Imagine what would happen if you took a half-season of The Walking Dead TV show, mashed it together with a Deus Ex or System Shock style of exploration and decision-making, and then drizzled it with the best aspects of a modern VR game. What you might end up with is a survival horror game that’s oppressively tense and brutal, but also tugs on you relentlessly to explore every corner of its post-apocalyptic world for hidden loot and nuggets of lore. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is exactly that, and it absolutely nails the mix, delivering it with a level of detail and a depth of interactivity that feels like a genuine step forward for virtual reality.
You play as the Tourist, a storied survivor and living urban legend who seems to be immune to the fictional virus that makes everybody else a little bitier in The Walking Dead universe. You’ve rolled into the sunken remains of New Orleans following a rumor about a buried hotbed of limitless supplies called the Reserve, and the rest is up to you. It’s a simple setup, but one that’s perfect for the size and scope of Saints & Sinners because it doesn’t immediately saddle you with any presumptions about your character’s morality.
You’re introduced to New Orleans by your old buddy Henri, but the moral choices you’ll make while navigating its several open-ended zones are yours alone. As an Obsidian fan, I was pleased to find that there were several major factions fighting for control of the Reserve, each with their own perspective on the bleak situation around you. One such moral choice involves a mission where a faction member will send you to rescue their brother in exchange for an important item, and it’s fantastic that you can then choose to upend the original mission and kill the brother, earning his captors as allies and instead taking the item by force – if that’s the path you prefer, of course. Saints & Sinners’ ending depends entirely on the decisions you make throughout the campaign too, few of which are decidedly ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
All that choice makes the Tourist primarily a shell for you to insert your own personality into, with decent voice acting that gives life to each dialogue option, much like Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series. By comparison, Telltale’s The Walking Dead accomplished some truly great feats of cinematic storytelling and meaningful decision-making in its hostile and zombie-riddled world, but it never gave me free rein to do whatever I wanted. That’s something I had craved for years when I was a regular watcher of The Walking Dead TV series, and while Telltale’s take on The Walking Dead certainly made me care about Clementine, it never made me feel like I was in that world.
Saints & Sinners scratches that itch with the grace and confidence of a well-lubricated bowie knife. The portrayal of killing zombies – or walkers – has never been as satisfying as it is here, and the abject terror of an unexpected walker swarm has never been as palpable. Zombie guts and brains are rendered with great detail, but what really grounds you in this world is the fact that weapons have appropriate weight and heft. Heavy weapons like axes and rifles require you to grip them with both hands for stability, while small weapons like shivs are much lighter and easier to land precise blows with. It’s not as nuanced as a game like Boneworks; you can’t wield just any item as a weapon, but this combat system is far more tactile and exciting than if you were doing it remotely with a gamepad or a keyboard.
Diseased walkers explode and unleash poisonous gases that lower your health pool when killed up close, meanwhile helmeted walkers are far tougher to kill, requiring a complete decapitation or extremely precise blows to exposed parts of their heads. This increased challenge only adds to the intensity of fighting an entire pack of walkers at once, a common occurrence later on, as you need to quickly pick and choose which walkers need to be killed in which way and in which order to preserve the durability of your best weapons. Rapidly juggling my inventory in real-time to acclimate to each fight forced me to be smarter and, as a result, Saints & Sinners never fell into that Action-RPG trap of becoming repetitive. I spent a little over 18 hours in the campaign – the story itself is a few hours shorter than that, but it was just loads of fun to complete scavenging runs and hunt for secret recipes on my own.
The walkers and human NPCs themselves have their own agendas too, often interacting with one another in interesting and useful ways. While the AI isn’t always the most bright, causing enemies to sometimes get stuck in hilarious and vulnerable positions, an impressive amount of the unfurling drama that makes Saints & Sinners exciting is simulated in real-time rather than deliberately scripted. To my satisfaction, I found that many of the quests allowed me to choose my own path to a solution, and it was a delight to discover alternate routes and secrets, even if the map can feel a little nondescript or claustrophobic at times. Even when I was presented with straightforward options for moving through a group of wary human NPCs or solving a quest with diplomacy – or simply by attacking an NPC directly – I could just as easily avoid interacting with certain characters altogether, either by attracting a herd of walkers and sneaking past the ensuing carnage, or by climbing over the side of a wall or up the side of a house. That freedom to tackle a situation so many different ways is fantastic.
And though the bigger story about breaking into the Reserve can sometimes feel pretty thin between long periods of exploring, looting, killing, and crafting my way through the streets of New Orleans, it was refreshing for a VR game to let me define my character through my own decisions in a setting as meticulously detailed and open-ended as this. While Saints & Sinners isn’t exactly the first of its kind, this caliber of storytelling reaches a height that VR had otherwise yet to achieve.
Zombalaya
Central to the tension of Saints & Sinners is that you only get so much time each day to do things before the city’s bells are rung and the streets flood with ravenous corpses. Once you head back to safety you can go to sleep and skip to the next morning, but the number of undead you encounter the following day increases. This creates a compelling risk-reward choice between pushing your luck past dark or playing it safe at the cost of worse odds tomorrow, driving the tension of the entire game.
That dilemma would be perfectly manageable if not for the fact that you only have a limited amount of inventory space, pushing you to think more carefully about what you grab. You also have to continue crafting or finding new weapons as your old ones tend to fall apart at a distressingly high rate. That forces you to make each attack count, which is easier said than done since you actually have to swing and aim with your real-world appendages. With a ticking clock looming behind all that, Saints & Sinners quickly becomes the perfect storm for adrenaline junkies.
Luckily, the inventory management is intuitive and feels great. Picking up items and placing them into your backpack is as simple as throwing them over your shoulder, and to access them again you simply grab the pack off of your back and pull items out of their neatly arranged slots. Meanwhile, weapons can be holstered in convenient slots on your waist and back while your journal and flashlight fit snugly on your chest. This style of physical inventory management has existed in VR games like Rec Room and Township Tale for some time, and it’s far more interactive and interesting than simply tapping on a menu screen with your fingers or pointing at some text with a laser pointer.
Limited stamina is also a worry. Running out of stamina makes you slow and unable to swing, aim, or run away, meaning it’s all the more critical to land each and every blow with finesse. Likewise, having a strong weapon or beefed up stamina pool makes you feel satisfyingly powerful, but never so much that you can let your guard down, keeping combat engaging even as you get stronger.
If you do die to the shambling hordes, you’re forced to respawn at the start of the map while the day’s clock is still ticking, and you only get one chance to reclaim your inventory before it’s gone forever. As time wears on, high-quality supplies and weapons can become so difficult to find that scrounging up a broken bottleneck or screwdriver in the nick of time is sometimes the difference between life and death. This, mixed with the fact that your health and stamina pools are temporarily decreased when you die, is a perfect formula for some of the most terrifying moments I’ve had in a VR headset – but that terror was met with an equal amount of satisfaction if I could make it back to my loot and come out alive after.
It is disappointing that character progression is fairly linear, with only a few tech trees to branch into – Gear, Guns, and Survival – and no mutual exclusivity between them. There’s nothing stopping you from unlocking every possible upgrade at the crafting stations in short order, just as long as you can find the right components from scrapping items you find in the world, similar to Fallout 4. It’s plenty of fun to use newfound upgrades like the Nail Bomb and the Grass Cutter, and there are some recipes that you first have to uncover the hidden nooks and crannies of New Orleans to find, but it’s too bad that there’s no real way to personalize your Tourist beyond the story choices you make.
The previously announced Torchlight Frontiers, which was previously announced as an action MMORPG, will be scaled back into a more traditional ARPG. As such, Perfect World Entertainment and developer Echtra Games announced that Torchlight Frontiers is being renamed as Torchlight 3.
“During development, you often discover what type of product a game was meant to be and we found Torchlight Frontiers was meant to be a true successor to Torchlight 1 & 2,” said Echtra Games CEO Max Schaefer.
“Based on this and extensive feedback from our Alpha testers, we decided it was time to take the game back to its roots and model it after the classic Torchlight games that ARPG fans have come to love.”
However, Echtra seems to believe that a more traditional approach is in order. Instead of going free-to-play, Torchlight 3 will be a purchasable game title with full access to all the playable content. So basically a traditional game release.
Furthermore, Torchlight 3 will be playable online or off and feature a more linear structure similar to the first two Torchlight games. Torchlight 3 still has online multiplayer and character classes:
The Dusk Mage, Forged, and Railmaster.
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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN. You can reach him on Twitter.
A dad spent a weekend building a custom pad for the Xbox Adaptive Controller so his daughter could use it to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Switch.
Rory Steel, who is the head of Jersey Digital Academy, tweeted his progress as he created a custom rig attached to the controller that Microsoft designed to “meet the needs of gamers with limited mobility.”
His plan was to build a controller that made playing the Nintendo Switch accessible to his daughter, who Steel told Channel 103 has “fine motor neurone issues.”
He started with some electronic parts purchased from eBay and the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
He added a solid base for all the electronic parts that sits above the Xbox Adaptive Controller. That base holds two joysticks: one moving the playable character, the other moving the camera.
After getting more parts from a hardware shop, Steel added 16 buttons that go around the outside of the base, each with a different function.
That’s enough for tonight. Some serious soldering and wire management tomorrow morning for some game testing in the afternoon. My daughter is desperate to try but we’ve kept it a secret from her brother who’s been itching to play #ZeldaBreathoftheWild. @Nintendo@Microsoftpic.twitter.com/bgIC9h9aH3
After some “serious soldering and wire management,” Steel moved onto testing and then filmed his daughter’s reaction as she finally got to play Breath of the Wild.
Steel’s weekend project has been noticed by head of Xbox Phil Spencer, who tweeted in response, “Incredible. And what a smile.”
He’s since been approached by Microsoft and Logitech, who want to help him build a higher-tech version 2.0 of his custom controller that could be used by other people with mobility impairments.
Steel told Channel 103 that he’s going to take the companies up on their offers, but adds “the project was always supposed to be something that anyone across the world could use. What I still want to do is a low-tech version, so people at home can have a go.”
A new patent has been published for an official touch pen attachment that would work with the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons.
The US Patent office revealed the patent, filed by Nintendo on June 4, 2019 and published on January 16, 2020, with a bunch of images and plenty of information on how exactly the touch pen attachment would work.
The stylus-like device is designed to work when the Switch is in handheld mode and the Joy-Cons are not attached to the touchscreen. You slide the attachment on to either Joy-Con – accommodating both left and right handed use – and then use it to draw onto the touchscreen.
The patent showcases that when drawing with the touch pen you are able to use the buttons on the Joy-Con too. In one example, the player draws a line with the touch pen, and then presses one of the Joy-Con buttons to change the thickness of that line.
The Joy-Con’s HD rumble function is also shown working in another illustration. The player touches one of three boxes displayed on the touchscreen and the Joy-Con vibrates in response to the interaction.
It’s worth noting that there is already a Nintendo Switch stylus available that allows for easy drawing on the touchscreen. However, it doesn’t work in tandem with the Joy-Cons and their features. Nintendo has also previously sold touch pens for its handheld consoles, such as the DS, 3DS, and Wii U.
This new touch pen adds more functionality due to being an attachment for the Joy-Cons, which could open up more gameplay possibilities for compatible games, including Super Mario Maker 2, Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
With reports of a Nintendo Switch Pro on the way this year, it’s possible that a Pro model be designed to make the most of ideas like this touch pen attachment. Is this our first look at how Nintendo will be responding to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X?
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Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
Joe Biden, the former vice president and 2020 candidate for President of the United States, has shared some harsh thoughts on Silicon Valley game developers, as reported in a wide-reaching interview with The New York Times.
When asked about the Obama administration’s legacy on Silicon Valley regulation, Biden talks about meeting with leaders in Silicon Valley to discuss intellectual property rights, and describes interacting with an unspecified game developer as “one of the little creeps” who make games that “teach you how to kill people.”
“And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- — close to a billionaire — who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people, you know the ——,” said Biden.
The reporter interrupted Biden at this point to clarify he was talking about video games, to which he agrees. The senator went on to use the words “righteous” and “overwhelming arrogance” to further describe those working in tech at Silicon Valley.
“And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, ‘We are the economic engine of America. We are the ones.’ And fortunately, I had done a little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it fascinating. As I added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said you have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment,” continued Biden.
“The point is, there’s an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance that we are, we are the ones. We can do what we want to do. I disagree,” Biden said.
The New York Times did not appear to press Biden on specifying which game developers he met with, or to elaborate further on his thoughts.
Biden’s views on violent video games aren’t surprising. Back in 2013 when he was Vice President he vocally saw no legal problem taxing violent media. That year The Gaming Association even published an open letter asking him to look at studies suggesting there’s no link between violence and video games.
An actual apex legend plugged his PlayStation 4 into a TV at Portland International Airport on Thursday to play Apex Legends.
According to Oregon Live (via Kotaku), the man commandeered a TV that was displaying a map of the airport. Security officials walked over and asked the traveler to stop playing. Kama Simonds from Port of Portland said that the man “very politely” asked if he can finish his game. Security denied his request, and the man stopped his game.
“Apparently it was a very polite and cordial interaction,” Simonds said.
Picture from Oregon Live
The television takeover occurred early in the morning on Thursday. Simonds said this was, “a good reminder of what not to do at the airport.”
US Gamer pointed out that the man decided to play a ranked match judging by a badge on the corner of the screen.
Apex Legends launched almost a year ago on February 4, 2019. The game has continued adding new events including the Grand Soirée event, which is currently going on until January 28. One of the events is an option to play in third-person mode.
When I think of the games and franchises that define Blizzard Entertainment as a development studio, the name that stands tallest amongst a formidable line-up of giants is Warcraft – Blizzard’s high-fantasy universe full of memorable characters and moments, epic battles, and lore that spans thousands of years.
In many ways the story of Warcraft is also the story of Blizzard, and the evolution of the accessible, fun, and cinematic approach it brings to many of its creations. It’s a story that takes us from a small studio looking to create something new and original to a larger and more experienced team delving into a broader online world. In the 25 years since Warcraft first hit retail shelves as a new strategy game, and in the 15 years since World of Warcraft created a community of millions, this franchise has evolved and grown, as has its popularity.
To celebrate the anniversary of Warcraft, the games and its history, I sat down with several key Blizzard devs to discuss Warcraft’s journey.
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994)
“I was actually at 3DO at the time, a company I helped found, and I had gone to Electronics Boutique to look at some new games that I could play,” John Hight, Executive Producer on World of Warcraft recalls. “And I see this game called Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. I picked it up and was completely enthralled, I played through the campaign and tried to convince anybody that would listen to me to go out and buy it. Partly so we could play together. It caused me to shift my career direction. After 3DO I went to work for Westwood Studios where eventually I worked on Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. Warcraft was my first introduction to real-time strategy, and I loved it.”
By 1994 Blizzard Entertainment had already developed a few titles: licensed products like The Death and Return of Superman for the 16-bit Super Nintendo in addition to original efforts like The Lost Vikings. Under the guise of Silicon & Synapse, the studio was made up of a small team of passionate developers that, when not working on a project, could be found discussing what games they were playing at length.
The Lost Vikings, a strategy platformer of sorts where players were put in charge of a colourful group of Nordic warriors who had to work together to reach a goal, began as a riff on the popular hit Lemmings. Warcraft, which would go on to define almost a decade of real-time strategy excellence for Blizzard, began in a similarly unexpected way.
Lost and clearly loving it.
“At the time it wasn’t actually going to be Warcraft: Orcs & Humans the strategy game,” Technical Director at Blizzard Bob Fitch tells me. “We were playing games like Monkey Island, and point-and-clicks were really fun, so the next thing was going to be a graphic adventure game.” And that adventure game was set to star the Lost Vikings.
As a Blizzard veteran, Bob has been working on the underlying tech that has driven many of the company’s most iconic releases for decades. This flirtation with the graphic adventure genre wouldn’t last though, thanks mostly to the release of Westwood Studios’ Dune II – a game that many cite as the original real-time strategy or RTS game. Slowly but surely the team became fixated on this new way to experience interactive strategy, so the decision was made to rework the engine and to create something in this space.
“We were thinking that the obvious answer was to take the Vikings, shrink them down to be really small, and then have the player direct them where they wanted them to go,” Bob recalls, noting that the initial tests were simple scenarios that were very different to the puzzles found in The Lost Vikings. Looking to Dune II, the addition of opponents, the ability to attack, and PvP entered the picture. But when it came down to creating abilities or different types of Vikings, the team hit a wall.
“We realised that just telling our Vikings where to go and attack wasn’t as much fun as playing Dune II,” Bob continues, confirming that coming up with Viking powers was a struggle. “The next thing you know, artists were drawing pictures of orcs and goblins and elves and saying that if we weren’t coming up with interesting ideas for what Vikings could do, this might be the answer.”[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%22D%26D%20and%20Tolkien%20were%20all%20very%20traditional%20medieval-styled%20characters%20and%20places.%20We%20pushed%20our%20fantasy%20world%20into%20the%20realm%20of%20superhero%20comics%2C%20blockbuster%20movies%2C%20and%20heavy%20metal%20music.%22%20-%20Samwise%20Didier”]
“We all grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, and reading Tolkien, so we all knew what an elf looked like, or what a paladin was,” Senior Art Director for Blizzard Entertainment, Samwise Didier, recalls. “Artistically, we really wanted to make our creations stand out. D&D and Tolkien were all very traditional medieval-styled characters and places. We pushed our fantasy world into the realm of superhero comics, blockbuster movies, and heavy metal music. Everything we created was ramped up. Anything ‘Level 1’ needed to look like it was ‘Level 5’. We didn’t go to ‘11’, we went to ‘111’!”
It was a defining moment for the studio. Although it had already created an original property with The Lost Vikings, the Warcraft universe would soon become something much more. Once the decision was made to tackle fantasy elements the project quickly evolved, with new mechanics and features added over time. Even the chess-like nature of the RTS genre would take literal form. “We had actual chess pieces, that was the black pieces and the white pieces,” Bob explains. “It was the Orcs & Humans. On one side you got the footman, on the other side you had the grunts, and they were kind of equal, and each side had its pieces in a particular slot.”
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans released in 1994 to both critical and commercial success. Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness followed shortly after in 1995 and saw the series, franchise, and real-time strategy really deliver on its potential.
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995)
“I was working on MechWarrior 2 at Activision and a colleague started playing Warcraft II,” Tim Morten, former Production Director on StarCraft II recalls. “I looked over his shoulder and it seemed like fun. There was a feature back then where with one disc you could have your friends play multiplayer with you. So, I got to join him in a multiplayer match and he immediately marched into my base and built towers. Of course, at this point I’m figuring out the tech tree. I hadn’t played an RTS so I had no idea how to counter that strategy and he couldn’t stop laughing at how my base was getting taken apart by these towers. That was my inspiration to learn how to get better at playing RTS games.”
“I think in a lot of ways we didn’t really feel like we were finished,” Bob Fitch tells me. The still relatively small team at Blizzard was ready to keep going the moment development wrapped on the original Warcraft. “We were finished in that it was the game we had set out to make, but there were things that got cut. Things like Naval battles. That and we just wanted to keep working on it. We had learned a lot about how to make an RTS, how they play, how to balance them, how to make artificial intelligence for them – and we knew we could do an even better job the second time around.”[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%22We%20had%20learned%20a%20lot%20about%20how%20to%20make%20an%20RTS%2C%20how%20they%20play%2C%20how%20to%20balance%20them%2C%20how%20to%20make%20artificial%20intelligence%20for%20them%20%E2%80%93%20and%20we%20knew%20we%20could%20do%20an%20even%20better%20job%20the%20second%20time%20around.%E2%80%9D%20-%20Bob%20Fitch”]
“Orcs & Humans was our first step into Azeroth,” Samwise adds. “And we basically just stuck to orcs and humans, with a little flavour added through water elementals and demons. With Warcraft II, we added elves and dwarves, as well as trolls, ogres and dragons. We were building our fantasy world with the standard tropes but were making our own versions of them – the Blizzard versions that we all know and love.”
“We realised that it would be more interesting if the sides were more diverse,” Bob continues. “And so, you can see that in Warcraft II, which had so much more variety in the way that each side played and what all the units were. And that evolution was then reflected in StarCraft where there’s three unique races.”
In creating Warcraft II, the team at Blizzard also worked to evolve the tools that it had, with the goal being to create something so powerful that players would have the option to create anything they wanted. In Orcs & Humans, many of the maps and campaign missions were laid out using text files. This evolved into a proper editor for the completion of Warcraft II and later, its expansion, Beyond The Dark Portal.
“The campaigns went through evolutions where originally they were simplistic,” Bob explains. “Over time they grew to have more story and sub-quests, as we got better. And then that segues into another evolution, which was the editor. We began building the editors to have more and more functionality until our goal with Warcraft II and eventually StarCraft II was to create engines and editors so powerful that end users could create whatever they wanted.”
Jumping forward to the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002, this goal was met when user-created versions of genres we now know of as Tower Defence and MOBAs began to appear for the first time – all within the Warcraft universe. For the team at Blizzard it was a gradual evolution of the tools it had been honing internally finally making their way out into the world. And in a way getting to see the end results felt like mission complete.
In expanding the scope of Warcraft II, however, the characters and lore of the universe began to form alongside the art and strategy gameplay. Compelling characters began to emerge, and events took on more cinematic qualities. This storytelling would eventually take the series and franchise in new and exciting directions.
Warcraft II saw the series really finding its feet.
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002)
“When I started at Blizzard, it was 1996,” Chris Sigaty, former Executive Producer and Senior Vice President at Blizzard recalls. “I was in college at USC at the time, and I knew a friend who knew somebody at Blizzard, and they invited me to come in and help test Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal. I absolutely loved Tides of Darkness and strategy gaming. And immediately there was this feeling of having found my people. I was a total Dungeons & Dragons nerd, science fiction and fantasy reader growing up and I never imagined there was a career in it. But once I arrived, I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do.”
Before Blizzard would return to Warcraft though there was – as the team lovingly puts it – many distractions along the way. From the dark action-RPG Diablo series to the science fiction space opera StarCraft. The latter took the RTS genre to its strategic limit by introducing three varied, asymmetrical, and involved races that engaged in grand battles involving large armies. It was StarCraft’s popularity and success in this space, bolstered by the earliest examples of competitive esports, that would inform the development of Warcraft III. That and the renewed focus on character and story.
“Warcraft III was where everything came together,” Samwise tells me. “The story, art, movies, hell – even the art in the manual, really pushed our game to 111. We came up with the franchise’s biggest characters in Warcraft III: Jaina, Illidan, Thrall and Arthas, and dozens more. Almost every character in World of Warcraft was based and modelled after something we created in Warcraft III and when World of Warcraft came out, it only got better.”
“It was originally a hero-controlled game,” Chris says, talking about the earliest moments developing Warcraft III. “You could only control your hero, and the units you had around it were selected only if you had vision of them. It was a very different game. It wasn’t working out, but it gave this differentiator for Warcraft III that we wanted, which was something that played very differently than the units-swarming you got from StarCraft. Hero-centric, level up, have items, consume them, go into different buildings and then focus on a few smaller armies. We called it RPS (Role Playing Strategy).”
This new direction saw an explosion of lore and gameplay come together, from the introduction of 16 or so playable races, to the simplification of base building to incorporate more story and role-playing character progression. Warcraft III would ultimately see this vision move back towards more traditional RTS mechanics, with the playable races cut down to eight and then four, but its focus on hero abilities and a central character remained.
“It was a complete revamp at that point,” Chris confirms. “We basically went back to the drawing board, but the element of having this hero character was something the team was very fond of. That hero-centric play felt like the big innovation for us.”
“We were still working on StarCraft at that time,” Rob McNaughton, Lead Artist on StarCraft II recalls. “We really sat down and thought about how we are going to evolve the RTS. We wanted to take it to the next level. First, we made the decision to go with 3D graphics, which meant that Warcraft III became one of our most technically challenging games to make during those years. But we also quickly realised that it was going to be more than just a continuation of the RTSs we’ve made. With the heroes and levelling, the game could become more accessible to a lot more people. So, from our point of view internally, the Warcraft franchise went a little softer where StarCraft went hard esports.”
“By Warcraft III, we added dozens more races and places to Azeroth,” Samwise adds, “including some of our most recognisable races in the game; the night elves, tauren, and murlocs. Working with 3D models and environments at this time allowed us to really push the look of the game and add to the immersion with in-game cutscenes. All the while, our pre-rendered cinematics were improving with each game and by World of Warcraft, both gameplay art and cinematic art hit a whole new level.”
“I was working at BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on a game called Jade Empire,” Kevin Martins, Lead Designer on World of Warcraft recalls. “With World of Warcraft we had heard the buzz about it. We played a demo at E3, but as we only played about 20 minutes of it, we didn’t think much of the game. I’m an orc and I kill scorpions. I hope there’s more to it. Oh boy, was there more to it! When it was released it quickly took over the team at BioWare, where it single-handedly delayed Jade Empire because we were all playing it. I had my troll and female mage, my first characters and they’re still around to this day.”
Taken at face value, World of Warcraft presented a new direction not only for the franchise but Blizzard as a whole. But much like the origins of Warcraft, which was born from playing and loving a new type of game with the release of Dune II, World of Warcraft’s inception followed a similar trajectory.[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%22When%20it%20was%20released%20it%20quickly%20took%20over%20the%20team%20at%20BioWare%2C%20where%20it%20single-handedly%20delayed%20Jade%20Empire%20because%20we%20were%20all%20playing%20it.%22%20-%20Kevin%20Martins”]
“The team was playing EverQuest and Ultima Online and loving them,” Chris recalls. “So, immediately we began asking – what if. What if we brought our slant to it? There was another game in development at the time and it was not an MMO in any way. And we didn’t want to do that anymore. The big moment came when Allen Adham walked in and said, ‘I know we’ve been doing this thing, but we all really want to go and do this thing.’ And everybody was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ And that new thing became World of Warcraft.”
Having thousands of people log into a single server, with the goal being to create a seamless world without the zone-loading seen in EverQuest, was there from the beginning. This alone proved to be a huge technical challenge and undertaking for the team. “It’s hard to wrap your head around it,” Chris continues. “We started building this engine that needs to do all these things, and it was new territory. Blizzard had been through this many times where we’ll ask, ‘What do we know about that?’, and then realise we don’t know anything about it.”
The sheer scope of World of Warcraft’s, well, world was larger than anything Blizzard had developed to date, and it required both new technology and a different approach to design. But it wasn’t long before the first prototype build was put together and the team could see the Warcraft universe face-to-face for the first time.
“I remember being completely impressed by seeing the world at scale,” Chris tells me. “With the Warcraft RTS games, even though they showed some size differences between units, it’s not truly a scale. It does whatever it needs to do for the gameplay, so an ogre might be bigger than a footman as far as the number of pixels on the screen is concerned, but it wasn’t an accurate scale.”[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%22When%20you%20look%20at%20how%20big%20that%20initial%20world%20was%20and%20how%20ambitious%20it%20was%2C%20comparing%20it%20to%20all%20the%20MMORPGs%20that%20were%20released%20before%20that%20-%20I%20don’t%20think%20any%20of%20them%20came%20out%20with%20a%20world%20that%20huge.%22%20-%20John%20Hight”]
“When you see a treant in Warcraft III walking around, it’s big compared to your footman,” Chris continues. “But it’s not like when you walk around in World of Warcraft, look up, and see a treant. That was one of those moments where it was like holy crap that’s a treant! That’s how we knew we were on the right track, because it’s such an epic feeling. We knew Warcraft players were going to like this too.”
“Instead of viewing multiple characters from above, we had our first experience of looking up to see a sky and seeing just how terrifying some of our creatures and characters could be,” Samwise adds.
Although early builds would provide this new perspective, there were still many challenges facing the team. One was taking the art style seen in Warcraft III and translating that to a more traditional over the shoulder look. “Keeping the Warcraft style; we struggled with that for a while,” Samwise admits. “For some reason, with this new point of view, the art team had a tendency to go more realistic with the characters and environments. Our weapons and armour were more proportionate to normal-style weapons, and our colours were becoming dull and muted. Maybe it was the view we were working in.”
Battle Chests… now that takes me back.
“At that time, most first-person style games were trying to be more realistic,” Samwise continues. “That is definitely not want we wanted. We wanted the immersion to feel realistic, but not kill the Warcraft art style that we all loved. We needed to get that superhero vibe back. We just applied our normal philosophy for creating art and tweaked it a bit to fit this new camera view. By pushing the proportions back to normal Warcraft levels, our characters became more dynamic and more heroic. We pushed the weapons and armour to be even bigger and bulkier, and juiced up our palette to keep our colours rich and vibrant. After that, we had the feel of Warcraft back in our art.”
“The game for me and I think for a lot of players, is that the world is the star first,” John Hight says. “There’s always something new and an interesting place to explore. When you look at how big that initial world was and how ambitious it was, comparing it to all the MMORPGs that were released before that – I don’t think any of them came out with a world that huge. And then each expansion added to the world with interesting storytelling and characters like Jaina or Sylvanas or Thrall. Characters that we’ve followed through many different stories over the years.”
“The moment to me that really stands out came on launch night,” Kaeo Milker, Production Director on Heroes of the Storm tells me. “We do launch events and we did one for WoW at Fry’s Electronics, which is this big warehouse electronics store. We’d done them before and usually a couple of hundred people show up, they’re all excited and they buy the game and we sign autographs and we all celebrate together. But that night when we arrived there was a line of people wrapped around and around this huge building multiple times. And then it went out into the parking lot and around the block. There were thousands of people there and it was the first moment where we realised that this was different. It felt like the beginning of everything, beyond all of our wildest expectations.”
It’s hard to overstate how the success of World of Warcraft not only impacted the industry but Blizzard as a studio. From a small team that created Warcraft: Orcs & Humans the studio would grow to measure in the hundreds, especially as work commenced on expansions for World of Warcraft. But behind this exponential rise in popularity and awareness, Warcraft has always remained the result of developers given the freedom to create. “We know what we like,” Bob summarises. “Sometimes that’s all it really takes, knowing what you like and a commitment to do it.”
“Warcraft came from passionate players creating the games they wanted to play,” Chris Sigaty confirms. “And it turns out that the people out there playing the games are basically brethren, people that feel the same way, and there’s this awesome camaraderie that comes out of that. You can feel that togetherness.”
“Friendships that people could make before ever meeting in real life, that’s always been a part of what the internet is,” Kevin Martins adds. “The power of relationship building was particularly strong in World of Warcraft and it’s a legacy that resonates to this day.”[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%E2%80%9CThe%20power%20of%20relationship%20building%20was%20particularly%20strong%20in%20World%20of%20Warcraft%20and%20it%E2%80%99s%20a%20legacy%20that%20resonates%20to%20this%20day.%E2%80%9D%20-%20Kevin%20Martin”]
“We love seeing people create costumes and artwork based on Warcraft,” Samwise says. “I remember explaining to the artists when they joined the team what the ‘Warcraft’ art style was. At the time, it was really different, and sometimes polarising for people. Now, everyone walks into Blizzard knowing what the style is. I have hired people as artists specifically from seeing their fan art.”
“You know, we do want World of Warcraft to live for another 15 years or 50 years or even a hundred years,” John Hight tells me. “And in order to do that, it has to remain relevant to the community out there. We’re also developing for the next two, four, six, eight years. We plan many expansions ahead. What’s exciting is that people coming to work on the game or play Warcraft for the first time probably have no idea about the games that had influenced the designers of the originals.”
With the release of World of Warcraft: Classic, which recreated the launch period of the game to great success, and the upcoming release of the remastered Warcraft III: Reforged, this is a sentiment that rings especially true for Blizzard. Both projects have artists, designers, and engineers who grew up playing Warcraft – either in its original real-time strategy form or the phenomenon that is the massively-multiplayer World of Warcraft.
“When I think about how those things influenced each other, it wasn’t this path that we set out on, knowing we’re going to get to this place,” Chris concludes. “But World of Warcraft became the giant exclamation point for Warcraft in that it created communities of people. It broke down barriers with people simply having a great time adventuring together. That for me, I want to share that with more people, and I look forward to 25 more years where we can broaden that feeling and bring that sense of togetherness to an even larger group.”
Spencer took to Twitter to confirm that the Xbox team is “hard at work on E3” and that they “look forward to sharing with all who love to play what’s ahead for us.”
PlayStation President and CEO Jim Ryan took the stage at CES 2020 today to finally unveil the long-awaited PlayStation 5…logo.
During the Sony CES keynote event, Ryan shared some notable milestones for the PlayStation 4 before talking up the company’s next-gen consoles. Other than confirming the previously known holiday 2020 release window, Ryan shared the logo for the PlayStation 5.
If you’re not familiar with it already, the PlayStation 5 logo is similar to that of the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Except with the five numeral in place of the three and four. Much like the name of the console, the logo is a natural progression of Sony’s console evolution.
In an email to IGN, AMD has clarified that the visual render of the Xbox Series X is not an official model from Microsoft. Instead, the company sourced it from a third-party modeling website. Here is the full statement below:
“The Xbox Series X imagery used during the AMD CES press conference was not sourced from Microsoft and does not accurately represent the design or features of the upcoming console. They were taken from TurboSquid.com.”
That means that while the Xbox Series X may still have any combination of the ports, none of it has been officially confirmed by Microsoft. We have updated the story below to reflect this new information.
