Category: News

In advance of the recent Game Awards, BioWare brought in a few journalists for a quick presentation discussing the story of its upcoming cooperative RPG Anthem.

As BioWare readies to launch a major new universe, we had questions about the future of BioWare as a studio. At the meeting, game director Jon Warner and lead producer Michael Gamble made a pitch for what the game’s multiplayer story experience would be like, explaining how players would be given private opportunities to advance the narrative while still going on missions with their friends. 

We were able to sit down with Jon Warner to discuss the evolution and development of Anthem, and learn more about how the company is shifting into a new world of RPG design.

Edited for clarity.

So as a group, we wanted to go after some new challenges. We knew that we wanted to start telling stories in a more social way, and that was going beyond our previous efforts at multiplayer like Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Right off the bat, we knew we wanted to create something that was going to be a little bit different from the start, we knew we wanted it to be a co-op experience, we wanted people to play together and be able to enjoy a BioWare setting for an extended period of time. These were the goals, the big tentpoles that drove our development.

Honestly, the first thing that really jumped out at me from our prototype was flight. We played around with it, had lots of different aspects to it, but having that feeling of being able to get to a point in the world and jump off a cliff and fly was like “oh my god, this is—this is amazing!” And then you kind of look around side to side, this is something no one else is doing either. It was magical right off the bat, our engineers, our animators, they were just eating it up. They dug it, they really dove into that challenge, and ‘yeah, we can totally do this.’

A lot of it is respect. Respect for the craft, we’re all game players, we’re storytellers and we tell stories in different ways. It starts from that position of respect. I want to listen to what you have to say as a developer and whether you’re a 3D modeler making terrain, or you’re a writer bringing these amazing characters to life, I want to hear what your opinion—you’re a writer, you have an opinion about how this rifle works or this piece of gear behaves. I really want to hear about that, or about how we’re casting and who we’re casting. You have to start from a position of listening. 

There’s a good structure of peer review that goes on, so you’re never really a lone voice. Sometimes somebody will come up to me and say “I had this idea, I think it should work like that.” You think about that, and I try never to either adopt or discard. It’s “hey let’s sit down and talk about that.” Sometimes there’s a great reason for it, and you go “yeah that would be really cool, and we do our best to make sure that gets adopted or changed or focused whatever the case may be.

But again it has to be a conversation, where are you coming from with this feedback and what do we want out of it? Sometimes it’s my job to draw the box around the sandbox and say “this is the sandbox we’re playing in, and this idea is outside of the sandbox so we probably won’t do it this time but maybe that’s an idea for the next game.” Part of it is my job to do that. That way we come to a place of understanding and agreement. 

It can be challenging. I think there’s one aspect of that which is very personal. It’s not just our coworkers, often time they’re our friends. Often times you go through a lot of challenging circumstances together, you draw closer together, it’s always hard to see somebody move on to that next opportunity, that next thing. I think that one of the ways that you do it is when people move on and choose to go to that next challenge. Again you’re always respectful about that. It’s not “oh well we didn’t need him anyway” or we didn’t need her anyway, it’s always being respectful and saying “they chose to move on, I wish them the best of luck.”

And you be genuine about it. You talk real talk with your teams and your developers. BioWare is an interesting thing because we’ve had such a stable base of people for such a long time. I think BioWare’s actually moving towards a more normal model, where turnover is a little bit higher, but I think that’s healthy in its own way, and it’s normal in its own way.

You roll on. You say “here’s our vision for Anthem, we still believe in it, we feel strong, and players who get their hands on it are believing in it too, and we want you to stay here and make something amazing with us.”

We definitely don’t want to have a culture of toxicity with our players, obviously. Doing things like allowing missions to be followed without voice communication, so everyone understands what you’re supposed to do without having tight coordination with strangers–that’s one important thing that just from a tactical point of view we do. 

The other thing is, we have a great team down in Austin that’s been running Star Wars: The Old Republic for a long time and they’ve developed a really good set of tools to work with the community and foster good practices and discourage bad practices, and I think we just have to be vocal and transparent about what type of behavior is tolerated and what isn’t. 

I think, especially for me, I’ll speak personally about this for a moment. I’m at a point in my life where I’m not always able to coordinate with friends for a long period of time. “We’re going to carve out three hours to do this thing together, and we have to coordinate our schedules to get that done.” I would much rather be able to go after really challenging content with other players who are trying to do the same thing, and let the software bring us together. 

That was kind of the general feeling behind that, let’s not cordon off our best content or our most challenging content in a way a lot of people can’t get to it. Instead, let’s encourage people to be able to get together, go after a challenge, and if they start to become acquaintances they become friends, hey that’s awesome, that’s great, but let’s let that happen, let’s let it happen, let’s see what the players need. 

A lot of it, having developed Anthem, I feel this acutely, you want your players to have the best personal experience. Well if we let you jump in here with a bunch of random people and you’re not really communicating, you might really struggle. But I think you have to respect your players and allow them to try. 

I think those moments are actually still very much there, and it’s the final expression of that friendship or that relationship that is the thing that’s changed. One of my particular favorite moments in the game is near the end of the critical path is a moment where you sit down with Faye and you discuss where you’re at, and it’s this quiet thing in the back of the fort, and it feels so intensely personal.

And by switching over to first-person camera for our conversations, you actually are able to make eye contact with her, and it’s this amazing connection that happens. It is about that friendship and that comraderies, and those moments are still absolutely there, there are moments like that with Owen, with Haluk, it moves me. I think it will move our players. I think that just understanding “hey, this is a game with a story that is about comradeship and friendship, that’s where it goes.”

The postmortem on these things, there’s always things you wish you could have done better. I think people’s experience with working overtime is going to vary from person to person. I can only speak for myself. I think for me, it’s been a challenging project but it hasn’t been crushing. I always said to the team from the very early days, “at the end of this project we are all going to be tired, but we won’t be broken.” That’s kind of the philosophy that we approached it with. I think that as an industry it’s a challenge we are all facing, and we need to be open-eyed and transparent about it. 

Yeah, sure, that is [a moment to wrestle over], it is. You look at it and go “oh, boy, we gotta do this,” but…I always try to err on the side of the person as much as I can, and whether I’ve been successful at that all the time, I don’t know. Because at the end of the day, the talented people who work at BioWare are what makes this whole thing go. I try to contribute to that, I try to lead them and guide them as best as I can, and I try to make sure they’re taking care of themselves as best as they can. Sometimes when you’re so passionate about a thing, sometimes it becomes easy to lose yourself in it, sometimes you have to step in and say “hey, it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint.”

You have to think about the group, the collective at every step. I think that we have developed a lot of muscle memory in how we we tell stories to individuals, and you have to do a little bit of flexing and stretching to tell a story to a group of people. The difference may seem subtle but it’s not, I would just say be mindful of that. And it’ll lead you to good places. 

Let’s take an example from Mass Effect, when characters would address Shepard or…let’s say Mass Effect Andromeda was a multiplayer experience, instead of saying “Ryder” you’d say “Pathfinders.” 

And it seems like a simple thing. Often again it’s that muscle memory as storytellers that wants to pull you back into that place, and just reminding yourself that you’re talking to a group of heroes, not a singular hero. 

In this GDC 2018 session, game developers Brandon Sheffield, Audrey Moon and Dan Boutros chronicle the ups and downs of the development of their vastly different games to help developers better understand the game development process.

One dev represents a more personal artistic approach, while the other worked with the Spider-Man license. The last discusses an update to an existing game, many years later.

As games scale up in team size, development gets more complex, and this talk shows a wide variety of game dev pitfalls and boons for to keep in mind.

It’s an insightful talk that’s definitely worth watching, so developers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do so now that it’s freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa

Alissa McAloon (@Gliitchy) writes a bunch of news stories on Gamasutra.

Usually these top ten game lists end up being more like a complete list of the only games I got around to playing this year, but 2018 was a year of so many standout releases that I had a hard time narrowing it down to just ten. This is probably my third rewrite of this list because I keep running across more and more gems I played way early into this very long year, actually. There have just been so many wonderful games and decisions are hard.

But for every game I managed to spend some time with, at least two have been added to that “I should really play that” list I keep neglecting. Cultist Simulator, Vampyr, Frostpunk, The Missing, and Mario Tennis Aces, are leading that one right now, along with Celeste, God of War, Return of the Obra Dinn, Gris, Below, and a bunch more that I know I’m forgetting. And I still haven’t gotten around to finishing Persona 5 yet. Maybe next year.

All of that being said, here is the final roundup of my top 10 games for 2018, revised and finalized several times, legitimately right up until the absolute second before my deadline:

Dead Cells has become the number one game played on my Switch this year, usurping Stardew Valley as the game that was nearly always running in standby and ready for a run or two. Dead Cells lends itself well to the pick-up-and-play nature of the Switch, like many roguelikes no doubt do, but does so with a wonderful level of finesse. Each type of weapon has its own satisfying feel and rhythm, made all the better by the game’s vibrantly dreary visuals. 

Unlocks that further increase the effects and varieties of objects that’ll randomly show up throughout levels encourage innovation on the fly, but allow you to become familiar enough with those different variables that it’s always easy to pick up the gear you need to get that “good run” and fight onwards toward the next boss or area. It’s a difficult game, and my first dozen runs had me getting my butt kicked time and time again, but the way Dead Cells handles unlocks and new gear helps feed into that lovely roguelike idea that you’re always making progress and improving, no matter how many times you die to the exact same enemy over and over and over again.

Forsaken was the Destiny expansion that brought our clan back together for weekly reset day play sessions. At its core, it has the same activity-rich allure that Destiny 1’s The Taken King expansion used to bring dormant players back into the fold, but Forsaken layers that focus on new activities with a captivating Western-like revenge story, some really really neat worldbuilding, and all around quality-of-life changes to make Destiny 2 the most fun it’s ever been. 

One of the best things about Forsaken is the Dreaming City. On the surface, it’s just another explorable planet to complete missions and strikes on, but the Dreaming City is unique in that it rotates through week-long ‘corruption’ cycles with every weekly reset. Those kind of gradual large-scale changes were a first for Destiny, and logging in each week to see the world had changed welcomed a new kind of play where our clan would explore the map to see how the world had shifted and rush to complete missions only available for that week. Drip-feeding activities is a good fit for Destiny and the groundwork laid by Forsaken bodes well for the rest of Destiny 2’s lifetime. 

Florence was one of the late additions to my top 10, so much so that I played it in one sitting yesterday morning and cried my eyes out while I was meant to be poking away at an earlier draft of this writeup. The game does a masterful job of introducing its small cast of characters along with their hopes, dreams, and flaws, all through small scenes, driven by simple puzzles and very little dialogue in under an hour. It’s a wonderful, emotional game that is a perfect fit for mobile and is now on the very short list of games that have moved me to tears.

The Hitman sequel drops the episodic format of that last rendition but keeps a firm grasp on Hitman 2016’s charm and quirks as it introduces just the right dose of new mechanics, new levels, and new content to the last game’s already tried and true formula. Hitman 2‘s magic is in each of the massive sandboxes that each main story mission of the game is set in and how it gives players the freedom to take complete ownership of their plans and assassinations, whether the steps they took to complete those objectives were laid out by the game’s suggested or plotted out completely from scratch.

Like the game before it, those base levels will also become home to challenge-like escalation missions, user-made contracts, and limited-time elusive targets throughout the lifetime of the game, setting the stage for hours upon hours of free content to keep Hitman completionists like myself busy until the paid expansion pass content shows up later on. And I haven’t even mentioned the Hitman 2016 Legacy Levels remade for Hitman 2‘s new AI and mechanics or the strangely satisfying competitive multiplayer Ghost Mode introduced in this game. It’s safe to say I’m still going to be obsessed with Hitman well into 2019. 

Minit bundles an adorable aesthetic with an interesting core concept to deliver a short, sweet, and productively frustrating little game. Your character dies every 60 seconds and is reborn from whatever place they call home each and every time, transforming what could be a straightforward classic Zelda-like world into an assortment of intriguing little micro-puzzles. It’s not a long game, nor is it complicated, but it’s a charming little adventure that does exactly what it sets out to do and does so wonderfully. 

I’ve got a thing for strange visual novels, so if you slap a multiplayer element in there and some spooky, monster romance I’m like 100 percent in, no questions asked. Monster Prom is all of that, with some witty writing and cute datable monster friends thrown in for good measure. 

Its competitive/collaborative play has it feeling more like a turn-based board game than a visual novel at times, tasking each player with visiting certain areas to raise specific stats, trigger encounters with their monster-of-choice, and track down items to give them an advantage or complete certain scenarios. It’s incredibly difficult to actually get the date, but learning the ropes and getting rejected a couple dozen times is all part of the fun.

Moonlighter is one part rogue-lite and one part shop-management sim, making for a gorgeous game that seems to be tailor-made for my interests. During the night, you scour procedurally generated dungeons for loot which you then sell through a shop during the daylight hours. Supply and demand for certain items ebbs and flows depending on what you bring back and sell each day, meaning you’ve gotta pay close attention to what loot you resell. Both sides of the game are equally fun on their own, but intertwining elements between the two of them add another layer to an easily addicting game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has become the game I play to get completely lost in. So much of the game is spent just traveling from point A to point B across countrysides and through towns, and those are the bits of the game I find myself falling the most in love with. It’s relaxing to just toss headphones on and exist in that world for a while, fishing, or hunting, or tracking down small oddities hidden out in the wilderness.

There are moments along the main story where the gang as a whole celebrates overcoming certain obstacles with a day-long party at the camp, something you can easily walk away from to go track down another mission or your next shootout. But just lingering among that cast of characters as they sing, drink, and celebrate is such an endearing and heartwarming moment that I can’t say I’ve found in other games before.

It’s impossible to mention Red Dead Redemption 2 here however without calling out some of the controversy that’s surrounded the game in the leadup to its release, mainly in terms of excessive crunch, mandatory or otherwise, at Rockstar Games. Devs have spoken at length about their experiences while working on the game at length, and the stories on those perspectives should be mentioned with any discussion of the game itself.

I almost passed on picking up Spyro: Reignited Trilogy until 2019 when I assumed I’d have free time to play new games again, but I’m glad I didn’t put it off. I had expected Spyro to be just a PS4-friendly remake of the original first three games but to call it just that is selling the Reignited Trilogy short.

The remake brings all of the levels, mechanics, and characters you’d expect but somehow replicates the spirit of those original PlayStation games as well. Spyro: Reignited Trilogy feels and looks like I remember Spyro feeling and looking when I was 7 and playing the game on the PlayStation 1 for the very first time. There aren’t many remakes or remasters that can replicate the feeling of the original, and that achievement alone is worth calling attention to. 

Mario Party games always have a wonderful way of showcasing the weirdest quirks of Nintendo’s consoles, and Super Mario Party is for sure no exception. I’ve played a decent number of games on my Switch at this point, but one of Super Mario Party‘s minigames was the first time I had that ‘ah-ha’ moment with the HD Rumble feature baked into the Switch’s Joy-Con controllers. The weird, two-Switch game board minigame found in the Toad’s Rec Room side area is another example of oft-used (or even known!) features worming their way into a neat Mario Party minigame.

That adage about Mario Party either making or breaking friendships is still true though; I haven’t played Super Mario Party since an old friend I know from high school demolished me with a six star lead at 2 in the morning a few weeks ago.

Want to read more about the best of 2018? Don’t miss our look at the 5 trends that defined the game industry  this year, and keep your eyes peeled for more end-of-year reflections and lists from the Gamasutra team!

Gamasutra editor Alex Wawro continues our annual series of year-end roundups by looking back at some of the big events that shook up the game industry in 2018.

A lot of long-simmering game industry issues boiled over in 2018.

As we noted yesterday while looking back at the trends that defined the games business this year, many longtime studios executed big layoffs or shut down entirely.

Unionization in the game industry is a hot topic again, and in 2018& Game Workers Unite coalesced and seemed to focus years of chatter into meaningful statements and action.

After years of giving chase, French media giant Vivendi finally gave up on trying to acquire Ubisoft and sold off its entire stake in the company to (among others) Ubisoft, Tencent, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Iconoclasts finally came out!

2018 was a long one. Before we put it behind us, let’s think about which bits we’ll still be talking about in the year ahead.

The closure of Telltale Games (and Capcom Vancouver and Carbine and Bandai Namco Vancouver and Wargaming Seattle and…)

Telltale Games wasn’t the only studio to fall this year, but it was among the biggest and the most beloved. 

Despite clear signs of trouble (including reports of a toxic work environment, a big round of layoffs last year and a legal fight with ousted CEO Kevin Bruner) it was still a shock when Telltale initiated its “majority studio closure” in September, effectively laying off over 200 people with no warning and no severance.

They weren’t alone, either; Telltale’s sudden shuttering happened within days of Capcom Vancouver closing and Big Fish laying off over a hundred people, meaning the game industry lost two big studios and over 500 jobs in the course of a week. In retrospect, this seems a particularly bad year for mass layoffs in the game industry: 

While Skybound Entertainment works to finish up Telltale’s final Walking Dead game with at least some of the original developers, the once-beloved studio’s abrupt shutdown and failure to pay workers what they’re owed (inspiring at least one class action lawsuit) drove many to ask: will Telltale’s failure be a catalyst for industry reform? 

Valve implements rev-share tiers that favor the biggest earners (as indies flounder)

This year Steam’s polite dominance of the PC games industry appears shakier than ever, seen perhaps most clearly the week Valve announced it was formally creating new rev-share tiers that give big sellers a break.

By cutting its take on big earners (the standard 30 percent take drops to 25 percent on all post-September earnings over $10 million, and 20 percent over $50 million), Valve seems to be making a serious play to keep top game makers from taking their work elsewhere in the years ahead.

This has never been more viable, now that multiple publishers (including Bethesda, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts), and it comes right as Epic and Discord are opening up their own online game marketplaces with much better rev-share rates.

Most importantly, Valve is making this concession to big game makers even as smaller devs continue to struggle with discoverability problems in a market overflowing with remarkable games. Low-profile or niche games can easily get lost in the mix, especially when Valve is tweaking Steam’s recommendation algorithms in ways that drastically affect some devs’ earnings.

Once upon a time, just getting your game on Steam meant nearly guaranteed sales success; now, most devs could be forgiven for seeking greener pastures in which to launch their next game.

FTC agrees to investigate loot boxes in games (closing out a year of loot box backlash)

“Loot box” reward systems have been a thing in games for years, but after the Battlefront II imbroglio of 2017 they caught the attention of media outlets outside of games. Fast-forward to the end of 2018 and they’re now firmly in the sights of gambling regulators around the world, with countries like Belgium and The Netherlands branding them a potentially illegal form of gambling.

This has already caused devs like Valve, Square Enix, and ArenaNet to modify or stop selling games in those regions, and it’s likely that more devs will be impacted in the new year as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission commits to investigating loot box monetization schemes and their influence on young players. 

British game devs get their first-ever union (amid rising tides of unionization talk)

Talk of unionization in the game industry is nothing new, but action remains a rarity. Not so this year, when the United Kingdom chapter of pro-union activist group Game Workers Unite signed on to become an official branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, effectively creating the U.K.’s first game dev union. 

It’s a notable step forward for game industry labor activists, and it should give devs a fresh opportunity to observe what (if any) effect organizing can have on your local game industry. This is important because practical examples of organized labor in this business are still rare (though some do exist), and it caps off a year of reinvigorated conversations about unionization in the game industry. 

(Photo courtesy of @GWU_UK)

Game Workers Unite has been a driving voice in those discussions all year (or at least, since the IGDA unionization roundtable at GDC), but the focus has been on how to curb the game industry’s predilection for precarious, high-pressure jobs that burn people out and push them into other fields at a steady clip.

After a year filled with big layoffs and high-profile stories of toxic, mismanaged, or just plain poor work environments at various game companies ( Riot, ArenaNet, Rockstar et al), those discussions are sure to continue — and the U.K.’s first game industry union is likely to play a key role.

The Epic Games Store launches (bringing the Store Wars to a head)

The continuing success of Fortnite Battle Royale has pushed developer Epic Games in some surprising new directions, most notably towards backing the strongest Steam competitor to date. In launching its Epic Games Store with an 88/12 revenue-share split across the board, the company made a specific pitch to devs: we can take care of you better than Steam can.

While some devs don’t buy it, the evidence is compelling: Fortnite claims over 200 million registered players across all platforms, and while the Epic Games Store reaches only the PC portion of that audience, the company aims to build out a cross-platform market. There’s a (comparatively) small number of games competing for attention on the Epic store, and no paid ads to clutter up search results. 

Perhaps most importantly, Epic’s 12 percent take is among the lowest in the business (narrowly beaten by Discord’s 90/10 rev-share split), and the company waives its royalties on Epic Games Store sales of Unreal Engine games. At the end of a year in which Steam faced fresh competition from Discord (which also boasts over 200 million users) and other would-be game merchants, Epic’s decision to throw its Fortnite-fed weight around in Valve’s territory may create a fresh wave of opportunities for game devs in the year ahead. 

Want to read more about the best of 2018? Don’t miss our look at the 5 trends that defined the game industry this year, and keep your eyes peeled for more end-of-year reflections and lists from the Gamasutra team!