E3 started today, but with so many of the videogame companies withdrawn from E3, the media circus that used to be E3 is really just a shadow of it's former self; even E-for-All, the $60 version of E3 had a poor turn out last year. So, just where are all the companies headed these days to show off their games to gamers?

Next week is the San Diego Comic Con, which is entirely sold out. With nearly a quarter million people in attendance, there's bound to be some games at the show, and with so many properties crossing over from comics to big and little screens, the likelyhood of having a comics-based game is high.

A month from now is the GenCon in Milwaukee. GenCon is the premiere geeky game convention in North America; focusing on all types of gaming, and in recent years has seen an increasing number of companies showing off their latest fantasy video games.

In August is PAX in Seattle, which one can consider to be the large-scale evolution of a LAN party turned convention, complete with famous speakers, rock concerts and a huge expo floor.

In October is Blizzard's own BlizzCon, which is their own convention to promote Blizzard titles (while charging $100 for admission and a wicked goodie bag).

Companies that have pulled out from E3 include Activision Blizzard, NCSoft, Her Interactive, id Software, Atlus and Foundation 9. Glancing through the Comic Con Exhibitor's list, I see Activision Blizzard there, as well as NCSoft, all of which leads me to suspect that their target is the mass market, not the games industry. In a way, this evolution away from the industry-only events make sense; competing against other media heavyweights only expends energy that could be focused elsewhere, and with most gamers looking online for reviews before they buy, there's little need to hype through the magazines anymore.

When I left Blizzard in '03, Blizzard North had done quite a bit of pre-production work on Diablo III, as well as some protoyping on the 3d-game engine. Today at the Blizzard Invitational in Paris, they announced the release of Diablo III. Since much of the work we had done on Diablo III was concept and prototype work, seeing the development they've done over the last 5 years was very interesting; while some of the concepts we were developing definitely looks like it made it through to the version of the game they displayed, some of the design choices they appear to have made seem counter to the decisions the original Diablo team members would have made had they remained on development of the title -- the most apparent change that I can point to is the appearance of "floating numbers" as seen in the gameplay video -- this was a feature that Blizzard Irvine continually "suggested" during development on Diablo II, which Blizzard North refused to implement -- with development now located within Irvine, the decision to add floating numbers to the game isn't one which surprises me.

One of the design choices which again shows Blizzard Irvine's hand in the changes made is the re-appearance of the Barbarian character class -- the original design documents for Diablo III included a set of all new character classes, with no reappearance of old character classes (our reasons for this was simple -- since we were enhancing and improving the skill system, we didn't want to try and adapt old skills into a new system -- we'd rather create all new skills for the new character classes. The return of the Barbarian class feels like a change that was made after development of the title was moved to Irvine 3 years ago.

One of the reasons why the Barbarian return shocks me so much is that I always felt that the Barbarian character class was the most broken of the classes in Diablo II. The Barbarian's ability to Leap, for instance gave him advantage over other classes which had to walk around the barrier -- it is the showcasing of this skill in the video (during which a bridge crumbles away, leaving no way to cross the gap) which makes me wonder if they have an alternate way for other characters to cross the gap or if all the characters have Leap now.

Of course, going 3D means that a lot of the things that were hard to do with sprites (such as actual armor looks being reflected on the character) is much easier using polygons and textures, as well as real 3d lighting. The use of a physics engine (Havoc, according to the game specs) is also a nice touch.

While I have more or less given up on the PC as a gaming platform, I'm glad to see that Blizzard is still committed to releasing titles that aren't first-person shooters; such a shame that we won't be seeing this title on the shelves for another year or two at the earliest.

One of the problems that I've noticed in game education is that a lot more universities in the United States have been offering degrees in video game design; while some of these programs are in fact very good; my own opinion is that a good portfolio and experience is the best way for a graduate to get a job in the industry, as most of these specialist programs do a poor job of preparing students for the job market. Instead my advice has always been to encourage students to study more traditional fields such as computer science, art/architecture and apply that knowledge in creating games.

Recently David Braben, the chairman of Frontier Developments and campaign spokesman for UK's "Game Up?", said: "The problem is compounded by the quality of so called specialist games degree courses; 95% of video gaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose.

"Without some sort of common standard, like Skillset accreditation, these degrees are a waste of time for all concerned."

Accreditation with Skillset, the sector skills council for creative media, is only offered at 4 of the 81 universities in the UK offering video gaming-related degrees,

Guardian: Video games degrees: 95% fail to hit skills target

After getting ousted from EA Origin following the cancellation of Ultima Online 2, Richard Garriott (aka Lord British) cozied up to NCSoft to create Tabula Rasa, a new fantasy MMOG in a new NCSoft studios in Austin. The game released a few months ago with little fanfare, and rumors of Tabula Rasa being a financial disaster certainly circulated about, not just in the U.S., but in Korea too. With an estimated cost of 100 million USD (which repordedly wildly inaccurrate), Tabula Rasa has managed to bring in only 5.4 million dollars. Official statement by Tabula Rasa's producer Starr Long, can be found here. A portion of his statement reads:

"I would be remiss if I don't clarify the matter of rumored "massive layoffs" within NCsoft North America and the Tabula Rasa team. While the game has not taken off as quickly as we had hoped, we also launched in an insanely competitive time frame, with several well-known intellectual properties launching follow up products at the same time. However, the fact of the matter is that we are transitioning from a pre-launch crunch-mode development team to a live service team. This is standard in our industry--you ramp up to launch a game and then ramp down once it's live. This is what we are doing over the next several weeks, and it only affects the Tabula Rasa team. Once all is said and done, we will still have a substantial live team for industry standards. As you can see by the new features we're working on, we're still planning on lots of great content and updates all year long."

Tabula Rasa launched at the end of October, beginning of November, and they were up against some stiff competition, since that marks the holiday release season; however if you're depending on seasonal sales to make your sales figures, the holiday season is not it -- it's not because of the hardcore gamers, but because the buyers out there are the non-gamers; they're the grandparents and rest of the family that don't play games, and their gut instinct is to reach for a brand they know. I've always felt that the summer months, when the kids are out of school is the best time to launch a new title.

That being said, what other massively multiplayer intellectual followup products were launching at the same time on the PC market? Just for a point of reference, November and December of 2007 were two of the biggest months for videogame sales; Novemeber 2007 raked in 2.63 Billion dollars, while December 2007 brought in 4.82 Billion. That's some big numbers, and yet of that 7 billion, Tabula Rasa managed only 5 million. A Top Ten game like Call of Duty 4, which came out a few days after Tabula Rasa has managed about 1.7 million sales, putting their revenue estimate to about 67 million in the same time frame, which means that Tabula Rasa is not doing well at all.

Starr Long mentions a ramp up and a ramp down; that would be true on some level, as artists and programmers move from one project to another, but you don't have massive layoffs to do that unless you're planning on finishing up the projects at work and shutting down the studio. If I was at the Austin studio, I might be polishing my resume right about now.

When I went to the GDC in 2004, one of the issues that was brought up in one of the more academic panels was the attempt at defining games as art, and a lack of game critics as one of the barriers to entry in the art world.

Criticism is not the same as reviewing, and it's for this reason that I think the popular site Metacritic is misnamed; it really should be Metareview.

The purpose of a review is simply to tell the reader whether or not they should buy the product. A critic is different from a reviewer, as critics are supposed to understand the object in depth and explain the merits and importance of a piece of work.

At a recent press gathering in which Sid Meier hosted but didn't really talk about Civilization Revolutions:Sid offered up his list of three greatest gaming innovations:

1. The IBM PC, for being created.
   
2. SimCity, for the idea of creation being a gameplay element, rather than destruction.
   
3. Nintendo's Seal of Quality, for offering a gamers a certain level of quality in their games.
   

Given that Sid Meier has been in the games industry about 20 years longer than I have, I think his focus on the 1980s as the era of game innovations is an interesting one; my own list would probably look something like this:

1. DirectX, for not requiring all game programmers to develop their own graphics drivers.
   
2. Magic: The Gathering, for inventing a game genre that was collectible, and didn't include all the playing pieces necessary to play a game.
   
3. Maniac Mansion, for moving adventure games away from text commands into the age of point-and-click.
   

There's definitely many more innovations out there, like the Wii, which finally included cordless controllers that responded to kinetic movements. (Remember those old days of playing Nintendo when you'd practically pull the controller out of the box because you were "jumping" so high?) When I think about gaming life in the 80s, and now, there's a lot that has been changed and invented in the last three decades -- we've gone from playing videogames at the university-owned mainframe to being able to play our games on our watches or our cellphones, and making sure that a device is capable of playing DOOM (an innovative game created in 1993) seems to be a popular hobby of hardware hackers these days.

Mark Wilson has penned a op-ed piece on Kotaku called "What King of Fighters Taught Me About Diablo 3, in which he advocates a hand-drawn solution to Diablo 3:

With these boundaries in mind, the solution of hand drawing (and sticking with sprites) seems perfect. Without the limitations of polygons--current screen resolutions combined with Blizzard's artistic talent could create a Diablo that we've only seen in our mind's eye, one that is essentially concept art imported directly into the game without the artistically-limiting technical compromises of 3D modeling. (In short, it'd look a lot like Diablo 2 with the gloves off.)

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that the first Diablo game is mostly pre-rendered in 3D. The artists at Blizzard North (called Condor back in those days) used 3D modeling programs to model the background AND the characters. Sprites were assembled using each frame that was rendered, and this is what is chiefly responsible for the 3D look of the Diablo games. The decision to go sprite-based again in Diablo II was strictly a technological one: polygons rendering and shading in realtime hadn't yet approached the level where the artists were satisfied with the look of the game, and the number of polygons one could handle on the screen couldn't come close to what Diablo II required.

It's interesting to look at the game all these years later, because even though were were sprite-based, a lot of people back then thought it was real-time 3D with a locked isometric perspective, and now the assumption seems to be that since it was a sprite-based game, Diablo must have been hand-drawn. There's a number of issues when it comes to hand-drawn art, and our computers and game systems have not been designed for it. There are no sprite-based graphics accelerators to help optimize the drawing of pre-rendered frames, and there's a finite limit to how quickly data can be brought in through the system.

For Diablo II, the sprite sizes were significantly bigger than anything in Diablo I, and there were portions of the game that could lag or pop due to the sheer number and size of loading the sprites into memory. (If you've ever been killed by Duriel at the end of Act II dungeon before you finished loading the area, you know what I'm talking about).

One of the issues I've had with King of Fighters' claim to be hand drawn is that they don't explicitly define what this means; does this mean actually putting pencil to paper and drawing out each individual frame, before they are scanned in, or does this mean that an artist is using a Wacom tablet with an animation program on the computer? Both can qualify as being hand drawn, it's just that one way is much more labor intensive than the other.

With all of that being said, is it possible for Diablo III to be hand drawn? Yes. Is it likely? Probably not -- first think about all the combinations of armor and weapons that a character in World of Warcraft has, now imagine hand drawing 30 frames for each of the following: getting hit, casting a spell, attacking, talking, and running and you've got just the basics -- that doesn't account for all the different directions the character could be facing, or any of the extra variations of getting hit or casting a spell you might want to include. Doing all that work by hand just to create a look doesn't make sense when you can emulate that look with much less work using 3D animation tools.

People wonder why I'm so pessimistic about the games industry, and the reason is this: I worked in it for 8 years, and managed to ship one game. Pretty much everything else that I was working got canceled or indefinitely postponed. I probably could have shipped more if I was working somewhere like EA, where I would have probably shipped 10 to 14 titles in the same timeframe. Everyone's fingers is in everyone else's pie at EA. What it really comes down to essentially is that there are two ways to ship a title -- you can do it the Blizzard way or the EA way.

The Blizzard way involves looking at the game, polishing it, making sure it's fun to play, taking as much time needed to make a game, and basically ensuring sales through quality. The EA way involves looking at the game, making sales projections based on other games in the market, and doing a cost analysis based on projected returns versus estimated cost of development. If it's not a proven product, it gets axed. A game like World of Warcraft would never have been approved at EA, because EA's estimates sales figures of an MMO wouldn't have supported the cost of development of WoW. Sometimes a Blizzard game just isn't good enough, and at that point, there's not much you can do -- you can keep throwing people on it, but something is wrong at the core of it, something that can't be fixed, that can't ever translate into fun, and Blizzard would rather not ship than ship a game that tarnished the brand. In the same situation, EA would rather just put enough money into the game to make it shippable, ship the unfun game and hope to recoup the development costs in the initial release.

Blizzard took a huge risk in developing World of Warcraft; it was then, and still is, the most expensive project in the history of Blizzard, and involved huge upfront infrastructure costs. These kinds of costs are what the risk-averse shy away from; publishers want games that recoup their costs quickly -- every game must make a profit. World of Warcraft was not profitable right away; I estimate that they were losing money for the first year or two they were in operation, but now at 10 million subscribers, there's no question that they're turning a profit every month that likely surpasses the original development cost of World of Warcraft. WoW has pretty much taken over the hardcore game market on the computer, so almost all efforts now concentrate on casual games and console games. The funny thing is, if you ask any of the developers who worked on World of Warcraft, they will all tell you that they never could have predicted the number of subscribers they have today -- the expectation was half a million, maybe one million at most, certainly not ten times that number.

Rather than taking risks, more companies are trying to do it the much safer EA Way,by running cost analysis, predicting their hits, and canceling the rest. This is what happens when business decisions come ahead of gameplay decisions.

A recent casualty of this method of thinking SCi, the parent company of Eidos (of Tomb Raider fame), who is restructuring, canceling 14 projects, and bringing their staff down to 800 people, losing 25% of their workforce.

"To get SCi on track we have to act rapidly and effect change quickly. We must allow the world-class people that we have within the Group to focus on strong, profitable titles which will create the value our shareholders deserve."

Of course any time you've got layoffs, combined with focusing on profitable titles, it sends one message throughout the games industry: the company is up for sale, and it's time to make the books reflect the offer they hope to get.

I don't see a bright future for the Games Industry, because it's becoming so business like, and personally I think it's likely that what we're going to see is a lot more franchised titles from here on out; forget innovative titles like Katamari Damacy, and while I love Zelda games as much as the next person, I don't want everything to be "Link's Crossbow Training" or Sim(something). The number of original titles goes down, while the number of franchised titles goes up, in a trend similar to that of the failing movie industry.

Ray Kurtweil was the keynote speaker for GDC 2008 today, a futurist and inventor, and while he's a very enthusiastic speaker, I wasn't quite sure if he was the right person to be a keynote speaker for the GDC, as very little of his keynote was actually focused about games -- even though the talk was titled "The Next Twenty Years of Gaming", he talked mostly about technology, and how the adoption rate of technology is fast, and progress of technology is fast, and how he as a student at MIT in the 60s chose to go there because MIT had their own computer, and how that computer cost 11 million dollars, and how the price-performance of a modern cellphone in comparison is about a billion times better -- the processor is a million times cheaper, and yet thousands of times more powerful, and all that progress has happened within the last 40 years.

Part of the problem, Kurtzweil explains, is that humans tend to think linearly, and not exponentially -- this is why the sudden growth of technology like the internet came as such a surprise to many people -- first it didn't seem to be growing very quickly, and then boom, it was everywhere. Nanotechnology and immersive VR were things that he said we should be seeing within a few years, and he seems to believe that the extension of life expectancy is within our grasp.

Kurtzweil demonstrated two pieces of technology that got thunderous applause; the first was a program on a cellphone that took a picture of text, performed some OCR and then read the words out loud to assist blind people, and the second was an audio translation program that translated English to French.

In the past, GDC has managed to have games industry heavyweights make keynote addresses at the conference; this year's speakers have been somewhat of a disappointment -- while I enjoyed hearing Kurtzweil speak, he seemed to geared towards the Wired crowd, rather than the gamers, and the Microsoft VP of Live (yesterday's keynote) is just pretty unexciting -- because when it's Microsoft giving the keynote, you know that inevitably it turns to a advertising pitch.