QuakeCon 2010

[Great Rumbler]

It's mid-August, so that means three solid days of LAN gaming, chugging energy drinks, and maybe catching a glimpse of some awesome game that hasn't come out. All impressions from playable games [Fallout New Vegas, Brink, Hunted: The Demon's Forge] and live demos/trailers [Rage, Doom 4 [*crosses fingers*] will be posted here. Wild, sugar-induced ranting may go here as well.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

are you going? you can say hi to my friend at the Obsidian booth.

[Joe Molotov]

[iconoclast]

Looking forward to Rage and Doom 4

I bought a new PC for Doom 3 (and Half Life 2) and it was so worth it. Game is awesome.

[Great Rumbler]

are you going? you can say hi to my friend at the Obsidian booth.

Yeah, I'm heading down there tomorrow morning for the full weekend.

[Positive Touch]

find some nerdo collector to buy my mint-condition id anthology for top dollar and i promise to cyber with you for at least an hour

[Great Rumbler]

It's QuakeCon, dude, everybody's already got that. 

[maxy]

Oh cool,more talk from vaporware makers

/...hears rumble../runs

[ManaByte]

It's QuakeCon, dude, everybody's already got that. 

Yup. I remember when the Quake shareware CD included everything up to that date on it andbit was immediately cracked.

[Great Rumbler]

Well, I'm at QuakeCon right now. Just got my computer set up, so far it's still pretty quiet in the BYOC.

Oh cool,more talk from vaporware makers

/...hears rumble../runs

:hippolaugh

This year I'll be playing vaporware. 

[Positive Touch]

requesting pics of the most freakish fatties you can find

[maxy]

Any live streams

[maxy]

Found live stream....zzzz...Rage iphone 60 fps....zzzzz

And he is talking and talking like some hyperactive teen.... 

[maxy]

From EG

id Software boss Todd Hollenshead has told Eurogamer that id Tech 5 will not be licensed out to third party developers and publishers.

Launched with great fanfare at QuakeCon 2007, id Tech 5 forms the basis of the studio's flagship Rage title and had been billed as a competitor in the middleware business to the likes of Unreal Engine 3.

Following id Software's acquisition by ZeniMax Media in 2009, however, Hollenshead said that the technology would be reserved for games published by ZeniMax and Bethesda Softworks.

"It's going to be used within ZeniMax, so we're not going to license it to external parties," Hollenshead told Eurogamer at QuakeCon 2010 in Dallas today.

"It's like, look, this is a competitive advantage and we want to keep it within games we publish - not necessarily exclusively to id or id titles, but if you're going to make a game with id Tech 5 then it needs to be published by Bethesda, which I think is a fair thing."

Hollenshead said he could imagine the technology being used by third-party developers, but only if their games were published by Bethesda, under which circumstances id would withhold nothing.

 

Keynote was like zzzz 

[Stoney Mason]

Well the good thing is that all but confirms to me that future Oblivion and Fallout games will use the tech which can only be a good thing for those series.

[Purple Filth]

Holy crap Carmack 

Video in the link

http://kotaku.com/5611523/id-unleashes-rage-on-the-iphone

During his keynote speech at QuakeCon 2010, id Software's John Carmack demonstrated Rage on the iPhone, running at 60 frames-per-second and able to "kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2."

Carmack's demonstration, using the id Tech 5 engine, could possibly be the most impressive tech we've seen on the iPhone. Running on the iPhone 4 but easily run on the 3GS, the visuals indeed rivaled anything from the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox, and might even be able to give a few current-gen titles a run for their money.

[Sho Nuff]

Dude, Carmack poops out stuff like Wolf and Doom ports on the iPhone on his weekends. He's a maniac

[Purple Filth]

Dude, Carmack poops out stuff like Wolf and Doom ports on the iPhone on his weekends. He's a maniac

IIRC he was on vacation then got bored and started to make the Doom port.

[Great Rumbler]

Played some Fallout: New Vegas today, it was pretty awesome. It's basically Fallout 3, which everyone knows by now, but with some tweaks and additions that look like they're going to make it a more fleshed-out game. It's gonna be good.

Also, I played some Operation Flashpoint with this crazy gun peripheral. It's a gun controller that has a small projected attached to it and when you move the gun around the aiming reticule moves as well. It was pretty wild, especially because you had to play the game inside this giant, inflatable igloo.

[maxy]

Fallout

Some news

Bethesda Softworks mother company ZeniMax has acquired Arkane Studios, adding to its stable of studios that already includes id Software.

Bethesda's Pete Hines made the announcement during the introduction to John Carmack's QuakeCon 2010 keynote. Terms were not disclosed.

"We are extremely pleased to join the family of Bethesda and id Software," Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio told the audience.

"I don't know how it could be better."

Hines came back on stage and said that Bethesda and Arkane were collaborating on an "unannounced project" but it would be "a while before we're talking about it".

Hines did say that we could expect to hear about it at a future QuakeCon.

[drew]

joe is there poopsockin it up

i talked to him while he was packin on chat

[Great Rumbler]

Fallout

Here's some of the new additions I noticed in the short demo:

-Towns seem to have more randomized events [a guy ran out of an alley and attacked a member of a local gang on one occasion]
-Melee weapons also have a secondary attack
-There was an item called "antivenom]
-More variety of weapons, I think there were three different kinds of shotguns in my inventory at the start of the demo
-Each town has a different opinion of you [I killed some people and eventually got shunned by the whole town]
-Factions play a bigger role, I killed a gang member and a bunch of his friends came out of a building and killed me
-Each gun has an iron sight
-Using the boxing gloves to attack someone will eventually knock them down [from fatigue damage], where you can then shoot them up at your leisure

[Positive Touch]

is the animation still shit?  and does everyone still have exactly the same body?

[Great Rumbler]

is the animation still shit?  and does everyone still have exactly the same body?

I noticed the jumping animation looked better. You're guy actually looked like he was jumping instead of just hovering a few feet above the ground. It was an early Beta build, so there were still parts of the animation that was stiff/awkward/janky [although I have my doubts about whether that will get ironed out much more by launch].

Another thing that I noticed was that you can actually get hit during VATS [unlike in F3 where you became invincible], adds an element of strategy to VATS that wasn't there before. Also, I noticed that injured combatants will sometimes try to run away from you.

[Great Rumbler]

Played some more games today.

Brink:

-Four classes that have fully customizable appearance [medic, soldier, engineer, operative/spy]
-Soldier can deploy explosives and give out extra ammo
-Medic can heal and issue revive kits [when you "die", you character falls down and you can wait to be revived or respawn in the next respawn wave]
-Engineer can deploy turrets and do construction objectives
-Operative can hack and take on the likeness of a fallen enemy
-All classes can be changed at will in the spawn room
-Completing objectives, killing enemies and so on gives you experiences that you can use to get more weapons and customization options
-Levels are pretty large and complex, rounds are objective-based and can last 20-30 minutes
-SMART system works really well, it allows you to jump over obstacles, grab on to ledge and pull yourself up, slide along the ground and other things like that

Hunted: The Demon's Forge

-At E3 people referred to this as Gears of Warcraft and I think the name is apt
-Two player co-op with a male warrior and a female archer
-New weapons can be picked up in the levels, along with other items like potions and extra arrows
-Combat is hack-and-slash, or shoot-and-kill [depending on which character you play as]
-There are various magical spells that the characters can use
-Certain things in each level require to characters to work together
-Kind of reminds me of Gauntlet [or maybe Hexen]

[maxy]

Rage

This game is coming out. will ship in U.S. on Tim's 40th birthday. 9/13/2011. Europe will be 9/15/2011

zzzzzz...z

[Great Rumbler]

So basically, Brink is fucking awesome? Does it look really good and run well in person?

It was the Xbox360, so of course it looked awful.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Not bad, lots of detail all around and it ran smooth from what I could tell.

[close]

Also:

RAGE

The good:
-Graphics are really good
-Animation is really smooth
-Combat looks fluid and different enemies will come at you in different ways [some guys are acrobatic and will use the environment to swing around and hit you]
-Dead City looks AMAZING, graphics and artistically. The boss battle there is insane, and the part where the demo cuts out at this segments is even more insane.
-The game finally has a solid release date


The bad:
-Still 13 months away

[tiesto]

I never even knew that Quake got its own con, or it was still that popular a series... shit, shows how far I'm out of the loop I guess

[cool breeze]

the screen shots of the city in RAGE is crazy.  I want to see that video.

[Great Rumbler]

Great Rumbler bringing us the real talk

I can't leave my boys hangin'. 

the screen shots of the city in RAGE is crazy.  I want to see that video.

As good as the screenshots look, it was even more amazing in person. It had a crazy amount of detail.

[Great Rumbler]

Got one more game impression before QuakeCon wraps up.

It's...

wait for it...

TWO WORLDS II:

-Deeper character customization [wasn't show off in the demo though]
-More generic wildlife [the savanna in the demo had leopards, ostriches, and rhinos]
-Spells are created through cards [combine fire card with missile cards creates fireball spell, but there are also secondary effects that can be added on]
-Weapons and armor are upgradeable [stackable system is replaced with the ability to break down armor and weapons into their key components for use in upgraded existing weapons and armor]
-Animations looks much smoother, big improvements over the original
-Several different varieties of travel exist [one is a sailboat that you can actually sail yourself, as in controlling the sail and rudder]
-Main storyline is 20-30 hours, but there are tons of sidequests
-Multiplayer is revamped and much deeper [the multiplayer actually covers the seven years between the original game and its sequel]
-Herbs and misc. animal items can be combined to create different potions, each combination will result in a recipe that will show you how to make it again [think this was in the original]
-No skill trees, all individual skills are available to add points to depending on how you want to play.
-Armor sets can be tied to a single button, making it much easier to switch between ranged, close-range, and magical focuses
-Didn't get to see dialog and voice acting in action, but considering how much everything else has been improved I would be very surprised if this didn't get fixed as well
-Combat feels much deeper with a variety of different attacks depending on how your character is moving

Looks like a major improvement over the original.

[maxy]

Well the good thing is that all but confirms to me that future Oblivion and Fallout games will use the tech which can only be a good thing for those series.

Slim hope for that...new engine sounds good though

Bethesda Game Director Todd Howard explained in a separate interview with IGN that his game would not use id Tech 5. The studio's new engine built for its upcoming title is more beneficial to creating huge, open-world games, such as Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, while id Tech 5 is better for more contained environments.

"We decided to really reboot our technology after Fallout 3, so we had been making plans for that and started doing some things. The id thing came along later, so it's a mix of that plus the kinds of games we do are a bit bigger and more dynamic.

"Id Tech 5 is the best thing in the world at doing a very static environment that looks pretty and you're going to run through. But for the kinds of things I like to do, I like the world to be more dynamic."

http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1112464p1.html

[Positive Touch]

Bethesda Game Director Todd Howard explained in a separate interview with IGN that his game would not use id Tech 5. The studio's new engine built for its upcoming title is more beneficial to creating huge, open-world games, such as Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, while id Tech 5 is better for more contained environments.

umm what?  isn't rage one huge open-world environment?

[Great Rumbler]

Bethesda Game Director Todd Howard explained in a separate interview with IGN that his game would not use id Tech 5. The studio's new engine built for its upcoming title is more beneficial to creating huge, open-world games, such as Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, while id Tech 5 is better for more contained environments.

umm what?  isn't rage one huge open-world environment?

Not entirely.

[pilonv1]

Another thing that I noticed was that you can actually get hit during VATS [unlike in F3 where you became invincible], adds an element of strategy to VATS that wasn't there before. Also, I noticed that injured combatants will sometimes try to run away from you.

I thought VATS moved in super super slow mo for Fallout 3 and you could occasionally get hit? Or maybe I'm imagining things wrong.

[Great Rumbler]

Another thing that I noticed was that you can actually get hit during VATS [unlike in F3 where you became invincible], adds an element of strategy to VATS that wasn't there before. Also, I noticed that injured combatants will sometimes try to run away from you.

I thought VATS moved in super super slow mo for Fallout 3 and you could occasionally get hit? Or maybe I'm imagining things wrong.

You could get hit, but I don't think it actually did any damage. I actually saw someone in New Vegas get killed while in VATS slow-mo.

[Eel O'Brian]

i like the injured trying to escape, that was always funny in FO3 when some raider screamed like a pussy and hauled ass (although it was pretty rare)

i wonder if getting injured/killed in VATS is just for the "survival" mode or if it's across all modes

in any event, can't wait, just have to decide where i want to preorder the collector's edition

[Stoney Mason]

Well the good thing is that all but confirms to me that future Oblivion and Fallout games will use the tech which can only be a good thing for those series.

Slim hope for that...new engine sounds good though

Bethesda Game Director Todd Howard explained in a separate interview with IGN that his game would not use id Tech 5. The studio's new engine built for its upcoming title is more beneficial to creating huge, open-world games, such as Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, while id Tech 5 is better for more contained environments.

"We decided to really reboot our technology after Fallout 3, so we had been making plans for that and started doing some things. The id thing came along later, so it's a mix of that plus the kinds of games we do are a bit bigger and more dynamic.

"Id Tech 5 is the best thing in the world at doing a very static environment that looks pretty and you're going to run through. But for the kinds of things I like to do, I like the world to be more dynamic."

http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1112464p1.html

sigh... i guess i can understand the timing issue but still i have very little confidence in the bethesda's ability to create an internal engine.

[Great Rumbler]

Just because Bethesda isn't using id tech 5, doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't getting some support from id.

[Joe Molotov]

Rage

This game is coming out. will ship in U.S. on Tim's 40th birthday. 9/13/2011. Europe will be 9/15/2011

zzzzzz...z

(Image removed from quote.)

You could feel the entire room's collective hearts sink when they announced the release date. Everyone knew it wasn't coming out in 2010, but everyone's thinking along the lines of "please be February, please be February" and then we they were like "September 13th" there was dead silence for a few seconds before anyone reacted.

That giant super-mutant was awesome, though. More games need insanely enormous bosses.

[Great Rumbler]

Engines aren't magical devices that immediately cure any and all development issues. If a team is intimately familiar with a production framework and has built an engine from the ground-up to suit their specific needs then switching over to another team's software isn't the brightest of ideas.

Bethesda has done a wonderful job creating the software they need to build the games they want to. They've been doing it for over 20 years with immensely popular and easy to modify games. It's safe to say that they've been doing a fantastic job creating internal engines.

But Gamebryo and Havoc aren't Bethesda-made engines.

[maxy]

Few thoughts

-main reason for the Rage long development is content creation,megatexture stuff has totally fucked existing id content creation...Carmack was blabbing about that in his keynote,render farm problems gpu 50x faster theoretically,in reality like 5x for various reasons,move to raytracing,cpu have lots of cores now...etc

-it's another thing to have some limited demo(like they had with Rage in 2007)...tons of problems when trying to make full game...he was blabbing about that



But not all hope is lost

Todd Howard interview

Eurogamer: You've been working on something secret now for two years. Do you have any sense yet of when you will be able to talk about it or even say what it is? Are going to be sat here next year answering the same question?

Todd Howard: I don't know [laughs]. I have a sense but we're not ready even to talk about that, because it might change. I don't want to disappoint people.

One thing I can say is that from when you first hear about it to when it's out will be the shortest it's been for us. It's pretty far along. When we show it, we want to show a lot, because there's a lot of game there to play right now.

You know, if Pete Hines came in and said, "I want you to show it," I'd be like, "Okay, I'm ready to show it." But we've just decided for now not to yet.

Eurogamer: Is it fair to say then that it's based on existing technology?

Todd Howard: The technology is ours and it is inspired by the technology we have. We have a lot of it. But that's our starting point - the Fallout 3 tech. It started with Morrowind, we went to Oblivion, we did a lot between Oblivion and Fallout 3 because now we had final hardware - with Oblivion we had six months on final hardware, so Fallout 3 technically does a lot more than Oblivion. The new stuff is an even bigger jump from that.

I can say it is on the existing platforms, which we're really happy with. You almost feel like you have a new console when you see the game.

Eurogamer: Has he helped to solve any technical problems in your games?

Todd Howard: Not specifically. He's helped validate some of our thinking. So if we say, "Hey, this is how we're doing shadows, you're John Carmack, what do you think?" And he says, "You're going about it the right way," and he gives us some things to consider at a high level - things he's messed with in shadow filtering and so forth. It's up to us to go try that and see how it registers in our tech.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-08-16-bethesdas-todd-howard-interview?page=1