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Warren Spector Starts His Own Shop
Gamespot has the word that designer Warrren Spector has gone ahead and formed his own development shop. The company, Junction Point, is titled after a MMOG that Warren designed but never got off the ground. From the article: "The company has started preliminary development on a "fantasy" title created by Spector, who worked at Dungeons and Dragons creator TSR in the 1980s. Although Spector said the title was rapidly evolving, he did not give any indication about what specific subgenre the game would fall under or what platforms it would be released for."
"Daikatana 2: Electric Boogaloo"
System Shock, the 1994 classic in which he was involved, affected me so much I wrote an entire novel based on the game.
Amazing guy.
--This sig is in beta. Please let us know abut any errors you find.
You can look up Warren on the IMDB.
I guess it was about two years ago when IMDB started listing video games.
Now I've seen Everything
It startled me to see a Gamespot story linking to my own bibliography. This was part of the reporter's detective work in trying to deduce the nature of Warren's current project. I worked for Warren at the Austin, TX office of Looking Glass Studios (then Looking Glass Technologies) in the mid-'90s on a game with the working title "Junction Point." I don't know what Warren's current plans are, but I'm willing to bet he isn't trying to resurrect that game. I expect he chose the name purely for sentimental reasons.
By the way, in case anyone cares, the Gamespot story gets one detail wrong: I didn't work with Warren at TSR. Rather, we worked together at Steve Jackson Games in the mid-'80s, where he was Editor-in-Chief and I was the lowly assistant editor. Warren worked for TSR after leaving SJG, and was involved in AD&D 2nd edition there. I never worked at TSR myself, though I did a lot of freelance work for them.
That's ok. That's what the millions of uninformed "experts" spouting vague conjecture on internet forums are for.
I personally know for a fact* that the new game will "employ massive scalability, breathtaking 3D environments taking place in a rich story-based realm, immersive best-of-breed interactive e-benchmarks, and breasts."
Why yes, I did just concieve that using eBizWeb's Game Press Release Maker Gold v1.5! Why do you ask?
* fact n. Reasoning based on inconclusive evidence; speculation or supposition
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I still don't get why everyone acts like Invisible War ran over their dog
It wasn't a horrible game, and was certainly worth playing. But it certainly wasn't the great game everyone was expecting. My laundry list of problems with Deus Ex: Invisible War:
1) The shadows were a gimmick: Dynamic shadows had massive potential for inventiveness in stealth gameplay (shooting out the lights a-la Riddick for example), and they were squandered. Essentially they hugely raised the system requirements for nothing except a bit of eye candy.
2) The textures: You could tell that DX:IW was a console port by the textures. No matter what resolution you ran at, they just looked awful on a PC. This was fixed by a group of fans who made their own (excellent) high-res texture pack, but it shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. The later European and DVD versions of the game came with official high-res textures, but they didn't offer them to anyone who had previously bought the game.
3) The great ballooning UI monster: Without tweaking, the game's HUDs and menus were huge and clunky. This is obviously yet another concession to the Xbox port, as a nice compact HUD would've been hard to read on a TV. Once again fixable on the user's side, but not something you should have to deal with.
4) Chairs on Ice!: The physics of the game were sorta entertaining, but way unrealistic. It really breaks the immersion of the game when you bump into a chair and it slides like it's on greased ice.
5) No more skill points: Half of the joy of the original was gaining skill points, and using them to tailor your character to your approach to the game. It just added an extra element of freedom that was missing from the sequel.
6) No exploration bonuses: This goes along with the previous complaint, but I thought it deserved its own heading. The original game provided a real incentive for you to poke around every nook and cranny of the level if possible. In the sequel you can still explore as thoroughly as you like, but you're not gonna get much for it except maybe some ammo or money.
7) Stupid AI tricks: Let's face it, the AI in DX:IW is dumb as paint. And while I admit that the original AI that was just as stupid, wasn't that one of the things they promised to fix in the sequel?
8) Choices? We don't need no steenking choices!: Despite the promise of a branching storyline and tough choices to make, DX:IW does not give you much of anything in the way of choice. Yeah you can choose to do or not do a mission, but that doesn't really matter. I was able to complete every single mission thrown my way with no consequences whatsoever to the plot. In fact, no matter what path you take, it's still possible to get all of the possible endings when you reach the last level.
9) Universal ammo: The one that pissed people off the most. Not only does it make no sense (carbon doesnn't make particularly good projectiles, it's too brittle), but it rips tons of strategy from the game, and has other obnoxious gameplay repurcussions (see #10 for what I mean). Ammo management was one of the most important parts of the first game. If you ran around sniping everyone with the rifle, you were going to run out. So you needed to pick and choose when to use what. It also allowed for cool stuff like multiple ammo types for the same weapon (mmmm... white phospherous rockets...). This was sorely missed in IW.
10) Retarded damage modeling: Walk up to a guy point blank, place a pistol straight to his head, and fire. Is he dead? Nope, he's running around barking the in-game equivalent to "Ow! Quit it!" To balance out the universal ammo, the developers made different weapons cost more based on their power (which, once again, doesn't make much sense - does a pistol round take all that much more to make than a sniper round?). Unfortunately, there's a wrench thrown in this when people keep picking enemies off with cheap pistol ammo. The solution? Make the pistol weaker than a Darringer. This means you can say goodbye to the efficient stealt