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To avoid any trouble with his employer, Kensuke Tanabe wants to make it clear that the following game ideas are his and his alone — and not an official statement from Nintendo. But that doesn’t make them any less fun to think about.

Tanabe is a producer on the upcoming Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, a 2D platforming sequel to Donkey Kong Country Returns. When Nintendo revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week that Retro Studios was working on Tropical Freeze for the Wii U, the announcement came as a shock to some hardcore fans. They had hoped that the developer was working on another installment in the Metroid series (it previously worked on Metroid Prime [above]), an iconic Nintendo franchise that features the heroine Samus Aran blasting away aliens with her arm cannon.

Retro president Michael Kelbaugh has already said multiple times why it chose to make Donkey Kong over any other game. So instead of asking him that same question, we tasked Kelbaugh, Tanabe, and Nintendo project leader Risa Tabata to figure out, hypothetically, how a Metroid game would play on a Wii U with the GamePad controller.

But that’s not all. Tanabe later comes up with another idea that’s so crazy it just has to work.

Source: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat

From left to right: Risa Tabata, Kensuke Tanabe, and Michael Kelbaugh

A hypothetical Metroid Prime

Kelbaugh and Tabata immediately thought of ways of using the GamePad to display information to the player – like incorporating the suit’s HUD elements on the controller’s touchscreen — and for minigames, such as turning Samus’s ball-morphing ability into a pinball-like game.

“Samus obviously has a lot of features [in her space suit],” said Tabata. “There’s a lot you can do with that thing — once she pulls her arm up and pulls out that [metal flap] and does some of this stuff [Tabata pretends to punch buttons on her forearm]. I can see mapping some of that to the GamePad. I think that would be really cool.”

Tanabe, meanwhile, focused on what the shooting gameplay might feel like. At first, the translator had trouble figuring out what Tanabe meant, going back and forth to confirm what he heard. Here’s what he had to say.

“I [told Tanabe], ‘What, you want to hook a GamePad on a Zapper [gun peripheral]?’” recounted the translator. “He said: ‘No, that’d be too heavy. Maybe something more streamlined. But like a Zapper-style thing with a GamePad feature on it or some device like that. I’d love to do some shooting stuff with something like that! Maybe some day.’”

‘Retro does Tingle’

Tanabe wasn’t done brainstorming. Toward the end of our interview, he spoke up about another type of game that he’d like to put on the Wii U. But he focused on a peculiar character — Tingle. He has a reputation for being one of the most annoying characters in the Nintendo roster — Tingle’s a middle-aged man dressed in tights who likes to yell “Tingle, Tingle, Kooloo-Limpah!” — but that’s exactly why Tanabe finds the idea of a new, standalone Tingle game so compelling.

Source: Wikipedia

The much-reviled Tingle from The Legend of Zelda games.

“There’s no definitive plan or anything,” he warned me at first. “It’s just me off the top of my head.” But as Tanabe spoke in Japanese, the room suddenly exploded into laughter. It took a second for the translator to calm down and tell me what he said.

“I know how hated the character of Tingle is in the U.S,” Tanabe started. “I know that people cannot stand Tingle. But to me that challenge is: Could I take this character that is so reviled in the West and just [do] a complete turnaround and make him a beloved, fun character? The idea of that really just gets me going. I know we have made a Tingle game in the past, but maybe at some point down the road. …”

My reaction gradually changed from horror, to bewilderment — is he serious!? — and finally to curiosity as Tanabe explained himself.

“It’s like love,” Tanabe said. “It’s like romance: You meet someone and you’re like, ‘Oh god, I can’t stand that person.’ And then three weeks later, you’re madly in love — it’s that turn, that quick whip, that motivates [me] a little bit.”

“If we we ever get a really successful Tingle game, maybe we will have like a big Tingle statue out there [points to Nintendo's E3 booth outside the room's walls],” said Tabata.

“Retro does Tingle!” Kelbaugh added, playing along with the joke. Another round of laughter swept through our little room.

I don’t know about you, but I believe in Tanabe’s vision. Forget Metroid — at E3 2014, I better see this damn Tingle game.

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Since the troubled launched of Final Fantasy XIV in late 2010, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada publicly apologized to the company’s fans and committed to relaunching the game as A Realm Reborn. As A Realm Reborn nears its Aug. 27 release on the PC, PlayStation 3, and eventually the PlayStation 4, GamesBeat sought out an in-depth interview with project director Naoki Yoshida to discuss the business aspects behind the decision as well as what both new and old players can expect from the game itself.

After all, it’s not every day a major game company — especially a Japanese one — publicly apologizes for releasing a subpar product. But it’s even less common for that company to then spend millions more rebuilding that years-old title for a second shot at success.

Note: Yoshida spoke through a translator who somewhat paraphrased the lengthier answers.

GamesBeat: What sort of reciprocity will there be for players who paid for the original version?

Yoshida: The first big thing about that is, if you purchased the original game, you’ll be able to have a free upgrade to A Realm Reborn. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that we’ll have a two-week “welcome back” campaign, where you’ll be able to play for free for two weeks. That’s what we want players to try, so we can show them that it’s a completely different game now. We’ll give them the two weeks to see that.

GamesBeat: Are there any sorts of in-game items that might be exclusive to founders?

Yoshida: We have two different types of players. We have players that purchased the game and didn’t like it and then quit, and then we had the players who kept playing the game. We call those our legacy players, the ones who played through all of the updates. Those legacy players will be getting a lot of stuff. They’ll be getting a reduced price on the subscription for A Realm Reborn for the lifetime that they played. They’ll also be getting an in-game Chocobo. They’ll get a lot of extra items. We’ve announced this all in the past. For players that didn’t stick around, but did purchase the original game, they’ll be getting the free upgrade and the two-week period to play for free, but there won’t be any extra in-game items, other than the ones that came with the original game. When you purchased the original game, depending on the version, there were in-game items that you got, and players will be able to transfer those over. All of that data will be transferred.

GamesBeat: As a longtime Final Fantasy XI player, I’m used to calling races “Mithra” and “Tarutaru” and things like that. What was the thinking behind having the same races as Final Fantasy XI but naming them something different?

Yoshida: Because I wasn’t on the team when that decision was made, I’m going to guess why, from what I’ve heard. What I believe is that, back then, they probably thought that a lot of the Final Fantasy XI users would move to Final Fantasy XIV when it was released. But because what they were making was a new game in Final Fantasy XIV, they didn’t want to make them exactly the same. Then it would just be Final Fantasy XI-2, and they didn’t want to make a Final Fantasy XI-2. But they wanted to make it easier for those people who had been playing Final Fantasy XI for such a long time to take a step into this new world by creating things that were similar, but different and unique to the Final Fantasy XIV world. Again, that’s just my guess.

But then again, that lets us see one of the biggest things that was wrong with the original release of Final Fantasy XIV. If they wanted to make it—they should have taken it and made it into Final Fantasy XI-2. Take Final Fantasy XI and make a sequel with new types of systems and new graphics, but build it off of that foundation. Instead of doing that, they decided they wanted to do something new, but still use some of the things from XI. Again, instead of taking one thing and taking it to the next level, they just kept everything kind of in the middle. Nothing was exceptional. That’s why you get this quagmire that was the original release of Final Fantasy XIV. There were a lot of great things that came out of XI, a lot of revolutionary things, like the level sync system. But the fact is, when they made the original Final Fantasy XIV, they made it with a server system that wouldn’t allow level sync. You have this great system you developed. Why not have your new game also use that?

GamesBeat: Do you feel some of those things you were just talking about, like the naming system of the races … has building A Realm Reborn on top of that kind of imperfect foundation held back what you were able to do with this new version?

Yoshida: If I wanted to destroy everything that was in the original XIV, I wouldn’t have taken on the position of rebuilding XIV. I would have gone on to Final Fantasy XVI and made that instead. The fact that I took up XIV is because I realized that, again, even though it had the rocky launch, there were still a lot of people out there who loved the game. You had this new generation of players who didn’t play XI and started their MMO experience with Final Fantasy XIV. For them, they don’t know about Tarutaru. They don’t know about Mithra. For them, they know about the Lalafell and the Mi’qote. To take that and destroy that would be destroying those people’s image of what they got into the game for. There’s tens of thousands of people that, for them, that was the first thing. As a hardcore MMO player myself, I know how important characters are to player. They’re your alter egos. Going in and destroying that and starting over with something absolutely new would crush those people. So keeping that was one of the things I decided we were going to do when we set out to rebuild XIV. Keeping those basic things that people had become used to with Final Fantasy XIV.

GamesBeat: I’ve noticed in almost all of the promotional materials, including the box shot and the giant image on the wall behind us, that “A Realm Reborn” is larger, literally larger, than the “Final Fantasy” title. Do you feel like just the title, Final Fantasy XIV, has a negative stigma following it around that you want to push aside?

Yoshida: Two main reasons. The first reason being – and this is kind of simple – is that we were just kind of tired of this logo, of this Final Fantasy logo. All Final Fantasys, from Final Fantasy I, have been a white background, this black font, this type. You’re getting to a point now that there are so many Final Fantasys that when you look at it, you don’t know which Final Fantasy it is. Is it the newest one? Is it a game from a couple of years ago? The font always looks the same. We wanted something that was new, something that was refreshing, to show that the game is going in a new direction. It’s not just this game. If you look at Lightning Returns, they’ve used a different logo now as well. It’s something that our company is doing as a whole. The series has to evolve if we’re going to evolve as well. So we’re taking that into a new direction. That’s one of the reasons.

And then we want to show is that… We have Final Fantasy XIV, and it’s online. You have this line here that represents the world, the world of Hydaelyn, the world of Final Fantasy XIV. Final Fantasy XIV encompasses this world. But this here, A Realm Reborn, is the game that you’ll be playing. We plan on changing this with every expansion, to show that while it’s Final Fantasy XIV every single time, you’re going to be getting a new game, a new experience, with each expansion. One of my ideas is that once Final Fantasy XV is released, we’ll maybe even remove the XIV from this and just make it Final Fantasy. What’s going to happen is, from a player’s perspective – someone who maybe doesn’t know about Final Fantasy XIV – if you see Final Fantasy XV, you think, “Well, XV is out. Why do I want to play XIV? That’s the old game.” By removing that and making this our title, that sets it apart.

GamesBeat: Given Square’s recent financial troubles, do you think that the company would have greenlit such a massive and costly undertaking as A Realm Reborn if Final Fantasy XIV had launched, say, last month? If Final Fantasy XIV had launched a month ago and it turned out that it wasn’t well received, would A Realm Reborn still be happening?

Yoshida: That’s a difficult question. It’s hard to say, given the economic state of the company. The thing is, when the original Final Fantasy XIV was released, a lot of people around the world had loved this story and this series, the Final Fantasy series. There’s a lot of love for Final Fantasy, so many fans of Final Fantasy. There were so many fans of Final Fantasy XI. They’d come to expect a great experience. When a company that, up until now, has made them great games gives them a game that’s not so great, a lot of people felt betrayed. It wasn’t just a small thing, either. It was a huge betrayal. People felt like, “We believed in you, and you did this to us.” We lost a lot of trust. And so doing something like—if it was released last month and we said, “OK, the release was a failure. XV has just been announced,” I don’t think we would say, “OK, we’re going to cancel XIV. Please buy XV.” We’d still have people feeling like they don’t trust us anymore, because of the recent failure on XIV. So I think we would probably do the same thing. We would try to get back the trust of our users, and getting back the trust of our users would mean saying, “Yes, we made this mistake,” and trying to fix that mistake. Cancelling the game would not be a way to bring that trust back.

GamesBeat: In Final Fantasy XI, I tried all the classes and advanced classes, but I ended up with a ranger with ninja as my subjob for my main character. I was wondering what in A Realm Reborn would mirror that type of gameplay if I wanted to try it.

Yoshida: System-wise, or role-wise in the party?

GamesBeat: Role-wise. The same kind of abilities and playstyle. I saw that there’s an archer. Do you have a subjob system?

Yoshida: The system that we have is similar, but different, in the sense that what we have is called the armory system. You have your one character. The one character can basically be any of the classes that are available. By changing your weapon, you change your class. And so you can have everything be your main class, because when you change your weapon, you instantly change to that class. We have the seven main battle classes, and once you get them up high enough, you can unlock the jobs that are connected to those classes and branch off from the classes.

There are nine of those jobs that will be available at release. What you can also do is, while you’re playing as one of the classes, you’ll be able to combine weapons skills and actions that you learned from other classes. Say you’re playing as the gladiator, which is the main sword class, like a warrior. You can combine to become a pugilist, the fighter type of class, a melee class, and mix those weapon skills. But you can only do that when you’re playing as one of those battle classes. If you switch to a job, which is one of the specialized versions of the classes, then you must use the skills of that job and the class that it’s connected to. You’re pretty much tied into that.

So it allows for two different play styles. If you’re playing as a class, you can mix and match different skills to create your own type. You can do a lot of different things, but you’ll be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. If you decide to go with the job role, then basically you’re put into one role. If you choose the paladin, you’ll be the tank. You’ll be specialized to play as the tank in your party. Depending on what type of game content you’re playing—if you’re playing end content where you’ll need a party and use tactics to defeat a certain enemy, you’ll need certain roles to be able to do that. You’ll want to be able to play as a job – talk it over with the people you’re working with, figure out how you’re going to do it, and fight that end boss. If you’ll be off by yourself and maybe want to do something a little more casual and you want more freedom in how you play, then you’ll want to choose the classes and mix and match those types of things. We’re allowing for different play styles.

GamesBeat: Final Fantasy XI is actually a very punishing game. If you die, you can loss levels. If anything goes wrong, if one mistake is made, your whole team can die. But I put up with it because I enjoyed the world and the characters and the gameplay. The thing that eventually made me leave, though, was actually the lack of variety in enemies. In the starting area, you face a Yellow Crawler, a level 3 crawler. Then, in the level 40 or 70 areas, you face a level 40 or 70 Yellow Crawler. It’s like that across all its regions. Is that something that you’ve addressed in A Realm Reborn — the variety of content?

Yoshida: The original launch pretty much had the same problem. You’d go to one area and see the same [monster] as you did in the high-level areas. We wanted to fix that. We’ve been adding a lot of new monsters. We have a lot of original Final Fantasy XIV monsters, but we’ve been taking monsters from other games in the series, like the monsters that you see in Final Fantasy XII. We’ve taken some of those, rearranged their models, and brought them into Final Fantasy XIV. We’ve also taken some of the monsters from Final Fantasy XI and brought them in. Again, we’re continuing to make even more new monsters. Our monster team, our graphics team, our assets team are making new assets and we plan on releasing even more new monsters. We realize that was one big problem, and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen in A Realm Reborn.

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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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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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LOS ANGELES — When Retro Studios isn’t working on a Donkey Kong game, it has to eat. Luckily for its employees, the studio is in Austin, Texas, so they have tons of barbecue restaurants to pick from.

“Everybody has their own favorite place,” said Retro president and chief executive officer Michael Kelbaugh with a smile. “It’s like saying, ‘What’s the best bar?’ [Laughs]. There is a barbecue place very close to us called Rudy’s, which have catered many events. They come in and give us lunch when we’re working a lot of hours. That’s a favorite watering hole of ours. We really like Rudy’s.”

It was 3 p.m. on an especially sweaty day at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles when I sat down to interview Retro Studios. Hearing the way it described Rudy’s and its delicious barbecue sauce had my stomach rumbling in no time — I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

“I think I have all of Nintendo of America hooked on Rudy’s barbecue sauce,” added Kelbaugh. “Every time I go up there, I bring a case with me. I give it away as thank-yous. So I would have to say, as a company, [the best place is] Rudy’s. Rudys.com!”

The actual URL is rudysbbq.com, but I’ll let Kelbaugh slide just this one time (rudys.com does redirect to the official site URL). Stay tuned for more of my interview with Retro Studios in the next couple of days.

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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 — Ubisoft is one of the winners coming out of the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo. The French game publisher’s press conference and new games scored big hits with consumers and the press. Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot sat down with us twice to discuss the reception to games that could drive Ubisoft’s growth for years.

We talked to Guillemot on Sunday at a pre-E3 dinner, and we did so again in a one-on-one conversation Thursday. He was in a good mood because Ubisoft had such a good reaction to hardcore games like The Division, The Crew, Assassin’s Creed IV, and Watch Dogs. Ubisoft also has some mass market pleasers like Just Dance 2014. All of these are big bets on the new consoles coming from Microsoft and Sony later this year.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: What was your reaction to your press conferences

Yves Guillemot: I think I should ask you, really. [Laughs] No, we were very happy with the press conferences. We achieved the goals we had, which were to launch the two new brands – The Crew and The Division – and take people into next-gen worlds, more open worlds, living worlds, with social and better A.I. and better graphics but also access via mobile and tablet and so on. All those things are coming along well.

GamesBeat: You had more than one game with seamless multiplayer and single-player.

Guillemot: That will be what we want to play now. If you want to be alone, you’re alone. If you have friends pop up, you can play with them. There will be a lot more cooperative play than before. There are lots of possibilities.

GamesBeat: I heard something weird. I don’t know if it’s true or not. Sony, on Monday, said used games are go. Then, on Tuesday, it said that publishers can charge what they want. Were you the publisher who got mad at Sony, because you wanted the right to charge what you wanted?

Guillemot: [Laughs] People are looking all over at what’s the best way to make this work for everybody. We have a system that works quite well in stores today, but games will change with time, so we’ll have to keep on evaluating. With time, I think we’ll find the right solution.

GamesBeat: You have a lot of games compared to, say, Activision. They had only three games on the floor. Do you feel like you’re headed in that direction, though? Or do you feel like you’re making more bets?

Guillemot: We want to cover a large enough scope. We think we can achieve the level of sales that each one of Activision’s games can achieve. We think we have the right strategy.

GamesBeat: EA says that they’re using the Frostbite game engine on almost everything now — Command & Conquer, Plants vs. Zombies, Battlefield. Do you also want to get to the point where you have an engine like that?

Guillemot: We already do that. Watch Dogs runs on an engine that’s very close to the one we used in Far Cry. Assassin’s Creed is using the AnvilNext engine, which we reuse in many places, too. We don’t want to be too limited in what we offer our creators, so we try not to be too restrictive there, but we optimize when we can.

GamesBeat: With the Kinect, you mentioned that you might try the toy business. That seems like one interesting use of it. Are there more interesting Kinect games that you see coming for you?

Guillemot: Yes, we do, because everyone will have a camera in the future. We’ll be able to do Kinect games specifically for this generation. They need to sell enough machines first, though.

GamesBeat: Everybody was coming into the show saying, “Do we need more consoles?” Coming out of the show, do you think everyone’s convinced that they want another console?

Guillemot: A lot of them, I think, are. We see that preorders are very strong for the new machines. People seem to be convinced once they come out of here, so that’s good.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else important at the show that you’d like to talk about?

Guillemot: We’ve said it all, I think. We have quality games. We have more innovation. The possibility for open worlds all over will give freedom to consumers to play what they want to. It’s going to bring this industry to a place that everyone will want to be part of. Using your mobile devices as an interface with those worlds will open them up not only to people who love to play with a controller, but also the ones that want to play with a touch screen, because they understand how to play that way.

GamesBeat: Is there more innovation you could point to? I like the multiplayer in Watch Dogs, where you’re interrupted in your game by somebody who comes in and hacks you, and you chase that person down. Is there any more innovation like that that you see in other games?

Guillemot: A lot, in a lot of places. Living worlds will give our creators the ability to do so many things.

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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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LOS ANGELES – At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), many publishers try to grab your attention with flashy booths, large television screens, and pulsating music. But sometimes, the best stuff are hidden, tucked in a corner away from the noise. One of those games and my personal favorite of the show was Eve-VR.

In truth, Eve-VR is more of a prototype than an actual game ready for release, but it’s already an incredibly immersive experience. The space-combat simulator by developer CCP Games uses the Oculus Rift, the popular virtual-reality headset created (and successfully funded on Kickstarter earlier this year) by Oculus VR.

After I strapped the goggles to my noggin, I was immediately transported to the cockpit of a ship. By tilting my head, I could see my virtual hands and feet resting next to a high-tech computer console. But I didn’t have much time to acclimate to my new surroundings before the ship launched into cold space.

With the Rift controlling my point of view and an Xbox 360 controller handling the ship’s thrusters and guns, I dove into an awe-inspiring dogfight between large space cruisers, with lasers and missiles attacking from every direction. The goal is simple: Destroy as many of the other players (who are sitting next to you in the booth) as you can. I died a bunch of times and only shot down two enemy ships, but that’s okay. I was too enamored with virtual-reality space flight to care about my kill-death ratio anyway.

It’s only a hobby … for now

The Eve-VR demo I played is only 7-weeks-old. It’s the same version that was shown during CCP’s annual Fanfest event in Reykjavik, Iceland. The team behind it consists of just 10 people — none of them work on it full-time. CCP allows its employees to dedicate 20 percent of their work time to side projects such as Eve-VR.

Gunnarsson plays Eve-VR

“We all have other responsibilities,” said Sigurdur G. Gunnarsson, one of the developers behind Eve-VR. “Like based on the [business] card I gave you, I’m actually a senior web developer. I work on one of the back-end web servers for Dust. We all have different jobs.”

As much promise as the prototype has, Gunnarsson, his team, and CCP Games are still trying to figure out where Eve-VR can fit in the universe shared by Eve Online (its 10 year-old massively multiplayer online game) and Dust 514 (a first-person shooter for the PlayStation 3). Both of those games are intricately connected. In addition to shared factions and alliances, Eve players can send down laser strikes from above to kill Dust mercenaries on the planet below them.

“It’s kind of complex because [it's] the Eve universe, so we have to figure out where [Eve-VR] can fit in,” said Gunnarsson. “With Dust, it’s actually really nice because it works with the planets. But in like Eve, it’s the rest of space — where are you gonna fit this without disturbing the normal Eve gameplay?”

Source: CCP Games

You have to keep your head on a swivel: enemy players are all around you.

Eve’s second decade

With its dark, moody lighting and monitors showing off massive spaceships, developer CCP Games’ E3 booth felt a lot like walking into Disney’s Tomorrowland park. A handful of kiosks displayed the latest updates for Eve Online and Dust 514, showing what CCP has accomplished. On the other side were a row of Oculus Rift headsets — just one way that the Eve universe may grow in the next few years.

This ongoing expansion isn’t limited to games, either. A TV show based on the adventures of real Eve Online players is in development — stories that CCP will also use for an upcoming graphic novel.

As for the future of Eve-VR, Gunnarsson remains optimistic about its role in Eve’s “second decade,” a term CCP uses to describe its years-long plans for the Eve-related games.

“I hope [it's a part of that second decade],” he said. “I really hope so.”

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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 — When Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, stood on stage at a pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo press conference and stated there would be no online authentication, digital rights management, or used game restrictions on the new PlayStation 4 console, the reaction of the audience was immediate and vocal.

For Tony Bartel, president of video game retailer GameStop, it was the roar heard ’round the world.

“I think the highlight … was the roar that went up, the deafening roar that I can still kind of barely hear, because it was so loud when they said, ‘We’re going to allow you to do with the disc what you want to do with it,’” he told GamesBeat in a recent interview. “I think it’s something we know, that gamers want to be able to trade it in their games or just own their disc, and I think what it said to the rest of the world is, yes, there’s a lot of passion around that issue out there. So it’s really exciting to see Sony go straight to the heart of the gamer and say, ‘Do with your disc what you want it to do.’”

GameStop president Tony Bartel.

Bartel is also glad that Microsoft recently cleared up its own position on used games, an issue near to his company’s heart (and especially its bottom line).

“I think they’ll still continue to clarify their message more,” he said. “But basically what they said is ‘unlimited ability to trade disc-based games at retail.’ And so I think that was well received by the gamers.

“I’m very excited that they did that. I think that was a major concern of some consumers. For them to come out and clarify that, that unlimited nature of it in that policy, I think was an important clarification.”

Although Microsoft said it will permit customers to trade in and resell games at participating retailers, which includes GameStop, it will also allow third-party publishers to opt-out of reselling games or to charge a used game fee. But Bartel believes publishers will choose to do neither. “The reality is that they’ve had that ability to opt-in and opt-out,” he said. “They have that ability today on the Xbox 360 and on the PS3 system.”

Bartel points to Electronics Arts’ Online Pass — and its recent decision to abandon the controversial practice – as an example. “We know they weren’t selling a whole lot at GameStop … and they just abandoned it,” he said. “So that’s been around, the ability to try and limit the transfer of used games. It’s been around.”

Despite what some industry folk might think, GameStop doesn’t cannibalize new game sales, Bartel said. It contributes to it, he maintains. Seventeen percent of all new game purchases done at a GameStop involve credit from trading in games, according to Bartel, and he believes publishers won’t risk losing those sales. “I think publishers understand, and I think publishers were not surprised either by the response Sony got,” he said. “Because they understand how valuable the trade of games is toward keeping the frontline market share and the frontline titles going.”

Ultimately, Bartel is not worried about the next-generation of consoles. “I think it’s business as usual.”

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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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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 — 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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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 — Producer Stéphane Roy really, really wants to make a great game. This doesn’t come across as arrogance, or pride, or even business. Roy knows he’s responsible for rebooting a legend. He’s carrying that weight.

So it’s not such a huge shock that when we sat down at a special pre-E3 event, he got out the first three questions before I even turned on my recorder. Roy wanted feedback. I’d seen an early build of Thief (releasing in 2014 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) just a few months previously at the Game Developers Conference, and I spent 20 minutes with it before our interview. He asked what I thought about it. If I liked it. If I found it to be too difficult.

GamesBeat: I did notice that the A.I. was a lot more attentive this time. They spotted me every single time.

Stéphane Roy: Really? Every time? Well, this is the middle of the game. When you come in cold and pick up the controller, it’s not easy.

GamesBeat: The first couple of times, I was trying to see what kind of trouble I could get into with it. Which is a lot, it turns out.

How are you finding the A.I. now? You asked me if it’s too difficult. What do you think of it?

Roy: For this game, the A.I. is a complex beast. We want to make sure that you’ll be able to play with it. It’s that cat-and-mouse gameplay. We have tons of parameters we can play with for detection, so that’s where we are now. It’s a question of balance.

We want to make sure that the hardcore gamer who doesn’t want to kill anybody will be able to turn off everything and play that way. But we also want to make sure that you don’t want to fight with the features. If you just want to play cat-and-mouse with the guards, we want to support that, too. The difficult job now is just balancing everything and making sure that it’s not too sensitive. It’s important that you feel like it’s fair.

GamesBeat: In the outer courtyard, I took out the two guards, but I made noise doing it. When I snuck into the inner courtyard, I would see those guys running around on alert, doing stuff outside their normal patterns. That was when I knew I had a bit of a job on my hands to get around them.

Roy: This is where the game and real life are a little different. In real life, that something happens and the guards all know something is happening. In a game, it’s not fun. This is the kind of thing we want to work very hard to balance.

GamesBeat: Some of the characters were mentioning something called a Graven. What’s a Graven?

Roy: On the one hand, you have the ordinary watch, the Baron’s guards. On the other hand, you have the Graven. If there’s a riot, for example — the population says enough is enough and rises up against this iron-fisted rule — the Graven are who will come in to oppose them.

GamesBeat: We’ve seen two missions in Thief, and both seemed like very isolated incidents. I’m wondering what the connecting thread is going to be through all of this.

Roy: I understand why you could feel that way. That’s kind of intentional on our part. Among the reasons why we showed you this section and that section, it’s because we feel like that doesn’t reveal a lot of the story. But I guarantee that during the game, you’ll have to find out a lot about what’s going on. There’s something weird happening, of course. It’s story-driven. Everything is linked together.

GamesBeat: Are there going to be any daytime missions?

Roy: No. This is a game that takes place by night. We might have something that you could maybe call the opposite later, but no, it’s really about the night.

GamesBeat: It’s been nine years since the last one, so this will be the first Thief game for a lot of people. What do you want newbies and/or veterans to see or hear or feel that will make this Thief the definitive Thief experience going forward? What do you want to add to this franchise?

Roy: We want to make sure that people who know the franchise will feel that we have the right to put the Thief name on the box. We want them to feel like we’re working up to today’s standards. This isn’t just something from 15 years ago. I don’t just want to tell you, “It’s this feature and that feature,” because it’s not just a question of features. It’s a question of how we build the game – the items, the level design, the way we make the maps today. I promise I’ll give you a better answer soon.

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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 — Jonathan Morin likes to compare games with painting. “You can craft something finite and precise,” he says. “You need to know exactly what you want to say to create something that the player will feel is elegant and makes sense, but it’s important to not say it directly. If you say exactly why you’re doing it, the player doesn’t get their own shot at it.”

Now, as creative director of the open-world actioner Watch Dogs, Morin’s canvass is privacy and exploitation in the cyberage. Anti-heroic lead Aiden Pearce can access and manipulate any electronic device in modern-day Chicago … all the better to destroy his enemies. Or maybe help some strangers.

It’s a big picture to put together. When I sat down with Morin at a special pre-E3 event, the first thing he told me was how it all began with small talk.

GamesBeat: What was the idea behind Watch Dogs?

Jonathan Morin: It started as, “OK, what are we interested in? What are all of us passionate about?” We realized that we were constantly talking about our phones and what impact that was going to have on our daily lives. We also knew we wanted to do a city, something bigger to explore. Those two ideas connected in a very natural way. If we do a modern-day city environment, it would be a crime to not talk about hyperconnectivity. It has to showcase the impact.

In a lot of ways you could compare WikiLeaks and its consequences to moment where we decided to create public libraries. It’s the same kind of insecurity. Suddenly, a lot more people have access to knowledge. It scares a lot of people.

GamesBeat: The Catholic Church illustrated stories from the Bible in stained glass windows because they were dealing with an illiterate population. The population was supposed to be illiterate.

Morin: Exactly. Instead of forcing a judgment call, I think our game is all about bringing players to interact with it. On one side, be careful about how you use these things. On the other side, you might glorify this whole thing. It makes us evolve in a lot of ways. If people play Watch Dogs, it’s a lot more powerful if it makes them ask questions.

GamesBeat: What kind of questions do you want people to ask after playing Watch Dogs?

Morin: I want people to think about the relationships that they have, and that humans in general have, with technology. Take social media. It’s a spectacular idea. It embraces communication. On the other side, we start to see psychologists talking about social media addicts. People are becoming addicted to what other people think about what they do.

GamesBeat: I’ve heard it described that [lead character] Aiden Pearce has an addiction to information. As soon as he starts hacking into people’s lives, he can’t really stop. He has to get more and more involved.

Morin: To be a little bit more precise, Aiden Pierce has an obsession with overprotection. There’s an interesting disconnect between what Aiden does and what the player perceives. Aiden is motivated to protect his family. It starts with monitoring his own home — which they don’t know about. It’s a bit creepy. There’s an interesting motive for why he’s doing that, though.

Progressively, he goes from the house to monitoring the neighborhood and then the district. Things get out of hand. He uses the only thing he knows, his grasp on power, to solve his problems. Once he gets to the point of monitoring the entire city, you can start to confuse Aiden Pearce’s drama and everybody else’s drama. You start to explore what I call the vigilante tragedy. It’s your own needs versus the needs of others.

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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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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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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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LOS ANGELES — Let’s face it: When space invaders attack the White House with kill-o-zap rays, you really want a chief executive who flips the “Oval Office secret arsenal” switch and goes a’gunning for alien ass shouting, “You f**ked with the wrong POTUS!”

That’s just what you get in Saints Row IV. It only gets more insane from there. I sat down with senior producer Jim Boone to talk about how his game would carve up sacred cows into prime rib, starting with how his team had to build on a game famous for its giant purple dildo melee attacks.

GamesBeat: Everybody thought maybe you topped out with Saints Row the Third, that you couldn’t make it any crazier, that you couldn’t take the gag any further. So … you went a little further this time.

Boone: We did. Yes, we did. It’s funny — the design director on the last game tells the story about how when they were a couple of months away from finishing Saints Row the Third, he said, “We’ve probably taken this about as far as you can possibly go. There can’t be anything crazier or more over the top than what we’ve just done.” Then you finish the game, and you take a step back to collect yourself. You start thinking. Suddenly, things like superpowers start coming up.

But if you have superpowers, who the hell do you fight? If I’m picking up someone and throwing them with telekinesis, what’s a gangster going to do against that? So what if we have aliens? Then the aliens can have different abilities. Yeah, that makes total sense! Then what about the player? What’s going to be? He already took over the Saints. He became a pop icon. What do you do with him? How about he becomes the President of the United States? That seems like the right trajectory for him. We pretty quickly realized that now we could go really over the top.

GamesBeat: So … Saints Row V?

Boone: I feel like we’re in the same boat. We’re saying that there’s nothing left. How do you go further than this?

GamesBeat: You could get into some Flash Gordon stuff. You gotta go conquer Mongo.

Boone: Hey, exactly. That would be the next step.

GamesBeat: You don’t start off as the president, do you?

Boone: Correct. We have our origin mission that sets up how you become president.

GamesBeat: And then it’s five years later.

Boone: Exactly.

GamesBeat: You got re-elected!

Boone: Yes, you did! Everyone loves you after all! [Laughs]

GamesBeat: Is there a way you could go too far in Saints Row? Is that even possible?

Boone: We’ve talked about certain things like blatant racism. We don’t want to have anything like that in the game. Sexism — I know this might sound strange given some of the things we do in our game, but we try to be very fair. You can play a man. You can play a woman. We try not to put things in situations where you might feel too uncomfortable. Those are kind of the only areas where we look and say, “No, don’t want to go there.”

The threshold is pretty high as far as something that wouldn’t make it in. We gave the team a week. We called it Awesome Week. We told everyone, “Do whatever you want to do this week. Preferably something that’s not even in the game right now. Come up with crazy ideas.” We had people come up saying, “What if we do a dragon you can hop on and fly around and it breathes fire.” In a week, they were able to prototype it. It was very crude, but functional. You won’t see it in Saints Row IV — it was strictly just an issue of time. But we were convinced. “We’ll find a way to make that dragon make sense in this game.”

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LOS ANGELES – If you really want to collect all 16 toy characters for Skylanders: Swap Force and create and play more than 250 combinations from the swappable top and bottom halves of those characters, David Nathanielsz would be very happy.

Skylanders: Swap Force debuts as the third in the series of game-toy hybrid products that have sold more than $1 billion worth since 2011.  The new game has interchangeable body halves of Skylanders: Swap Force toys, so players can mix-and-match their collections to create new kinds of characters. The combos are an ingenious scheme to get kids to bug their parents about buying new Skylanders toys, which sell for around $10 each, not counting the $70 or so for the Skylanders starter pack with a portal.

We interviewed Nathanielsz, an executive producer at Activision’s developer Vicarious Visions, about competing against Disney’s Infinity toy-game hybrid and what’s going to be cool about Swap Force.

Here’s the 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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LOS ANGELES — The man who is about to be beheaded above (well, not really) is Darby McDevit, the lead writer for Assassin’s Creed IV, the next big sequel from Ubisoft in the continuing series that pits the Assassins against the Templars over the centuries.

The man above McDevit is Assassin’s Creed new main character, Edward Kenway, who grew up in England but was dissatisfied with his lot. He became a privateer and sailed to the Caribbean, where he’s found a new home and a new calling: a pirate. He is the first hero in the series who is more of a mercenary than a crusading Assassin, and McDevit says that produces a new tension in the game. Assassin’s Creed IV is set in September 1717 at the end of the golden age of piracy. Kenway will take out targets for money, but he’ll always see what’s in it for himself.

We saw a preview as McDevit narrated what was happening. You can chase your assassin targets across land or sea now, and much of the combat takes place aboard ships as you roam the open world of the West Indies. Kenway can lead his pirate’s ship into battle, ramming his enemies and boarding them in a pitched battle among the decks and the masts. He can also lead attacks on island forts and storm ashore. But this is also about stealth movement and sneaking past guards. Kenway makes his way in the demo we saw through small islands like Misteria, where he looks for hidden treasure, to the bustling streets of Havana in Spainish-held Cuba.

Ubisoft is showing the game off at the E3 video game trade show in Los Angeles this week. Here’s our video interview with McDevit.

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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 — Argggh! Assassin’s Creed IV features a main character who is a lot more pirate than assassin. And one of the men responsible for that twist is Darby McDevit, the lead writer for the next big sequel from Ubisoft. The French game publisher is previewing the title this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo video game trade show.

The man above McDevit is Assassin’s Creed new main character, Edward Kenway. He is detached from the usual Templars vs. Assassin’s plot because he would really rather be making money as a pirate who takes the side with the winning pot of gold. The Caribbean is a vast playground for him, where he can hijack ships and assassinate characters for money at the same time.

The result is a game that is both familiar and different from the last title, Assassin’s Creed III, which was set (mostly on land) during the American Revolution. It’s set in 1717, at the end of the golden age of piracy. McDevit told us all about it, and here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: For how long did you know you were going to do the ship combat? Was that the heart of what this was going to be?

Darby McDevit: For a long time, yeah. We started work on this game in August 2011. As Revelations was finishing, this team took a look at the naval combat as it was forming in Assassin’s Creed III. With ACIII being even more than a year out, we saw that the naval combat was working well.

We already wanted to try to do a story about Edward Kenway, because we were doing the Haytham-Connor story in ACIII. Very early on we had this idea to also do the grandfather, so we had a family saga. As the same time as we saw the ship combat coming in, we had this idea to do Edward, and we looked back in time and saw that the Golden Age of Piracy was right there. All these things came together and showed us the way forward. Even before ACIII came out, we immediately began prototyping extra features for the naval gameplay that would have to be upgraded for a pirate game.

GamesBeat: What is Edward’s background again?

McDevit: He’s a kid who was born in Swansea in Wales. He moved to Bristol with his family at a young age, grew up fairly poor, married very young, and decided that he needed to go to the West Indies as a privateer to make money. His wife doesn’t like that very much and that leads him into some trouble, but he goes there anyway, and that’s where our story begins.

GamesBeat: In Assassin’s Creed III, some of the naval combat seemed too easy. You could take out another ship with one shot or something like that. It doesn’t necessarily seem that realistic. Are you shooting more for entertaining combat?

McDevit: What we’ve done, very specifically, because a boat can be upgraded so vastly—You’ll begin the game with very few cannon. I think it’s six or eight right now. You can upgrade all the way to 56. There will be ships at the very beginning of the game which you absolutely will not be able to defeat. They’ll destroy you in a matter of seconds. They’ll make a hash of your sails and rigging. It’s going to be very obvious. People, I think, will have one or two experiences as they play through our game where they will pick on somebody that vastly outclasses them, and they’ll be killed immediately.

We’re actually excited about this, because with hand-to-hand combat, it’s always very hard to make boss characters in a realistic game. We can’t give them special powers. We can’t upgrade a human being too far. We can give them weapons that do a little bit more damage, is all. But with boats we can go up to a crazy scales. When you’re in your eight-gun brig, the Jackdaw, and you come across a British man o’ war with a hundred guns, you will know very quickly that you need to upgrade – your hull, your sails, your guns, all the weapons and ammunition.

GamesBeat: Does the world feel larger than in earlier games, larger than ACIII?

McDevit: Yeah. ACIII’s naval gameplay took place in self-contained arenas. There was no free roaming. The West Indies as we’ve made it is a massive area. It’ll take quite a while to sail from one end to the other. Of course, to accommodate that, we do have fast travel once you’ve discovered locations. That’s the balance that we tried to strike very early on. We did lots of tests. What’s the happy medium between having a vast world to explore and sinking into utter boredom sailing across miles of ocean? That was a challenge we gave ourselves, and we tackled it pretty early on to try to get it right.

GamesBeat: How did you have to change the ship-to-ship combat coming in from ACIII?

McDevit: We added a couple of new weapons. There are things that you’ll probably see in another demo, but we’ve tried to make the experience more varied. The boarding itself gives a new element to the combat. You can actually sink ships, or you can just whittle them down to a little bit of health and then board them. The boarding is a very important aspect. If you want to get the maximum amount of loot – wood and steel and gold and rum – you’re going to need to accomplish a boarding.

We throw lots of different AI types at you. We’ve only showed a very small portion of the selection. We have AI types that will try to ram you. We have AI ships that will try to get away from you and bomb you with mortars from long range. That’s another way to try to change up the pace. We’ll have lots of different enemy archetypes and sizes of ships and things like that.

GamesBeat: You also changed the aiming mechanic. You have to elevate the cannon and arc your shots now. Is that because it has an emphasis on more than just ship-to-ship combat, with the new battles against land targets?

McDevit: Exactly. We needed to be able to do that. A lot of the towers, for instance, are a bit higher than the level of the ocean. We also wanted to just give you a little bit more control over where you fire. Before it was just making sure of your rotation in the water and maybe the size of the waves. Now, if you’re in stormy weather and the waves are causing you problems, you can angle the guns up to arc over the waves.

GamesBeat: We saw a boarding where you had multiple goals. You had a contract to fulfill to assassinate a guy on board. You also had a goal to take the ship, which would happen when you killed 50 soldiers. Are there a lot of different objectives like that?

McDevit: There are other goals as well, yes, like taking out all the snipers in the crow’s nest. There might be three or four, depending on the size of the ship. The galleons, I think, are triple-masted, so they might have three or six snipers. There might be multiple officers on board that you have to specifically kill. Our designers are working on as many little goals as possible, so we can change up the boarding. The other thing is that the boarding can be accomplished kind of any way you want it. If the objective is just to kill 15 sailors, well, you can get on board that ship and kill them. But you could dive off the back of your ship and swim around, or go some other way.

GamesBeat: If I’ve taken the ship before killing the contract target, what would happen then?

McDevit: No, you still have to kill him. The boarding won’t end at that point. The contract is added to your list of boarding constraints, so you still have to kill him.

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LOS ANGELES — As the senior producer on Plants vs. Zombies 2, Allen Murray plays it a lot. It debuts on July 18, but Murray already has loads of tips for how to survive those giant waves of zombies that attack your house and moan while traversing your deadly lawn.

We caught up with Murray at a recent press briefing and played a round of PVZ2. We wanted to learn about all of the tactics you can use to protect your brainz from the zombies. The first PVZ debuted almost four years ago, and it became a huge hit across multiple platforms. It sold millions of units and PopCap got diverted doing lots of ports. Now it has revamped the gameplay of the new title and added new gameplay elements, like plant food. You can use that to feed your plants and help them stave off zombies attacks.

PVZ2 debuts on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch on July 18. It’s being revealed today at the E3 game trade show in Los Angeles.

Here’s a video of our interview with Murray.

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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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Square Enix has come up with a great original game in Murdered: Soul Suspect.

Airtight Games is developing Murdered for release on unnamed next-generation platforms early next year. Eric Studer, the senior design producer, said in an interview with GamesBeat said it was thrilling to work on a new intellectual property with a unique story. You play the ghost of a murdered detective who can only find peace by finding his killer and bringing him to justice. It is a creative title that blends a detective mystery with a scary ghost tale.

At a time when the consoles are in transition, it is gratifying to see companies make a big bet on a cinematic game. Studer talked with out about the inspirations for the game and the unique detective style gameplay that distinguishes it.

Here’s our video interview with Studer.

[Video editing by Alejandro Quan-Madrid]

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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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Sega’s Total War: Rome II is going to pack a nice surprise for gamers when it arrives on the PC this fall. It’s going to be two games in one. The title combines turn-based strategy in its Civilization-like campaign map of ancient Rome with the hectic combat of real-time gameplay.

Al Bickham, the communications manager for Sega’s The Creative Assembly studio, told us about this hybrid strategy of mixing Civ-like empire building with on-the-ground combat.

Here’s our interview with Bickham below.

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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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