Recently, a number of EA-published games have suddenly dissapeared from Valve's leading online game portal. Speaking to Develop, Newell said the reason why is down to "a whole complicated set of issues".

Last month industry sources speculated that the issue hinged on EA's desire to sell DLC directly to Steam customers, as opposed to hosting content through Valve's own portal.

Valve takes a revenue cut from all content sold through Steam, meaning that EA's alleged strategy - if true - could allow EA to circumvent those payments.

Certain EA-published games have been removed from Steam on days that coincide with the release of new DLC. Electronic Arts has also launched the Origin service for PC; something that is categorically a competitor to Steam. Newell suggested the struggle with EA is complicated, but nevertheless reconcilable.

"I don’t think Valve can pick just one thing and think the issue would go away if we fixed that," he said.

"We have to show EA it’s a smart decision to have EA games on Steam, and we’re going to try to show them that," he said.

We may agree to disagree or, perhaps, it may be just a misunderstanding based on an imprecise communication of ideas on my part.

Often when I talk about making the game darker, people assume I mean visually darker. What I really mean, is thematically darker. When I say "sexier" like God of War, I'm speaking figuratively and not talking about actual sexual content and I'm not advocating that it should have been like God of War. Mainly, I'm just saying that we should have been a bit bolder in our decision making and advertising of the game. There seemed to be a constant fear during the development of Titan Quest about upsetting this or that segment of the audience or someone's grandmother. I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it (even though his grandmother had never played a game before in her life). We were building a game with relatively complicated and hardcore gameplay systems but trying to make it thematically and visually appealing to as wide a casual audience as possible. The end result, is that the game was a little more bland and generic in some respects than it should have been and the game world didn't do much to convey a sense of danger.

One example of this would be the mandate that enemies not use language or build anything that would make them seem like they had more than animal intelligence. It was felt by one of the higher-ups that people might feel wrong killing enemies that displayed any obvious intelligence. I guess somehow it is wrong to fight intelligent enemies but okay to slaughter dumb animals? We also weren't originally allowed to have humans die, ever, in the game and no human corpses.

One area where this handicapped us was in the creation of environmental assets that visually demonstrated the enemy's war against humanity. We originally wanted to create enemy siege-works outside Athens but were told that would make the enemies seem too intelligent. It was a struggle just to monster camp assets. All of the ruins were also removed from Greece at one point because someone was afraid that players might not understand why, if the game took place in ancient times, that there would still be ruins... I had to fight for both of these things. Without them, Greece would have just been a featureless expanse of wilderness with occasional human towns that never really appeared to be in any serious danger.

At the same time, we were told that enemies should seem like noble adversaries, not evil or demonic creatures. It was highly controversial when the designs for the Limos and Arachnids were first presented. I had to personally fight to get those approved because they were considered too grotesque and scary looking even though they were based on actually mythology. Undead and the Spirit Mastery were also a struggle to get in the game. I was told that Spirit Mastery was too "Necromancery and evil". We managed to push a few more things like that through over the course of development but it was always frowned upon.

Basically, my belief is that Titan Quest never had as much style and character as it could have because we were afraid to do anything even remotely controversial. When I first designed the skill masteries, they were all based on Olympian gods, with skills modeled after the powers or attributes associated with different gods in mythology. This was rejected because it was potentially too religious and people might not want to feel like they were worshiping mythological gods to receive their powers.

We ended up with a game set in Greek mythology that barely contained any actual mythology other than the inspiration for some of the monsters and dialog on peripheral story-teller NPCs stuck off to the side in the towns. The first quest I put in the game, when we were prototyping it for THQ was modeled after one of the 12 labors of Heracles. The Erymanthian Board was terrorizing a town and the hunters they sent after it hadn't returned. You had to ascend mount Erymanthos, discover the wreckage of the hunter's camp, and then continue on to the snow-capped summit to battle the monstrous board. Of course, I was told we couldn't have snow on the summit because people might not realize it snowed in Greece and then later the whole quest vanished and was replaced by generic crap like retrieving a dowry ring so some chick can get married while monsters are overrunning the world.

So, this is where I'm coming from. I don't think the game needed to be all low-light environments or contain sex mini-games. When I talk about the difference between the TQ and TQ:IT box art, I'm talking about the difference between THQ hiring an outside marketing company to generate box art out of generic assets (ever look at the quality of the temples and stuff in the background?) vs. letting our artists design our own box art. The original box art we submitted for TQ was drawn up by our concept artist, featured a hydra that looked like the one in-game, had a far more interesting composition and better use of color. I think Titan Quest just needed more artistic freedom and personality so that something more unique and exciting could have been created in-game and conveyed by our marketing materials.

Of course, I'm probably also looking at this from the overly critical perspective of a developer evaluating their own work.

It’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod.

Hi Lars! What was the initial design goal you and the team set for Battlefield 3 multiplayer?

-- We thought a lot about Battlefield 2 and how Battlefield 3 would relate to it. The mindset at DICE during the development of Battlefield 2 was pretty much: “Play the game our way, or play something else”. Now, we have made a conscious effort to reverse that mentality. The goal with Battlefield 3 is to offer a vast variety of gameplay experiences and to be inviting to everyone. We’re not telling you how to play the game. You choose.

How will that be apparent in Battlefield 3?

-- Part of it is in the variety of game modes and the types of environments you can play in -- from the wide open battlefields that people learned to love in Battlefield 2, to the urban gritty maps with their tighter gameplay focus. Combining these two elements and adding destruction and our social Battlelog hub in the same package is something I believe no one else is capable of – and that just makes it doubly entertaining for me to deliver on!

Where did the "play our way" mentality come from and how did the change come about?

-- I think it emanated from the pride in the unique game modes we created at DICE, like Conquest and Rush. We’re still super proud of them, but going into Battlefield 3 we had a frank discussion about our mindset. We discussed the strengths of Battlefield and ended up with a lot of interesting questions. Does teamplay have to be squad based, or can it be in a more general sense of playing together? Am I less of a gamer if I don’t want to play in squads? If I want Team Deathmatch? If I want infantry only gameplay? That discussion really was an eye-opener and has changed how we view ourselves and what we set out to do with Battlefield 3.

Battlefield 3 is going to be our best Battlefield yet. The Frostbite 2 game engine not only lets us build spectacular multiplayer maps – it also lets us populate those maps with wildly differing kinds of environments. The classic Battlefield multiplayer map would be an open type terrain, fit for tanks, helicopters, and other vehicles to take part in the action. Now, we will take the fight to dense urban environments as well, painting a stark contrast to the more open rural gameplay.

At E3 this year, we brought the Rush mode map Operation Métro for visitors to play hands-on. In many ways, this map illustrates our multiplayer design philosophy for Battlefield 3. Operation Métro starts out in a lush, rolling park outside of the Paris city center. As the attackers push forward and take out the two enemy installations, this is when a normal multiplayer mode in a normal game would end. In Battlefield 3, this is just the beginning of a much larger journey; a journey taking you through a number of distinct and varying environments, each tasking you to re-evaluate your combat tactics and loadouts on the go.

Does Take-Two own the intellectual property surrounding Duke? Could you spin that out into not just new games, but movies and TV?

We don’t really talk about it in detail but you will see future Duke IP coming from this company.

Part of it is the economic opportunities that interact with entertainment are so huge. Part of it is that we are very creative folks in control. Part of it is we don’t want to ever be in the position of dumping something down just to make another buck. If we can take some of our intellectual property and bring it to another medium in an extraordinary high quality way, that delights consumers and represents an interesting commercial opportunity for us, we will. We have certainly considered doing that with BioShock and with other titles. So far we haven’t brought anything to market, but stay tuned. Do you see 2K and Take-Two producing more titles for Nintendo’s Wii U console? Are Rockstar games going to come out for that?

We’ll see. We are looking at it seriously and at the relationship with Nintendo. We have supported the Wii and it has worked for us. We have done Carnival Games for the Wii. They support the platform and they were pretty excited about what they have seen. It will not be driven by me pounding the table saying do it, it will be driven by economic opportunity and creative opportunity.

PCG: If you were to buy a graphics card right now, what would you get?

John Carmack: Let me caution this by saying that this is not necessarily a benchmarked result. We’ve had closer relationships with Nvidia over the years, and my systems have had Nvidia cards in them for generations. We have more personal ties with Nvidia. As I understand it, ATI/AMD cards are winning a lot of the benchmarks right now for when you straight-out make synthetic benchmarks for things like that, but our games do get more hands-on polish time on the Nvidia side of things.

Nvidia does have a stronger dev-relations team. I can always drop an email for an obscure question. So its more of a socio-cultural decision there rather than a raw 'Which hardware is better.' Although that does feed back into it, when you’ve got the dev-relation team that is deeply intertwined with the development studio. That tends to make your hardware, in some cases, come out better than what it truly is, because it’s got more of the software side behind it.

You almost can’t make a bad decision with graphics cards nowadays. Any of the add-in cards from AMD or Nvidia are all insanely powerful. The only thing that’s still lacking—and it’s changing—is the integrated graphics parts. Rage executes on an Intel integrated graphics part, but it isn’t something you’d want to run it on right now. But even that’s going to be changing with the upcoming generations of things.

I mean, the latest integrated graphics parts probably are more powerful in many ways than the consoles. If they gave us the same low-level of access, coupled with the much more powerful CPUs, we could do good stuff there. Of course, that’s the worrisome large-scale industry dynamic there, where as integrated parts become “good enough,” it’s got to make life really scary for Nvidia on there. If it went that way to its logical conclusion, where Intel parts were good enough and Nvidia was pinched enough not to be able to do the continuous R&D, that would be an unfortunate thing for the industry.

PCGH: Will the renderer of the PC version of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood support DX11? If the PC version will be developed without DX11 support, what are the reasons to do so? Are there existing plans to patch in DX11 support later?

David Coulombe: All iterations of AC were developed with DX9. On AC1 we experimented with DX10 but the benefits were not quite there. Vista had just been released and drivers were not mature yet so it wasn't as great as we would've liked.
On AC2 and ACB we decided to concentrate our efforts on DX9. Nevertheless we are quite happy with the visual results. We manage to visually impress the players and give them a great gaming experience. In the end, that's what matters most!

When Warner Bros. picked up Midway, it really only wanted the Mortal Kombat studio and back-burnered everything else, right? Were other teams fighting for consideration, and were you showing Hero around, trying to sell it off?

CS: Early on there was no known buyer for Midway. Lots of IP got shown to lots of publishers. All the IP was for sale. Eventually, my understanding is Warner Bros. bought most of it, but not all. This was a huge shock to all of us -- besides losing your jobs, it is like a friend died. Many of us had two years of eating and sleeping this game. Not sure if it is hope or denial, but you really try hard to keep anything of a team together.

Right away, you start having "offline" communications with the whole team, with a team email distribution list through personal email instead of corporate, giving them updates on how you are still trying to sell this game that we all fell in love with, but it is really hard -- they all need jobs, many have families, they can't just hang out in limbo, waiting.

It is pretty crazy how even after getting let go... how much the whole team was still engaged and wanted to make this game more than anything. Looking back now, it is pretty amazing we have so many of the Hero team working with us now at Phosphor, even though it took us over a year after the layoff to get a physical studio.

Could you take any of it with you?

CS: What we're doing now is, I mean -- we just totally started over. We don't have any connection to the old codebase, story, assets, whatever. What we have is the very cool idea that create-a-player [concept of Hero's central feature] is this really awesome opportunity to change your character and your abilities to whatever you want them to be.

It's crazy, because after you have that power... you get so used to that idea that when you see other games, you're like, "I wish I could just do this or that, I wish I had this other kind of skill."

When Develop asked Muzyka what disappointed him the most about the industry today, he flipped things around and said that it was bad that the industry is so good. "There's too many games released today," Muzyka replied. "It's very, very busy, it makes it very hard as a player to keep up."

"For us, we have to play our games, play competitor's games, play other relevant games, and play the handful of games we just really want to play more of and finish," he continued. "I try and play two-or three hours a night, but that's hard and it's not enough."

I couldn't agree more. The industry is really being hard on everybody in the way that it's putting out too many games that are worth playing. We now not only have major console releases to follow, but smaller (and sometimes not-so-small) handheld titles to juggle along with purely digital games on XBLA/PSN and cellphones. If the industry were to release another platform with even more first and third-party content, I just don't know what I'd do.

On the other hand, what does Muzyka like most about the industry? "All the great games," he says. Very diplomatic. Fellow BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk feels the same way, adding: "There's not really too much repetition; there's just a lot of really good experiences." So why do these two want to release a game that threatens to suck up even more of our time? How very cruel.

GR: Okay, what about this. We already played a mission in Brotherhood where there’s a brief co-op (with AI) bit of platforming with Lucy. In a later Assassin’s Creed, might a separate player control her?

PP: I think eventually there will definitely be co-op in the brand. For this one, we focused first and foremost on the validation for multiplayer – and the templar angle was interesting. In campaign, co-op comes with a lot of challenge. At GDC the Saint’s Row guys were like: ‘if you want your game to have co-op – especially in a sandbox – you need to build it from the ground up.’ They’re right – it’s a couple of years of turnaround to make sure co-op would work. With Brotherhood we were expanding the brand, but we also have the quiet confidence that we’re successful enough to take our time. That’s super liberating – we have great ideas, but we can put some of them on the backburner for the time being then – next time round – revisit some of those old ideas.

1UP: You've stated that co-op play will be a big part of the sequel. How has it been working on co-op design and what are the challenges you've faced?

LH: Yeah, we're really excited about online co-op and we're keen to share the love. In Trine 2, everyone can experience the co-op fun -- or inadvertent mayhem as it may sometimes be, especially with three players. The co-op works on a drop-in/drop-out basis, and you can switch between single-player and co-op on the fly, so it's completely hassle-free, too. And of course, just to be perfectly clear, Trine 2 will have both online and offline co-op, so the couch is still a good option if you want to make sure your friends will face the consequences of their misbehavior.

The main challenge with co-op is in level design. Levels need to support co-op in addition to single-player and any number of characters on screen at once. And by support, I mean that the levels and the gameplay must be fun in both single-player and co-op. Luckily, I'm happy to say that our level designers have done a fantastic job so far and Trine 2 is going to be enjoyable for all players, no matter how many are playing. It's so fun that I'm spewing out marketing speak with ease, that's telling something!

What's great about the levels and the puzzles is that they support a great number of "solutions": there's no one way of doing things, getting past obstacles and so on. You always have multiple choices, even in single-player. Co-op adds another layer of possibilities and that's going to provide some nice replay value too.

We also wanted to make sure that every character has something fun to do at all times but the solution is actually the same: making sure that each puzzle and situation is possible to solve with any character. Of course some solutions are easier and some tougher, and the characters' different abilities play into this as well, but overall there's a lot more depth and even some complexity to the puzzles in Trine 2. We want to keep the player moving forward at a reasonable pace, though, and the almost limitless physics-based solutions certainly help at that. It will be very interesting to see what kind of cool solutions players invent in Trine 2 -- I bet we'll be surprised more than a few times by tricks that we hadn't even thought of!