How do you deal with the hardcore fanbase - that is, in development, how do you balance the need to be true to the series to the point where you are satisfying those people, but not to the exclusion of those who don't live and breathe Fallout?

PH: I think, ultimately, it comes from us having been in this space for a while, and kind of - you know, I mean, we hear this a lot with The Elder Scrolls. You know, with the folks that were around in 1994, when Arena came out, versus the folks that showed up in 2005 because they were interested in Oblivion. And it gets back to listening to what people have to say, and understanding not only what it is they want, but also sort of the root of what their concerns are.

I think that we do have a pretty good understanding what all of the different sections of our fan base are interested in, but it comes back to the thing of, you know, gotta make the game that we think is the best. Certainly, try and take those things into consideration, but there are people in the office who spend 14, 16, 18 hours a day making this game, and sometimes, if you're going to break a tie, you go with our instincts.

The people who know everything about it are the folks who know - you know, you can't make a game with a committee of three thousand, or three hundred thousand. Just, nothing would ever get done. Somebody has got to break the tie and say, "This is what's best for the game."

I think we've tried to make that our approach, and we've tried to do the best that we can to listen to all the segments of our fan base, and give them what they want, and I hope that all of them will give the game a shot, and it will be something that they'll enjoy.

IGN: What kind of effect do you think the splitting of the franchise's name from its characters and plot have had / will have? As a consumer who doesn't follow these kinds of articles, which title do you think they'll pick from a store shelf (or download)--the game that is, according to the title, the sequel to an excellent first-person shooter, or something called Project Origin?

John Mulkey: Let's break it down. Monolith created F.E.A.R. People liked it. VUG [Vivendi Universal Games] and Monolith split up with VUG taking ownership of the name and Monolith owning everything else to do with the franchise. VUG wants to expand on series, so they contract out the development of a couple of expansion packs that don't pan out that well. Now they are talking about creating "F.E.A.R. 2" but they cannot legally base it on anything to do with the first game... and they have to find a developer to do it for them since it will not be Monolith. Meanwhile, you have Monolith, the creators of the original game making a game based on the characters, story and universe they created for the first title, but they cannot use the "F.E.A.R." name.

For my money, I am going with the actual sequel, created by those who created the original... Project Origin developed by Monolith.

IGN: Do you think consumers even look at the developer credits or do you just put a gigantic line of text near the title on the box saying "FROM THE MAKERS OF F.E.A.R."?

John Mulkey: Some do and some don't. I think shooter fans are a little more in touch with the idea of who is behind the titles they like, and wary when the
reins are passed from the actual creators to a new developer. I am sure that our marketing team will make people aware that Project Origin is the sequel to F.E.A.R. developed by the creators of F.E.A.R., but at the end of the day I am less concerned with people understanding the relationship than I am that Project Origin turns out to be a great game that people really enjoy.

BIZ: My last question is going to be about Madden 2009 for the PC. You did say in your blog that you had ideas on how to revitalize the PC for sports games. Can you talk a little about how you can exploit the platform?

Moore: Well, it's disappointing, and as I said, it would be an unpopular decision, but we're running a business. It's been very challenging for us over the past few years. People took some of what I said out of context - 'serious business challenges on the PC.' Well, the sentence actually [says] 'for the sports category on the PC.' And - rightly or wrongly - we've built sports games to take advantage of the plasma televisions, and the new hi-def experiences that people are having in their homes. We've also built them to be very social. So whether it's playing online, or equally likely, two or four of you in the room together, the PC business has just...waned. For every - I don't have the numbers, but for every...do you have the numbers yet?

EA rep David Tinson: I do. So to give you an example... Last year, for every 30 copies on PS2, we'd sell one PC. And that's PS2. We're doing things on the PC in other parts of the world, FIFA Online, FIFA Street Online.

Moore: The bottom line is we've got to bring games to the PC consumer in a different way than we currently are right now, which is a packaged goods model, yeah with online element - but there's got to be deeper online. If that consumer wants to buy sports games and they don't want to play on their televisions - I recognize that. We need to find different and innovate ways to be able to do that. And I need to protect my intellectual property. Piracy's a big issue on the PC. I can't turn a blind eye to the fact that it's very difficult for us...and we lose money making a game. At some point, I have an obligation not to bring out products that lose money.

PC Play: How do you estimate the current state of the PC gaming industry? Some say that it's only a matter of time when it's going to finally die-off, the others say that "the big one" is only getting its comeback pace.
Considering Crysis is a PC-exclusive title, what do you think of its market reception and its future? Skeptics would say that it's pretty risky going PC-exclusive with such a high-profile title.

Cevat Yerli: It is certainly. We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that's the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy. To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.

PC Play: You have confirmed that Crysis is a trilogy, which is a really, really great thing to know. Taking that Crysis is a part of the Microsoft's Games for Windows program, is the "master plan" making Crysis the killer-app of the Games for Windows platform, as Microsoft did once before with Halo for the Xbox, Sony with Metal Gear Solid for PlayStation or Nintendo with Super Mario?

Cevat Yerli: There is not really a master plan. We just designed Crysis as a trilogy, that was the plan. Of course this largely depends on success of Crysis for PC. As with every game or entertainment property, if the commercial success wont suffice, plans have to be revisited.

PC Play:You confirmed that it's impossible to make Crysis run on an console, but yet there are constant rumors that it's nearly inevitable. Can you finally give us, our readers, and the industry the final answer on that matter? Is Crysis going to be ported to a console?

Cevat Yerli: Crysis as we have seen is impossible. Crysis would have to be largely changed to bring it to Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. Crysis is designed to be PC Exclusive. Our internal focus is not linked to bring Crysis to consoles.

For the expansion, the tuning was softened up a lot more to make Forged Alliance a lot faster, and make the experimental units easier to build, plus the UI was overhauled. I actually think it's a better game.

I also love adding factions - they're very expensive to make, so nobody likes to do that in our business except me. I'm the first guy that wanted to do it back on TA, but all I could do was add more units. I was really excited to introduce the Seraphim in FA - the only thing stopping me from doing it on any sequel is memory.

I've been told by my engineers that for Supreme Commander 2, I don't have enough memory in a PC with 4GB of RAM to have more factions. I'm like 'that's insane!', so we've got to work that one out. We'll return to the SC universe again, but we'll just have to see when that day is. Maybe when everybody has 64-bit processors...

IGN: What's the performance difference of the CryENGINE on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 compared to the PC? Are you able to tailor the engine to each platform?

Harald Seeley: Yes, we definitely tailor the engine specifically to each platform. More than just the difference in CPU and video hardware capabilities of PCs and consoles is at play here. So are the much smaller memory budgets we must work with, the lack of a hard disk on some models, and the acceptance requirements of the hardware vendors themselves. All have an effect on how we approach each version of the engine. The surprising thing has been how well the consoles can perform visually, once this tailoring is in place. We expect the final outcome will result in games that look like they're running at high settings, or nearly high settings, on a PC. Actually, we found it as much or more challenging to address the memory limitations of the consoles when converting our current AI system, as we did while converting our rendering engine or physics system, which was not something you might have expected at the start.

IGN: Is it too early to think about CryENGINE 3?

Harald Seeley: Well we're always thinking about it! Technology doesn't stand still, and we must be ready to take maximum advantage of it when it arrives. One of the best things about working here at Crytek is the great relationships we have with so many other leading technology partners, who are working together with us in shaping the direction the future will take. Just as the worldwide appearance of the Internet changed everything about how we viewed the role of computers in our lives in the past, so will real-time 3D visualization change our view once again in the very near future. Nearly every industry will be affected by 3D graphics eventually, and we expect future versions of the CryENGINE to find uses not only in the latest state of the art games, but in many other places in our lives as well.

IGN: So we have to ask, when can we expect to hear what Crytek is working on next, post-Crysis?

Harald Seeley: We understand there is a lot of interest in that topic. But we're not yet at the stage where we can confidently discuss it. Too much depends on the rate of progress our development teams are able to make in the coming months for us to make any announcements, or even really make predictions about the timing of future announcements. On the other hand, one of our licensees, Paleo Entertainment, has now begun to preview some screenshots of their project, Merchants of Brooklyn, running on the CryENGINE 2. What's interesting is how completely different their art direction is from our own photorealistic style here at Crytek, yet how well our engine has allowed them to express their vision, and how terrific it's all starting to look. It clearly demonstrates that choosing the CryENGINE 2 can allow developers to unleash their creativity without limiting them to any particular visual style

GamePro: To Oblivion players, what will Fallout 3 feel like? It's obvious (to us at least) that combat mechanics and design play a much larger role in Fallout 3 than Oblivion.

Todd Howard: The overall game flow feels like Oblivion, in that you make your own character and then explore a huge open world and do whatever you want. The basic gameplay of Fallout 3 is similar, which is one of the reasons we really wanted to do Fallout in the first place. I'd say the amount of action is similar to Oblivion, not more, not less. The basic combat in Fallout 3 may seem more complex then Oblivion's, but at the same time, there is no magic in Fallout 3, so we felt we needed to do as much as we could with the guns and add a nice layer of being able to shoot body parts and feel the effects of a crippled leg and such.

- New plush toys are in the works. TF2 characters will soon be your bedside companions, starting with the Heavy.
- There is presently no Counter-Strike 2, however...
- As I said in my "Valve Bits" article, and as stated again on the show just now, IF they go ahead and start development on a Counter-Strike 2, they are leaning to taking an approach similar to what was done with TF2. Re-evaluate everything but try to stay close to the heart of Counter-Strike.
- That's not to say that CS2 would match TF2's art style.
- Portal 2 is sort of, kind of confirmed (again).
- Kim Swift wishes to explore more of the Aperture Science labs themselves, to provide more of a look at the building.
- Some very impressive Left 4 Dead footage is being shown (we'll have links to the episode once they're live on Gametrailers tomorrow).
- Gabe states that L4D will greatly appeal to fans of Counter-Strike
- A PS3 version of L4D isn't completely ruled out, and may one day be developed.
- Goldrush for TF2 is looking to be a rather massive map, easily the size of Dustbowl with the same texture style.
- Nothing in development for the Wii and that is something Valve really wants to look at.
- Episode 3 is being worked on, in case there was any doubt.

PCGH: When porting for the PC have you thought about integrating support for DirectX 10 into the engine? Will there be a version of Assassin's Creed that will utilize the new Vista API?

Charles Beauchemin: Yes, Assassin's Creed supports DX10 as well as DX9.

PCGH: What are the technical advantages of that API?

Charles Beauchemin: DirectX 10 enables us to make fewer calls to the API to perform the same actions. Therefore, it will be possible for the drivers to make optimizations making the game faster without any change to the game engine. Since most of the DX10 drivers are still young, we can expect a lot of gain to come from the optimization of these drivers.

PCGH: Do you use advanced features of Direct X 10/Shader Model 4 like Geometry Shader, Virtual Texture Management etc.? Can you please give examples how they are utilized? In what way do these features improve or simplify the rendering process?

Charles Beauchemin: No. Most of the porting to DX10 involves optimizations of the existing calls, without any new content.

PCGH: Will the DX 10 visualization differ substantially from the graphics that are rendered with DX 9 hardware? What are the visuals that can only be rendered with shader model 4 hardware? Can you supply us with a visual proof via screenshot too?

Charles Beauchemin: No new content has been added to the DX10 version.

PCGH: How much of a performance hit will the improved optics of DX 10 incur? With all details maxed out is a typical first gen DX 10 card already running at its limits?

Charles Beauchemin: No performance hit occurs, since no improved optics are implemented. However, when running on Vista, DirectX 10 version speed will be much faster than its DirectX 9 counterpart (also running on Vista)

Q: 2007 was a huge year for the gaming industry. The overall quality of the games and the frequency at which they were coming out was something we have not seen in a very long time. What are your thoughts on the big year and what were some of your favorite titles?

Tramell - I think it's good for our business. The gaming industry is expanding beyond every ones expectations at this point. We now see older people playing games, thanks to the Wii. Games aren't just for kids anymore; they are a legitimate form of entertainment now. Games like World of Warcraft, Second Life, Wii Sports, Rockband, Guitar Hero, and Halo3 are breaking sales records and expanding the player base. This is just the beginning. I think we're going to see gaming become the number one form of entertainment some time in the near future.

07' was a really busy year for me but I did get a chance to play a couple of games. I'm half way through Crysis right now. It's shaping up to be a pretty good game so far. Half-life2 ep2 /TF2/Portal were nicely done. Right before my Xb360 red ringed on me I was playing Need for Speed Most Wanted, the best in the NFS series if you ask me. I know that's an old game but I got it for my son and I couldn't put it down ;) Of course I can't forget Wii Sports Bowling. I know everyone with a Wii loves that game.

Q: How have those games impacted Duke Nukem: Forever and/or the quality bar you have been reaching for?

Tramell - We are always keeping track of what the rest of the industry is doing. As artists, we want to try to create the best visuals possible. The guys on the art team look to other artists in the industry, other in-game art, myself and each other to gauge where the quality bar is. We want to be one of the games that other artists in the industry look to for inspiration. Every day the artists are reminded of the level of quality that is expected of them via the "inspiration machine". The inspiration machine is a computer that is set up in the artist area that ONLY displays images of renders and in-game art from games that have defined quality (in that screenshot). It's just a friendly reminder of what the rest of the world is creating with today's tech. No one should develop in a black box.

Q: Do you feel pressure knowing that you are working on such a highly anticipated and iconic title?

Tramell - Yes, there is a massive amount of pressure that goes along with the name. "It is what it is", Right Blaw-Dog? "It's the nature of the beast"…Scanny, can I get a slow clap ;-) (My guys from SOE know what I'm talking about) But what can you do? We are trying to create something that the majority of people will enjoy. We hope the fans appreciate our efforts as much as we appreciate their support.

It was created to support the game, but it was also created with the idea that it would become standalone middleware which was capable of supporting more than one kind of game. MMOs were definitely always figured into the process, but in the rush to get a game out, you always take some shortcuts that later you have to go back and do more thoroughly. That's an ongoing effort, because we have so many MMO licensees, and we have good relationships with them such that we don't want to see a lot of replication of work. We want to make sure that everybody who has a good idea and makes a change to the engine and makes it more MMO-friendly... that that gets shared with the rest of the community. So we foster that kind of interaction between them."

IGN: Are we seeing anything new here at CES 2008 with Space Siege?

Chris Taylor: Well what you're seeing is a game that's much closer to being finished. But what we're trying to do actually is be a little more secretive with our development in terms of not throwing the kimono so far wide open that by the time someone gets the game or by you, as a member of the press, get to play the game you say "oh I've seen so much of this I'm not surprised by how much I'm getting." There's something about taking the shrink wrap off of your game and putting it into your machine and…oh I'm just seeing Supreme Commander on the big screen over there. That's awesome [Chris is looking at a display running game footage at Microsoft's CES booth]...there's something about that impact. It's like in film. You know when trailers go too long and they show you the whole movie, you're sort of disappointed because you've seen it all in this synoptic form. So I think that we're trying to show you just a little bit of the game here at CES this year, and so that when you get it you're going to have some surprises left.

John Comes: What was your inspiration for Demigod? How long have you been kicking around the idea for this game?

A: Bob Berry (Demigod's producer) and I spent a lot of time playing RTS mods. We looked at all the popular ones, like Defense of the Ancients (DotA), Footmen Frenzy and even some tank mod for WarCraft III. Each of the mods circled around the idea of playing as a single hero in a huge battle. That was our starting point.  From there, we combined those ideas with my love for team-based first-person games like Battlefield and Team Fortress, then we added in the principle that we wanted the game to be quick and fun, something you can play for a short time and then quit. The Supreme Commander engine was the final piece of the puzzle because it allows for a fantastic sense of scale. I first got the itch to create a fantasy game with the Supreme Commander engine about a year before we started the concept phase of Demigod. Moving away from the strict RTS model is something I've wanted to do for a long time, and Demigod has given me the freedom to do just that.

John Comes: How did "white boxing" (creating the game with minimal art assets) Demigod in the early stages help shape its design?

A: If you were to look at the original design document, the original maps or play an early version of the game, you wouldn't recognize the game we have today. White boxing gave us a luxury most game makers don't get-we could drastically change the gameplay when something wasn't working without spending any money on redoing art assets. "Find the fun first" was our motto. The first few months were crazy. We ripped out and replaced entire systems over and over again, but each iteration just got better and better. We finally got to the point where the game was an absolute blast to play, and all it was a bunch of white boxes. That's when we knew we really had something special. By the time we ramped up the team, Demigod was already completely playable, had a ballpark balance and people were playing it every day because it's fun. White boxing also gave us an intangible benefit in that everyone on the team could just pick up and play the game-they didn't need to read through a big design doc in order to understand what we were doing.

John Comes: Demigod takes several different genres and combines them into a new experience. Is that the future of gaming?

A: It's hard to say what the future of gaming is, but sticking with the same model over and over again has proven to wear out over time. I do believe there are a lot of in-between-genre areas that we still have to work with. How much of each genre to put in a game is the tricky part. You don't want to alienate your RTS players because it's too RPG-esque and vice versa.

11) John Parks Ubi's Marketing Director said that Far Cry will have a very progressive AI. Could you please give some detail what makes your AI so smart? What are the advantages of your AI routines?

DG: One thing that FC brought forward was AI that were not scripted. There is a lot of shooters out there where if you play a section and quick load back and replay it, AIs will pretty much redo the same thing. They are scripted to react in a constrained manner. Far Cry wanted to let the player use varied strategies so it offered a systemic AI that fed on what was happening in the world to take decision, not what a designer wanted it to do at the time the game environment was built by predicting what the player would do. FC2 pushes further in that direction. Now with an open world game, we need our AI to be even more systemic and we are working at enriching the things it can do in the world. In order to do that, we need to feed our AI with a lot of information on what is happening around them.

Also, the AI in FC2 "lives" in the world, they are not just waiting to be shot at by the player. They have basic needs that they need to satisfy and they go about their business satisfying those needs. Obviously, those needs change according to the time of day or weather: for example most people like to sleep at night. ;-)
12) Your title will not be released before 2008 and by then many players will have changed to Windows Vista and PC hardware that supports the new DirectX 10 API. Will your engine support DX10? If yes, what are the technical advantages of that API?
If there will be no support for Direct X 10 what were your reason to do without?

DG: Yes, Dunia supports DX9 and DX10. DX10 has all sorts of interesting advantages from a developer point of view but in a simplistic manner, among other things, you could say it brings extra performance as the API layer has less overhead then DX9. For the player, it can translate in having more detailed graphics and/or a better frame rate. The impact is not so big that it means games must only support one or the other: it is possible to build a game in a manner where it can run under both APIs with different settings. One thing to note is that as far as the GPU itself is concerned, ultimately the raw power of the card is more important then the API that it is running under. Obviously, a high end DX9 board is still much more powerful then a low end DX10 one.

oatmela: what engine is it using? Not bashing at all, just curious.

Broussard: Unreal. I believe we branched off somewhere around the Unreal 2 time when they added static meshes. Since then we've redone the rendering 100% and it's a fully modern engine.

jimvolk: Now that the game has been through such a long development process and revisions, will it still be a LONG game? or will it be a fairly short experience (ala Prey)? Surely after 9-10 years, we can all hope for a decent length game, and a wide multiplayer experience.

Broussard: The game has not been one continuous game worked on. It's probably re-started 3+ times due to various issues. The current (and last) version is 2004-ish. As for game length we should be similar to competitive games in our genre.

Unleashed: how long does it take for one of your characters/monsters(duke for example) to get modeled/textured and ingame?

Broussard: 6 weeks?

Sturm08: What's your favorite part of the game so far?

Broussard: I like environment puzzles, and blowing the heads and arms off of things.

smacknca: any regrets breaking the long media silence with this teaser? its pretty obvious many people didnt quite get the whole 'this is just a teaser made by some cool folks at 3DR for the holidays and we wanted to share with the world'

Broussard: Gotta start somewhere. No regrets. With our development history if you let regrets bother you, you'd jump off the nearest roof. Onward and upward.

omnova: Is environment interactivity going to be a bullet point in the game's feature list?

Broussard: Big, big, yes.

pyrogen: Will it have over-the-top gibs flying everywhere? You know, the old-fashioned kind with body chunks and blood trails everywhere.

Broussard: Yes. But in a way that makes sense. Shotguns pull limbs off, but not a machine gun or pistol. Explode something or set off a pipe bomb and you can remove limbs that are within splash range and take enough individual damage. But yes, gibs are back.

"I stand behind my work, regardless of where I do it," Gerstmann told Joystiq in an e-mail. "If there was content that I felt I couldn't support, it wouldn't see the light of day." Gerstmann did not comment specifically on the edits made to his text review of Kane & Lynch, or the site's removal of the video review, but he did support the editing process in general. "If factual errors are made, I have no problem owning up to that error, correcting it, nothing that a correction has been made, and feeling like an idiot for making the mistake in the first place," he said.

Gerstmann also directly addressed the somewhat pernicious rumor that he did not complete Kane & Lynch before he finished his review. "A reviewer's Xbox Live Gamercard is rarely a good place to look for answers about how much that reviewer has (or hasn't) played a game," he said. "For the record, I saw both endings in Kane & Lynch before writing about it."

As for his future plans, Gerstmann seems to be keeping his options open. "I'm not really sure what I want to do next," he said. "This whole situation has left me with a lot to think about. While this sort of clean break would be an acceptable time to think about trying game development, I feel like I still have more to say and do on the editorial side of the fence, too."

Surprisingly, the experience doesn't seem to have soured Gerstmann on video game journalism as a whole. "Despite the number of people who are taking these rumors ... to mean that game writing is ethically bankrupt, I don't feel that's the case," he said. "Either way, I'm currently keeping my options open and have been in contact with interesting people on both sides."

Q: Will Black Plague lean more than its predecessor toward horror and adventure?

A: Black Plague will emphasize horror and adventure more than action. We wanted to have some action in Overture, but it didn't turn out quite as we'd envisioned, so we've increased the horror and psychological tricks in Black Plague. There are also more adventure elements, as there are more puzzles and the story is more detailed, In particular, we have more voice acting, which should spice things up a bit.

That said, there will be enough action and monsters to ensure the game isn't a walk in the park! In general, we've tried to minimize how much you're exposed to monsters. You'll still have to sneak around, but instead of having to avoid a lot of free roaming enemies every time you go through an area, you'll only need to survive specific encounters. The game is also more dynamic, meaning the levels are less linear in terms of events and monster placement.

RPS: A trailer for Episode Three was notable by its absence.

DS: We deliberately left that out for a number of reasons. One was we didn't want to dilute the moment of the ending. I think if you'd watched the credits roll and then this high action Episode Three trailer came on, you wouldn't quite feel the same. Another reason was to leave us open on Episode Three. We're going to try and do something pretty ambitious for that project. We don't want to over commit. If you look at the Episode Two trailer that we shipped with Episode One there's some pretty radical difference between what you see there and see in finished game. That's really an artefact of making a trailer for a product that's still in heavy production. You just don't know where you're going to end up.