A video game as metaphor: How a Twitter freakout inspired ‘Adr1ft’
It feels like a lifetime ago, but early 2013 was a really strange time for video games. In the lead-up to Microsoft debuting the Xbox One that May, the mood was incredibly tense. Rumors were flying that the then-unnanounced console would require a constant connection to the internet in an effort to thwart used-game sales. Redmond’s refusal to comment wasn’t helping the situation, either. Enter Adam Orth.
Back then, he was the creative director for Microsoft’s gaming division. When he tweeted rather indignantly that he didn’t “get the drama” of having an always-online console April of that year, saying the reaction didn’t go over well would be a massive understatement. “Sometimes the electricity goes out. I will not buy a vacuum cleaner,” he continued.
“The internet totally erupted,” he says. “I got death threats.” He resigned from his post shortly thereafter and set his Twitter account to private. Adr1ft is his way of coming to terms with that situation. In the game, you play as the lone survivor of a wrecked space station that’s floating above Earth. Oxygen is constantly leaking out of your spacesuit and every pulse of your thrusters to move around consumes it.
“The destroyed space station is a metaphor for my life at the time,” he says. “This isolation is that I felt entirely alone. Instead of talking about it, I just made a game about it.”
Orth tells me that he’s always been fascinated by space games. The seed for Adr1ft was in the back of his mind for a bit but it wasn’t until his Twitter incident that he had a eureka moment. “It went from something that would be really cool to do, to something I had to do,” Orth says. “It took over my life.”
He quit Microsoft that April, and says that the entire game, universe and story were complete that July; his first prototype took a week to build. But making the game wasn’t exactly therapeutic — at least not at first — because he says that developing games isn’t an immediate act. Meaning, even after a day’s work you won’t necessarily have a video game to play.
“I don’t really think of it as a cathartic experience, but as more of a creative experience simply because about a week after the thing with Twitter happened, I knew what was going on,” he says.
“The destroyed space station is a metaphor for my life at the time,” Orth says.
Surprisingly enough, Redmond has been very supportive of the game. “Microsoft was never bad to me. Ever. I was bad to them,” he says. “[It was] my mistake.”
Every piece of narrative in Adr1ft comes from Orth’s life in some way, he says. And the game isn’t just about him, he’s brought in the experiences of others to build the story out as well. For example, the medical officer on the ill-fated space station? He’s an addict whose old cravings aren’t helped by the fact that he’s having a hard time with sobriety. The mission’s been going on for far too long and the bottle is looking more and more attractive as a way to cope. He also lied to get his job. His entire narrative arc is him telling an Alcoholics Anonymous group about how hard he’s trying to stay on the wagon.
Given that a bad judgment call combined with a one-to-millions communication platform led to Orth leaving a job at one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, you’d think that he’d be bitter or angry. Or even that some of those emotions would’ve made their way into the game. That isn’t the case as everything is pretty calm. Well, until you start running out of oxygen that is.
“There’s no male power fantasy here,” he says. “It’s not a heroic save-the-world story, it’s ‘save yourself.’”
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft
GameFly Streaming App review
GameFly recently released their new video game streaming app for the Amazon Fire TV. They have support coming to the Fire TV Stick as well. This is great news for budget gamer’s, who don’t mind paying a subscription fee and at this point, it’s the only way to get console quality games on your Fire TV. Oh, and did I mention you can play any game in their library for 10 minutes free?
To get started, you’ll need an Amazon Fire TV and a video game controller. You can purchase one from Amazon for $39.99, but the app also officially supports the Xbox 360 wired and wireless controllers, Logitech F710 wireless controller, and the Logitech F-310 wired controller. I used the Xbox 360 wireless controller myself in reviewing this app.
The app starts out by testing your internet connection. In order to use the app, you need to have a wired connection or a 5GHz wireless connection. Gamefly recommends that you have a 5.0 Mbps connection at the very minimum, but for HD resolution they recommend at least an 8.5 Mbps connection. The maximum resolution at this point is 720p and the system can automatically adjust the resolution and bit rate to keep your game playing smoothly. In short, it looks great.
The interface is top notch as it was very easy to use and find games to play. In order to play a game, you select the category on the right and then use the cover-flow style interface to select a game.
You can play any game for 10 minutes free of charge and you don’t need to set up a different account because your Amazon account is your GameFly streaming account. If you would like to play beyond the 10-minute demo, you’ll need to subscribe to a game pack. Game packs range between $6.99/month and $9.99/month. Unfortunately at this point there is no all inclusive game pack, but you can subscribe to more that one game pack at a time.
| Pack | Price | Titles |
|---|---|---|
| Action Pack | (7 titles) – $6.99/month | F.E.A.R. 3, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, Red Faction: Armageddon, Red Faction: Guerilla, Mafia II, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman |
| Adventure Pack | (7 titles) – $6.99/month | Dark Void, Overlord II, Darksiders, Darksiders II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Batman: Arkham Origins |
| Gamer Pack | (16 titles) – $9.99/month | F.E.A.R. 3, Red Faction: Armageddon, Red Faction: Guerilla, Sleeping Dogs, Hitman, Darksiders, Darksiders II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Batman: Arkham Origins, Shank, Shank 2, Dark Void, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, Mafia II, Overlord II |
| Speed Pack | (7 titles) – $6.99/month | Ace Combat, Dirt 3, GRID, GRID 2, MotoGP13, Ridge Racer Unbounded, WRC 4 |
| Fun Pack | (7 titles) – $6.99/month | Flock!, PAC-MAN Championship Edition, PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures, LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams – Rise of the Owlverlord, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger |
| LEGO Pack | (7 titles) – $6.99/month | LEGO Batman, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, LEGO Lord of the Rings, LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7, LEGO Marvel: Super Heroes, LEGO The Hobbit |
The game graphics are console quality. I did not have any screen artifacting or latency issues while playing. Especially since I was using the Xbox 360 controller, it was easy to forget what device I was playing on. The only time it seemed to have a small stutter, was during a few cut scenes. Overall I was very impressed at the graphics and image quality during streaming.
The only real negative that I could come up with, is the limited selection of games in their catalog. Although there are some pretty great games in that catalog, many of the games are at least a few years old. They do, however; have more titles coming in the near future. One major limitation is that the games do not have online multiplayer support. If the game supports a local multiplayer option, then you are more than welcome to play with friends using that option. You will, of course, need additional controllers to play together.
Overall this is a great service, and if I hadn’t already purchased and finished 90% of the games in the adventure pack, I would subscribe. The lack of more recent games and games in general, really kills it for me. However, if you haven’t played many of these games, the Gamefly Streaming service provides a great way to play the games in their library with a minimal financial commitment. Also if you unsubscribe from one of their play packs, all your save data remains in the cloud to access at any time when you may wish to resubscribe.
GameFly Streaming – Amazon App Store
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‘Mega Man’ creator says Japanese publishers need to ‘wake up’
If you grew up playing any installment of the storied Mega Man franchise, the name Keiji Inafune should carry some weight. Inafune’s one of the masterminds behind the beloved metallic man in blue we first met in the NES era. And with his new game, Mighty No. 9, a spiritual successor to his Capcom legacy, he famously kicked off a new wave of Japanese developers who’ve struck out on their own with the help of crowdfunding.
But Inafune didn’t get to this point solely because of a desire to try more modern things; he was essentially forced to turn to Kickstarter when Capcom refused to innovate the beloved Mega Man IP he helped create. “As a creator, as myself, the best thing that happened to this project [Mighty No. 9] is that I have the IP,” he says of the experience with Kickstarter. “The IP is mine. The IP is the company’s IP, so we can do whatever we want. And that will actually speed things up really nicely because once the backers ask for something, we don’t have to go over to the publisher or the first-party [studio] … or whoever we’re working with. We can just make the decision.”
Though the bulk of support for Mighty No. 9 comes from the nostalgia of the legions of backers seeking a fresh Mega Man, Inafune stresses that the game is more an evolution of the series than a direct sequel. “We didn’t really think about [making] another copy of Mega Man,” he says. “In a way, I wanna kind of evolve this genre and this action platformer kind of genre with this game. So, yes, we had Mega Man in mind at some point, but we didn’t just want to copy that.”
Mighty No. 9 isn’t due out on consoles until September 15th, but even still Inafune’s already thinking about a possible next installment. Just don’t expect him to retread the crowdfunding route. Instead, he says that he’s looking to Mighty No. 9 publisher Deep Silver for the next adventures of protagonist Beck, which should center on the bosses from the game. “I’m more thinking of making this game by myself and, since we have such a good relationship with Deep Silver right now, maybe working with them. Sort of starting a partnership with them and making this game from the start for them.”
If Inafune has any gripes with crowdfunding, he’s certainly keeping them close to his chest. In fact, he refers to the roughly 70,000 backers as “staff members,” and confesses that the only negative aspect of the process, which raised over $4 million (including pledges through PayPal), was the stress his team felt in emailing out three development updates per month.
But perhaps the greatest boon of this whole community-supported endeavor — what Inafune refers to as “the best-case scenario” — is that he was able to fully realize his concept. “I pretty much achieved every kind of stretch goal that was out there. At this point I can’t think of too many things I left off. In a sense, this game is kind of complete,” he says.
Inafune’s aware that the success of Mighty No. 9‘s campaign has inspired other Japanese developers, like Koji Igarashi with Bloodstained and Yu Suzuki with Shenmue III, to strike out on their own and embrace crowdfunding. It’s a domino effect he blames on the blindness of Japanese game publishers. He also attributes those recent Kickstarter successes to an unaddressed appetite for Japanese-developed games in the North American market.
“We haven’t seen too many Japanese games or too many new Japanese IPs coming out in the recent years,” Inafune says. “For example, at this year’s E3, there’s not too many… almost nothing. So I think this is what the gamers want. And I think a lot of the Japanese creators, not necessarily the publishers, are realizing this and some of them realized they [can] just do the Kickstarter and they [can] become a really huge success. And of course this is a really good thing, but we shouldn’t just stop here with just creators. We should get those Japanese publishers to get involved as well. Wake them up and let them see how demanding the market is for Japanese games. So hopefully the publishers will see this soon enough and I guess [start] challenging themselves a little bit more.”
[Images credit: Comcept]
This interview was conducted via translator. It has been condensed and edited.
Check here for everything happening at E3 2015!
Valve opens up ‘Dota 2 Reborn’ to beta testers
Dota 2 Reborn is now open for beta testing like Valve promised, and just in time for the weekend. You will need to install Dota 2 if you haven’t yet, so you can access the Reborn tab and download the game. The two versions share your match history, MMR, cosmetic items and friends, but Ranked Matchmaking isn’t available in the beta yet, as the game developers want to focus on testing and improving the basic features first. Reborn runs on Valve’s new Source 2 game engine, which makes it easy for people to create user-generated content. According to PC Gamer, it has a stunning UI, and it feels like a brand new game instead of an update to Dota 2 — plus, the Custom Games tab made possible by Source 2 looks promising. The only bad news? Like many other betas (and far too many commercial releases) your worst enemy at this point in time is serious connectivity issues.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Dota 2 (1), Dota 2 (2)
Epic wants to avoid making ‘terrible’ VR with Unreal Engine
Epic Games is a big proponent of VR, led by its Unreal Engine and the integrated resources it provides to developers. These tools are designed to be compatible with most existing hardware for virtual reality, including the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR. And to give you an idea of how strongly Epic Games feels about the technology, CEO Tim Sweeney told us earlier this year he believes virtual reality will “change the world.” On the ground at E3 2015, we sat down with Chief Technology Officer Kim Libreri and Unreal Engine General Manager Ray Davis to talk about the state of VR and where they believe it’s headed.
Both Libreri and Davis think it is key to have a set of standards for VR development, as it would make things easier for every developer, not only those who are interacting with the Unreal Engine. “We wanna make sure that, whatever platform developers choose to use, they’re well supported in UE 4,” says Libreri, who previously worked on visual effects for The Matrix franchise. Davis adds, “It’s always been sort of our [approach] with the engine. Even going all the way back to the original Xbox [360] and pushing back on Microsoft to make sure they put enough memory in it.” He says it’s also important to learn the lessons of what works and what doesn’t in VR and share that information with developers and companies like Oculus or Valve.
For Epic Games and Unreal Engine, one of the main focuses right now is to better understand input, motion-tracking and how those two elements work with VR experiences. “You know, we’ve got controllers on the horizon; things are gonna be really difficult,” says Libreri, “the first time that you got into a new generation VR experience with Crescent Bay or the Vive, you wanted to touch things.” That’s expected to be supported by Unreal Engine, along with whatever new methods of input may come up in the future. “We just wanna help sort of propagate people’s ability to evolve quickly,” he says about what Unreal Engine’s goal is in the VR landscape.
Davis also emphasizes that partnerships between manufacturers, such as Microsoft and Oculus, will be crucial going forward. Davis believes these types of collaborations could pave the way for VR projects that are actually a pleasure to experience. “It’s actually really, really great that they found that connection, because it’s really easy to have terrible VR experiences — it’s like the Wild Wild West out there,” he says. “On the PC front, having a good partnership between Rift and Windows 10 increases the chances that it’ll actually work consistently well. That’s always been the Windows problem; it’s such a wide-open hardware ecosystem, you don’t know what kind of drivers you have or the right GPU, all that kind of stuff.”
“It’s like the Wild Wild West out there.”
Libreri, for his part, says developers will benefit from creating snackable VR, rather than taking on large-scale projects from the beginning. “As we start to think about the evolution of the shooter game or the exploration/action/adventure game, the Uncharted for VR, I think that it’s better to experiment initially with smaller, digestible things,” he adds. “As a collective, we learn that language quickly.”
Check here for everything happening at E3 2015!
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Media Molecule’s ‘Dreams’ is for YouTubers and Twitch streamers
When Alex Evans, co-founder of Sony PlayStation first-party studio Media Molecule, announced Dreams onstage at E3 this week, there was a lot of confusion in the audience and on social media. And that’s okay, according to Evans. “What we wanted to do was get it out there and get people talking about it. And your staff are right to be scratching their heads. … If it’s on your radar, fantastic. Because it is hard to take it in. The main confusion I’ve seen reading on the net does seem to be that people are like, ‘Is it a movie maker? Is it a game maker? What is it?’ The communities will probably define that. But it’s absolutely a game. We are making games with it. What you will choose to make with it, what the community will choose to make with it — that’s the cool thing. We don’t know.”
A demo of the animate tool in Dreams
It’s clear from chatting with Evans and studio creative director Mark Healey that, much like the nature of dreams themselves, development of the title took on a stream-of-consciousness approach. Although the sculpting and animation tools were created first, Evan explains that the game engine is actually what ultimately ended up influencing its design. “If you watch the PS4 announce … it’s a very different engine than the one that we showed yesterday,” he says. “The visual look of the game actually changed drastically and improved what people were making when the engine changed. Weirdly, what you’d think is like where did the game idea come? Where did the mechanic come from? Actually, the engine’s ended up influencing that, the look of it. So it’s very kind of like [an] eat-your-own-tail sort of thing. It’s awesome, though.”
This E3 wasn’t even Dreams’ debut. Evans actually demoed the puppeteering aspect during Sony’s first-ever PlayStation showcase back in February of 2013. “That was early Dreams right there,” he says. “In fact, we’ve still got those assets kicking around. I mean, they’re all in the server.”
Evans continues: “We didn’t want to confuse people and kind of reference [that showcase] too heavily. But it’s totally the same lineage. And our process is sort of ‘explore to find the product’ kind of vibe. It was half tech led, half make it up as we go along… kind of find-the-game-within-the-game thing. So that was a stage. And if you rewatch it now, it’s 100 percent legit.”
Production on Dreams has been underway for four years now, but Sony and Media Molecule are staying tight-lipped about any release date, saying only to stay tuned for more news at Paris Game Week this October. That said, there is a possibility the title will be released in beta, as Healey says the studio wants to get it out “as soon as possible because we want the community to be really foundational in what it becomes.”
“Our process is sort of ‘explore to find the product’ kind of vibe. It was half tech led, half make it up as we go along.” — Alex Evans
In a way, Healey says that Dreams embodies the spirit of game jams: sessions where different artists and developers come together to brainstorm the creation of a game within a 24-hour time limit. “That sort of collaboration and that live aspect to it is really catered for in Dreams,” says Healey. “So if you’re a specialist; if you’re someone who thinks, ‘Well, I’m not just going to sculpt,’ you’re going to find people to team up with and make something. Or, if you’re more of an auteur, you can sit there.”
“You can be a game director,” adds Evans. “You don’t have to do anything. Because it’s all live, connected online. … We’re pushing collaboration as much as we can. So if you want to be in your bedroom on your own for three days and work on your magnum opus, that’s cool. That’s legit. But actually, it’s a much more welcoming world if you can go in and it’s like, ‘Hey! This dude over here is building skyscrapers.’”
“We’ve seen this with our previous project, LittleBigPlanet. There’s an important part of any community [and] that’s the sort of curators and editorializers and the people who are tastemakers. And this YouTuber generation … the world of Dreams is going out into the world of Twitch streaming and YouTube and live PS4 streaming with Share. And so we tried to build a lot of the creation sort of vibe into that world so people who are familiar with that world of streaming and Twitch and YouTubing and Let’s Plays and all that will be right at home. And if you wanna get your boss made, you could probably just go online and find someone who is good at that and be like, ‘Can you make this for me, please?’ So it’s collaborative.”
Media Molecule’s Mark Healey (at left) with Alex Evans
That underlying focus on community and feedback is a strong theme for Dreams. It’s an approach to game design that you don’t often see outside of Kickstarter-backed projects, like Keiji Inafuna’s Mighty No.9. Both Evans and Healy freely admit that they’re not quite sure what final form the game will take upon release and so they hope legions of YouTubers and Twitch streamers will help mold its direction. As Evans explains, “I think doing the beta, when we finally do it, it’ll just allow us to shape [the game]. So some of the questions we’re being cagey about is because I think we can allow the community through feedback to actually help us shape some of our stuff. We have a plan and we’re doing it, but it may be that we have to kind of turn twenty degrees to the left.”
“Dreams is going out into the world of Twitch streaming and YouTube and Live PS4 streaming with Share. So we tried to build a lot of the creation vibe into that world.” — Alex Evans
Evans and Healey weren’t quite so cagey when I asked them if Dreams would be a Morpheus VR launch title. Though the pair wouldn’t outright confirm it, Healey admits “it’s an obvious thing to do.” Adds Evans: “Let’s just say Anton Mikhailov, who helped build the first ever Morpheus prototype, is at Molecule now. … So I’ll leave it at that.”
Now about the mysterious gameplay: There’s a reason why Dreams‘ visual design shifts between the solid and the gauzy — an effect Healey likens to an impressionist painting — and that’s because progression through the game will mirror that of actual dreams. Healey says that players “can go from experience to experience in a very dream-like way.” It’s an effect he hopes will spur the community to experiment quickly with the create tools and stumble into new modes of play.
A 3D-print of “David” the piano guy from Dreams
Evans elaborates on this: “You might be an FPS [first-person shooter] guy, so FPS is your entry. But as you’re playing the FPS, you open the door and it’s a fucking desert and you’re in Journey. You walk out and then you’re walking through the desert and then you see … a spaceship and you climb into it. … It sounds mad, but when you’ve framed it all as dream-like, actually you just get into it. The same way that when you’re in an actual dream in real life, you don’t question the fact that you walk out your house and you’re in the middle of the beach. … You know what I mean? That feeling.”
“You can share everything from an entire level to the smallest asset.” — Mark Healey
As for more traditional gameplay modes, Evans says that players can expect to see that bundled into the final product. Both he and Healey referenced the bubbles shown off at the end of this year’s E3 demo as a tease of what that “game-like content” could be. “At Media Molecule, we’re game makers so we’re making games with it. So there will be Media Molecule content there. The scope of that is to be announced. But it will be there and it will be good,” he says.
With LittleBigPlanet serving as the game’s spiritual predecessor, it should go without saying that Dreams is heavily focused on amassing a shared online library of user-generated content. “You can share everything from an entire level to the smallest asset,” says Healey. “You can make a pebble if [you] like and it could end up in everybody’s game or ‘dreams.’ And your name will be attached to that, however remixed.”
“David” the piano guy as seen in the E3 Dreams demo
If there’s any major takeway from what PS4 gamers can expect from Dreams when it’s finally released, it’s that Media Molecule is building a title for today’s connected culture of remixing, streaming and sharing. “Dreams is difficult to explain,” stresses Evans. “But I think once the community gets a hold of it, it’s really going to flower.”
[Images: Sony PlayStation/Media Molecule]
Check here for everything happening at E3 2015!
Here’s how Xbox One backward compatibility works
The Xbox 360 had a dedicated spot in millions of living rooms, bedrooms and offices for nearly 10 years, and during that time, players purchased massive libraries of games. However, when the Xbox One launched in 2013, it didn’t include the ability to play or transfer Xbox 360 games, a disappointment for many fans. That’s why Microsoft’s announcement at its E3 showcase was so exciting: The Xbox One is getting backward compatibility this holiday, with a lineup of more than 100 fan-requested Xbox 360 games to start and more to be added as demand warrants. Xbox One backward compatibility runs an Xbox 360 emulator right on the console, which is no easy feat, Microsoft General Manager of Games Publishing Shannon Loftis explains during a chat at E3.
Are you pleased with the response to the announcement of backward compatibility on Xbox One?
It’s something that I, as a gamer, have been wanting. Actually, the genesis of backwards compatibility is that gamers asked for it. It took some time for us to figure out how to do it, but we did and the response has been amazingly positive.
How does it work, technologically?
It wasn’t easy. It took some pretty dedicated engineering effort and very talented engineers. What they did was they created a software-based 360 emulation within the Xbox One architecture. So, when you put your disc in the drive, we’re actually loading up an emulator, and then we put up a little portion of the Xbox 360 dashboard and you use that dashboard to launch into your game. You still have access though to all the great Xbox One features: game streaming, game DVR, screenshots. It works for digital games as well and your saved games do transfer. Gamers have put so much into 360 games, so much passion, energy, time, money, and that value I think is important for us to bring into the Xbox One story.
Will every Xbox 360 game eventually be available via backward compatibility?
It’s up to gamers to tell us what they want. We do all the work, but there is a little bit of work and part of that involves talking with the publisher and making sure that this is consistent with their goals for the game as well. So, as gamers ask us, we will deliver.
Check here for everything happening at E3 2015!
How Microsoft keeps ‘Halo 5’ multiplayer games glitch-free
Glitches and bugs can ruin even the greatest of multiplayer games (looking at you MW3 Javelin Suicide Bomb). But thanks to a pair of cutting-edge analytics tools, Halo‘s dev team can find and fix these coding hiccups before they become memes. Senior researcher Rob DeLine recently explained how they work. Trill is a temporal processing and in-memory analytics engine. “It’s pretty much the world’s fastest,” DeLine said in the video below. “It’s two to four magnitudes faster than the competition in terms of processing temporal data.” When combined with the Tempe exploratory data-analysis web service, which allows devs to watch replays of real-time play, devs can quickly spot and solve issues based only on what (and how) the community is actively gaming.
These tools allowed the Halo dev team to spot and fix one such glitch almost immediately after it appeared in the multiplayer beta release of Halo 5: Guardians. Halo devs used Tempe “to see what customers were doing while playing in real time. What they were looking at was how often players were winning these really rare medals.” Specifically, the team looked at how the Combat Evolved medal — wherein players have throw a grenade at a discarded weapon, blast it into the air and then catch it — could be getting awarded every few minutes. The team used Tempe and Trill to go back and analyze the gameplay footage, figure out that a coding bug made the medal ludicrously easy to get and apply a patch.
Filed under: Gaming, Microsoft
Source: Microsoft Blog
Xbox is working with a ‘broad array of VR providers’
Microsoft is entering the virtual reality conversation with a one-two punch: partnerships with both Oculus and Valve VR. The Oculus Rift will be bundled with a wireless Xbox One controller, native support on Windows 10 and the ability to play Xbox One games in a virtual cinema via Xbox-to-Windows streaming. Valve VR joins the Rift on Windows 10, a partnership that Microsoft announced during its Xbox E3 conference, suggesting a focus on gaming in Valve’s virtual worlds. But, Microsoft’s VR plans may be bigger than just two other companies, Microsoft General Manager of Games Publishing Shannon Loftis suggested during an interview at E3 this week. Read her thoughts on VR, gaming and Windows 10 below.
What’s going on with Microsoft’s Valve VR partnership?
What we’re focused on is creating a Windows 10-based ecosystem that extends to as many different platforms and experience types as possible. VR is incredibly important. Gamers have told us that it’s important; game developers want to use it to tell stories in a special way.
We want to make it easy for game developers to deliver to gamers, so we are partnering with a broad array of VR providers — we’ve talked about Oculus; we’ve talked about Valve — to make sure that when people are creating these experiences that they have as many choices as possible.
To clarify, are you working with any other VR hardware manufacturers, besides Oculus and Valve?
None that we’re talking about right now, but a Windows 10-powered pipeline that extends to a lot of different outlets is a great value for developers and in turn a great value for gamers.
Are virtual and augmented reality the future of gaming?
Different game experiences play best in different settings and I think virtual reality is an incredible experience when you’re totally immersed in a universe, and I love the inherently social nature of console gaming. I don’t really see any of them going away because I think there are still great stories to tell and great games to build for all of these.
Check here for everything happening at E3 2015!
Microsoft: We won’t skip ‘Halo’ betas from now on
When Halo: The Master Chief Collection launched last year, it was supposed to be ultimate fan service: four of the most renowned games in the series, all in one fancy package loaded with extras, all on Xbox One. The final product was… well, problematic. To this day it still isn’t 100 percent functional all the time, with a rash of issues like game crashes still persisting. “It was our first game on a new platform, and it was essentially five engines [with] a wrapper,” 343 Industries head Bonnie Ross explained to me this week. All that to say, because the game wasn’t a native Xbox One game is why it had so many issues. Still that makes it incredibly difficult to get excited for this fall’s Halo 5: Guardians. Will it be as heartbreaking on a technical level as MCC? I briefly spoke with Ross about how she and her teams are working to overcome and address that very valid concern.
I know that the Halo 5: Guardians development team is a different from the one that developed Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
Bonnie Ross: That’s why I’m here to answer all those questions; it’s not this team.
But not everyone else knows that. My readers might not. How do you convince people who bought MCC that this isn’t going to be a problem like what happened with that game?
BR: First off, when I say it’s not the same [team], it is 343 Industries. We’ve taken full accountability and we obviously let the fans down. That’s crushing to our studio as well. I think we’re doing everything to make sure that that will never happen again. The difference with Halo 5 is that it was purpose built for the Xbox One in close partnership with the platform team. It’s a brand-new networking stack built for Xbox One, which is not what we were using with MCC; we were using old code.
Being able to solve and understand what the problems were with MCC right before we had the [Halo 5] beta, the timing was very beneficial. We did a ton of changes with the beta. It was a huge learning of the issues we fell down with with MCC that we were able to quickly incorporate into the beta and make sure that we were standing up.
We took that learning to make sure that this [game] is purpose built for Xbox One. You will never see us not do a beta again because there were a lot of things we couldn’t see when we stood up externally. Some of the testing that [Halo 5 lead] Josh Holmes alluded to is testing that we’ve developed since then to make sure we can test all the regions, with all the different types of network profiles (NAT, settings) to make sure that we are standing up.
What happens with MCC once Halo 5 releases?
We will keep supporting MCC. You’ve seen that we’ve given continuous updates, and as fans are giving us feedback we will continue to support MCC.
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This interview has been edited and condensed
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
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