By Anonymous on Apr 08, 2017 08:30 pm The Mummy (1999) is one of the Best Films Ever Made. Here's 5 things you might not know about it. #FraserFansUnite
There is nothing more exciting than watching a movie with a high-speed car chase, especially if it ends with a spectacular crash. With a new Fast and the Furious movie coming out on April 14, we thought we'd take a look at the 10 best movies that heavily involve cars in their storylines. Using scores primarily from Metacritic--and a few from IMDb--we're starting with number 10.
10. Cars (2006)
The Pixar film Cars takes the audience into a world inhabitated entirely by anthropomorphic automobiles. The movie follows Lightning McQueen, a racecar who learns the meaning of family.
While many people are familiar with the 2003 version of The Italian Job, it is originally based on a 1969 Michael Caine film. In this heist movie, a group of thieves plan on stealing a shipment of gold by creating a traffic jam in the streets of Turin.
Jeff Bridges stars in the biography of Preston Tucker, an ambitious car designer during the 1940s who has a revolutionary idea for an automobile. The biggest challenge wasn't designing the car, though: It was taking on the auto-industry.
The cult classic starring Steve McQueen follows a San Francisco police officer looking for a criminal kingpin who killed a witness he was protecting. The film is filled with gritty car chase scenes set throughout the hills of the city.
Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl star in Rush, the true story of James Hunt and Niki Lauda, two rival Formula One drivers. Things were very heated between the two, which led to some horrific crashes.
The Mad Max sequel is unlike the majority of the other films on this list because it takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The movie again follows Max, who helps a small community fight off bandits.
This 1971 film isn't incredibly well-known, but the trailer is insane. A man who is driving to the desert for a business appointment finds himself in the crosshairs of a truck driver who chases him around, trying to kill him.
Part of the 2007 double feature Grindhouse, Death Proof follows two groups of women who are stalked by Stuntman Mike, played by Kurt Russell. He uses his "death proof" car to kill his victims.
Metacritic Score: 77 (The score is reflective of the double-feature also featuring Planet Terror)
2. Drive (2011)
Drive follows a Hollywood stuntman, played by Ryan Gosling, who moonlights as a getaway driver. He becomes the target of some very bad men in Los Angeles after agreeing to help his neighbor.
Finally, the best movie revolving around cars is Mad Max: Fury Road. It stars Tom Hardy as the titular character as he helps Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, and a group of enslaved women escape the clutches of Immortan Joe.
By Anonymous on Apr 08, 2017 06:30 pm 2017 has been a killer year for games so far but we still have 9 more months of games to go. The Lobby crew talks about the ones they are the most excited about.
Ahead of the new shooter Get Even's release next month, you can now listen to some of the game's music tracks composed by Olivier Deriviere. You may not know him by name, but you're likely familiar with his work, as he composed the music for Assassin's Creed IV: Freedom Cry and Remember Me.
Developer The Farm 51 and Bandai Namco are promising something new for Get Even's soundtrack, as the music will combine "real-time MIDI," performances by live musicians," and "other audio tricks." The music itself blends electronic and live orchestra, as performed by the Brussels Philharmonic.
You can listen to all five of the preview tracks through the Soundcloud embed below. Additionally, the mini-documentary above sheds more light on how Deriviere and The Farm 51 went about creating the game's music and their ambitions for it, stylistically and tonally.
There will be 19 tracks in all on the Get Even soundtrack, spanning 60 minutes. A premium version of the soundtrack will come with a music sheet and extra songs.
GameSpot spoke with Deriviere about the soundtrack for Get Even. He told us about how he became attached to the project and revealed that he turned down offers from AAA franchises to work on the game because Get Even is a "very personal game, unlike any other."
Another interesting element to the music is that it's all connected to the story...somehow.
"Everything in the music makes sense and has a purpose that connects to the story of the game," Deriviere said. "If you hear a solo violin, if you hear a clock, if you hear breathing…etc…it is all connected."
He also discussed the "music journey" players will get to experience with Get Even, touching on all manner of tones and feelings, including "melancholic, oppressed, [and] happy."
GameSpot: How did you come to be attached to Get Even?
Deriviere: I think, as for any game, that I landed the title due to a number of factors including an element of luck as well as hard work and friendship. This game was such an amazing challenge that I even turned down some other exciting offers, including some AAA franchises, because I hoped we would achieve our ambition to create a very personal game, unlike any other.
When you say you're "challenging industry conventions" with the music for Get Even, I presume this is the real-time MIDI system. Can you talk more about how that works and what it required from you, the performers, and the game?
Get Even is not a VR game but its setting takes place in VR so I had to approach it as a VR game. Therefore, I wondered how music would work in a world where everything looks, hears and feels so physical. How can an abstract music cue play when there is no ground for it? So the first rule we created was that every composition should start with an actual source from the world. Let's take the first level. You progress in a building with many different rooms. In the real world rooms emit a random tone called "room tone." We designed them to be all in the key of C as well as for the lights buzzing around you. So we have a low pitch C and a high buzzing pitch C that will morph seamlessly to a drone texture. As you progress through the level. But that's not all! On top of that we have a very slow clock mechanical sound triggered in MIDI that will accelerate the more you approach your objective. At the end of the level we hear a live recording in sync with the clock and the drone that creates a very emotional and intense moment in the game. This could not be achieved in a traditional way.
What kind of preparation did you do for this project?
This was very challenging work and preparation was key. I had to do a lot of research on both an artistic and technical level to make sure it would meet what the game needed. To merge real time generated music with pre-recorded music was really fun because we had so much more flexibility. But what really mattered to me, and for any game I score, is to be meaningful with what I am doing. Writing music just for the sake of adding a musical layer to a game has never been enough to me and Get Even is so mesmerizing that I had to make sure everything you would hear is connected to the story. Everything in the music makes sense and has a purpose that connects to the story of the game. If you hear a solo violin, if you hear a clock, if you hear breathing…etc…it is all connected.
What were some of the themes and tones you wanted to accentuate with your music and how did you go about delivering on those? I heard regret and guilt are two themes of the game.
Nobody can anticipate what this game is about but yes, the main themes are regret and guilt. Time also has a big part to play. When you look at some screenshots of the game or the trailer you might think it is a horror genre game. There is some of that but it's maybe less than 10 percent of the experience. As well as the shooting part. Get Even is a very narrative-driven game that will play with your mind and, hopefully, talk to your heart and soul. That's what my music is definitely for. It is a very intimate story; there is no world to be saved, no zombie killing, etc… It's about making mistakes and the utter feeling of being powerless against them.
What kind of access did you have to the development team at The Farm 51 during the production of your score? And was it a very collaborative effort?
My relationship with a studio I work with is like the ones you can have in the movies such as Spiellberg/Williams, Burton/Elfman, Nolan/Zimmer... It is an intense collaboration to provide the best experience we can to players. I think this is the only approach for me to really capture the vision and enhance it with music.
"Get Even is a very narrative-driven game that will play with your mind and, hopefully, talk to your heart and soul." -- Deriviere
You've worked on some very high-profile projects in the past such as Alone in the Dark. How did this experience compare?
Well, working on high-profile games is no different in my opinion. You give the best you can. Of course it is very gratifying when you have worked on big franchises like Alone in the Dark or Assassin's Creed but Get Even is very special to me. This game is not about the big picture but much more about us. Also the team was much smaller, we are talking about 60 people, so it feels more personal. I really had a great time talking with the team and I must say the lead level designer Gosia really provided me with all the material I needed for the music, I can't thank her enough!
What should people know about the musical score for Get Even?
I think people will be very surprised listening to the whole soundtrack, it is such a musical journey that they will feel sometimes melancholic, oppressed, happy but in the end, at the very end, they will listen to it and, if I did my job, deep down, they will know it is about them as well.
Hacknet is a refreshingly grounded take on the hacker-sim genre. With a crude, Linux-inspired interface and dark, driving soundtrack, it follows the story of a recently deceased hacker named Bit, who reaches out to you from beyond the grave. What follows quickly becomes a hive of building tension and a satisfying deep-dive down the rabbit hole of online security and its moral effects on society.
Initially released in August 2015, Hacknet is now seeing its first expansion: Labyrinths. This entirely new chapter takes place alongside the main story and opens up soon after you've cleared the tutorials of the main game. In addition to granting you new hacking tools and techniques, it provides even more challenging investigations that require some serious attention to detail.
Missions in both Hacknet and Labyrinths range from straight-forward break, enter, and delete jobs to thorough investigations that involve finding vulnerabilities in order to crack into secure networks with numerous, heavily-encrypted servers. You'll read files you shouldn't be reading, steal confidential software, rummage through memory dumps for valuable information, and counter incoming hacker attacks amongst myriad other activities. Labyrinths is far tougher than the main campaign in this regard, though, since it doesn't waste any time throwing you into the deep end and relies on experience with previous puzzles.
Hacknet's reliance on typing to navigate means you'll want to break out a real-life notepad or smartphone camera to keep track of the commands available to you. Almost all the puzzles involve breaking through network security to find a specific piece of information, which means first cracking that system's ports by using various executables from the command-line to grant you administrator access. Once in, you are free to browse, move, rename, delete or copy files, as well as scan for other linked systems on the network.
The challenge is that on top of taking up valuable time, these executables also take up a chunk of system memory while they're running, so identifying the most economical order to run them is key to hacking efficiently. It doesn't take long for hostile tracers to start pushing back on your progress, and they'll make your life difficult unless you learn how to get in and get out quickly. You may even find yourself in dire situations where your UI is deleted.
While the act of hacking in Hacknet is wonderfully exciting in itself, frequently recurring variables in the core puzzles means that after several hours of nefarious online activity, much of the process becomes routine. At worst, it feels like a missed opportunity to subvert the somewhat processional nature of the moment-to-moment in the later hours of the main story. This is not a problem in the Labyrinths campaign though, which grants that extra bit of variety to each hack.
In Hacknet's main storyline, you get involved with a group named Entropy--affiliates of the recently deceased Bit--and work together to uncover the mystery surrounding his death. Labyrinths branches off this, pulling you away from the group to focus on a different, secret task with a different collective of hackers before returning to complete the original job. Labyrinths can be started at any point during the main campaign, though how much you enjoy it will largely depend on how deep your understanding of hacking in Hacknet is.
Hacknet's narrative explores and captures the dark side of the Internet while also knowing when to keep it light-hearted. You stumble upon random IRC logs that vary from typical troll-level banter to arguments about the depravity of society. You'll dig incessantly at various corporate interests all while uncovering the mystery of your colleague's death. As the stakes get higher and the stories start to intertwine, the feeling that you're doing things you really shouldn't be starts to hit home, creating a wonderful sense of tension around your actions that remains a constant throughout.
Where Hacknet relies on personal emails to move the story forward, Labyrinths tries to introduce the concept of team hacking with IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Replacing emails with a chat log that updates regularly with chatter from your fellow hackers during missions, the faster back-and-forth conversation effortlessly flows from mission critical information to jokes. That said, it's disappointing that you can't talk back to these characters, because you'll want to feel more involved in the group and contribute firsthand to their discussions.
Labyrinths also slightly falters towards its end, where the stakes suddenly take a huge and unexpected leap. Although twists and surprises are central to Hacknet's main campaign narrative--counter-hackers and tracing programs are everywhere--Labyrinths' felt more jarring than most. The frenzied urgency that's whipped up in the campaign's climax is gone just as quickly as it starts, leaving you feeling largely unaffected by its outcome.
The feeling of playing Hacknet in a dark room with headphones on and being absorbed by its engrossing puzzles and soundtrack--full of heavy beats and filthy synth sounds--feels as close as you can get to the Hollywood hacker experience. The puzzles are uniquely challenging without feeling inaccessible, and the Labyrinths expansion takes the formula further by integrating deeper investigations and adding more puzzle variety. Despite the stumbling climax and steady learning curve, Hacknet - Labyrinths is one hell of a ride that leads you down the rabbit hole and back again.
Ubisoft veteran Alex Hutchinson has left the company to create his own studio. Hutchinson, who was the game director on high-profile Ubisoft projects such as Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 4, announced his departure from the French gaming giant on Twitter this week (via IGN).
"Extremely proud of all we achieved on Far Cry and Assassins but very excited to build something new," he said. He's starting a new company, Typhoon Studios, with former EA and Warner Bros. producer Reid Schneider and "some other wonderful people." Hutchinson added that you should not expect to hear much about the developer's first game soon, though he did tease, "We are hard at work imagining a brand new world to inflict on all of you, so stay tuned."
So! I left Ubisoft after 7 years. Extremely proud of all we achieved on Far Cry and Assassins but very excited to build something new.
Hutchinson made headlines in 2012 when he said the the pursuit of AAA games is "kind of cancerous growth…that will leave AAA blockbusters as nothing more than the last of the dinosaurs." In 2013, Hutchinson said something similar, claiming that AAA games are dying out.
Today at an event in Taipei, Wargaming revealed new details on the company's previously announcedWorld of Warships partnership with the naval-themed anime High School Fleet.
This will come in the form of a pair of new premium ships to buy, including the HSF Harekaze (destroyer) and the HSF Graf Spee (cruiser). You can see these ships in the image below.
Voice actors from High School Fleet will lend their voices to the DLC, for the characters Akeno Misaki and Moeka China, Wargaming announced during a stage presentation. A video was shown, but the voices were not added yet. We'll add the video here when it's made available.
The new High School Fleet ships are coming to World of Warships later this year, timed with the release of the anime's launch for Blu-ray.
Keep checking back with GameSpot this weekend for more from the Wargaming event. For more on what we've seen and learned so far, check out the stories below.
First, the developer confirmed the game will get monthly updates. Previous entries in the series have instead opted for seasonal updates, so around four major ones per year. "Considering all we have in store for Battlefield 1, we've decided to move to monthly updates," DICE said. "With this new tempo, we're going to bring you more of what you want, faster than ever."
The next major update for Battlefield 1, the Spring Update, will add Platoons as a new feature. As its name suggests, Platoons let you join up with friends to form a unit. That's all we know for now, but DICE says more details are coming.
An update scheduled for May will help make Battlefield 1 "as frictionless as possible," DICE said.
"This includes streamlining the flow into matches (especially Operations) and improving many gameplay grievances that will hopefully make the action feel more balanced and fair," the studio explained. "The development team is also working on a feature update to the Battlefield 1 Rent-a-Server Program which we hope to release soon."
The other part of DICE's blog post today focused on Battlefield 1's three upcoming expansions: In the Name of the Tsar, Turning Tides, and Apocalypse. We already knew about these, but DICE published some new concept art, which you can see embedded above, and official descriptions (see them here).
Are you looking forward to what's next for Battlefield 1? Let us know in the comments below!
The next Total War game differentiates itself from those that came before it. Total War: Arena is a free-to-play, online-focused game in the works for PC, made by series studio Creative Assembly. It's still without a release date, but progress is moving along, and employees from Wargaming--whose Alliance label is working on the game--shared some new insight on the project in an interview with GameSpot today at the WGL APAC event in Taipei.
Wargaming producer Jose Edgardo Garcia talked about potentially bringing the game to consoles and how Wargaming is trying to avoid a pay-to-win scenario, among other topics. On the subject of console plans, he said the focus is on bringing the game out for PC first, though he strongly suggested that a console release could happen further down the road.
"Right now, we want Creative Assembly to focus on what they have--which is a PC game," Garcia said. "Now, the thing is, Total War: Arena will be under the Wargaming universe in our portfolio. That means they will follow the rules that our other games have."
Wargaming's biggest hit, World of Tanks, launched first on PC and came to consoles later--it's available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Xbox 360. It sounds like the same thing could happen for Total War: Arena. One thing is for sure, though--Wargaming is not going to push Creative Assembly into something before it's ready.
"We don't want to pressure them to rush into anything," Garcia said. "We want them to concentrate on making a high-quality game and that's where we are at right now."
Moving on to Total War: Arena's business model, we asked about the stigma that is still attached to some free-to-play games for being "pay-to-win." Some games might be guilty of this, he said (without naming any names), though Total War: Arena hopes to not be one of them.
"Definitely going to say no," Garcia said about Total War: Arena being pay-to-win.
"We know our audience; we definitely get their feedback," he added. "We make sure that the game is for their enjoyment, their entertainment. We want to make happy players, not pissed off players."
"We are very committed to keeping players happy."
Wargaming's head of marketing for APAC, Tatsiana Martsinouskaya, stressed that Arena remains in development (it's in alpha now), so the main goal currently is to refine and polish the gameplay. The decisions about monetization will come later, she told us.
Keep checking back with GameSpot for more from this interview and other topics in the coming days. For now, you can see some footage of the game in its alpha state in the video above.
Are you looking forward to Arena? Let us know in the comments below!
By Anonymous on Apr 08, 2017 09:30 am Even after a good month of playing nonstop, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild continues to surprise us with its wealth of hidden secrets. Matt gives everyone yet another set of tips to help you better survive in its massive world.
As Mass Effect: Andromeda recently showed, even games with massive budgets, schedules, and teams can sometimes come up short. According to XCOM Lead Jake Solomon--a man whose own forays into triple-A development have produced highly successful games like XCOM 2--that's not too surprising.
In a talk Solomon gave last month at PAX East, he explained that failure is as much a tool as it is a stumbling block, that the lessons we learn from it outweigh the toll it takes. In the world of triple-A game development, however, it can still be a liability. We recently caught up with Solomon to take a peek inside his high-stakes world in hopes of better understanding the people and processes behind some of our favorite games.
GameSpot: I wanted to start with something that you spoke about in your speech last month. One of the subjects you touched on was failure and how it's an important step in building toward success.
Solomon: Absolutely.
So my question is, do you think that triple-A development currently leaves room for failure? Is there time and money for people to iterate and experiment and fail on their way to creating something great?
Yes, I think so, but even in triple-A, the absolute top, most developers […] have some types of constraints and schedule and things like that, which of course makes sense. I think that there is an opportunity for failure, but I think […] the reaches that you take have to be planned to where anything you're innovating on, you have to plan for that type of failure in the schedule.
With sequels, typically, you don't have to reach as far. I think the real challenge is when you're either making something new or rebooting something. Just by the nature of it, you're going to have to take some really creatively risky reaches, attempts at things, and so when you do that, there's guaranteed to be big failures along the way. I think that the challenge is, I guess, having enough time.
But in terms of the industry as a whole, it's a tightrope. It is an absolute tightrope, I think because triple-A games are so hit driven. It's an interesting thing to think about. In this industry, I think your first failure is probably going to be your last one, too.
It certainly seems that way, yes.
It wasn't that way a while ago, but it's just the nature of [the industry]. And it makes total sense. There's nothing wrong with that. I think that if you're talking about tens of millions of dollars to make games, if you're talking about margins like that, then yeah, it's hard to recover from that.
"In this industry, I think your first failure is probably going to be your last one, too." -- Jake Solomon
You have to take risks, you have to innovate, otherwise you're not offering value and people will find it somewhere else. At the same time, those risks could sink you if you don't fail fast enough and get to the actual right answer, so I think it really is kind of a tightrope.
I think it's why people in my position typically don't stay relevant for that long. It doesn't bother me to say because it's just a fact. There are some people who stay at the absolute top of the game for a long time. Todd Howard's been making games for a long time, but you can think of any name from 10 years ago and you could say, "Oh yeah, they're not as big as they were 10 years ago, so in 10 years, what does that mean for me? What does that mean for a lot of people in my position?"
This word is going to sound harsh, but that almost makes developers sound disposable, to an extent. Is that true, and if so, how do you escape that mindset? How do you go into a project knowing, "Maybe this will be my last one; maybe I won't matter after this"?
I think that that is always my mindset. It's the sort of thing that I keep very, very present. It does not make for a really relaxed thought process, but it's something that I always try to keep present in my mind: the thought that when you're creating things, you're basically pulling ideas out of thin air. The only way you can offer value to people is coming up with something new.
When you try to come up with something new, failure is a big part of that, and so that means failure is a very big part of what I do. And so there's a very good chance that my failure could end up becoming big enough that maybe a game is my last game, for a long time or forever.
I don't know if developers are disposable so much as... It's like any business, basically, except that ours has a lot of turn over, really quick, and I think it's because our industry's still kind of in the early stages. We're still trying to find out what it is that provides the most value to players. I think that you just have to keep in mind that if you don't innovate, somebody else will, so you have to taking those risks, knowing that inherent in those risks, potentially, is your failure as well.
That's why I think you just can't dwell on failure. You have to fail efficiently, and that means that you can't dwell on failure as a personal thing. You can't dwell on it as an emotional thing. You have to be very cold-blooded about it and say, "We are going to fail. I'm going to fail." The key is to fail efficiently. When we fail, look at it right in the eyes and say, "What did that teach us?" And we very quickly need to get onto our next failure because we've got to get through these failures until, all of a sudden, we have something that we say, "Okay, this is good enough."
The scary part is that you can never predict. Eventually I think, as a designer, you have this sense of, "This will work out at some point," but you don't know how many failures that's going to take, and you only have so much runway. So it is kind of terrifying when you're in the middle of the process and you're like, "This is not good. This feature's not good, but it must be good," and you're like, "We've just got to get through. We've got to keep trying to find the right way."
To circle back to something you mentioned a little while ago, it seems like, ultimately, what raises the stakes, what makes failure such a potential liability for a developer, is money, really. It's an economic question. Like you said, you're investing tens of millions of dollars into a game. From an economic standpoint, it's hard to question publishers' need for guarantees.
Not at all.
The question is, what does that money actually allow you to do as a developer? Is that trade-off worth it? Is raising the stakes to that degree worth that kind of monetary investment?
It's kind of an industry question. Whatever game you're making has to have the audience to support your investment, obviously. Certain games have massive audiences, and so that means that they can support [bigger budgets]. I'm more of a standard developer. We have limits on what we do, and we have to be efficient with what we do, and we have to think about, "Is this really going to provide value to our audience? Should we really be doing this, because it's eating up time?"
I think that you rise to, basically, a breaking point. This is just industry wide. Everything has changed so much. When I started, something like Civilization III, it probably sold a couple million copies or something like that, but it cost nothing to make. But then eventually, a certain standard of quality is expected and your teams get larger and they continue to get larger and the quality of titles continues to be expected to go up, and all of that means that as the cost of development's going up, you either have to increase the revenue [or] increase your audience. It's all a question of which game you're making, because your return does justify the investment--and if it didn't, it'll be the last time you do it.
"The only way you can offer value to people is coming up with something new. When you try to come up with something new, failure is a big part of that." -- Jake Solomon
It's interesting because the return on hits are so big that you can certainly understand why people want to make these big, big games. I don't know what the return on Call of Duty is, but I'm sure it's really f**king great, so you certainly understand why people would want to make games like that. There are so many other games that exist in the middle. I was talking to a designer who's a really good friend of mine. He's more of an indie developer. I said, "How you guys doing?" He said, "Well, if we sold half of what we sold we'd be out of business. If we sold twice what we sold we'd be rich." And I'm like, "You basically just described all of us."
I think that holds for most people and the vast majority of game development. And so the tension, obviously, on the business side comes from rising costs and how can you recoup that. Because you can't just sit there and costs can't continue to rise if you're not also increasing your audience or revenue. Business is a really big part of what we do. It's just not something we talk about because most people find it dry, I suppose.
It's inescapable, though. Games are a business. And to hear you talk about it, it almost sounds like game development is somewhere between an arms race and a gold rush. Is the current system sustainable? Where does this end?
The industry is so varied now; even indie games have a really high level of polish now. I think the problem is that, every time you make a game, you have to look at [all these different games] and say, "Wow, they did this thing, and wow, they did that thing," and then there are all these reasons you're like, "Yeah, we could 20 more people to do all these neat things," and then you have to balance that against, "Okay, is that really going to be worth it?"
I'd love to try making a game where it doesn't f**king matter and I can be like, "You know what? I want to add this feature and this feature and this feature." But a lot of us have to think in terms of, "This is the most valuable feature to our audience. This is what they love, so this is what we're going to focus on. We can't just throw everything in there."
You have to be real smart about that, and obviously, that's another place where you can't make mistakes. You can't say, "The big feature for this next game is X," and if your audience is like, "We don't give a shit about X," then you're like, "Oh s**t" because we spent a lot of money making that.
Do you have a project or an idea that you would pursue if you didn't have to worry about money from publishers or even fan expectations?
Whenever I see people designing space sims and things like that, I'm like, "That sounds like so much fun." I think the best sim that's ever been made is Minecraft. Minecraft is so simple, but it feels so real. It feels so authentic, which is its power. I just think Minecraft is amazing, and I never would've been able to come up with an idea like that because I tend to think in incredibly complex simulations type stuff.
That would probably be the thing I'd work on. I joke about that, even with other developers I joke. That's what I would do. The kind of person I am, I would be happy spending 20 years working on some obscenely complicated universe simulation and then never release it, probably, and go f**king crazy by the end. I'd be the guy with the hair, pissing in bottles, telling people, "Er, go away. I'm working on the space simulation." There'd be websites about "Whatever happened to Jake Solomon?"
So what you're saying is, you're not going to make a space sim?
No, no. I'm not going to because I don't want to go crazy.
Your most recent game, XCOM 2, is a strategy game. Strategy's not really known for being a big triple-A seller. How do you approach making a triple-A strategy game knowing that it's not traditionally a high-selling genre?
XCOM would never exist without Civilization, because Civ is the proof. They're a very non-standard triple-A game, but they do amazingly, amazingly well because they have a loyal audience. I think that's what's important about strategy, and that's why I like making strategy games. Not only because I love strategy, but we have a relationship with our audience and it's probably more important to us than a lot of other titles.
Having a very distinct, loyal audience makes it easier as a developer to focus on, "Okay, this is what they like. This is what our relationship's like," and you get to a point where, when you're making Civ or when you're making XCOM and you're making sequels, the ownership shifts from me as a designer.
When you make your first game, you feel like you have creative ownership over it. When you make games that have an audience already, then you shift the ownership over to your audience. And now you're in a position where you're sort of curating this game for your audience, and you can have this back and forth with them in terms of understanding what it is they want. I think that that's how you have to approach a game like XCOM, or even a game like Civ--you feel like you have this shared ownership.
At the end of the day, whose opinion about what happens in the game is more important: the fans or the developers?
Unquestionably the fans, unquestionably. I always, always say that our players' values are our values. They have to be. I always have to project players' values onto my own, and when I'm designing a feature I have to try and say, "This is something they're going to appreciate or they're going to like," because if I don't, if I'm off this way, then the problem is, I'm going to have to readjust. It's not like the players are going to readjust what they like based on what I've said.
For a specific example, in XCOM 2, a lot of the missions are timed--like, you have to complete this mission in this many turns. And I did that because I was just thinking, "Okay, objectively, that's a better design because it forces players to make sub-optimal decisions. They don't have all the time in the world, so now they have to take risks." The good thing about that is that when players take risks, they have varied experiences from mission to mission. There's no optimal way to solve a mission. You can't just sit back and be real defensive.
The problem is, some players didn't like that kind of pressure on them, and it's not for me to then defend my design decisions. Another death trap for designers is to say, "Let me explain to you why I'm right and you're wrong." Instead, the goal is to say, "Okay, if that's what my players' values are, I need to readjust." It's one of the hardest things, but I really have to force myself to say, "I need to find a way to make this work with my players' values, not my own particular opinion about what's the best design."
At the same time, though, most fans are not developers. They don't necessarily know what's going to work in the context of the game. So if you're turning creative control over to people who don't know how to make games, could you ultimately end up with something that doesn't work or make sense?
Oh yeah, [but] I think the mechanics are up to the designer. It's more the broad strokes of, if the players don't like something, you're like, "Okay, well this is what I want to achieve, but if they didn't like this mechanic, I need to come up with another mechanic." Again, you just have to make sure your values are aligned with your players.
"I always, always say that our players' values are our values. They have to be." -- Jake Solomon
Again, it goes back even to the thought of money and development. The only things that matters are the things that bring players value. It's like if an artist was modeling a table and they spend a s**t load of time modeling the underside of the table and the player never sees the table. All that time is just money poured down a hole. That's the kind of thing we have to be careful about. Because if you're doing that, you're just wasting time. They'll never see it. They'll never care.
The only way to get around it is to make sure you understand your players' values well enough to say, "You know what? We shouldn't waste time on that. They're not going to give a s**t. We shouldn't worry about that. We should worry about this thing that they really care about, that they spend a lot of time on." That's why understanding your players is so, so important.
Details and technical specifications of Microsoft's Project Scorpio surfaced this past week and from what we can tell, it's going to be the most powerful console to date. Eurogamer / Digital Foundry had the inside scoop and were also able to see the console in action. The report was dense with tech jargon and details, but to help digest this news, we have highlighted six important things you need to know about Project Scorpio.
It's set to launch sometime in Q4 this year, around the Holiday season, and we don't have a definitive price just yet. But for everything else related to the upcoming console, check out everything we've done here at GameSpot:
FLOPs--floating point operations per second--is simply a measurement of performance; it can be calculated by multiplying the number of compute units, raster operations (ROPs), and the core clock speed. Though it's not a perfect indicator of how games will run due to potential bottlenecks, it gives us an idea of where performance will stand among other consoles and comparable PC components.
How do Scorpio's six teraflops stack up against the competition? Well for starters, this measures at about four-and-a-half times higher than the Xbox One. Compared to Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, this is roughly a 30 percent increase. Scorpio will be the graphical powerhouse among consoles. The GPU itself is comprised of 40 custom compute units and is clocked at 1172 MHz.
CPU and System-On-Chip Design
CPU and System-On-Chip Design
Scorpio's horsepower is built into what's called a system-on-chip (SOC). Both the graphics and central processing units are housed on the SOC, which is where you'll find its 8-core CPU. It's described as an evolved version of the the Jaguar-based CPU inside the Xbox One, and it's clocked at 2.3GHz for Scorpio; 550MHz faster than the Xbox One. Like the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, and Xbox One, Scorpio's SOC is made by AMD.
The SOC is going to be cooled by a vapor chamber solution, similar to what Nvidia does for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. There will also be a fan atop the SOC that'll blow the hot air out the back of the console.
More Memory: 12 GB RAM GDDR5
More Memory: 12 GB RAM GDDR5
Microsoft built 12GB of GDDR5 system memory into Scorpio. As it stands, 8GB will be dedicated to games, while 4GB will focus on background processes and overhead. This is a sizeable upgrade from Xbox One's and 8GB overall with only 5GB dedicated to games. Not only is it 4GB less RAM, but it's slower DDR3 memory. Is this important? From what we can tell, yes. The system was shown using a little over 5GB in the Forza demo used to show off the Scorpio's power.
The system will have a total memory bandwidth of 326GB/s, meaning it will offer much more memory throughput than any of the other consoles. For example, the PS4 Pro's memory bandwidth is 218GB/s.
Forza Demo and Native 4K
Forza Demo and Native 4K
Alongside the reveal of its tech specs, Scorpio was shown running the Forzatech engine, used in Forza Motorsport 6 and Forza Horizon 3 by Turn 10 Studios. The demo was said to be a straight port from the Xbox One version and ran at a native 4K resolution with high res art assets; it was pushing out 60 frames per second (FPS), with room to spare. According to that benchmark from Digital Foundry, the system peaked at about 70% GPU usage; texture filtering, lighting, and shadows remained untouched. Turn 10 also pushed the PC equivalent of ultra settings and the game still ran at 60 FPS with 88% GPU usage. There's still untapped potential under the hood.
Keep in mind that this is one scenario, and Scorpio's performance will vary from game to game. True 4K was promised and as far as we can tell, it's being delivered, though not every game may hit 60 FPS.
Backwards Compatibility
Backwards Compatibility
If you have your eyes set on Project Scorpio, but are worried about certain games not running on it, don't trip. Every Xbox One game will work just fine on Scorpio and every Xbox 360 backwards compatible game will as well. If games are to take full advantage of the improved hardware, the onus is on developers to implement the necessary tweaks.
More Powerful Than The PS4 Pro
More Powerful Than The PS4 Pro
Yes, Project Scorpio is more powerful than the PS4 Pro on paper, which was expected. However, both the PS4 Pro and Scorpio require developers to implement changes to take full advantage of the more powerful hardware. It's hard to say how difficult this will be for developers, but according to Microsoft, Turn 10 was able to put together the Forza demo in two days.
However, Microsoft says that games that render at 1080p--and even 900p--on the Xbox One will get native 4K support with Scorpio. It remains to be seen what, if any, graphical compromises need to be made to maintain stable performance in future games.
Welcome to GameSpot Q&A, a section where we ask our staff and readers an interesting discussion question about video games. Look at this as a forum where you and others can discuss and compare your opinions of this beloved hobby of ours. Let us know what your answer is to this week's question in the comments below!
This week's question is:
How Much Should Xbox Project Scorpio Cost?
Microsoft recently announced more details about its upcoming Project Scorpio Xbox One hardware. The console's specs are beyond what we've seen in the current console generation, but with such power, the current big question is its price point. Our editors voice their thoughts towards the issue in the answers below.
Jimmy Thang, Technology Editor | $500
If I had to guess, I'd wager that Project Scorpio will debut at $499. I think the PS3 showed that users are resistant to spending $599 for a console (despite the fact that it was actually kind of a steal, being one of the most affordable Blu-ray players at the time). I think Microsoft recognizes that and won't go above $500 as a result.
Having said that, on paper, the console is poised to be noticeably more powerful than the PS4 Pro, which currently costs $399. I would be very surprised if Microsoft came out at roughly the same price, considering Scorpio's beefier specs. So, I'm going with $499. Think that's too expensive? Well, I'm willing to bet that Microsoft would say, "That's what the Xbox One S is for." It helps that Project Scorpio is backwards compatible with the S, even down to the peripherals.
Peter Brown, Senior Reviews Editor | $400
Considering Scorpio's spec advantage relative to PlayStation 4 Pro, it stands to reason that Microsoft will release the system at a higher cost than Sony's current top dog. $500 might be the sweet spot, but that creates a perception problem given that Xbox One S retails for $250. The working theory is that both Xbox One S and Scorpio will run the same games, meaning Scorpio will only have a performance advantage, albeit a considerable one. Still, in the eyes of consumers, paying twice as much to play the same games with better visuals will be a tough pill to swallow; performance helps, but it isn't the whole story.
If Scorpio sells for $400--where Microsoft (likely) sells the system at a loss--people might forgive the current lack of enticing Xbox exclusives due to the perceived value of the hardware compared to PS4 Pro. Microsoft wouldn't be the first manufacturer to subsidize the cost of a new console, and doing so with Scorpio may be the only way it can revive Xbox's competitive edge in light of the current lukewarm game forecast.
Scott Butterworth, Editor | $450
I know consoles are generally priced in nice, round $100 increments, but I think $450 might be the best way for Microsoft to balance the points already raised by Jimmy and Peter. Scorpio is far beefier than the $400 PS4 Pro, which would make it easy for Microsoft to justify charging a slighter higher price (and even at $450, Scorpio would be a steal relative to what that amount buys in PC components).
But it's also important to remember that, despite its impressive specs, Scorpio does not mark the beginning of a new console generation. It will likely play the exact same games as the $250 Xbox One S. That means consumers are ultimately paying extra for a performance boost, and I'm pretty confident most people aren't willing to pay fully double the price of an S just see their games run in higher resolutions and framerates, especially since many gamers don't even own 4K-capable TVs yet. So my guess is Microsoft will launch several Scorpio bundles at $450: a console plus one or two free games (most likely Forza, given the demo during Scorpio's recent unveiling).
Justin Haywald, Managing Editor | $500
We don't think about the cost that often, but your phone probably costs a lot of money. A current top-of-the-line iPhone 7 Plus starts at $770. A Samsung Galaxy S8? $850. And it's that early-adopter, technologically savvy consumer that I think Microsoft will be courting.
$500 for Project Scorpio seems pricey, but it puts it within striking distance of its competition in the PS4 Pro, while firmly establishing Scorpio as a machine with better specs and more capability. People who will benefit the most from a Scorpio are those who own a 4K TV, and while the price of that technology is rapidly dropping, that just means that Scorpio can start out at a premium and drop in price early in 2018.
The more interesting question will be how (and if) Microsoft handles virtual reality. Part of the reason for a system like Scorpio has to be in preparation of an increased emphasis on VR, but what would an Xbox hardware bundle look like? Sony's PlayStation VR is still hard to find in stores, and the launch bundle for that system (even without a console) was $500. I'd expect, sometime in 2018, Microsoft will offer up an all-in-one VR console package in the $800 range--and Project Scorpio will be at its core.
Eddie Makuch, News Editor | $500
For a long time now, Microsoft has referred to Project Scorpio as a "premium" device. It will of course be more expensive than Xbox One S, and my estimation is that it will go for $500. That price point steers clear of $599, which does not have good memories attached to it. Given the guts of the console, anything under $500 seems an unlikely scenario. At the same time, Microsoft has been clear in its messaging for Scorpio that this is a console aimed at players who want a higher-end experience--and will presumably pay for it. Doubling down on this, Phil Spencer has said Scorpio is not expected to sell anywhere near as well as Xbox One S. With the reveal of Scorpio's specs now out of the way, it will be intriguing to see where Scorpio comes in for price. Expect all to become clear at E3, if not sooner.
Michael Higham, Associate Tech Editor | $500
Considering how much power is under the hood, I can't see Project Scorpio priced any lower than $499. Also, the PlayStation 4 Pro is currently $399, and who knows if there will be a holiday season price cut this year. Of course, if Microsoft is willing to sell the console at a lower price, the barrier to entry will be lower and we'll all win. But I'm not holding my breath. Scorpio is coming with a robust cooling solution to keep that 8-core 2.3GHz CPU and 6 teraflop GPU system-on-chip (SOC) cool, not to mention it'll come equipped with 12GB of GDDR5 RAM. This is all-powerful stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's expensive to manufacture.
I used to fake being sick to stay home from school as a kid, so I watched a lot of The Price is Right--you can bet on me.
This year's edition runs April 11-17, Microsoft's Major Nelson announced on Twitter today. There will be more than 350 games in the sale, with discounts as deep as 67 percent. Additionally, Xbox Live Gold members can save as much as 10 percent more.
Spring Sale runs from 11-17 April and features over 350 titles with savings up to 67% off (Xbox Live Gold members save up to 10% more) pic.twitter.com/EWbJE2qHjk
Additionally, new Xbox Live Gold members can subscribe for just $1, while Xbox Design Lab custom controllers will see a $15 discount for the first time ever as part of the sale. On top of games, music and movies will be featured in the sale, according to the video.
We will post a rundown of the deals when they are announced.
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