Nick and Aaron on Gamescom: a conversation

Last week, two Engadget editors braved the sweltering Gamescom floor in Cologne, Germany, to bring you all the news. Now that the show is finally over, Aaron Souppouris and Nick Summers look back on a week at the world’s largest public games conference, breaking down their highs and lows from Gamescom 2015.

Microsoft wins on merit, not attendance

Aaron Souppouris

I came to Gamescom expecting to be able to write two things about Microsoft: First, that it won just by turning up, and second, that the dream of Xbox as the entertainment center of your home is over. Turns out, neither one of those things is true. Yes, Sony didn’t hold a press conference this year, but Microsoft did more than just show up. It brought a ton of new game demos, and also announced a DVR feature for recording live TV, which kills the premise that it’s given up on the Xbox as an entertainment hub. It’s just making it an option, rather than a requirement.

Nick Summers

DVR functionality is huge for the Xbox One, even if it’s only compatible with over-the-air channels at launch. Some people will argue that this is proof Microsoft is still supporting its TV vision for the Xbox One, but I’m not sure that’s the case. Many of these features will have been in the pipeline both before and after the console’s launch, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the last of those scheduled updates. Under Phil Spencer, the messaging for Xbox has been focused specifically on games. The TV features are a nice bonus, but they’re not the company’s core concern anymore.

Regardless, I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft’s showing at Gamescom this year. Scalebound is shaping up to be Platinum’s most ambitious game to date, and Quantum Break continues to intrigue with its mixture of traditional gameplay and live-action episodes. I was also pleased by the new Rise of the Tomb Raider footage, which seems to be bringing back the series’ iconic tombs in a big way.

Aaron Souppouris

I did the math and Kudo Tsunoda said “gamers” more than once per minute during our interview, so you’re definitely spot-on about Microsoft’s messaging in recent months.

So we both liked Microsoft’s lineup a lot. I already know the answer to this, but what was your standout game?

Favorite Games

Nick Summers

Scalebound is probably the one that I’m most looking forward to. PlatinumGames is a tremendously talented studio and this Xbox exclusive seems to be pushing the team in new, interesting directions. The protagonist fights in classic Bayonetta style, but this time he’ll be joined by a dragon called Thuban who acts independently. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to give him suggestions and customize his appearance with different skin tones and armor. There’s also an intriguing system whereby you’ll earn more gems for using Thuban with restraint in combat. Did I mention it looks absolutely beautiful?

Aaron Souppouris

I don’t think I can disagree there. Customizable dragon buddies and a PlatinumGames combat system sound like heaven. For me, though, the surprise of the show was a little game called Renowned Explorers: International Society. I hadn’t heard a lot about it before the show, but I’m now super excited for its release next month. It’s similar to XCOM, but adds in the nodal system of FTL: Faster Than Light for navigation and transforms the emotional aspects of The Sims 4 into a combat system. It’s a tough one to explain, but I’m super amped. The fact that I’ve put over 100 hours into both FTL and XCOM should give you an idea as to why.

Nick Summers

One game that surprised me was Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and for all the wrong reasons. For years, I’ve wanted the franchise to explore either Victorian London or feudal Japan. I should be over the moon now that Ubisoft has chosen the former, but everything about Syndicate feels drab and lifeless. I played a demo this year with protagonist Evie in the Tower of London, but nothing about my assassination felt particularly novel. You can now use a grappling hook to scale buildings and pretend to be arrested with the help of an allied guard. They’re new additions, sure, but they don’t really change the core gameplay loop. I thought the new setting would win me over, but what I played this year left me feeling pretty disappointed. Was there anything that crushed your spirits?

Challenging games

Aaron Souppouris

So… a slightly embarrassing question: Did you struggle with any of the demos? I heard a lot of people talking about how hard Dark Souls III is, but I actually suffered a lot with some rather basic platforming in the Rise of the Tomb Raider demo, falling off a ledge several times. My gaming life began with the NES, SNES and Saturn, so I didn’t really grasp the whole third-person camera thing until it was too late. Gamescom served as a harsh reminder of how bad I am at most video games.

Nick Summers

It’s been a while since I’ve played the original Mirror’s Edge, so jumping into the new Catalyst demo was challenging. Within the first five minutes (of a time-restricted 15-minute demo) I had sent Faith falling to her doom a grand total of seven times. The booth was set up like a football stadium too, so I suspect plenty of fellow attendees were watching my pitiful leaps and silently judging me. Parkour is hard folks, both physically and digitally.

Aaron Souppouris

I really can’t wait for Catalyst. I’m also legitimately looking forward to Star Wars Battlefront after playing through a level with you.

Shooty bang bang games

Nick Summers

Yeah, I had almost forgotten how much I love Star Wars. When I first launched my X-wing fighter, I felt like a little boy again. The sound of the lasers, the various knobs and dials inside your cockpit — everything has been perfectly recreated from the films. Fighting for either the Rebel Alliance or Galactic Empire is a blast too. You’re never too far from the action and it’s easy to lock onto an enemy and trail them through the night sky, waiting for the perfect moment to fire your proton torpedoes. The force is strong with this one.

Aaron Souppouris

Loving Star Wars was never going to be an issue for me, and I think the authenticity is enough to put my Battlefront phobia to one side. Trying to stay with positivity, what was your best moment of the show?

Best moment

Nick Summers

I’m a little obsessed with the band Chvrches at the moment, so I flipped out when I heard they had been playing Rock Band 4 on the show floor. As you might expect, their performance of Paramore’s “Ignorance” was pretty solid, especially with Lauren Mayberry’s gorgeous vocals. I was on the fence about whether to buy Rock Band 4 or Guitar Hero Live this year, but this might have just made up my mind. After all, I want to play the game with a few beers and my friends — Rock Band still looks like the superior social experience.

Aaron Souppouris

So it wasn’t when you rode that Metal Gear Solid hog? I still can’t decide which photo I like best.

Nick Summers

I was going for the “blue steel” look here. Ben Stiller, if you need any extras for Zoolander 2, just give me a call.

Aaron Souppouris

You’ve got a big Ben Stiller cosplay career ahead of you. Talking of, I saw a couple cosplaying as Ashitaka and San from Princess Mononoke. They looked so adorable, so authentic… I was legitimately upset when I realized my camera was back in the press room.

One of the great things about conferences is, after the dust settles, you don’t remember fighting your way through the ridiculously busy show floor; you just remember the awesome, the quirky and the fun.

Lifehacks and sad food

Nick Summers

Yeah, I love seeing all the ingenuity of the attendees, especially at public shows. Loads of people carried cheap, foldable camping stools this year. You know, the simple kind made from two metal squares and a sheet of thin fabric. They’re light and fold down flat, so many people were tucking them in between their back and rucksack. When you’re queueing for hours on end, a comfortable perch can be an absolute lifesaver. I want one for next year.

Aaron Souppouris

Because you definitely need one more thing to carry all day. I suppose it would make a nice change from sitting on the floor hunched over my laptop and an overpriced bottle of water. One stall was selling 250ml bottles at €0.01 per ml. And that wasn’t even the worst. I had 30 minutes to eat on Thursday and the only food within reach was from a sushi place. Despite my rule against eating seafood at trade shows, I paid the equivalent of $20 for a few pieces of dry salmon and a prawn uramaki. It was dreadful, but I’m still alive, so small mercies.

Slideshow-311401

Nick Summers

Everything I ate at Gamescom was bad. I stomached half-cooked hot dogs, cold chicken pasta and a sandwich that looked like it had been prepared six months ago. I shudder just thinking about them. The larger problem was that the event just didn’t have enough places where you could buy food. Attendees want to be queuing to play games, not for overpriced burgers that taste like cardboard. For shame, Gamescom overlords.

Aaron Souppouris

I still enjoyed this year’s show, though, even if the food literally left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s easy to get caught up in the negativity when you’ve been working 16-hour days all week. I keep on forgetting games that I’ve seen when people ask. Just so many games.

Nick Summers

Yeah, it was a great show. Can I go to bed now? Gamescom is a blast, but it’s also incredibly tiring. I just want to lie down, grab my 3DS and play — wait, no. No more video games. No. More. Video games. At least for the next few days, anyway…

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We’ve had a busy week full of stories — far too many to mention in a single article. You can catch up on them all at our Gamescom 2015 page, from now until the end of time.

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Tags: Gamescom, Gamescom-2015, Gamescom2015, microsoft, mirrors-edge, Scalebound, Star Wars, Tomb Raider, Xbox

Virgin-Tesla takes you to space in Gone Home studio’s ‘Tacoma’

Fullbright struck a nerve with 2013’s Gone Home, its emotionally haunting tale of a 20-something who returns from Europe in 1995 to find her family home deserted. That indie game darling not only became a critical success for the small Portland, Oregon-based studio, but also won a BAFTA in 2014 for best game debut, and two VGX awards — one for best PC game, the other for best independent game.

For Fullbright’s follow-up, the near-future, set-in-space sci-fi tale Tacoma, the studio has some undoubtedly high expectations to meet. It’s a good thing then that Microsoft, which has partnered with Fullbright to make the game an Xbox One exclusive, is there to lend a deep-pocketed helping hand. Tacoma is very much still in development and won’t be out until mid-2016. But that didn’t stop Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor and level designer Tynan Wales from trotting out a short 30-minute demo that gives a glimpse of the augmented reality and artificial intelligence that pervades Tacoma‘s world. I recently had a chance to chat with both Gaynor and Wales about avoiding the sophomore slump, their sci-fi inspirations, a possible HoloLens demo, killer AIs and why space could be a very gay place.

What was it like having to follow up Gone Home with all that critical acclaim? Were you afraid of a sophomore slump at all?

Steve Gaynor: For me, the biggest challenge is just making sure we don’t repeat ourselves. Because I think the biggest danger of the disappointing follow-up is when the creators have tried to recapture: “Oh, we need to do that again. We need to make sure that we do this and this and this [thing] that worked last time.” And I think if you feel like, okay, I remember playing this, but it was better the first time, then that’s when you’re in a danger zone… of feeling like, okay, I don’t have anything new to say.

What was so exciting about the first one was that it was new and I didn’t know what to expect. … That’s why we’ve done everything we can to push ourselves to say this doesn’t take place in a real time and place in the past. It has to take place in a fictional universe, a near future that we have to completely imagine instead of trying to authentically recreate. And it can’t be about a family or a love story. It has to be about: Who is this group of people? It’s a very different situation, a very different set of relationships — a different way of understanding the environment.

I’ve played Gone Home and this seems very similar. I hope you would agree with that. It’s sort of that quiet, haunting first-person exploration. So in what ways did you seek to differentiate it from Gone Home?

SG: Well, we wanted to push more outside of what we felt like was familiar. So much of Gone Home was about the familiarity, the recognizability of what you’re finding: the analog, the handwritten notes and tape cassettes. So I think what we wanted to say, for one, is the player’s discovering the bounds of this fictional world kind of at the same time as we are because it takes place outside of our own experience.

“What does it mean when Gone Home is in zero gravity a hundred percent of the time?”

— Steve Gaynor

The thing that you’re pointing to is definitely correct because we’re starting from a similar place. And so our hope is to take one interesting step forward along multiple vectors to say: In Gone Home, you never saw another human figure. In Tacoma, you aren’t coming face-to-face with other living people, but you’re understanding, getting to encounter and kind of relive these moments in these characters’ lives in a way that’s more present in the environment than what we could do in Gone Home. But it still is relying on that isolated, kind of I’m here by myself, but I can kind of involve my experience in these moments that these people lived through. And kind of feel like I’m inside of them in a way that you were always outside of the audio diaries describing events in Gone Home.

And also, we really wanted to say something that is kind of inherent to a game like Gone Home; that’s inherent to gravity. If you’re not giving the player a grappling hook or you can’t glide like Batman or something like that, you’re very much glued to the floor. In a lot of ways, you’re kind of playing a 3D game in 2D. And we wanted to push one step past what players are used to with, “I just navigate a first-person environment like this,” and say, actually, we just want to challenge people to think of this space in a fully three-dimensional way.

Tynan Wales: The game, at one point, was actually a lot more similar to Gone Home — it was in a house.

Having come on from not doing Gone Home, very early in development, not only was the idea of a space station suggested, but also the mechanics Steve just outlined with the AR scenes and using gravity and moving from surface to surface. Now that I’ve been seeing them all up and working, I feel like the tone may be similar, but the experience is pretty different when I play it.

I noticed that instead of retreading the same things — experiencing narrative through audio playback — you use holograms to replace these story cues. And the fact that now you have this space where it can wind up being a little bit too overwhelming, but it gives you more areas to search through. Does that all tie into coming up with the near-future space theme? How did all of that evolve?

SG: The project started in a much more familiar, mundane location and we went down that road for a little while. I’d had this concern in the back of my head that I hadn’t really been paying that much attention to. But I went last summer on an anniversary trip with my wife. And, being on the trip, we were away from stuff long enough to get some perspective. And I’m just telling my wife, “We’re doing another fucking house game. Now that we’ve started developing it further, I can feel how close it is and I don’t want to do that again.” We needed another place that’s like an isolated place where a small group of people could live. It’s not an apartment building or an arctic base or an oil platform. It’s something like that; it could be a space station. And my wife was like, “Yeah, a space station’s cool.”

“When Microsoft started looking at the game and talking to us about it, they were immediately like, ‘You know, we can do this with HoloLens.’”

— Steve Gaynor

And so it started from there, in saying it’s on a space station, so what does that mean? When is the space station? Where is the space station? Why does it exist? And, like you were saying, how do we play that off? Well, you could make a space station that’s ring-shaped and you could use centrifugal force or you could have one that has artificial gravity. But, in a lot of ways, then you’re just making Gone Home, but the house just looks like a space station. So from the beginning, I was like, it should just all be in zero G because then we can’t say, “Oh yeah, you open a drawer and you put a pen on the desk and it rolls off.” What does it mean when Gone Home is in zero gravity a hundred percent of the time? We don’t know.

TW: In the early version, when it was a house, some of the plans were to have an actual AI that moved around with you and responded to your actions or asked you questions, etc. And this was, I think, a really interesting — not exactly solution — but evolution of that idea with multiple characters and these [holographic] recordings instead of a live, active character. And the way you can, hopefully, interact with them by not being a static observer all the time and trying to move between voices and conversations and different locations and follow characters.

SG: In Gone Home, there were no other characters in the game. So, we thought, what if in our next game there was a character in the space with you following you around? Okay, well that’s a super-literal solution to, “We want to have another human presence in the space.” So okay, let’s start working on that.

And then there are all these other problems that come up when the AI has to react to what you’re doing and be interesting when they don’t have anything to do. What it makes you do is start asking yourself, “What are we actually trying to get out of this? Are we trying to get a feeling of an AI companion following you around? Is that what we care about?” No, what we care about is you feeling like you can observe these people in the place where they live, where these moments happen. And so that’s a way the near-future, sci-fi, high-tech setting gave us the ability to say, “Well, I think augmented reality could be a pervasive technology in a facility like this two generations from now.” So what if you were seeing these live, positional, Kinect-like skeleton recordings of what happened to these people and that gives you that ability to share the space with them without us having to say, “Yeah, there’s somebody who has to have a good reaction when you just start throwing stuff at the wall.”

Did you do any actual research on AR technologies and what’s to come? Or was it more: Since this is sci-fi, we’re going to take liberties based on what we know?

TW: So just timeline-wise, as far as I’m concerned, the idea came up before I ever heard anything about HoloLens.

I don’t think it came from understanding modern tech or where modern tech was headed or who was researching that. I mean, it’s kind of interesting to see HoloLens coming online as we’re developing the game because it’s super relevant and super possible.

It seems to me that Fullbright-style games like Gone Home and Tacoma would lend themselves very well to being displayed through HoloLens. Is that something you thought about? Have you talked to Microsoft about that?

SG: Well, it’s funny because we’re putting the game on Xbox One, so we have a relationship with Microsoft. And when they started coming and looking at the game and talking to us about it, they were immediately just like, “You know, we can do this with HoloLens.” They could put an AR scene or they could put the info panels in HoloLens and you could do that.

But the thing that I think is a lot more relevant to that is something that’s more of a focused experience. I think there’s still not a good solution to the idea of freely walking around in three-dimensional space while also being in one of these AR/VR experiences. They are great if the entire experience takes place in the size of the room that you’re in. With Oculus, the experience is more about sitting at a desk or sitting in a cockpit. They have things that they’re more natively geared towards. So on the one hand, we’re not planning to do Oculus support. We didn’t for Gone Home. We’re not planning to do it for Tacoma. I’m not sold on this kind of game just being able to… okay, just put it in a headset.

But I do think there could be a very interesting focused demo. Like you could have a HoloLens recreation of the orbital lounge in the game where there are info panels so you can look out and see the moon and the Earth. And you can see this scene play out and be inside of it. I think that would be fascinating to see a version of. I don’t know if that’s in Microsoft’s promotional budget or whatever. But I think that it would be really cool to basically be able to step into that experience in a controlled way that would be a good fit for what I’m aware [of] the technology to be good at.

“Virgin-Tesla is a fictional extrapolation of our present where these two prominent companies merged and now are providing this [space tourism] service.”

— Steve Gaynor

The thing that definitely cracked me up when I noticed it was when I was examining objects [in Tacoma] and saw the Virgin-Tesla logo. Did you have to get special permission for that?

SG: It’s like mentioning a brand name in a novel. We aren’t using any of their copyrighted logotypes or anything. Something like Virgin-Tesla is clearly a fictional extrapolation of our present to say that the game takes place in a fictional universe where these two prominent companies merged and now are providing this [space tourism] service. And so, it’s a way for us to ground what we’re doing hopefully in the present that we live in and talk about it directly. As opposed to just having to make up Aerospace Tourism Corp. because I feel like when you don’t have any direct connections to where we are now, everything just feels a lot more abstract. That’s what we love about [the film] 2001. Because it’s like oh, there’s Pan Am and Howard Johnson. … If you look at this in 30 years, it’ll be very much a 2016 imagining of 2088, like Blade Runner was a 1982 [imagining of] 2019. Having those hooks into our present is really valuable.

With ODIN [the station’s AI], it seems as though there’s the potential you could be drawing on what’s happening now in technology. That you’re going after some of the fears around the possibility of semiconscious AIs, like how Stephen Hawking or Bill Gates is saying: “Everyone be careful because that day is coming.”

SG: Now, that’s legit! When those guys are writing letters about: Can we stop making killer robots, please?! It’s not just jokes anymore.

So is ODIN a killer AI?

TW: That’s the question…

SG: Is ODIN murdering you?

TW: I don’t want to spoil anything…

SG: That’s something I became conscious of during Gone Home. We can say to you — the download link can say nothing’s going to jump out at you in this game. And it doesn’t matter because we can say seriously there’s no enemies; nobody’s gonna get you; nothing’s gonna jump out at you. It’s just an empty house. There’s literally no way if somebody’s predisposed to thinking, “Yeah, but what if?” I can say right now and I will say the ending of this game is not that the whole crew was killed. ODIN is not going to try to murder you. This is true.

“I’m happy to say [Tacoma’s] not about a murderous, killer AI.”

— Steve Gaynor

TW: Oh, he let it loose.

SG: As a creator, you’re like, if we tell people too much, it’ll ruin the experience. I’m happy to say it’s not about a murderous, killer AI. But it is going to be in a lot of ways about discovering what the capabilities and what the consciousness of this thing actually are. Because you start out and clearly it’s keeping things from you. And so hopefully, some of the questions are like: Why? Who has given it these directives? Or has anyone? Does it have its own reasons for keeping this information from you?

Is that theme of AI and what it could become something you wanted to make a commentary on with this game? Or is it just that you came up with the space setting and decided to include an AI?

SG: I’ve never really started from a point of wanting to state a message with what I’m working on. I’ve never worked on something where I’m like, “I want to say this about what I believe about what AI is or what the dangers of this technology are or anything.” Honestly, it always comes from really practical perspectives.

Maybe I misinterpreted this, but the two holographic messages I first encountered were about two different gay relationships. I think that’s a really interesting choice to start the game. So is it a gay space station?

SG: It’s a bit of a “gaystation” — you could say. We have the two women that are in a relationship on the station; and Andrew, who has a husband that’s off the station. Evie and Clive are straight and then Sarah’s really kind of undefined. Her orientation has not been really … she’s involved with looking into AR dating, but we haven’t really talked about where she lands.

I think what we’re saying about the state of society that the crew of Tacoma’s living in is that it’s continued to some point where if these people are gay, there wouldn’t be any reason that they wouldn’t not just be open about it. People happen to be gay on the station and are not trying to hide it and that’s just how it is. That’s just an implicit statement about where we think this part of the society is headed, I guess. It’s a decision that you make when you’re doing speculative fiction. You can either say, we’re in the present; we’ve got this trajectory and we basically feel like it’s going to continue. Or you can say, society’s here now and we’re going to make our fiction about it taking a hard right turn.

There’ve been tons of very disruptive changes to technology and society and how we live our lives. And as far as that goes, cellphones have totally changed everyday life for people, So hopefully, we get to talk about that kind of stuff with AR and with saying commercial space tourism is a thing, but only for the very high-end of society still. So what does that mean? Hopefully, the identity of the crew and who they are and what kind of relationships they’re in and so forth is just part of that fabric.

Tynan Wales (at left) and Steve Gaynor

How far along in development is the game at this point?

SG: We’re aiming for mid-2016, but I don’t want to say a date because we don’t know what it is.

Why go with Xbox One when PS4 has the largest install base and PlayStation’s been the friendliest to indies, arguably?

SG: I think it is always shifting tides with that part of the industry and with companies that size. I think that Sony did get a head start reaching out to indies and making it part of their identity when PS4 was first getting off the ground. It’s obviously worked out well for them. We’re at a point now where I think Microsoft is working really hard to reach out to people that are doing small projects and get them to align themselves with their platform. So, after we put Tacoma out there, Microsoft reached out to us and started talking to us and got the conversation going. And they’ve been a really great partner so far. Microsoft, at this point, is doing the work, getting out there and trying to get this kind of stuff onto Xbox.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Images: Fullbright (game screens)

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