Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Indie dev Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage, Sleep Is Death, Inside A Star-Filled Sky, The Diamond Trust of London and the near-mythical Chain World is a divisive game designer, because reasons. I personally reckon his stuff is reliably fascinating, bold and often important (including on those occasions that I’ve rather bounced off it), so I’ve been very keen to find out more about his upcoming game The Castle Doctrine. An MMO based around the concept of home invasion and home defence, the nature of the Rohrer’s tenth game has remained cryptic since a guarded reveal last October.

In this first of a two-part interview, Rohrer explains just what this dark multiplayer game of strategy, construction, burglary and cold-blooded murder is, how it works, its amorality and politics, the unenviable living situation and fear of vicious dogs which inspired it, and why the late-in-the-day addition of a wife and kids changed the nature of the whole affair.
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There was an unexpected element to DmC: Devil May Cry. It was always going to be about smashing up demons. It was always going to feature weapon-switching, combo-building, score-chasing, and combat tech-fests. What was possibly more of a surprise was it being an outlandish political satire which takes aim at consumer culture, finance and banking, surveillance society, and right-wing media. Ninja Theory’s Dominic Matthews explains the role satire plays in DmC’s cultural commentary on evil.

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At the end of last year we were pleased and then surprised to find that DigitalMindSoft were making a “spiritual successor” to the Men Of War games set in the modern world. Call To Arms, as it is called, baffled us a little by kicking off with a crowd-funding appeal, which seems to have gained little traction. Concerned to learn more – because Men Of War is a favourite game series of mine – I thought it might be good to talk to the developers and ask about their plans: would they go to Kickstarter? And would the GEM engine be updated? I talked to Chris Kramer.
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Planetary Annihilation was undoubtedly one of the strongest Kickstarter projects to have appeared since Double Fine set off the goldrush. A stellar pitch, a cap doff to Total Annihilation, and the tech lead from Supreme Commander pouring all of his ambitions into it: few games can boast anything like this, and consequently this game threatens seismic effects in the RTS genre. The man making that happen is Jon Mavor, and I thought it well overdue for us to catch up with what he was up to, and why he is making one of the most exciting games of 2013.
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“This is like your nightmare interview here, huh?”

Nah. This might not be going too well, but I’ve had worse. Much worse. (The most terrible was probably with an executive at one of the industry’s biggest PC game developers a couple of years back, where I had the distinct impression I was interviewing a robot who’d much rather murder me than talk to me).

This half hour with the lead designer of BioShock: Infinite would definitely win a place in my Top 40 Botched Interviews, but it’s not up there in shotgun-to-the-head territory yet. The mutual acknowledgement that it’s been a misfire does wonders too. Eventually.
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When GSC collapsed and seemed to take STALKER 2 with it, there was immediately a ray of light: Vostok, a team consisting of a large section of the original Stalker development team, now making their own game, Survarium. While the art style and atmosphere look astonishingly similar to that classic open-world shooter, what we’re looking at here is a free-to-play MMOFPS. Quite a different proposition indeed, despite powerful influences from the Roadside Picnic/Zone mythology which underwrote the original GSC games.

With Vostok’s recently-announced development timeline showing a Survarium beta happening in 2013, I thought it might be a good idea to catch up Oleg Yavorsky, the company’s spokesman, and a fellow I had previously conducted numerous STALKER interviews with over the years. Read on below to see how we got on.
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Some interviews with prominent figures, as in Polygon’s widely-circulated one with BioShock: Infinite lead designer Ken Levine, are held on top of skyscraping Californian hotels. While it’s not something I’ve experienced myself, I can entirely appreciate why this often leads their eventual write-ups to be somewhat defined by awe, be it overt or subtle: a famous figure is encountered in a dramatic setting, the trappings of aspirational luxury around them. Thus, they are inevitably presupposed to be superhumans of a sort, with achievements and a lifestyle far beyond those of mere mortals such as the humble interviewer. This is the tale. Notoriously, this week also saw the outermost extreme of this, in Esquire’s absurd interview with/clearly lovelorn ode to the attractive but otherwise apparently unexceptional actor Megan Fox.

I can’t ever imagine going as far as Esquire, and I’d hope someone would throw me into the nearest sea if I did, but I do understand why it can happen. The scene is set in such a way that the interviewer is encountering, if not a god, then at least royalty. Even on a more moderate level, I have never conducted an interview in a Californian luxury hotel’s roofgarden, and my own interview with Ken Levine last month was no different, but I am nonetheless left thinking about the narrative created in that half hour. What tale could I now tell from just a talk with a guy in a room? Initially, I thought it impossible, or at least redundant, to spin a story out of a short, slightly awkward conversation in a dark little room somewhere in London: this is why Q&As are the standard interview format here. Let’s try, though. I want to tell you about what happened in that interview, and how it felt to me, as well as sharing Ken Levine’s comments about BioShock: Infinite’s characters, pacing and mysteries with you.
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Long-haired lover from Liverpool David Valjalo speaks to ex-Relic art honcho and founder, Rob Cunningham, about his new project: a planet-spanning free-to-play RTS called Hardware. Oh, and he also discusses how he’s building giant, working robots in his spare time.

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In this concluding part (the first one is here), we discuss boardgame influences, commercial success, what XCOM might mean for the future of strategy, the need for realism within science-fiction, and why XCOM wound up rather buggy.
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Wildman! That’s fun to say, isn’t it? I like bellowing it at the top of my lungs while charging down sun-spattered hills, colossal bonking club aloft. Of course, I was doing that long before Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games announced a fantastical prehistoric RTS/MOBA/RPG with the very same title, so now it’s actually relevant. But how exactly do all those puzzle pieces fit together? Is this just Total Demigod Annihilation Siege Commander, or is there more to it than that? And, most importantly, what sorts of objects will we be bonking people with? Dinosaur femurs? Pterodactyl eggs? Primitive religious ideologies? Also, something something DRM (or lack thereof) and mods and Kickstarter or whatever, I guess. See it all after the break.

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With Firaxis’ de-hyphenated, largely very well-received remake of the legendary, incomparable, enormous-haircutted X-COM now out there saving the Earth from the worst scum of the universe for several months, now seems the time to sit down with its enthusiastic main man Jake Solomon. What went right, what went wrong and what comes next? As per recent tradition, we had a very long chat.

Covered in this first part – the base, the skills, the missing element of surprise and what they’ve learned if they ever do this again. Edited out to spare you the horror: his Punch & Judy-style impersonation of an Englishman.
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