PAX East

For those of you who don’t know what PAX is, it’s short for Penny Arcade Expo. It was conceived around 2004 by the guys who write the Penny Arcade webcomic.

The first show started out in Washington initially and then it expanded to the east coast in 2010 when they brought it to Boston. The show in Boston became known as PAX East and in the past, it has drawn tens of thousands of fans.

In Edmar’s report he goes over a few of the main elements in PAX that make it the gamer-centric conference it is:

• About PAX: http://paxsite.com/.
• Exclusively for gaming…for the gamers!
• Tabletop included.
• Console freeplay area.
• Handheld lounge.
• Classic arcade room.
• Tournaments.
• Freeplay Area.
• Concerts.
• Panels
• INSTA-COMMUNITY.

Natural Selection 2

You may remember us talking to Charlie Cleveland back in 2010 on BASH 157. Looks like Charlie and the gang are getting set to spring NS2 on us. Edmar caught up with his dev crew over at PAX East. Check out their latest video for the game:

Ravaged

Ravaged, by 2DawnGames, is in the middle of a crowd-sourcing run on Kickstarter.com. Visit Kickstarter and send 2Dawn some love.

Wargaming Interview with Victor Kislyi

Victor Kislyi is the CEO of Wargaming.net.  Wargaming is a company based in London and its main development studio is in Belarus. Wargaming started out as a strategy game development company in 1998 and since then it has made it big.

Real big.

Victor Kislyi the CEO recently talked about having 20 million users in World of Tanks and they’re now making about 2 million bucks a month – the game launched in Russia back in only 2010.

• Edmar got to meet with Victor during PAX East and they shared some treats (see pic).
• Wargaming Synopsis:
• 120 -> 800 devs in 18 months
• 3 titles in production: complement each other…fast, medium, more tactical/calculated.  Games not competing with each other.  Use one game’s xp in other game.
• Best Decisions: no publisher
• Worst Decision: no USA presence
• Guiding Principles: Be professional.  Be transparent.  Be kind.  Don’t be greedy.
• I asked how they keep design consistent and he said that since Tanks doesn’t need the same design support anymore the leads can move to other projects and jump back as needed.
• They do well enough with about 30% of players making purchases in game, compared to Zynga which has 1-2% of players paying…so no need to charge more.  He regularly denies design ideas that would encourage more spending.  1-2 movie tickets/month is the sweet point.
• Future:
• cross franchise play?
• consoles

World of Warplanes

• Optimized graphics and effects for plane battles.  15v15.  Full joystick support.
• Dog fighting and ground objectives
• Expect fun environments…hinted at cities such as NY!
• Planes: 1930’s to Korean War including planes based on actual blueprints that were never made production.  No missiles.
• Ranked battles / tournaments
• Cross vehicle play may be in the future…maybe in a year. 5-10 year plan for the franchise.

Check out these exclusive PAX East screen shots:

WoT’s just recently celebrated a year in business and who doesn’t celebrated with a catered, all-you can drink, music-thundering, hot-chicks shakin’-what-they-got, partayy?

You can bet the Vodka was flowing at this Wargaming shin-dig! Thanks to Edmar and his cracker-jack reporting, we get to hear all about it, cuz he was invited to it thanks to Victor and he’s got the scene evidenced through his phone’s camera. Blurry, underexposed, but it’s evidence dammit!

Thanks to Arthur, Victor and all the good folks at Wargaming for inviting us into their inner sanctum and getting to talk-the-talk with them. Congrats on the one year anniversary of WoT and we cannot wait for the Beta of World of Warplanes. I’m warming up my joystick as I speak.

As a special bonus, Edmar and I will be giving away WoT gold to our listeners. Thanks to Wargaming.net for providing us with the bullion. Here’s how you can get in on it:

1. For Edmar’s WoT  gold, listen to the podcast.

2. For my WoT gold, watch my Twitter stream in the next few days: twitter.com/bashandslash

The code you will see is for WoT gold. You have to register at WoT to use it.

Log in to your profile and enter the code I tweet.

Edmar was there at GDC and shares with us the highlights of the summit:

F2P

We knew Free-to-Play was hot this year, but judging by all the sidebars, panels and aisle-chat at GDC, it’s on fire!

For example, Edmar tells us that the biggest booth at GDC was from Wargaming.net, makers of the F2P WoT. Gameindustrybiz.com quantifies some of Wargaming’s success in an article this month. Some of the surprises from that article include the fact that:

• World of Tanks is “generating ‘double digit’ million dollar profits a month,” that quote is attributed to Wargaming’s CEO Victor Kislyi.
• WoT has approximately 20 million registered users and about 30% of them actually paying for content in the game – if true, is an incredibly high conversion rate.
• The game is huge in Europe (~85000 online) — and is massively popular in Russia, where they hit almost half-a-million online last month (no surprise given its Russian dev’s roots). The game in China is also big (~150,000 online). Relatively speaking, the game has not caught on in the same way here in North America (only ~25000 online).
• Edmar tells us that Wargaming’s staff now is approaching 800 staff world-wide.

As everyone who reads this blog knows, Wargaming will be offering a new game very soon, called World of Warplanes. Kislyi was at GDC and recorded this interview:

F2P games at GDC

Here are some of the games that were being shown at GDC:

Planetside

MechWarrior

Warface

Many AAA-game developers I have met seem to think so. While games like Modern Warfare and Battlefield owe their success to the fact that their games play out like movie-fare, sometimes…gameplay suffers as a result.

Recently, at least one influential developer has spoken out against this trend. We discuss this topic and wonder aloud whether developers should put the “game” back in gaming, or whether they should continue to evolve the digital arts until it overtakes movie-going audiences in both numbers and in terms of artistic merit.

To discuss this and many other topics, we have brought on a new roundtable member, he’s a former producer for KAOS Studio’s Homefront, Edmar M. — the last person I interviewed on BASH, is making his first FBS appearance. As usual, we also have our good friend from fpsadmin.com, Jim (aka Rudedog).

Stories ruin gaming?

I have to be honest, I’ve always thought that the game should come first and the story second in any video game…but I have always felt that I was in the minority. Many of you, will only buy a game for its story, just look at the heavily scripted Call of Duty as an example of how popular the “story as-a-game” can be. So, I know that I’m swimming uphill on this one.

It is no surprise then, that I was elated to hear that God of War creator David Jaffe recently lectured his colleagues on the appropriate use of narrative in video games during D.I.C.E. 2012 in Las Vegas. As I am nowhere near as eloquent as Jaffe in expressing my wish that developers should prioritize gameplay, I’ll be quiet and let Jaffe express his arguments here:

Note that Jaffe isn’t saying that we shouldn’t ever have storylines, he just cautions against turning a videogame into an ebook.

Ravaged

In addition to giving us insight into the world of game development, Edmar also alerts us to a really interesting indie vehicular-shooter that is currently being worked on. The name of this new game is called Ravaged and it is being designed by 2Dawn Games.

Ravaged takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth that has been devastated by natural disasters caused by solar flares from the sun.  The main conflict in the game sees the so-called “Resistance” fighting the “Scavengers” for territory and resources. A “Mad-Max” style art design is employed and you get a really good feel for the game when you take a look at some of the gyrocopter action in this new pre-alpha teaser:

Here’s a Trike Vehicle vid that came out in a 2Dawn developer diary a few months ago:

First order of business is to find out how he ended up being in the center of one of the hottest Internet memes going: The Ocean Marketing story.

After we deal with that tidbit, we go on to talk about the Spike TV VGA’s. Are they really all that important to gaming? The technological superior and critically acclaimed shooter Battlefield was shutout this year…so what is the true criteria for winning?

We then move on to discuss the PC platform, how will it do in 2012? After all, BF3’s loss at the VGA’s is not a good thing for PC gaming, at least on the AAA level. Does the MW3 win change the momentum PC platform gaming has had lately? Do you agree that the PC platform even had “momentum”? Some folks apparently think that PC gaming is doing really well. According to nVidia, for example (see reference) by 2014 PC sales will supplant console sales. PC games have been doing really well. League of Legends is one good example. With a reported 15 million gamers worldwide, there are more people playing it than World of Warcraft!

What are the major threats to the PC gaming platform going forward?  We know that console games take a front seat now, will mobile gaming platforms leapfrog everyone? Ben Cousins, who left EA’s Easy Studio and now GM at ngmoco Sweden recently tweeted this graph showing what he thinks the trend forward for performance (with performance should come popularity):  http://yfrog.com/oc4itp

Social gaming is definitely one threat. Mobile platform games in Japan are taking off. Publishers like GREE and DeNA (they own ngmoco) are multi-billion dollar companies with 40%+ profit margins.  In the states, start ups are trying to realize that success… e.g.  U4ia games, headed by Dusty Welch and Chris Archer in Bellevue Wash.

And finally, we talk about F2P. Wasn’t it only yesterday we were talking subscription models? Now it’s F2P. Is this a short or long term industry trend?

Again, we’d like to thank JD_2020 for taking the time to talk gaming with us! Remember to check out Aggregame.com and add JD_2020 on your Twitter.

On a personal note, if you like what we are doing here please help us spread the word about this cast to your friends/colleagues. We’re now on iTunes (link), so you can load the cast up on your iPod and listen whenever you want. If you’d like to write a review on FBS in  iTunes, please do so, we’d appreciate it. The more people listen to the cast, the more influential our community can be in getting the PC platform point across to developers and publishers. Again, thank you so much for listening.

Aside from our co-hosts Chris, from the Blackmonkeys.de and Jim from FPSAdmin.com we have a special guest, Josh — you know him as JD_2020 — from aggregame.com on to talk about the games of 2011.

In addition to sizing up the games of the year, we get into a spirited discussion about gaming criticism and this year’s hot-button topic: Metacritic scores.

Here are some of the games we noticed this year:

• Star Wars: The Old Republic,  BioWare
• Saints Row: The Third, Volition, Inc.
• Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Softworks (voted by you as best game of the year..tied with Batman)
• Portal 2, Valve
• Total War: Shogun 2   (my vote for best non-FPS game of the year)
• Batman: Arkham City (voted by you as best game of the year..tied with Skyrim)

As for the FPS Games…there were many

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3  (Infinity Ward)
• Battlefield 3  (EA DICE)
• Rage  Shooter  id Software
• Duke Nukem Forever
• Brink
• Homefront
• Bulletstorm
• Dead Space 2

My vote? World of Tanks.

Find out what the guys voted for by listening to the cast!

Happy 2012 everyone!

Zh1nt0 stopped by to give us a status check on Battlefield 3 and to talk about the year leading up to its release. It has been an exhausting 2011 and for those at DICE who were deeply involved in BF3′s development and it must have seemed as though it would never end.

Daniel has taken the experiences from 2011 and put them in a journal. Everything In-between is half chronicle, half philosophy lesson. He takes us from the start of the program back in January all the way through numerous game conventions and marketing junkets, into the nail-biting release of the game.

We were able to get a draft copy of his writings and we got the sense from reading them that it was more of a journey of the mind than of the body…though, there was plenty of body journeying as well. There are light experiences and dark experiences in the journal and one can even spot a streak of Heart of Darkness running through it.

Daniel’s memoirs will be released to the community very soon, but he decided to talk about the project and his year-long effort, right here, exclusively on FBS first.

In addition to his own experiences, we also talk to Daniel about BF3 and its success with the PC FPS community. We look into areas of improvement for BF3 and review how its doing with  eSports competitors.

Here is the webcast:

Links: Twitter.com/zh1nt0

This episode, FBS 1 is the start of a new era for us in PC FPS webcasting.  On this, the inaugural show, we introduce the hosts of FBS: Chris (Xiao) from the Blackmonkeys.de, Jim (Rudedog) from FPSAdmin.com and myself, Jock from BASHandSlash.com.

It is quite clear that many changes have occurred in FPS gaming in the past few years. As AAA game companies steer their products towards the average consumer, hardcore gamers and modders — once the core of the PC Gaming community — are being left behind, lost and in search of something more.

BASH, our previous foray in webcasting, we chronicled firsthand the dismantling of our community. With the outlook grim for PC gaming, we finally put BASH to bed early this year and hung up our mics. After all, what was the point? Our community was being eroded and we believed it would stop only once publishers left the PC SKU altogether; however, in only a short span of a year, change has come to our platform.

While AAA games have been a mixed bag, Battlefield 3 of course was tailor-made for PC. But, stepping up big have been  indie manufacturers and the Free-to-Play scene. This spurt of activity that has compelled myself, Chris and Jim to want to strap on the guns once more and ride. With FBS 1 in the can, it signals that we’re indeed back in the saddle again.

In the future, FBS will be live on Ustream and then on demand here on YouTube: BASHandSlashtv. We will be talking about PC FPS gaming and are really looking forward in the participation of the community. As we did on this cast, future FBS’s will be recorded live. Go to BASHandSlash.com for more information!

Remember, the cast will be live and you can take part, just download the stream here: FBS Live . Remember to subscribe to our Twitter stream as we will be announcing future casts there: BASHandSlash Twitter Feed