Welcome to the first of many weekly blog updates! Firstly, I have posted this a day late since it took a bit longer to write than I expected! Anyway this is the place where I sum up all the goings on over the past week, including whats been posted on the blog. The biggest event of the week is the fact that this blog was created, but there are many other topics that need to be covered such as my trip to London to go test out the Xbox One, lets get started!
Whats been posted over the week?
As this is the first week that the blog has been live, most of the blog posts have been introductory to what i'm planning to cover over the coming weeks, such as 'Beginner Game Development Books' that will cover a few books that I recommend to game development beginners/newbies. Each book will be posted in their own blog post, containing all of the vital information they cover, and what I thought of the book.
The first real important and proper blog post that I have posted was yesterday, called 'Introducing Project Emperion'. This is the first in a long series of blog post covering a particular unit on my University course, which is about making a technical game demo throughout the first academic year, and presenting it in March 2014 to peers, lecturers and industry VIPs, who ask intensive questions and give vital feedback. My group have come up with a simple game idea, which we have been discussing in group meetings, which is a 3D Third Person, action adventure game, with the closest game relative being the Zelda games. More details can be found on the blog post.
Xbox One Tour Event, London
Also this week I got to go to the xbox one tour - #xboxonetour event in London on Friday, to get the chance to get my hands on the console and a number of xbox one games a few weeks before the big launch on November the 22nd. This was a brilliantly organized event as it was invite only, therefore only around 50 other gamers were there which meant no queues! Unlike the other gaming related event I attended this year which was gamescom, where a lot of the games were not actually playable like Dead Rising 3, but still had long queues just to attend their presentations.
The games playable at the event included, Forza 5, Kinect Sports Rivals, Fifa 14, Ryse: Son of Rome, Dead Rising 3, Killer Instinct and last but certainly not least Battlefield 4. I played all of the games listed except Killer Instinct as it didn't really interest me that much after playing it at gamescom, but I got to have a good look at it, and I have to say it looks fantastic with great visuals and a buttery smooth high frame rate. Since the limited numbers of people there I got to play each game multiple times, which was fantastic as I was able to get a feel for each game to confirm which ones I will be buying day one. There were also a few concerns which I had, that I hope will be sorted at launch later this month. I will go into more details later.
After a short wait outside and a quick introduction to the event, I got my hands on a xbox one, and first game I had the pleasure of playing was Forza 5. I had already played Forza 5 before at gamescom in Germany earlier in the year, so it was intresting to see if there were any noticeable changes, I was able to play it around 5 times during the event so I was able to completely analyse it. It does seem mostly the same from gamescom except when I looked in the rear view mirror in cockpit view I was able to see some horrendous low res details and object pop ins, that I hope will be sorted by the final build, as they are able to optimize for the final system specifications which were only finalized a few months ago after Microsoft did a last minute CPU upgrade. Other than that the game looked pretty good, with a constant frame rate without any noticeable dips. I hoped that they would be showing off a new range of cars and another one of the race tracks from their gamescom build, since its so close to release date, but no luck.
Since it was first announced and shown off I always had doubts about Cryteks new IP Ryse: Son of Rome, just because it looked more like a cinematic experience with little interaction apart from the occasional button press, and this seems the view of many people over the internet. Well these expectations were well and truly smashed when I got my hands on it, they game looks fantastic and also had a great smooth frame rate throughout my time playing it. The demo I played was one of the game modes which was set in a Roman coliseum with waves of enemy's that you had to put down in a spectacular fashion to both complete the waves and entertain the crowd. The combat definitely reminded me of the sword combat in Assassins Creed and the melee combat in the Batman Arkham series, as its a matter of waiting for an enemy to attack and then hitting the counter button to then inflict damage, once the enemy's get a bit tougher and start using shields etc... you need to start dodging their attacks and using 'B' to roll behind them to preform a fatal slice. The real good looking cinematic part comes in when an enemy is weakened and a skull icon appears above their head, this is a sign that you can preform a finisher move by pressing the right trigger. This is when it gets interesting as it sends the game into slow motion and makes the targeted enemy glow in a certain color corresponding 'A','X','Y' or 'B' colored buttons. I love this way of informing a player what to do, as its simple and effective, unlike in the game play trailer which showed a button icon above the enemy's head. After playing it a few times and getting used to the controls, as this arena level was not a tutorial level, I was able to complete the 'round' of enemy waves. I must also add that each wave also had a sub objective, such as destroy the catapults and enemy spawn points.
I then moved onto the highly anticipated Dead Rising 3. The demo was again very smooth, but I did have some real concerns after watching the live game demonstration of the same level by one of the developers at gamescom as it looked very slow, with constant frame rate drops which were very noticeable. Luckily it seems that all of these issues have been ironed out in this demo build, and I hope its the same in the full game, I suspect the fact the hardware in the console was still changing back then, it would be very hard for developers to optimize it. In the demo I was able to free roam around medium sized map, which included interior scenes as well as outside. I experimented with combining a number of different objects together to create super weapons, and tried out the new technical combination which worked well. Finally I got the chance to play Battlefield 4, but only got one game on it as throughout the day the developers had been updating the game builds, which apparently took 1 hour per console! Therefore only 6 could be setup within the time I was their so 3 v 3 battles were setup. This was the first time I was able to but the console and the controller to the test handling a FPS, which was as expected very good, I was just disappointed that the developers didn't make use of the new rumble trigger in the xbox one's controller. I will say that overall I walked away with good expectations of the xbox one, and have kept my pre-order, but the biggest issue I saw in all of the games I played was the load times, which were very noticeably long. I also saw one of the developers power up a xbox one console which hung on the title splash screen for a good 5 minutes before loading the dashboard. These were beta consoles, but if this is still apparent in the final version, then that could be a serious problem for Microsoft.
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