Giant Bombcast E3 2015: Giant Bomb's Day 1 Live Broadcast (Premium)

And now coming to you from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and points a
round look glow a giant bomb at E three fifteen and we're back. Hello.
I'm Jeff. E three twenty fifteen continues on somewhere around us, raging
across this very city, destroying it piece by piece every year. It's not
you know, there was no basketball finals to tear it apart, so we
figured three had to do it right. I'm joined by by Mark and Johns
from MADE four. How you guys doing very good grads here? Came to
so, yes, E three. Uh, you guys are based out of
Japan. How often are you getting over here these days? A couple of
times a year? Yeah, it's a good E three for Japan. Yeah,
seems like Yeah, Sony conference, the Big Three were for all Japan.
When you sit down and think about it, you know, you live
in Japan for a while, you work in the game industry, it's kind
of easy to get a little down on things, tis Yeah, unless you're
talking localizing mobile games or something. Well theoretically hypothetically, you could, you
know, want to slit your wrists when you are Matt, you know,
translating Match three games. But but it helps when you come to E three
and you get and you get the last guard and you get the ship move
kickstarter concept and that too. Actually yeah, which which I think talked to
any more about that outside of the trailer. Okay, Yeah, I actually
thought that looked cool and I got I was told to my face you lived
in Japan too long by somebody for saying that. But no, I thought
it looked really kind of can put the you kind of think, Okay,
I think I see what this game could kind of be with the name and
what they showed and stuff like that. Like to me, like that trailer
just seems like puzzle solving all day long of like take core out of things,
put into other things to solve situation. God, what was the game?
It was? It was not noticed by anybody but boy in his blob.
No, yes, yes, that was it. No, there was.
There was one that was made by Games Game Republic that you had a
large creature that did your bidding. Do you know on this game? I
can't remember the word of it, but it actually had a pretty cool mechanic.
And I think you switched between you and the your sidekick, and I
think you might have changed different Sidekicks. Anyway, it reminded me of this
game that was so great that none of us can remember the name of it.
Really amazing, but it was it was inspired by a boy in his
blob. But yeah, I mean, what did you guys think of What
do you guys think of that stuff that happened? I'm sure you've talked about
it to death. But those three the shin Mood, Final Fantasy remake,
Final Way seven remake, it's it's three games that I think they should make,
but three games that I am pretty much completely uninterested in. Were you
ever into Final Nay seven? No? You just know I got the snowboarding
part and said, you know what, fuck, so you're not not really
an RPG guy in general. And that was the kind of the game that
was my last hurrah for it. I was just like, okay, like
I played, you know, fin Fantasy four. I was a big Fantasy
Star guy. Okay, uh, and then just kind of fell off.
So seven was was kind of my attempt to kind of get back in a
little bit, and it just did nothing for me. So I never ended
up finishing it. Did you? When Eric died, I got a little
misty, little spoilers. Come on, man, game not out, Yes,
seriously, come on the remake, Generation Cloud dies in the remake,
anything could change. Yeah, it's it's a you know, it's a whole.
I mean, I have enjoyed some Final Fantasy in my time. Final
Fantasy seven is not even in my top five Final fantasies though, so for
that game to be the one getting all that go, yeah, in order,
not in order, but uh four, six, ten, ten,
you put yeah, ten in front of seven. Yeah, all right,
you don't need to finish. Don't worry about the other two? Ten too,
right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Thirteen why not just fucking throw
thirteen bucket carrying simulator? But seven white crack the top five? Maybe?
Anyway, what about Last Guardian? Have they shown more? I all I
know about it is what we saw. I think we're scheduled to see a
little bit more at some point. We haven't seen it yet, but I'm
not I'm not one hundred percent sure on that one. So uh yeah,
so we just saw what was at the press conference, which yeah, like
yeah, stas where I'm not a big ego guys, right, like one
dog thing, yeah exactly, Like look at it look like Echo and Shadow
the classes both put together. It's like Eco with the bird dog instead of
the girl. Right, I'm also not an Eco guy, but I was
a big really Shadow the classiest guy, which is it was legalist. I
think it was legal like one of those Look at the sales and we definitely
leaving Japan. No, yeah, I know they let me in the country.
If you look at the sales numbers, we definitely exist because Eco did
nothing and Shadow actually like blew it out of the water. Yeah. If
I had to pick, I think i'd go Week. Really, they were
both. They were Fantasy ten and for taste and then like for me,
like you know, Chen Move was always this like super ambitious thing that never
came together in an acceptable way, Right, Yeah, I want to and
I always wanted to, and I still want to really love Shin Move,
but I never really did. You know. It's like it was always just
shy of like enough open world stuff has been figured out now that I could
see, like that game fitting into a template in a in a better way,
but making that game the way that they made those other two games,
like at some point like m and ironically, like yeah, I totally agree
with that, and it also came out at a time where it wasn't okay,
you had to be a game game, right, Like a game had
to be like a certain experience. And it was kind of weird in that
sense where it's like I went to work today and shin Move and just like
when went to sleep and was I playing a game I don't even know?
And some people, yeah, including me, were kind of not scepting of
that. But and now the climate has changed a little bit for that.
But it was ahead of its time. People are finally in some ways it
was. It was full reactive eyes entertainment exactly. Finally there you go,
finally going to come into a time of fifteen years, but we're here.
Yeah, I mean it'll be very interesting, I think with Final Fantasy seven
and Shit Move in particular, to see kind of it's kind of out of
the broken Age question, which is, Okay, people wanted this game,
but do we know what it is that people exactly wanted of this It's like
it's like, do you really want the game or do you just want to
feel the way you felt when you played it when you were a kid?
Right? Do you want to update it? Do you want to keep the
stuff? That made it what it was, even when it was awkward and
weird a little bit. There's there's the infamous thing that comes out of every
show where it's like it's not for you, right, And I think in
the Final Fantasy especially like yeah, we're going to be real nostalgic about it
and excited, but it's probably more for like a new generation of people to
get you know who. I wonder, I don't know, like at some
point, like you know, then what then why we make seven instead of
just like putting that time into fifteen. I mean, you know, well
whatever they are putting time into fifteen, but you know, like why remake
the game for a new generation of people try to get instead and something.
But here's the crazy thing though that happens I think, especially you see this
with Kickstarter all the time, is like people who are nostalgic for it,
we'll throw their money at it, even if they're not the ones who are
necessarily like the audience, you know what I mean, Like look at look
at these kickstarters. I mean they're like blowing up in like the first couple
of days. Even if they end up getting disappointed, they still bought this
thing. I've done it myself. I've back kickstarters that I just I believe
in it, or I like the person doing it, and I just want
to be a part of it. But I don't even I haven't played like
ninety percent of the kickstarter games like back because either I don't have time,
or like I just wanted to help it happen. You know, I think
a lot of people do that. What do you what do you guys think
of the shen Move three Kickstarter? It's weird. It's really weird. Bottom
So it was really weird for me to have the press conference have have them
up there going like this is not our thing, that we just wanted to
give them space on our stage number one. And then today was the other
shoe of like, well, now that it's funded, by the way,
we're helping making it happen. No, so it was your thing. So
they didn't talk about that today. You know, I didn't hear that.
I so love to know what they're actually going to put into that game.
I don't know. I'm sure you saw all the snark on Twitter today about
like, yeah, like like two million dollars to make the sequel to a
sixty seven million dollar game right. I don't think anyone was looking at that
thing and going like, oh till two million will totally write like everyone knew.
Like it seems like most kickstarters that are like this style, this scope
have funding lined up and get the funding lined up. If the kickstarter is
successful, the funder the people with the money are like proved to me that
there's a demand for this, and then the kickstarter is really well and they're
like, okay, we'll give you our tons of money in the name.
And I will say if you look back and like, hopefully someday somebody will
do a documentary or a book about the making of shen Move, because there's
a lot of stories to be told there for sure. But like the amount
of money spent on things back then, I mean, I don't even know
the fidelity that they're going for. They showed, you know, a little
bit of stuff at the press conference, but I don't know what it's going
to end up looking like. But like you know, in that time,
the amount of the tools basically right, like everything back then, especially at
Sega and Dreamcasting whatever, was crazy, customized, ridiculous tools that don't work
on anything. That was the generation where you made your own engine for every
game, even famously had nine divisions, which one of them did not share
technology. And so even just like if you made a character generator and then
a randomized you know, that would save you. I don't even know how
many millions on a Shen Move, but you're right, it's you know,
if people are thinking they're getting what was in Shen Move one and two with
modern you know, graphics and everything, it's like, you know, you're
gonna have to give somewhere eventually on that stuff. But I kind of feel
like people would be okay, you know, it's it's not gonna look like
GTA six. You know, it's not gonna have that kind of stuff with
it. It's going to continue the story. I'd be fine if it looked
like the old games. I mean as a fan, I'm not again,
I'm not the biggest Shin Move fan myself, but like, as long as
they're not going to make it any worse than it used to be, Like
I'd really be just satisfied getting it period, because like they've waited for so
long, seen years or whatever. It's like, yeah, if you've been
waiting for Shin MoU three this long, you're not going to cook clean if
it's not like they's been doing a lot of dirt in that time. See
the other part that kind of tugs at me over all. This is like,
you know, if I want you Suzuki doing something, it's like Virtual
Fight or six, right, you know, like or seg or it's just
well, maybe this will be should be making Virtual Fighter six. I'm caring.
Maybe six will be a mini game in three but maybe this will be
a return to I mean we we met with him a bunch of times over
the course of the last couple of years, and he was he's been doing
stuff kind of on the side here and there, and if you really google
him, you'll find like a thing here or there that he's been working on,
but it's not really been like plugged back into the game industry, right,
and that's probably its own you know, like he was doing stuff with
relate to a school or something was for a while. Was he was he
he did that stuff and he had some mobile phone stuff, right, it
was there was like the various like kind of I don't know even what they
were, like shen Mouve things in China and here. Yeah, that's right.
They tried like shen MoU Town or I forget what it's called. But
yeah, but you know, I think this just and this has been a
long time being worked on, and I think this represents his return to Okay,
I'm getting back into the game industry, and so he was going through
a bit of a re education and so, like, I don't know,
maybe that maybe this does open the door for him to be doing some of
his other I mean, that guy has such a ridiculous history. I mean,
any one of those things, even like a space harrier or something.
You know, he has such a crazy catalog to go back and choose from
that. It'd be cool to even have him do like a little arcade games,
you know what I mean, and stuff like that, but much less
like a virtual fight. Right, it just get hard at some point because
you get the impression that Sega is not really super interested in going down the
rabbit hole on Maybe that's a good thing though, because they say, right,
yeah, if they if they be willing to just three million dollars maybe
here, yeah, maybe that's probably can't afford to. I mean that was
I think that was a pretty traumatic time and Sakea's history. I mean,
that game, in my mind almost sunk that company, right, I mean
they lost so much money and they ended up merging with Sammy and all this
other stuff happened. But you know, from you Suzuki standpoint, he's a
creative guy, and I think you know that was like his life. That
was like his life's work, Like shin MoU was supposed to be like the
big thing for him, and he never got to finish part story part of
it, right, So part of this, I don't know if he's like
planning. I actually wasn't. I didn't read the whole Kickstarter. I don't
know if he's like planning to finish it with this or if this is just
the next step. I believe it's kind of framed as the next chapter.
Okay, like it's not. It's not even like so there's finish. But
yeah, but I mean I could see why he would want to do that
over the other stuff because to him, it's like, Okay, I had
this dream and I never got to finish in and now I'm getting another chance.
Yeah, And I mean there there has been a rabid uh group of
people out there that have been trying to get this thing back for a good
life is shown by the Kickstarter doing like what a million dollars in like two
hours. Yeah, you know I was. I kind of wondered because they
had that what was it the list or whatever the hashtag that Sony had,
and uh, they had said to anyone who listened or asked, like,
yeah, these Shin Move fans are like crazy, and I kind of always
wondered. I think we all did, especially as we were talking, like
one guy like if it was like you know, I mean two three thousand
people that were just really really insane, but like you know, well,
there are at least four people that said yes to the tune of ten grands
right, three dinners with one jacket? Wo wow. Okay, if I
was rich, I might have gone for the jacket too. Sure. Yeah,
you wherever you are, not yet, some someday you're gonna get yourself
jackets Shin Move Forward starts dream by move jacket from another Kickstarter. What about
what the last year when we talked, I think you and I were both
excited about Mario Maker. Yeah, have you seen it yet? This show?
So we're gonna check it out first thing in the morning and play it.
But like I watched the World Championships, Uh, Oh, yeah,
which were awesome, right, the game looks so good, it's really good.
Yeah, so you watch the finals based that was those levels, those
custom levels that the Nintendo guys made were just out of control, so amazing
and but like well made too. I mean, you know, there have
been people out there hacking ROMs for a very long time and releasing their own
fucked up Mario stuff, but those levels that they have created, there was
a fairness to them in a way that you know, they didn't just go
out of their way to make something completely crazy. I'm sure plenty of people
will be able to make something that is total garbage, right, But yeah,
I'm really looking forward to checking that out. I can see spending tons
and tons of time on that. We messed with it a little bit today
and it was definitely like I mean, there's not a lot of we U
titles here right as somebody who owns two we use because I have to one
for Japan one for US. There's not a ton of software, but that
Mario maker, even just messing with it for five minutes, and I mean
I've I've messed with other games before where you're making even like Little Big Planet
and just the time just like goes away, but like they're really it has
that like little clever Nintendo like sheen on it, you know, like I
think it's different from last year. I don't think it was in last year
where any item that you grab, if you shake it, it modifies what
I didn't know about that till today. You grab a kupa and you shake
it and it becomes a red kupa, or you grab like a conveyor belt
and you shake it, it becomes a faster conveyor belt. It's just like
that's a and even how the undo and all the different functions work, and
the UI is basically almost like a little I mean, I wouldn't call it
a game in itself, but more of a game than most people that are
making like a level creation tool. Ever, it totally feels like the evolution
of like Mario Payne to me, like it feels you're mentioning that's a really
good even the rocket like to erase stuff like it just it has that thing
that makes you it's weird, but like you're you're kind of doing work,
but it makes it feel comfortable and like accessible and just like even little sound
effects when you move stuff around. And everything. It's got that Nintendo Touch.
That's just like I found myself looking at that and thinking, I want
to make levels that are as close to on par with the original Super Mario
Brothers, right like just I don't want to make that crazy business just like
nah, I want to make something. I want to go buy the rules
of original Super Mario Brothers and just try to make something that is like that.
I think it'll be interesting because I think when it starts off, I
mean, who knows, but I have a feeling it's going to be like,
what's the craziest stuff I can do? Hey, just like six thousand
you know, Kopa magicians on this one level or whatever. And then you
know, over time, I think people are going to get more and more
and more and more and more refined and like it'll be really interesting to see
how close to that old feeling, you know, people can get as just
like this is the best, you know, highest rated Internet level out there,
Like does it feel like and that's the hope that they get, like
the sharing and the filtering and the stuff down right where it's like it is
easy to like, you know, like a little big planet just did that
stuff so well, Like follow a creator. Just serve me up some stuff
that's highly rated, or here's some stuff. You know, trials does it
really well too. Yeah, And the lady was telling us today, like
you have to finish level. You have to be able to finish your level
before smart you if you download someone else's level and like edit it or whatever,
you can upload their stuff, so like you kind of have to.
They're kind of forcing you to be creative and follow at least some set of
rules to And also I thought it was interesting that they're going to be filtering
levels by difficulty and then also user rating. So how many people have finished
this level is a thing, if you know, I don't you know,
ten thousand people have tried and only ten people could finish it. You know,
that's kind of interesting in that achievement, you know, checking what percentage
of people have finished an achievement kind of way, so separate totally from quality,
like oh, people had a good time or not. It's like,
how hard is this level? You know, how hardcore are you? I
don't know that that could be pretty interesting. That all sounds fantastic. Yeah,
So I like so I could see I could see sinking a ton of
time in the game at least it's like Minecraft for thirty something, you know
exactly. It's such a really good Yeah, that's a really good a knowledge.
It'd be interesting to see if they just like take some of their designers
and you know, like like Mimotos and other people have them just to have
them just like, hey, I created a world here. Yeah, they
could do endless DLC even if they wanted to. You're just having like different
people from their company, like you have the Galaxy guy makes some levels or
have or just do it incognito and see how well it does for the levels
and let's see see you still got it. Stephen King's pen name, right,
did that? Yeah, Richard Bachman, that's right. What was we
noticed? There was no Mario two on the different skins for the things.
Yeah, there was no in the the version we played didn't have it.
But have they said if two is in it, I guess that breaks the
physics, like there's weird mechanical issues there. But I saw Mario two doors
in the background of one of the stages, so oh yeah, so so
maybe there's items. Yeah, I mean it's really in the Mario one style,
like they do everything, do everything, They do it in all the
different styles, So maybe they just added some additional items from from too we
said too oh we were Joe King like DLC and it got some like sideways
glances, But it would be it would be funny if last year, yeah,
Reggie was not giving us the demo. It seemed like last year that
they were maybe kind of hinting it maybe doing some of these skins as DLC
act, it would totally make sense to be adding you just seems so whatever
I mean, you know, like the history of two makes it weird,
like as you know, Japanese Nintendo making it like their view of what two
is, like, you know, do they care enough about it to include
it? And there's a weird question too when you include that, if you
if it's the same game now, which most games are between Japan and the
US, where it's like okay, that's you know two. Super Mario USA
in Japan was released later very popular, but also as kind of like side
series, right you know what I mean? Yeah, well yeah, kind
of basic ya, which just might not make sense to include in kind of
that context, But that that that's my can you think this got thinking like
if this ends up being successful that they could take some of their other franchises
that I want to keep going. I want, I would love to just
make Zell the dungeons, even like I mean, it would probably a lot
harder. I mean, obviously it's a little easier to put together a platform,
right, bas like design a like link to the passage would be something
that would let you wire up some real basic logic about like I pushed this
block to make this open and stuff like, right, but are really good,
like you know, first game for them to make to figure it out?
Right if it's Mario and then I don't maybe a metro would even make
more sense, as it's like another side scroller. And yeah, I mean
the other interesting thing would be do they do the skinning if they were to
do like a Zelda maker where it's like one and three kind of look close
games that you could easily if they're not like Mario and just be like,
oh, this is the exact equivalent of a you know, the hip.
Yeah, like when I when I envisioned like a Zelda creation tool, it
is the original Zelda because then it's like flop down a room, what colors
this room would love? Exactly? Okay, here's lock orders of the room,
you have spiked dudes in the corners or not exactly, like you know
which block has this staircase under it and right which trees can you burn?
Yeah? Did you did you guys make the rounds at the Nintendo booth or
was this private demo? I mean, I asked because just today most most
things we didn't get to play on the new the new Zelta. Ye.
Well, I asked, because I feel like every year, like there's no
house, their press conference or now it's a direct or whatever, and they
show X number of games, but then you go into their booth and there's
always like a few three to twelve like unannounced or you know, games that
they didn't mentioned, like for Ds games off in a corner or something like
did you see any stuff that they have completely not mentioned yet? I didn't
see anything like the equivalent of last year. You're talking about the little like
Miyamoto experiments that they add. I didn't see those. They did they mention
those in the in the direct they mentioned those somewhere and they're like, yeah,
we're still working on those ideas. But I didn't see anything except for
the main stage that they talked about in the digital things. Star Fox.
Yeah, we didn't really like explore the booth. We just did like one
of those booth tours that they give just to people behind the thing, So
like, you know, I would love to go back and check it out,
but I don't think that there's supposedly I mean, people will talk about
that stuff online and I haven't heard of anything major that that was not announced.
All right, well, I know you guys got got around. Thanks
so much for coming by. Absolutely always a pleasure to see you guys.
Man. Now, I just like it is our first appointment tomorrow is to
go see I really want to hear them. I really want to triple fucking
I didn't even get to talk about Star Fox. I want to know how
you feel about Star five. Yeah, it sounds like I've seen some disappointment
around that and to some disappointment around Metroid, which I guess that's it is
one game. Like there's some confusion earlier if people going like is are those
two separate Metroid games? Like it's apparently one thing, but well they had
retro get on Twitter and tease, you know, like people started building expectations
before E three sure about a new Metroid and then when that turned out to
be what the new Metroid was, that's the danger, right, I guess.
Yeah, I definitely really want to hear what you think of Mario Maker
and Star five. Yeah, yeah, for sure, I definitely want to
check that stuff out. So Mark John from eighty four, check out the
eight four play podcast and visit an eight eight hyphen four dot JP. That's
right, Thank you too much. We'll be back after this break, all
right, coming down back right, coming out three two and we're back.
Welcome back to giant bomb dot COM's coverage of E three twenty fifteen. I
mean, coverage is like a weird word, right, I mean we're just
kind of hanging out here. We got another set of guests here joining us
to talk about virtual reality, virtual reality, virtual reality. Now I understand
there's a pterodactyl that comes at you and you have to shoot it, but
you're wearing the now for decades. Yeah no, that's I just I remember
I remember old VR. It's very scary. So I wasn't born yet.
Yeah, No, Falmer Miraculous is here. Uh. Patrick, you're working
on a game called The Assembly. Uh and and John Drake, Now you
you are like handling a lot of the Project Morpheus. Like, describe your
affiliation with the project of Project Morpheus. Yeah, that's a great question.
It's kind of fine quality questioning I expect from Giant Plumbs. E three coverage
twenty fifteen. Yeah, oh no, sorry. The I work on a
therapy relations team, So I'm helping fine cool VR games and bring them to
uh PlayStation platforms and help bring developers sort of over a console too cool.
And that's been really fun. We have a lot of games we're showing off
and I'm having a good time taking the headset on and off over and over
again all day long. Super fun. Yeah. So, uh, this
seems like it we're kind of in that kind of rubber meets the road time
frame for for a lot of this stuff, because in some ways this is
gonna well this this is gonna be the final E three before some of the
stuff really starts coming to market, right, h Palmer, how's it been?
You had your your big press conference, uh in San Francisco and and
now you're here on the floor. What's the what's the reception been? Like?
How how's it been? It's too early to say. We've only been
meeting with press for you know, single digit hours now. And I haven't
read any of the coverage, but I think it's going well from from from
from what I can tell, people are really excited about virtual reality. And
like you said, it is the finally three before a lot of these headsets
are coming out, whether it's Morpheus or the Oculus Drift, and so people
are this is a really good chance for people to show off their games and
get people excited about what's coming soon. Yeah, and it seems like like
now's the time for software, right, I mean, you know, we
we've had a lot of time to kind of think about, you know,
just the concepts behind VR, improve it and and trying on headsets and and
develop get ones and developing Get twos and Crystal coves and listen, you know,
people have been proving it out. I can think kind of the whole
way like get Away the rubber met the road a year ago, because it's
too late almost now to start working on a VR title of any large scale
for launch. So really dev's have been working on these things for the past
year or two years, and now is when they're finally unveiling them because it
makes sense to unveil them because they have something that they can actually say,
you're going to go play it on this But if you show them off a
year ago, they'd be like, here's a game I'm making. I don't
know when you'll be able to get it or if you'll be able to get
forever, please thank you. But I guess what I mean. We've come
a long way from the Rift Coaster, and you know, some of the
early kind of DK one demos and stuff that I think that like, how's
it been, how's development? Yeah, we've we've seen a ton of people
who are really pleased to see final games now. You know, I think
people have seen tech demos for a long time, and you know, and
they're great and they demonstrate how fantastic the Harbor is. But finally they're same
games. These games I can actually play and I actually see myself sitting down
for four or five hours and playing this when I buy a VR headset.
And that's that's that's been the reaction we've had so far. Yeah, And
how's it been over at PlayStation? What are you doing during the day?
Are you out there kind of watching people put stuff on or are you just
like running around drink and tied cokes? Punching people like, yeah, yeah,
both, I mean both. The thing. The thing is when someone's
in a VR headset you can punch them and they can't They can't see you
coming. They think it's just part of those real No. So we uh,
we have this crazy uh parallelogram stationed thing in our booth's giant leaning tower
of VR games, and its like, is it a parallel gram because that's
the shape of the PS four Also like the inverse of the PS four.
Okay, it's colossally under the weight of the immense library of VR games.
Yes, the yeah, so we have a we have twenty stations there that
consumers are consumers in media are being ground through the pr M upstairs and retail
them and all that stuff. So we have like I think, fourteen games
in the booth and to your point, like I think a lot of them
are demo E three demo levels of full games. We can see the mechanic,
you can see the play loop, you can see how long you think
the session might be, and there's still a handful of I don't want to
say tech demos, but a handful of people like this is a concept that
we are working on and we don't have a full sell sheet to give you
right now, because there isn't a hard date for anything yet. There isn't
you know, a hard price for anything yet. So I think there's still
some dancing with that line of is it a formal announcement or is it something
that's you know, on its way to be announ set a later date.
Sometimes they fall, but it is it is the right time to start getting
people excited. Like I think today this is like Morpheus's biggest show presence of
any kind. And you guys, having that many booth means that you can
show it to tons of people, and we're doing the same thing exactly.
These booths don't get bigger through vanity, they get bigger through practicality capacity.
Yeah, you have to show people VR for them to understand it. It's
the only way they'll understand and so get people excited. Now you have to
start investing and getting it out to people. Well, people are excited,
yeah, And it seems like that's like now kind of becoming. One of
the harder problems remaining is how to get people in a headset to understand it
for themselves. It's interesting, like as someone who you know, like my
job. Part of my job is ostensibly to kind of communicate these experiences to
people in a way that they can understand. Like sometimes it's just hard to
find the words when talking about VR because it is the ultimate example of like,
now you just kind of try this thing. Well, maybe you're talking
about it. Yeah, you can talk about presence, you're talking about appropriate
exception, you're talking about all like the crazy terms. But it's really like
the whole idea of immersion, which again, like all these buzzy buzzwords are
kind yeah, I mean, immersion is not new to VR. It was
burned out before. Yeah, And so we're at that point now where really
I think that part of it is compelling enough content where you can see the
fun of it. I mean obviously, like we're folks on games watching the
conference, you guys the last week. I think there's a lot of games
coming and to me, like a game is something that's fun that you want
to be drawn back to. And I think that what we've seen up to
date is a few games and a lot of sort of understandable experiences. And
you talk about the toy box. If you guys are showing where it's it's
sort of in that nascent space of like with the touch, which seems amazing.
Why laking regulations. I saw a tweet earlier that someone just said I'm
playing tetherball with Palmer Lucky and it didn't explain like without touchdown was just like
E three has gone off the fucking radis we are just in the parking lot
hanging out. But but you know you're seeing immediate fun and immediate return on
someone being in there, even for like a three minute demo or five minute
demo wars before it's well, And what I really wants for the first time,
Yes, and what I want now is people to be able to go
for like I want people for an hour to play three or four different things
and not be bouncing and checking one thing and bouncing out. That's the hardest
about them. I'm going to show it right. It is going to help
when a lot of these we're in this weird situation where we want to get
people excited before launch. But this problem will largely go away once there are
are consumer of o cor reality devices on the market, like more powerful than
any of us. Like you're supposed to be reputable. I'm not reflessable a
lot, but it's like none of us are really reputable because we have skin
in the game. You know, we can say all we want that nobody
really should believe us on our own merit, and but who people do trust
are their friends. And when people are able to take people you've seen this
probably with d K one and d K two even people take it and they
show it to other people and that's how they get it. So this problem
is, like, I think, kind of go away as more and more
people actually have have that word of mouth, or not even just word of
mouth, but like, hey, come over, you need to see it
comes right now, we're still getting people coming in and saying, you know,
a steaming VR is going to be a big a hundred foot screen in
front of them, and having no idea, and then they put the headset
on and go, oh my god, it's around me and it's three D
and then they get that veal of virginity smile that you say, you know,
they stay it for the first time and it's great, Yeah, that's
lovely, and we're still getting that. I had a moment looking at the
new Oculus logo for a second there that I thought like, is it supposed
to be the jaw drop. Is it just supposed to look like this,
like open mouth, like the look that everyone has when they put it on,
And I realized, Oh, it's probably actually just like just reach into
your depths of your mind and interpret your own meaning out of wow. Wow.
I mean it looks it looks kind of like an eye or an oath
that you've squashed, or like a oculuscrift if it depends. Really don't how
you want to look at it. It's pretty heavy. And so, you
know, are are we seeing like types of our developers? Do you feel
like they're gravitating towards certain types of experiences? I know? Like that?
To me, it seemed like the thing that it made sense to avoid was
just like, hey, let's take every game it's got a first person camera
and just slap headset sport on it. Are people kind of doing that anyway?
Or or is it just okay people people? Are people are doing it
When they get there get their device at the first time, they may be
like, oh, this is I thought I'd learned this lesson, but this
is not worth get it too. Like the devs are the ones that are
investing in VR the most arguably and it's one thing for a person to try
it and say, oh, I don't mind that I'm husking, or you
know that I did behalf my friends. Yeah, a dev has to say,
wow, like what I thought was going to be the obvious fit is
no longer the obvious fit. And there's a lot of moments like that in
VR where you're figuring out what works. And well, the convenient part is
that you uh, you to make a game in any VR headset, you
can spend a lot of time in that headset. So hopefully devs are self
selecting towards mechanics that don't make people blur or else they're all going to die
of, you know, like vitamin deficiencies. Yeah, it's a ton of
variety out there as well. I mean you're saying, you know, third
person cameras, you know from multiple games. You're saying, you know Diorama
type games. You're saying, first Petty, there's what's nice is it's so
many different games. Yea, yeah, it's it's lovely. There's a real,
real variety stuff and there is. I mean, I think that what
we saw early one of the easier ways to go is just like seated experiences
cockpit games where you are like, you know, it's clear you have a
control scheme in your hands. It's very straightforward. And I think that for
a while that was we got a lot of those. I maintained part of
my gig is maintaining just like a giant spreadsheef of anything I've heard about that
could possibly be in VR and sort of what it looks like and what control
schemes that uses and things like that. And for a while it was like
all cockpit all the time, or all like you know, seed stationary,
you know, fixed to a chair experiences. But the as we've gone on,
like you see you know, staying experiences in moving basic experience. You
look at you know, the London heist and the kind of hiding mind of
desk and shooting, or you look at Lucky's Tale sort of a third person
camera above and beyond like a third three D platform, and you you've seen
seen god cool games, but you're seeing god mode games where like people people
are like, how do you like, how do you explain that to people?
And it's like imagine like turbo charged board games, like board games with
all the figurings are robots, Like what would you pay to play Warhammer if
you could buy a set of figurines that were mechanized with weapons, and you
could play against friends who weren't in the room with you. Nine. Yeah,
so you talk about like Dev's getting sick and stuff like that. I
mean, you know, Oculus will will have a storefront of its own.
Of course, you know, Sony seems to you know, I have a
lot of us did that, Yeah, did did a lot of that stuff
A lot of fun. Let's talk about certifying VR games for sale. What
what are the platform requirements? I mean imagine you both got is Oculus going
to be checking in on that stuff and saying like, hey, this is
too fast, like this is this is off the chain, this is off
the meter on our like get people sick, thing you can't be in our
store, or it's some level that starts to happen. But I mean not
in terms of reasonable game Blay decisions likes. Something's clearly broken than sure.
But our goal isn't to block things that are uncomfortable. There's a lot of
people who can play uncomfortable things. There are people who have entirely broken factively
our senses and like that. They'll play anything, and so what we want
to do is give devs the tools they need to warn away consumers who aren't
going to enjoy the game because they don't want to sell to people who are
going to become angry or refund their game. And so, like Inoculus Share,
which is like our current kind of dev content sharing platform, we have
a quality rating that people can vote on, the community can vote on,
but also a comfort level that the community can vote on. And so by
doing that, people there's games on share that are really highly rated for quality
and very poorly rated for comfort, not even poorly, just differently. And
there are people who say, like this is great, I could play it
all day, but nobody else I show it too, can and it's good
to warn people about that. Yeah, it's kind of the philosophy. It
seems like it's Yeah, it seems like one of the potential problems. It's
just kind of educating people that, like, some of these experiences might not
be okay for you or not the first experience when I introduced somebody to be
out right, there's also like there is some ramp up adaptation and acclamation over
time, where like, you know, the first time I played Valkyrie,
I was like this is amazing and beautiful and so cool, and like this
is like the highest, you know, highest res thing I've played. And
then I started doing barrels and stuff and I was like, oh no,
I don't know how to do this in my brain. And now I can
play it and you know, staying there for ten minutes at a time and
feel pretty fine. Like see, Valgrade is interested because it's an example of
the of a type of experience that you can't really fully solve motion sickness.
For even if you were to perfectly simulate reality like going and doing barrel roles,
having your entire horizon line shifting with no real good reference, it will
make people sick in real life as well. Now, there are some things
that you can do in the virtual world that shouldn't make you sick that in
real life. But that's like, that's an example of something where we can't
solve that problem. It's just something where games have been made without this limitation
of directly stimulating the human perception system, and your intere still thinks the ground
is the ground, and we'll always guess right, thinks about honesty as well.
I mean, you know, one thing we've noticed is you know,
fear, for example, emotions are amplified and va you know, much more.
And you notice that with figs it's the lowest hanging fruit. You get
scared really easily. And you know, you need to tell people that if
people are easily scared, they probably don't want to play that game. Let
them know, have a warning on there, and that'd be fine, you
know, And that's part of the funnel. We'll get that too, like
jump scares especially. Yeah, oh sure, sure. So so developing uh
the assembly, like, like, how tell me a little bit about the
game. Yeah, So it's a it's a kind of mysterious adventure game,
lots of narrative. We found when we started playing with VR people, what
people wanted to do was explore and just look around and you know, and
look up at the cobwebs and things like that. So we decided adventure adventure
games made a lot of sense of vir I think it's a genre that works
really well. So it's a kind of rich adventure game. Two different characters.
One's a woman who's quite short and a guy who's very tall, and
it's quite interesting switching between them because you notice it always going up and down
and you see things from a different point of view, which is quite fun,
and it's like you're playing with perception. It is the game very much
like Two Sides, absolutely crazy. Yeah, it's cool, and there's a
lots of moral choices, so you know, we're trying to play with you
know, a simple example. You know, if you could kill somebody to
save a thousand people, would you do it? You go, well,
of course I would if I had to do it. But then if you
if that choice was presented to you, you know, it's it's slightly different.
And then VR that kind of decision making is quite tough well, and
it's a light different than normal games like that. Heavy decision making is one
thing when it's happening on a screen and you don't think you can say you
feel emotional connection to characters, but that's siding through traditional means, just like
a book or a movie. You're not triggering a lot of the empathy that
we have for people built into our bodies on a much more basic level.
In NVO, you can tap into that. Yeah, like feeling like you're
in a room with somebody, whether it's an NPC or you know, another
person controlling an avatar. It's just so different than seeing that on a screen
because there's so much on levels that we there's so much on levels that you
just can't activate unless your brain really believes that it's another person there right.
Well, And like I thinking about scared, I mean, jump scares and
fear are are palpable and real and can be very like kind of frightening obviously,
but I actually don't. I can keep myself disassociated just enough from like
a monster jumping behind a curtain and trying to freak me out right, like
look, it's not really there, It's not gonna get me. Yeah.
But the thing I noticed, so I was started putting the London London Heights,
which was one of the demos we did for a GC by our London
studio that as and part of world Wide Studios group, and I felt there
was a there's a scene where guys interrogating you and I for the first time
in a video game, felt like on physically uncomfortable, Like he was like
in my face and You're just like he has a blowtorch oop, and I'm
like, I know he's not gonna blowtorch me, but like I am but
like sweating and like like squirming and like that's not a thing I get in
video games versus like I jump and get scared when I play, you know,
a horror game. I'm just on a regular flat TV. But but
it's not like intimidating me. Yeah, it's a it's a startling thing,
right, it's not necessarily like it's your it's your feet, it's you,
it's your fight or flight response. Not you're like brain processing and being like
oh god, why no, don't yeah, don't know this stuff like you
know, and then just to the the motion oriented stuff like the evacyries of
the world and stuff like that. Like I remember, so there's back when
video game companies used to have money, they used to have extravagant events and
it was all ridiculous and stuff. So Namco ad a thing where they took
people to Las Vegas and had them fly planes. And it was a situation
where it's like you're playing laser tag in a plane and they have smoke pots
on the other planes. So if you if you're hitting the target right,
the smoke pot fires and you go, I hit them and the abstect.
That sounds like a really fun idea. It was rad Yeah, but the
thing that they don't tell you. Was like, hey, you've spent your
life playing flight simulators on a screen and you just do loops and barrel rolls
forever and who cares. And then you get to where you're actually grabbing a
stick and the minute you pull it back, you're like, oh, my
body's not meant for this. So I was one of the lucky few that
didn't actually vomit on that specific job. I felt pretty good about it.
Yeah, but it was like there was a moment there where I'm like,
I feel real dizzy. This isn't like like face turning white. There's a
video camera pointed in my face the whole time. It's like you just see
like that kind of white out thing, And I start to wonder, like,
you know, can VR start to trigger those sorts of I mean,
obviously, you know gravity, the pull of gravity is very very real thing.
But because you get like you've tried an experience like that, a lot
of people don't have reference for experiences that make them sick, even in you
know, always in real life, right beyond something like sea sickness, which
most people don't understand the mechanisms of, right, but like, there are
a lot of things you can do in real life to make you sick.
There's all is gonna be things and they're gonna make you sick in VR,
and it's devs have to be really aware of those things that kind of develop
around them. And it's very different from a monitor where you can get away
with basically anything. And I think we're seeing an E three versus what you've
seen it. You know, like when someone is showing a random demo on
a DK one that's not like in ocus booth but just sort of like in
a hotel room, right like, hey, I'm check out my game is.
People are being more thoughtful and I think that I have not seen anyone.
I've not was not their all day, but I've not seen anyone coming
out of Occuss booth or the Morphous booth looking like pay on Easy. If
they were, they're like, oh I tried another one and it was cool.
I think I just gotta you know, maybe uh flight games are from
me, or maybe like you know, this like a top ten of a
venture would better start with. And I think you actim over time. So
I think that that is a a lingering sort of vestigial concern that is hopefully
devs are working out for themselves as the platform goes on, and I just
got to kind of keep an eye on it and try to help guide people
towards the right simes. I think it's rule number One of the odd developments
is you know, do do stuff that make that you would be comfortable doing
in reality because you're feeling like you're there. So I looked at just Cause
three and you grappling hook a jet and you know, suddenly get flung into
the air and you know, triple back somebody. So it's amazing, it's
great, everything's amplified's for eleven. Yeah, but you know what, in
real life, if you tried to grappling hook a plane, that would be
pretty messy. It's super bad for everybody. Maybe how messy for you?
That's just Thursday, I don't know. But you know, in real life,
whatever you're comfortable with, you'll be comfortable VR. If you're uncomfortable in
real life, you would be uncomfortable VIR. And I think that's the code.
That's what we're trying to figure out. Here's Edge is another example.
Yeah, that would be such a good game in VR. Yeah, it's
yeah, it was tailored and built from the ground up something like that could
where but you have to design from the the input. I mean, we
talked about this a long time and then only we're talking about connect or whatever,
right, like the games work best or games to take the input method
into consideration, to design from that to the consumer and not think like this
game's a cool world, like let's just shove this onto whatever platform and it'll
work itself out, whether it's mobile or work. Yeah exactly, Yeah,
yeah, So how far away? I mean I guess like some extent it's
already happening, but like I guess, like some extent coming into these it's
all happening coming into these press conferences. You know, we had to have
that conver station. It's like, well wait a minute. I mean they're
making a new Mirror's Edge, like VR is is very now, Like are
they gonna is ea gonna come out and say, hey, we're developing for
this stuff. Is you know or is the Noman's Skide demo gonna end with
you know something? And by the way, let's do this, you know,
like I'm gonna take a page from Phil Spencer. Number lower VR heads
up from the ceiling. Okay, you know, just a straight up deal
with this style just directly onto his head. Uh yeah, I guess,
like like how far off? Like what what's the interest level from the hugest
of huge publishers. You know, it seems like they're probably all prototyping something,
But how far until we see them kind of really get into this is
it gonna take it coming out and being proven as a retail consumer success.
We don't make any announcements for developers, so yeah, that's the type of
thing you'd have to ask them. Yeah, I mean, I think in
general they are waiting. They have been waiting for this quarter right there,
waiting for people to come out and say like we are committing to a date
range and we're committing to a form factor and specs and you kind of can
tell your teams now that they can develop in ex direction and it's real and
it's going to become a product and not like this is skunk Works really cool
tech. You should put a team on that, right, Those bigger publishers
are you know, have a lot to do, Like you know, even
even our press conference, we have to cover a lot of ground and we
can't spend an infinite time on everything that we know exactly. It was a
fast segment. Yeah, so I think that with the I think with the
publishers, it's a thing now of like okay, now you can put a
team on this in good faith and know that this will this will come out.
And we've everyone I've talked to has been enthusiastic. Right, it doesn't
mean they're signing a development team up today and kind of have a product shipping
and launch, but they've been like, this seems cool, this seems real,
and like it's not going away. It doesn't seems like a fat it
seems like the industry is there. The development teams in the in the independent
side are are already committing in making things, and the publisher side, I
think they've seen the consumers are excited. So I'm optimistic that we'll see some
big teams. And we have a lot of double a medium sized teams.
We have, you know, Single Guy Studios. We have a game called
Headmaster of It's watch the trailers. It's it's weird to watch a trail over
of VR game, but but it's you know, it's like Portal Cross FIFA.
It's a company called Frame Interactive on in New York and it's you know,
you head butt soccer balls into a goal, and as soon as you
put it on immlily it's like, this is fun, this is silly,
and it's like I understand it, and then it like then it's like head
butt soccer balls into a pinata and se if you can break it, You're
like, okay, well now I'm confused. This is escalating in a weird
way. And then you as you're trapping a person camp and have to headbut
soccer balls to get out, So you know, okay, alright, a
weird game that sounds like a fun twist, small team, big teams,
crazy ideas. That's not the trailer. It's well, you know, it's
allutic to the trailer. Man. You can see it in the background.
Yeah, so obviously there's plenty of else going on. Yeah, man,
three busy show. Did you bring Awiu with you? Were you ready for
the Smash Brothers DLC drop, you know, or the catch off Guard And
you're like, oh man, I gotta get so I'm really excited full of
two. I'm really excited about all the DLC characters. I am super excited
that they're bringing in street Fighter move combos into Super Smash Brothers. That is
that is such a good idea. I'm an unapologetic Nintendo fan boy, but
I'm gonna apologize for how fanboys. But when I heard that, I thought,
oh my god, it's so smart. How could anyone be so smart
to come up with that idea. I never even would have thought of that
idea, Nobody would have nobody's ever thought of it. I heard, Yeah,
No, it's it's like a I mean, because you can do the
moves two different ways, right, It's like you can you can do the
Smash brother style, but if you do them the right way, it's mixing.
You can get that bonus. And that's for me. It's someone like,
you know, like I like that style of fighting game. So the
proper one on one fighting game ass fighting game. Uh and and Smash Brothers
is always a little kind of esoteric for my taste. Which side of the
EVO debate were you on? Is Smash Bros? A fighting game? Does
it deserve to be? And I think I think they need a separate term
for it that I think that there's definitely like a you know, people playing
it incredibly skillfully. I don't want to take anything about fighting games. People
care about tournament. Yeah, just Smash fair fair enough. Yeah, I
guess at some point that's that's like Smash Brothers and like Street Fight Er five.
I guess like uh and uh that Jackie Chan game fistifier that that game
get downloaded. I mean, I mean, go buy an arcade board for
Jackie chanpis daveling is like weeping somewhere in town right now? Yeah, always
always sure, you know, yeah, good good? Uh? Yeah,
So I think that's a it's a it's a super smart way to introduce that
character into that world while it's still being faithful to that character. H And
that to me, that makes me want to try it. And I haven't
played that game in in months. So it's also cool that like it's coming
really far post launch. It's clear they're still working on the game. They're
making it better. It's not like this is DLC that you know, should
have shipped with the game. I felt the same way about the Mario Kart
DLC, right, I mean that stuff came played that way later. It's
insane. I couldn't I also couldn't believe what I said. How could anyone
be so smart? I mean, Nintendo, Nintendo could think let's make it
faster, like I just I just wanted to at this point, Like,
if we're gonna make fast racing games at a Nintendo, uh, then I
wanted f zero or a wipeout game. Come on, people, it's the
lower it from ceiling. Cha. Yeah. Wave race, yeah, absolutely.
Like you think about like the last time they made a wave race game,
the wave physics and all that sort of stuff. You know, we're
so much further past that. There's so much they could be doing with all
of that stuff. Uh, let's not forget the Kickstarter watching during the Sony
press. It's crazy. Sometimes you gotta break the Internet. Sometimes you gotta
break everything. It's hard. It's it's closed two and a half, it's
closed on three. Yeah, it's it was like above two seven last time
I checked. But yeah, So so, despite Adam saying that this is
very much not our project, it sounds like that it's it is that Sony
is definitely involved in a way. What makes you say that? I think
Geo's confirmed it there. I didn't see the stream, so I'm okay assuming
that the talking points that I saw an email or what he actually you know
said, but oh who knows? Uh Yeah, we're you know, we
obviously wanted to make that project happen. We've know it was on the list
that got built. It was at some point of at some point the company
is obligated to build the list. Hashtag built the list like we did it.
Building the list was the you know anyway, No, no, we
are still building the list now, Fighter six. Oh yeah, I saw
your immediate response. By the way, thanks, Can I have a moment
to bask in the old we did this thing? And You're like, virtual
six, where is it? And I'm like, come on, give me
a break, a minute to enjoy the glory of shem with three. Yeah.
Also, that theme song is real good, but having heard it in
rehearsal a couple thousand times, it's it gets in your head and then you
have to walk around lay not saying it out loud because people will know,
right that was fun? So yeah, SHEMI three funny sy what hard.
We've known Suzuki San for a long time and he has wanted to make the
game, and all the fans never stopped talking about wanting that game. As
someone who has come out and said like I don't think they should make that
game, I know that there are people who are very interested in seeing that
game. Yes, they will never stop telling you that you're on. So
we wanted to give him a stage to sort of spread his message on and
hope that it could happen. And we knew it had to be supported by
the fans. It's always a thing where it's like, are there ten thousand
people who want this or a million people who want this? And just they
all have a hundred ault accounts and hey, no, I think ten thousand
dollars. Spots went pretty fast quick, like four people stepped up. But
it's their Kickstarter, it's their game. We are sort of helping bring that
message to more people, but it's you know, we want him to make
the game he wants to make right, And then that seems like that's the
the MMO of third party production in the grand scheme of things, is just
hooking up developers with stuff and making that those experienced people at Sony who can
advise to like here, as a director, you could go, here's some
efficiencies you could gain, and we here's some games that fans won't stop telling
us that they want, so maybe you should give them those games. And
if we can help along the way, that's awesome. Cool And I'm i
as someone who launched a kickstarter a little over a year ago and raised you
know, a fair amount of money for Amplitude, which is looking great.
I put it to down the floor. Cool, you know shen move three
being like the basically the fastest funded kickstarter in recent memory, if not of
all time in games? Is uh, ours was faster? Yeah? Okay,
not faster to a million, no, but faster to our goal?
Well what was your goal? Two hundred fifty thousand dollars? Okay, well,
then send up basis. I don't know, like we went for two
minutes. We shot, but they were shot calling it. I was just
I'm only responding to the meeting the goal. I didn't say mean you said
meeting the goal? You she changing them rule. I don't even know what
to do play court play that's square lines. Anyways, that's a cool thing.
That and hearing people cheer and freak out was really exciting. And hearing
people so nobody expected great and well people people said yeah that and then they
all chuckle, like that's ever gonna happen. I did it, I think
before. So that was the weird thing. Is like before we start before
the press conference started, like we kind of walked went down the table and
said so last Guardian and everyone went yeah uh and and the final Fantasy stuff
had kind of gotten around at that point, and then I think I said,
like sheen, move right U and everyone else was kind of like crazy.
I'm like, it's a long shot, but if it happens, here's
how it'll happen. And I did not get the kickstarter part right, but
I heard a better. Microsoft was going to announce a Dreamcast backwards compatibility for
Xbox One, going all the way for it, Like why not, like,
you know, just if they want to get in the hearts and minds
business, like Emilian, Dreamcast games is a pretty fast way to the top
of that, right, Remember when you remember when you asked me about Call
of Duty on the Big Live Live Show and I just like immediately through through
to somebody else and ran away from you. So thanks for doing that.
That was real fun to try to not answer that question problem, glad I
could help with this fun either call of Diddy, Yeah I do, yeah,
no, yeah, I do big games for big for you know,
big mass consumer stuff and then also games fans want. It was a fun
show to watch people react. And so this was your first time. I
mean obviously you've been part of these press conferences before, so I mean you
you had to work with the Beatles to bring them to a stage before,
but this was the first time that you were kind of yeah, yes,
exactly, Yes, he had to spread his Easter cheer. Yeah that's a
fun video, but you were, you know, kind of It seems like
more heavily involved with this PlayStation rest conference. What was that Like? I
got to see most of it before it happened. That was fun because being
like a third party at those shows, it's like you're locked in the women's
locker room at the gaming center of for Xbox for example, like for you
know, two days, and you could see your segment and nothing else.
It was really fun. There's obviously a million more people than me doing stuff,
and they're all immeasurably smarter and more talented. And I've been doing it
for a long time, so I was happy to be on the periphery watching
really smart people make really cool stuff happen, and sitting there and having a
couple of people be like you think the shame wood thing is gonna go over,
and I'm like, I think it's gonna go over okay, and then
have that redemptive moment of like not only to go over okay, like people
were like rending their shirts and crying on the floor and rolling around. You're
like, yeah, that's that guy. Seems it seems like it's going okay.
That guy tweets at me every day, so you know, we're happy.
Fans got what they wanted, and I can't wait for the game,
which is, you know, al ways off. But yeah, I'm pretty
red. Yeah that's well, we'll see how that thing comes together. How'd
that answer your question? Sure? Yeah, I'm just that was me asking
how are you doing? Is it I blacked out like halfway through what you're
talking? No good? And the are you showing the game at the show?
Yeah? Yeah, we're we're in the concour still shine enough to a
weak say cool, Sorry, are you just locked down in the booth or
you get a chance to get around and see anything? Pretty lockdown? I
saw the conferences. I was blowing away by her Horizon zero it's on.
Yeah, yeah that looks really good and some really good stuff out there,
but no with just in NonStop press press damas going to see these hardly get
see anything. I mean, it's it's on some level, it's a it's
a good problem to have, you know, it's to be showing off the
games plenty of people and you know, getting it out there, so spread
the word. Well, guys, thank you so much for coming by.
I wish everyone the the best of luck as we get closer and closer to
getting the stuff out there. And and I'm super excited to finally see like
consumer VR products being sold, Like it's people not regretting buying exactly. No,
Yeah, it's been a it's gonna be the big change, right,
it's been a it's been a long time coming before, but people have sold
before. But yeah, you know, I was so I mean I was
at CS and ninety four when Sega showed Sega VR and that thing was garbage.
Did you hear one of what of Like if you did, you read
the magazine articles back back about what it was canceled. One of the quotes
from them, They're like it was canceled because it was too realistic. It
was so realistic it might you know, I played the missile the missile game
that they were demoing there and you know, you know he was a while
ago. Yeah, he died. He's dead now, it's been dead for
it was trash. That thing was was hot garbage. It was a complete
mess. Uh. And you know it was one of those things you put
it on and go, this is never going to work. So like,
well, you were wrong, weren't you? You know, I should have
taken a long view on that one because it seems like it's going to work.
It seems like it works now. Uh. And and we'll see when
that stuff gets out there twenty sixteen, you guys, Yeah, it's not
a lot of time left. Stop talking, all right, all right,
get out there and get back to work. There's so many people that are
like, aren't you relieved finally? Like announced when you when you're shipping,
You're like, what I joke, because like that's when you're showing something.
You're like, this is the final product, and we're promising we're gonna ship
it within this age range you're giving yourself. Why would that be the relief.
I'm sure you guys have gotten the same stock with them. We gotta
finish making them and get content for him and stuff. It'll be relief.
It'll be a relief when they people actually have these things. We relieve when
I'm dead, It'll be great, great, Until then, I'll be anxious
the whole time. And and what are you looking to have? Are you
going to be in the launch windows one and all the headsets? That's the
plan. Yeah, all right, awesome, Well, thank you all for
coming by, Thanks for having us. Yeah, we are gonna take a
break and we'll be back with more from Giant Bomb here in Los Angeles.
Right, yes, hard to say. Cool. All right, we're back
and it's time to get down to one of the biggest E three mysteries of
all What is fire Watch? Jake and Shawn are here from Campus Santo and
Roland lestraland game director of Just Caused Three rolland what is fire Watch? This
is really exciting, a really good time for us to announce our partnership.
Is our just cause three Firewatch partners, That's what fire watches? It was
just caused Threll along clearly now I'm on board. When it was like throw
a boom box into water and I don't know, and then I'm just like,
okay, all right, but if I can get in stunt position on
the boom box and set the whole thing on fire Yeah, and AC one
thirty flies over and you hit it with a harpoon gun okay, and that
you go from there. Yeah, that's why we fade out at the end
of that click. So I I watched the fire Watch trailer at the Sony
Press comments you're you're first on place. Do you think of it? I
thought it looked really nice Artistically, it looked really nice, real solid.
Didn't sound good and uh no, great everything that's like people talking, Like
who talks these video games? Not talking? I still I have some idea
about what fire watches, but I want to hear do you actually want to
hear? What? We have time? Right? Like we are here for
forty five minutes, so I guess is fire Walk. So he has a
really great framing on that show. I can't Oh my god, that's why
that's why you're getting what you're feeling. Oh yeah, I know, like
that's why he's doing that. Was so you play one of those guys that's
in a tower forest ranger type guy. Yeah, So we just go into
what it's like from the I really want to tell the story, but I
don't know if it's a good story or not. Oh, I don't know
about that. Which part started the beginning. I don't know the or the
middle. Okay, so in an FCP client because an it's involved exactly transmit
for ye can handle your Amazon S three, ok rack space, I have
multiple buckets, I multiples three. It's really it's good for that. Also,
it's a sort of psychological filler mystery as a first person game about a
guy in a lookout tower. But you can totally pair it to your Amazon
has three account. It's terrific, okay, web development integrated environment as well,
just published straight up to your ft S FTP server. Greatly amazing.
I will say it's a first person adventure game. It's the best way to
describe it. Yeah, So like the design, I aim to tell the
story because I think it's the best way to describe this game. So this
is gonna be long and a little off topic, but I think it'll get
you to the essence or will make you hate the game more. Yeah,
or like you'll just watch viewer count, just start to like Havel itself and
then like welso a slow fade out to the black and white other room.
That's just three, just cost three. I saw just cost three at a
pre show event, got to play a little bit of it for myself,
and holy shit, man, so you start like looking at fires. Oh
my god, wouldn't just be the Uh. I do have a lot of
watch towers actually, but they all explode, yeah when you shoot them.
Just kidding watch Okay, it's a shame. I like explosions. I I
ended up kind of coming to Just cost two a little late. Okay late,
Uh think like years, like a year or two after its release.
Kind of tried playing it, you know, just the I never got the
the kind of just grapple the parachute like the propulsion stuff. Uh. I
never got it quite down. But now you've kind of you're redesigned the parachute
stuff. You've got the wingsuit in there. Uh. And what do you
think you played it? It feels real good. It feels real goods.
I got a time on feel. So it's seems like there are a lot
of decisions that get made while you're designing this game. I assume, yes,
I get the impression that every time you had to make a decision for
Just Causse three, like from what I've seen of it so far, you
picked the one that was like, what's going to be the fucking craziest thing
we can do that would just blow up more shill it would be the cooler,
most insane thing we could do here. That's pretty much how we go
every day. I mean, that's a regular start to your work day.
Yeah, you sit there and you think, how do we surprise someone who's
played just Cause two or any other game out there? And to be able
to go out there and make a game that will actually still surprise you and
maybe even make you laugh out loud still and remember why you're twelve years old
and having fun. That's kind of the essence of where Jess Cause is fun
and we've tried to make that again. Is really like I'm missing up hearing
you just a little bit. I was twelve, you do. Yeah,
it was great, Like play were tall and well playing just Cause when you're
tall, Now, that's impressive. I wish I had though me too.
I would I would have liked video games a lot more. Yeah. So,
now this is the first just Cause that you've worked on. This is
we were talking about it seems like a lot of it, you know.
Yeah, I've just been a fan of it since the beginning and when the
opportunity came up. It's one of those easy responses like hey do you want
to direct? Just cause you you just say you say yes absolutely. There's
not a long phone call there. When a game has everything in it,
like so much stuff in it, like I don't even I can't even comprehend.
Like you're sitting down and you're thinking about, Okay, this is like
the core gameplay flow of this game. Oh no, no, no,
you're not going to be Oh my god, I'm over too. I'm starting
ideas to be interrupted. It's Steve. This is gonna be really fun for
everyone. Thank you Jesus. Yeah, there you go, Steve. Steve
Gayner's here, Steve Gayner. What is Firewatch? Well, it's like gone
home, okay, fell off, they can't. It's going pretty good.
Thanks for drop b Yeah man making it the Xbox KENO. They didn't think
it lowers you down from the sky, you know, unlike a car in
that way, crappled in you like a car in a lot of way.
It's just an uncontrollable killing machine that veers into all sorts of organized human events.
Yeah, I'm not going anywhere. I'm sure this is a hit.
And disk the tires on our chest and I'm trying to like hit my life
alert and nobody, whether you like it or not, you will wear the
microphone because all these people out there that didn't hear anything that you said before.
I'm talking very lowly. Okay, that's true. Hey Steve here,
Steve. It's really excited to see Steve. I'm gonna pin this to you
so it doesn't fall off again. Wow, this guy's multi talented, No
exactly. Yeah, he makes FTP clients and can clip on a microphone and
multi faceted. The one thing from playing Just Cost three, Uh, yeah,
that that I didn't do and and I guess it wasn't really in the
demos seems like, you know, you're really explicitly focusing on fucking shit up.
Yeah, And I mean there is a story to this game, you
know that you talk about young got A Rico returning to you know, his
mother's homeland, all this sort of stuff. Uh, how do you balance
between like, Okay, we want this game to be crazy off the chain
a lot of the time, while also kind of providing these goals and things
for people to do that might not always be just blow up everything or I
guess I maybe my question is, is every mission just blow up everything?
But I mean you can because it's just cause. Yeah. I was kind
of inspired by, you know, the old Spielberg movies like Indiana Jones and
even more modern stuff that's sillier, like Tropic Thunder. Just you can be
as ridiculous as you want, but if you have some characters that feel kind
of real, then it's good. Then you have fun and you can be
really silly, and then you try to write as many one liners as possible
that feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote the script. Yeah, that's what we do
for fire Watch. It's almost exactly. That's almost verbatim. I'm like with
Arnold Schwarzenegger, have written a script. No, and I go back into
my office and and I come out later, You come out later. Yeah,
a lott of ice to meet choose things like this, that's what's bain
what? Oh it's well it's close Semilachrome. Yeah, so we'll let it
pass, says yeah. And then in the freeze ice ice, freeze whatever
video. Yeah, No, is that's that's from a movie. I guess
that's Batman. And I've just seen which action movie is Tacoma pulling from well,
I saw some cobra in there, a little bit of that. Is
that old style story? Yeah? I like that good store. Yeah,
classic kind of yeah posts First Blood Part two, pre Rambo three. Yeah,
no, that that was a wonderful time America. Yeah, it's a
very specific slice of America that we're driving. It's like speed too. When
you say that, like if the space station goes, well, let's go
a certain speed, it's it's like, uh, Friday the thirteenth ten,
Jason in space because it's a space station. Yeah, the but there's no
serial killer. So a hockey mask or something is there's some kind of like
bonus there. I can wearing a hockey mask the whole time in Takoma.
You just can't see her run reflection. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah,
that's what you're doing language y mask. Well, also, Jason can't
talk. How do you know that Jason doesn't just choose not to talk.
Well, I played Mortal Kombat acts and the character doesn't talk it all there,
So I mean that's pretty much cannon. That's yeah, that's yeah,
that's that's as good as reading the Wikipedia. Fitch imagine a world whearing Mortal
Kombat X, Jason said, get over here. Would he reach out with
his blade? Ye, don't imagine how terrible and amazing that would be.
What if it was just a guy? So what if he occasionally popped out
of the corner and said toasty, that would be fine. I might be
a little more on board with that than the way they actually implement. He's
really tall in that game in a way that makes me feel like Scorpions not
as cool as he used to be because here's this guy from somewhere else and
he's so tall. So he made the rest of Mortal Kombat less cool a
little bit. Everyone met Scorpion. He's like five three. I mean,
if we assumed that Ed Boom is Scorpion, then like, yeah, I
guess, I guess I kind of have He does the voice, the voice
that did the voice. Yeah. Yeah, he has some kind of record
for doing the voice of a character in a video game for the longest period
of time. Wow, because he's been the voice since the beginning. It's
amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's a weird. I like it. It's
weird that I know that maybe not that weird, it's not, I don't
think. So here's anything you would know, giving your chosen profession. I
feel like that's a valid factoid for you too to have again, so like
mother's birthday and I don't know, but that voice of Scorpion, well said
Boone, and you know, if he's done it since the first coincidentally same
birthday, probably maybe as your mom, maybe it should be interesting maybe,
but he wasn't the voice of subzero, the sub zero ever saying anything.
I mean, now they all talk because there's a big story mode and also
the stuff and now it's like a little big thing. But yeah, before
I was just like, yeah, they were like jo, you know the
whole thing. I remember that now yeah, wow, how could I have
forgotten? I mean they started out at m K two, o K one
didn't have as much speech. Yeah, it just cost two at a hugely
popular multiplayer so good. It's what we call deep sex. Yeah, the
deepest exhuming the train. No, people were going to go back later,
and there's there are levels to this that are gonna like when we tie back
into the f PE stuff from the start, people are gonna go like fuck.
And I feel like that I will really answer your question about what is
fire Watch? But I figured we doll just Cause and sound Effects and Mortal
Kombat and nothing. Yeah, you're working is you're making it really easy for
in post, for them just to cut out all of the bullshit. That's
exactly how we operate. We want to cut out all of the bullshit.
That's that's the giant bomb mantras right below the title is just like, none
of this bullshit. A three questions about just cause Yes, and then it
ends and then it ends yeah and then and the title is the Just Cause
three. The the Square and Express conference this morning did address the kind of
the modern community around just Caused You and the Just Cause You multiplayer. I
understand like there's there's been some kind of statement about kind of what what just
Caused three and how it relates that will be, But like, what was
that insanity? Like how influential was that on kind of what you want to
do with just Cause three? I mean, all the money can it is
awesome. I Mean most of dev's come from modding or hacking or doing something
to a game when you weren't meant to at some point, and that was
awesome. I started doing that by putting curse words in games when I was
eight because I thought it was funny. You know, so you do that
to start? It would be weird as a developer to say, don't do
that anymore. God. That just reminded me that I used rez edit to
replace all the aliens in Marathon with Barney the Dinosaur. You made that mod?
No, I didn't release it. That you can do Barney. It
was a popular idea. Really, Yeah, that's awesome. Play that.
Yeah, you could, Jibarne I had in the loading screen of a Wheel
of Fortune game to put my name on it. That's that's pretty really good.
Good, And now I write about games? Is there a spot for
your campus? Santo? Though? Great? No, I know I be
stuff really well, so I was you did it? Yeah, that was
the callback he got. Ye, let's talk about Firewatch. Let's talk about
Firewatch. I'm ready. Yeah, I mean I wanted to actually talk about
this every time. You're like, I do really want to talk about this?
How do I throw the boom box in the water? It's really present?
Actually played it? Yeah, pick it up too? Is it just
in my inventory? Do I have to go to it? Straw schemes you
would play? Press? I guess sorry, we're on PlayStation four. Now,
so you'd plays a cross or the X right, I'm sorry, call
it across all the way on brand. I read the whole manual before I
left left the house about like everything I was allowed to say about the PlayStation
four. It's the PlayStation for computer entertainment system or whatever. Yeah, you
press cross. All the other ones have normal names. It's a circle,
square, triangle, a cross, cross. Yeah, it can't be.
There's not a different or like I can't tell how much you actually want to
know about Firewatch and how much you just want us to sort of trip over
to each other. And in the name of preserving the mystery we have we
have four utes. We don't like five minutes, mister McGoo, just tumbling
down, just Tacoma like fire Watch. Maybe I could back into this that
way. When when you're making Tacoma, are you looking at fire Watching going
like those fun you have hands on screen? Now we do everyone. Yeah,
you're not gonna do as much as you guys, that's true. You
put hands all over the place. We only do we really liked. But
are both of these games very handsy? It seems like our game is more
handsy than ye more. That doesn't mean anything more handsome, Stephen, what
do I have to leave that? I just ruined the giant ballad there,
he did it real bad. It's fine though. We do have hands now,
okay, but but only sometimes, like like when she's doing like the
sign in thing with the sign is your game puzzly? Not really? I
mean it's no more puzzly than gone home. Like the closest thing to a
puzzle is just figuring out how to get all the way to the place to
unlock the thing, to get into more your support so that I can be
handsy like that would be announcing a skin glove that you can put your hand
into. Are the skin glove work? No? I think it's a working
name. I'm probably not supposed to say that. I told us not to
tell you skin glove inside. We're definitely going to support. I'm all for
this. Everyone wears skin gloves in their keynotes. That's got that's the thing,
right, yeah, totally, everyone inside it gloved up. I'm wearing
one right now. No, they're quite nice skin glove. I don't even
want to that is a mad cat's skin glove. I just wear mine a
little differently. That's very yeah, Sean, No, one wants to like
aftermarket third party skin glove. Yeah. No, one's going to Niko and
like our skin gloves got a fan inside to keep it cool. That's incredibly
dangerous. I don't want to do that. I think we can all agree
keep it clean. But you know, but no when they clean and I
wanted normal temperatures, yes, no, ye, no, keep your market
cooling. Yeah, liquid cooled skin gloves is fire watched so intense that I
might want to play it with a controller that has a built in fan to
keep my hands cool. That's a really good question. No, I'm glad
you asked. The answer is absolutely not. It has moments of tension,
you know. I mean, I really really will answer your question. You
don't really care. I'm playing video games like this is like whatever is?
He asked, But I think he already knows. I think so too.
Yes, you tell us what firewatch is, okay, turned it right around
on him. It's like gone home, No, thank you, sir.
It is in that you walk around a lot and there's some talking and you
learn some things about the world. The difference here is that you will talk
back. You don't talking Gone home. You know that, right, I
know but like there's talking. He is talking. That's what I'm saying.
That's what I'm saying, Yad. The pillars of Firewatch one talking, two
fires three, this boom box water thing I keep hearing about, which is
great. Yeah you can. You can swear at teens real early games,
you can shout that. Yeah, we don't with all that shouting it If
I'm not mistaken implicitly naked teens, that's edgy as ship. It is implied
that the teens are naked. It's also not implied that their teens even calling
them teens because it was easy. It short. Some teams are nineteen not
not implied. It was the text on your its teens and I don't know
ship with that, Okay, So like do you play as a teen into
COMA key feature of Firewatch is shouting at nude teens. If we had a
box, I would really push for that to be a that e SRB.
I mean the script you can shouting at dude. That's actually that was the
working subtitle. It was Firewatch Nude teen Shower showder at shower. Yes,
it's you're just developed. You collect items, Yes, you use those items
to interact with other parts. Of the world really sometimes kind of show Okay,
yeah, okay, let them finish. You can solve there are puzzles
to solve with some of these items that may get your access to other parts
of the area. Well, yeah, it's more let's say, it's more
like, like I want to go there because I can see this landmark on
the map or even game, you see it, you can go there.
It's like sky look at like like a sky rim den. We're like,
look at that a mountain if you can go to that less like that,
it's but it is place. It is a contiguous world. It like you
can go without loading and go as far away. You can't sort of scoot
up the side of a mountain and get somewherether. It's more like it's like
Metroid Prime in that it's more there's just there's a clear edges to the level,
but it's still whenever the explosion, do you see the fire watchman's face
on the inside of the visor like Metroid Prime, or if you lower the
visor, got it? Okay, yeah, okay, so visor lower and
whenever there's an explosion, I can promise you that happens first, all right,
yeah, everything explosion and see every single time there's an explosion, you
will see Samis Rand's face. Okay, seems illegal, but you know what,
though I'm not a part of the first you know, the first party
guys have got are really they're not uptight. They like they all they act
like eighty three. It's like the reflection thing. And they said, wait,
so are you playing if Sammis said no, it's just that you're playing
as a guy wearing a Samis mask with a visor in front of it,
with a visor in front of the mask. Yeah, yeah, and then
from out you're wearing he's wearing it. He's caused playing as Sammus, but
it's really accurate. So he's wearing like a mask of like what SAMs.
I get the Jason pre order DLC. I'm playing as Sammis wearing a Jason
mask and Avis and advisor. It's a post postmodern in its references. I
would say, Okay, that goes deep. Yeah, so a Firewatch is
an adventure game. I mean, I mean it's like the best I will
say. It is really hard to turn down a genre for the game.
Like we did a live we thanks Steve's a it's adventure game, you think
so it's a it's a it's an adventure. Exploration is an action adventure game.
No, I mean yes, no, you can. You can s
you can do. You have like ropes, you can use the climb down
stuff, and you have an act that you can use this sort of chop
your way through things. And there's a lot of climbing on stuff. But
it's more like we kind of mantling. We think we have mantling and stuff.
We can, but it's not like a timing thing, and you know,
don't have to like it's almost more just there to mix up your control
so you're not just walking into make the universe more interesting, to explore,
to sort of paste that it feels good, it's all, and then feel
the rope and stuff or like like the gating tools in a metro a game
where it's like, oh, well, I see if I had a rope,
I could go up there, and now I have the rope get back
to those Oh I wish I could attach a rope to this thing. Here
can just cause three You can attach ropes to whatever the fuck you want and
then make them collide into each other. Is there into each other? Mechanic
and Firewatch we played just cause too when we saw how much they could do
with ropes colliding like connecting to each other, and we said, that looks
quite expensive. Our rope in fire Watch is actually a physically driven it's a
full simulated rope, but it's just to simulate a fat guy climbing down a
hill. So when the game breaks, it looks like just bob because it
flies over the place and connects to things that it's not supposed to be.
We don't want that to happen in fire Watch. Actually, like, yeah,
we'll leave that to the my community. We'll Tacoma have space ropes.
Space ropes. Uh, we have questions. You have a grapple beam,
We have tables and stuff. We do have like things that kind of like
float nicely but has no grappling, like unulets. There's there's no parish.
There's there are very many zero gravity parish. There a wing. I don't
know how feature. Okay, all right, second time through. I mean
it is actually funny to build a really big because the world's pretty much built
now more or less, and it's way bigger than what we ever thought it
would be. And you've even made it like way smaller than you had originally
made it, right, we shrank it multiple times and it's still huge.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And once you build a whole beautiful world that
looks amazing and you start thinking, like, god, it would be kind
of great devil wingsuit in here. So I see that you get to just
Cause three like really quick, you know, like we're like walking around with
a Yeah, I know the moment, like you fire Watch is all just
it's you walk around in it, and there's like to the point, there's
not you don't you don't jump in fire Watch. But when fire Watch is
before we had our current first person character controller, you could jump in fire
Watch, and then you could make yourself jump really far, and then it
was like again, just all you want is to jump a million miles into
the air and then deploy a wingsuit and then connect the grappling hook or something.
So I guess everyone else is making the wrong game. Yeah, No,
that's that's if something that's like come out of like E three is like
I feel in some ways people are kind of making the wrong game because it's
yeah, because it's not just cause, Yeah, I'm kind of happy.
Then not everyone is making Yeah, that would be kind of rough. How
do you how do you rein it in when you're making a game like just
Causse three, where you kind of before I ask questions, at some point,
at some point, you have to have right Otherwise doesn't the game get
way too easy if you if you don't rate it in at least a little
bit, and and I mean a little bit, give you some rules.
We don't give you a jet pack yet. Yeah, so that's that's the
restraint. You don't have a jet pack yet in this game. You have
one of those like games that like go up the insanity scale or go up
the crazy scale. Like at some point you get to that Saint's Rowe point
where like you've made the character fly, You've you've trivialized all of the cars
in the game and all that sort of stuff to the point where like,
yes, it's fun. But then where do you go from there? Or
do you just it's at this point you just like, we don't care about
just cost four. We're too busy making just cost three. I think I'll
have gone too far if there's like a wingsuit or a shark, okay,
and then that's probably jumping it too far. That's all right, I don't
know fair enough, fair enough, maybe it's fun. Do you have like
infinite parachutes, like if you fall off a plane is guaranteed you can always
parachute out of it, or we actually always grappled that our parachute. We've
actually put a reason why you have infinite parachutes. Now it actually sucks back
into your back every time good and then goes back. So we actually put
in a couple of frames of animation when the person. Eventually we actually wanted
to put a giant pile of parachute somewhere in the world where there was just
like eighty billion parachutes there for no reason. That was just like what happened
when Rico got rid of all his parachutes, Like someone's just going around finding
them and going like there's another one. Yeah. And then I wanted,
like at your ten million parachute pool, for it just not to work just
on it's just like pull it and like silverware flies at it wrong. One
that is for just cost three colon funk right too. All right, you
got a parachute, you've got a wingsuit, you got malaria, let's talk
about it. I don't want to get you guys talking about just now,
we're not chronic, we're not glass. You'll notice that someone end game map
actually looks a lot like the map and fark R two because I really like
the funk R two map. Okay, straight up, advice hand brings up
a nice, sort of flappy paper map that has a lot of really nice
stuff and it looks like in fire Watch, grenades don't roll down hills,
but like everything beer cans and pine cones. That causes problems though. Sometimes
when like a thing that you don't expect to roll rolls in, a teen
interacts with it because it hits their trigger volume and you didn't expect that to
happen. That's cool. Yeah, so that's fun to make a game like
that, make a game well, it's fun to make an adventure game of
systems Like it's like those type of systems were like unexpected outcome. Do we
support that? And then we all kind of go like, I'm like,
oh, yeah, I can write like three lines of dialogue to make that
happen if you listening rolls on or you just let it happen, and it's
fine. Yeah, I mean I feel like on some level that's actually a
really good summation of the kinds of games we make. Their adventure games with
systems like It's really gone Home. It's in a lot of ways, is
like walking around and click on this stuff and find the stuff, but also
has a full physics system, so people like gather up all the objects in
the house and pile them in the bathtub or whatever. You know, Like
it matters that there is systemic light and shadow and physical objects. It affects
how you actually encounter the world. And I think it's totally true Firewatch as
well. Yeah, Like I like the way like it let's player expressivity mess
with the story so much and your perception of the story. Yeah, that's
like the story that you're experiencing, you know, like we put little personalize
a little bit, because they'll have them almost that they can look at and
up and I like that. Teens they went like, that's nature. I'm
not afraid of that. Yeah. The saddest version of that is when you
pick up the whiskey bottle and then you set it down, but it just
angles a little bit and then spends like three minutes rolling into the lake and
you don't realize it, and then they just start screaming you for messing with
their stuff because it you've ruined her whisky. Like, well, well I
didn't know anybody could have stopped that. Yeah. These are very lazy teens,
you know how teams are. They're drunk. You know you you found
their underwear. Yeah, that's a problem. They're implicitly name you have their
underwear. Yeah. They have to stay out on that really far away little
island. That's true for that for now. Yeah, yeah, Steve.
But like we put a turtle in the game that you can find and like
basically be like you're I'm adopted, like that you're hanging out. That was
just an idea that like somebody had one day and we said, oh yeah,
we can probably do that, and like James our animator animated it.
So it's in the trailer, the PS four trailer and uh but then it's
sort of like the system saying kicked in where somebody was like, well can
you throw it off the like into the canyon? Yes, like will will
something happen? Could? So I put it on my good list? Yeah
right, And then James and like we were talking about we were today we're
doing a bit of live press and we're talking about the outhouse. Gotta have
a good outhouse system video game. Toilet's see, you're a big ficionado,
deeply interacted. And then somebody talked about like throwing him into the into the
pit of the outhouse and closing him in and leaving him in there for the
rest of the game. And that's just totally something you can do. And
so when you have systems that like start to allow you to that's the action,
by the way, that's the action that really gets you on the right
track to solving the mystery. That's a script path to solving The players who
don't do that will never understand the mystery file. You need to have some
kind of classic YU sword fight this turtle, Yeah, and then whatever happened
after that, I don't know. It just kind of remind because we designed
adventure games at Telta for a long time, so it's like it reminds us
that, like when we start having all these like systems that collide with each
other and create moments to happen, that like we have to like actually think
about it. When you put a living creature in there, have you actually
written lines for what happens if you act like, because that seems like one
of those things where if you're going to acknowledge it, it's one of those
crazy things where the player character has to acknowledge that they are terrible, but
they just did something no one would actually probably do unless they were just awful,
and then they just have to like you're like or just just stop.
Okay, it's okay, fuck off. Can you blow up turtles and just
cross three? We have no turtles? Okay? Yeah, do you have
any other turtle? Dlcah exactly, there will be a turtle turtle. Let's
run it down here. Yeah, we can wrap it up all right,
Let's let's let's run down here a chair. No, that's the universal sign
for like this conversation has been. I know that these are all unreleased games.
It will be unfair to rate them at this time. But let's let's
just review all these games by a rating system. Let's just pick one out
of the air, like I don't know, number of explosions, for example,
that sounds great, fire Watch. How many explosions would you estimate our
in fire Watch? That's a really good question. Great would I estimate?
Uh huh, Well, there's a lot of emotional explosions. Sometimes I think
the yeah, that's how that's how much stuff? Was it gonna explode space?
There's no air in space? Okay, there's air inside the stations to
one? Okay? Is there just cost? How many numbers are there?
If I could do anything with numbers or math, I would have not done
whatever whatever it is it has to do with FTP. Okay, alright,
so just Cost three is the world's premiere leading FTP client, coming out December
one, December one, December first. Oh, yeah, that's gonna be
a fun, fun summer. Yeah, it's gonna be great. And Mortal
Kombat X is available in stores right now. That's that's a good. Fire
Watch fire I was gonna say, fire Watch is gonna have some Mortal Combat
XDLC coming right. No, we don't have a date yet, but it
will be announce in Winson. You damn indie kids. Just put it out
whenever, man, I see how it is, Well, Tacoma, when's
that coming out? When we fucking feel like looking, Oh god, Stevens,
that's you'll say, like I know, you know, we know it's
like never. We're not sure yet, but yeah, that's good. That'd
be good. That was great. All right, Thank you all for coming.
I'm sorry, I don't know what Firewatch is. It's a real time
strategy game that connects to Amazon S three just cost three. You have guns.
We'll be back, all right, we are back. Thanks for hanging
out with us. Uh Our E three coverage continues. It's only day one.
We've got two more nights of this stuff, but it's on right now
because joining us. Right now, we've got Phil Spencer and Kudo Sonoda from
Microsoft. How are you guys doing. Thanks for having us. It's great
to be here. Yeah, yeah, welcome back, Kudo. It's been
a while. It's been a little bit. Yeah, you sound so excited
about being here yourself during your intro. That's I am one. But we're
still been over here is the last time you were on the shows? It's
been a worse Yeah, yeah, it's and it's yeah, yeah, it's
it's been a little bit. But I mean, man, I just you
know your your history. I remember visiting the three d O offices. Well
that's going way back, and thanks for calling that one out in the public
form. Absolutely, and of course the time at EA Chicago yea and night
night yeah, and the fight night and you know I was I was a
very I was. I was a big def Jami conference. Good, thank
you. That's really it was. It had an authenticity that the wrestling games
didn't have. Yeah, that's super fun game to work on. Yeah no,
I really appreciated that one. But let's talk about Microsoft. What is
fire Watch? It seems to be the thing. It seems to be the
big forget Firewah. We'll never know, never know what it is. It
can't be known, it's never coming up, can't be no big show,
big press conference. A lot of it seems like you guys just continuing to
make moves. I gotta say. The thing that that jumped out of me
is like being completely unpredictable, unexpected. Was the backwards compatibility stuff. Uh,
I don't know. I mean, you know, maybe isn't all you
know one up your How how are you guys doing that stuff? It seems
like emulating an Xbox three sixty on Xbox one would be pretty hard. It
is hard, uh, And it's it was our decision in the leadership team
to make the investment. How it happened was almost exactly a year ago.
We started talking about things that we could do to make three sixty owners look
at Xbox One is a safe place to play, and millions of people made
investments in three sixty content. We saw the right thing to do is to
make it go that content go forward, but we didn't know its power PC
to X eighty six. The approach that we've taken is to actually emulate the
full Xbox three sixty OS are the full Xbox O sixty hardware layer, So
the OS for the three sixties actually running when you run the game, and
if you watch the game's boot right now, you'll see actually the Xbox three
sixty boot animation come up. So it's it sounds like a pretty low level
emulation, it is, and that from a performance standpoint, it allows us
to work so we're able to get really framed by frame performance equivalents. The
Box Live thinks you're on three sixty, and people been watching some of the
things I've been playing over the last month, and people have been asking,
hey, why are you playing Mass Effect on the three sixty. I was
actually playing on the Xbox one. And then from the reverse side, so
the three sixty games think they're running on the three sixty OS, which they
are, and the three sixty OS thinks it's running on the hardware, which
it's not. It's running on an emulated kind of VM. On the other
side, Xbox one thinks it's a game. That's why things like streaming and
game DVR and screenshots all work because it thinks there's just one big game that's
called three sixty. But that's why you kind of download a manifest or a
rapper for the three sixty games so that we can say, hey, this
is actually banjo or this is mass effect, or to configure the parameters of
the emulation exactly show that it runs right. But the emulator runs exactly the
same for all the games. So that's because like I was around when we
did the original Xbox to three sixty, where we had a shim for every
one of the games and it just didn't scale very well. This is actually
the same emulator running for all of the games. Different games do different things,
so as we're rolling them, we'll say, oh, okay, this
game needs uh, maybe we have to tweak the emulator. But it's for
everybody because in the end, the emulator is emulating the three sixty platform itself.
So when you say that, all a public has to do is kind
of give the go ahead yeah, that's it's not that they're approving a bunch
of work that has to be done, it's they're just as are not touched,
right, So there's some caveat. And I was always I like to
be as transparent as it can be on this connect. Games won't work from
the three sixty because translating between the connect sensors is almost impossible or basically impossible.
We're still working on a multidisc, so people have asked like Lost Odyssey,
Blue Dragon or some of my favorites from the three sixty. There's actually
work on the multidisc and packaging up to the single that requires us to go
back and look at the original kind of package on the multiple distance reconfigure that
there weren't a lot of multi discs on three sixty games, but that is
an issue for us. And then you're right. You just need the publisher
to approve it. We run it through a QA test to make sure everything
is fine, and then it's in. I just thought the reaction when film
made the announcement was awesome, like it's you know, it's so funny because
when you're waiting your turn to go into the keynote, you know you've got
like the headsets on. You know, you can hear all the stage crew
talking, and like just the level of applause was like so loud in the
arena, so nobody could hear anything in their earpieces, and like all the
stage crew people were freaking out because they didn't know when to hit their cues.
Nobody could was able to talk to each other, just because the fan
response was like just so overwhelming. When as right after film made the announcement,
Yeah, it was crazy. You know, we were in a car
later that night, uh, you know, just talking to the drivers like
oh, we do video game stuff, and you know, eventually it's like,
you know, he was someone who hadn't upgraded at all. You know,
he actually just straight up said it was like you put him there or
something. It's like, you know, no, yeah something. I was
being on the Microsoft show, so I want to put it. Uh you
know, he said, like you know that I want to I want to
get another console, but like the old the old games don't work. And
we actually actually they just announced like some of that stuff works like today,
and you're like, well, well maybe I get an Xbox one to set
of a PS four. And I was like, oh yeah, right,
geez, I guess that does make some sense. Huh. The funny thing
in the arena was actually quickly because we had a bunch of fans on the
floor, which is amazing, Like their energy in the show was incredible.
But you know, I'm I'm just reading while I'm up there, so like
like I'm not smart guy. So people turn around and they look at the
displays. They always see what I'm reading prompter and the people were reading what
I was going to say before I said it. Actually, the kind of
enthusiasm that these cheering started before. I couldn't even get the words out right.
People were ahead of me. It was. It was cool. It
was just a great moment with the crowd. Yeah, and then it seemed
like, you know, well I'm one of the other big things, you
know, kind of continuing to talk about hollow lens. Yeah, and uh,
that's so I got a chance to try the Halo five stuff. Uh,
this more this morning. That thing's crazy, that things, I mean,
so let's let's talk about it. It's the hardware is a prototype right
now, right, I mean, it seems like that there, you know,
it would you have to be some stuff like the thing I know.
I mean, obviously it's it's a small window where you're kind of seeing the
augmented reality. Yea, uh is the plan to have full peripheral on that,
so I mean the hardware like just hangman, Certainly the hardware is and
final, so you know, none of the things on there are completely done.
I mean, I think you know you're never going to get to like
full peripheral field of view, but certainly the hardware we have now you know,
the field of view isn't exactly final, but I wouldn't say it's gonna
be like hugely noticeably different either. Okay, all right, Yeah, but
it's one of those things like you watch it in the press conference and like
also that camera that can make that stuff viewable that it's a technical marvel on
clutch super clutch being able to show like, hey, here's what this actually
looks like. It's one of the things. I mean, certainly since we
started working on the program, you know, at some point you're gonna have
to go do bigger demonstrations to large crowds of people. So yeah, I
mean that that's the thing. We think the problem the VR faces at this
point, you know, like making people understand, like, like, how
that stuff's gonna gonna look so like I came out of that Minecraft or I
came out of the press conference looking at the Minecraft stuff, going like that
looks cool, but I bet it's gonna be really ginery or really messed up.
And so the first thing we did when the show open, we had
an appointment to watch the Halo stuff and strapped it on, walked through and
it's this moment where you're you're sitting there and they say, okay, stand
up and turn left and walked to the way point and you turn and there's
a Halo way point down the hallway. It's like, holy fucking sh So
I walked towards it and then it told me what to do next. I'm
like, all right, this is well, much like your driver experience with
back and Pat, your quote was exactly the reaction we were going for.
You got it. Yeah, that thing was pretty crazy, like watching the
kind of mission briefing and being able to look around different parts of the ship
and having it highlight. Yeah, and all that stuff was was really really
cool. That are you going to come into see any getting a chance to
come in and see any of the other game demos that we have, Yeah,
over the course the show, Yeah, definitely, and checking out checking
out games for sure, and checking out I guess like like UI stuff showing
off some of that stuff too, right, so like kind of kind of
big show does the UI stuff kind of you know, I guess some of
that has to come as a result of you know, you can't expect everyone
to have a connect anymore. So it's like the voice isn't necessarily a guarantee
and and and all that is it more about just kind of unifying with Windows
ten because like looking at the screenshots, to me at I'm running Windows ten,
it looks a lot like I'm an insider. Yeah, it looks at
the Windows ten Xbox app. You know, for us, the Xbox UI
focus, my push with the team was all about performance because there are just
certain things and the dash that they're too slow and I'm basically on my Xbox
every night, and then so I wanted to want to keep you close to
the game and allow you to do things finding your friends, matchmaking as quickly
as possible. Kudo needs a beer, and that was it, Like how
do we make it fast? We are getting some benefits from Windows ten coming
to Xbox one in terms of performance and other things that will show up in
the user interface, and we were going to show that stuff on stage.
It's kind of a hard demo to do on stage, so we thought let's
just give it its time, both in our daily show and then having people
come behind closed door to see. But I mean, for common tasks,
we're almost fifty percent faster in our dash just in terms of button clicks and
speed between things, which for me is just critical. It wasn't as much
about connections, just let's make it faster. Cool. I also think though,
I mean, the team did a great job of taking the features that
are really getting used the most and then making them easily accessible for people.
So I mean there's part of just a performance and how fast you can get
in do things. But I think they did a great job, you know,
with the alignment of just you know, now that we know a lot
more about what features people are using, how often making those things easily accessible
in the place that people really want them. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
But you know this year, you know, with the I mean,
these consoles have been out for a little bit, and you know, the
stories are starting to kind of finally pivot more and more. You know,
last year it was a lot of that, and then this year seems like
like, hey games, Yeah, that was you know the thing Obviously before
this role I was I was had a first party, and to see the
way our first party teams are delivering this year was was great. I thought
that having Bonnie opened the show with Halo five was fantastic. Having Rod at
the end of the show sewing both Gears collection but also Gears four run on
an Xbox One and it's not shipping until next year. Getting to do some
new things like Recorps we were talking about before we came on. Yeah,
yeah, I think like that was the thing that stuck out for me.
Rare getting to do a new game right and Sea of Thieves, I thought
from the first frame just felt like a rare game and something that that they
should be working on. I love the way the first parties teams are showing
up right now and delivering great content this year. Another fort se which is
going to be twenty four player multiplayer. It's gonna it's good. Teams are
really doing an amazing job. I think we get too much credit for standing
on stage and reading lines, but the work that they do to do things
like back and pad and the controller and other stuff is fantastic, right.
I mean I did think, you know, you saw a lot of our
big franchises show up in the keynote, but I was super impressed with the
variety of the types of games. I mean, I think we had stuff
that really looked and felt a lot different than you know other times you've seen,
you know, game shows in the past, and I thought, like,
Records looks great, Fable Legends, you know, it's super fun to
play, but also a very different looking game though you know, some of
our indie stuff I looked amazing, Like Cuphead Beyond it looks nuts. Yeah,
like it and that game is super fun to play. Yeah, so
I need to get over and finally play it for myself with Alex. Played
it and it just yeah, it's a tough game. I have it in
my understanding that it's it's quite different. It's like Ori and if you played
Ori this year, but like you know, people looked at Oria, uh,
and then you go play the game and it kind of kicks. You're
in the head over and over and over. But it was but when you
finish, then it's like Okay, a really feel yeah, yeah, and
it's it seems like, you know, I mean we've been talking about it
for the past couple of years now, but you know it really, you
know, the it seems like there's just so much diversity across all of games
right now. You know, you have these kind of smaller teams making things
that are now able to exist on consoles in a way that it was you
know, it was a little harder for them to exist previous generation and certainly
the one before that, you know, it just didn't happen. Yeah.
Uh, you know, seeing kind of the stuff that you would normally look
at and go like, well, this will only ever be a piece game.
Yeah, and now we're we're seeing that come to consoles and and help
kind of feel I feel like some of the gaps that we lost along the
way, you know, some of the publishers that you know did consolidate,
it didn't make the jump, you know, just this kind of you know,
that kind of mid tier game that we used to think about, you
know, a double A B, you know, whatever you call it.
But you know, it just it seems like the small games are getting bigger,
though, Uh, do you worry that like we're gonna get into you
know, it's like the big budget games seem like they're these blockbusters, They're
gonna be hugely expensive. I'm all stuff gonna get Pricier two. I don't
know about Pricier I haven't really seen too much of that. The thing I
really enjoy is if the back in the day when everybody felt like they had
to be sixty dollars, you'd find mechanics and stories and games that should have
been ten dollars and would have been great at ten dollars, fifteen dollars,
twenty dollars, but felt the need to kind of inflate themselves to a point
where just because that was the only market that was there. If you weren't
retail, you were dead. And now you can come out with the game
that can kind of be what it wants to be at the price point and
the complexity and the story and the budget, and you're happy with it,
and you can see the six and we see that with the Idea at Xbox
program. The games sell incredibly well. The good games sell well, and
the bad games don't exactly the way it should be right, and it does.
The game doesn't have to strive to be sixty dollars, and I think
that's that is a great time for just gamers all up, because you're seeing
the diversity of content that Kudo talks about. That's sorry, I was gonna
say, I just think it's also you know cool, Like you know,
one of the things that we're doing now with xboxes are game preview program So
it's not only the variety of content, but even just getting you know,
fans in gamers in seeing the games that are earlier time in development, being
able to give their feedback on the games. I think that's going to be
stuff that's you know, super exciting going forward. Also, it's just how
we could really get gamers involved more in the development process the games, get
them involved earlier on and really you know, not only have them you know,
get different size games or different types of games, but really getting them
involved the development process and being able to you know, give the development teams
earlier feedback as well. Do you worry, you know, when when you
get into the business of kind of having a storefront for games that aren't finished.
I feel like, you know, one of the criticisms we see of
a lot of you know, bigger games shipping and you know, like Assassin's
Creed took a lot of flag for it last year of just you know,
lots of patches, master Chief Collection need need a lot of work post release.
Like we're you know, games are getting to a point where they don't
some of them don't feel like they're shipping in a complete state already. H
if you're taking a step back and selling stuff that's definitely not finished, Like,
where does that end? I guess, like is there a way for
I guess a separate question would be like what's it going to take for that
to change? I mean, obviously you guys don't control the third parties,
but what's it going to take for games to kind of stop shipping in a
semi broken state that I would separate out, say MCC from the game preview.
I think your point's valid. Uh, MCC was just we needed a
better job, and I think I collate that stuff because of you know what
we see on Steam, you know the early access program, and you know
we've tried, and you know, part of us saying that every game in
the preview program has to have a demo was part of us recognizing that we
want people to be able to put their hands on what they're going to pay
for totally before they make the decision to pay for it. And that was
an important part of the program for us as we're working with Chris Charla and
how we wanted to set that up. The other thing, just to be
honest about it, we're going to curate the list a little more on console
right. We didn't go out and announce four hundred games right, and we
found developers that have been in early access before and they they're kind of reputable
indies. We want to expand the program, but I want to be careful.
I find right now, especially at a conference like E three, and
the community gamers, a subset of them want to be very close to the
development and as you said, there are other people that just want to buy
a disc, put it in and have it run perfectly. And we want
to be a great place for both of those. And what we're going to
learn from the game preview program. Nobody does it, or it's not working,
we will stop doing it right And but I like taking the opportunity,
taking the risk if people want to look at it that way, to try
something. The developers wanted it, and we're going to learn from it,
and I think it can open up a creative outlet for studios and if it
doesn't, we'll stop it. Yeah. I think it's been one of those
things where when you know, like looking at Steam like the early access time,
when it works, when it works, it works incredibly well that's right.
Yeah, So yeah, I think you know, like like curating that,
like having a demo steams like that's like a key differentiator that will hopefully
solve some of those And we pay a lot of attention to what its Steam
is doing there. They've done a great job in being a great marketplace for
content big and small. The sales that they do early access and you know,
we've done some things on Xbox Live, and I think it's just good
for everybody as we learn from each other. So the PC, let's talk
about it. It's huge. I understand, like tons of people window that
thing. There's anysider program that Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I'm
in the fast ring. I'm not messing around, you know, was like
one one, yeah, thirty, Yeah, you're gonna be getting I think
forty five here pretty soon. Yeah, look at that. Yeah. No,
it's actually it's been fun to watch Windows ten kind of move along.
Well, I mean it's interesting because and even in our Xbox inside our preview
program, right, we that's not that different actually than the game preview program
when you think about it. Yeah, it's a bigger dice roll because at
some point I need to be able to send emails and pay my bills.
How have we done? Have we done? Okay, it's been fine.
Yeah, while that's good. All the fonts were broken in Chrome, but
other than that, it's okay. Good. Well, it's not good that
we broke things and chrome. Yeah, you know, we don't want to
break things and chrome. So, uh, it's it sounds like that.
You know, you've been talking for a while about doing more stuff on on
the PC and kind of getting back into that business and maybe a bigger way,
is my understanding. The earlier tonight, Uh, some announcements attached to
Yeah, it was on that was that the PC Gamer Press conference, And
first I just thought it was fantastic that there was a PC Gamer press conference,
Uh, bringing PC games to E three they're here, but giving them
a stage to kind of talk about news. It's it seems like it's it's
almost always been a console show. Yeah, I mean it was. It
was an old retail show and then as PC Games kind of went away from
retail, it was left with console. Uh we announced Killer Instincts coming to
PC. That's actually you should talk about that. Yeah, so will that?
Will that work with the multi cross multiplayer that sort of stuff separate multiplayers
said it would one, Yeah, no, that's fine. That's usually how
most of the major game decisions get made, as Phil will go either on
Twitter on stage somewhere and say what we're doing, and then you'll find out
later and go, yes, Killer Instinct is going to be shipping on both
last cross It's just something you just get ahold of those goops of Iron Galaxy
and just say do the world yeah, and they just take care of it
right now. But I mean, I think that's something we're really uh,
you know, pushing for on a lot of our first party titles. Now.
You know, Fable Legends is going to ship both on Windows ten and
Xbox One enabled cross play, and then Gigantic is doing that as well.
So yeah, I think you're gonna see a lot more titles that's enabling that.
Not just because Phil says it in public. We also had Rod Ferguson
come out on stage and talk about the Gears Collection coming to PC. Which
Gears collection, the Gears one remote, Yeah, and he announced that it
will shipping four K on PC. Great, which I thought was, you
know, great, it was something we've Windows is obviously important to Microsoft,
right and the gaming space on Windows. I've said this before as we went
through the decade of all about Xbox, we didn't do the job we should
have done in playing a role, a proactive role in PC gaming. As
we talk about the future, both the studios and platform and live, I
think Windows is really important and it's an opportunity as a gamer. I play
games on PC. I play games on my television, on my Xbox one.
I sometimes play games on my PlayStation four. But I want to be
able to play the games I want to play where I want to play them.
And I know there's this kind of back channel that frankly I don't really
subscribe to, of you need to keep people from playing in certain places that
somehow that's the answer, and I just, you know, I want to
give people choice, and I think in Xbox I want it to be the
best TV gaming experience you can have. But Frankly, if I'm not around
my TV and I'm on my laptop and I want to play Killer in strict
and I want to play Gears or I want to play Fable, I should
be able to do that. And to try to force people to buy something
by excluding their choice it doesn't feel right. It was kind of our connect
decision early on about is Connect into out of the box, like let it
kind of exist on its own merits, and same thing with our games and
where people want to play. Yeah, and I do think it's really one
of the great things too. It is just being able to play the games
on your you know, console at home and then you know, if I'm
going into work, not not that I'm sitting at work playing games, but
you know, then if I go into some place that isn't my home where
I have a PC that I'm supposed to be doing other things on, you
can just pick up work. Yeah exactly. Yeah, this is not going
thought, but you know, and then just be able to come in and
just you know, seamlessly pick up the experience at work and still have the
things that you know that you had done back in the console transfer right over
and make it feel like one awesome experience, right, somebody was doing that,
but yeah, yeah, and it's Killer Instinct just seems like a cool
one. It's okay, it's research. Yeah, I know, it's research.
Everything, you know, it's just all comes back into it, just
like you just you need to just destiny, right yeah, yeah, yeah,
uh it's been I Killer Instinct. I think it's a really cool move.
Like fighting games on the PC just it always felt like one of those
huge disconnects for me, where like why would you ever play fighting game on
the PC? That's crazy to perform? It can be better, but it's
not not always stable, so you know, it's like fighting games need to
be locked and uh it always just seemed insane. But you know, like
more and more of those over the years and and just and KI it's just
super impressive, Like over the course of these two seasons, like I couldn't
stand Killer Instinct and KI two. So when it was like when old yeah
the original games, yeah, uh so widam lamb now in the rare replay
yeah, just to run. Yeah, so are those gonna be the same
versions that we're already made available to people that you know, if you bought
certain packages of new Killer Instinct. You got those arcade games. Yeah,
it's like it's might be right, I should know the answer to that,
but I think it's the same version. Yeah. But so, like I
went into Killer Instinct thing like this game is a joke and was really pleasantly
surprised by the quality of that thing. And just over the course of the
two seasons it's just been getting better. That stuff's are really cool and a
lot of players. It's been great to watch and you know when people push
on, hey you can't take Ki to PC. I think it's good for
the franchise because there'll be more people playing, which not to be all business
about it, but lets us invest more in the franchise. There's more people
are buying stuff. Do you Is this the sort of thing that you know
helps to enable like say, a third season of Killer Instant totally, Like
you think about having more people playing, having me for people buying characters,
giving you more people to play against, right, I just think it it's
just healthy all up. It's great for Live because it keeps people playing on
Live and letting them engage when they're on the PC or they're on their on
Xbox One. Right, you know, it's so I see it as just
a win win, and I know we'll push through people seeing somehow we're betraying
the Xbox Nation, which is critical to us. Yeah, but allowing people
to play their content wherever they want to be, and it's I think it's
great for what we can invest in games and letting people play. Yeah,
I mean, I'm bringing more people into those games and let them playing them
more places. It doesn't seem like betrayal that that seems like, you know,
just giving people more choice. Yeah, I think you can see definitely
the k I also though, like once people get a chance to play it,
you know, just like yourself, like it is one of our most
engaged you know communities you know around that product. And so I think,
you know, just getting giving people more of the opportunity to experience what the
game is really see how fun it is, and making free to play work
on a fighting game, which seems like you know, like that's it's a
business model. It just seems to make perfect sense for like that genre if
you do it right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean when we announced the
streaming that we did in January, announcing in January on your Windows ten machine
that you're streaming from your Xbox one to your Windows ten. That's kind of
unlocking that content already, and I think you're going one step further. Uh
yeah, because I feel like, you know, it's I still can't trust
streaming, you know. I feel like it's one of those things where there's
gonna be just enough latency that it's like not gonna feel especially for a fighting
game, you know stuff. Yeah, that's right. So having you know,
streaming is okay, but having code run natively somehow a problem, like
you know that that seems totally uh, but it's it's great. I mean,
the reaction to the PC show going all the way back, it was
nice. I was kind of expecting to come on and get booed and I
didn't get that. It's like, why is this Xbox guy here? But
it was nice. The crowd was great. I thought that they did a
nice job running the event, and we had some good games to show and
a couple of announces, and it was nice to see PC gaming have a
real press event. Cool. Well, uh, you guys, thanks so
much for coming by. The great talk with game of free beer. Yeah,
there's plenty by the way for me to come back in in an hour
or so. Yeah, that's great. I want to come back a little.
We'll do We'll do an hour on def jam Icon forty was the best
character and just the soundtrack, the thing like this, you know, that's
oh said. I had to fight a lot of people for my love of
def jam Coon like that. It was not always the most popular decision,
but yeah, that was me. Uh, Phil Kudo, thanks so much
for coming by having here. Looking forward to seeing more of the lineup over
the course of the show. And we'll be right back after this, all
right, Black Yeah and three two. Welcome back to Giant Bomb's coverage of
E three twenty fifteen. Day one is almost over. We've got our last
couch full of guests here and we're going out with a bang. From three
four three we've got Josh Holmes and Frank O'Connor, hi, guys doing lovely
and from from Phenomena Fun Fun Nomena, we've got Robin Hooniky. How are
you doing. It's been fantastic great, thanks everyone for coming through. Uh
so, what has the show been like? Are you showing the game here?
Yes, Actually, this is the first time we've ever shown what Tom
to a public audience. Yeah, big deal, Alex. Alex talked a
little bit about what Tom earlier. It sounds real cool and real crazy.
It is crazy, it is fun, it's very joyful, very it's no
guns. Okay, it's gonna say that out loud, no guns. Guns
are stupid. Yeah, free order DLC guns. And yet and yet so
much explosions, very very joyful, fun explosions. So we've had a lot
of people exploding, building big sets of characters and blowing them up, which
is the sort of core of the game. And uh wait, a Sun
came by today and play the game and drew a Last Guardian in our guest
book, which was a big, big win for us. So no matter
what else happens, we got a Last Guardian in our guest book. And
so we're super psychy cool shows going pretty well. Yeah, yeah, exactly
two more days to go. Two more days. I mean, what else
could happen? Maybe maybe you know, someone amazing will come by and try
to draw like a like a shitty version of the Last Guardian. It will
be like, oh no, we're maybe now everyone will come through and try
to draw a different We already have one of those dress something. It could
be a thing. No, it was really honestly, we were blown away.
We're tiny, We're just twelve people, So it's like, you know,
it's a big deal when you get to show it and people say that
it's fun. Yeah. Well, speaking of tiny and joyful three four three,
it's here with Halo five Guardians, which I got a chance to check
out the war Zone mode today, and then you're showing some campaign stuff as
well closed doors. We're talking a bit about campaign, but yeah, I
mean most of the focus is on war Zone. Yeah. Yeah. So
with with war Zone, what led to the kind of the genesis of that
mode? Where did that come from? I mean that was kind of back
on Halo four, we just started talking about what it would be like to
bring different parts of the Halo sandbox into one big multiplayer mode. You know,
like what if you brought Ai I and and massive scale environments and just
sort of smashed it all together. So do you think about bringing AI into
it? It kind of maybe widens the appeal a little bit. It seems
like, you know, like multiplayer shooters, like competitive shooters, You're you're
gonna have people that are just gonna have that impression of just like even if
they do fine, they'd be like, oh, I'm not good enough for
that. I'm I would just be bad. I would bring out my team.
Does this feel like maybe a friendlier way to kind of get some of
those people to try it out? Yeah? I think so. We we
had we had conversations obviously on the show floor with loads of people different types
of player. We we met with a couple of pro gamers today, the
South of Twins. Don't don't Google image search that and uh, they really
because they will show up as the result. Okay, all right, Yeah
they were. They were asking about, you know, how is this going
to work for competitive gamers? Because they're like really serious. I think we
I think it's easy to understand how it's gonna work for casual gamers, right,
yeah, But the pro gamers were actually really curious about it, and
they're like, you know, can I have a role and like a marksman
and be like hyper hyper accurate pro gamer in this and the answers, yes,
everyone can do something. And if you're a really crappy gamer at the
other end of the spectrum like me, like you can literally just runner the
periphery, scoring points for your team and the game always tells you to go
do something useful, so you can't. You really can't do it wrong.
I mean your team can, but as an individual, you're always doing something
that's contributing. So it would still make sense like there's still a role for
a player if they just gotta want to go farm AI. Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean we've got we've got bosses that appear around the map at different
points in the in the match, and they can contribute, you know,
pretty handily to to your team score. So it's kind of some mobile influences
that came in there. And then you know, just more than one map
though, right, I mean you're not not that much of a MOBI.
Yeah, okay, okay. You know what's interesting is actually that my almost
PhD is an AI dynamic difficulty adjustment for games. So when a long time
ago, before I was a gamely delver, I was an AMI programmer,
and yeah, I built a mod for Half Life that adjusted the difficulties.
It's such a shame your companies, no, just eleven people, But I
love that stuff. I think it's really great when you see technology really influencing
the way that a game can be played. I think the way that I've
ended up moving in my own career has been investing in creative systems and physics
and being able to kind of exploit AI as a behavior system that then you
play with, like in the SIMS for example, which I worked on.
But I really really love building reactive systems and like a lot of the stuff
that I worked on when I was in graduate school was about building stacks and
behaviors that would allow you to sort of experience a space differently depending on your
level of skill, which I think is it's a really hard problem. It's
hard to do well, especially for competitive gamers or people that really think of
themselves as being really good at games. I did a lot of human subject
studies with my thesis, and people that really good at games were insulted when
I tell them the game was adjusted, whereas people that were not so great,
we're like, hey, that's pretty awesome, you know, So there
is a point of pride. I like knowing, you know, I don't
want the game to go easy on me, or I don't want to feel
like I'm not really competing with the system, or I don't want to feel
like the system is cheating. And you can't get that just right where people
can't tell what that's happening. It's it's programmers. Programmers are like athletes as
well, and that they're just hyper competitive to almost a fault where they and
you know this with with pro athletes, they just gamble on anything they don't
like literally because they just want to be a person and it's not by the
money and an elphin gambling for fake stakes. Yeah, and we get that
with programmers as well, where they're going to get more satisfaction out of either
taking down a boss really fast or more importantly taking down the other players.
And the cool thing about the motive that you can choose to do whichever you
like, Ryan, And so yeah, I know the you definitely like you
know, hear about like fighting game players that are like a betting each other
on like uo claw machines and stuff, and it's like, no, I
don't know, that's not actually gambling special way they're meant to rip you off
and if you find out the exploit, then great, we'll get a bunch
of stuffed animals and everybody wins. But like, why would you go down
that that rabbit hole that far dynamic? AI? Is that something that factors
into your work? These days or is it something that you know. Yeah,
Actually, when we when we look at the landscape of what tom,
I think one of the things that we're really interested in is building a world
in which every character has a special ability and a special behavior that they can
execute, but that you know, when you're not playing with them, they
just kind of pick them around and do their thing, and they're interesting enough
just to be in the space with. I think there's really something impelling,
especially when you look at like younger kids, if you put them in front
of something where characters are just kind of moving around having fun, doing their
own thing, there's a moment where they're looking, they're experiencing the system,
they're watching all the characters, and then they start talking to you. They're
like, oh, you know what, I think this is going to happen,
and then this is gonna happen. And then if they can assert control
and move around, it's like the character and then make those two characters I
discovered something really unique, like I made this character do this with this other
character, and that was really cool. And like if you look at games
like like you know, Animal Crossing or even Bannana stuff like that, that
is the thrill of you know, exploring that system and kind of you don't
think about it as a computer simulation when you're that age, you think of
it as magic. Like I remember playing Mule and thinking like that's it,
Like that is the coolest thing I've ever seen, Like I just wanted to
philosophize and think about and it's just right, and like to be able to
play it with someone else and to to sort of barter and talk and then
no, it was a real person. But then also the computer and you're
just like this is so cool. And when you're that small to look into
the game and see those behaviors, it's it just seems like no one programmed
it. You don't think about the you know, the man months and the
you know, the assets coming from China and all the stuff. You know,
you just you look at it. It's magic. And to be able
to deliver that to people, as I mean, that's the magic of being
people. People think that the challenge is to make them smart, Like it
would be really easy to make an AI it's really smart and can beat you
all the time. It's really trivial. In fact, making an AI that's
believably dumb or believably imperfect. It's maybe a better way to say we're like
our marines in the base where like they're looking around because they're like literally distracted
rather than perfectly focused on the tesk end. There's weird little things that you
don't think about until you see the work that goes into it. So when
you're when you're programming, kind of you know, like AI and a multiplayer
setting is gonna you know, act a little bit differently than kind of you
know, your your campaign AI and stuff like that. You know, we
saw like a you know, Killer Instinct has its shadow system where it's kind
of like learning from player inputs and trying to recreate that sort of thing.
Other games are kind of done something similar Drive Autar exactly. Like is there
any room for that you think in a game like Hale. I'm not saying
like, hey, is this in a Halo five, but I mean,
you know, when you look at a game like you could be able to
think somebody actually brought this up today where they were trying to get them in
the base to draw get into the car and drive with them because they knew
they can do that in a campaign, right, but it's turned off in
war zone because those Marines are doing a job, like your job is not
to go on a jolly ride around this this this landscape. So but I
mean it's something that could happen in the future. But yeah, I mean
one of the challenges that we've been sort of wrestling with with Halo five is
we have on the campaign side, we have like this this dynamic AI system
that supports you because you've you've got to drop in, drop out cooperative place,
and we want AI that's going to be there with you when you're playing
solo. But then when your friends come in, they take over, and
then they leave, the AI takes back over. But you want it to
feel like they're present, but they can't do all the work for you,
so they have to feel effective enough, and like you have these contextual commands
where you can say, go and attack this target, or go and grab
this weapon, or go and take this vehicle, and you want them to
react when when you're a player, you're asserting agency. You want them to
you know, yeah, now go do that thing I told you to do,
be effective in doing it. But the rest of the time, I
mean, I want to feel like I'm the star as the player and so
it's finding that that balance of intelligence and that imperfection and framemation that really I
mean, I think when I think about kind of the past of Halo,
you know, you think about kind of that that loan, and you think
about the Master Chief as primarily working alone, like yeah, you can get
the Marines jumping on the tank, like they'll come with you, they'll do
stuff, but you're you're doing it and having the squad and having those tactics
seems like such a huge change, is it? Is it a really dramatic
shift so far? Like are you worried about getting too far away from some
of the elements of previous Halo games with that? And I think, yeah,
I mean, of course, but they I think if you if you
played a lot of Halo co op in the past, you'll know that that's
the most fun you ever having Campai and it just days. Even people you
want to do it in a solitary way, they know intellectually they're going to
have more fun with with people they know. And I think, so,
I think, and Josh can elabrate this. The trick was getting those other
three characters to behave like your friends when your friends aren't there and in meaningful
ways. Yeah, I mean you want them to feel like they're alive and
with you in the experience. But yeah, I think that the social experience
of playing games together with other people is something that is just, you know,
unbeatable, And like Robin was saying, like when you're playing with the
systems and seeing how they react, I think that's for me, that's what
always drew me to games, Like as a kid, Yeah, I went
through that process of learning and sort of poking the system. Oh I made
it do that, And I think that's what's just magical about the medium most.
Yeah, I felt I felt a lot about this, Like I'm a
huge fan of xcom. Like the first xcoun was just like for me was
just so mind blowing and like the idea that I could play a scenario and
play it over and over and I'd try to get it perfect and I'd think
about all the angles and then occasionally the system would throw a little bit of
a randomness in and you'd be like, oh, yeah, I know they
put this guy here, and they put this guy there, And for me,
that the the immersiveness of just being really in that moment and like,
Okay, this is the moment. I've got a plan exactly how many moves
I'm gonna make. I gotta move three steps forward and then one to the
left, and then I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna check, I'm gonna
save a little bit of energy just in case there's a name. Oh no,
And then you get blasted and your guy goes crazy and he starts shooting
all your other You just take that last risk and you're just like it'll be
fine. And that sense of being able to kind of roll and then fail
against the system and to know when I actually I can remember when I realized
like I had a conversation with Well right about the Sims at an AI conference
there was a robotics conference in like nineteen ninety nine or something at Stanford and
realizing that that was his brain that I was playing against in sim City.
And then the Sims was like that is fucking awesome, Like that is like
sid Meyer, like that's just like I don't even want to know what you
have to eat and like how many push ups you have to do every morning
to have that brain because I know I don't have it, but to be
able to play against that kind of a mind and then have that stimulated over
and over. It's it's fascinating to me. I'm a huge AI nerd.
I've watched every AI movie that there is, Like, I've read all the
AI science fiction. Like I'm just a nut about it, and I believe
that that is really there's a magic there at some point when you get a
system to a place where you can't predict what it's going to do, that
is just it's it's compelling and it's also really scary. And then sometimes just
seeing you know, just interlocking systems operating away you didn't and maybe initially expect
that they could. Yeah, genuine surprise. I mean, isn't that the
definition of what a child is? You know, just a bunch of systems
that suddenly generate novel behavior, Like it's the dream, you know. I
don't know if you saw Xmack and them as a big fan, but I
totally want to see it's really it is awesome. I've I've heard a lot
of that's great. It's great. I mean, I mean, I mean,
maybe I don't know, moon also amazing, but like this idea that
you could build a machine that could fall in love with a person and then
protect a person to the point that it would, you know, end its
own life in order to protect another human like I do. It's just a
concept. Just generally speaking, it's a concept, but I really, I
really believe that that is that is something. I mean games games are one
of I think they're one of the things that are on the forefront of building
expressive machines because we're building routines and behaviors into these into these games that are
expressive in a way that a lot of our machines are not. We you
know, we worked with we worked the Windows Phone team on Kurtana the and
and they we were you know, I think that you know, Apple made
series super efficient and awesome and tries to be like inoffensive and the Kortana guys
like kind of very because we were talking about making her like Kurtana and what,
well, what is Quartana like like? Well, the reason you're engaged
with her even in storytelling is she has a personality. You don't have to
like it, right, but it's it becomes convincing maybe because you don't like
little bits of it, and so I think we we convince them to loosen
it up a little bit so that she doesn't always give you the polite answer.
She'll always give you the best answer, but like it doesn't have to
be polite, and she can get she can make fun of you and stuff,
and they have a real personality and it just helps you engage with the
machine. And I think that's where I think that's where that technology is all
headed. Let's as much as I want a robotic servant to do all my
bidding, like I'm not gonna feel anything about that thing unless it has a
real persona. And and that means again you're back to imperfection because people are
imperfect. I still run into situations where I feel it's it's the problem with
a lot of the newer technology and and it's we're creating all this stuff and
then everyone is afraid to use it because they think it makes them look stupid
or or you know, like I still feel silly talking to me. Yeah
it's I don't know. I mean, hey, I can side talk with
the best. I actually just found a prototype end gate. I have a
I have a weirdly huge collection of end gags game. I have tons of
that. I think I have so many of them, was like, here's
like twenty more copies of this thing, but just please the gis mom doo
same way of course. Yeah, but it's it's that feeling of just like
I, you know, I can just and and I don't use the connected
voice stuff as much as I used to on the Xbox I dude, like
it makes you look silly. Well, I feel like it's it's one of
those things where ice cold efficiency. It's often faster for me to just grab
the controller and hit a I can't know because I'm on the floor and it's
a beer on my belly and I can't I'm too lazy to channel. So
it's perfect for that lifestyle. But I think I think when it gets it
right, like like I remember the first time when I set up the Xbox
One and I can just say you know, Xbox on, you know,
and and have it just respond and and so that's like those are the last
commands that I use now, is Xbox on and logging myself in. Yeah,
because that's something I can do like, hey, I'm like taking my
jacket off, or like I need to get I need to watch some TV,
and you just I'm like doing other stuff. But then once I'm like
actually engaging with it, it's almost all controller at that point. You know,
actually there was something that like in Moon in the way that they characterized
the robot character. They used the emoticon to express the character's sense of self,
and so you know, the character would be talking to the robot,
and the robot would say something in a really measured voice, and then you'd
get the little column you know, like you know, smiley face. And
it was like, very clever because my experience of that is that it's on
the other side of a chat, so I associates and so when you see
that in the film, you go, oh, right, that's a person
on the other side. It's not a robot, it's a person. And
I think one of the things that makes robot or intelligent programs easier to talk
to is that sense of there being someone on either side. If you just
walk into an open room and say, you know, Xbox on or you
know, open door or whatever, you're just speaking into a random empty space,
right, But if you're having a one on one with something that even
just a little bit of data, a little bit of data coming back at
you, it really does make a big difference. And I think we're going
to see that it doesn't take a lot of animatronics and heavy animation and a
big rendered character on the other side, it's like, would you like to
order a plane ticket? You don't need that, you just need a little
bit of intelligence on the other side of the job. And I get I
get Jeff's discomfort with like just talking to the Xbox for example, and my
girlfriend moved in not the long go. So now that there's some there's someone.
I mean, it's not it's not judging. At some point it becomes
like a are you talking to me? No, No, I was talking
to the Xbox. But that one I think part of it is it doesn't
respond, so you're like barking orders into into the vacuum. And which is
why I think sometimes your most magical tech moments where you feel like Blade Runner
are like when you're talking to Kurtana or Siri and they respond and they give
you the information and you're then having a conversation, and sometimes that feels like
sci fi movie right now, So I think five years from that, it's
going to be ludicrous to not be able to talk to a lot of objects.
Yeah, and not just I have Alexa. That the Amazon Speaker thing,
that thing's incredible because I mean not just it's kind still really dumb,
and they know that, and they're making it better every day. They're doing
a really good job of kind of updating it. But the fact that I
can say something, I mean five rooms away and that microphone still catches it
perfectly is really incredible. And that so that's not just about AI, that's
just about it's microphone technology. Yeah. Yeah, I know. When I
was doing my thesis and I was working in robotics and stuff, I think
one of the things that was so frustrating at that time was that robots are
really slow, they're really big, the batter technology was crap, like it's
a lot of just the physical things of building robots was really painful. And
now it's actually not so bad. You can everything has gotten a lot smaller.
The power, the power profile of things is much smaller, the embeddedness
of things is much more. It's just much more pervasive. And like I
mean, I rented a fancy jeep, you know, because I had to
bring a bunch of stuff to the convention center for the booth. And the
other day we were driving, I said, oh, I think we need
to turn the lights on, and the lights just turned on, I was
like, oh, I think I just did that with my voice, Like
that's so weird, Like listening to us, that's always the scariest thing.
It's like when you don't know that something like that is there and you're like,
oh did I Oh what else could I have done? And if it
but this weird thing, like if it didn't respond, you don't know if
that's really what happened. But if the jeep had said, hey, I
turned your lights on for you, that you're welcome, like you like you,
I think you do. As humans need that response in that that engagement
and that I think it would need to say ten points lights on, you
win, and then I waiting. I think a lot a lot of you
know, interacting with technology is going to require kind of changes in social conventions,
Like people are just gonna have to become more comfortable. I mean like
this one. Yeah, yeah, well there's I mean, I think back
to ten plus years ago. I it's probably ten years ago. I went
to Japan, and I remember going over there and seeing everybody with their face
and their mobile phone everywhere phone though not like a smart restaurant's train everywhere.
Everyone was just buried in their mobile phone, completely immersing their own world.
And I was shocked, and I was like, this is never going to
happen in America million years. Yeah, and how we are today and it's
been you know, years and years since we're doing exactly that. And it's
just a total shift in the way that we interacted. Because I saw a
Banksy cartoon. It was just a sun Tans twenty fifteen. It was all
these kids walking out to get into the water in their trunks and that just
had like like a white spot where there were two hands in a big square
chest laying on the beach. But like you know, but it's also gives
you access to like literally every single piece of information there's ever been. Like
kids, kids are growing up now and they're like, I need to know
an obscure effect about an obscure thing and seconds away, and that's crazy.
I would have to go on a trip and get on a bus and go
to a library and they get actually, it's I need to know how babies
are made. I think that's what the show. Yeah, I mean,
kids pretty straightforward. Yeah, it's gross, but it's horrific really. I
mean, I you know, when I was a kid, we had an
encyclopedia. Back in my day, we had said of encyclopedias, and at
some point my mom had just started using it a soft crossword puzzle. Yeah,
I wasn't doing my whole work anyway, but yeah, you know the
very nature of that. But yeah, in terms of just like you know,
society and technology, you know, think about Bluetooth headsets and or you
know, the inner into your pieces and how that is pretty close to the
Star Trek dream of just like let's talk into the ether to someone else.
But everyone on the street doing that looks like they're out of their damn minds.
Like the interface isn't right, you know, and and like having to
fix those things too. You know, it seems like it's more than just
talking to computers. It's going to be every the way we interact with each
other too. But we get it, we get it. Really addicted to
the information, So you get dicted to the encyclopedia information like knowing where babies
come from. You get really addicted to knowing where babies come from. Things
then Internet, but the but you also just get addicted to knowing like where
where is my mom? Where is what's happening with the dog? And like
justus reams and reams of garbage and good information. But we're I think we're
really addicted to it now. And I always complain when people are on the
fine I do it myself all the time. It's like, oh, Email,
I have to do something, and it's so Yeah, that notion of
presence is really hard to get at. I went to a talk that Brian
Eno gave in here actually in La Area a couple of years ago, and
he was talking about the fact that we time travel every time we walk down
the street. When we're walking down the street, we see a person coming
towards us. Like let's say the person is wearing like a white T shirt
with like cutoff sleeves and a leather jacket with a ton of studs. Yeah
exactly, you know, and like they got a bunch of face piercings and
stuff. That as you're walking towards that person and you see them, immediately
in your mind you're simulating all of these things about who they are and what
they listen to and their head said, and like all the stuff and that
in that moment, you're just you're at a time you're having a conversation with
yourself about what that person could be and all the things, are they aggressive
or they're going to punch you in the face when they walk? Buy are
the mad max? Like what the hell? And then you pass them and
then the next person comes on. And that moment, when when I was
sitting there on that talk, I thought, you know, it's really amazing
the amount of time we spend processing these external signals. And like you're saying,
if you have a Bluetooth headset on and there's no hail over your head
or like a dot on your foread or something that says I'm on the phone,
you look like a random person talking out loud to the universe, which
normally means that you're maybe out of institution, needs some kind of medication,
something else going, Maybe something else is in your blood stream that needs to
sort of work itself out. And that lack of interface really is something that
like, this is what it is, like, you know, you're the
way you dress, the way that you walk, the way that you talk
in real life is part of that time travel that we do with each other
every day. I was really blown away by that moment, and I think
that that is it is so hard to build a technology that is at once
transparent to everyone else and useful to someone else. You know, the watch
is a good example, like is it a really good idea to be constantly
looking at your watch for data? Like looking at your watch for the time.
It's like a one second activity looking at your watch to see what was
that email? It's maybe a five to seven second activity. And then it
starts to become well why didn't you just pull out your phone? And then
we have the it's I'm not even like that. I gotta be somewhere.
I know, I'm just looking to Twitter. I was reading something about someone
who's using Apple Watch. I'm a huge fan of Apple products and I don't
have an Apple Watch, but I mean, it's really curious about how it
was going to be received. And that was one of the things that people
kept bringing up is that, yes, it solves the problem of constantly pulling
out your phone, which is really rude. But this is a social signal
that says like, yeah, I gotta go, you babe. Button looks
like amailing me about my something I have to do three days from now,
instantly important. Well, you know, obviously gaming technology changes all the time,
but it feels like, you know, right now we are in the
heart of this huge potential shift with VR with aar the howl that stuff like
it seems like they're just there's going to be a lot of new problems to
solve around that stuff Like, I disagree, you don't think, you know,
I think so. Firstly, I don't think it's a new gaming technology,
so I think it's a new display technology. And don't get me wrong,
I'm actually I think that's actually more important than in new gaming technology because
all of the problems that we try to solve in games, the hardest problems
that we spend time solving AI is an exception, but they're display problems as
well. Right it's how many pixels can we get on this screen? How
realistic can we make this thing? Blah blah blah blah blah. See this
display technology VR comes along and solves a crap ton of those problems. What
it's going to change and you solve the arguments online is how do we interface
with it? That was the number one thing everyone was freaked out about even
at E three, And we already have great solutions. There's the half moon
things, and there's people are going to solve that. So to me,
it's not it's not a new gaming technology because we're doing all the things we
want to do in games period. I want to be I want to be
Uncharted dude, and I want to be Halo dude, and I want to
be pac Man. Like we can do all these things. Girl. Yeah,
but I'm pact girl. I think it's going to reduce problems. I
believe it's Miss pac Man just to stay on brand. Yeah, but I
think it's I think it's going to solve more problems than it creates, which
is a cool problem to have because or it'll have different affordances. I mean,
like the idea, like the idea of presence is really compelling. You
know. I started looking at VRS technology, you know, two three years
ago and got super into it and then have been really focusing on developing ideas
that translate into VR, but also then some really unique concepts for VR that
that amplify the concept of presence, like in Journey, for example, that
one of the core elements of the game was that you needed to be a
small person in the presence of a grandiose landscape. And nothing makes you feel
that way like DR like you can really put yourself inside of a world in
which your scale compared to everything else is minuscule, and the feeling of being
it's not just like you're one guy and a starfighter and there's space, but
literally you're a person walking through you know, money, you know, you're
walking through the desert and it's just an endless expanse and that sense of time
passing, that sense of presence is it's so visceral in VR, Like I'm
a one hundred percent NERD fan, Like I'm a big truck E love it,
want the holidack all that stuff. But what I want isn't games,
it's presence. I want to feel present in a world that I can't be
in right now, but it goes. It's amazing Like Journey. For me,
it was amazing just that sense of like loneliness that I felt and how
much it was able to convey and really like a relatively simplistic experience visually,
but it was just it connected so deeply. You know that you were able
to just feel yeah, as you played through the experience. Well, and
you know, one of the things you've been looking at on one of the
titles that I'm working on, Luna, like we've been thinking a lot about
sort of the world as almost like a small die arama or like a snow
globe that you you discover and then you uncover as you move through it.
And the idea of being able to look into that little sort of toy world,
almost like a playmobile toy world, and put it together and spin it
around and see it change in front of you. This is a thing that
like if I was to try and express that, you know, talking about
a PC game that was going to be on a you know, just a
two D screen or you know, an iPad or a phone, it's a
very different concept when you think about having on a headset or looking down at
a table and seeing that project in front of you, being able to use
a a tool or even reach in with your hand and move things around.
It's just a different kind of experience. It's a it's a different level of
dimension. It's different, a different level of before. You know, there's
exciting too. I think there's going to be really super bizarre applications and this
one's, this one's it's dumb, but it's real. Like you can live
in a shitty, squalid apartment filled with garbage and underpens our helmet and live
in a palatial mansion and everything is gorgeous, and I've got Da Vinci's on
the wall. Like there's weird, dumb crap that people are going to do
with it to improve the quality or the perceived quality of their life. Has
nothing to do with gaming or entertainment at all, And I think it's going
to be amazing and terrifying. Yeah, right, Like you get that switch
of people disappearing. I'm just trying to find I don't want to claim on
the world. This is going to help, So yeah, no, that's
claimed to my apartment. I think that, you know, and then there
ends up being kind of the social situation there of like you know, if
we think about like immersion and that sort of stuff, like you know,
people might have kids, they might have people in the house. You're like,
are you going to be able to put all this stuff on and disappear
for four hours? This is we're talking about HoloLens. That's a crazy part
about dr versus are right, Like, I mean, at least are you
have this mixed reality you can kind of be present in the world that you
inherit that habit with people as well with other people, And then have this
augmented experience, and I think, like, we we have an experience here
at E three. I saw it. It's it's really cool. Yeah,
and you're with people, which is interest thinking about it. You're with other
people the whole time blows my mind. Like going through that experience blows my
mind. And I also did the experience where back back hit Microsoft campus where
they were doing the Mars rover thing where they know they're like, Okay,
we're gonna bring you into a room and now we're going to put you on
the surface of Mars and everything in the room just goes away and you're You're
like you're there on Mars, and it was like a It was just an
amazing experience for me. It completely changed my perspective. And yeah, I
don't know you're bound to technology. It just blows my mind. You're neither
bond to catch nor a special place. It can be any place and it
will solve for the any place problems. And I think that will be that
I think is going to be a challenge for fully immersed VR, right is
how do I how do I how do I move? How do I how
do I not be locked in a place? Yeah, I just I love
the idea of being in a completely different place, Like if I could close
my eyes and open them and be an anchor lot or be at a temple
and Bhutan, you know, be at the top of mount hood, you
know, and just be there and have no one bothering me. Like,
let's just say a book an hour for myself. Maybe I get up a
little bit earlier and I do it before the kids wake up. Like I
love the idea of being able to be completely immersed, headphones on, headset
on, sitting still, breathing, experiencing a place that is so clean and
so open and so mind expanding, and like I do think there is in
my dream. It's like you can turn the shutters on and you're fully in
and you can turn the shutters down and then you can see out, Like
that's not hard to imagine. Are using your example, like you can combine
it with other things like why I'm going to read a book? Why would
I read a book in my squalor underment all the way to comes by?
Just read a book? Yeah, you can kindle a book on moth hood
like seriously, like why do anything normal? You know? Like Miazaki is
like, oh, you know, here's my child home. I've already animated
it because I am that guy that just like drew my childhood into every film
I made, just you know, put that foot on and sit on a
rock. In my childhood, dr was a mistakes. Those those dreams you
know actually speaking of which you know, you know the team that's a little
bit panent, and I think they're working on some stuff right now with dreams.
That's really great. The idea of building a bunch of environments, you
know, that people can move through in that space and be able to crack
those things for the people. I guess that's what has always gotten me really
excited about VR is not just the potential of being alone in it, but
like imagine that you and I are you know, we're friends or relatives.
We live type of telep Yeah, yeah, we're both horses in a herd
and we're running to the ocean and I look to you and you look to
me, and it's like we're both embody this experience. We're having a great
time, or we're just walking along and be holding hands. We can't do
that in real life, but we can do an NBR or do an R
That is so emotionally compelling to me on such a deep level. Yeah,
it's uh, it's gonna be I mean, I guess you'd say this is
any point in history as it's gonna be a really interesting few years here because
we kind of figure this stuff out. It's the future right now. Yeah,
wait, it's a future right now. Wait, it's all right,
Well in the future. We're gonna have another day of coverage. We're gonna
let you guys go. Thanks so much, so much for coming by.
One day survived, Yeah, yeah, two more to go. You guys
just on the floor were kind of giving demos behind closed stuff, so a
little bit an. I am on the floor all the way to left in
South Hawk. Come see me see what Tom? We have cookies? Well,
Tom and cookies. Can I come and draw a dick by on your
Yes, you guess, all right you can. I mean technically you can
draw dick on anything you want. I have. We'll continue to Yeah,
no, no, silent hill, all right, Josh Frankie from three four
three, Thanks you going by, Robin. Phenomenal. Well, Tom's on
the floor with cookies. That's right, and that's gonna do it for day
one of coverage. We made it. We got two more days to go.
We'll be back seven thirty pm tomorrow with a few more Racks, guests
and some beers, and we'll order some more pizzas and do it all over
again. So join us then. Until then, I'm jeff kershman. I
have a great night. I don't know how to wait