Game Design & the Next Generation of Systems
World Centre for Digital Media, 555 Great Northern Way

• Dave Elton, EA Black Box (chair)
• John Doyle, EA Black Box
• Sean Smiley, Propaganda
• Eric Holmes, Radical Games
• Clint Hocking, Ubisoft Montreal

• Control schemes for games need to be more accessible. Nintendo is on this.
• Even demanding control schemes can be simplified (FPS -> Call of Duty 2).
• Nintendo’s attempt to capture emerging markets is largely due to the fact that the Japanese market is shrinking. This does not seem to be happening in the rest of the world. The Wii might not have as large an impact outside Japan.
• Developing these games provides both new opportunities and new risks.
• Wii control brings back social elements to gaming – seeing someone act out the game is fun. Guitar Hero is an example.

• Next gen is all about online – not head to head, but being connected to people and information in a variety of different ways.
• There are great opportunities for online storytelling and creating massive communities that carry their own momentum.
• Not every game will be online. Getting killed in Battlefield every 3 kills does not provide a power fantasy. For prolonged ass-kicking, a single player campaign can be great fun.
• At the launch of SSX3 the dev team played people online around the world and learned a lot from it.
• You can have a consolidated online persona that plays many games. This is appealing, although limited to each console’s service.

• Total Annihilation offered incremental updates that shifted the benefit of two competing forces back and forth. It extends the lifespan of a game.
• DLC can help with incremental releases. Rainbow 6 has new versions of games between major releases that could be distributed online.
• DLC can help with staff retention. They can be working on DLC between projects.
• Some companies will inevitably screw up micro-payments. It must appear as additional content, not existing content that needs to be unlocked.
• Episodic DLC is trying to emulate the success of 24 and Lost where there are cliff-hanger endings and massive anticipation for more bursts of content.
• Game development is different. Episodes are at least 9 months apart (Valve). Consumers might lose interest.
• We can’t hear consumers begging for episodic content.
• Incremental content is working well in Korea and China but the west has a lot to learn. There was a second economy of $300M in World of Warcraft that slipped through Vivendi’s fingers.

• Assassins Creed (AC) is a great example. It uses sophisticated crowd behaviour. This realistic feature is used as a gameplay system. That is important.
• AC uses ‘messy’ systems: things that seem unpredictable but that can be used in predictable ways. Crowds and climbing physics are examples. You can manipulate bricks and poles rather than simply looking for a climbing texture.
• These types of systems will characterize next gen. They can also be called ‘chaotic’ systems. Crowds, cities, physics and liquids are all examples that we are likely to experience.
• Is the AC level of detail really necessary? Who cares how realistically the character moves his hands? Cosmetic realism is necessary to compliment the realism used for gameplay. It detracts from the experience if these cosmetic details fall behind in quality. These details make a game feel right, or ‘richer’.
• We must be careful where we invest our effort in the jump to HD technology though. There is no point spending 2 months modelling a tree in a racing game if you fly past it at 100mph.

• Next gen still does not arguably start until Sony and Microsoft lock horns in the marketplace.
• It is an exciting time. There are greater opportunities in design but greater risks in budgets. It is not clear what direction games must take as the reality gap begins to close.
• We must not lose sight of story, entertainment, intrigue and fresh ideas. We must spend more time in pre-production to get our core concepts right to avoid being consumed by the new technology.
• The different direction the Wii is taking means that game development for the new systems has fragmented. We need to look for new revenue streams to support this. We are still waiting for a truly revolutionary experience in next gen gaming.