Archive: 21st February 2008: GDC 2008 / Gamasutra
GDC: The Future of Story In Game Design - See what I mean about one of the main themes being story? I wasn’t complaining - this was another entertaining session. I’m really pleased to see how many comments this story got, too!
GDC: Radical Talks ‘More Is Better’ For Prototype - This session blew me away. It was obviously hotly anticipated (the room was packed in a very not-legal seeming way, and I tripped, oh, 86 people with my laptop cable) but I hadn’t even heard of Prototype before I went (feel free to pillory me for this if you wish.)
Most people obviously came just to see the game in action, and it did look amazing, particularly for the amazing fluidity and freedom of the main character - like a cross between Assassin’s Creed’s Altair and Crackdown’s nameless agent. Wasn’t a fan of the gore, though. There had better be a decent explanation for it - I’m not against violence, but it’s actually one of the few games I’ve seen where I thought “man, this seems gratuitous.”
What actually impressed me most about the session was the speakers’ clear understanding of their game design tenants: that the fun of open world games comes from the variety of systems in the world interacting. A mistake the developers of Assassin’s Creed made was to produce a game full of systems that didn’t interact, and I’ve wanted to write about that concept for a while now.
GDC: The Inter-Species Game Design Challenge - What a great day for sessions! This was really wacky - particularly Alexey Pajitnov’s Dolphin Ride concept, which largely involved electrocuting dolphins (or shooting them with paintballs.) I was very impressed with Brenda Braithwaite’s One Hundred Dogs, though. If I ever signed up for Facebook (and if I ever get a dog) I’d play it for sure. It should have won!