The basics: As you play through Diablo III you will come across various runes, which can be slotted into active power slots to enhance their powers. Rather than just increasing the damage or range of an ability, however, the runes radically change the form and function of said abilities, almost creating completely new skills with completely different uses.

During a panel on Diablo III development, Jay went over some of the various examples of how runes interact with powers. By far my favorite example was teleport, an ability the new wizard class receives. By itself, it simply moves the character to a different location on the map. Add a damage rune and suddenly porting into a group of monsters hurts them. Add a multi-attack rune and teleporting splits you into multiple characters for a brief period of time.

Another example was the witch doctor's flaming skull spell, which by default has him filling a skull with fire and tossing it at the enemy. With a power rune attached, the skull leaves behind a damaging pool of fire. With the multi rune, it bounces. Bouncing flaming skulls equals love.

It seems like a ton of work, not only creating each of the skills but determining how they function with runes attached, but Jay assured me it wasn't a problem for Blizzard.

"We have a saying at Blizzard when something looks like too much work. How about we pay you? You can work on it, and every two weeks we'll cut you a check."

I love Jay Wilson, and Jay Wilson loves the Blizzard fans. Not only does he love them, but he also values their input. At the end of our far too brief interview, he urged me to urge fans to come up with their own rune / power combinations and send them in. Who knows, if you put in a lot of work, maybe one day they'll pay you.

"When I got to that point I had to stop. I actually said "Holy shit" out loud in the office."

Having played through the entire Death Knight experience myself on multiple occasions, I know exactly how Brack feels. There were several moments in the starting area where I was completely blown away. It's an experience unlike anything I've experienced in an MMO, all centered on this one, heart-rending moment.

During our discussion, J. Allen actually brought up the old Electronic Arts magazine ad that asked the question, "Can a computer game make you cry?" He then quickly dismissed the comparison, but I thought it was quite apt. The Death Knight starting experience from start to finish is one of the best things I've seen in any MMORPG, and Brack agrees.

"It's a very powerful, very visceral experience. It's one of the best things we've ever done."

Those of you who know the moment I speak of try not to ruin it for everyone else. You have to agree that it is something you just have to experience for yourself.

Each new single player campaign will come with upgrades and changes to the multiplayer. The main difference here is that instead of giving you a tacked-on extension of the single-player experience as you often find in an RTS expansion, each title comes with a fully realized campaign.

Chris explained that each of the three installments would play a bit differently as well, with different meta-game types in each. The initial campaign would feature Terran Jim Raynor, with a meta game that involves upgrading technologies. The second focuses on the Zerg, with a meta-element involving diplomacy. I mentioned Star Control, and Chris said that that sort of gameplay element had been discussed.

So why the change? It really comes down to scope. "We always start with this really gigantic scope", Sigaty explained. Basically StarCraft II got bigger than they expected. They have a huge, solid Terran campaign that needs a bit of fleshing out at this point, and once you figure out the dev time needed for the other two campaigns it would have delayed the game for years. After months of discussion, this was their solution.

So basically, as I suggested to Chris, instead of thinking of the StarCraft Trilogy as three separate courses, think of it as three different meals, each with a different flavor.

"I met a couple of people downstairs the first time who played Fable, I didn't know them before, and one guy was super fanatical about his dog," Molyneux said. "He just asked me a million questions. 'Am I doing this right?' and 'Can I find this book and train the dog?' and 'How come I've seen other people's dogs?' and they're better at finding treasure.' He was talking all about the dog, he really cared about the dog.

"The other bloke standing next to him said, 'Ah, you're such a wimp. I just left my dog and he was hurt and he had to crawl around and I found it funny. It just made me laughed he was so injured all of the time.'"

"That was a fantastic moment for me because I realized that's what I wanted. Some people are going to be fanatical about the dog, but I didn't want to ram him down your throat. I didn't want to insist that you had him."

But does that mean you can play through Fable II without the help and companionship of the game's emotional anchor, the dog? Sort of.

"If you don't use those dog treats to heal your dog he is going to stay sick and if he stays sick he is not going to be able to keep up and you're not going to be traveling with him," he said.

Not only is that built into the game, but the Lionhead team was so aware of the possibility that some gamers may want to go it completely alone, they created that opportunity very early in the game.

The first time you fight with the dog in fact, he gets injured.

"If you don't want your dog you just leave him injured. Thats it," Molyneux said. "Eventually, he's going to catch up to you, it may be in half an hour's time and you may be in a pub. But you can leave him way behind."

The decision to not include some sort of toggle for the dog and instead force gamers to abandon the dog to be rid of him was born of Molyneux's design philosophy for the game.

"I could have put into the menu, I could have put something that said disable dog, but how does that make you feel anything?" he said. "I wanted people to realize this dog loves you. There has to be a consequence to your action. The consequence is he is going to catch up to you and that's when he is going to make you feel guilty. It's an emotion consequence rather than it being a GUI tool."

But what interested me more were the cut force powers.

"We implemented more force powers than we shipped with," Blackman told me. "We removed some because of consumer feed back. There were too many in the game and (the force) started getting watered down.

"We do have other ones we could go back to look at."

While Blackman declined to list out the cut force powers, I did manage to get him to talk about one of the cut powers he particularly liked.

"We had this plague power where you could infect enemies and they would get sick and lose health over time," he said. The plague power, which showed up in a different form in the final game as a crystal power-up for the light saber, also spread. When an infected enemy got near their cohorts they would catch the killing disease too.

The problem was it moved a little too slowly for the pacing of the game, Blackman said.

"The Force Unleashed is such a visceral, fast-paced time, that it wasn’t that effective."

Speaking of not that effective, I also asking Blackman about the sometimes problematic targeting system in the game. (No, I didn't mention my son crying. LucasArts already emailed me to apologize.)

Turns out he was surprised that so many reviews mentioned the sometimes touchy targeting.

"Targeting wasn’t an issue that came up when we did focus testing," he said. "The other thing I was really surprised about, the story was strong, and reviews have said that, but we haven’t seen a lift in scores."

"Maybe that means stories aren't important to reviewers."

Personally, I think that's more an issue of the current state of review systems, rather than a statement about the the importance reviewers put on story in a game. Or at least I hope that's what the issue is.

Blackman pointed out that the average rating on Amazon is higher than the Meta Critic score, which he found gratifying.

"We worked really, really hard on all aspects of the game," he said. "On bridging the gap between those trilogies. At the end of the day I hope we provided a good, satisfying experience."

Now that the game has shipped, Blackman and some of the team are concentrating on the downloadable content.

"Everybody working on the DLC is someone from the core team," he said. "Everybody worked on The Force Unleashed. It’s all being produced internally.

Blackman brought this up, he says, in part because of the rumors still floating around that LucasArts is no longer doing internal development.

"We absolutely are," he said. "This is the continuation of The Force Unleashed team while we plan our next game."

"We are doing internal development and have projects in the works. I'm hoping more (of my team) will roll onto my next product, which will more than likely be a Star Wars game."

"There's definitely scope for a PSP version," said Healy in an exclusive interview with (GamesIndustry.biz) sister site Eurogamer TV, to be broadcast next week. "We've had discussions and talks, [but] nothing concrete at the moment."

So the idea has certainly been kicked around, which is lovely indeed. What could be sweeter than a portable version of LittleBigPlanet? How about portable LittleBigPlanet utilities?

"It'd be great to make, for the people who are really into the Create side, some kind of companion products that allow you to create things while you're on the train," he said. "One thing that I'd love to add is the ability to create you're own music, for example, that you can import into the game. That seems like an obvious one to do and it'd be quite easy really."

Now these are some excellent ideas, and in my opinion exactly the sort of applications the PSP should be used for. The key lies in making the PSP a living, breathing extension of the PlayStation 3, to the point where a built-in PSP dock is a serious consideration when designing future iterations of the console. That'll be when the portable truly hits its sweet spot.

LittleBigPlanet boss reveals PSP vision [GamesIndustry.biz]

As they work on the game, Seabury says that NetDevil is trying to identify what is "really core LEGO play" and not create a directed adventure like you find in the Traveller's Tales games. In fact, he hopes that the game could get people to do the same in the real world. Right now, it seems that lots of kids buy the pre-packs to make the models found on the box cover. Seabury says playing the game inspires he and his child to actually take their virtual creations and make them with real-world LEGOs.

Seabury also talks about how LEGO Universe will compare to LittleBigPlanet and Spore when it comes to user created content. It's a chunky, though interesting interview if you have the time.

I think both games are playing around with the concept of user-created content, of delivering more a system of creativity than play. In fact, the folks that I've spoken to from both teams say things that could be about either game. They both talk about giving gamers a pallet of creativity, of broadening the user experience by handing over control of the game to the gamers.

The chief difference I see between the two games is that they've approached the idea of shared creative control from opposite sides of the same coin.

In Spore you're given a game and the tools with which to populate it. In LBP, from what I've seen, you're given characters and the tools in which to create their world.

At least that's what I thought, but when I floated that past the LittleBigPlanet guys earlier this week they totally shot it down.

"LittleBigPlant allows you to create your own characters and world," Kareem Ettouney, Media Molecule art director, explained. "And it doesn't stop there. You can animate your own creations, you can make them speak to you.

"That exceeds just the aesthetic."

Ettouney, like Wright, believes that user created content has the potential to push the medium of gaming forward.

"At the end of the day people have so much to say, to do, to express," Ettouney said.

Scared off already, huh? Shame on you; the quirky girl always has a great personality.

Mount & Blade’s personality has had nearly eight years to grow into the in-depth medieval sim it’s become today (currently running on a near-final .9-something version). You might not get any of that if you were to look at the beta version currently online (using a way-older version); the chunky graphics might turn you off before you even gave the game a chance. But from its humble origins as a realistic sword fighting combat simulator, Mount & Blade has evolved into a deep game with a rich, dynamic setting tied to some very boss gameplay mechanics.

It’s the 1300s in some parallel version of Europe called Calradia, and you’re a wandering rogue/disgraced noble/dirty peasant out to make your fortune the way people did back then: the sword. The overall game has a skeleton plot about something to do with war between two Calradian countries – but the end “goal” for the game is for you to gather your own army and create a fief. That, for me, is a check in the “good” box – Oblivion gave me some houses, but Mount & Blade gives me a freaking castle.

…If I can take it, that is. After some time spent in beta and an interview with developer Armağan Yavuz, I got the idea that Mount & Blade won’t be holding my hand through each skirmish, siege and battle the game throws at you. You pick up a scant tutorial in the basics of fighting: blocking, swinging, shooting arrows and mounted combat. And after that, you’re on your own. You do level up as you go around completing missions given to you by the nobility and killing the odd vagabond who tries to jump you; but no amount of XP or gold will buy you superpowers or the most amazing weapon ever. You’ve got master combat through practice, earn the respect of your NPC posse so you can send them out to do battle, and pillage your way to that castle. So add another check to “good” because this means it doesn’t matter how many levels I gain in the game; I’m only going to be as good as I learn to be. And I get to pillage – big plus.

Yavuz talked a bit about his inspiration to create Mount & Blade. He and his wife both have a thing for history and there weren’t really any games out there that recreated the medieval period all that well (at least not without adding dragons and magic and stuff). Yavuz started out with just a basic combat sim – tweaking the mechanics so you dealt more damage when moving during a strike, and having the AI counter your block if you held down the block button instead of waiting for it to attack you. From there, an online community sprung up like so many mushrooms and the developers reached out to them, giving them mod tools to make their own additions to the game. Turns out Yavuz liked some of the modders so much, he hired them on as writers and programmers – and this is where the game began to evolve some kind of plot.

Creating your character is a lot like Oblivion – moving sliders this way and that way, choosing a class and allotting skill points and so on. But instead of starting off at the center of an epic story in some dungeon that’s about to get attacked by red-robed ninjas, Mount & Blade drops you into the middle of Calradia with nothing but a weapon, a horse and a shield. The world map is huge, providing plenty of places for you to travel.

I found all that freedom almost overwhelming, but after I went into a town and talked to a lord to receive a quest, I was on familiar territory. I went where the lord told me to go and talked to some peasants to find the guy he wanted me to find. This guy didn’t want tobe found, so he took a few swings at me with his sword and I put a crossbow bolt in his chest – but he still kept coming and I found out the hard way that you can’t reload a crossbow while you’re running away (no wonder France had trouble in The Hundred Years’ War).

After getting “knocked unconscious,” I wound up on my horses back, half-sliding out of the saddle somewhere on the edge of the town. Most my life bar was gone and some quest text told me I had failed. I’m pretty sure you can go back and re-try the quest if you talk to the lord again; but I got jumped by some bandits on my way back and died again. This is where that NPC posse would have come in handy – I can make them do all the fighting and just hang out in the back, feathering the bad guys with crossbow bolts and healing my party with mad first aid skills (not magic spells).

The realism in Mount & Blade was inspired by Sid Meier’s Pirates! and by the novels of Bernard Cornwell. Sid Meier’s famous game did away with the normal type of adventure plot and let you carve your own fate out of the seven seas; which is pretty much the same thing you’ll be doing in Mount & Blade, only with horses instead of boats. Cornwell’s books (all bazillion of them), are gritty historical fiction pieces that cover everything from Napoleonic captains to Viking conquests. I’m actually a fan of Cornwell – playing Mount & Blade reminded me so much of one of his books, that I brought it to the interview. I showed Yavuz my copy of The Archer’s Tale and was rewarded with an excited squeal more appropriate to an 8-year-old girl than a developer.

But cut Yavuz some slack; he’s living his dream. He wanted to make a game that was realistic and he won a fan base. His fan base expanded his game and he won Paradox Interactive as a publisher. He wants to bring the world Mount & Blade and thanks to Paradox, he will.

So even if the game looks ugly to you and you’d rather be off screwing the hot girl playing Oblivion, I defy you to say there isn’t depth in this game after completing just one mission. Go check out the official site for more details and maybe hit up Wikipedia for some background on the factions (because there are a lot). Mount & Blade will be on shelves September 16 – and keep your eyes peeled for an announcement about digital downloads…

And for the record, quirky girls are always dynamite in the sack.

But what about Rock Band? With an established fan base and a head start in the rhythm band genre, how can Guitar Hero: World Tour compete? Bright's simple answer? "We're bringing it."

His more complex and informative answer? "We want to push the genre farther forward. We're bringing innovation this year."

He's talking about the host of new features Guitar Hero: World Tour is bringing to the rhythm game market, such as the whole music studio, the GHTunes community they are building, and a drum kit with a built-in midi controller...they basically created a midi controller for the PS3 and Xbox 360 from the ground up.

Now that the PlayStation 3, PS2, and Xbox 360 versions of the game all support Rock Band instruments, the stand alone version of GH:WT should be able to find an audience in even the most stalwart Rock Band fans. "They can pick up the standalone version of World Tour and use those instruments, and when they break they can buy ours."

All that innovation, plus World Tour is technically the first third-party title to utilize Nintendo's Mii system, allowing you to bring your own brand of superdeformed style to the game.

Seeing as the main game - friends getting together and playing music - is essentially the same, the battle will come down to innovation and music selection, and from what I've seen so far, Bright is right - they are definitely bringing it.

Just yesterday it was announced that Epic Games would be joining EA as one of two new partners along with Grasshopper Manufacture (of Suda 51 fame).

I got some face time with Michael Capps, President of Epic Games, to see how the little independent studio that could feels about going with a Big Scary Publisher – especially one like EA that's got a reputation for ruthlessness with smaller development houses.

“The EA five years ago is not the same EA they are now. We wouldn’t have partnered with them five years ago,” Capps counters – shooting a furtive look at the EA handler at the interview. He scratches the back of his neck and removes a square of tape. “From the [stage] microphone,” he says.

Sure, I believe him. He’s not going all Manchurian Candidate on me.

I asked about his game and got one of those fluffy PR answers about “it’s great, but we can’t tell you about it.” But he did say that it was being developed by Polish studio People Can Fly, which Epic picked up last spring after being blown away by how awesome the studio did with PC content for Gears of War.

“We said ‘do another Painkiller!’” Capps laughs. He’s really into Painkiller – and guns, and things that go “boom.” But what do you expect from the guy who brought the world Unreal Tournament and Gears of War?

Gears of War 2, is what I expect, maybe another Painkiller. But Capps is anxious to go with a new IP; and that’s a big part of why he went with EA instead of some other huge publisher. Their enthusiasm about this mystery project clicked with Epic’s enthusiasm – and that’s the way to make a game, Capps says. You need more than just a dev team that’s jazzed about the game; an entire studio of people has to love the game so much that they’re willing to sacrifice sleep and years off their lives. So People Can Fly + Epic + EA = at least 300 people who aren’t going to sleep for the next few years while this game gets made.

I say “few” because Epic’s average dev cycle is between three and four years and we can assume this idea was pitched well before my interview. Gears of War 2 doesn’t count because most of the game was already made before they even started, so cut that dev cycle down to two years.

So what kind of game are we getting for the collaboration of no sleep? Anyone’s guess at this point, by my money’s on something action-packed with a rich back story and tons of super cool guns that explode things. And multiplayer; they can’t do a game without multiplayer.

“We don’t do unicorns,” Capps says. I asked about exploding unicorns and he wrote something down, muttering, “We’ll see.”

“We only get so many ‘fuck’ tokens,” Capps says. “And ‘badass’ is one of them, so I won’t use that…” But he says bigger than “wicked” and better than “really cool.” And we won’t have to worry about some watered-down version on the Wii. Capps is pretty sure this new game won’t appeal to “that crowd” and that the best way to make a game that works on multiple platforms is to build a super-awesome story, find a badass hero and then work with the system particulars to deliver tailored experiences. So – maybe – mods for the PS3 version and official DLC for 360?

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” Capps says.

As a parting shot, I asked about chicks in this new game. I hinted (flat-out said) every Epic game I’ve seen is severely devoid of badass females (except Unreal Tournament) and wanted to know if he planned to do anything about it. Apparently, I’m not the only one with this concern. Capps’s girlfriend is also very interested in the badassitute of female characters in Epic games – ditto for the EA handler’s girlfriend and double it for all the guys at People Can Fly with girlfriends.

“Well, we thought about…” Capps starts to say. The EA handler sits up and Capps switches to, “Ah! I can’t, I can’t! You almost got me!”

Almost. The option to play as a girl? Co-op female sidekick? Gotta wait a little longer for more details to leak out.

But seriously – Epic – give me Ellen Ripley and exploding unicorns. Is that so much to ask?

"I don't believe that WoW is untouchable," he said. "I completely believe that a game could come out and be more successful than WoW. I'm hoping that we're working on it right now."

Designing and developing any MMO, Kaplan said, simply distills down to a series of choices. "I think a lot of other companies have had great opportunities to do what WoW has done... usually for whatever reason, they miss the mark."

"I actually feel really bad, a lot of times, when new MMOs come out and don't do really well, because I'm not thinking of it from a business perspective. I know what it's like to be a developer on a team that you believe in on a game that you just love, and for some reason, you don't get enough time, or someone makes a bad decision... everybody's making a lot of small choices, and when those go wrong, your game ends up not successful."

Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson believes that one can really focus on one MMO at a time, because of the time demand. He said he played Age of Conan for a couple of months, played Lord of the Rings Online a lot, and still goes back to City of Heroes every now and then. He thinks the key to MMO success is "not making choices based upon being different, but making choices based upon what's good for your game."

"If there was an MMO out there that had a tone different from WoW but was executed as well, I actually think there could be a huge audience for that. When I get disappointed, it's because I don't see that level of execution."

Another key factor for global success, said Blizzard's associate PR manager Bob Colayco, is that it takes a lot of time to develop the infrastructure to support a global audience. Players in any country around the world can receive service and support on WoW in their native language and the localizations are meticulous, he said, which contributes to the retention of a broad userbase.

But will Blizzard's next project be the game that finally tops WoW's global success?

"I believe it can be," Kaplan said. "The same challenge is on us. Are we going to make the right decisions? I don't believe that just because we made WoW, we're guaranteed on the next MMO that we make to have the same success." He also said that at launch, WoW was not what it is today — it's taken the game a five to six-year development cycle, plus two years on Burning Crusade and a year and a half on Lich King. Similarly, StarCraft 2 is renowned, he said, for its "perfect game balance" — but it didn't launch that way, the team recalled.

"I really believe you're only as good as your last game. I really think you gave to prove it every time," said Kaplan.

And is the bar especially high for Blizzard? "Yeah, for sure."

Said Wilson, "The only thing we get for free is faith that we'll follow up on any problems. Anything else, we have to earn."

I didn't need to say any more, of course, because Wilson already knew about the fan-fit I was referring to. "It's a complex issue," he said. "It's been a big issue online, but for the most part, the response we've gotten has been very positive. We've got petitions, a few people on forums [who are] very loud, but it's really more of the 'squeaky wheel' syndrome."

"Certainly, internally there's no doubt. I would tell people who don't like the art style that probably, getting the art style was the hardest thing."

But there's a careful method to all of it, Wilson explained:

Wilson said that what we see now is the third iteration on the Diablo III design. As with many of the decisions the developer makes, much of the art design issue was based in gameplay principles.

"Diablo is a game you play for, hopefully, hundreds of hours, and one of the rewards is a variety of different-looking environments." People looking back on old Diablo, he said, may have a selective memory. "People remember the Act I dungeons... but they kind of conveniently forget the green fields of Act I, and all of Act II... and it's palaces, its bright deserts."

Actually, Wilson said the team originally shot for a "very desaturated, very dark" gameworld. "We had all kinds of problems with identification of units... combat wasn't very good, and the worlds got homogeneous very quickly. As we played through it, we didn't like it, or think it was very much fun."

Diablo II, said Wilson, was actually "very saturated, very bright."

What about the complaint, then, that Diablo III may be "too much like WoW" in style and vibe?

"There's a philosophy that goes across all of our games, and that philosophy stays true from game to game... so it probably draws some comparisons," Wilson said. "One philosophy is that our artists feel like if they're just using photorealism, not creating a unique look for the game, not stylizing so that it's uniquely Blizzard, then they're not doing their jobs."

Color choices, he said, promote telling units apart and telling players apart from monsters, philosophies that cross all of Blizzard's titles. "If you do follow those rules, there's going to be some similarities."

And what's so bad about drawing some comparisons to the hugely-successful WoW, anyway? "We definitely learn from all our games," said Wilson. "We don't say, 'oh, we don't want to do anything those games did' — it's all Blizzard, we're all a family. WoW pulled stuff from Diablo II... if we think it's a smart choice, we try to pull stuff from them. We don't really worry about whether it's different. What matters is, does it make the gameplay better? That always wins."

There are some cases, though, where the sharing of art philosophy doesn't always work — WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan said that the team takes care not to make the gravestones in WoW's pivotal cemeteries too Gothic-looking — those tombstones belong in Diablo.

"Diablo can do a lot of things WoW can't even do," Kaplan said. "We can't do the level of violence that they can do in Diablo III; we would lose our rating if we do the things that Diablo III does. They have a much darker vibe."

In other words, said Wilson, the Blizzard team won't pass over a good idea just because it's not brand-new. "If we're actually making the game worse with no other reason than to be different from WoW, then it's a bad choice. We don't think, when people play, that they'll have any problem telling that it's a different game."

The preliminary art we've seen so far, Wilson said, is from early on in the game. "We want to generate the feeling of everything getting worse... it's part of our narrative. It makes the more gloomy part of the game a place where the stakes get higher."

"If you start out at the apocalypse, and then move to more apocalypse, it's not going to have much of an impression on players."

"We've wanted to add them for a long time," WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan, who is as enthusiastic in person as he appears in this picture, told Kotaku. "I'm a huge fan of achievement systems in other games; I love Xbox's system, and I also think Steam did a really good job in introducing achievements. We always talked about it for WoW... [since] players are always measuring themselves against other players."

Why the decision to include achievements, then, with such a heavily status-based leveling system at the core of WoWs mechanics? Big difference, said Kaplan: "With levels, you're gaining tremendous character power... skills, abilities, access to more items and areas... with the achievement system, we really wanted it to be a history of your accomplishments. Not gaining character power through it... we wanted it to be a reflection of your character's power."

So how does it work? Squirrels ensue:

Blizzard says it's built a really expandable system, resembling a character "score," as a reflection of the things you've done in the game. The rewards are largely cosmetic, playing into the player's desire to "show people their trophy case."

"The greatest example is the Xbox gamerscore, which is for absolutely nothing," Kaplan said, adding that despite the uselessness of achievements from the perspective of game mechanics, it's still a great way to create further engagement. He told us about a friend of his who meticulously played the Avatar: The Last Airbender game strictly for the amount of points he could accrue.

Over 500 achievements are ready as of now, said Kaplan. "I think by the time we ship we'll have close to 700 achievements. We have 500 in the beta right now, and that number grows by 10 to 20 a day at this point. we're really getting a lot of content in there, kind of crossing all the different aspects of the game."

Among the achievements are what Kaplan called "fluff flavor" accomplishments. Like what? An NPC called "Haris Pilton" sells an item called the Gigantique Sack for 1200 gold. Buy it and earn the achievement, "My Sack Is Gigantique."

Some are fairly light, like "Kill 15 Turkeys In Three Minutes." Kaplan admitted that not every achievement has a super-clever name — with the aim of 700 different achievements, that's understandable. Another one? "To All The Squirrels I've Loved Before." Address a certain number of in-game squirrels with the "/love" emote, and be credited toward the achievement.

One thing that's bugged Kaplan in general about achievements in the past is that there's no gauge of how far you're progressing toward the available unlockables. With WoW, that won't be the case — you'll see, for example, how many squirrels you have left to love before you hit sweet success.

"A whole slew" of the achievements will also still apply to the base game and to the Burning Crusade expansion.

World of Warcraft game director Jeff Kaplan has a different perspective, though. When we spoke to him today, he said, "I don't want to undervalue innovation, but there's sometimes the wrong focus on innovation. I think you innovate when you need to... and I also think the best innovations are things that people overlook and don't even recognize as being innovative."

Though WoW can be recognized as an innovator by introducing formulae years ago that brought new life into the MMO space, it's largely hailed today for having solid core mechanics, not for drastic self-reinvention. Blizzard's priority, Kaplan said, is to "execute on all systems well — whether they're innovative or not."

So while Blizzard would rather be great than be brand-new, there is one key game mechanic that Kaplan thinks was revolutionary:

"WoW's rest system was the first of its kind, and people don't stop and think about its effects on people psychologically... [that there is] actually a bonus for coming back to the game, but playing for a long time is not a great thing," said Kaplan.

"It's a subtle system, and displayed well. So although when people talk about WoW it's the last system on anyone's mind... every single MMO that's come out since WoW, they have all added that exact same system."

In fact, Blizzard sees an upside to being hitched to the Activision star. "They have a lot of expertise in the console area, where we're very-headed in addition to PC and online," Kaplan said.

"Activision's point of view is, there's a lot of trust in Blizzard and what we do. Activision's just trying to figure out how we work and try to learn from us."

But Activision's an ambitious company. CEO Bobby Kotick has talked in the past about monetizing massively multiplayer environments, competing with iTunes, even evolving pricing models for consoles. Does Activision have the power to change the way Blizzard monetizes WoW, if it wants to?

"Theoretically they could, if they wanted to," Kaplan said.

Blizzard has always staunchly bucked the trend in online games that seems to be considering microtransactions, ad-supported freebies, and other alternate revenue streams as opposed to the subscription model, which many people theorize is going the way of the dinosaur. Blizzard has always said it favors balanced gameplay as opposed to alternate biz models, and according to Kaplan, this is still the case.

"We would always do whatever's coolest for the game," he said. "A great example of this is our paid character transfer service, which in its own way is sort of a microtransaction within WoW. The reason we introduced that service was because we thought it was a benefit that wow players needed, and the pricing model was put there as a barrier to entry, not a source of revenue."

Free transfers for everybody, Kaplan said, would do bad things to the community and realm populations, but Blizzard still wanted to provide the service as an option for legitimate cases where players do need to transfer realms.

"We would look towards other microtransactions, or services we would charge for, but not with the intention of 'oh, here's this great source of revenue,'" he said.

Jay Wilson, lead designer on Diablo III, summed up the developer's policy on the microtransactions issue: "I think we always look to make the game we want to make, and then figure out the kind of financial model that works with that game."

But business-savvy Activision, aiming for top-tier publisher, does have the power to change that financial model. So is Blizzard worried?

"I'm not concerned at this point at all," said Kaplan. "What's important to note about Blizzard is that we've had many owners over the years. Our executive staff, sort of the first thing they do whenever we get bought by somebody else, is to go through this big training process of, 'this is what makes us successful. If you mess with this, you're going to mess with your own revenue at this point.'

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime and COO Paul Sams are "extremely talented," Kaplan said, at working with publishers to communicate Blizzard's philosophy.

"Our track record has been pretty golden over the years," said Kaplan. "With Burning Crusade, we could have put it out in the Fall and gotten all of the Christmas revenue — who wouldn't have wanted that? But everyone agreed that if we worked on it for two more months... it was a better long term decision."

"And short term decision," added Blizzard associate PR manager Bob Colayco, pointing out that the expansion helped keep WoW at the top of the charts since it launched.

Kaplan said, as someone who's "very much a gamer, and into games first and foremost," he was excited by the Activision news. "I'm excited because of the games they're making right now," he said. "I thought Call of Duty 4 kicked ass. I had that in my top five games of last year. I thought it was brilliant — the way Infinity Ward executed on CoD4 reminded me of what Blizzard values."

"It wasn't about innovation... it was all about execution, and how well they executed on every single idea, and the level of polish was just awesome. Knowing we're partnered with people who have some of the same values... that's really exciting."

Today, Kotaku spoke to WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan, who was able to offer some clarification.

"That is our goal, and sometimes it gets taken in a weird direction," he said. "Like you're failing [if] you're not releasing an expansion each year. It's probably going to be a long time before we get to the point where we are releasing an expansion each year."

Kaplan explained what the team would rather focus on:

"Our goal is to make an awesome experience, and obviously we felt that Lich King needed more time to get to where it needed to go," he said.

So while Blizzard is still aiming for annual expansions, "We're never going to slim down the content in order to make an annual date."

Kaplan told us that the developers who work on content and patches are the same team members who work on expansions. Those developers, he said, are "core to the quality of both the patches and expansions, and we aren't going to sacrifice the quality of one or the other just to get an expansion out."

Now, just about anyone can be a game developer — and get paid for it, too. At its Gamefest 2008 event today, Microsoft announced that community games made using its XNA tools will be downloadable via either PC or Xbox 360, and that the creators will get 70 percent of the revenues, as we reported earlier today.

We spoke to game developers' group general manager Chris Satchell about the new community initiative. "We realized there was so much creativity out there in the community," he said. "So many people had great ideas, so we needed to give them a toolset to express themselves… and then we had to give them that worldwide stage where they could show it. And then the final step is, why not let them benefit from it?"

Microsoft saw, Satchell said, that incredible innovation came from viral communities of indie game designers across the web, and hoped to capture some of that community for its users. Satchell hopes that community games will become viral in the same way:

"You'll be able to take the url from the Community Games page and forward to a friend… for the same viral effect you get on the internet and in general, as with movies and music, but with gaming through the service," he said.

So, like YouTube, only where people can be paid for the creations they upload? "Well, I think YouTube... and other film services are all very viral, and sometimes you do searches, but often it’s your friend just sends you a link. Also, what we realize is a lot of people just want to sit down at their computer, and browse and see what's cool and new."

You'll be able to browse community games by genre, and creators can price their work at 200, 400 or 800 Microsoft Points. Additionally, there'll be a front-of-store section that will feature popular or promoted titles, though being front and center comes at a cost — Microsoft will take a marketing fee of anywhere from 10-30 percent for the duration that a title is so visible, but the creator's take goes back up to 70 percent once it's out of the highlight section.

Community games will have a separate storefront from Xbox Live Arcade, but will still be available to the audience of 12 million Xbox Live users. "That's tens of thousands creating games for millions to download," Satchell said. "In some ways, a good way to think about it is using a baseball analogy. Think about the community games... it's really like the minor leagues. Cool new talent, new ideas... and Xbox Live Arcade is the major leagues."

In baseball, often a star minor leaguer catches the eye of a big-league team, and gets plucked out of the minors to bat for the majors. Does Satchell see the potential for standout innovation in community games to catch the eye of big publishers?

"I think that will absolutely happen," he said. "We sort of do that with Dream-Build-Play… but I think that other publishers will obviously be looking. Games that come up will be brilliant... but maybe not fully fleshed out yet, needing more hours of content and more features, but [publishers will say], 'why don’t we go and work with this person or indie studio and help blow it out to a major release,' and so I absolutely think that will happen."

The community games storefront will launch this holiday season, Satchell says, though an official date has yet to be announced. A thriving homebrew scene on a thriving console can only be a good thing for the industry, as high risk and rising budgets limit innovation somewhat among the major publishers, and we look to talented indies for brand-new aesthetics and game mechanics. Bored with this year's E3 slate? Go make your own.

Microsoft Transforms Community Game Developers Into Entrepreneurs

Xbox 360 creates marketplace for user-generated content with Xbox LIVE Community Games.

SEATTLE — July 22, 2008 — During the keynote address today at the Gamefest 2008 Microsoft Game Technology Conference, Microsoft Corp. revealed that it will allow anyone to turn the hobby of game-making into a full-fledged career. Through what is now officially called “Xbox LIVE Community Games,” Microsoft makes its marketplace of millions available to members of the XNA Creators Club to create, sell and share in the profits generated by their unique creations.

Microsoft has already opened up game development to the masses by offering the easy-to-use, affordable XNA Game Studio toolset. With this newly announced business model, Microsoft will have truly democratized game distribution by enabling XNA Creators Club members to participate in the multibillion-dollar-a-year console gaming industry.

Newly appointed to his role as Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business Group Chris Satchell said the business model was designed to create the best possible experience for both consumers and developers. Community games that have been submitted by XNA Creators Club Premium members and have successfully passed a rigorous peer-review system will be added to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace catalog for sale to consumers. Creators will be able to choose from three suggested preset retail price points varying from 200 to 800 Microsoft Points to sell their creations and will receive up to 70 percent of the total revenue generated by their game.

“Not only are we democratizing game development with Xbox LIVE Community Games later this year, but we’re creating an opportunity for aspiring developers to start their careers on the world stage,” Satchell said. “It is really a win for both developers and consumers because this will no doubt act as an incentive for game creators to continue to develop the best, most innovative games for Xbox 360.”

A host of new and creative ideas are already appearing on the Xbox LIVE Community Games beta. When the service launches for consumers this fall, community-created games on Xbox LIVE are expected to double the size of the Xbox 360 video game library, offering some of the most inventive, quirky and unexpected games ever seen on consoles. By the end of 2008, Xbox 360 owners are expected to have access to the largest, most creatively diverse game library across all next-generation platforms, with more than 1,000 titles spanning Community Games, Xbox LIVE Arcade and retail blockbuster titles.

When the bold new Xbox experience, a re-launch of the largest online social network on TV that is fun and approachable, is released late this fall, the Community Games storefront will be an easy-to-use addition to the existing marketplace on Xbox LIVE. The new Community Games channel is currently scheduled to launch in the United States, Canada and select European markets later this year. Other regions will be added over the course of 2009 and beyond. Consumers will also be able to view and rate community games on Xbox.com, watch trailers, and even play a trial of each game before buying it.

“Since first launching XNA Game Studio in 2006, we have been working hard on improving the toolset and building resources for the community, and the response has been amazing. To date, we’ve had more than 1 million downloads of XNA Game Studio and adoption in more than 700 universities,” said Boyd Multerer, general manager of XNA. “For some perspective, the incredible creative community we’ve unleashed worldwide is more than 25 times the number of professional developers in the industry.”

Microsoft also is giving aspiring developers a hand with the second annual Dream-Build-Play game development contest based on XNA Game Studio projects. The competition will yield prizes in excess of $70,000 and an opportunity for one of the winners to sign an Xbox LIVE Arcade publishing contract. Three of last year’s top performers and winners, “The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai,” “Blazing Birds” and “Yo Ho Kablammo!” from the United States, Canada, Sweden and United Kingdom, respectively, are all slated for release on Xbox LIVE Arcade in the near future. For more details and Dream-Build-Play Official Rules, see http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/Rules.aspx. For more information on XNA Game Studio, head over to http://creators.xna.com.

We got a chance to chat with the 20 year-old Brasil (who's never won a contest in her life) about her winning concept, what she thinks of a "G.I.R.L" contest, and what she'll be working on with SOE — full interview after the jump.

Brasil first learned of the contest during a late-night event at GDC, where she worked as a volunteer staffer. The event featured lots of women with jobs in the game industry, who recommended she enter. Getting a $10,000 scholarship and a guaranteed in with a publisher like SOE might be any gamer's dream. So how did Brasil feel when she found out she won? "At first, I passed through shock, and then I was in denial. And then, I was really happy, and now I'm just okay with it, I guess!"

When asked to guess why her EQ2 level won out, she guessed it was because she made it "a little bit crazy." The judges, she said, told her they found her work funny and original.

"It involved finding a particular sheep among a lot of other sheep," she said. "It was a little bit adventure game and a little bit of the usual MMO grinding and things."

Female development professionals are under-represented in game industry demographics, so it's fair to consider that a girl-focused contest might be necessary to promote more interest from women in the game industry. But at the same time, there are plenty of male students who'd love to be internship contenders as well — we asked Brasil how she felt about this.

"The thing about the contest is, it's called G.I.R.L, but there was nothing saying guys couldn't apply," Brasil said. "It was geared toward any group that is a minority in game development. I guess the girl thing led people astray to think that, because you are a guy, you couldn't possibly win."

So what are her career dreams? "I want to work in the game industry, like anyone in my class," she said, referring to the game art and development program she attends, where she learns a some art and design, and some coding, too. "But what I want to do specifically once I get in the industry, I'm still not sure about! I still like drawing, and doing concept art and being an artist, but I also like doing level design and scripting."

Brasil hopes her time with SOE will help her experiment with a variety of different industry facets to see what she takes to. Specifically, she'll be interning with the team that's developing The Agency — "I'm looking forward to that," she said.

Interactive entertainment is both business and art, and the Academy of Interactive Arts And Sciences recognizes both of these faces with their annual DICE Summit and Interactive Achievement Awards. They also host the Into the Pixel game art exhibition, which we saw this year at E3, award scholarships to game design students, and more activities designed to support the industry's creative talent.

We sat down with Academy president Joseph Olin to talk about the state of the industry, this year's E3, and more.

"As much as I think most people reflect upon 2007 as a watershed year for games ad interactive entertainment, I think everything I've seen so far at this E3 shows... that 2008 to 2009 will be bigger, better and brighter than last year," said Olin.

"It's very impressive that, stripping away the challenges of the E3 environment, and the hype and everything else, and looking at games and game makers, there's very impressive things that were shown this year... there's a broader variety of games that were shown this year than in the past."

It's true that while this year's event was low on big surprises and towering spectacle, there were perhaps a broader variety of genres and game types on offer than ever before, something Olin credits in part to Nintendo's success in widening the market through the Wii and the DS lite.

"You have to separate the business of magazines and journalism from the reality of what's here, and why it's good," said Olin. Though he admitted that the hype cycle had been useful for attracting attention and enthusiasm toward the industry, he said he thinks the industry would benefit from providing less advance notice on new products.

"My personal hope is that someday we will show less more often, rather than show more more frequently, because I think that you have the opportunity to be new, fresh and exciting only once," he said. For example, Spore has been on our radar screens for nearly three years now — and Will Wright's ability to likely deliver on such long-cultivated expectations is a rare exception to the rule.

Olin said it's unfair to games for them to languish in the long wait after early announcements. He said the positive showing for EA's Dead Space was a pleasant surprise, since in his view it had suffered from some poor "been there, done that" buzz after being announced a good while ago. "Why not wait a little bit?" Said Olin. "The things you don't see help build your interest."

He also said that Mirror's Edge is a good representation of the maturation of the craft, reflecting some film talent sensibilities in terms of style and camera use. Increased connectivity is another sign of industry maturity, he said, and his favorite current trend is cooperative play, like Resistance 2's squad creation.

Game narratives are also evolving, said Olin. "I think the thing that Ken Levine and his teams did with BioShock, and to a certain extent Metal Gear Solid 4, and to a certain extent the story within GTA IV show the promise and potential that games have to be as narratively important as film."

"We're not there yet, but in some ways, I think we're better, because I don't know that the story of Niko would necessarily make a great movie, but it's strong enough to make a brilliant game."

Olin predicts that the lines between film and games will continue to blur, but that games will use their innate strengths. He said he expects we'll see fewer non-interactive cutscenes, and more game-like cues that tell the player what to do.

"The reason that most people will still choose video games is because of their personal involvement... you go to a movie for a completely different experience and entertainment expression."

"It's about giving gamers more choices, more points of entry to get to the party, open more gates to the theme park as it were," he said. "It makes a lot of sense for us.

"The main idea is that this is Portal available as a download, and there is additional content as advanced challenges that will be available to you after you finish the critical path of the game."

But will we be seeing more of GlaDOS this time around, or perhaps an extended storyline?

"No," he said, breaking hearts everywhere. "That's for a game to be named later perhaps."

To check out our full interview with Lombardi and hear him pontificate on everything from Left 4 Dead Machinima to Steam as an archive for games hit up the link below.

Left 4 Dead May Get Machinima Maker Post Launch [Kotaku]

Now, it's a different story — Grand Theft Auto IV and BioShock are some of the highest-rated titles on Metacritic, and Take-Two is the number three publisher in the industry. The turnaround strategy seems to be working.

Feder credits the success to focus on the part of the publisher's creative studio teams. "They had their heads down, not focused on what was going on outside of what they were doing," Feder said. One of those outside things is an ongoing and aggressive acquisition bid by Electronic Arts, which Feder declined to discuss.

He was happy to discuss GTA IV's unprecedented debut. Since he's a business kind of guy, I asked him how much he deals with the Rockstar team:

"I deal with them all the time," he said. 'We are really proud of [Rockstar's] performance, and they're proud of GTA IV. it's been an unmitigated success, not just from a financial standpoint but from a creative standpoint... it's stunning success on any metric."

Feder said Take-Two prioritizes giving its studios creative freedom - what's his strategy for nurturing that creativity in the publisher's studios? "We need to protect our creative folks," he said. "We need to make sure that the outside world doesn't interfere with their creative process. We then need to provide the resources, and finally, we cant get in their way... [by] putting something in a box whether it's ready or not."

"We serve no wine before its time. We respect their work and their creativity, and that's not a strategy that everybody takes in this business."

Letting that wine take its time often means delays, however. "Title slippage is the bane of this business," said Feder. "We may have gotten lucky in the past, but titles slip."

Does that mean we can expect delays, then, with titles we're expecting? "We're on track," said Feder. "We try to operate with financial discipline and operational discipline. First and foremost, we need to delight and amaze our customers."

Since Feder mentioned "protecting" the creative talent, we asked about the ways that GTA IV has been strung up as a social whipping boy in the past for the so-called horrors of violent video games. Does Feder feel Take-Two's done a good job of standing up for Rockstar's work?

"I think we defend our work all the time," he said. "First and foremost we need to start with the notion that an M-rated game is not for kids... don't call it a game then, call it interactive entertainment, but it's not for children."

"But one of the great things about GTA IV iis that the parameters of the debate have completely shifted. It's not about any of the controversy... because the initial reviews were, it is an artistic tour de force, a technological tour de force, a success on every stretch of the imagination, it stretches the definition of an interactive experience. That was the bookend by which all discussion began, so any controversy that came out had to combat all that positive momentum."

So is Take-Two finally winning the PR war? "I don't think of it that way," he said. "I think it was just a hugely impactful and culturally important product."

So does EA worry about the new competition for top dog? "No," said CEO John Riccitiello. "I think it's a cool company; they make products I like. I like Call of Duty... I don't play much WoW anymore, but I was hooked for a while. And there's no question that I thought Guitar Hero, when it first came out, was an innovative product and one I'd like to play."

"They make some cool products. The fact that the two of them are together, though, doesn't change much for our industry. Comparing stock ticker to stock ticker isn't really what happens."

But that is what happens, to some extent, in our industry driven so strongly by numbers and sales figures. When we asked Riccitiello about this, though, he stressed that can't be the whole story.

"You don't make games profitable on purpose," he said. "You make great games first, and then they are profitable."

"I think that trips up a lot of companies... even EA, at different times, when a company is seeking to make purely a profitable game. Frankly, even when EA was at its peak at the last cycle, we didn't talk a lot about profitability as a goal," Riccitiello said.

"I think it's the beginning of the end when you talk about profitability as your goal. We manage the business intelligently to try and be more profitable, but that's never the primary goal. Bands don't set out to make profitable albums; Pink Floyd didn't say, 'I want to create something that people are going to buy for 20 years so that I can make X amount of money."

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello bears no resemblance in person to Darth Vader. I was a little bit surprised.

"People have asked me many times how EA is going to be loved by this particular audience," said Riccitiello, when I told him about the popularity of anti-EA sentiment I often see from the readers. I asked him if he's ever read Kotaku comments, and in fact, Riccitiello was ready right away to recall one of his favorites.

"'Hating EA is so last year,'" he quoted immediately.

The company's pride is its label structure, which EA says provides individual autonomy to the studios under its purview. But better to acquire well-functioning and talented external studios and let them self-govern, Riccitiello maintains, than to attempt to meet high production volumes from a centralized locus of control.

"I think we might have learned that the hard way," he said.

EA is still building its way back from a loss of face in the gaming audience, after aggressive studio control led to quality lapses. But Riccitiello says the company's most definitely on its way, as he spoke to me alongside EA's packed E3 booth show where there were quite a few standout titles, like Spore or Mirror's Edge.

"There's a noticeable shift in quality and innovation playing its way through," Riccitiello said. "We had a tough transition, made a lot of falls, but right now, look around this tiny little booth. It's hard to pick a loser off the wall."

Riccitiello said it will take time before the change efforts over which he presided since he rejoined EA a little over a year ago begin to gain appreciation in the audience. "If you were to look at the [comments] on Kotaku a year ago, I think you'd have probably read [a ratio of] 90-10 anti-EA venom. Six months ago, it's 70-30... and right now, what I see on Kotaku is 50-50, if not leaning toward EA."

"At the same time, I read something else they'll say is, 'I don't like EA, but I really like Maxis, DICE, Black Box, Criterion...' at a certain point, they named all of our children, but they don't like the family."

EA will earn its way back in the eyes of the gaming audience, said Riccitiello, "not through PR or advertising, but through better games and doing the right things. There will be a shift... but it won't happen overnight."

"If I were not working at EA, or didn't know EA as well as I do, I'd still have a little bit of a 'wait and see,' or 'prove it to me.' It's hard not to. But it's also hard to square the fact that Will Wright calls us home. John Carmack, Gabe Newell... Lucy Bradshaw on the Spore team... these folks could be at any developer or head of production for most any publisher, and they're here because they're happy to be here."

"I'm not sure they were happy three years ago," said Riccitiello, "But frankly, if you were there [then]... I think you'd be able to see something different about EA [now]."

Igarashi's answer? It's not a fighting game. See? Simple.

To Koji Igarashi, Castlevania Judgment is so much more than a fighting game. It's a 3D action adventure title that just happens to feature one on one fighting. "I understand that it looks like a 3D fighting game, but calling it that isn't doing it service."

Okay, so why a timed, one on one action adventure game? As with all things Iga-related, it really comes down to the whip.

"When I decided to make a Wii game, it was natural to use the controller as a whip, but I realized that after two hours of constant whipping players arms would get tired." The answer to the problem was time limits, and 3D action adventure with time limits needs quick fights, and that calls for competitors.

"Castlevania has a rich history spanning 22 years, and I thought it would be a great idea to bring together the different characters from the series, and this sort of game was the perfect way."

Igarashi is watching. He's seen your mixed comments and wants you all to know that this isn't a fighting game...it's a celebration of Castlevania's history in a game that is quick to pick up and play and a real treat for fans of the series.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to order a whip and a rakish hat.

Here at E3, we chatted with Dead Space senior producer Chuck Beaver and asked him about creating fear in such an action-heavy, fast-paced environment. Many of the standard-setters for survival horror — think Silent Hill and the earlier Resident Evil games — used atmosphere, environment and careful pacing to terrify players. But Beaver's got some very specific tactics planned for Dead Space:

I'm the sort that when an enemy leaps out and terrifies me, I reflexively mash my pause button. Not only does it give me a little break to calm down, but it lets me check my health, ammo and other stats (anyone else do this?). I will not, said Beaver, be able to hide behind my pause menu anymore. Everything in Dead Space happens in real-time.

"It keeps it live," he said. "So if you don't have your shit together, you're going to be in trouble."

This extends beyond the game mechanics themselves into Dead Space's narrative structure — there are no game-stopping cutscenes or scripted events, Beaver told us, in an effort to present a continually-flowing game experience. Beaver cited the "divine design"of Half-Life 2 as an inspiration for this. The overall intention is to tell the story without having to stop the gameplay in order to do so.

Although Beaver said the team studied horror films like The Thing and Alien for inspiration, films like these, he said, use certain visual auditory structures to create fear in a way that can become predictable. Aside from the continual focus on real-time, uninterrupted action, Dead Space relies on depriving the player of any predictive cues they can use to know when the scary stuff's going to happen. As a horror title, he explained, a key strength is that the actions and events are specifically designed to be unpredictable.

I asked Beaver if he had one area of uncertainty with this title, and that's where he and I talked about the difficult task of having to create a survival-horror title in an era that favors in-your-face shooting mechanics. Though Dead Space is very action-intensive, Beaver hopes that people don't see a shooter when they look at it — he's aiming for the middle ground where favored and current game mechanics meet environmental storytelling and psychological fear and suspense.

After Microsoft's presser, Adam and I hit the floor to talk to Matt Barlow, general marketing manager for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment biz, about the announcements — we talked the new Xbox 360 user interface and the avatars, asked how Lips will work, and whether he thinks Final Fantasy XIII will help the company's console penetration in Japan.

We were curious: why is this massive music promotion for Madden such a huge deal to EA? It seems perplexing at first to see a publisher throw so much muscle behind a soundtrack. But it turns out there's a rather sensible motivation behind it that seems to be a win-win for EA, music artists, and for the gaming audience (or would that be a win-win-win?)

Hit the jump for Kotaku's full interview with Schnur:

Schnur admits that licensed music in games is subjective, and often a contentious topic. "I do remember seeing a blog once where somebody accused me of 'doing it wrong' in Madden a couple of years ago because we didn't have any Miles Davis in there," he said.

"It was just one guy, but his comment stood in my head... I don't know how many bodies I want to crush on the football field while listening to smooth jazz. My point is, you can't please everyone."

Discovering new music is something that all people generally enjoy, said Schnur; it's not especially particular to gamers. "But the problem in the last ten years specifically is that radio and music television have failed kids," he said.

Schnur recalled an era that you don't have to be very aged to look back on — a time when fans of certain musical genres or artists would unite under the banner of a favorite radio station and wear its bumper sticker on their cars. But radio is much more genre-restricted now and circulates the same careful list of top hits, making the days of radio and music television as the primary means of music discovery largely obsolete.

"The consolidation of radio has ensured that the music that I grew up with would never be able to be discovered in 2008, because radio plays the same 20 songs across America," he said.

"So how do people discover music, or the new coolest band? Through the places where they spend time, and that's online and playing games. So we decided to take that simple thought process of bringing new bands, new songs, to where kids were."

In that way, Schnur hopes games can become a new music discovery tool for today's audiences. Many gamers, he said, have become turned on to a new artist by enjoying their level in a game like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, or by developing a positive association with it through Madden.

An added benefit to introducing music through games is that it removes the genre-bound context of radio. "We believe that hip-hop, rock, other forms of music... there's no reason to put up walls between them. Hip-hop artists love rock songs because of Madden and vice versa, when we don't hear them separated out on the dial."

Granted, Schnur doesn't expect gamers will like every song that makes a soundtrack. "If there are 30 songs in Madden, we're not going to bat a thousand, because obviously it's subjective. But the goal was that after you played Madden in 2004, 2006, 2009... 3 months later when you hear that Trivium song, you're gonna go, 'Oh, Madden'."

See where the 'win' for EA comes in?

And it goes a bit further — what if, by earning the fealty of young people's tastes through the connection to popular music, sports games could actually influence the aesthetic of real-world sports? Schnur said that in Madden's early days some players complained that there were too few traditional AC/DC or Gary Glitter-style "stadium songs" on the soundtrack like you'd hear at a real football game.

"Now, we have stadiums from Foxboro to Oakland playing the music of Madden," said Schnur. "Because what they've learned is that younger people get into sports initially through the virtual experience of playing games." Whereas ten years ago kids' primary intro to sports would be playing out in the street, today the sports video game is a significant part of many kids' diet, and the real world is now tasked with keeping up.

It becomes somewhat of a virtuous cycle, said Schnur, in which new music can use games to reach its audience better, games can use licensed music to richen the experience of games, and in a sports title, it completes the loop of an overall cultural experience, because sports are also participatory events in which music plays a role.

So what determined the songs that made it onto the recently-revealed Madden soundtrack? Schnur said it took two colleagues and himself from January and May to distill the final list down from 4,000 possible candidates.

"What a song has to do is, it has to serve the game - in the case of Madden, get you pumped up. We have to... see how it fits within the game, and if that band could potentially have an impact on people going forward." The latter refers to a timing issue, he said, in that he seeks out bands on a rising career arc or with a chance for wider success in whatever the present climate happens to be, rather than picking songs that were popular years ago.

And the artist, Schnur said, will have gotten 1 billion impressions from its turn in the game, more than it would have had on the radio. Gamers are happy to discover a new favorite song, and that benefits the artists, too, in obvious ways.

"Some of the bands may never get on the radio. But some might just change your life, musically speaking; you might end up buying tickets to one of their concerts in the future."

And when you're at that life-changing concert, you'll have Madden in mind, which has got to work out well for EA. Win-win-win.

If we made a mistake with Hellgate, it was trying to do too many things for too many people. We wanted a cutting edge graphics engine, we wanted multiple business models with subscriptions and free play, and single-player, we wanted to combine third-person play with first-person play, we wanted to do random 3D levels, and when you're starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much. We ended up rushing it to market and not keeping it in the oven long enough, just out of necessity.

It's still a shame, especially when the game had so much potential, but it's good to see Flagship accepting and learning from their mistake and moving on to bigger and better things. Hit the link for the full interview.

Flagship's Max Schaefer [Eurogamer]

A few months ago, Kieron Gillen sat down with Paul Barnett, EA Mythic's Creative Director, and has been posting bits and pieces of that interview session ever since; this week, we were treated to one of the best cynical descriptions of GDC ever. Barnett explains why, despite being asked to go, he declined the chance to go to GDC and went to the LIFT futurism festival instead:

I never go to GDC. But I was asked point blank why, as it seemed this year they were quite happy to take me to GDC. Mythic wanted me to go there. And I effectively said “Well, I don’t like GDC”. Which turned out to be the wrong thing to say. Apparently I’ve now learned that if you’re in the games industry, and someone says “GDC” what you’re supposed to do is say lots and lots of lovely things about how wonderful they are.

I went for it from the other point of view - I’m not going to GDC because it’s combative, it’s a peacock display and it’s full of people who do what I do or want to do what I do or are doing what I do and don’t want me to do it anymore. It’s not open-minded. It’s very narrow-minded. We’re all talking about the same thing. We’ve all sharpened our knives for years at it, so we get into… well, not a fight, but it’s always about the same things. We talk about design, mechanics, philosophy of design. All I was going to hear about was: WoW and the Activision merger. Whether Spore is going to be any good. How do I get into the games industry? Would you like a job? You’re going to be fired. Why don’t you start a label? I can get you a lot of money? There’s no money available in the market. What we need to do is form an independent development company. What we need to do is unionise. Is microtransactions really the way? What do you think of INSERT WHATEVER IDEA WAS.

The rest of the interview set currently posted is pretty interesting, and it's worth a read through — and not just for the scathing commentary on one of the premier events in the gaming world.

Barnett On: Why I Don’t Go To GDC [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Electronic Arts Los Angeles studio head Neil Young recently announced he'd be leaving EA to embark on a new project - we now know what it is he'll be doing. Young's new endeavor, ng: moco, will focus on publishing games for the iPhone, and Kotaku spoke to Young all about his big plans, and reflected on his 11-year career with EA.

And yes, we also asked him what it's like being named Neil Young - and he's heard all your jokes before.

Young joined EA in 1997, where he ran the Origin studio in Austin, Texas - launchpad of Ultima Online. After that, he created and executive-produced Majestic, groundbreaking as it was one of the first PC games to incorporate ARG elements, calling players on the phone and sending them emails.

In 2002, Young helped overlook the Sims birthplace in Maxis, and has been studio head at EALA since 2004.

"Each of those studios has their own sort of unique culture," Young said. "EA has gone through a lot of changes as a company over those 11 years and... Riccitiello [has taken it] from the place it was at to the place it needs to go to. I think that change is probably the only constant in the world, and EA has been through its fair share of it."

So after riding 11 years of change with EA, what achievement is Young proudest of? "Probably the thing I take the most personal satisfaction out of is helping people grow and develop inside the organization, and sort of step up when I moved on to the next adventure," he said.

"In terms of my personal learning, [I got] a great deal of satisfaction working with Maxis, and getting the opportunity to understand how Will Wright worked, and how Maxis thought about developing software. It was really that sort of period at Maxis that changed a lot of my views on what the future of gaming needed to be," Young said.

Part of that vision for gaming's future, said Young, rests on the iPhone as the next-gen mobile gaming platform. "I am going to create a next-gen mobile games publisher, specifically and initially focused on the iPhone," said Young. That company will be called ng: moco ('Next-Gen Mobile Company).

The iPhone, says Young, provides entirely new opportunities to advance mobile gaming. "My sense is that the mobile games business has kind of been stagnant for a while, on one side because of the limitations of the handsets, and on the other side because of the way in which the business is structured as far as the relationship between the publishers and the carriers," he said.

"One of the great things... iPhone is doing, is changing the relationship between the people making games and the people buying them. It's removing that carrier that limits the potential of the business."

And Young is enthusiastic about where things can go from here. "The device itself is, from a performance standpoint, somewhere between a DS and a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it's got touch, the accelerometer, the camera, the microphone... it's location-aware, and from a usage standpoint it's always on, always with you and always connected to the network," he said.

"My sense is, the types of experiences that we're going to be able to build on that device and the devices that follow... are going to be really interesting and blow the doors off the business."

Young has now transitioned the majority of his responsibilities at EA to some of the folks whose professional development he reflected on as one of the high points in his career. Mike Verdu, general manager at EALA, will take over Young's studio head role, while Spore business head Lucy Bradshaw will continue to handle Maxis, reporting directly to group manager Nick Earl. Young also said he'll continue to function as an advisor for the time being.

"The new business is starting now," he aid. "When there are developers out there who think, 'hey, I have an awesome idea for the iPhone and it can only be done on that device', I want them to know they should be thinking about us."

Of course, we had to ask him - does he get a lot of jokes about his name? "Pretty much every day," said Young.

"It's fine; literally somebody makes a Neil Young reference every day, and it's probably funny... for the posters. I also have to say, I'm not sure where you got the photo you used [for me], but I look really pissed in that photo, and I was reading some of the comments and one guy was like, 'dude, that guy looks really pissed,'" Young said.

"I'm actually completely the opposite; I can be pretty intense, but I like to have fun. It's hard to make fun if you don't have fun, and I try to have as much fun as the next person."