little bit controversial. I think the next giant leap of game AI is actually artificial intelligence."

The statement got a laugh out of the audience of game AI developers—but why? It’s because a good amount of game AI developers see their craft as outside of general AI. Some developers in the AI Game Programmers Guild even said that game AI has little to nothing to do with the advanced AI techniques that come out of academic and industrial organizations—that game AI has wholly different challenges from AI at large.

So what are the common challenges of game AI versus the challenges of industrial and academic AI?

For game developers, AI challenges are related to player experience. AI needs to operate in such a way as to convey an experience that provides for fun, drama or some form of enjoyment. In games, it often serves a tightly-controlled, authored experience, whether you’re talking about enemy AI that ducks behind a wall in Halo: Combat Evolved , or the squad AI in Half-Life .

"My prediction is a little bit controversial. I think the next giant leap of game AI is actually artificial intelligence." - Alex J. Champandard at GDC 2013

"Most game AI is designed to be exactly as intelligent as it needs to be in order to give the player a good experience," said former Sims 4 programmer Bruce Hill. "For many games, this means the AI should behave in predictable and barely intelligent ways, like the enemies in a Mario game or most first person shooters."

Dave Mark, who runs the AI Summit at Game Developers Conference and is founder of AI consultancy Intrinsic Algorithm, said much of what game AI developers work on is "more like 'artificial behavior'" than "artificial intelligence."

Advanced AI development happening outside of games isn't about creating AI that is "barely" intelligent, and it's not typically hinged on authoring an entertainment experience for an intended user. Rather, it attempts to create systems that closely mimic true biological intelligence. Here, there's much focus on machine learning, in which computers learn to perform tasks without being explicitly programmed to perform those tasks.

Challenges on this side of AI include creating AI that can learn and adapt to new environments; creating more robust systems for understanding speech and noise; pattern extraction; and developing AI that can evolve and take on non-trivial tasks. Self-driving cars, autonomous stock market traders, targeted advertising, autonomous military drones, and natural language recognition are all in the realm of general AI.

The trouble with convergence

The solutions to every one of advanced AI's challenges, and their applications, seem fantastic for video games. Playing with AI agents such as NPCs or training bots that can learn, understand, and perform interesting tasks sound like fun...theoretically.

But machine learning and its potential applications in games is a bit of a controversial topic among game AI developers.

"The video game industry takes almost no note of cutting edge AI research, which I find unfortunate," said Jacob Schrum, assistant professor of computer science at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. "Many advanced AI techniques can produce amazing results."

The reason games don't often used advanced AI techniques (as Schrum did acknowledge) is that implementing concepts such as machine learning in games isn't so simple, and often not desirable from game production and game design perspectives.

"It's not that we can't get good behavior out of machine learning techniques... it's that it may not be the behavior we want for the game experience we are looking for."

Game AI developers point out that advanced AI is unpredictable, and could not only destroy the player experience (imagine an AI bug in a new Call of Duty game in which enemies experience catastrophic unlearning and go completely haywire), but also that unpredictability could throw a wrench in more traditional game production processes.

"If you train up your AI agents [with machine learning], show your designer, and he or she says, 'yeah, that's cool... but in this one situation here, can you make it do this [action] a little more often?' you're kind of hosed," Mark said. "What do you do? Re-train your data set and hope for the best? In most architectures, we turn one or two 'knobs,' restart it, and say, 'how's that?'

"It's not that we can't get good behavior out of machine learning techniques... it's that it may not be the behavior we want for the game experience we are looking for."

That's a recurring theme: that game AI needs to fit the experience, and often, particularly in commercially-proven genres and franchises in video games, advanced game AI and the production issues that come with it eclipse any potential benefits of implementation. One game AI developer said he mostly uses AI techniques that were well-known in the 1970s.

Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science and neuroscience at University of Texas at Austin, said, "I don't think it's really 'game AI' vs. 'academic and industry AI.' Games just have different types of AI, and it's been like that for a long time. [Game AI] is what we like to call 'Good Old-Fashioned AI' - 'GOFAI.' You do A* pathfinding, you have your behavior lists and behavior trees, and you have lots of authoring go into it."

The resistance to convergence of these types of AI is rational: If the game you want to make doesn't need advanced AI, then don't waste the time developing that kind of AI. And if your existing, entrenched production pipeline, development process, or even studio culture isn't conducive to newfangled AI techniques, it's difficult to convince a team to rework the entire system, unless they clearly understand how the benefits outweigh the pain.

All of this is not to mention the common understanding that AI that's too "smart" can destroy the enjoyment of a game. "Everybody hates to lose to Deep Blue," said Dan Kline, former tech designer on The Sims 4 at GDC 2013's AI Summit. "Nobody's looking to get crushed by awesome AI all the time."

The promise of convergence

Even though more advanced AI techniques only seem to be trickling into game development, there have already been successful implementations of such AI in commercial games: there's Black & White (machine learning), F.E.A.R (context-sensitive behavior), Façade (natural language parsing) , Spore (data-driven lifeform simulations), and The Sims (Sims’ interaction with objects, each other), to name a few.

Game design that hinges on more advanced AI techniques is slowly but surely becoming more commonplace, said AiGameDev.com’s Champandard. He said his tongue-in-cheek prediction from two-and-a-half years ago—that artificial intelligence will be the next giant leap for game AI—is coming true, in a measured way.

"Developers are more willing to let go and embrace more complex systems," he said. "Since the rest of the tech industry is getting great results with machine learning, games are following behind quickly. [For example,] Killer Instinct using case-based reasoning, [ Forza 's car AI] Drivatar using neural networks, and Fable Legends using Monte-Carlo tree search."

There's also more recognition that advanced AI is useful in areas other than bot behavior. AI can, and has, been used to improve game production and design itself.

Champandard, who also has worked on game AI in studios including Killzone developer Guerrilla Games, said an increasing number of studios are using hierarchical task network(HTN) planners, an AI implementation used for tasks such as logistics planning and military coordination.

"Developers are more willing to let go and embrace more complex systems. Since the rest of the tech industry is getting great results with machine learning, games are following behind quickly."

For Mark with Intrinsic Algorithm, a medium-term AI implementation in games could come from big data. For example, games are already toying with the idea of interacting with speech and written language, but the next step would be for machines to understand more natural, unscripted speech. To get there, it'll take big data, AI to parse that data, and design to make it enjoyable for players. This tack presents its own challenges, not the least of which is where does one get that data.

Mark also described a scenario in which AI collects player data, then autonomously creates new content to fit the player's play style (e.g., an RPG that takes modular pieces of content and fits them together in data-optimized ways within a quest template). Such an approach would help keep an MMORPG fresh, and alleviate a developer's pressure to constantly create all-new content.

Paul Tozour's company Intelligence Engine Design Systems implemented advanced AIto take on the complex job of game design, using it to balance and optimize the strategy game City Conquest . In a 2012 interview, he said he had a revelation: "I had a huge change in perspective. I came to the realization that machine learning isn't a tool for game AI-- it's a tool for game design ."

Today, he believes that in the long term, machine learning will be the basis for a new set of tools that facilitate systems-based game design. "Someday, designers will have vastly more powerful tools at their disposal, including some tools to help evolve and grow and tune and optimize the design itself, not just the content," he said. "And that will have to involve a lot of machine learning."

What would you say…you do here?

There’s a sentiment among some game AI developers that their non-AI colleagues don’t quite "get" what AI programmers do, which in itself could be a barrier to the adoption of newer, interesting techniques and implementations.

Asking AI programmers to describe in one sentence exactly what they do was an interesting exercise that showed a variety of responses:

@AIGPGWe teach the game to make the decisions that provide the context for the player's own decisions.

— Paul Tozour (@PaulTozour) September 16, 2015

@AIGPG @gamasutraTake a system that knows everything and can do anything, and dumbs it down just enough to be fun to beat.

— Steve Martin (@Purple_Steve) September 16, 2015

@AIGPG @gamasutraan AI programmer tricks the player into thinking that elements of the game are making informed intelligent decisions.

— Leonard Ritter (@paniq) September 16, 2015

@krisgraftThey build interactive systems in code that generate performances or content.

— Alex J. Champandard (@alexjc) September 16, 2015

@AIGPGIt's not an easy question to answer, however I did put "I make the baddies" on my business cards! pic.twitter.com/gSpLnIY2yp

— Rich Welsh (@Welshy31) September 16, 2015

@AIGPG @IADaveMarkAI developers make tools that allow for more interesting worlds to be created

— Lance Hitchcock (@lancehit) September 16, 2015

Game AI developers have different ideas of what game AI is, what its applications are, and what the future holds. And amid the spirited debates about game AI, there is typically a sense among developers that the field is moving forward. For game AI developers, it’s just a question of which direction forward.

Convergence between AI in games and general AI is happening, even if for some developers it is practically imperceptible or even irrelevant. Champandard argued that instances of convergence are not as isolated as they used to be, and that in the past couple of years, convergence has become a bona fide trend.

"As much as some industry developers like to distance themselves from academia--or the rest of the tech industry--there are many parallels, and that's increasing," he said. "It's an amazing time."

Thanks to Intrinsic Algorithm's Dave Mark for the help on this article, and to the AI devs who kindly entertained my nightmare scenario of evil game AI taking over the world.

Killzone: Shadow Fall Story Trailer Released

Killzone: Shadow Fall Story Trailer Released “To what lengths would you go to defend your home?” asks the trailer. Set on the planet Vekta, the trailer focusses on the uncomfortable truce between the Helghast and the native Vektans. The trailer can be found below; The two main opposing forces seem to be Chancellor Visari – who chairs the helm of the displaced Helghast populace – and Director of the

The PC Gamer Show - Windows 10, 144hz monitors, and more

This week's topics

Last week we debuted our new talk show on Twitch, The PC Gamer Show. If you didn't catch it, don't sweat: we're also publishing The PC Gamer Show as a podcast!

Windows 10 144hz and variable refresh monitors Wes played Dark Souls 3! Mass Effect, ranked Intel Skylake CPUs - should you upgrade? Reader questions on Steam Controller and Overwatch Wes' pristine cheekbones

Listen

Your flapping heads for this episode:

Here's What to Expect from Alien: Isolation's First Eight Hours

Although our October issue and month of online content is a celebration of all horror games , we are focusing a lot of our attention on the promising Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within .

. Game Informer editor Jeff Cork played through the first seven chapters of Alien: Isolation on PS4 and wrote extensively about his experience in the new issue, but he also sat down with Alien fan Tim Turi on camera to talk about his lengthy hands-on impressions. They discuss the pros and cons of weapons in the game, what makes the game horrifying, and why the checkpoint system might prove to be divisive for players.

Watch the video preview below to see new gameplay from the beginning of the game and learn why you should keep your eye on Alien: Isolation.

Click on the banner below to enter our hub for more information on Alien: Isolation, The Evil Within, and more horror games throughout the month.

Video: How Telltale designs narrative-driven games

It's easy to talk about games as "narrative-driven" experiences, but much more challenging to actually design and create one that guides players through a good story while still affording them meaningful choices.

Few studios spend more time mulling this problem over, collectively, than Telltale Games. From Jurassic Park to Game of Thrones to Tales From The Borderlands , designers at the studio have learned lessons about good storytelling in games from a wealth of different experiences.

At GDC 2015 some of them shared those lessons in a panel moderated by writer Tom Bissell. It played host to some interesting conversations about creating stories in an environment where the process of writing and game design have increasingly become one, and if you missed it in person you can now watch the entire panel for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel.

About the GDC Vault

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vaultand its new YouTube channeloffers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech

20 Minutes of Killzone: Shadow Fall Gameplay Released by Sony

20 Minutes of Killzone: Shadow Fall Gameplay Released by Sony Killzone: Shadow Fall is one of the most anticipated exclusives on Sony’s PS4 launch line-up, and for a game that’s released in just over a month, there is still fairly little footage of the game in action available online. Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and Asia have put pay to this by publishing 20 minutes worth of footage from a mission

Why I hate pausable real-time RPG combat

The big choices about who to side with, the gang of companions who open up the more you talk to them, the romances—so many of the things we think of as quintessential BioWare began in Baldur’s Gate 2.

The big choices about who to side with, the gang of companions who open up the more you talk to them, the romances—so many of the things we think of as quintessential BioWare began in Baldur’s Gate 2. It seemed like BioWare had seen what Obsidian had achieved with the Infinity Engine in Planescape: Torment the year before and stepped up their game in response.

Pillars of Eternityfeels like Obsidian returning the compliment, picking up the ball and throwing it back. It’s a blend of the two studio’s house styles, with deep philosophical questions and the consequences of past lives making it a close cousin to Planescape, and the lack of romance options an Obsidian trademark. Meanwhile, Caed Nua is their take on the strongholds of Baldur’s Gate 2 and navigating the factions of Defiance Bay resembles the Athkatla section of that game.

But of all the things to keep from the games that inspired it, pausable real-time combat is the most baffling. Planescape seemed to go out of its way to have as few as possible of those moments where the story grinds to a halt while the Dungeon Master puts everyone’s miniature on the board and says ‘roll for initiative.’ Even when the Infinity Engine was new, its pausable real-time combat felt like a clunky compromise necessitated by the peculiarities of the era.

They were strange days

Timothy Cain, producer, lead programmer, and one of the designers of the original Fallout, gave a talk at GDC in 2012, a post-mortem of that classic, turn-based RPG. Halfway through that talk he paused, queued up the next slide and said the word ‘Diablo’ with a sigh. "Fun game," he went on to clarify, "lots of fun." And then the bitterness crept into his voice: "Thorn in my side."

Saying Diablo streamlined the RPG is like saying bullets streamlined arrows. It was fast and frantic and so pure it was almost grotesque. Sometimes, Diablo said, you just want to click skeletons to bits and take their stuff. This was the late 1990s, and real-time strategy games had already beaten up their turn-based ancestors and taken their lunch money, presumably while they were waiting for someone to click the End Turn button so they could retaliate. It seemed obvious at the time that Blizzard was going to do the same thing to turn-based RPGs, making them seem clunky and old-fashioned—at least in the eyes of people trying to market them.

Fighting a gila monitor in Wasteland 2.

"I had to go to lots of meetings with marketing and administration," Timothy Cain goes on to say in his GDC talk. "They wanted Fallout to be multiplayer and real-time." But Cain stood his ground. Fallout had already been in development for over two years, and he argued the cost of changing it wouldn’t be worthwhile. In the end they let him make his game the way he wanted to, and it’s better for it. The blackly comic tone of Fallout is well-served by gruesome text descriptions of each called shot’s results, whether to the eyes or the crotch, and there’s a rising tension you only experience when one by one your characters fail to take down a Super Mutant spinning up a chaingun and you’re forced to end the turn and pray you survive once the bullets start flying.

In September of 1998 Interplay brought out Fallout 2, with the same turn-based combat system. And then three months later they published Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate and ushered in the era of pausable real-time combat. Baldur’s Gate was no Diablo, and giving you control of a party of up to six heroes rather than a single protagonist meant a fully real-time system wouldn’t have been feasible. To compete with the hot new thing in RPGs the designers looked back, drawing on 1992’s Darklands for inspiration.

In Darklands you controlled a party of four in 15th century Germany, but it was a version of Germany in which the beliefs of the time were true. Dragons were real, and praying to saints could result in miracles. High fantasy games cross the street to walk on the other side when they see realism heading toward them, but the relatively low fantasy Darklands was at least a nodding acquaintance with the concept, and in theory real-time combat is the more realistic option.

The path of most resistance

While fighting gangs of thieves in Darklands’ streets you pressed spacebar to pause and then gave orders individually, telling your alchemist to fire his crossbow while the other characters formed a defensive line and then tried to envelop the enemy. In practice every battle descended into a chaotic scrum. Characters sent round the back to flank would get distracted and attack the first enemy they saw, while Gretchen the Holy would bump into one of her allies then turn around and head off in entirely the wrong direction through the side streets of Hamburg.

Still, that was only 1992 and early days. Surely, six years later—especially given the hectic rate of technological advancement that characterized game design in the 1990s—things would have improved significantly. But, three levels deep in the guts of the Nashkel Mines in Baldur’s Gate, Minsc the ranger was meandering into the darkness because he’d collided with Branwen the cleric in the narrow tunnels, inevitably blundering into a trap.

Bad pathfinding isn’t unique to games with pausable real-time combat, but it is exacerbated by it. It’s easier to ignore when short-lived enemies are the only ones who get stuck on crates, or when you’re controlling just the one character who sometimes gets confused and tries to take the long way round. When it’s your entire team turning into bumbling lummoxes the moment you press spacebar to send them into action it’s impossible to ignore. They stop feeling like they’re under your control: the game may as well be playing itself.

Pathfinding isn’t the only problem pausable real-time combat highlights. Behind the scenes, most of these games are still giving characters turns. Even if those turns are overlapping and often simultaneous, there’s still a noticeable pause between actions. In Knights of the Old Republic your Jedi will leap into the fray, flipping through the air and landing among enemies with lightsabers spinning like blenders of death. Then they stop and just sort of bob on the spot for a few seconds, like a Mortal Kombat fighter waiting for the next round to start. Gun-toting characters behave just as weirdly, snapping off a few shots then standing out in the open until an invisible hourglass fills up and they can act again.

In turn-based combat your imagination overrides the abstractions. You know that while one of your XCOM squaddies is racing for cover the enemy isn’t holding their fire and the rest of the squad aren’t patiently waiting their turn; in your head the firefight never stops. But Knights of the Old Republic’s sudden switches between slick attack animations and characters awkwardly bouncing on the spot like they’re holding drinks on the edges of the dancefloor is much harder for the imagination to paper over. It just looks silly.

To minimize the amount of time characters in Dragon Age bob like idiots when it’s not their turn the attack animations are extended into dizzying combos so that even your wizard’s default attack involves whirling a staff and whizzing off multiple blasts while striking dramatic poses. To reduce the amount of pathfinding calculations by the second game the rogue’s backstab ability somehow involved teleporting behind enemies so you didn’t actually have to walk round them. In Dragon Age: Inquisition the amount of whizz-bang special effects hurtling across the screen every time an ability is used can almost distract you from what’s going on, though the longer you play the more the clunkiness behind the curtain becomes apparent.

A leaping attack in Dragon Age 2.

By contrast the Mass Effect games remove those hidden turns, giving you the responsiveness of an actual real-time game. When you look down the scope of your M-98 Widow Anti-Material Rifle, take a breath, and then place a round in the head of an advancing Collector, you’re doing it while the battle smoothly carries on around you. When you do pause to give orders they’re carried out instantly as well, your squadmates launching Incinerate or Singularity in devastating synchronization. By Mass Effect 3 the system was so polished they could scrap the ability to pause altogether for the multiplayer mode and still have something that was surprisingly fun. The multiplayer mode of Dragon Age: Inquisition didn’t hold up nearly as well.

Pillars of Eternity makes its own tweaks, of course. Its engagement mechanic punishes running around like a headless chicken, there’s an option to play in slow motion rather than stuttering stop-start, and of course the spell effects look a lot more impressive (although that means if you pause at the wrong time half your party will be obscured by bursts of light and flame). But it still has characters who get confused by having to walk all the way round an ogre to get somewhere, or wait until an oil slick has been summoned to run right through it, or blithely stroll straight into traps they’ve already detected. Wasteland 2, another Kickstarter-funded resurrection of old-fashioned RPGs, modernized the combat of the early Fallout games with a healthy dose of XCOM, and was better for it. But while Pillars of Eternity preserves a lot of things about old games that are worth keeping, its preservation of pausable real-time combat feels like a step in the wrong direction—one that leads back into the darkness of the Nashkel Mines, where I never want to place foot again.

But if anyone finds Minsc the ranger in there, say ‘hi’ for me.

An Assortment Of Lesser-Known No Man's Sky Facts

As we near the end of our month of No Man's Sky coverage , it's time to focus on the smaller details.

, it's time to focus on the smaller details. This game is huge and has many elements that inspire questions about space, gameplay, science, and more. Read on for excerpts from our extensive interviews with Hello Games' managing director Sean Murray about things you may be curious about, but never got a straight answer on.

Will There Be Mod Support?
Sean Murray: I think PC games should have Mods and the ability to mod. I almost feel like we need to give them the tools otherwise then they're just going to start making them, tearing apart your game. That's what I have more of a fear of. I think if they get in there and they just start disassembling it they will end up creating parallel universes; like genuinely that's what would happen. They would change the numbers and then someone else would be playing in a different universe, but still posting to our servers.

We will probably give them some tools to allow them to do some stuff.  But we don't want people creating new planets within an existing game. I don't think we can stop them doing that if there's a clever enough programmer, which there always is, there are going to be weird things with the game unofficially. But officially I think we probably want to give people some modding ability just so they leave our game alone. Just give them enough creative outlet to keep them busy rather than them thinking of all of the destructive things that they could do.

Ship Summoning Is Out
When we started off you used to be able to summon your ship. You would land your ship, and then you would just walk anywhere, and you would press a button to summon it. I thought it was quite nice, but it made for weird gameplay because it wasn’t like Destiny. People just would walk, summon, walk, summon. They were summoning it for practically a toilet break. They would walk and see something that was on the other side of this room and summon their ship and fly over there. It just amazed us how lazy people were. So we can't have this. It just looks silly.

You Can’t Steal Ships
No, there’s no stealing ships, but we’ll see because everyone asks about that. I just don’t like it. We’re trying to keep the game not too destructive. I think as soon as you do that it becomes the game about stealing ships. We’ll see.

Game File Size
There is a core part of it that would need hardly any download. When we first started making it, I thought it would genuinely be that. It would be the size of the executable and then the small amount of data. That's what we were aiming for. So I was gonna be like, I know this sounds ridiculous but we thought it would be like 10, 15 megs or something like that. I can get it down to that and have a lot there with a really small download. Like the galactic map takes no space, which is crazy. And all of the terrain of the planets take no space. And the textures that are on the planets only take a couple of megs.  And the skies take no space.  90 percent of what you see takes no space.

But it was very naive of me to think that we would have that really small download because we need sound effects and we need weapons and cockpits, things that are still similar across the game. And we have prototypes that we use as blueprints. And they actually take up space. So actually it will end up coming out the size of a regular game. This makes me sound weird or a bit arrogant or something, but the production values are maybe a little bit higher than a regular download game. Like a lot of download games might be 2D or overly simplistic. So it’s probably more approaching your triple-A game which would be maybe 5GB or something like that.

Isolation Vs. Community
You want them to feel quite vulnerable, like we're all in this together. And I want that feeling where you bring up the map and you can see every now and then a star twinkling because someone has made a discovery - just that sense that this thing is a little bit alive and there are a lot of people out there. I think that's a really nice feeling. It's not just you are a tiny dot and the world's a horrible place and there are robots and creatures and sharks that are just gonna kill you all the time. You want that feeling that there's a slight sense of purpose. This is all getting a bit more filled in. It's becoming a bit more hospitable.

Creating A New Periodic Table
I wanted us to use the Earth's periodic table, and I thought that would be quite cool. I thought we'd teach people about science. It turns out people don't know chemistry that well. And it is no help to them. You're like, "What are you trying to do combining those two elements? They will never go together." They're just like, “Eh.”

It's a shame, but whatever way we teach people in school there are certain things that are a total turn-off even though they can be intellectual sci-fi and stuff like that. It's amazing to me that you can have somebody super into sci-fi but school has managed to turn them off actual science.  It's like they're back in the schoolroom again and they're like, “Bleh.”

What things can we make? We think about molecules and think about crystalline structures and stuff like that and then they're just like, “Eh, sounds boring.”  And you just switch it, you change the names, and suddenly it's cool. So there's that element to it.

But also we just wanted to be a bit freer. There's only something like seven different compounds or something like that that we create really good types of liquids that you could have creatures survive in. And we might want more than that for the game. We might want to decide our own rules and you just get tied up into too many conversations about it and things like that. Sometimes gameplay and science don't sync together. That sort of a shame but I think for the best.

Grant [Duncan, art director] and I had such a battle over this, these planets have green skies. And there's no such thing. You see it in sci-fi all the time. Light is defracted by the chemical compound. The things that can form an atmosphere - there's only a certain number of them and they defract light differently. And none of them will ever produce green.

We have our own periodic table. We had it so you can see it in the game. It's a button you can press it pops up and it tells you a little bit of info about the planet. It tells you the chemical compounds. So when you come out of water, it will pop in and say what type of area you are in. And when you go underneath the water it tells you. And when you're in space it tells you.  So that's your little read out. It comes up automatically. Then you think, “I could survive in that.”

Because Grant wanted green skies I ended up adding this thing that was like “unknown air detected.” I was like, “What are we doing? We brought the magic green sky. Green sky component detected. Where have we gone to?”

But it's true. You have it in sci-fi all the time. Neil deGrasse Tyson likes pointing out things all the time about films and stuff that aren't real. He said like the Daily Show globe spins the wrong way.  But I was watching Cosmos and Titan in the pre-rendered stuff had a green sky. It's a me thing. I think everyone just goes, “The sky can be green. Whatever.”

VR Headset Support
Personally, there's nothing more futuristic for me than playing this procedurally generated universe thing and having some sort of VR headset on. We have played about with them. Having said that we are a small team. We're making this super ambitious game. People would probably rather we got the game out sooner than, “Let's do this stuff with it.” But I don't know. I think it's a really good fit from the experiments that we've had.

It'll be interesting. I don't think anyone knows how the plan for Oculus or Morpheus is gonna work over the next few years. I don't think Sony knows that. I don't think Oculus knows that. And we definitely don't. But I can tell you that I've had a VR headset working in a very rudimentary way and walked around a planet. To me anyway it's cool experience. We're all about being in a space and experiencing it.

The Lack of NPCs
I feel like games just don't do NPCs very well. I don't know how much it adds. We've talked about it. It would actually be easy using the procedural stuff to put in every single one of those trading posts a guy behind a desk. Sometimes I think about doing it. Who knows? Maybe people feel they need that. But at the moment we don't have that. And I feel like we don't need it. I don't feel it would add anything. But maybe people will really miss it. It's not feedback that we've had so far, but I don't think it gains that much to just have this cold dead eyed guy. “Welcome to my shop. Do you want to buy some weapons?”  And just a few loops, bits of vocal as well. Like when you go into shops in Destiny it's like, "A shipwright’s work is never done." That's how I feel is that it takes from it.

That Damn Shark!
That first trailer that we showed at VGX [in 2013], it starts off underwater and there's a shark there. I don't know how many times we took that shot, but it was like hundreds. All you do is you start off underwater, you turn around, you walk up, and you walk along the beach, and then you get into your ship and fly up. It should be so simple. I wanted the shark in there because he scares away the fish that he goes past, it just gives some visual interest. And he just kept attacking us.

It was late at night and we didn't want to start changing the code so we were just like, “Come on, let's just take it again because sometimes he doesn't attack you.” And then you have these brilliant moments where he didn't come at you and you were like great and you would walk up and something else would go wrong.

Are There Twin Stars?
Yeah. They’re really rare. We're going to have to work on this. You can't just zoom in on them. They look graphically slightly different.

Are There Gas Giants?
You are always able to walk around a planet. There are ones that aesthetically look gaseous. They are actually what toxic planets kind of are. But there's no point in a planet that you can't land your ship on. And we felt like it would be frustrating for the players to see this planet because you and I would know what gaseous planets are but then everyone else might not.  And they would be like, “Oh, I get out and fall?”  It's just a weird concept for people, but I still wanted to have something in there.

Is There Planetary Weather?
We use temperature and humidity to make sure, like, if you see rain, you're probably on a rainy planet and it probably rains there pretty much all the time. We don't want you to go to a planet and see everything that is out there, because that kind of is what Earth is like. You see everything in one planet and there's almost no need to travel.

Throughout the month of December we have a deep dive on the galactic map, video interviews with the team, insight on the generated soundtrack, a special-edition podcast (coming soon!), and more. Click on the banner below to visit our No Man's Sky hub and see everything collected in one place.

State of Decay sells 250K copies on XBLA in two days

Dust 514 Review

Dust 514 Review Within the farthest reaches of the Tranquillity server, a tale of debauchery and deception is always waiting to be told. CCP Games’ Eve Online is an MMO that, by nature, is driven by conflict. It’s often heralded as one of the most interesting games to read about, but for the inexperienced player, one of the most boring to actually play. This is a mantra that continues to ring true

BioWare creates new Mass Effect level to help fan propose

When Mass Effect fan Jackie sought BioWare Montreal's help in proposing to her partner, the studio pulled out all the stops .

. A small team made up of level designer Colin Campbell, writer Ann Lemay, and QA analyst Barrett Rodych put together a completely new level loaded with subtle references to their relationship, then studio manager Marie-Renée Brisebois cooked up a fake contest as a way to bring them into the studio to play it.

A letter sent to Jackie and her partner, Amy, informed them they'd won "A Day With Our Devs" contest at PAX East, and that part of the prize included playing a new Mass Effect level in order to provide feedback to the developers. Lemay, Rodych and other employees made the whole thing look legit by watching and taking notes as she played.

"I was really nervous, even having gone through the level 20 times on my own making sure all the doors were working and all the message boxes were working," Rodych said. "But I would do it again in a heartbeat."

The final room contained a single console and Jackie and Amy's names for one another painted on a wall in 50-foot high graffiti. When Amy activated the console, a message popped up stating, "Dear Amy, Jackie would like to ask you something. Love, all of us at BioWare."

Jackie then took out the ring and proposed. "When she got to that room, everyone around was riveted and hoping she’d say yes," Brisebois said, and of course, she did. "It was a beautiful sight to see. No matter how grumpy you are, when you see a thing like that you can’t help but smile and maybe even tear up a bit."

A happy story with a happy ending—isn't that nice? Well done, BioWare.

Freeform Chaos: Hands-On With Just Cause 3

Some games craft a tight narrative experience and then usher players through the story like it was a ride at Disneyland.

Some games craft a tight narrative experience and then usher players through the story like it was a ride at Disneyland. Avalanche Studios' Just Cause series, on the other hand, opts to drop players into tropical islands without artificial borders and then hands players the tools to start blowing things up. Games like this have to be experienced before they can be judged. Fortunately, two GI editors had the opportunity to jump into Just Cause 3’s open world and cause some havoc. Here is their tale.

Ben: Bryan, we both just got back from a trip to New York, where we sat down with the Avalanche staff and got to play their game. I don’t know about you, but I had a blast. The first thing I did was grapple a member of the militia to a flagpole and watch him fly into the air using the new tension feature that pulls two grappled objects together. Less than a minute after getting my hands on the controller, I was using passing cars to parasail through the air and dodging gunfire from a grumpy police force.

Bryan: I made sure to fire up a bunch of Just Cause 2 before we went on the trip to refamiliarize myself with the series and was surprised by how rough the controls were. It came out in 2010, and there have been a lot of advances since then. When I picked up Just Cause 3 for the first time, the leap ahead was readily apparent. I was also drawn to the cars and grappled on top of one. Instead of being stuck in the center of the roof you can now walk around on the tops of vehicles freely. They also cut the ability to hang off the sides of the car, which I never thought worked very well anyway.

Ben: I agree, it feels like a more modern shooter now. I was also impressed with how intuitive it is to switch between the wingsuit and the parachute. If you grapple onto a passing car, you can launch yourself into the air and then deploy your wingsuit to soar through the air, then switch over to the parachute to get some extra stability while aiming, and then grapple onto the side of a building to gain speed before launching into the wingsuit again and repeating the whole process. During the trip, the guys kept saying that you’re weaker when you’re on the ground. I found that to be true, because Rico is so light and agile in the air, and it’s actually pretty easy to keep that grapple/wingsuit/parachute combo going so you can stay in the air indefinitely.

Bryan: The parachute controls much more naturally now so it’s easier to circle around a base and shoot and chuck grenades on all the chumps below. Another big change is the infinite supply of C4. You’re never stuck shooting at a fuel tank with your crappy pistol when you’re out of everything else. You can set up to five of these explosives at a time and detonate an entire base. Did you get to see the big spherical fuel tank? It’s like an enormous EPCOT globe, and when you blow it up it makes a huge flaming mushroom cloud.

Next up: We dive into the grappling system, talk about vehicle handling, and blow up a military base.

Insomniac's engine guru expounds on his studio's approach to code

Mike Acton serves as Insomniac Games' engine director, and last month he delivered a keynote address about the studio's approach to optimizing code at the CppCon C++ conference that offers some potentially interesting insight for game programmers.

Acton outlines the working pilosophy of Insomniac's engine team, runs down how the inherent limitations of C++ can restrict the performance of console games ("How are games like the Mars rovers?") and takes pains to strike down some common programming wisdom that's antithetical to game design.

He also offers some practical examples of how developers can architect their code to better satisfy the unique demands of console game development, and explains the reasoning behind some of Insomniac's data-oriented design practices.

It's a talk worth watching, if only to better understand what exactly an "engine team" does at a studio like Insomniac. Acton's keynote was filmed by Bash Films and posted to the CppCon YouTube channelthis week, so we've taken the liberty of embedding it above.

The Elder Scrolls V Desktop Wallpapers

We've been rolling out as much information as we can about Bethesda's new role-playing game throughout this month, and our readers seem to be as excited as we are about the potential of this great-looking title.

As a little thank you for following our coverage throughout the month, we've put together a couple of desktop wallpapers. Feel free to download one or both of them (in the size of your choice) from the links below.

We also wanted to let you know that there's more to come. We have some exciting new gameplay details and glimpses into the Bethesda studio coming next week. Check back in the coming days and you'll find a dedicated article on the combat of Skyrim, including Bethesda's exciting dual-hand approach to battles. We'll have a video about the talented art team and the work they do at the studio. In addition, watch for a focused piece on Skyrim's completely overhauled user interface and menu system, and how it differs from what you remember in Oblivion.

Need to catch up on the rest of what's going on with Skyrim? Explore our game hub by clicking on the image below.

Thanks again to all our readers, and a special thank you to the folks over at Bethesda  for all their hard work on this project we're all so excited about. Enjoy the wallpapers, and have a great weekend!

The 51 biggest games we expect to see at E3 2012

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An Interview With Shinji Mikami, The Father Of Survival Horror

Shinji Mikami's career began at Capcom in 1990.

Shinji Mikami's career began at Capcom in 1990. He's known as the father of survival horror today, but his early work suggested a much different title. The first three games that Mikami worked on were all Disney properties: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Aladdin, and Goof Troop. He was given the chance to create his own intellectual property for the PlayStation in 1996. Mikami and his team introduced players to a mansion infested with zombies in Resident Evil. This genre-defining release paved a bloody road for Mikami's career. In addition to the Resident Evil series, Mikami helped create Dino Crisis, Devil May Cry, Killer 7, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Viewtiful Joe, Vanquish, and God Hand. After departing Capcom, Mikami helped create Shadows of the Damned for Electronic Arts. His latest venture with his new studio Tango Gameworks and publisher Bethesda Softworks is taking him back to his survival horror roots. The Evil Withinis his first survival horror game since 2005's smash-hit Resident Evil 4.

In Game Informer's November issue, I played through the first five chapters of The Evil Within, finding it to be as much a new take on survival horror as it is a love letter to Mikami's previous work. I talked to him about the state of survival horror,
embracing different types of horror, and a nod to
Resident Evil that he's included in The Evil Within.

You are often referenced as the father of Survival Horror. What’s it like to hold such a title?
I am proud of the fact that I have been able to create and introduce a new genre that is neither pure horror nor pure action. I am grateful to the fans that have supported my games and the genre and I cannot thank them enough.

What are your thoughts on the current state of survival horror? Are you pleased with the direction it has taken?
It’s definitely gone more toward action. This is just my personal take, but to me the definition of survival horror is a game where fear and the sense of exhilaration coincide. So some of the games out there don’t exactly fit my definition. But I don’t have any rights to the definition of the genre so people can call them survival horror if they feel it fits. Basically, I understand that the spectrum of what survival horror is to the general public is pretty wide.

How did The Evil Within come to be? Did it start with a story idea? The horror elements?
I wanted to make a pure survival horror game. The start of it all was that simple. Also, I knew I wanted to depict horror in a world not set in one reality.

The Evil Within contains spirits, hallucinations, Japanese-style horror, Western horror, enemies that stalk you – a bit of everything. Why did you choose to borrow elements from multiple parts of the genre rather than focusing on one?
I’ve been exposed to horror pretty much all of my life regardless of whether that’s Japanese or Western, so I can understand why you see both elements.

Many of the horror elements in The Evil Within are not tied to reality, and instead fall into the realm of psychological horror. How does this different setting influence your design for horror and gameplay elements?
As a form of expression I wanted to use something other than realism. I like the fact that you are never really sure what is going around you, which adds to the horror elements of the game.

How much time and iteration goes into making sure the player has just enough ammo for a combat encounter?
Balancing horror and fun certainly is a huge challenge. From player speed versus horror, darkness versus level of visibility, spacing of save points versus risk of “retrys” and player motivation, the amount of ammunition versus horror, as well as considering the player‘s play style – there were so many things to account for simultaneously. It wasn’t something that could be determined by fiddling with numbers or logic. It meant a lot of trial and error, and yes, it is a painstaking process. I’m glad I don’t remember the number of times we reiterated.

A lot of the game seems to revolve around the human brain. What kind of research did you do regarding this element of The Evil Within?
I spent time reading up on how the brain worked when dealing with information and learning and what parts of the brain controlled human emotions. It wasn’t like I had a neurology expert, but I want to thank Goggle search for their assistance.

In some sections in the game, the best course of action is to run, but the game doesn’t tell the player this outright. How do you lead them down the path of fleeing rather than fighting?
There are three ways. First, introduce a creature that no one’s ever seen before. In this case we have to make sure that even with the weapons you have, they most likely won’t work. Second, we simply let players know either from story or NPCs that they have to run away. In this case the situation must be very persuasive such as having hordes of enemies coming at you. Third, is decreasing the amount of ammo toward the point where you want the player to run. If the player has less ammo, it’s natural for the player to runaway rather than confront the enemy. But this is the most unideal method of the three.

Are there any horror elements that you left out of the game because they were too grotesque or frightening?
I never leave out anything because it’s too scary, but I do leave out because it may be just too grotesque.

Are you finding you can do new things with horror elements using the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware?
I’m happy how light and dark parts of the game turned out. I think there’s more depth. But it’s a fine line between making it look beautiful versus how visually scary it looks as horror.

The first zombie reveal in The Evil Within is almost identical to Resident Evil's. Is this an intentional nod back to your past for survival horror fans?
Initially, I didn’t think about putting that scene in the game but I was hearing voices from the team that it would make horror fans happy – hence it’s in the game. There are other scenes in the game that pay homage and horror fans may recognize them as well.

We have a full month of horror-themed coverage set up for
gameinformer.com, complete with video features and more. Be sure to
visit our hub throughout the month for a steady stream of updates.

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Top 10 Horror Game Survivors

Scary games give us a lot to talk about, from life-saving
weapons to nerve-jangling scares.

Scary games give us a lot to talk about, from life-saving
weapons to nerve-jangling scares. We, the players, are on the receiving end of
these experiences, but so are these games' enduring protagonists. In the spirit
of our October celebration of horror games ( check out our cover story reveal), we're
ranking the very best survivors in horror games. The list is varied, from an
antihero who killed for a second chance at life to another who has seen the
horrors of space travel. These are the Top 10 Horror Game Survivors.

10. Point Man – F.E.A.R.

The Point Man was destined at birth to become a bad-ass soldier, and thusly a very capable survivor. He's handy with a variety of weaponry and heavy artillery, giving him an edge when facing off against the opposition. His creepy origins also give him a unique perspective on the battlefield. His mother, the series' creepy Alma, left him with some unique psychic capabilities (though muted in comparison to his brother, series antagonist Paxton Fettel). Point Man can slow down time to better mow down his enemies, which he owes to his mom according to F.E.A.R. 3. When it comes to taking down waves of armed foes and enduring psychic disturbances from a ghostly little girl, Point Man is expert.

9. Frank West – Dead Rising

Mr. West's photojournalistic experience covering wars comes in more than handy during a zombie outbreak in a Colorado mall. The beefy shutterbug can snap pictures on the fly one moment then bash a zombie to pulp with a mannequin torso the next, all while wearing nothing but his underwear. The sheer number of zombies on screen at once in this Xbox 360 title makes Frank's ability to survive even more impressive. What's more, he had a strict, unyielding time limit ticking down the entire time.

8. James Earl Cash – Manhunt

Survival isn't generally a viable option for someone sentenced to death, but James Earl Cash gets a second chance at life thanks to a demented film director. Starkweather, an unhinged filmmaker with a taste for snuff, offers Cash a free get-out-of-jail-free card if he can kill his way through various gangs of murderous criminals. Death is a sure thing in prison, so Cash has nothing to lose by getting his hands bloody. Living through the final showdown with a fat, chainsaw-wielding *** in a pig mask is no small task, but Cash manages to squeak by with a fresh shot at life on the other side of the prison bars.

7. James Sunderland – Silent Hill 2

Harry Mason explored Silent Hill looking for his daughter, who last he saw was alive and well. James Sunderland is in a different boat, traveling to the creepy town after getting a freshly penned letter from his dead wife. Where Harry battled terrible, knife-wielding ghost children and skinless gorillas, James confronts the demons of his subconscious. One of the worst manifestations of his brain is Pyramid Head, a terrible giant that pursues James when he expects it least. Whether you look at James as a true survivor depends in part on the ending you earn, but at the very least he's a man dedicated to the survival of his marriage. Death be damned.

6. Clementine – The Walking Dead

This star of Telltale's The Walking Dead series has the severe disadvantage of being a defenseless child when the zombie apocalypse hits. Sure, she has Lee's help for the really rough bits, but she would've have made it long without her wits and a keen survivor's sense. How many little girls would be smart enough to hide in their treehouse during an outbreak? Even more, Clem has impressive amounts of grit that allow her to shoulder past traumatizing events and significant loss. She's the type of person her ravaged world needs.

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Developer Salute – Ninja Theory

When Ninja Theory announced it would be taking the reins of the Devil May Cry series and it unveiled its new dark-haired Dante, the Internet collectively grabbed their keyboard-shaped pitch forks and started stabbing them into the air.

When Ninja Theory announced it would be taking the reins of the Devil May Cry series and it unveiled its new dark-haired Dante, the Internet collectively grabbed their keyboard-shaped pitch forks and started stabbing them into the air. I, on the other hand, got incredibly excited.

Since my first playthrough of Heavenly Sword, I have been a great admirer of Ninja Theory. Their focus on storytelling and actor performance capture elevates its virtual experiences to something that lies somewhere between a video game and a film. Heavenly Sword may have lacked some technical polish, but its characters and world were absolutely engrossing. It was easy to look past some of the glitches when Nariko and each of her supporting cast members felt and moved more like a real person than any virtual character I had seen to date. Even Heavenly Sword’s most ridiculous and over the top characters are believable and memorable. They seem to be a product of Ninja Theory’s insistence on letting its actors perform and experiment, rather than simply using them as hired hands to say words into a microphone.

With games like The Last of Us, we’re becoming more and more familiar with the importance of actor performance capture. Acting in a video game today requires much more than the ability to speak well. It now encompasses an entire performance, and it will undoubtedly elevate in importance as we move into the next generation. Ninja Theory seemed to recognize the value of good performance and capture before most other developers. It partnered with Andy Serkis, the unofficial master of digital performance capture, before most studios even built their own in-house motion-capture studios.

I remember seeing Game Informer's Crackdown 2 cover back when I was just a subscriber. I was a huge fan of the original Crackdown, but it was the text on the top of the page that got me really excited. I headed straight to the feature covering Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, ignoring every page on the way to see what the Heavenly Sword team was working on next.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West’s ending is a head scratcher, but it does little to diminish the odyssey leading to it. There are many moments in Enslaved where Trip and Monkey feel incredibly real. Trip’s return home is heartbreaking, and Monkey’s response to Trip’s willingness to remove his slave collar late in the game continued to resonate with me long after moving past those sections, and well after witnessing the game’s admittedly strange ending.

Which brings me all the way back to Devil May Cry. Before I saw the trailer for DmC, but knew Ninja Theory was taking command of the freelance demon hunter’s ship, I knew it was exactly what Dante needed. I barely made it through Devil May Cry 4 without rolling my eyes every few minutes, and I was ecstatic to see what Ninja Theory could do with established characters. The developer was so good at introducing and building new characters that I couldn’t wait to see what it did with ones I already knew. It was like seeing a favorite author take over a well-known comic book series. The result was easily my favorite Devil May Cry in the series.

With capture technology moving forward as it is, I can’t wait to see what Ninja Theory has up its sleeves for Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Its worlds are so beautiful and fantastic, and the characters that inhabit them feel like people I could meet in real life – even if they get dressed by flipping in a trailer as it flies through the air. With experiences like Heavenly Sword, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and Ninja Theory's take on Devil May Cry, this developer has earned my excitement for every game it announces.

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Dissecting The Horror Of The Evil Within's New Gameplay

As part of our October cover story on the past and future of horror games , Game Informer executive editor Andrew Reiner played through and wrote extensively about the first five chapters of The Evil Within.

about the first five chapters of The Evil Within. You can learn more about the game from its creator Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame, or you can watch Reiner's video discussion about the game with horror-fan Tim Turi. They talk about the game's variety of horror influences, how they all tie together into one world, and why it has more in common with Eternal Darkness than you'd expect.

Watch the video below to see new gameplay from The Evil Within and learn about how the game compares to classics like Resident Evil 4.

Click on the banner below to enter our hub for horror-themed content that will be updating throughout the month.

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Jump to Section: Best Price Comments Pros A calming and melodic soundtrack Simple non-demanding gameplay The pervasive European aesthetic Cons All-over-the-place design direction Complete understanding requires multiple playthroughs Rain's message is ultimately confusing Tutto le strade portano al circo . In Italian this phrase means “All roads lead to the circus,” and you'll find it scrawled on a

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28 Developers Share Their Picks For Best Horror Games Ever

We ranked the Top 25 Horror Games of All Time for our recent Game Informer issue celebrating everything horror.

celebrating everything horror. But we're not the only ones interested in naming and ranking the best the genre has to offer – 28 developers from the game industry have shared their individual Top 5 Horror Games of All Time lists with us.

The participating developers include the creators of games like Left 4 Dead, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Resident Evil, Dead Space, Alan Wake, Borderlands, and more. Have fun finding your favorite developers, comparing their picks to yours, and looking for the most popular choices. Check out our analysis of these developers' choices at the end of the article to see which game received the most votes, discrepancies between our list and the developers' picks, and more.

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Thomas Grip Frictional Games Creative Director Best Known For: Penumbra, Amnesia 1. Silent Hill 2. Silent Hill 2 3. Resident Evil 4. System Shock 2 5. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth	Chris Ashton Turtle Rock Studios Design Director and Co-Founder Best Known For: Left 4 Dead, Evolve 1. System Shock 2 2. Resident Evil 3. The Walking Dead Season 1 4. Slender: The Eight Pages 5. Limbo
Bruce Straley Naughty Dog Game Director Best Known For: Uncharted, The Last of Us 1. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly 2. Resident Evil 4 3. Dead Space 2 4. Condemned: Criminal Origins 5. Outlast	Phil Robb Turtle Rock Studios Creative Director and Co-Founder Best Known For: Left 4 Dead, Evolve 1. State of Decay 2. Left 4 Dead 3. The Walking Dead Season 1 4. Resident Evil 5. Limbo
Neil Druckmann Naughty Dog Creative Director Best Known For: Uncharted, The Last of Us 1. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly 2. Manhunt 3. Silent Hill 2 4. Resident Evil 5. Condemned: Criminal Origins	Steve Papoutsis Visceral Games General Manager Best Known For: Dead Space, Battlefield: Hardline 1. Resident Evil 2. Doom 3. Dead Space 4. System Shock 2 5. The Walking Dead Season 1
Ted Price Insomniac Games President Best Known For: Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, Sunset Overdrive 1. Resident Evil 4 2. Doom 3. Left 4 Dead 4. Dead Rising 3 5. Parasite Eve	Drew Murray Insomniac Games Game Director Best Known For: Resistance, Sunset Overdrive 1. Resident Evil 4 2. Call of Cthulhu (pen-and-paper) 3. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow 4. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly 5. Alan Wake