PixlBit

Larry! I look forward to seeing Metal Monday come Monday! Until then we can all still chat and do whatever it is we do lol.

TAMI!  :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

That is all lol

At the moment there isn't but it's definitely something Nick should be able to add. He wants to add more community features so that it will be able to attract that kind of community feel and usability. The site has been adding features for a while now and I'm looking forward to getting even better stuff so we can message each other, do friend lists, and keep track of blogs from people we want to follow and such.

Thanks Aaron, I'm glad you came and created an account to check the place out. I think over time Pixlbit will grow on you kind of like 1UP did. There are certainly people here that enjoy retro games and would enjoy talking about them with you. Julian is a fucking walking gaming encyclopedia at times, he likes to archive things and collect games and talk about games.

Don't worry about Dark Souls, you don't need to play Dark Souls in order to be part of our community lol. You're perfectly fine the way you are and we will accept you the way you are.

Ben thanks for stopping by, you're one of my favorite guys at 1UP and a good dude in general. Hope you can stop by more often as well, there's some folks here that have similar interests in anime, art, fighting games, jrpgs like Persona, and more. Your voice and personality would be nice to see around here more often, this is a unique place and I'd like to see more and more people experience it and make it their own.

Your idea of keeping things mysterious is good. Mystery and speculation tends to be more interesting than the truth in a lot of situations. That's how I am with Mass Effect. Back when the first game came out I was blown away by the scope of the universe and all the questions that I wanted to ask. Then Bioware did what everybody asked and started answering all the questions, and the truth is never as interesting as the mystery. The ME universe is still great and the characters that develop in it are great, but I'm no longer that doe eyed fanboy I was a few years ago when I thought Mass Effect was the greatest thing to ever happen to video games. Dark Souls is so great because the lore is one big mystery and everything in the game is there for a reason. If you come across some big randomly placed guy in a tower like Havel in the Undead Burg you won't have any idea if he's important or not. He doesn't seem to be, but if you dig into the lore of the game, read all the item descriptions, and explore the details you'll realize that all the most random people and places in Dark Souls have some notable place in the universe and something happened to them in the past which led them to be where they are.

If Dark Souls just came up with a Codex like Mass Effect, made tons of epic cutscenes, and just started answering every question I have I bet I would think a lot less of the game. All the clothes would be taken off, the tits would be out, and I'd be left with, "Well those are nice tits Dark Souls I guess, now show me something else I'm bored and need something new to learn or be intrigued by." The mystery is always more appealing.

Editorials and J-Bone go well together.

For years people have been debating on how to make these franchises fresh again and scary again, and every time a new game comes out from any of the horror franchises it tends to disappoint at least in the freshness and scary areas, even if it's a fun and solid game. People critically analyze each new game and try to figure out how the developers can stitch together something that engaged them as much as the first game in the series, or whichever game it is that was the best in their eyes. People want to hold onto those memories of fresh scares, strange new worlds, and recreate them. People want Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 1, and Dead Space 1 all over again but people don't want to admit the fact that it'll never happen again. The thing that people don't bring up often enough is the idea of just leaving the whole franchise behind, and trying not to franchise a horror game in the first place, which is what you brought up here.

Horror games, or any game that could eventually get franchised, can often start out as a very unique and artful endeavor. If it all goes well and people love it, the best thing you could possibly do as a creative might be to do the "scary" thing, do the more creatively taxing thing, and leave it all behind to try and make something fresh. Leave it as an artful and unique endeavor. Even if you poured years into making the universe and characters come to fruition so people could experience it, you should probably just start fresh once it's over. I don't think franchises are evil (most of the games I play and love are franchised), they can certainly be called a necessary evil, but they can still churn out good games.

It's all about choices you make as a creator.  There's nothing black and white or right and wrong about it, there's simply choices and either way you have to realize you can fail miserably. You can try and franchise a single horror universe and it could potentially make for a sustainable business allowing you and your fellow team members to put food on your tables and income to keep creating games. Or it could fail and you could all be out of jobs. Taking a different path, you could try to always keep pressing fresh content, stories, gameplay, and possibly even new universes with each new game even if it stretches you creatively and makes you uncertain of the future. It could lead to profits and a stable business, or it could fail and you could be out of jobs. There's choices to make, at least for an independent developer perspective. Developers with a strong publisher relationship may not often have such a freedom.

I listen to Irrational Games' podcasts Irrational Behavior as well as Irrational Interviews, and in their discussions Ken Levine has said that he's always kind of on that edge and not sure when or if the company and team will fail and spin out of control. He says even with all the critical acclaim they have he and his company still don't feel comfortable, they iterate a lot and get taxed creatively, and they don't want to make the same games time and again. He wants to keep the integrity of his games and stories at highest priority, but it's never been an easy road for him to go down, and hasn't always been successful for the company.

I guess when it comes to horror games I have independents on the mind, like Slender. People really liked Slender, it was terrifying, simple, yet mysterious. Right now there's another Slender game being made and it's supposedly the "full" game and Slender was suppose to be seen as more of a working concept or demo. Hypothetically, how many more Slender games do you think it would take until the beloved and somewhat lesser known PC horror darling would become a stale overdone franchise? The "full" game may already end up feeling stale for some people once they have a chance to play it, even if it turns out to be the well designed more ambitious project it's suppose to be. People may have to admit the possibility that there's nothing that new Slender games could do to recreate the feeling you got when you first had Slender Man scare the crap of you.

Most horror games shouldn't be franchised. I'm sure some have the potential to explore the same universe over and over and be great, but most don't. Action games, FPS, RPGs, strategy games, there's a lot of genres and types of games that can work well when franchised, but horror is different. Horror is so subjective and personal, it can be very artful, stressful, and challenge you emotionally and intellectually. Those small moments in some random horror game where you actually get terrified and engaged are something very cerebral and unique. It's not something you can franchise or mass produce over and over and expect to work the same way. If you're in the horror business, don't franchise, do the real scary thing go off in the dark and try to do something new every time. If you can't sustain that and you don't want to scare people anymore or you just can't scare people anymore and you're out of ideas, go to another genre and make something else. Be honest with yourself, be honest with your team, try to make the best games you can, and do it with at least a dash of integrity and you might have a chance at a good thing, or fail miserably.

I need to take more writing classes and read more, it takes too long for me to make a point or express thoughts. Ken Levine appreciates the quality of brevity in video game writing, I need to learn about that. There's so many good writers here on the site, hopefully some of your magics may rub off on me. On twitter one time I was giving Rob from Nerds Without Pants a hard time because he was explaining his hopes for the story of a game and I started basically saying that it won't be very great unless the systems and design are solid, which isn't always true. When making story driven games it isn't an either/or proposition, you should strive to have both great storytelling and great gameplay to allow you to interact with it, but in my comments to Rob I didn't say any of that. I said that any monkey can write a story, which isn't true at all. Lol so I pissed him off obviously, and I believe the reason why is because I want to learn to be a good writer. I'm an inferior writer and need to develop the skills and respect the craft more. Among all the skills in design I lean towards level building and system building but ultimately the games I want to make are epic story driven affairs, so I just need to be honest with myself and learn more about storytelling through both level design and character development instead of poking at Rob with a stick by calling writers monkeys. I'm actually envious of every writer I know.

Crysis 2 was designed so that the exploration was more linear but when you go to encounters things always opened up and you could decide what pace and tactics you wanted to use. Imagine the design like sets of bubbles connected with strings. On the AI side enemies go about on patrols and do their own thing, so it's not like CoD where everybody spawns once you walk past an invisible trigger and then they are all looking at you by default and 15 people are trying to shoot at your from behind cover the second you show up.

I don't play multiplayer often at all, but when I have TF2 was always my favorite. I haven't played in a long time but I really really loved it. It makes me wonder how much has changed in the game since I last played. A great new class based FPS is something I'd love to see. I prefer class based team games over the somewhat lone wolf chaos like Halo and CoD tends to be or tends to end up as. When I played TF2 I always felt like I was contributing in some way and the classes were all useful to me. I could defend the base during CTF by putting up turrets. When the team was having trouble getting into the enemy base I could be a spy and disguise my way in there. I could use the sniper to be a camping jerk for a little while which was still fun, and I especially thought it was fun being part of a medic/heavy team where the heavy would run around destroying everything and I could heal him constantly and we could use the temporary invincibility power or whatever that was. TF2 is a lot of fun.

@ Jesse and Mike

The original is worth getting into I'd think, as is the second game. They are both quite different though. The first game was pretty much open world and was set on a tropical island. I think the first game had the most problems when it came to AI issues, but it's probably the one that's most similar to Far Cry. The second game improved on a lot of things but some people didn't like it because it wasn't an open world game.

Crysis 2 is a game designed into levels so it won't have the open world, but the levels themselves are designed well and the encounter spaces are sandboxes that you can sneak around and observe, assess threats, explore to find ammo, and plan how you want to deal with people. It's also in New York so it's an urban feel. At the beginning of the game the cloak mode won't last as long so you have to use your stealth cammo wisely and once it's depleted it'll take a few second to recharge, but as you progress through the game and gather XP from dead aliens you will be able to upgrade all of your suits abilities including the effectiveness of cloak. Some of the upgrades are game changers and the cloak based ones really let me play the game the way I wanted.

Now Crysis 3 seems to be trying to take ideas from the designs of both the first two games. It seems to have some big sandboxes like Crysis 2 and they are trying to give you the options to observe, assess, and both sneak around assassinating and go all Halo at your direction. They are trying to meld the organic and tropical feel of the first game but still in the New York setting so it's more of an urban jungle. They said they're trying to build 7 distinct areas of the city. I can't tell you the extent of any open world elements it may have, but I don't think it'll be quite like Far Cry 3 or Crysis 1. I bet it will be level based but the levels will probably be quite large and they'll try to play to the strengths of the two main playstyles when designing the areas. The first Crysis was more open world, but a lot of people complained that a lot of the areas weren't relevant and felt like fat that needed to be trimmed. They'll try to go for somewhere inbetween.

Crysis 3 should be really fun. I've spent a lot of time over at the Crytek website going through all their tech demos of the new engine, all their blogs, and publications, I'm a big fan of the studio. Crysis 2 was the best looking game on console when it came out, and it was the most mechanically fun shooter I ever played. Crytek is a highly respected developer and a dream job for people who like making FPS games and engines, but it's still a company that people here don't know much about since it's headquartered in Germany. They are extremely busy over in Europe, they have expanded to a ton of studios and are experimenting with some different genres in some of them, they license Cryengine to schools and universities and get involved in the educational field, they're way bigger than people realize but the name brand isn't household yet. They just opened up a studio in Austin which is great so they have a foothold in America for the first time.

I personally think Crytek is the best FPS developer in the market, no matter how much I love Halo and Half Life. CryEngine 3 can hold it's weight against any other engine I know of and when it comes to cutting edge features and usability it should be a good competitor for Unreal 4 in the next gen. The most fun FPS games you'll play this gen will probably be Crysis 3 and Ubisoft's Far Cry 3 and they have the option of stealth in common and sandbox gameplay design in common. I played 73% of Crysis 2 with the cloak mode activated and I played it at my own slow pace stabbing people and using a silenced magnum a lot. My 2nd playthrough I played it like  Halo with an assault rifle, rockets, C4, letting everybody know I was there etc and it was better at Halo than Halo is. Not only is every level designed with both of those playstyles accounted for, but they both end up working well. The guns feel solid similar to CoD with low latency and fast cause and effect, but the overall pace of the game is up to you because at any time you can use stealth and high action on the fly as you see fit. There's a vertical element to the levels as well which Halo and CoD never had. You can run, super jump, climb up on ledges, run and slide under obstacles while shooting, and even random things you never get taught like blowing a car to pieces than grab the car door to use as a shield. Really impressive lighting, impressive simulations, Crysis has a new wind feature in which foliage will react to the outward force of grenades, helicopter wash, and any wind setting the designer put in. The difference being that most "wind" simulations in games are just smoke and mirrors with a scripted motion repeating itself. In Crysis 3 the designers have been able to place a wind entity in an area, control the direction, the speed and physical force, and things like the foliage will finally have the ability to react to the physical force. I've been waiting for a system like that since Halo 3 and it never happened, Bungie engineers talked about doing that but either couldn't or didn't. If you're a graphics snob and/or performance snob, which I know Julian likes the graphics, you'll want to see what Cryengine 3 is doing. There's a nice set of features built in, and the engine handles it well, and the games are pretty fun.

Crysis takes influence from all the other great games like Halo, CoD, and Half Life, except the gameplay is better than any of them on their own and adds new features like being able to modify your weapon as you play in real-time without pausing. It doesn't sound like a big deal but once you've done it in Crysis 2 and 3 you will wish you could do it in all other games. On console you hold the select button, your gun comes up, and at the press of any of the buttons you can add a silencer, grenade launcher, rail items, etc and have the gun modified instantly while you hide behind cover in the middle of a firefight, and be back in the action without any stoppage.

For all the people who enjoy shooters, if you're not at least trying out the Crysis games you're really missing out on a legit AAA shooter with a fun and diverse sandbox from a legit design team on a more than legit engine. I'm happy singing their praises, try the game out, don't be a jabroni. Even as beautiful as Halo 4 is and with all the nice features their engine has, they are basically just dabbling in the stuff the Crytek has been mastering with Cryengine. Halo 4 is like the junior varsity team and Crytek is varsity.

Here are some really cool demonstrations of the engine I enjoyed that you all might as well. Especially the first video, in it you can see the wind features, some lighting features, a little bit of cloth sim, water and how light is reacting with the water sims, and particle effects and how light interacts with the particle effects.

Crysis 3 Community Day with Sean Tracy

Soft Body Physics

Thanks Travis! I always love your comments and writing. I'll definitely send you a request on Live. The stuff I do in Forge and Minecraft really helps me think creatively and it's a lot of fun, but my next goal is to do actual modding like you mentioned. I'm going to save up some money and build a PC, and I'm going to get Steam and start exploring the community and games. A lot of the time you need to buy the specfic games you want to mod and get the kits and tools for them. I've been looking around and learning some second hand knowledge and advice for engines and I really want to check out the Unity3D engine because it's really amazing and I hear it's fairly easy to use. I also want to try some Half Life 2 modding, Skyrim building with the Creation Kit, and Crysis' CryEngine 3. I've heard from experienced level designers that it's preferable to try and focus on getting great with at least one engine like Unreal and not to spend all my time dabbling in everything but I kind of want to try different ones and maybe I'll find out which one I like to use best.

Once I start getting enough comfort and skill with a particular engine I would probably start not only building levels but experimenting with gameplay, characters, environment art, and try to do more than just architecture, flow, combat, and puzzles. There's a lot to learn so I need to dive in and start developing some skills. I want to get good at the basics and do things step by step. The craziest thing about design and trying to learn these things is that there's so much opportunity it's crazy. So many engines, techniques, mechanics, programming languages, and those are all just the tools. Once you get a hang of some tools and can make stuff it's just up to the imagination to build cool stuff. It's kind of overwhelming, but it's a bit of a good thing I guess. You can get overwhelmed with opportunity, tools, paths to take, skills to learn. The tough thing is figuring out what to do first since there's so much.