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

From the Counter-Strike article:

[eviloverlordx]

The characters are gritty, burly, and not particularly appealing - so Namco got an artist to anime them up a little, replacing sweaty gringos with guys in primary-colored spandex and PVC shoulderpads

This isn't looking too good...

and hairy guys in fatigues and ski masks with antigravity-busted women in three square inches of purple nylon.

...but I can live with it.

Re:From the Counter-Strike article:

[Jace of Fuse!]

I'm glad you're views aren't the strong majority.

I hate overly realistic "Gung-Ho" militant shit in games.

I couldn't give 2 rat's asses about racing games that look like my TV is tuned to some motosporting event. And as much as I like some racing games, I'd rather see more Carmageddons than Grand Turismos.

I'll puke if I see one more historical war rehash as a 3rd person shooter. I'll take Shogo's Comic Influence over any of the newest first person shooters any day.

I think the reason a lot of gamers feel the way I do is that video games are supposed to be fun, over the top, and SURREAL.

Yes. SURREAL. Pac-Man wasn't a dog, a pig, or a bug. He was a -- uh - A Pac-person. Mario might have been a plumber, but he wasn't stomping on Lawyers, he was stomping on -- uh -- whatever Goombas are.

Early video games were surreal probably more for the sake of their inherent limitations. Modern video games are surreal because realistic is dull and boring.

If every game looked relaistic, nothing would be interesting. The more advanced graphics rendering engines become the harder it is to differentiate the look of a game.

Give me surrealism to realism anyday. As far as I'm concerned there are too many "mainstream realism oriented" games today.

And to counter your view, in MY opinion the realism --IS-- the Pop-Culture. Not the cartoony surreal stuff. That, if anything, is the Unpop culture. It is the real spirit and heritage of video gaming. And if you don't like it, buy the games you do like. Just remember, some of us wouldn't have it any other way.

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.

128kbits is terrible.

[Inoshiro]

If you have lots of hearing damage in the high end, perhaps it is ok. However, to me, I can hear the distortion in vocals over the engines in Sega GT and Project Gotham. That means it's bad.

What's bad about a higher bitrate? Nothing. It chews less CPU time to encode and decode (after all, the trade off is compressed representation vs. CPU power), and results in a better representation of the music file. The Xbox HD is fast enough loading that you can have your 64mb of ram section up such that you have a buffer window of 128kbytes - 512kbytes, which can cover several seconds of MP3 data at 192 or 256kbits (4 - 16 seconds depending on if you pick lower or upper size). This assumes CBR encoding -- VBR encoding will be better.

So there are no technical reasons they could not have done this. The XBox is, as you pointed out, limited, so people wouldn't be loading their entire MP3 collection on to the device without running out of room for save games.

On the other hand, I would be able to load the songs I like onto my Xbox. Even 1gb of music would be plenty (my Shuffle is only 512mb in size, and with my 10-15mb MP3 files, I still get 3 hours of non-repeat music, which means I hear every song twice before the battery dies). So storage isn't a problem either.

The fact is that these people at Microsoft put out half-baked products. They put in just enough to get a bullet point on the box, but don't really invesitage the use cases or consider it in the context of the rest of the device. The only equivalent half-baked thing I can think of from a company like Apple would be the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X, which performs so terribly as to be useless.

Half-baked designs are why iPods are more popular than all those other, more complex players. They're also why I have no desire to buy any WinCE PDAs depite the half-baked feeling of modern Palm devices. Microsoft just happens to be another company that lacks vision in this space; it's hardly unique to them.

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?