Fallout 3 Developer Slams Diablo III’s Design

While everyone is gung-ho about Diablo III, Ashley Cheng, producer of Fallout 3 has criticised the game design and called it “conservative”.

I must say I am disappointed that Blizzard has stayed on the conservative side in terms of design with their updates to Diablo and Starcraft. Diablo will be interesting since World of Warcraft has a lot of Diablo-like qualities. I have no doubt, however, that they will be incredibly fun, addictive and polished games. Blizzard is the top of the class when it comes to game development - nobody does it better.

Oh no he didn’t!

New Need for Speed game in Development, entitled “Undercover”

Need for Speed: Undercover is under developement as EA’s CEO John Riccitiello revealed during an investor meeting. Riccitiello admitted torturing the developers. What a surprise:

We were torturing a very talented group of people up in Vancouver, which makes it harder to be as innovative every year. So, I think we are going to get better from here.

Splinter Cell: Conviction development still on track, says Ubisoft

Amidst all the confusion, Ubisoft has announced their next Splinter Cell title is shaping up nicely and “still on track”. The developer team posted the announcement on the official Ubisoft forums:

 It’s been a while since our last message but we’re happy to say that development of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction is continuing well and the game is shaping up nicely. The team here is very dedicated and focused to making sure that Conviction turns into an amazing experience of Splinter Cell.

There are lots of rumours flying around right now about Conviction’s development status and we can tell you that the gameplay has evolved, similar to what happens in every game’s development process, and you won’t be disappointed. We take your feedback from these forums very seriously and, although we can’t respond to each and every thing people say, we do take these posts into consideration when making the game.

Unfortunately we’re not able to make Ubidays this year but in the forthcoming months we’ll be back in touch to begin showing you this new installment of the Splinter Cell series.

SEGA gets Unreal

SEGA has renewed the license for Unreal 3.0 engine and plans to use it on a yet-to-be-announced upcoming cross-platform title. Oh goody! Even more color-less environments and brown trees!

Press Release:

SEGA of America today announced that it has extended its relationship with Epic Games by signing a new Unreal Engine 3 licensing deal for an unannounced, cross-platform game. SEGA entered into its original licensing agreement to develop multiple titles with Unreal Engine 3 in May 2007. Details of the project in development will be released at a later date.

“The great capabilities of Unreal Engine 3 make it possible for our developers to deliver incredible gaming experiences,” said Dave Cobb, Vice President of Development for SEGA of America, Inc. “Unreal Engine 3 provides superior power and flexibility enabling SEGA to bring original and exciting next-generation multi-platform titles.” Read more

City of Heroes Gets Injected with Double Fusion

Leading independent game advertising provider Double Fusion has entered an agreement with NCsoft, the leading developer and publisher of online computer games, to represent the successful comic-book inspired massively multiplayer online game, City of Heroes. Double Fusion will provide the technology and sales force to bring brands into the popular online role-playing game which takes place in a modern urban setting, an ideal environment for unobtrusive in-game advertising. Read more

Postmortem: Infinity Ward

The latest issue of Game Developer magazine features a cover story on the making of Call of Duty 4. Infinity Ward discusses why they switched to a modern setting as well as the bombing failure of the PC demo. Here’s a snip provided by Gamasutra:

“Call of Duty 4 was Infinity Ward’s third Call of Duty game, and as such we approached it knowing we needed to do something fresh. We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves any more than we have to, and many members of the team came off Call of Duty 2 promising never to work on another WWII game.

We tried several different directions, many of which were failures, but the ultimate result was the best game any of us have ever worked on. As a game development experience, it seemed to go so smoothly that it was difficult to come up with five things that went wrong…

Coming off Call of Duty 2, we knew we wanted to do something different for our next game. We don’t agree with some critics who say that WWII as a genre is dead, but we couldn’t muster the same passion for the subject that we had in our first three WWII games (Call of Duty 1 and 2 and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault).

We had a few ideas that we wanted to do and eventually settled on two. One was Modern Warfare, and the other was a new project.”

Read more