Ryse: Son of Rome is one of the launch titles for Microsoft’s Xbox One video game console. And it’s one of those gory titles that will turn your green Xbox One screen to bloody red. The Crytek title has been in the works for a long time and got a reboot in its current form about two years ago.

In the game, you play Marius Titus, the son of a Roman general who is following in his father’s footsteps. The fictionalized story follows his career and the choices he makes. And it also shows off the graphical power of the Xbox One. We caught up with P.J. Esteves, game director at Germany’s Crytek, at Microsoft’s showcase for its new games at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles last week.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Esteves.

GamesBeat: So where are you guys making the game?

P.J. Esteves: Frankfurt. Well, actually, it’s Frankfurt plus other resources from various parts of Crytek.

GamesBeat: What’s some of the backstory here? You’ve been working on it for a while, right?

Esteves: Yeah. The original-original concept is something like six years old. It’s gone through several iterations. The last major addition was the Kinect part. Now we’re here with a third-person action-adventure.

GamesBeat: What’s it like to work on something like this for so long?

Esteves: I’ve only been on the project about two years myself. When it came to Frankfurt I took over the project with a bunch of other guys.

GamesBeat: We saw something of this about that time, maybe two years ago. It was a 360 game at that point.

Esteves: Yeah, it was a 360 Kinect game at that point. It was mostly a fighting game.

GamesBeat: Did you reboot it in some way, then, and take it in a different direction?

Esteves: I don’t think it was really a reboot. We just iterated our way towards this. With our engine, we can iterate very heavily. I keep telling people that the hardware isn’t a problem. We work with that just fine. It’s more an issue of — the example I always give, you put 100 people into a room and you say, “Row the boat.” Everyone’s going to row the boat in a different way. One of the design challenges with Kinect is that you have to train people to row the boat in roughly the same way so that they can play the game.

So what are we building here? Are we building a game where we have to teach people how to row a boat, or are we building an experience where you can just get immersed in it and enjoy the game? We built a lot of successful prototypes. We had a good navigation model and a good handle on the combat system, but we reached a point where we had to get serious about it and get it out the door. It came around the time where Microsoft said, “Hey, we’ve got this cool hardware. What can you do with it?” It was a partnership the whole way, landing where we are.

GamesBeat: How were you able to re-fashion it to take advantage of what the Xbox One offers you?

Esteves: At Crytek we’re constantly pushing this technology, no matter if it’s an iPhone or an Xbox One or the PC. The general idea is that now we can push more. We can have more particles. We can have more characters on screen. We can have more burning arrows. [laughs] When you have a big fire in the background, all these arrows coming at you, and then the boulder impacts, it’s just more of everything. We’re also pushing quite a lot on facial. We have cloth simulations and physical attachments and that sort of thing. We’re really trying own this “six feet to six inches” idea.

GamesBeat: What’s the backstory to the character himself?

Esteves: You play Marius Titus, who’s a Roman legionnaire. He wants to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was a general. What winds up happening is he sees his family killed in front of him, massacred, and what follows after that is a quest for revenge. He ends up in the depths of Britannia, and then he has to come back to Rome to finish it off. The general idea is that it’s about the arc he goes through at the same time, as he goes from being a warrior to being a general. It’s about that transformation process.

GamesBeat: You’re spending time controlling other soldiers, but you’re also fighting individually, right?

Esteves: We’re trying to strike a balance between what we call the lone wolf — your typical third-person action-adventure gameplay — and then being part of the legion. That manifests in several ways. You’re fighting on the battlefield side-by-side with your soldiers, and you have some features where you can order them to help you out, like with arrow volleys or manning the catapults. Then you have the direct control, where you’re selecting formations and calling the shots. You can see that here when you hear Marius telling you, “Arrows incoming!” you put up your shield. Then he shouts, “Hold! Hold!” We’re trying to nail down all these different feelings of being part of ancient warfare.

GamesBeat: With the controls there, it seems like you’re trying to be very precise in the timing to coordinate all these soldiers.

Esteves: We’re all core gamers here. The controls need to be tight. When you play the demo and you see the arrow volleys, if you don’t block, your guys are going to die. That’s the idea.

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We forget sometimes that video games are like supercomputer simulations, masterful demonstrations of technology used in the service of entertainment. So don’t be surprised that some of the best new technologies are being created in conjunction with games. Here’s GamesBeat’s perspective on the best new technologies at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big video game trade show held last week in Los Angeles.

1. Oculus VR showed off the latest prototype of its industry-buzz building Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset — featuring a hot-off-the-factory-line 1080p panel. “We’re now putting the flag in the ground. … It’s at least 1080p. That’s what we’re showing here,” Brendan Iribe, Oculus VR chief executive officer, told GamesBeat. “Most likely, this is what people are going to be experiencing.” The unit featured a significantly better picture than the developer model that shipped to the Rift’s Kickstarter backers. “We’re still optimizing the lenses. … There’s a whole number of things that we’re still looking at,” Iribe said. Regardless, a better image leads to a better effect. What Oculus demoed provided an exciting look into the future of immersive gaming experiences — and other simulated endeavors. – Eduardo Moutinho.

2. Sony’s PlayStation 4 is an impressive piece of hardware. It uses the same silicon cores from Advanced Micro Devices as Microsoft’s Xbox One console. But Sony focused all of its engineering efforts on making games look their best. Sony’s machine uses faster GDDR5 graphics-oriented random access memory. And because it has one operating system instead of three, it requires less memory for the box’s overhead operations. The graphics memory delivers 176 gigabytes per second of memory to the combined CPU/GPU chip, compared to 68 gigabytes for the Xbox One. Sony’s machine will likely be able to display 4K video and games once the higher resolution televisions and displays arrive. While Microsoft dedicated its console budget to entertainment and Kinect features, Sony went all in on games. That could be a winning formula in head-to-head comparisons. But it’s up to game developers to exploit Sony’s processing advantage. If they can’t make games that stand out from Microsoft’s, then the bet won’t pay off as well as expected. Of course, Sony can’t brag too much: The high-end PC will run circles around the PS 4. – Dean Takahashi

3.Microsoft’s new Kinect is a tech marvel that uses 3D depth sensors, microphones, and a high-definition camera to capture your body in motion. The new version for the Xbox One can detect up to six people at the same time instead of just two. The field of view is 60 percent wider, so you don’t have to stand ten feet away anymore. It can distinguish among your fingers, whether you are smiling or frowing, which way your limbs are turned, and even detect your heatbeat based on movements in your face. The system can recognize your voice and it will respond instantly if you say “Xbox on” by turning on the machine from a deep sleep. Kinect can recognize your face and automatically switch to your preferences when you pick up a controller. You can issue voice commands and it will respond instantly if you want to change the channel on your television or answer an incoming Skype call. It’s so good that Microsoft had to reassure people that it would not use Kinect to spy on people and that players have the option to turn it off if they wish. Kinect uses two dedicated silicon chips in the Xbox One to handle all of its processing needs, but it can tap the cloud as well. – Dean Takahashi

4. Microsoft’s cloud processing holds a lot of promise for the Xbox One. With cloud processing, the game console offloads non-urgent processing tasks to the web-connected data centers. This so-called cloud of processors can be much more powerful than the game console alone, performing tasks such as artificial intelligence or background rendering that aren’t as essential to the instantaneous twitch experience of games. That means that one day, Microsoft could simply upgrade its hardware for the Xbox One by upgrading the hardware in its data centers. The technology will be useful in Forza Motorsport 5, a racing game where artificial intelligence is used to create rival drivers for the computer-controlled cars that you race against. The so-called Drivatar captures your patterns as a driver and uploads them to the cloud. Once analyzed, the Drivatar delivers an AI driver that approximates the same kind of skilled driving that you demonstrate in your games. Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn Ten Studios, the maker of Forza, calls this the “death of AI.” We’re not so sure about that, but it makes sense to split some processing between Microsoft’s 300,000 servers and the Xbox One. In a demo, Microsoft showed that it could turn an asteroid belt with 40,000 asteroids rendered on a local machine to an asteroid belt with 500,000 asteroids using cloud processing. The danger of cloud processing is that you might lose your internet connection. But in that case, the technology should fail over to local processing without a hitch. – Dean Takahashi

5. Microsoft’s Xbox One game controller is a step above the last generation when it comes to immersive, tactile feedback. The company was able to physically test lots of models thanks to its rapid prototyping 3D printer technology. The new device has magnetic triggers for both index fingers. These triggers can give you different touch feedback. Older controllers would simply shake when you were shooting a gun. But the new controller sends different sensations. Microsoft hasn’t shown the tech working in games yet, but it showed off a half-dozen demos that make you feel things like the kick of a gun, the rumble of helicopter rotors, the squeal of brakes in ca race car, and even the beat of your very own heartbeat, which Kinect can detect. The device does’t have a “share button” or a touchpad like Sony’s controller. But it does have an infrared LED on the front of the controller that, when combined with Kinect, can clearly identify the person who is using the controller. As a result, you can easily jump in and out of games. This may not seem like much of an advantage on the surface, but it is an improvement to the overall experience of playing games that you’ll know for sure when you feel it in your hands. – Dean Takahashi

6. Microsoft Xbox Smartglass has moved forward as a “second screen” app that serves as a companion for your games. Smartglass is integrated directly into Xbox One so you can use a Microsoft smartphone or tablet to control or view features in your game. You can use Smartglass to start a game, set up and launch multiplayer, look at your achievements, and view the timeline. While watching a demo of Crytek’s Ryse: Son of Rome game, I saw that the timeline tells you what percent of a game’s level you have completed while you are playing it. You can view game play hints, status of friends, and see the stats of your friends and how they stack up against your own. Xbox Smartglass will match you based on your skill, your language, and your reputation. – Dean Takahashi

7. The Virtuix Omni is similar to devices like the Oculus Rift. It plans to deliver more immersive gameplay for players. The Omni, however, is all about movement. According to Simon Solotko, public relations representative for Virtuix, “The Omni is a natural interface for virtual reality that enables locomotion. It enables you to run, walk, or jump in virtual reality.”

GamesBeat experienced the Omni first hand, and the technology shows promise. Virtuix chief executive officer Jan Goetgeluk skillfully played through a Half-Life 2 demo, successfully navigating one of the levels from the first-person shooter. The entire setup consisted of an Omni, Oculus Rift, Microsoft Kinect (for body-tracking purposes), and a standard console gun controller. Players will have to wear special shoes and strap themselves to a belt harness that rests on a safety ring connected to the device. Then, they can walk or run in place by sliding around the Omni’s frictionless base.

While awkward for newcomers, Goetgeluk showed that one can get used to the process. The Omni is just another piece of tech poised to take our gaming experiences to new and exciting frontiers -Eduardo Moutinho.

8. Frostbite 3 is the core engine behind DICE’s Battlefield series. The division of Electronic Arts built a platform for creating high-end 3D games with the editing tools to create spectacular 3D imagery. Battlefield 4 will get the benefits of Frostbite 3, which includes destructible environments and ultra-realistic character animations. EA says that Frostbite 3 in Battlefield 4 will deliver scale and destruction, showing you how huge events such as explosions can be rendered against a sophisticated environment. It also features realistic character animation and immersive audio. EA has bragged about the synergies of its game engines before, but it was infamous for the failure of the Criterion RenderWare acquisition. EA bought Criterion in 2004 for $48 million to create games for the last generation of consoles. But developers hated it and the technology failed. Frank Gibeau, president of worldwide game studios at EA, said that the company once had 17 game engines to build its games. Now it is reusing Frostbite 3 and its Ignite sports game engine for all of its titles. Among the Frostbite 3 engine games: Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, Command & Conquer, and Mirror’s Edge 2. – Dean Takahashi

9. The Dark Sorcerer short film is Quantic Dream’s latest attempt to create human faces so realistic that they cross the uncanny valley. That’s the aesthetic concept thatholds that the closer animated human faces approach reality, the more unnatural they seem. The video played at E3 is meant to suggests the level of photorealism that the PlayStation 4 console can achieve when it comes to rendering faces, particles, flames, and water drops. The animated face of the Dark Sorcerer is indeed just that — a 3D animation — even though it looks so real. At the moment, Quantic Dream has no plans to turn The Dark Sorcerer, acted by David Gant and directed by Quantic Dream’s David Cage, into a full game. While it seems like a serious demo at first, you’ll quickly see that the The Dark Sorcerer is a comedic spoof of both filmmaking and video game development. Earlier this year, Quantic Dream released a demo dubbed Kara that also demonstrated a new level of emotional realism in 3D-animated human facial expressions. – Dean Takahashi

10. Project Shield is Nvidia’s Hail Mary play to participate in the video game business. Shut out by the console makers when it came to graphics chips, Nvidia decided to build its own portable gaming device using its Tegra 4 mobile processor and the Google Android operating system. Going on sale later this month for $349, Shield can play Android games on a 5-inch high-resolution that is attached to a game controller. The device is aimed at hardcore gamers who want to play Android games on their living room TV, using an HDMI cable for connectivity. Shield will also enable gamers to play PC-based Steam games on the big-screen TV. It remains to be seen if the demand exists for Shield amid so many other devices. Ouya is a competitor bringing Android to the TV, and so are devices like Bluestacks GamePop and GameStick. Shield itself may not be the winning bet for Android in the living room, but you can bet that mobile will give the console makers a headache at some point, given the free or 99-cent pricing for most mobile games. – Dean Takahashi

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Titanfall was one of the great new surprises of the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show in Los Angeles last week. The sci-fi shooter has cool, next-generation 3D graphics and definitely has a Call of Duty-style feel to it.

That’s no surprise because it comes from Respawn Entertainment, the game studio that former Call of Duty developers Vince Zampella and Jason West founded. The title offers innovative play and a fresh new intellectual property for gamers to enjoy as they make the leap to next-generation consoles. Set in a distant frontier, the game features a war where 24-foot-tall Titan mechs square off against elite mobile infantry known as Pilots. That might not sound like much to you, but this multiplayer-focused shooter has some wonderful characteristics.

The title emerged from a state of legal warfare. In March, 2010, Activision fired Infinity Ward chiefs Zampella and West for breaching their contract and plotting to start a new studio while still working for the publisher. Electronic Arts stepped in to fund Respawn and lock down the rights to its first release. The litigation almost went to court, but the companies settled the lawsuit on the eve of the trial. That left the team with the creative freedom to do what it wanted and compete with Call of Duty.

Titanfall will come early next year as an exclusive on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 video game consoles. That’s a coup for Microsoft, which promises a lot of exclusives in its war with Sony for the hearts and minds of players. Zampella appeared on stage at the pre-E3 Microsoft press event to announce the game. Titanfall incorporates the Source game engine that Valve uses for its releases.

One of the first things you notice is that the game makes use of vertical space. The demo that Zampella showed featured multistory buildings. You could climb up a wall, parkour style, and surprise enemies who think in a two-dimensional way. If you earn a few kills, you can get enough points to jump into a mech, or Titan. Once you are in there, you become much more powerful. You can riddle your opponents with bullets or missiles. And you can jump to the top of buildings much more easily to gain a height advantage.

But the Titans are not invulnerable. Infantry can fire shoulder-launched rockets at the big mechs and eventually bring them down. As a Titan falls, it makes a big explosion. The battle teems with soldiers, including non-player characters that give you the feeling that the game is heavily populated with troops. This allows even weaker players to succeed by getting multiple kills, and it reduces the number of player deaths.

The game is multiplayer only, but it has single-player elements such as a narrative that serves as a backdrop for the gameplay. It’s too bad that the title doesn’t have its own full-blown single-player campaign because Respawn’s team has a definite flair for the dramatic, as you can see in the trailer below. But you will experience story elements during the launch sequences for the multiplayer matches. Each drop into a fighting zone is epically presented, as you jump off of a drop ship and then run for hardpoints. Once you secure the hardpoints, you can set up a coordinated defense. Clearly, the side with the most Titans is going to have an advantage.

The shooter has the same kind of score points and name tags on friendly players as in Call of Duty offerings, but the gameplay is cinematic in almost every way. You can catch your enemy’s bullets with a force field and send them back in the other direction. As a Titan, you can pick up soldiers and toss them. Or you can stomp on them. You can add jetpacks to your feet and jump off the ground in thrilling fashion. You can also run up walls, and get the jump on rivals. It’s very cool when, as an infantry soldier, you can land on top of a Titan, shoot its computer out, and jump off to watch it explode.

I thought the demo for Titanfall was superb and the action very intense. Here’s a video trailer for the upcoming release.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is a major departure in the gameplay and feel of the fastest-selling game franchise on the planet. As such, publisher Activision Blizzard is taking a major risk. It is balancing the need to give fans what they have always liked against the need to provide them with something new, so they won’t get bored. We’ve seen enough of the game to offer our first impression.

From what Activision Publishing and Infinity Ward have shown so far at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Ghosts will provide both. You can still play intense multiplayer battles and enjoy all-out combat. But the emphasis in this title is on stealth, as with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series from Ubisoft. In this release, the United States is no longer a superpower. A catastrophic event has devastated the southern half of the country, and the American military is in tatters. Survivors are putting up a guerrilla resistance, and they’re known as Ghosts.

This game couldn’t be more different from what Electronic Arts has shown so far with its Battlefield 4 game, which promises epic combat scenes where firepower rules. In that offering, as many as 64 players can fight in a multiplayer arena at the same time, and a single commander can give orders to the troops. With Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision has only showed off a couple of single-player scenes. The company unveiled an underwater level (pictured at top) at the Xbox reveal on May 21. And they showed another sequence in advance of E3 last week. That new level featured a military-trained dog that accompanied U.S. Special Forces on secret missions.

Ghosts isn’t a letdown. But I’d like to see more of the old Call of Duty: the fast-paced action that made the series great and the intense, emotional scenes that showed you exactly what combat could be like in the midst of a harrowing mission. Call of Duty is all about an epic, cinematic experience, and I fear that this title might swing too far in the direction of stealth. After all, the U.S. no longer has the upper hand in weapons superiority and greater numbers, so stealth is the most logical game plan.

A soldier’s best friend

In the first mission, we saw divers secretly navigate through a coral reef and attach a bomb to a nuclear submarine. The divers had to stealthily navigate past enemy swimmers and engage them in open combat using underwater guns. Those guns are actually based on real weapons that the Soviet Union developed in the 1970s. The undersea combat moved in slow motion, but it was still intense.

At E3, we learned even more about the playable main character, Simon “Ghost” Riley, a soldier who, along with his brother and fellow combatant, grew up in America after a calamity had nearly wiped it out. The developers haven’t revealed the cause of the disaster yet, but it happened 10 years ago in the game’s chronology, which will not match the chronology of any other Call of Duty entry. The story is a brand new one set in the franchise’s universe. It has no other narrative connection to the Black Ops or Modern Warfare arcs.

The Russians aren’t the threat anymore. Instead, the U.S. is facing off against “resource rich” entities that include the oil states of South America. One of the battles takes place in a no-man’s-land about 10 miles north of San Diego, Calif. — now a wasteland full of wreckage and collapsed interstates. The Americans and an unnamed faction contest the region.

During the mission, players come upon a mile-wide crater and have to send scouts with hazmat suits and gas masks into the area. The dog participates in this mission as a remote recon scout. Players can track where it is through a tablet-screen viewfinder. The canine is not just a companion character. It’s a real participant in the action.

The dog carries a periscope-like camera and an earpiece. The team can tell it what to do through the earpiece. Squad members can also give nonverbal vibration commands to the dog to send it in the right direction. You steer the dog as you would a soldier. When the dog comes upon an enemy, the player taps a shoulder button that sends the dog to attack the enemy’s throat. It can also bark to distract an enemy and lure him into view. A soldier with a silencer rifle can then dispatch the enemy.

The dog is pretty fierce, but the animations of its kills all look the same for now. It seems like the dog always gets the drop on the human enemies and rips out their jugulars in an instant. I hope that will change by the time the game ships because it feels unrealistic. I mean, a dog just isn’t that good, right? It’s a breathing animal, not a real drone that you can operate with a laptop on a battlefield.

Show us more

As with Activision’s Destiny, I want to see more. The publisher wants to migrate 40 million gamers who are playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II and other titles over to Ghosts.

Is this the stuff of billion-dollar games? From what I’ve seen, I don’t know. Last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II generated $1 billion in sales within 16 days of its launch. But Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell series sells at much lower levels than the Call of Duty games. And will the multiplayer be more like Splinter Cell’s, a stealth combat version that is not nearly as fun, or will it be more like traditional Call of Duty releases?

Activision officials assure me that we’ll see a lot of the action later on. The underwater level shows that all hell can break loose. I say, bring it on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Bungie showed off gameplay for its long-awaited Destiny at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) this week. We had a close look at the title, and this is our first impression. Destiny is a huge bet for Bungie, which moved off its best-selling Halo video game franchise, and for its publisher Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard. And Sony has made a big commitment to Destiny by signing a long-term partnership deal with Bungie and Activision to get some exclusive content for the multiplayer-centric first-person shooter.

So far, we’re not nearly as wowed as we wanted to be. While so many things about the game are impressive, from the graphics to the depth of customization to the unique multiplayer gameplay — we were left wanting more. During the first-hands on gameplay demo at Sony’s pre-E3 press conference, Bungie co-founders Joe Staten and Jason Jones walked out on stage to demo the title in a two-player cooperative session.

On the big-event screen and on the smaller screens where we saw it, the graphics are breathtaking. The demo opened with a view of a huge valley on Earth, where an alien attack has savaged the world, leaving it with a small number of heroes, known as Guardians, defending the last safe city from alien attack. The art work was impressive and first-rate, considering that Destiny is a massively multiplayer online release, which will have hundreds of hours of gameplay and many such environments. I can see why Bungie has 400 people working on the title.

Destiny will contain a shared, persistent online world, set in our solar system. Bungie has announced four playable races so far. The passage of time has made Earth strange, and nothing looks like it does in the present day.  The canyon in front of the players was full of awesome lighting and shadows. Weeds and bushes swayed in a gentle breeze. The trees feature graphic-rendering techniques like tessellation, so the details come to life. The surroundings are alive with audio effects. You can hear the footfalls. Shadows cast in real time, and that makes the world feel alive. The water looks realistic with accurate reflections and ripples. The landscape views are truly epic in scope, with big views of giant buildings and vistas.

The action

When the developers got to the action during the Sony press event, the Bungie co-founders bantered as they showed off Destiny’s features. They went on a mission together into a dark underground space. Staten was chattering a lot, and I couldn’t tell if that was actually the characters in the game talking. In fact, it might have been nice if it was. The lighting in the dungeon-like space was spectacular.

“I’m going to meet some friends, and we’re going to shoot some aliens in the face,” Staten said. “Because shooting aliens is relaxing.”

But the two characters were strangely silent as they went through the world in a section called Old Russia. One character was a male Warlock, while another was a female Hunter. The game will let you customize your character through your clothing, armor, and weapons. One gun was a level 200 weapon, suggesting a huge tech ladder for leveling up your arsenal. Some of the upgrades will completely change the way a weapon feels. That’s how players will express their personalities and abilities in the world over time.

A ghost, or an artificial intelligence character, spoke up and said, “We always visit such cheerful spaces.” That character is a lot like Cortana, the A.I. who always banters with Master Chief in the Halo series.

One of the characters dispatched enemies in a casual manner with a powerful “hand cannon.” It seemed like a very large six-shooter, and it could take hostiles out with a couple of shots. Rockets and machine guns also took part in the action.

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Owen Mahoney was bored at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) this year. As the chief financial officer of Nexon, he is immersed in digital gaming — social, mobile, and online — that is much more popular in Asia. More than a decade ago, Nexon pioneered free-to-play downloadable online games in Korea. But there was very little mention of new business models and new ways to play games at E3, from Mahoney’s point of view.

Mahoney helped steer Nexon through an initial public offering that raised $1.2 billion in 2011. His company has doubled down on the massively multiplayer online game market with a majority investment in NCsoft. And it is figuring out how to spread its success in digital games through the rest of the world.

We sat down with Mahoney this week. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What did you think of E3?

Owen Mahoney: I found less than I hoped that was really interesting. The whole discussion of $399 versus $499 for the consoles is sort of a non-issue. People are making a lot of noise about it, but it doesn’t seem very important to the future of the industry. Whatever mistakes or tactical errors that someone makes — if they are mistakes at all, especially on a pricing decision like that — they can always reverse them later.

What matters to me is, are there a lot of fun games to be played on these new platforms? What do the new platforms provide? I saw very little that I was excited about as a consumer. It felt a lot like it did 10 years ago. We were pushing more pixels as an industry. I don’t find that particularly interesting. When I think about the games that I’m playing and that my kids are playing, it has nothing to do with all that stuff. I see more and more people playing Minecraft on their laptops sitting in front of a turned-off 60” plasma display with a console attached to it. They’re sitting there playing an online role-playing game instead, or a mobile game. I’m not sure everyone’s clued into that. When I think about the convergence that’s happening in platforms right now, I think everything’s going to get turned upside down within a couple of years.

I remember at this point in the last console cycle, there was a lot to talk about from a technology perspective. It wasn’t all about pricing. It was about much more interesting stuff.

GamesBeat: We haven’t seen much about digital gaming from the big folks. Microsoft is defending its used-game policy, but they’re not talking about putting up a whole library of games for you to access, or somehow making use of digital in a way that’s new.

Mahoney: Yeah. [Sony's] Gaikai and OnLive weren’t a discussion topic this year. We have this perspective at my company, which is informed by the world we live in, which we continue to believe is the future of North America. I don’t envy my former colleagues at EA trying to figure out how to get the consumer to spend $60 on a piece of entertainment software. That’s a hard job. You’re going to be in for tens of millions of dollars.

While all this noise is happening and all these billboards are all over and there’s all this TV advertising, there’s a few companies around the world that are very quietly picking up all the dollar bills lying around the industry.

Did you ever see the movie Moneyball? You remember the scene when all the scouts are spitting and chewing and talking about what they think of various players? Then there are two guys there, Billy Beane and his numbers guy, saying, “No, these are the stats you need to worry about.” It feels like one of those things where there’s a real disconnect in the industry between what matters for consumer fun, what matters for profitability and growth, and then what everybody’s talking about.

Again, I have these conversations sometimes and people say, “My God, I had no idea about your company’s growth and profitability.” Once again, last year we grew 25 percent year-on-year — more than $1 billion U.S. Our operating margin was more than 46 percent. When I was at EA, you couldn’t dream of 46 percent in the thick of a console cycle, much less at the transition. We’re not the only ones. Look at Tencent’s business. Lots of companies in Asia have our model. I’m not talking about casual games that explode and then go away. We’re talking about games that are consistently huge earners. It’s because of online connected synchronous multiplayer and free-to-play.

Another interesting stat comes from NCsoft, the Korean game company. We’re the biggest shareholder there now. Their game Lineage, which came out in 1996 I believe, just hit a new peak in the last month and a half. It’s still growing. That tells you a lot. Even Activision can’t imagine a game that old that’s still growing.

GamesBeat: It’s always surprising to me how many games are out there in Asia that westerners know nothing about. Puzzle & Dragons is just now finding some awareness here. Same with CrossFire.

Mahoney: CrossFire’s the number one game in China, or number two at least. Dungeon Fighter, our game, which is also up there, nobody’s heard of it here. It’s interesting. Again, what are we all in business for? We’re in it to make money by delivering fun stuff. It’s a great business. But you have to do both of those things. One defines the other. We want big audiences and to be profitable and grow. Everybody in this room would like that for their company, and a few companies around the world are doing it. Somehow, though, that’s not what we’re talking about as an industry here.

GamesBeat: How do you guys take your success and use it to expand in the west?

Mahoney: We think there’s a huge opportunity that we’re pursuing, certainly over the course of the year through the next E3. We’re taking what we know about free-to-play — which is very hard to do, and very misunderstood in the west — and combining it with great IP, great physics, great graphics, and gameplay that’s popular in the west. We already have some experience of doing this and partnering this way in the east, and we’d like to make those same combinations here.

For example, we have a very close relationship with Valve, which we think is one of the best, if not the best, western developers. We had a viewpoint several years ago as to how to makes Counter-Strike into a free-to-play game. We created Counter-Strike Online. They essentially allowed us to use the assets – the technology, the art – and make a free-to-play game out of it. It worked beautifully. It’s one of our biggest games in Korea and Japan.

We’ve picked up the FIFA Online relationship with Electronic Arts. That game originally was created with another company in Korea, where EA provided the FIFA engine while their other partner provided the front-end and handled free-to-play. The lead developer in that company was actually a former Nexon employee who’s come back to us. He started a company that we’re an investor in. It worked beautifully. Now Nexon is the publisher of that game in Korea. We want to do more of that and do it here as well. There’s a lot of great IP in the west.

The challenge for us is, great developers like Valve and EA and Crytek and so on, with their physics engines and graphics engines and so on, they’ve spent a lot of time and effort and money to develop these great games. That’s a great strength. It beats a lot of what you see in Asia. It’s not that Asia has bad graphics, but they’ve got things that work well in the west, that are very advanced. What we have is the knowledge of free-to-play.

There’s a massive misunderstanding of what free-to-play is. You play a lot of free-to-play games, especially the casual type on Facebook, they’re not free-to-play at all. They’re pay-to-play in the guise of free-to-play. What we’ve learned from experience from more than a decade ago is that if you make it impossible to progress in a game without paying, it’s not a free-to-play game at all. You alienate your users and you lose them over time. You have no longevity in the end. We have 10-year-old games that continue to grow.

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LOS ANGELES — Julie Uhrman is a fighter. The chief executive of Android game console maker Ouya is happy to duel with the big box publishers for the hearts of gamers. But she also had to battle with the group that runs the game industry’s biggest trade show as well.

Ouya had a run-in with the Entertainment Software Association, the trade group that puts on the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). It seems that the ESA didn’t like that Ouya set up its exhibit in a parking lot across the street from E3 rather than inside the exhibit hall. So the ESA reportedly sent the cops over Monday to shut down the exhibit (Update: The ESA declined comment) and even hauled in a huge white semi-truck trailer to block the view of the Ouya exhibit from the convention center.

Ouya simply put its signs in front of the trailer.

But the scrappy Uhrman soldiered on and said the publicity about the flap helped the company more than being inisde the convention center would’ve. The incident highlighted the company’s alternative origins, as it raised more than $8 million for its Android game console on Kickstarter by appealing to the indie crowd. Ouya, which also raised $15 million from prominent venture capitalists, launches June 25. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Uhrman.

GamesBeat: How as E3 gone for you guys?

Julie Uhrman: It’s been a good show. We’ve had developers demoing their games to gamers. We’ve had a steady flow of traffic. It’s just a lot of fun, great content. It’s great to see people engage with it and watch them react.

GamesBeat: Are you guys at war with the ESA here?

Uhrman: That might be a bit of an exaggeration. It’s unfortunate, the way it went down. Ouya is all about being open, and we want to have any gamer be able to come and experience Ouya, meet developers, and play great games. Being outside the convention center was the only way that we could be open to everybody.

GamesBeat: I always see people displaying along this row here, every year, so I don’t really know what the problem is.

Uhrman: We’re not the only ones here, no, so I’m not sure why we caused the most fuss. It’s unfortunate. We look forward to working with them next year. But it’s important that everybody who wants to experience the Ouya can do that. We need to be open to everybody.

It was a distraction on the first day, but really, it’s been great. It’s almost rallied people behind us even more. They love our open nature. They love that we’re accessible to gamers because of our price point. We’re open to developers because anyone can publish. It just brought more interest and more traffic. A lot more people, thanks to them, know about Ouya now.

GamesBeat: It’s all about trying to stand up above the noise here at E3.

Uhrman: Yeah. This wasn’t an easy year. A lot of next-gen consoles were shown off. There’s a lot of talk about processing power and graphics and polygons on a screen and the games that are leveraging those and how much longer it’s going to take before you can play those games. What keeps coming back to me from our gamers is that they just want to play fun games again. Ouya offers a lot of fun games.

We have a lot of exclusive content that keeps coming through the door. ChronoBlade is exclusive to Ouya. We have a demo today, and the game is coming in December. Tripwire Interactive announced Killing Floor, the sequel, coming exclusively to Ouya. We’ve been showing Kim Swift’s Soul Fjord. You Don’t Know Jack is here demonstrating the gamepad that they created for Ouya so you can play it not only with the Ouya controller but also with any iOS device. It’s great to see developers, both new and established, starting to embrace the platform.

GamesBeat: So you guys didn’t direct them to do that? They just did it on their own?

Uhrman: Absolutely. Ouya is built for Bluetooth, so the whole idea was that you could pair any peripheral or accessory. They’re the first ones to do it and launch something on Ouya.

GamesBeat: Are you all set for launch, then?

Uhrman: All set. June 25. We’re launching in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. with Amazon, GameStop, Best Buy, Target, and Game. Units have been shipped and delivered. Retail boxes have been created. We’re excited.

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LOS ANGELES — PopCap Games is known for pioneering casual titles like Bejeweled and Peggle. But at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, Electronic Arts showed off PopCap’s Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, a shooter game based on the same engine that developers are using to create Battlefield 4. In the multiplayer game, you can play as a plant or a zombie and wreak havoc in a garden with weapons such as pea shooters and exploding pumpkins. This comical title is one that may explain why EA paid $750 million-plus for PopCap a couple of years ago.

We talked with PopCap producer Brian Lindley about making Garden Warfare. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Are you guys making the game in Seattle?

Brian Lindley: Actually, most of my team is located in Vancouver. We’re on the same campus as EA Canada, where a lot of the sports games like FIFA are built.

GamesBeat: The first game came out about four years ago. How did you get this going, and how long ago did it start?

Lindley: We’ve been in development for more than a year now, close to a year and a half. Around early 2012 we started with concepts of what the game could be, and we’ve iterated on that ever since to build what we have today.

GamesBeat: I’ve been told that they spent a ton of time getting Plants vs. Zombies on all different platforms, and that’s why it took four years to get the next one going.

Lindley: Yeah, there’s a whole story behind how long Plants vs. Zombies 2 took to make. The name is both a joke on how long it took as well as the game mechanic itself, which is pretty clever. Good games take time to make.

GamesBeat: Is this game as complicated to make as a Battlefield game?

Lindley: In some respects, yes, but we’re trying to differentiate ourselves. We’re not trying to build something with the scope of what a Battlefield can do. They have a lot of modes. They have their single-player campaign. That adds up to a lot of work over time. Because we’re so focused on multiplayer and cooperative, just nailing a great online experience, that means we can pick our battles a little bit more than Battlefield can.

GamesBeat: Are there some things in Plants vs. Zombies 2 that you’ve also brought over into this?

Lindley: A lot of characters we’ve taken straight from the other games. The new one we showed here today was Bonk Choy, which is a new character in Plants vs. Zombies 2. I don’t know if you’ve seen him in any of the demos. Any time we see characters in the other games that we think might apply, we grab them and put them in. We’re trying to share as much of the character base from the other games as possible.

GamesBeat: Are some of the characteristics of the two sides similar to the roles in the first game? Like the plants might be less mobile, while the zombies can move but are slow?

Lindley: It’s a little bit different from that. The way we look at it is that the plants are very much defensive, because that’s what they do by nature in the game. The zombies are more an offensive team. I think you see that come through in their abilities. The plants are geared toward defending things, as opposed to taking the fight to the zombies. We maintain that in our game as much as we can.

GamesBeat: Do you have Battlefield people assisting, because it’s the Frostbite engine?

Lindley: We definitely get help from the Frostbite team, which is part of DICE. They’re not actually working on the game – our team’s working on it – but we work closely with them as far as what’s going in the engine, when they’re updating it, when they’re improving it. We try to take all that stuff in, so we can take advantage of the work and energy they’re putting into Frostbite.

GamesBeat: This shows that the engine works, that it’s versatile, that you can do anything with it.

Lindley: Need for Speed is a Frostbite game. We’re a different flavor of game. We’re third-person action. Army of Two was a third-person action game on Frostbite. It’s definitely getting more robust and more versatile as time goes on.

GamesBeat: It seems like that would help reduce the workload for you guys.

Lindley: A little bit. We spend less time building up core technology and more time just making the game, which is ideally what you want as a game creator. I’ve worked on a lot of projects where we just spent years getting technology to work. We have very little time at the end to iterate and make the game as good as it can be. We’re actually iterating all the time on this game, because we don’t have to worry about building a shooter engine. It’s already there.

GamesBeat: Getting it to work, did you evolve from something that was very different in the beginning to what you have now?

Lindley: Quite a bit. One of the things that we started with is that we sort of threw everything and the kitchen sink at the design. How do we make this work? How do we take all the elements people love about Plants vs. Zombies and weave it into an action experience? Over time we figured out what works best and what doesn’t. We’ve simplified what we’ve done a lot. We had a lot of complicated and detailed stuff early on in development, and we’ve pared that down to what works best. We’re down to something that’s really tight at this point.

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There’s no pressure on Karl Magnus-Troedsson. He’s just the guy who has to beat rival franchise Call of Duty, revive Mirror’s Edge, and work on the next Star Wars game. The general manager of Electronic Arts’ DICE studio in Stockholm has to juggle multiple blockbuster games under design. But the big one coming this fall is Battlefield 4, the next installment in the modern-combat series coming on next-generation platforms including the PC, PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One.

Magnus-Troedsson’s job gets easier because all of EA’s major games (except sports titles) are now using the Frostbite 3 engine as the common development platform. Battlefield 4 will feature a new commander mode and 64-player multiplayer. Its graphics and destructible environments will be far better than in the past generation if EA’s demos are to be believed. We talked about all of DICE’s big games in an interview with Magnus-Troedsson at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Here’s an edited transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: How’s your E3 going?

Karl-Magnus Troedsson: It’s going very well, actually. It’s E3, so it’s chaos of course, but everyone has to deal with that.

GamesBeat: What’s the feedback been like on your demo?

Troedsson: We’ve been catching up on the Internet and hearing what people have to say on the floor. It’s very positive, both for Battlefield 4 and what we teased out there with Mirror’s Edge and Star Wars: Battlefront.

GamesBeat: Yeah, I don’t think anyone was really expecting those.

Troedsson: A lot of people have speculated about it. Some people have said that they were 100 percent sure that they knew it was going to show, but in hindsight it’s easy to be smart, right? It was a big day for DICE at the press conference, showing three games like that.

GamesBeat: It’s a diverse lineup there. Is there something in common there, besides the Frostbite engine? What else helps you do all three games at the same time?

Troedsson: Frostbite is a very strong common foundation to build on. It’s good for all of EA. We’re very happy about that, of course, since we built the engine from the beginning. We custom-built it for the first Battlefield: Bad Company a long time ago. Actually, during the last generational transition between consoles, that’s when we built it. Now, having that as a technology used by so many game teams within EA is very positive to see, and it’s also a strong force for us. If we need help with it at some point, a lot of people can jump in. They know the tools and so forth. That goes for all of EA. It’s easier to have everyone on the same engine. But that’s not what we’re counting on to deliver these games. It’s going to be built by DICE.

GamesBeat: I guess this isn’t an easy thing to do. With Criterion, it didn’t quite work out. RenderWare just didn’t fulfill the need. How do you think you’re able to be successful with this kind of technology?

Troedsson: There’s a couple of things. First and foremost, Frostbite is driven by what the game teams need. We don’t just sit around fiddle with stuff because we want to. We’re focused on building an engine and editors and workflows and pipelines that are driven by the game teams – what features they want and what improvements they need. We’re driving a whole community of developers now inside of EA that all together work on the engine. We have the core Frostbite team, of course, but then every game that we make on the engine makes the engine better as well. It’s a cool thing to see happening, a very collaborative way to work.

GamesBeat: How has it been upgraded for the next generation? What does the engine get better at doing?

Troedsson: There’s a lot of things happening under the hood when it comes to lighting and shaders, especially if you look at characters for instance. We’ve done some upgrades to animation and made that even better. A.I. and so on. You can probably find an engineer who can answer that much better than me. But one of the really important parts is scalability. We’re releasing Battlefield 4 now on five major platforms – [PlayStation 3] and PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and PC — which range quite a bit in their capabilities. If there’s one thing Frostbite does well now, it’s scaling up or down so you can make use of all the power of those different platforms.

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Yamauchi talked with us at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in a small group interview. Here’s an edited version of the talk.

GamesBeat: If you have an untrained eye, what would you notice that’s better about PlayStation 4 racing games compared to the PlayStation 3?

Kazunori Yamauchi: It’ll be an answer for an untrained eye as well, but the hardware performance of the PS4 is much better than the PS3, so you’re going to be a much richer image.

GamesBeat: What if I don’t care about graphics so much, though? What if it looks good enough for me already?

Yamauchi: I totally understand that because you’re right. To an untrained eye, the distinction between the images that you see on PS3 and PS4 might not be apparent. I think in that respect, video games have really matured. From here on, what’s going to be demanded of video games is an evolution that isn’t just about looking better or moving faster.

GamesBeat: [Gran Turismo 5] was very robust. It probably had the biggest scope of any of the GT games. Where do you go from there? What can you add to GT6 to give fans more?

Yamauchi: You’re right. GT5 was a huge game. At the same time, it was kind of bulky and slow as well. That was something I wanted to improve for GT6. I think that if you try out the demo on the show floor, you might realize that right off, going from the top screen to when you’re actually driving a car, there are no loading times. Everything is seamless now. There’s nothing that will stop you in between the scenes when you’re playing the game. The scale might have been great, but we were lacking in response because of the sheer size of the game. In GT6, one of the major objectives was to improve upon that.

GamesBeat: If we could take a broader view for a moment, you’re in a very unique position, having been involved with Sony’s consoles since Sony started making consoles. The series has spanned every one. I was wondering what kinds of things you’ve been able to do with each transition and what you’re looking forward to doing with the next transition. With GT6, you’re building on that speed and efficiency with the PlayStation 3. I’m wondering what else is in store for the next generation.

Yamauchi: Should I start with the first one, then? [Laughs] Back in the days of the PlayStation, the development device was about the size of a refrigerator. I created the first demo on that machine. I did the modeling by myself. I made a demo where an F1 car would drive around an oval track with flat shading — no textures. But the result was really kind of stunning. I never thought that I’d see the day when we could make games with 3D graphics. Of course, back then, I used to tinker with PCs and make games there as well, but I never thought there would come a day when these 3D models could run at 30 frames per second. That was a major surprise for me, when the first PlayStation came out.

When the [PlayStation 2] came out, one unique characteristic of that system was that the screen fill rate was very fast. Even looking back now, it’s very fast. In some cases, it’s faster than the PS3. There, we were able to use a lot of textures. It was able to do that read-modify-write, where it reads the screen, you take the screenshot, and you modify it and send it back. It could do that very quickly.

I don’t know if anybody remembers, but when the PS2 first came out, the first thing I did on that was a demo for the announcement. I showed a demo of GT3 that showed the Seattle course at sunset with the heat rising off the ground and shimmering. You can’t re-create that heat haze effect on the PS3 because the read-modify-write just isn’t as fast as when we were using the PS2. There are things like that. Another reason is because of the transition to full HD.

The PS3 was a combination of a poor GPU with an SPU that’s really fast if you use it right. It’s not a very well-balanced machine. It’s hard to use the hardware properly. That’s one reason why it took us five years to develop GT5. Using the SPU properly, though, that in itself is really interesting. On the PS3, in the demo, we showed the adaptive tessellation. That’s the kind of technology that you normally wouldn’t be able to do unless you were on the PS4-generation of machines. When you optimize the use of the SPU properly, you can do that even on the PS3.

That leads into how we work on the PS4. The PS4 isn’t as off-balance as the PS3 was. If you look at the market right now, Gran Turismo is one of the only games on the PS3 that does 1080p at 60 frames per second. It was really difficult to achieve that. On the PS4, the lowest common denominator is going to be boosted. Most games will be able to do 1080p at 60 frames per second. That’s the real good part about the PS4.

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LOS ANGELES — In the wake of the press conferences at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Sony’s stock price rose this week and Microsoft’s fell. That says a lot about who did the best job of explaining their next-generation video game console to the public.

Jon Koller, Sony’s vice president of marketing of home console and handheld platforms, said all indicators suggest that Sony had a better show thanks to its surprise announcements that it would price its box at $399, or $100 cheaper than Microsoft’s, while it would permit gamers to sell used games without restrictions, once again in contrast to Microsoft’s position. But he knows Sony has a tough fight on its hands and wouldn’t presume to do a victory lap yet. We talked about the reactions to the E3 announcements and the big differences in strategy among the rivals.

Here’s our edited interview with Koller.

GamesBeat: What’s your take on the competitive picture that’s emerged here?

Jon Koller: We came here with two things to do. One was to establish ourselves as for gamers and be focused on that. The second thing was to establish PlayStation 4 as the best place to play. I think we did both very well. Those were our objectives, regardless of what the competition did. I think it’s been a good E3 for us. Got a lot of work to go, though.

GamesBeat: I was telling someone that if Microsoft makes the case that their machine and their system is better, it takes them a 30-minute infomercial. Sony right now can just do it in 30 seconds. “We have good games. We allow you to buy used games. Price is $399.”

Koller: One of the things that I think we’ve learned through the years is that the simpler and more focused approach is better, irrespective what Microsoft is doing on their marketing. For us, we look at how clean and simple we can make this. Can we make this as efficient as possible? The trend in the market is much more towards just making it easy for people.

We started working on the PlayStation 4 back in 2007. At the time, there were two things that stood out to us, and still do. That’s immediacy and accessibility. They’re the two key issues in this industry in general. This was before the rise of tablet and mobile. Those two things need to be solved. If you’re not clear about how you’re going to solve both of those things, then the gamer will react accordingly. I think you’re seeing some of that here this week.

GamesBeat: Was there an advantage in going after Microsoft’s event, or do you think you guys pretty much stuck to the gameplan as originally conceived?

Koller: We definitely stuck to the gameplan. It’s a strategy we’ve had for some time. We have had our price in place for a long time. We’ve had our used gameplan in place for a long time. The used gameplan, which a lot of people know about by now – a couple of your interviews even talked about it – is the fact that we want to make it as simple as possible. We don’t want to change what we think is a good system now with the current generation. We said, “It’s not broken. It’s working for us and for our partners. And gamers love it.”

If we have a stance, it’s for gamers. There’s really no other means by which we can change this. We looked at that as a foundation for us. So there wasn’t anything changed in that six-hour period between Microsoft’s press conference and ours, other than me being at the Microsoft press conference and seeing their price point and thinking, “Now we’ve got a tidal wave coming here in a few hours.”

GamesBeat: There are a few things people pointed out as diminishing some of that tidal wave a little bit. You’ll charge for multiplayer gaming on PlayStation Network. Maybe some publishers objected or something, but I guess there’s the asterisk that they could charge fees if they want to for used games. And the PS4 has no camera included, like the Xbox One comes with Kinect. I don’t know if that diminishes the argument or not.

Koller: We clearly don’t think so. On the camera, we wanted to be as open as possible and allow choice. One thing that we’ve tried to do throughout the history of PlayStation is give gamers choices. If you notice, we didn’t announce bundles. It’s a core [unit]. It’s $399. It comes with the console, HDMI cable, and a DualShock 4 controller.

The rest is up to the gamer – what games they want, if they want a camera, if they want another controller. We felt that was a better path. It by no means suggests that we’re diminishing the camera’s importance. The camera, as we showed in our announcement with games like Dream from Media Molecule, will be intrinsic to many experiences. But we want it to be up to the gamer to make that choice and see if they want to include it. It was our goal to get to that $399 price point. We felt that if we got there, we could have a real win. The freedom part, I think, was important.

On your second point, about publishers, we’ve now made it clear, but the system of online passes, charging for online play, is still available to publishers. That’s something they can still do. As a first party, we’ve said we’re not going to do it. But that port is open. What’s not open, and what we’re very clear about, is that we will not charge for offline gaming. That’s not something that we want to do. As the current system exists, it will transition in exactly that way to PlayStation 4.

Your first point, charging for multiplayer, we talked about a bit at the press conference. We’re building a network worthy of next-generation gaming. We view the network as critical, intrinsic to the experience. Again, we’re giving gamers choice. They don’t have to do this. We think that with all the features that are wrapped up into it — multiplayer gaming is part of it, but also instant game collection, sharing, the social experiences – there’s going to be a real consumer proposition. We’ve done a lot of research and testing into all of this. The feedback that’s come back says it’s a positive opportunity. I think that gamers appreciate what the network is going to be.

GamesBeat: It wasn’t quite as much about bringing in a lot of the other innovations that have happened in the rest of the industry – online, mobile, social – this time around. I don’t know if you had already said a lot about that in February. This was mostly about games, but it would be interesting to hear more about some of these other things that are now possible, because you have Unity on the platform, or because you have Gaikai, or these other things.

Koller: There’s a lot more to talk about with PlayStation 4. This is one of those times when we’ve felt that we can give specific focused messages based on the venue and based on who’s listening. For the announce, we went with a heavier tech spec. We went with what our value proposition is. We showed some of the partnerships we have. There’s a lot of other things that will be announced at future opportunities. E3, we wanted to focus on gaming and have that be the key.

The last point I want to make on that is just—innovation, relative to PlayStation 4, there are obviously plenty of things to talk about in the future. There’s a lot in the works. But innovation, insofar as the way that publishers work with us, is one thing we tried to convey here at E3. Things have changed. In the past we would see development that was fairly agnostic. It was very much created across all the platforms at the time. It was up to the marketing teams to try to push that index rate one way or the other, based on a little bit of money that you’d put into the market.

It’s changing now. I think that you’ve seen things like what we did with Destiny, where there’s not necessarily exclusivity, but there are different types of gaming experiences – maybe hours of gameplay or different characters and whatnot – for the various games that we’re partnering with. Those things, we think, will end up influencing adoption on a longer-term basis and rolling up to the fact that we think the PlayStation 4 is the best place to play.

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Few companies are betting as big on the next-generation consoles as Electronic Arts. Peter Moore, chief operating officer at EA, believes that the enthusiasm for those new consoles has never been higher, thanks to a series of big announcements at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show in Los Angeles this week.

Here’s our edited interview with Moore.

GamesBeat: Do the show and the industry look good to you overall?

Moore: I think so. It’s funny. I was afraid, or at least concerned, coming into E3 that the conversation would be about, “Do we need consoles anymore. Is there a reason to buy next-generation consoles? Is this the E3 where we shift away from game-specific hardware?” We’re exiting E3 today with less about “Should we?” and more about “Which one?” That’s good news for the industry. From what I’ve seen of gamer reaction – I’ve talked to a lot of people here – and what I see online at night as I go on the forums and the blogs, the conversation has shifted nicely. They’re confused, but they’re excited. That’s good for us. Will the industry grow as it’s done in previous generations? I think the answer’s yes.

GamesBeat: The used game thing has been an interesting sideshow.

Moore: It’s a sideshow, yeah. It’s become emotional. It’s confusing. I think it calms itself down. It was funny to me that we’re all focused on coming to E3 and getting our new games in place, because that’s what E3 was about, and yet the conversation was looking back on used games.

GamesBeat: There are all these emotions tied up in it. Things like, “Do I get something for free? Can I try something out?”

Moore: That’s the issue. It didn’t take us by surprise, but all of our work and all of our focus in these last three weeks is on getting Battlefield ready for prime time. Then Microsoft forgets to plug in the audio. It’s just disappointing that we get caught up in talking about business models when we should be talking about how great the games are, what are the games of the show, things like that. That has been a sideshow and a distraction. The industry spends a lot of money coming here to show off our games, and all we can talk about is used games?

GamesBeat: I don’t know if you get reports like this about what got tweeted the most or whatever. Is there a conversational change, though? People want new consoles?

Moore: It’s my sampling. I’ll sit and marinate on the boards and forums and get a feel for the mood. The mood coming in was, “Boy, they better show me.” There was disappointment with Microsoft’s unveil, that there were no games. It was show-me time.

GamesBeat: Used games were sort of the threat that they were using. “If they don’t let me play my used games, I’m going to mobile. I quit the console business.”

Moore: Yeah. But then they won’t like mobile because they don’t like free-to-play. You have these sidebar conversations that unfortunately circle around business models rather than the content. That’s not why we come to E3. We can go have a conference somewhere cheap to talk about business models.

A lot of the conversation started to shift, though. I think next year, it all changes. Everything will be clear by then. The consoles will have shipped and then we’re in that golden period of developers on their second game and starting to show pre-alpha. They get used to the hardware. They know what its limitations are. We start to see better games.

I have a smile on my face coming home today. It was probably a clenched jaw on Sunday morning when I got off the plane.

GamesBeat: Which of your games got the best reactions?

Moore: If I were to pick two—There’s the obvious ones. 64-player Battlefield 4, the line’s been out the door. It has been spectacular. I haven’t met anybody that didn’t have a great time. I played on stage in the Monday press conference. So that doesn’t surprise me. FIFA doesn’t surprise me. Madden looks magnificent.

The two real hits that have been interesting, though, and they couldn’t be more opposite — Titanfall has been a huge hit. It’s a candidate for a lot of Game of Show awards. And then Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Two ends of the spectrum, which makes me smile about EA. You can have a game like this and a game like that and those are the two you’re talking about. It’s a testament to who we are as a company.

GamesBeat: Titanfall had some very small things that I thought were very good touches. Being able to run up a wall and go to a second floor that way.

Moore: You have to get up a real head of steam up to do that.

GamesBeat: It was too bad somebody scooped you and found the posters for Garden Warfare. That would have been a great surprise with the Battlefield-like trailer.

Moore: You forget about that the week after, though. Those will be the games for us. The Mirror’s Edge and Star Wars: Battlefront teases were clearly big. I had a unique perspective for the unveilings, because I was behind the stage, ready to come on stage. Looking at 4,000 people like this when they see Mirror’s Edge, I wish I had taken a photograph. First they think it’s Mirror’s Edge. Then they’re not sure. Then, boom. Same with Battlefront. We showed some snow, right? “Woohoo!” As soon as the walker’s foot came down, they knew exactly what it was and the place went nuts. That moment there, where I’m about to close the show — the entire audience is just lit up, when you’re looking from behind the stage. I was very happy with our show.

GamesBeat: The interesting thing to me is that all of these things are on Frostbite. Plants Vs. Zombies, Mirror’s Edge, Battlefield. Even Command & Conquer, right?

Moore: Frostbite 3, yeah.

GamesBeat: That’s very cool. I’m sure your CFO gets excited about that.

Moore: You were at our investor breakfast yesterday, and you saw Frank Gibeau’s slide. You can find it on the web. It’s an interesting little item for you to write about. I think Frank said we were at 17 engines at some point. He put that slide up. NBA had its own engine.

GamesBeat: And then there was RenderWare, which didn’t work.

Moore: Yeah. You had middleware in there as well. We’d bought Criterion. The good news is that we bought Criterion. The bad news is that we had RenderWare. I think we bought Criterion for RenderWare and then ended up with a great studio. None of the dev teams liked RenderWare much at all.

What it means for the company – and you’re right, the CFO loves it – is you’ve got EA Sports Ignite and you’ve got Frostbite 3. You’ve got bits and bobs here and there, but that’s about it. The great thing about it is for our people. You have a bunch of guys in Montreal. You need some help from a team in L.A. We can move people around just like that. It’s great for developers. “Go live in L.A. for six months and help us finish up a game.” “Sure!” And off they go. We don’t have to train anybody, because they already know. It’s our own engine and our own intellectual property.

GamesBeat: Did the reuse of Frostbite 3 across games also have something to do with Larry saying that in this transition, you’re actually going to be able to hold costs fairly flat?

Moore: It wasn’t the edict. It was that you can hold costs because you’ve got R&D that is so much more cost-effective, because you don’t have so many engines you’re working on. We have held costs. That’s an unbelievable achievement for this company. To deliver all the next-gen you’ve seen at flat operating expenditures? That is a big deal.

GamesBeat: Where do you say you’ve put your chips on the table now? You’re at a point where you know you can’t do everything. You have some chips to lay down on certain parts of the industry. Where are the chips down?

Moore: Certainly we have strategic objectives for the company. Nailing next-gen is a strategic objective. This company needs to get back to where we were, and I’m confident that we will be where we were on the PlayStation 2 platform. We got in early, made big bets, did things like game engines that were focused on next-gen, delivered big franchises, and had some new IP at the beginning that allowed us to get after the business on a broader basis. I’m feeling that again. We will tell you that we didn’t do that as well in the last generation. 360 and the Wii and the PS3, we didn’t get after that.

So nailing next-gen is one. Driving our mobile business, which has a huge growth potential, is one-A, as we would say. Mobile continues to be a very important part of our business. Simpsons: Tapped Out, Tetris Blitz, Real Racing 3, Sims Free Play, all of these titles are growing. They’re growing our user base. They allow us to ride out the trough that we’ve seen over the years. If you were console-reliant, the valley gets a little deeper, and then the peaks go up. This flattens it out and smooths out the edges. Mobil does that for us. Free-to-play does that for us. Our downloadable content, FIFA Ultimate Team, Battlefield 3 Premium, that’s still selling. The smoothing-out of those valleys is very helpful for us.

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LOS ANGELES — Victor Kislyi had the distinction of walking out on the stage at Microsoft’s press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo show this week. And it was a tank that got him there.

Kislyi is the chief executive of Wargaming.net, and he runs the company that built World of Tanks, a free-to-play online tank battle game. World of Tanks has more than 60 million registered players, and it’s coming to the Xbox 360 game console from Microsoft. To celebrate, Wargaming threw a giant party at E3 with thousands of guests.

And now the company’s World of Warplanes game will enter its open beta test on July 2. And it’s testing World of Warships, another massively multiplayer online game where players battle with each other in World War II-era naval duels.

Here’s a transcript of our interview with Kislyi.

GamesBeat: You got to go up on stage with Microsoft. That must have been an interesting adventure. How did that happen?

Victor Kislyi: The Chicago studio, we shook hands on this a little more than a year ago. They’ve been working on this project for quite a bit – a year and a half, let’s say. The project was looking good, and Microsoft was happy. But the reason is easy. North America, the U.K., most of France, Spain, and Italy: They play on consoles. We can’t make millions of people go and buy $1,500 PCs, even if they really love tanks. In America you play 10 feet away from the screen. We have to go there, where the consumer is.

It’s looking good. Did you have a chance to see it?

GamesBeat: Yeah, I played it at the Microsoft showcase.

Kislyi: What happened is, as you may have noticed, it’s a console game. It’s not a PC port. Of course it uses the same concept – tanks, 15-on-15 multiplayer, random battles – but the controller experience, the user interface, the little magnets and dirty tricks they use for shooting games on consoles, they’re all here. These guys have been making console games for 10 or 12 years. We didn’t interfere with them. We just discussed monetization and how we can tailor that for here. The leveling up and the monetization are a little bit simplified. On a PC screen, you can have lots of numbers. Here you upgrade in packages.

The maps are similar for 15-on-15. They’re beautiful maps. The tech tree is the same, because this is canonical. It exists for pretty much all platforms. For consoles, also, we usually have more spectacular explosions.

GamesBeat: For the 360, did you have to change monetization in some way, or could you just drop it in?

Kislyi: We simplified things a little bit. It’s not about getting more or less money, because we’ll get as much money as statistics will allow. We’ll not try to squeeze out more than you can afford. It’s about the whole concept of leveling up, which is in modules. Monetization is a part of leveling up. In general, it’s a little faster and more dynamic, but the concept is the same. Unfortunately for us, and I’m very open about this, Microsoft cannot drop this Gold membership requirement for playing online games. That’s the rule for everyone.

GamesBeat: It’s $50, and then it’s free-to-play.

Kislyi: But that’s the platform service. It’s like cable TV or your ISP. We can’t change Microsoft overnight. But the beauty of it is that it looks like, in comparison with all those horrible stories I heard before, our teams are working very closely with Microsoft’s team. It’s very risky for them and for us. The stakes are high. For us it’s a new console with Microsoft behind it, and for them it’s the first big attempt at free-to-play on a console. You must have noticed this during the conference. They see it as a front-runner. We were on the stage within the first four minutes.

GamesBeat: As far as the timing on it, you announced 360. Do you also have next-generation work going on?

Kislyi: No, no. Right now, we’re not doing anything for Xbox One. First of all, they haven’t released it yet. Second, even after they release, for free-to-play online you have to have a critical mass of players. Forty-eight million Xbox Live members is a much juicier number than the million or two players that usually buy a console in the first year. Consoles start slow.

GamesBeat: So it makes sense to be late in the cycle.

Kislyi: First we’ll see how it goes on the 360. Forty-eight million Xbox Live members, that’s a good platform. Let’s see if we don’t screw this up.

GamesBeat: You have a date now for World of Warplanes, right?

Kislyi: World of Warplanes is the very beginning of July. We say July 2, but it could be the July 3 or July 4. That’s going to be the open beta. We had some problems with the controls, an ideological problem. How do we preserve the authenticity and the photorealistic visuals, but give controls for people who don’t necessarily fly fighter jets or play a lot of simulation games? We did prototypes and we experimented a lot, and now it works. What’s left is just adding bells and whistles. There’s a tale of the tape here, a comparison between your plane and enemy planes. You can click on it and see that their firepower is bigger, so there are tips and suggestions regarding horizontal or vertical speed maneuvers and things like that.

GamesBeat: I saw this around GDC. Did you do anything significantly different between then and now?

Kislyi: We added lots of things, like crew skills that can affect the gameplay. We have pilots and gunners that you can level up. They have perks. We also have a lot of different consumables. It’s in line with the World of Tanks model. We’re adding some things like that in time for release, and we’re still polishing the gameplay itself and the rendering system. We re-created the greenery from scratch, and now we’re working heavily on optimizing the build and getting ready for open beta.

GamesBeat: How much will be ready by the time of the open beta? How many maps or types of airplanes?

Kislyi: Content-wise, there might be some additions, but it seems like we’ve pretty much stabilized. We have two new maps in this build that are pretty interesting. While we were delayed working on conceptual issues with the controls, we had enough time for more content. With this game, content is not the problem. We have hundreds of planes to come after the release. Whatever number of planes we’ll have at the release, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll have enough for you to grind for a couple of months, and then we’ll add more and more. Like in Tanks, there’s no lack of tanks or lack of maps. We can make maps and planes. That’s easy. Controls, balance, new gameplay modes, e-sports support — those are challenging tasks.

Did you hear that we announced the single premium account? I’m personally very proud of this. It was my idea, and I pushed it through all the layers of our 1,600-strong company. You pay for one in World of Tanks, and you have it for all three games when Battleships comes out. We don’t charge you for a second or third premium account. Not even a discount. The typical American sales approach would be “buy two get one free” or something like that. We say no. You spend your time, and that’s a big investment. The premium account is something that allows you to save time across the long-term progression. We work hard. We pay programmers and pay rent and pay for servers. But we don’t want to charge you $30 for three games at the same time. I think that’s cool.

GamesBeat: The interesting question is that you’ve built this great audience, but it’s anybody’s guess as to how long these games last. The only thing that maybe knocks it out is if a better game comes along and people move to that.

Kislyi: We have obvious success. We have huge numbers and all the statistical analysis and blah, blah, blah. What I love about our company, myself, though, and the culture within our company is that we don’t sit on our butts. We’re hungry to make this gaming world better. There are so many things we haven’t done yet, and inside the company we’re very critical. People can come up and criticize me for doing this or not doing that.

GamesBeat: Like your parties are too small.

Kislyi: That’s one example. Or your presentation wasn’t good, or you need to shave before you go on stage. But we have to be perfect. Let me put it like this, to give you a more concrete answer. Russia is an example of saturation. There are so many people there playing World of Tanks. In every school, if you ask a schoolboy, he’ll say, “Of course I play World of Tanks.” Any police department or fire department, if you ask someone, he’s been playing with his friends. Russia has a peak concurrent users (CCU) at 800,000 now, 800,000 players at the same time. That’s a benchmark. I don’t think infectious diseases spread that fast. You couldn’t ask for more than that. In September, we’ll make one more attempt to reach a million CCU in Russia, but that’s a good example of saturation.

America, Europe, Korea: They’re so far away from that saturation point. That was the main reason, by the way, why we went Xbox for America, because Americans play on the console. This is a blue ocean. There’s a lot of space for us, or anyone else who is smart and productive, to grab a lot of turf, even without big competition.

We don’t compete with League of Legends. We were drinking with [Riots Games cofounder] Brandon Beck two days ago at Microsoft’s dinner. He confirmed that they don’t see people leaving League of Legends for World of Tanks. We know that World of Tanks people don’t go play League of Legends, even though both games are huge. He has problems with DOTA 2, obviously, and our competitors are things like Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Crossfire in China, or this War Thunder in Russia, but I think we overcame their numbers already, so they have no chance.

GamesBeat: Do you have a billion-dollar game yet, or do you think you’re going to get there in the foreseeable future?

Kislyi: I think we’ll be hitting a billion in revenue—the cumulative Tanks revenue will be more than a billion. Not yet, but it will be. It’s close. Frankly, though, I don’t care, because I know that we’re far from saturation. My goal is to get similar saturation numbers in the U.S. and the U.K. Germany’s good.

GamesBeat: When are you going to do World of Infantry?

Kislyi: Right now, we’re not planning on it. What I can tell you is that we finally, with Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games—it always takes some time to integrate, brainstorm, go to visit each other, shake hands, do some drinking and some thinking. He will start very soon on a very big project. He’s not going to be fixing models for World of Tanks. We’re not in a position to say anything meaningful to the media right now, but that’s going to be our fourth big project.

Our hands are full now with Tanks, ‘Planes, and ‘Ships. The Xbox version is a different game. World of Tanks Blitz, the mobile game, we’ve nailed all the technological issues, That was probably the bottleneck. The controls are almost there. Then it’s just the bells and whistles. I can’t give you the date, but it will definitely be released before the end of this year. They’re polishing and doing internal tests.

That’s the science of our games. We don’t just hope that it will be good. The rule is that you don’t release the game until your focus tests demonstrate that people hit a certain conversion rate and the churn rate is low. It’s not a big presentation to the big boss and I say, “Yeah, release it.” It’s science. It’s now rocket science. Everything is being checked in the lab for sustainability, churn rate, and conversion rate.

GamesBeat: How do you manage the community at this stage?

Kislyi: We have the best of the best people. We have 15 offices. Approximately 800 people are publishing people. They’re customer support and community management, plus a little bit of PR and e-sports. They go to work every day and draw a salary. They’re getting training from their seniors about the rules and the forums and the ethical norms. There are certain marketing messages we give to the community. We have anger management specialists, literally. It’s hard work every day.

We have a lot of people on the ground – Koreans in Seoul, Japanese in Tokyo. We just announced the new Japanese office. We’ll have Japanese people supporting the Japanese market. In Singapore we have Thai people, Filipino people, Malaysian people, Singaporean people, and people on the ground in all those countries doing support. Same for the Americans and Europeans. In Paris we have 120 people, approximately – Czech people, Polish people, Dutch people, Scandinavian people, Spanish people, Italian people. If you go to our Paris office there are maybe all of five French people there. The rest are multilingual Europeans.

GamesBeat: Does something like live streaming make sense to integrate into the game at some point? Like Twitch?

Kislyi: We’re thinking about that. We believe that streaming is a good thing, having it right inside the game client, so we’re thinking in that direction. We don’t have any official decisions, but it’s in our field of view.

You have to understand, we can’t create everything instantly. It takes work and polishing and integration. We have a huge list, both for Tanks and for Warplanes. The game’s going to be around for the next 10 years. I don’t even say five now. It’s going to be the next 10 years. There will always be something to do.

Right now, our biggest focus – apart from graphics and everything – is e-sports. World of Tanks is a huge e-sports bonanza. It’s fair. It’s competitive. It’s spectacular. It’s team-based. It has tanks. It’s all you could wish for in an e-sports game. For this, the budget is like $2.5 million. That’s not too much, but it’s a good beginning. Next year it will be bigger.

Again, though, e-sports isn’t simple. It’s not as if you just wave the money around and people show up. It’s hard work for our community managers, organizing the regional championships and coming to the finals. It’s like maintaining FIFA – the actual worldwide football league. But everything that helps World of Tanks be more tweetable, more streamable, we’ll be doing it. It’s just a bullet point on a to-do list that takes a certain amount of time to realize.

GamesBeat: EVE Online had the interesting idea of doing Dust 514 in the world of EVE Online, doing two different games together. Is that appealing in some way?

Kislyi: Right now, we’re still dealing with other challenges. Let’s deliver Warplanes and make sure that it’s a cool, hit dogfighting game. It has its own merits. Let’s see how it goes then. Same for Warships. After that, we’ll be thinking about how to combine them. I’ll be honest with you. Within this year, we don’t have any plans to combine the three. It’s not possible technologically in such a short term.

But we’ll be combining it on the clan war map. We’re developing the clan wars more aggressively now. Air squadrons will be fighting over Moscow before the tank battles. If my squadron wins, my tank team has, say, two airstrikes or recon or some other bells and whistles that they earn for their battle. A victory at sea might mean a coastal barrage or some help in the landing zone or an advantage in the economic lines. Certain things will make for meaningful coordination between clans for ‘Planes, ‘Ships, and Tanks.

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LOS ANGELES — The folks at Microsoft must have been thinking about bigger targets like Comcast or Disney. Because when they weren’t looking, Sony came back and stole away the hearts of gamers at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week. Microsoft was the undisputed leader in gaming moving into a new generation of consoles, but Sony reminded everyone that we’ve got a real console war this time around.

Sony’s message was simple. In a 30-second commercial, it can simply say that its box is for gamers and is cheaper. Microsoft can argue that it has a better deal, but it might take a 30-minute infomercial to get that across.

Starting with its Xbox One reveal on May 21, Microsoft made some serious miscalculations. It took some controversial positions on consumer rights issues related to used games, privacy, and requiring an always-on Internet connection. It may have had good reasons to do so, but the publisher wasn’t prepared to talk about those reasons in the way that it should have. It also didn’t talk much about games. Instead, it showed how the Xbox One worked within a larger system that could manage all of your entertainment.

Gamers reacted negatively. And Sony seized the opportunity. Kaz Hirai, the chief executive of Sony, said that Sony’s focus this time around with its upcoming PlayStation 4 was on gamers. The company would target its box at them to get it established in the home, and then it would deliver its broader entertainment message to scoop up the mass market. Microsoft, by contrast, made architectural decisions that suggested it wanted to go for the mass market first.

Just before E3, Microsoft tried to defuse the consumer rights issues by announcing its somewhat complicated stance on used games — it would not charge fees for them, but publishers could, and it would limit a owner’s sharing rights through digital rights management.

At E3, it got worse. Microsoft’s Don Mattrick, head of the game business, went first and announced its price at a high $499 and showed off its games. Then Sony’s smackdown began. Jack Tretton, the chief of Sony’s game business in the U.S., got a roar of applause when he announced Sony would permit consumers to buy and sell used games without restrictions. (Nintendo articulated the same policy). And then came the second big blow: Sony would sell the machine at $399, a full $100 below Microsoft’s price.

“Sony is having a great show,” said Frank Gibeau, head of worldwide game studios at Electronic Arts.

Microsoft was reeling. While its box may be as capable as Sony’s, and its policies not that far apart from its Japanese archrival, perception is what matters. At E3, Microsoft made a safe, comfortable bet and took an arrogant stance toward consumers. It could recover from that, but it would take a huge amount of marketing dollars to do so. It would be better instead for Microsoft to retreat sooner, change its policies, and match Sony’s price.

You could make a comparison to the grocery business, where high-end grocers tout their services, quality, and ethical buying practices to try to compete with Walmart. But consumers flock to Walmart because of its lower prices. They don’t have the patience to listen to a complicated marketing pitch, especially when someone else is simply offering a cheaper deal.

Sony isn’t bundling a Kinect-like motion sensing system in its box like Microsoft is, leaving out a system that may be valued at $50 or more. Microsoft does have a camera, and it dedicated a considerable amount of the silicon in its box to Kinect and instant switching between applications. But it failed to show the value of that system at its press conference. Marc Whitten, chief product officer at Xbox, acknowledged that this was a mistake.

Sony is also charging for multiplayer this time around on its PlayStation Network, much like Microsoft does with Xbox Live. And Sony acknowledged it will permit game publishers to charge consumers fees for used game sales if they so wish. So the differences aren’t that big. But Sony is going to do all it can to push the winning message: Its box is for gamers, it favors consumer rights, and its box is cheaper.

Microsoft could spend a billion dollars arguing why that isn’t so, but it should simply match Sony on those points.

Some of that is easier said than done. Microsoft put three operating systems in its box so that it could enable gamers to multitask their games with Skype calls and TV services. But that takes memory away from the games. Sony did not do that with the PS4. Microsoft included Kinect as a fundamental part of its system and  took away some of the processing power away from games. That may not matter too much, as Sony and Microsoft share the same chip technologies from Advanced Micro Devices. Microsoft says it can also tap the cloud for processing power through what it calls “cloud processing.” That essentially makes up for any shortfall in the game console by offloading tasks to web-connected data centers.

The jury is out on whether that will work, but Sony has not articulated the same message, and it may help Microsoft equalize the hardware battle. But that argument is an exceedingly difficult one to convey, even to gamers.

“The hardware is essentially the same,” said Brian Fargo, the head of InXile Entertainment. “This is a war over business models.”

Because of the choices it made, Microsoft is now on the defensive. It can easily change its positions. And it should do so fast, or else it could undo all of the work it did in the Xbox 360 generation to show that it could truly be the favorite among gamers.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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LOS ANGELES — Nintendo is in a tight spot. The Japanese company launched its Wii U last fall, but it has had a tepid response from the market. The new consoles from Sony and Microsoft are arriving this fall, and the Wii U’s best proposition is its price and the promise of new games coming soon. But those titles are based on Nintendo’s tried and true properties, nothing really new or innovative.

The company had so little to show at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles that it canceled its large press conference and scaled down its efforts to publicize its games. Scott Moffitt, the executive vice president of sales and marketing at Nintendo of America, acknowledges that Wii U sales are slow but big games are on the way. Will it be enough to make Nintendo relevant in this generation?

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Moffitt.

GamesBeat: So, how’s your E3 going?

Scott Moffit: It’s going good. We’re excited. I’m seeing a different approach to it this year. The feedback we’re getting is positive.

GamesBeat: How did the showcase and the Nintendo Direct webcast combo work for you?

Moffit: We had a series of events. We had Nintendo Direct in the morning [Tuesday morning], which is the way we broke all of the news. That was simultaneous globally. Then we had two different events.

We had the developer event, where media and gamers got a chance to interact with some of the developers and ask questions. Then we had an event for retailers and business partners, where we explained some of the information that matters more to them – launch, dates, and pricing. We’re talking with many of those retailers in meetings, giving them further details about bundles and the like for the holidays.

So far, the feedback has been pretty good. Separating the two events was the right thing to do this year. It’s not that we’re going to follow that model every year, but it was the right thing to do this year for the content we had.

GamesBeat: It’s not a new year for hardware. You don’t have to do as big a thing as you normally would.

Moffit: If you add in the Best Buy consumer sampling program, where we’re taking E3 beyond the walls of the convention center and allowing game fans to go play our E3 games, we’re doing more this year than we have in years past. We’re just doing it differently. This year, for us, E3 is all about the games. We have an amazing lineup of some of the best content we’ve ever brought to market. We’re going to have fresh new experiences on both Wii and on 3DS. That was our main message, and that’s what we have to share this year. But we try to find a different way to bring that to life for people. We have the developer experience, but we also thought this Best Buy consumer demo experience was a great way to get the games into people’s hands.

GamesBeat: It seems like the content for the Wii U has been coming slowly. Would you agree with that? Something about this console launch that has seemed slower. The hardware isn’t selling as well.

Moffit: The main learning is that software sells hardware. When you have great content, you’re going to drive the hardware installed base very rapidly, but that cuts both ways. When you’re not launching a lot of games, hardware sales are going to be slow.

Coming out of E3, we’re launching two great titles right away – Game & Wario and New Super Luigi U in June, followed quickly by The Wonderful 101 and then Pikmin and Zelda. Then, around the holidays, we have Wii Fit U and Super Mario 3D World. That’s an amazing lineup in just six months. There are enough games there to fill playtime for over a year. Then we also announced Mario Kart 8, which you got to play, and Super Smash Bros. for both Wii U and 3DS will be coming next year.

That’s an incredible lineup of fan-favorite popular franchises, all coming in quick succession. I missed Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze there. The anchor titles for us in the holidays will obviously be that, Wii Fit U, and Super Mario 3D World. When that content comes out, we fully expect hardware sales to take off, just like we saw with 3DS. The 3DS had an explosive first holiday on the backs of Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land. Those two games drove hardware in ways that we’re still feeling today.

GamesBeat: What did you think of the competitive picture at E3 this year, with Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft?

Moffit: I haven’t had a lot of time to study their announcements, but I can tell you that I feel very confident about our chances to compete and about what we’re bringing to market. “Content is king” has never been more true. The only way to experience our franchises is going to be on the Wii U. While Microsoft and Sony may compete for the hearts and minds of core gamers, our fans will appreciate the breadth of content that we’ve got, which has universal appeal. Avid gamers, kids, families, all of them will find something in our lineup that’s fun to play and that’s bringing new, unique experiences. Innovation is what Nintendo stands for. We’re proving that with a fresh new, reimagined array of games we’re bringing to market this year.

GamesBeat: As far as variety goes, where do you feel like you are with third-party developers and publishers?

Moffit: We have great relationships with third parties. You’re seeing great new games at E3 here from Ubisoft, from Disney, from Warner Bros. We have Mario and Sonic at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games from Sega. When we drive our hardware to higher installed bases, even more content will be coming. We’ve got tremendous content coming from developers who are finding new ways to use the features of the systems. The GamePad with a game like Watch Dogs from Ubisoft is a great showcase for the power of the hardware.

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LOS ANGELES — Bungie stepped out of the shadow of Halo this week and revealed its new game. The Bellevue, Wash.-based rockstar development studio is making Destiny for the PlayStation 4 and other platforms with publisher Activision Blizzard.

The studio finally showed off extended gameplay this week that demonstrated how the massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game will work. It involves not only breathtaking art but also some innovative thinking in allowing multiple players to participate in a shared, narrated experience, said Pete Parsons, the chief operating officer of Bungie, in an interview with GamesBeat.

The most interesting part of the demo Bungie showed was the “public space,” where a group of players entered an area and teamed up together to take down a fierce Spider Tank. That’s just one example where Bungie will innovate in its next-generation game, Parsons said.

Here’s our edited interview with Parsons.

GamesBeat: So you got a chance to show it for the first time, or to show it extensively. How does that feel for you?

Pete Parsons: You’ve seen it. We have more than 400 of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and we’ve been working on Destiny for years. The opportunity to bring it to [the Electronic Entertainment Expo] and show it off to the world, show it off to our community, it just couldn’t be more exciting for us. We’ve been working on this project, depending on how you count it, for five or six years. A lot of the ideas were around in 2002. It’s been a long time coming.

GamesBeat: How did you choose what to show first?

Parsons: Destiny is a massive, persistent, living world. We had to figure out, what are the things we want to show that will be interesting to people? In the end, what we wanted to show is that you come in and have your own really tight personal story that we feel good about delivering — whether you do it by yourself or with friends — but then when you proceed in that story, you come into a public space. That’s something that everyone will experience.

GamesBeat: Can you explain more about that public space?

Parsons: Public space is where players converge. No matter what their activity, they converge from all across the game. Some players might be moving through their more narrative-driven story-like experiences. Some might be going off to raids. Some might be going off to more familiar multiplayer-type activities. But all of them have this crossroads.

At that crossroads, they can continue to move along in their journey, or something like a public event triggers. In the demo we’re showing, a big Fallen craft screams across the sky, drops off dropships and the Devil Walker, and I can choose to just jump in. It’s certainly high-intensity combat, but it’s low-intensity in the sense that nobody’s counting on me to be the only thing between success and failure. I can just jump in, have a great time, take down something like the Devil Walker we showed, and get a reward for it. Then I move on my way. That’s a lot of fun. That’ll happen throughout the game, whether you’re playing more story content or playing other types of activities.

GamesBeat: You also have a pretty heavy storyline.

Parsons: We do, and that was a huge challenge. We faced a number of challenges with Destiny. One is, how do you combine great story and narrative with these more public living spaces and worlds? How do you break down the barriers between what it means to be doing player-versus-player multiplayer or cooperative play or narrative play? How do you break down those walls so that when I’m investing in building and growing my Guardian over time, I can move from the story with that exact same build and exact same skills right into a multiplayer experience? What’s our new 30 seconds of fun, where we’re combining space magic and deep investment in your armor or weapons? Ultimately, what does it mean when we go back to the Tower, which is a purely social space? What do I do there, and who am I meeting, and how does it send me off on new adventures?

We spent tons of time trying to solve all of these things, let alone what happens on the back end, where all that seamless matchmaking happens. What are the tools we need to develop to build so much content over time? How does it continue to grow so you feel like you’re a part of something and not just another piece of content that’s being dropped in?

GamesBeat: Sony came to you a long time ago to get this relationship going.

Parsons: Yeah. Certainly our relationship with Xbox remains strong and long-lasting, but it was interesting. Sony came to us years ago and wanted our feedback about what they were doing — not just on what’s next for PlayStation 4 but what we thought of the PlayStation Network and what our needs were. They definitely listened to us. It was great to begin building a relationship with them. We haven’t been on a Sony platform since 2001, with [the game] Oni.

GamesBeat: You haven’t quite spelled out what that relationship means yet. Is there more to come on that?

Parsons: Yeah, there’s more to come. Right now, we think they have definitely lent an ear to understanding what our needs are for the future, both for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. It’s a great opportunity for us. We’re welcoming more people to the Bungie family. And they’re a bunch of great guys.

GamesBeat: And you got Jason Jones to go up on the stage.

Parsons: It was the first time since Gamestock in 2001, with Halo: Combat Evolved. I remember that moment, when we said, “What better than to have Jason get back up on stage with Joe and show off the thing we’ve been working on for so long?”

Honestly, across the studio, this is the game that we’ve always wanted to play. We had to expand quite a bit. We’ve almost doubled our size. We were bringing in some of the most talented people in the world, and we couldn’t actually tell them what they’d be working on. They had to make that leap of faith. It was really gratifying to have them come on and say, “Oh, man, if we can even pull half of that off, we’re going to have a game that I’ve always wanted to play.” I feel like we’re well on our way.

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Solstice Arena is taking Zynga into the new market of midcore games, or hardcore titles that you can play in a matter of minutes.

The be beleaguered publisher of social (and now mobile) games built an audience of hundreds of millions of players with casual games on Facebook like FarmVille. But Solstice Arena is a bold new expansion area made possible by the acquisition of A Bit Lucky, a San Mateo, Calif.-based game studio headed by Jordan Maynard and Frederic Descamps.

They earned their hardcore game developer chops at Trion Worlds and Electronic Arts. Descamps and Maynard cofounded the company in November 2009. It built titles that blended casual and hardcore elements like Lucky Train and Lucky Space. Then Zynga bought it last September in a gambit to acquire more engaged players. The A Bit of Lucky team has been busy, and its game is now launching on the Apple iTunes App Store on the iPad 3, iPad 2, iPad Mini, iPhone 5, iPhone 4, and the iPhone 4S. It requires iOS 5.1 or later.

Solstice is free-to-play, where you play for free and purchase options via virtual goods transactions. But it’s also “fair to play.” You can’t purchase your way to victory.

Descamps, the general manager of Solstice Arena, describes the game as the world’s first “speed MOBA.” (That alphabet soup stands for multiplayer online battle arena, which are games like Riot Games’ League of Legends or Valve’s Dota 2.)

“We’ve designed Solstice Arena with a distinct mission: take a genre we love and transform it to allow hardcore fans and casual players to experience the fun of MOBA gaming right from their mobile devices,” Descamps said in a blog post. “To those familiar with MOBA games, you will find a deep, competitive, and well-balanced MOBA – one that is unlike any free-to-play game on the App Store. But our goal wasn’t to just attract players similar to us. We want to make Solstice Arena accessible to new players, too – so many of whom may have never tried a MOBA before.”

In the 3-versus-3 multiplayer game, you can jump into a fast-paced battle on a map that encourages players to make tactical decisions. The first to destroy the enemy’s base wins. It’ll have three modes. In single-player, you can play solo against bots. In real-time multiplayer, you can fight against others or play cooperatively with others against bots. It uses a matchmaking and queue system to connect players based on their skill, level, and hero ability. Players can invite friends to play and see who is available in real time.

Each match lasts only five minutes to 12 minutes. That’s a deliberate design choice because it fits well with mobile usage. People have time to play on the run, but they don’t have a lot of time for long sessions, as with League of Legends.

“We have put a lot of emphasis on making the game accessible, with a good user interface and experience,” Descamps said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We think there is a huge opportunity in the ‘speed MOBA.’”

Solstice has no farming. It has no “minions” or “creeps” who can be dispatched as cannon fodder. The battles are distilled to the core of fighting player vs. player. It will have 10 heroes available at launch. Each hero suits a different kind of play. You can level up and gain new skills and shape your personality.

Descamps said the Unity-based game has been tested on servers around the world and that Zynga has figured out how to provide a good experience with snappy game play. Zynga says you can play on 3G, 4G LTE, and Wi-Fi.

Here’s a trailer for the game.

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LOS ANGELES — Activision Publishing moved all of its chips to the center of the table when it bet on Bungie’s Destiny, Skylanders, and Call of Duty. The division of Activision Blizzard showed off its lineup this week in a giant booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

Eric Hirshberg, the president and chief executive of Activision Publishing, is the one who pushed those chips forward. He is spending billions and making billions. His company should benefit from the huge investments that Sony and Microsoft are making in their next-generation game consoles.

He isn’t saying which in his favorite console: the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, or the Nintendo Wii U. With his cross-platform games, Hirshberg is selling ammunition to all three in the console war. But he is willing to offer limited exclusives, and we probed into that in our interview with him at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: The console makers have spoken. Did they reveal anything that enables you to talk some more about any particular things that are relevant for these games? They do seem very different as far as where they stand on the sensors, with Kinect, and the controller.

Eric Hirshberg: Yeah, for sure. Has PlayStation even talked about the Move?

GamesBeat: No, it hasn’t. There was no mention of it.

Hirshberg: Is that just going to fade out?

GamesBeat: I haven’t had a chance to ask Sony about Move yet.

Hirshberg: It’s interesting. One of them is doubling down, and the other one is not.

GamesBeat: It sounds like the Move isn’t on your radar at the moment, then.

Hirshberg: [Pause] That’s a good deduction.

GamesBeat: On the Destiny demo, I couldn’t quite tell if the chatter was from the two guys on stage chattering as opposed to the chatter in the game.

Hirshberg: We were worried about that when we were putting that demo together. We thought we’d made it clear with [Bungie's] Joe Staten’s introduction – this is Destiny, I’m a Guardian, and here comes [Bungie cofounder] Jason Jones, we’re going to meet up. Before they start bantering between one another, there was this setup that made it clear that this was their voices. But it’s interesting that you noticed that. Those were the voices of the players, not the onscreen characters.

The thing we were trying to get across in that demo was to bring to life this idea of a shared-world shooter. That was a single-player type of environment where you’re playing against artificial intelligence. That’s also the way that you go through the story in the game, how the plot unfolds before you. So it would be most highly related to single-player in the current lexicon. But here you are bumping into friends who are inhabiting the same world you are, and bumping into strangers who you have to team up with in order to take down a boss villain. That’s pretty fresh. That’s what we were trying to get across. That’s why we kept adding people who kept teaming up with one another.

Now, if you just want to play alone and have a single-player experience, you’re able to do that in Destiny as well. But this was one of the key innovations. It’s either a new genre or a very fresh take on an existing genre.

GamesBeat: It’s a little like what Ubisoft has been calling seamless multiplayer, where it has no break between the single-player and the multiplayer experience.

Hirshberg: Yes, but I would say that because you’re progressing through the world—it never turned into a multiplayer game. You never entered an arena and started competing against other players. You could team up or not team up and make that choice autonomously. But you’re all inhabiting the same world.

GamesBeat: I saw the public part of this pop up. Can it be as large or small as the developers want to make it?

Hirshberg: The space itself? Yeah. Those public spaces appear at the right cadence as well. There’s a lot of different types of gameplay that you’re going to encounter through an average play session in Destiny. The demo showed that. It showed Joe starting out as a lone player. He’s deciding to go outside the wall. He teams up with a friend. They get in and have a battle, just the two of them, and then they encounter the spider tank – a miniboss, if you will. There’s another strike team that’s hard at work trying to defeat it, and they team up so that the five of them are able to take it down. I feel like those public spaces are both novel and differentiating, but they need to come at the right pace, so you’re having different experiences. The demo definitely focused on the newness.

GamesBeat: Is there a narrated experience that you haven’t shown yet?

Hirshberg: Yeah. We’ve shown a bit of that in the trailer. It wasn’t a huge part of the demo. The story of Destiny, the mythology and the characters and the narrative, is a very important part of the game. It’s something Bungie historically has done very well: creating characters that you connect with and care about and worlds that seem to have their own set of authentic structure and rules that you connect with. I certainly felt that way about Halo.

GamesBeat: Could you explain your long-term relationship with Sony?

Hirshberg: There’s not much to explain. It’s a fairly straight-up-the-middle relationship, not unlike the relationship we’ve had between Call of Duty and Microsoft. It’s a way for us to amplify our launches and our branding and our marketing. It’s a way for us to give them some exclusives that are relevant to their audience as well.

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LOS ANGELES — Marc Whitten faced some tough questions from the press after Sony outshone Microsoft on Monday in the dueling press briefings on the eve of the Electronic Entertainment Expo. On the surface, Sony scored a victory when it told a cheering crowd that it would price its PlayStation 4 at $399, $100 cheaper than Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One video game console. It also pleased the gathering by saying it wouldn’t charge for used games.

But the fight for the hearts of consumers is just beginning. The Xbox One goes on sale in November, and Microsoft has plenty of time to fight back. We went deep on some of these questions with Whitten, the chief product officer for Xbox at Microsoft. Here’s our edited interview.

GamesBeat: Remind us of what you do.

Marc Whitten: I’m the platform guy, so I deal with how we use the cloud, the Xbox Live system and how it works, apps — all that kind of fun stuff.

GamesBeat: So do you want to talk about the price and used games? [Laughs] Sony seemed to get a lot of applause when it announced its policies for the PS4. If you look more into it, I wonder what your answer would be. It seems like there are some asterisks to what Sony has as well. The PS4 don’t have Sony’s camera in the box so it can make that box cheaper, but you’re paying extra for it on the side. It matched the cost of Xbox Live by making multiplayer something you pay for with PlayStation Plus. Sony exec Jack Tretton got quoted [Tuesday] as saying Sony will leave used game fees up to its partners.

Do you think you have something to answer with, given these are some of the details?

Whitten: I’m not spending time looking at what they’re doing as far as their policies. What I will say is that I’m focused on how we build an amazing premium entertainment experience for our users. To me it’s key, as we look forward, to think about the advantages that come with digital. Once you have a complete digital ecosystem, it’s a better experience. You can instantly switch. Your family can see your games. You can see all of your games regardless of which Xbox One you’re on. You don’t have to remember to bring discs with you. All those things become second nature once it’s a digital ecosystem.

That said, we know that there are still a lot of advantages to physical discs. They start with some basic things. A physical disc gets down to the hard drive very fast, because the games are big. It’s a good way to get it on to the console. We know people like to sell their discs back at retail. So what we’ve tried to do is bring forward many of those advantages from physical discs as we transition into this digital future, which we think is really key. That’s why we’ve focused on enabling scenarios like gifting or the ability to resell.

We’ve also focused deeply on how the family can have one shared view of all their content, regardless of who bought it. We’re starting to build the foundation of how my digital content just works for me wherever I go. I hope that when people get a chance to see how it works, they’ll like the way they get to interact with their content.

GamesBeat: Was there something in the thinking that drove this change in the used game policy? What specifically was just not working for you?

Whitten: Again, it doesn’t have to do with used games. It has to do with how we create a digital ecosystem for content. How can we make sure that all of your content is always with you? That requires thinking about the architecture for the future. Suddenly, you’re talking about how I have my content stored in the cloud and how it’s everywhere. Now we have to start to think about how we can bring forward into that world many of the things people were used to in the physical one. It’s been about how to add that into what we see as the digital future for content.

GamesBeat: Is it unfair that some people are simply characterizing this as Sony scoring some points against you Monday?

Whitten: Sony’s building a great program. I actually think it’s great to be a gamer right now. I hope that it’s a great time for platforms to be successful, for there to be amazing new games. That’s what makes it fun to be here right now.

What I’ll say is, I feel proud of our games lineup, games like Titanfall, like Project Spark, like Forza. They show off both the fidelity of what you can do with Xbox One and what happens when you can start counting on the cloud for new ways to interact. When you look at what we’re doing with Kinect and with all of your entertainment coming together, we’re building an incredible value for people.

GamesBeat: Could you address this interpretation – is this right or wrong from your point of view? Both companies were able to tap very similar PC technology from AMD, tweak it for their own purposes, and put it in the box. You guys invested more in Kinect, putting dedicated processing for that in the box, which probably costs a little more. You have three operating systems running, which takes some of your RAM.

All things being equal, it would seem like Sony would have more power dedicated directly to games performance, whereas you guys are multitasking more. But the cloud processing is one thing they haven’t talked about. I don’t know if they can do it or not, while you guys can compensate for processing power that isn’t in the box itself.

Whitten: Again, I’m not spending a ton of time thinking about the architecture of their system. We’ve built an architecture that we think is going to allow the true next generation of gameplay. The raw power that exists in the box; you saw that in the games. Clearly, it looked next-generation. But it’s also a matter of how we can interact with that content, how Kinect and your gamepad can work together to create a better experience. By using voice, I have more control inside of that. And then of course, as you said, the ability to use the cloud natively in games is key.

There’s a lot of complexity behind the tool set you give to people to create these experiences. [Turn 10 Studios creative director] Dan Greenawalt talked about Drivatars and what that was going to mean for the end of A.I. in Forza 5. When you step back and think about what’s happening, they’re running these massive neural networks to understand how you drive – and not just you, but how everybody drives in Forza, so that they can be constantly calculating how that would play out across the universe of Forza players. They can do that only because they have access, in an incredibly deep way inside the architecture, to drive that experience end to end inside their game.

The other thing about the architecture that is key for what the next-generation gaming experience is going to be like is things like Twitch. The power of Twitch to say that in any game, I could decide to start broadcasting, and our platform natively allows that to happen so that I can create my own gaming experience. That is about gaming. It’s about how gaming gets better with Xbox Live and this architecture.

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LOS ANGELES — Scott Rohde and the rest of the team at Sony’s PlayStation business are riding high in the wake of a successful press briefing in a duel with Microsoft at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The Japanese company struck two blows against Microsoft when it undercut its rival’s new home console price by $100, pricing the Sony PlayStation 4 at $399 compared to Microsoft’s $499. And Sony drew cheers when it said it would allow consumers to purchase used games with fees.

The dust is settling on those announcements, and Sony’s position isn’t so far apart from Microsoft’s. But it’s clear that Sony out-marketed Microsoft, targeting gamers, consumer rights issues, and indie game developers with its message.

At various times over the last decade, Sony has been called arrogant, clueless, and brilliant. On Monday night, it was riding so high that it had to refrain from declaring victory in a console war that hadn’t yet started. To talk about the reaction to the press conference, we caught up with Scott Rohde, PlayStation software product development head for Sony Worldwide Studios America.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: It seems like sometimes there’s an advantage in going second with a press briefing at E3, but you guys probably had a game plan for a while.

Scott Rohde: Absolutely. Everything that you saw [Monday] night had been in place for a long time. It’s not reactionary. It’s just a matter of forming our plan and executing on it.

GamesBeat: Some have pointed out a couple of things that clarify what Sony announced. They noted that Sony exec Jack Tretton said Tuesday that game publishers are still able to make their own decisions about whether to charge fees for used games. Others pointed out that Sony now has a subscription fee in place if you want to play multiplayer on PS4. On top of these, I think they pointed out that the PS4 lacks a camera, so it’s natural to price your console lower than the competition. Can you speak to these points?

Rohde: Let me comment on the last one. The strategy to not include the camera in the box is more about offering consumers that choice. Sure, they can buy it, pay the $59, but that was a conscious decision to give value to the consumer. We wanted to bring the machine in at $399. That was our goal. Those other topics, as you might imagine, over the course of the day they’ve been kind of beaten to death. But I will say that the policies that we’ve laid out very clearly at the show are very fair policies.

GamesBeat: The hardware had a couple of hiccups when it was running. The frame rate slowed down during Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. I think I noticed similar issues with Watch Dogs and Destiny as well. Was there a common problem that would explain the issues? Some speculated that there was a hardware problem.

Rohde: We haven’t talked about that at all, but—it could be any number of things, quite frankly. All I know is that sitting in the rehearsals all weekend, it never happened. It’s software in development that is running through a very complicated video streaming setup in that room, with all sorts of different possible explanations. But it’s not anything that we’ll worry about.

GamesBeat: Microsoft has brought up again the idea of cloud processing. I haven’t heard much about that on the Sony side. Do you think about that in the same way as Microsoft has?

Rohde: We’re not talking about the type of cloud processing that they’re talking about. We’re concentrating on what cloud servers can mean to us regarding Gaikai and getting our content on all sorts of different devices over time. That’s our goal. It’s going to start in early 2014.

GamesBeat: It sounds like the point of view may just be different on some things. Microsoft has the three operating systems and the cloud processing. It seems to want to be able to instantly switch between things.

Rohde: It’s just a matter of strategy there. We’re very confident in the power of the PlayStation 4 as a box. We could look into that type of technology, but again, Gaikai is a big part of our company. That sort of thing is certainly something that we could explore, but it’s not something that’s in our plans right now.

GamesBeat: Were there any particularly interesting reactions you guys heard, whether to the whole presentation or those two big points where you drew cheers?

Rohde: It’s fascinating. You’ve been to so many of these shows, just like I’ve been. Those are some of the biggest cheers I’ve ever heard at an E3, when Kaz [Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai] started out with the policy. And of course, the price at the end was just a big exclamation point.

We’re very proud that, after a long three or four years of work, we can get PlayStation 4 out the door. It’s a powerful machine at a great price. We’re proud of the engineering team that pulled it together. They made it possible to announce it at a price point that’s $100 cheaper than the competition. That cheer just kind of said it all at the end.

GamesBeat: I think you might get a bigger cheer if you show up with The Last Guardian one of these days.

Rohde: [Laughs] That’s been a running joke all day long. It wouldn’t be an E3 if I wasn’t fielding questions about that. All I can say is that it’s still alive. That’s all I’m going to say.

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LOS ANGELES — Third-party game publishers are typically shy about favoring one game console maker over another.

But Electronic Arts’ Frank Gibeau, the president of EA’s worldwide labels, said at an investor breakfast what may be obvious about the dueling at the Electronic Entertainment Expo press briefings that Sony and Microsoft staged to introduce their PlayStation 4 and Xbox one video game consoles.

“Sony is having a great show. They have done a good job on services, price points” and policies for consumers. “We like the reception to all of the news from console makers. Sony is striking the rirght balance. Microsoft is showing killer capababilities that we have known about for a while. People have stopped talking about whether Generation 4 will be a growth driver.”

Sony drew more applause at its event for pricing its machine at $399, or $100 lower than Microsoft’s Xbox One. Sony also was praised as more consumer friendly in deciding not to charge for used games and putting few restrictions on consumers, in comparison to Microsoft.

Now, he said, they are talking about the growth that will happen this fall. He acknowledged that EA gave Microsoft a big exclusive with the announcement that Respawn Entertainment (founded by Call of Duty pioneer Vince Zampella) will launch its title Titanfall exclusively on the Xbox One. But that is considered a “tactical exclusive,” or a limited endorsement for one console.

While Gibeau praised Sony, this doesn’t mean, however, that EA is going to favor Sony over Microsoft when publishing games exclusively. EA’s strategy is to be a cross-platform company so that it can reach the biggest audience for its games and spread out the costs of its development and marketing.

“Over the lifetime, we are not tilting one way or another on these platforms,” Gibeau said.

Last time around, Gibeau said the consoles were very different.

“Now the architectures are more alike than different,” he said. “We are able to get more efficiencies” about the commonality between the upcoming consoles.

As for the hot consumer rights topic of used games, Gibeau said EA is still evaluating the announcements about used games. He said that EA’s position would be consumer-friendly and a promote a positive experience with consumers.

“We make the ammunition in the hardware wars,” Gibeau said.

One investor asked why EA had not launched a free-to-play version of FIFA Soccer.

Gibeau replied, “I think you’ll be very pleased this fall.”

He said afterward that EA will adapt FIFA for touchscreens and also launch its Korean online version of FIFA in more territories like Russia and Brazil.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Blizzard Entertainment has delayed its expansion pack for the action-role-playing game Diablo III until next year, GamesBeat has learned.

[Updated: A Blizzard spokesman said to GamesBeat, "We haven't officially announced an expansion to D3, so there's no release date."] Blizzard takes issue with the word “delay” in our story, as they say they never announced a date and by virtue of that fact, they can’t miss the date. But we stand by our description, as we believe the expansion has been pushed back.

The delay is a big deal because expansion packs can generate a lot of revenue for the company, which is a division of Activision Blizzard and the publisher of huge games like StarCraft II and World of Warcraft. When the StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm expansion pack launched in March, it quickly became the top-selling PC game for that month.

The Diablo III expansion was never announced with a specific launch date in mind, but many were expecting that it would arrive in 2013. We have learned from a source that it has definitely been delayed. And even with some reassigned employees who came over from another project, it’s clear that the expansion will not arrive until 2014.

Blizzard recently decided to reboot its massively multiplayer online game, codenamed Titan, and delay its launch. The company reassigned some people from that project to the Diablo III team, but the additional resources have not been enough to accelerate the release of the expansion pack.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Ubisoft showed off its Just Dance 2014 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and while it’s a multiplatform affair, it has something special for players of the Nintendo Wii U: the capability to recognize up to six players at once.

The new game is the sequel to last year’s Just Dance 4 and is part of a series that has become the No. 1 dance franchise of all time, with more than 40 million games sold to date. It’s biggest platform was Nintendo’s Wii, so the Wii U version will likely be highly anticipated. It will also play on the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and other platforms.

Last year, Just Dance 4 was the fifth largest-selling video game on all platforms. In this version, you will see 40 new tracks, such as “Pound the Alarm” by Nicki Minaj and “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor. One new feature is World Dance Floor, an online multiplayer mode where players join a virtual crew with other fans.

Here’s our video of Just Dance 2014 on the Wii U.

Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Beyond: Two Souls is out to capture the moral dilemmas that you face when you have supernatural powers. Will you use them for good? Or evil?

That’s the heart of the preview scene that Quantic Dream is showing at the E3 video game conference this week. Beyond: Two Souls is a cinematic game with an engaging story, and it was one of the top titles previewed at E3 last year. Sony is promoting it heavily again at this year’s show in anticipation of its Oct. 8 launch on the PlayStation platforms.

The story tracks the life of Jodie Holmes, a girl who has an invisible, ghost-like soulmate named Aiden. She can summon Aiden when she needs him, and Aiden can use supernatural powers like going through walls, choking people, and possessing them. The voice and motion actors include Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page (Jodie). The title is heavily anticipated in part because Quantic Dream always pushes the limit on making artistic, movie-like video games. Its past games include Heavy Rain and Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

With Beyond: Two Souls, Jodie has been recruited into the CIA. But it’s not for her own prowess as a spy, as she is one of the weakest-looking heroines you’ll ever see in a video game. It is because she can tap Aiden’s supernatural powers to do things that no one else can do.

Quantic Dream chief operating officer Guillaume de Fondaumiere told GamesBeat in an interview that the scene shows the choices that Jodie has to make and how she has been repurposed into a weapon by those who want to use her and Aiden for their own purposes. She has been assigned to take out a warlord named Jamal in Mogadishu, Somalia. At the demo’s start, she had just made a harrowing escape with a small Somali boy. Breathless, she says that she must part ways with him. He becomes emotional about that, but they separate.

Then Jodie begins to move up on Jamal’s compound in stealth. She can move quietly behind someone and then take them out herself. Or she can tap Aiden, who can choke the guards to death. If they catch Jodie, it’s all over. Once she spots the compound, she finds it’s heavily guarded. She switches over to Aiden, who crosses the street unseen. He finds a side door and unlocks it for Jodie. She then sneaks into the compound and sends Aiden out once again.

“As the player, you can switch between Jodie and Aiden at any time,” de Fondaumiere said. “You have to find a way to work together.”

Aiden is kind of a wispy smoke character who moves through walls and overhears conversations. He sneaks into a command center and identifies the warlord. You then have to decide how to attack. You can use Aiden to take possession of the body of one of the guards. The guard then walks over to the command center and sprays everyone with bullets. Jodie runs in to view the massacre and confirm the kill for the CIA. But then the little boy comes in and finds that the slain killer is his father. He points the finger at Jodie, who runs into the street.

A bunch of angry Somalis gather in the street and block Jodie’s path. She uses Aiden to clear a path. Some of the soldiers shoot at her, wounding her in the leg. She moves into a house and opens the door. Then she seeks help from others in the bar. No help is forthcoming. Jodie escapes into a building, but the Somalis surround it and pound on the door. She can escape through the roof. But if she is captured, she is taken out into the street. At that time, an extraction helicopter arrives and strafes the crowd. Soldiers drop down and rescue Jodie.

The scene is riveting, and the acting is top notch. But it is not very interactive. If you make a slightly wrong or late decision during the pursuit, you will be captured. The scene tells you what it’s like to become a supernatural agent for the government and what happens when you allow yourself to be manipulated in a bad way.

We caught up with de Fondaumiere at a recent Sony press event in advance of E3. Here’s our video interview.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Beyond: Two Souls is one of the truly cinematic games coming out this year for Sony, with a deep story that is characteristic of game studio Quantic Dream.

In the scene that Quantic Dream is showing at the E3 video game trade show in Los Angeles, Jodie Holmes is 21 years old, and she is working for the Central Intelligence Agency. It isn’t the kind of job you’d expect for her, but the CIA is on to the fact that she is soulmates with Aiden, a ghost-like character with supernatural powers. Aiden can go through walls, choke people, and a find a way through obstacles that Jodie can’t penetrate.

So the CIA sends her into Somalia to perform an assassination. She has to take out a warlord in Mogadishu, and she gets help from a little Somali kid in doing that. You have to use Aiden’s special powers to infiltrate into the warlord’s compound. She has to sneak up on guys and take them out or rely on Aiden to set off diversions. This kind of work clearly doesn’t come naturally to Jodie, who still seems like a little girl. And when you perform the kill, it doesn’t go as planned.

“As the player, you can switch between Jodie and Aiden at any time,” de Fondaumiere said. “You have to find a way to work together.”

Sony is publishing Beyond: Two Souls for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 on Oct. 8.

We caught up with de Fondaumiere at a recent Sony press event in advance of E3. Here’s our video interview.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Watch Dogs is breaking new ground in multiplayer action — your friends can barge into your single-player game and challenge you. They can break into your game, hack your defenses, steal the data that belongs to your character, and then try to escape with it.

Watch Dogs is a very imaginative and original work that has drawn a lot of attention for Ubisoft, the French video game publisher that plans to launch the game Oct. 8. If successful, Watch Dogs could generate huge revenues for the company and establish a new franchise. I’m predicting success because this game is full of so many fresh ideas, like its seamless connection between the multiplayer and single-player modes.

With a multiplayer demo at the E3 video game trade show, Ubisoft has shown that lot of thinking has gone into making the game fun. In a single-player game, cyber-vigilante Aiden Pearce can hack into the central computer system of Chicago (think of him as a one-man National Security Agency) and obtain data on everyone. He uses that information to hunt down criminals and other enemies and deliver street justice. Aiden is all-powerful, acquiring secret codes, stealing money, buying upgrades, and making cars crash by changing the street lights. But the authorities in charge can use the same technologies to hunt him down. That basic tension drives the single-player experience.

But multiplayer mode can intrude into your game. Using a companion app on an iPad, another player can direct the police as they try to trap you and hunt you down during a car chase. The player with the iPad can see the chase happening on a city map. They can direct a chopper to chase after you and can control other forces as they try to trap Pearce.

Here’s another way that multiplayer gamers can intrude into your game. Since Watch Dogs takes place in a big city, you can’t always tell who the people are when you pass them on the street. Some of them might actually be your friends. If a player enters your game as another random character, they can sneak up behind you and use a smartphone to hack into your own mobile device. They have to stay within a certain range in order to do that as they follow you, said Dominic Guay, senior producer on the game.

“This is core to the game experience,” Guay said.

It’s similar to the way that multiplayer works in Assassin’s Creed games, which Ubisoft also makes. In that series, you try to find an assassin or target in the crowd and take that person out. Then you try to blend back into the crowd. But this is a modern-day version, where players duel with their smartphones rather than their knives.

If you, as Aiden, discover that you’re being hacked, you can try to run away. If the hacker succeeds in compromising your phone, they can then run away and download your data as they do so. The download takes a couple of minutes. During that time, Aiden gets an alert that he is being hacked. He knows that the hacker must be nearby, so he then as to chase down the intruder and kill them. That’s easier said than done in a large city, since the hacker will likely pretend to be an ordinary nonplayer artificial intelligence character. So begins a cat-and-mouse chase in a crowd.

This portion of Watch Dogs looks enormously fun, because it makes the city come to life. You don’t know if the people who are in your city are just faceless A.I. characters, or if they’re actually real human beings. That’s a brilliant way to make the player believe in the reality of the world, and it’s one more reason why Watch Dogs is going to be such a compelling title.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Nintendo showed off Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U today at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. This new Mario Kart features anti-gravity, where you can turn off the track and drive up a wall as a short cut.

I used the Wii U tablet to control Mario Kart 8. It was easy to learn. I used the A button for gas and the left trigger for using special items, like leaving banana peels for my fellow racers to run over. And I could use the left trigger to slide brake around turns. A huge red button in the middle of the Wii U tablet screen blows the horn.

I played it with producer Hideki Konnno. I think he let me win, but I managed to pass him even though he used the anti-gravity side route. He flew up a wall, appearing to go vertically, and then the track reoriented to his point of view. And when he returned to the main track, the world rotated again, and he played from a regular point of view.

Nintendo is showing 12 characters and three tracks so far. The multiplayer mode accommodates up to 12 players.

Here’s the video below. And I played the fellow on the right, Konno.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto kicked off Nintendo’s showcase at the Electronic Entertainment Expo today with a description of his latest game, Pikmin 3 for the Wii U.

Miyamoto did a demo that shows how good the Wii U is at rendering lots of the cute little garden creatures in a preview at Nintendo’s booth in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Pikmin 3 has been in the works for a long time, but Miyamoto began adapting it to the Wii U a couple of years ago because he felt he finally had the processing power required to do the game he envisioned.

Here’s a video of Miyamoto’s talk. Nintendo’s Bill Trinen provides the translation.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot is familiar with risk. He asks his teams at the French game publisher to make big bets on new intellectual properties all of the time. But Guillemot hopes the new games will thrive on the new platforms that are launching later this year. He has made big bets on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Guillemot met with a group of journalists Sunday evening, before the press conferences that opened E3. So we talked to him before Sony and Microsoft battled each other Monday.

Here’s an edited transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: Microsoft has started a lot of controversy over what it’s doing with used games on the Xbox One. Sony hasn’t said anything either way [Sony now says no restrictions on used games]. What’s your opinion on this? Do used games hurt the market or help it?

Yves Guillemot: Microsoft’s decision to go for no tax on what’s done in stores is the right decision, I think. It means that we can have something that’s close to what we have today, with the older generation. There’s nobody in between that takes a big fee. At Ubisoft, we’re likewise waiting to see what Sony has to say, but the first move from Microsoft is a good move.

For each transition, people will have to adapt – not only gamers, but manufacturers as well. They come up with a model. Consumers react to that model. Then they’ll have to change certain things to that it fits with what consumers want to play and the experiences they want to enjoy. You’ll see adjustments coming, so that we’ll be able to take advantage of all the software features of these consoles.

GamesBeat: So you think they’ll adjust what they’re offering to suit the demands coming from the market?

Guillemot: Yeah. You always have your theories about who will like this or like that, but it’s not until it’s in front of your customers that they say yes or no. Then you adapt to fit what they want. Today we’re at a phase where the manufacturers are saying, “We think it should be like this,” and consumers are saying, “Well, I don’t like this,” or “I’d like some more information about that.” I think Microsoft and Sony will make sure that the experience will be good for the consumer and bring greater innovation over the older generation. I’m not too worried.

GamesBeat: Microsoft’s said that publishers can choose to charge a fee to activate used games if they want. Have you decided which way Ubisoft will go on that?

Guillemot: We’re waiting to see what all the manufacturers are doing before we settle on what we’ll do. We’re waiting now for Sony’s position and to see if Nintendo will continue as they have in the past.

The Xbox One collection.

GamesBeat: If Sony adopts the same policy as Microsoft has and used games do become a thing of the past, do you accept the logic that with games retailing at $60 or $70, people will just buy fewer of them?

Guillemot: From the beginning, I’ve liked used games. It gives gamers the option of taking more risks. Instead of buying three games, they can buy five or eight, and it helps to make sure that people can play different types of games and enjoy those great experiences and so on. What’s happening with boxes is that people play a game, and they come in four weeks or six weeks later to trade that game in and buy another one. I think that process is working fine. It’s just when if the guy comes in three days later to take the game back, that not going to be able to sell new ones. It’s to everyone’s benefit that we sell enough so that we can reinvest.

So the way used games happen in stores with boxes these days, I think it’s fine. There’s no reason we can’t continue like this. The only problem is how much support you have to give to those games, like with multiplayer – we need to pull in some revenue to provide support for those players. If you can sell extra content, you can pay for the post-launch team and continue to provide the experience.

We very much like the fact that players can buy many different games, because that means we can have many hits all through the year, especially at Christmas. You’re either part of that or not, so the risk increases a lot.

GamesBeat: Are publishers keeping the price of digitally delivered games artificially high? The price of a new game on Origin or uPlay is usually the same as the boxed release. Is that your choice, or do retailers require that of you?

Guillemot: It’s a difficult question. It’s hard to discount a game too much on digital if it’s in stores at a different price, because that puts retailers in trouble. A lot of consumers buy secondhand, it’s true, but there are also a lot who never do. Those guys, whether they buy online or if they buy in store, they don’t ever plan to exchange that product. For them, it’s the same thing. For a person who regularly resells their game, they still have an extra reason to go to the store.

If you look at Steam, they do a lot of discounting, but they take 60 percent of that business. Discounting digital versions isn’t going to help retail to succeed. We want retail to keep going and to grow, because those guys have people in stores who can help gamers learn about what we’re releasing. They can share that love of gaming. When you’re only buying your games online, certainly you can look at comments from other gamers, but you don’t have that relationship with another person. And it’s not only that. It’s also the visibility your games have in so many stores.

Things will change, step by step, but we’d prefer the transition to be smooth than to go too quickly.

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES – Company of Heroes 2 captures the full brutal effect of Russian winters and the suicidal charges that Russian commanders ordered during World War II. The tactical-combat video game is able to convey that brutality in part because the team at Relic Entertainment did its research, including feeling the sting of a modern Russian winter themselves.

The result is a real-time strategy game that, when it debuts on June 25 in the U.S. and Europe, will give players an experience that is rooted in historical realism. Sega, which picked up Relic from the ashes of THQ, is showing off the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game conference this week in Los Angeles.

The PC title is looking very good. We recently got to play another full level of the game at a press briefing, and we got to see the environmental effects in action. The Shlisselburg level showed an attack across a frozen river, with troops and vehicles falling into the freezing water when artillery shells crack the river’s ice.

Quinn Duffy, the game’s director at Relic Entertainment, told GamesBeat’s Alejandro Quan-Madrid in an interview that the goal of including the effects of nature and the environment is to convey just how hard it was to survive on the Russian battlefield. Advanced simulation technology helps make battles more believable.

“The Essence Engine 3 gives us the horsepower to show the winter, the cold effects, the breaking ice,” Duffy said. “We wanted to show the Russian winter in all of its glory and horror. We talk about authenticity. We want to deliver the feeling of danger and effort. We want to make it fun. We want to tell a story.”

The team visited Russia during the month of February, and it was horribly cold at about minus 20 degrees Farenheit. They shot video and tried to see what it was like to run through snow that was thigh deep.

“It’s like trying to run in the ocean,” he said. ”You flounder. You try to get out. You instantly understood the challenge. Seeing it was an important part of the research.”

The animations show the soldiers struggling in the snow. If you set up a machine in front of those soldiers, it’s much easier to take them out.

“This snow has not only texture but depth,” Duffy said. “The vehicles leave tracks. When a blizzard comes in, it wipes out the tracks.”

The team spent time in Russia and also visited Berlin. They noticed from the research that the jaded Russians had a dry sense of humor. So they put that into the dialogue of the game to give players a flavor for the personality of the Russian soldiers.

Across the Neva River

The battle we played was set in Shlisselburg, Russia. The Russians stormed the German fortress by crossing the Neva River in 1943. The attack was critical to restoring access to the besieged Lengingrad, which was under siege for more than 900 days. The cinematics introducing the battle to the player were very dramatic and appealed to the Russian sense of patriotism. Many soldiers didn’t appear to mind the suicide attacks, or at least they didn’t flinch when ordered to make them.

In the battle, I launched my set of Russian infantry across the river amid a withering German artillery strike. Some of the troops fell into the water as the ice cracked from the artillery shells. German machine guns pinned down some of my soldiers, but I ordered my troops to outflank the machine guns. Once we made it across, the first task was to take out the line of infantry along the embankment. Then we had to push deeper inland to take out the artillery. Once that was done, we pushed deeper into the buildings along the embankment.

The battle was chaotic, with lots of shouting, cursing, and shooting. The Germans started doing a lot of damage to my soldiers with a flamethrower. But we took it out with grenades and then used it to attack the Germans. Then we had to put our soldiers into a defense perimeter and hold off the German counterattack. The Russians were under a lot of pressure from multiple sides.

It seemed like a suicide mission to cross that river, but my soldiers survived. The tables had turned, and what seemed like a suicide mission for the Russians now became one for the Germans as they ran across a narrow access bridge right into machine gun fire and a flamethrower.

Why it’s looking good

Company of Heroes 2 delivers on the seasonal winter and spring play. The winter effects make the game a lot harder to play. The gameplay is cool, the graphics are beautiful.

Just a few weeks ago, Relic dropped a very pleasant surprise on fans by showing off the new Theater of War mode, which is a cooperative single-player mode that serves as a bridge to multiplayer play. The title will ship with the 1941 pack of Theater of War missions, including nine German and nine Russian missions. That’s a huge amount of additional content considering that the single-player campaign itself has just 14 missions.

While the single-player campaign follows a strict narrative — a story about the war — this new mode offers battles that illustrate other important moments between the Russians and the Germans during the first part of the war. Big battles of 1941 are in the Theater of War missions — engagements that the main game doesn’t cover.

We’ve tracked the progress of this game through multiple previews, and Relic hasn’t let us down yet. Overall, I’d say this game is another big reason to stick with gaming on the PC.

Alejandro Quan-Madrid contributed to this report.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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