Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve got the most incredible surprise announcement to make after the jump in this post! It’s going to be amazing! Start getting worked up about it now! Also there’s 1UP’s interview with Valve’s Erik Wolpaw, lead writer on Portal 2, and PR guru Doug Lombardi. It’s a slightly awkward interview, established by a very peculiar opening question. But it contains all manner of titbits about Portal 2, including how the game will manage to offer two-player co-op without breaking the fiction. Don’t forget about that surprise!

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The mystery behind the Flagship fiasco has produced much speculation. At last Bill Roper has spoken out, in an interview with 1Up. You can now learn about the last couple of months at Flagship in detail. And it looks like it really is the last couple of months at Flagship. Sad stuff.

“Really, our focus now has been on how we best take care of the guys that aren’t there anymore and help them find jobs with other teams… We’re really working to get those guys placed. Then, past that, we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to take care of our creditors and other fiscal challenges. But it’s definitely at the point where we’re not exactly trying to plot a gigantic turnaround with a bright, rosy future at Flagship. It’s unfortunately more the other side of the coin… We’re working hard on how to end gracefully.”

Read the full interview here.

The guys over at 1up were lucky enough to get some time to sit down and talk to Will Wright at the EA3 event, and they’ve posted the video over at Game Videos. We, being repurposing blogger-types, have posted it after the jump. There’s not a whole lot of new Spore information, but it’s nonetheless satisfying to hear Wright wax about his game, and admit that the creature creator has been completely redesigned around ten times to get it to the state we find it in today.

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1UP are reporting some interesting tactics by Relic to get into the piracy-warped Chinese games market with the most excellent Company Of Heroes. Apparently they intend to turn the game into an “’experience for online gamers where players will be able to build their character up from private to general through new multiplayer cooperative missions, gameplay modes, and player-versus-player combat’ in a persistent RTS. Presumably, they have a quirky pay-to-play plan to match.”

Presumably. Hard to know though, especially when most RTS games remain free and details are still pretty sketchy for Relic’s plan of attack. The persistent RTS has long sat just over the horizon for developers, and it’ll be interesting to see whether commercial pressures like this force it to happen.