David Gaider, lead writer of the Dragon Age series, feels narrative gives the player a reason to care about what they're fighting for. Chris Avellone of Obsidian Entertainment, developers of Fallout: New Vegas, doesn't know whether story even matters to the gameplay experience, and ponders if narrative's role is to create backdrops, letting the systems and the player's interactions with them create the story. And Ken Levine of Irrational Games, who is releasing BioShock Infinite this fall, believes that story gives context for player experience, but the value of narrative in video games is rather marginal. Levine thinks his job is primarily to present an environment for the player.

Gaider's answers might sound more like what we'd expect to hear from all three men, who are known for their skills in telling tales, but their answers underscore the complicated relationship between stories in video games and video game mechanics.

Levine is more concerned with environment than the words he's going to write. “I would say the best tool we have to sell our story is the world. The visual space...if you think about dialogue, especially in a first person shooter...the environment gives you so much information,” he said. “You can take in so much more visual information than you can take in audio information.”

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Professional gaming fans gathered on Sunday to hear from some of their favorite competitive gaming hosts and discuss the future of eSports, and it's clear this rich world with its unique set of personalities has a challenge in making itself accessible to new audiences.

Dan “Artosis” Stemkoski is a competitive StarCraft player in his own right, has been a captain of professional StarCraft teams, operates a popular stream on the TwitchTV video game internet channel, and is a well-known match commentator in professional StarCraft circles. Stemkoski feels that a chief challenge of popularizing American competitive StarCraft play is how weak America's competitive gaming circuit is compared to the rest of the world.

Getting new players into the circuit comes down in part to making players aware it even exists. TwitchTV has made strides towards accomplishing that goal. Kevin Lin, TwitchTV's Chief Operating Officer, made a guest appearance on the panel to talk about the growth of Justin.tv, the parent site from which the gaming channel spawned, and how it led to the ability to support competitive gaming broadcasts.

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Developers don't always know whether or not they'll have the chance to continue their stories, so narrative devices like foreshadowing can be difficult to justify or work into a game's plotline. When Obsidian Creative Director Chris Avellone and his team were told they would have the chance to create four DLC packs for Fallout: New Vegas, it was a unique opportunity.  “That allows us, as writers, to do foreshadowing across titles and guarantee it will see the light of day,” Avellone said

The challenge of creating the Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road DLC packs for New Vegas lay mostly in the story, in creating DLC that would be meaningful after the game had ended and were still relevant to the player. There was also concern over the fact that Obsidian would know nothing about who the main character of the story was, as they stress player choice in creating and growing characters throughout the game. They began with what they knew about the player for sure.

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John Romero, Cliff Bleszinki, Sid Meier, and Will Wright talk about the videogames that inspired them as young game designers during the Forgotten Tales Remembered: The Games That Inspired Leading Innovators panel at GDC 2012. From Pong to Seven Cities of Gold to The Legend of Zelda, find out what these gaming luminaries played growing up, and what influenced the games you play and love today. 

Every year design students and professionals flock to the Game Developers Conference to soak in knowledge and advice on how to get started and improve in the games industry. Innovators like John Romero, Cliff Bleszinski, Sid Meier and Will Wright serve as senior figures whose words will be analyzed and digested by attendees attempting to glean knowledge. But what were the games and the developers who provided that same inspiration and wisdom to the senior figures of today?

Will Wright got his Apple II back in 1980, in a day when every game was almost its own genre. Bruce Artwick's FW1 Flight Simulator introduced Wright to wireframe graphics, Choplifter showed that you could rescue people and not just kill them, and “Sundog was almost like the first Grand Theft Auto, but you were in a spaceship,” Wright said.

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In this Gauntlet Postmortem from GDC 2012, Ed Logg told us all about what went in to making the classic arcade adventure.

Logg joined Atari in 1978 after getting in trouble with his previous employers for working on video games on the side, and worked on a slew of games for Atari including Super Breakout, Video Pinball, Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Xybots, Space Lords and Steel Talons among others.

In the cop-op industry, games were entirely completed for a field test. “If you don't get enough quarters, your game is dead,” Logg said. Those field test units had no marketing whatsoever, and 50-66% of games didn't get past their field test. Logg was chiefly responsible for 12 games for Atari, but only Asteroid, Centipede and Gauntlet were hits.

• DETAILS:Journey and The Way--Designing for Friendship At GDC 2012

Logg drew from many different sources for his ideas. Atari had brainstorming sessions a few times a year, which Logg didn't find very useful. Centipede came from a game called Bug Shooter which Logg had assigned to a new hire.

Managers also had ideas, which is where Asteroid came from, and sometimes the programmers brainstormed among themselves, which is how Gauntlet was conceived.

Specifically, Gauntlet came about because Logg's son played Dungeons and Dragons, and had been bothering Logg for a year to make a D&D game. “I played Dandy on an Atari 800 and the bells went off,” Logg said. Dandy represented players in a dungeon using the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4, had monster generators, used money for treasure and red crosses for food, and had doors and keys, all elements which formed the core of Gauntlet gameplay.

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Some people set their New Year's resolutions to address failures of the year gone by, but we prefer to look at setting goals for 2012 that build on successes. This got us wondering what gaming had done right in 2011.

By "gaming" we mean the entirety of the video game world: developers, critics, publishers, pundits and fans. We're all part of the gaming community and have the potential to contribute in meaningful ways to make our pasttime better. Here are 10 examples from 2011, some serious, some silly, and presented in no particular order.

Successfully fought California's violent video game law

Not since the days of Jack Thompson have we had to put up with such stupidity as California's law criminalizing the sale of “extremely violent video games” to minors. The psychiatric science behind California's law was so bad that California State Senator Leland Yee, who holds a Ph.D. in Child Psychology and introduced the law in 2005, should be ashamed of himself.

Thanks to the efforts of the Entertainment Merchants Association, who fought the California law all the way to the United States Supreme Court (which struck the law down in a 7-2 ruling in June of this year), not only will it be more difficult for anyone to try and pass such absurd laws in the future, but video games are now officially recognized as protected speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Of all the wins scored for video games in 2011, this one was the most epic.

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We recently spoke with a bevy of game developers for a feature on what “the rules” were for constructing great first person shooter multiplayer maps. (Read Part One and Part Two of our Guide to building the best FPS maps) This naturally got us thinking about the best FPS multiplayer maps in history, but then we thought of a different and potentially more important question: What were the most influential FPS multiplayer maps in history?

Best is mostly a matter of taste. Influence is about maps that inspire future design, or pioneer new mechanics, or exemplify best design practices for different game modes or types of first person shooters. Here are ten multiplayer maps that have left lasting legacies on the FPS genre.

2fort – Quakeworld Team Fortress Mod

Modern incarnations of 2fort appear in Team Fortress Classic and Team Fortress 2, but they hail back to the original 2fort map from the Quakeworld Team Fortress mod in 1996. 2fort introduced class-based gameplay to first person shooters and also helped establish the precedent for symmetrical design philosophy in FPS multiplayer map development.

The design team lead of the original Quakeworld Team Fortress mod, Robin Walker, went on to work for Valve and is believed to be Lead Designer for Team Fortress 2.

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Yesterday, we brought you a look into the creative process behind the best first-person shooter multiplayer maps in gaming history. Our panel of experts:

• Jim Brown, Lead Level Designer at Epic Games (whose work includes the Unreal series);
• Phillip Tasker, Lead Level Designer at Treyarch (the studio responsible for Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty: Black Ops)
• Adam Crist, Design Lead at Certain Affinity (World at War, Black Ops, Halo Reach and Halo: Anniversary)
• Inge Jøran Holberg and Niklas Åstrand from DICE (Battlefield series).

Today, we conclude with an in-depth discussion of variabiltiy of player tactics, game modes, and how much advantage a map's design should give to player who are experts versus noobs. 

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Producing quality maps for first-person shooter multiplayer games is a tricky business. Players demand variety, but also want consistency, and when map packs can run fifteen dollars apiece, players want to make sure they’re getting value for their money.

We were curious as to whether the experts in multiplayer FPS map design held any “rules” in common for how to design the best maps, so we spoke with a group of experts in the field: Jim Brown, Lead Level Designer at Epic Games (whose work includes the Unreal series); Phillip Tasker, Lead Level Designer at Treyarch (the studio responsible for Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty: Black Ops); Adam Crist, Design Lead at Certain Affinity (World at War, Black Ops, Halo Reach and Halo: Anniversary); and level designers Inge Jøran Holberg and Niklas Åstrand from DICE (Battlefield series).

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The video game industry is a shooter fan’s world. Shooters are the most visible, profitable and popular of all the genres video games have to offer. For intellectually-minded critics, shooters can be a guilty pleasure. For socially-minded pundits, shooters are dangerous symbols of how violent video games can be. For the core gamers of the PC and console audiences, shooters represent the best that the industry has to offer.

Shooters are often tied to or spawn the hottest, most powerful graphics engines. They form the nucleus of professional gaming circuits. They hosted some of the earliest social networks (Clans) back in the day when “deathmatch” was still a new word. Shooters are an important part of the history of video games, and an integral part of video game culture.

Last year, G4 listed sixteen games in our “Future of Shooters” piece for Epictober. This year, we have even more games to discuss. The future of shooters is bright, and we’re going to give you twenty-one reasons to believe it.

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If you're a fan of mech games, then you're going to want an inside look at Hawken. Last week we presented a brief history of the mech game genre to prep you for this new mech game in development. If you love mech games, then you probably already know what we’re talking about. For everyone else, here's a brief review:

In March of this year, a trailer popped up on the radar of the games press for a new mech shooter that looked incredibly polished. We were amazed to hear that the game was the work of only nine developers at Adhesive Games, using the Unreal Engine, and that the trailer was the product of only nine months’ worth of development. The level of polish on display was something that major studios could spend years to achieve on their AAA titles.

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Among the common genres we talk about in video games, like first person shooters, side-scrollers, and role playing games, we don’t often hear mech games listed as one of these basic staples of video gaming. We might blame this on the fact that mech games come in such variety, as genre is usually defined by mechanics. Some mech games are in-the-cockpit simulators, some are third-person perspective action games, and some are real time strategy games.

What they all share in common is a core concept of walking war machines with pilots. The history of mech games is surprisingly deep, with hundreds of titles that fit the criteria for inclusion into the genre, such that we’re only going to be able to give you the highlights! We’re also going to stick with North American releases, so as to limit ourselves to games you might have played, or could play if you wanted to take a trip back through mech video game history.

There’s an argument to be had that the arcade game Battlezone is a progenitor of all the mech games. You controlled a tank, not a mech with legs, but in terms of establishing the feel of a mech game you can see the fingerprints of Battlezone over the mech simulators which followed.

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Want to know who the real Cliff Bleszinski is? He gave a keynote lecture at GDC this year wherein he gave young developers advice on how to develop into a “power creative.” One of his notes for the audience was to make their games personal, citing the loss of his father as a motivation for Marcus Fenix’s story in the Gears of War series, for example. I covered that keynote back in March for G4, and it was in the middle of this section on making games personal that Bleszinski said what I found most interesting of all:

“So, press, feel free to ask once in a while. I mean, some of the best interviews I’ve ever had are ones where we’re not going ‘What are the new weapons that are in your game? How many levels? What’s the new features in the Unreal engine?’ ‘cause you’re just going to get us spouting the same thing we said to the 15 other guys. Come in and talk about, you know, ‘What it was like to grow up in New England and how that influenced you,’ or, you know, ‘What do you value in family?’ or ‘What’s your favorite music?’ or ‘What book have you read lately?’ and that sometimes yields an interesting insight into how the power creative mind actually works.”

We sat down with Bleszinski to take him up on this offer of getting a little more personal, and we were glad for the opportunity. Read on for the full interview, and watch the video where he peels away some of the layers of perception to let us know about the guy behind the public image.

• TUNE IN: X-Play presents the first look at Gears of War 3 DLC, a new map, and a new character! 

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You might be surprised how many great video games get canceled far into their development cycles. Plenty of titles go all the way to having fully playable build, only to have the plug pulled at the last minute. Millions of manpower hours has been put into games that never saw the light of day, even though they look like they might have done respectably well if they'd seen the light of day.

But, thanks to the internet, games that never had a chance can still be seen and appreciated on the web. Even if they might not look good, you can appreciate what the developers were going for. You just might not ever understand why they got canceled in the first place. Read on for our list of the greatest canceled video games, and ponder about what might have been.

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Karen Traviss has a very cool job: she gets to bring the stories in Gears of War to life. When Dominic Santiago finds his wife, Maria, in the Locust tunnels in Gears of War 2, it is a dramatic moment. The intimate, raw emotion of this scene stood out with a power that has kept gamers talking ever since. It was completely out-of-character for the Gears series, which at that point largely conjured images of no-neck, weightlifter-types toting chainsaws on their huge guns and chopping up monsters in gouts of blood.

Gears of War 1 and 2 dripped with a unique visual aesthetic, challenged us with dark themes of genocide and social collapse, and thrilled with Hollywood-esque set pieces and mechanics that balanced on the line between twitch and tactics. While the characters who occupied this rich world certainly had personality, other than Dom’s tragic reuniting with his wife, very little of import was overtly shared about any of them, and the larger story was implied more than shown.

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