God of War, Counter-Strike, 360 Design at GDC

Some more great writeups of GDC events are now available. Gamasutra's coverage continues to be comprehensive, with articles on the localization of Counter-Strike, the development of God of War, and the a design postmortem on the Xbox 360. God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another discusses the ways the dev team balanced the needs of the artists, designers, and programmers to create a cohesive title. The Localization of Counter-Strike in Japan gives the reader some object lessons in what it's like to take western ideas and translate them to an eastern culture. Finally, Ophelea wrote to mention a GamersInfo.net story on the design of the Xbox 360. From this last article: "The user interface was one of the more difficult designs to accomplish. While the original Xbox had 250MB of space to utilize, the Xbox360 had only 4.5MB uncompressed or 1.5MB in total! Not only this, they expanded on the original Xbox's 45 screens and grew it ten fold to 450 screens! Several iterations were gone through with the end result being a combination of several of these schemes."

Comments

Don't shoot them in the back?

[PFI_Optix]

Wow. In a game like CS where kills actually count for something (since you don't instantly respawn), the karma idea is pretty lame. Oh no, you shot someone from too far away. Don't ambush them as they approach their objective, either. And if you turn a corner and find a dope staring in the opposite direction, don't shoot him until he turns around or you step in front of him.

After all, killing him wouldn't be fair unless he knows you're about to do it and has a chance to kill you first.

If they'd fought WW2 by those principles, it would have been a SHORT war.

Re:Don't shoot them in the back?

[PFI_Optix]

The best way to fix the "fairness" problems in CS would be to keep a "skill score". A few things I would implement:

1) Award more points for killing someone with a glock than an M4, and more for an M4 than an AWP.

2) Conversely, award more points for the dollar amount of your slain opponent's equipment; a guy with a glock shouldn't be worth the same as a guy with an M4.

3) Give "assists", points for doing damage to a player if someone else kills them in the same round.

4) Finishing with 1 hp and 100 hp shouldn't result in the same score. If you get more than one kill, the point values of those kills could be mulitplied if your health is over, say, 80.

5) AFK players don't count on the scoreboard. If there has been no input from a player during a round, killing them would not impact score.

6) Implement a karma system similar to /.'s with types like "Team player," "Potential cheater," "Camper," et cetera.

Re:Worst. Mod. EVAR.

[SSCGWLB]

What, no kamikaze mode? They should be able to strap 10 HE grenades to their spandex torsos and fling themselves at the other team!!! I bet the loosing team doesn't even have to commit Seppuku! Kids these days, sure don't have the starch of their ancestors.

~nate

didn't change it

[MoreNoiseThanSignal]

From the article:
"we didn't want to change it; we didn't want to ruin it."
uh... yeah. The core mechanic, maybe, but I'd say you can only loosely call the game counter-strike now. I find it funny that (I have been lead to believe) the japanese are pretty xenophobic when it comes to western games but a lot of the character designs are not only western but overtly caucasian. What's up with that?