One of the biggest things we missed at E3 this year was the upcoming Vigil Games / THQ title, Darksiders: Wrath of War. How we managed to miss this one is still unclear -- we can only assume that it was in our blind spot the entire time. So, during our recent jaunt down to Austin for the Game Developer's Conference, we made time to stop by Vigil and take an in-depth look at the the team's debut title and two-year labor. Luckily, they weren't holding any grudges against our non-existent E3 coverage and were nice enough to give us a huge chunk of time with the game and the designers.

Concept artist and Vigil founder Joe Madureira and lead designer Hadyn Dalton sat down with us for two hours, taking us through the game and showing us levels that haven't been released to the public just yet. We got to take control of protagonist War and do battle with enemies, solve puzzles, and even take his massive warhorse Ruin for a spin. Check out the full writeup after the break, and be sure to check out the gallery, full of exclusive images from the game, just below. If you've been itching for a Joe Madureira Battle Chasers fix, this might be about as close as you can get.

Writing in games has come a long way since players were asked if they were bad enough dudes to rescue the president from ninjas. It's a growing area of game development that Vicious Cycle senior game designer Dave Ellis has certainly taken to heart, having won the 2008 Writers Guild award for writing for his work on the PSP action horror title, Dead Head Fred.

Now Ellis plans to impart some of his wisdom on other aspiring game writers as the keynote speaker for the Writers Guild Foundation's workshop on video game writing, which is set to take place in Los Angeles on October 18. In the run up to the event, however, we had the opportunity to pick his brain on a number of game writing-related topics, including the state of writing in the industry, storytelling's role in game design, and the potential for games like Heavy Rain to push the industry forward. We also took a second to touch on Ellis' passion for collecting classic arcade cabs, all of which you can check out after the break.

When the Joystiq Network last spoke with Warhammer Online executive producer Jeff Hickman, the experience left us rolling on the floor in laughter. During a guest appearance on the Big Download podcast, Hickman and company were noticeably tired from a tour in Leipzig and PAX promoting the massively multiplayer title, and decided to kick back with a few drinks and have fun.

While still entertaining, this time it's all business. Today, signifying Warhammer Online's one-week retail anniversary, Hickman returns to discuss the launch, future add-on content and address some of the issues with the game.

Listen to the entire interview now or jump in if you like your interviews in ye olde style wall-of-text format. We're all about options here.


[MP3] Download this interview in MP3 format

One thing that regular readers of Joystiq know is that we don't tend to delve too deeply into the mechanics behind the games, mostly because we're far too busy getting the news out. However, we got to sit down with games writer Susan O'Connor at Austin GDC and she provided an excellent insight into games from the writer's point of view.

Click through for the full interview with Susan to find out why she thinks short games are better than epic ones, why the cinematic model isn't the best for games, and what she did on BioShock.

AMD today launched the Fusion Gaming Utility, the first in what the company is calling a major push in rebranding (Cinema 2.0 is part of that), complementary to the AMD Game! Initiative it launched earlier this year. We had a chance to talk with AMD Gaming Strategist Brent Barry and PR representative Matt Davis, to grill them on the odds and ends of the new software and AMD's push to capitalize on the mainstream core gamer.

Earlier this week, EA announced that the three developers (Jack Matthews, Mark Pacini, and Todd Keller) who jumped ship from the Nintendo-owned Retro Studios back in April would be forming their own development house, Armature Studios. They were courted by several big companies (read: as big as EA, and/or bigger) and finally signed a long-term publishing deal with EA to develop games for all consoles. Pacini said, "What really gets me going is that now, no platform is off limit. That is just something we didn't have the ability to do before."

Both Retro and Armature are located in Austin, TX, so the timing of the press release was meant to be a part of the Austin GDC. Even though this same team worked on the Metroid Prime series, it's itching for more knuckle-blasting, thumbstick-twiddling, button-mashing fare. After the jump you can read our interview with Jack Mathews and find out what sort of platforms the new studio will be developing for. One thing we did learn: they're not making any MMOs.

Since its impressive unveiling at GDC '07, the virtual community of PlayStation Home has gone from being Sony's most ambitious software undertaking as a console manufacturer to something just shy of vaporware. We hear that more members of the gaming populace are being cherry-picked to test it, but despite this – and a spattering of showings at industry events – it nevertheless seems no closer to realization.

With the expanded closed beta underway and Sony still talking about a public "open beta" release by year's end, we met with PlayStation Home director, Jack Buser, to get a look at what those under NDA are experiencing right now.

Despite keeping players salivating over Castle Crashers' eventual price and release date, The Behemoth's hand-drawn epic nonetheless remained near the top of a short list of 2008's most anticipated titles right up until the game's recent XBLA debut. Since then, Castle Crashers has more or less delivered on its promises of manic 2D brawling, though a near-crippled online experience threatened to send us stomping off to our rooms in contempt. Nevertheless, at the end of the day Castle Crashers is still a heck of a lot of fun to play.

Fun as it is, however, we recently managed to put the controllers down long enough to speak with The Behemoth's Emil Ayoubkhan and Dan Paladin to discuss their game's price, what took the game so long and what the team has planned now that Castle Crashers is out the door.

A quick addendum: This interview was conducted just before its release on XBLA but, due to Wednesday's Large Hadron Collider test, got lost in a black hole. Read on little soldiers! And for more, be sure to check out our PAX interview with The Behemoth as well.

Between all the hip nerdrock concerts and multifaceted gaming marathons, it was easy to forget that PAX 2008 was a pretty sweet place for developers to show off their big titles. Not that Epic really needs to spread the word about their sequel to 2006's chainsaw-wielding bestseller, Gears of War 2 -- regardless, our Bleszinski-loving sister site, Xbox 360 Fanboy, recently got a chance to sit down with the lead artist and writer for the Locust massacring simulator to ask about some of the finer points of sequeling. If you find yourself hungry for details about the story and art direction for Gears the Second, we suggest hopping over to X3F and skimming through the twin interviews (or, if we may be so bold, the twinterviews).

Resistance Retribution was a surprise hit last month at E3, and we had another chance to play it at last week's Penny Arcade Expo. With more playtime, however, come burning questions that need to be answered. Thankfully, Sam Villanueva, Senior Designer at Bend Studio, was at hand to answer our queries and make sure we could sleep soundly again.

Will you be optimizing Resistance Retribution for the PSP Brite?

That's a good question. We'll be evaluating this. We're pretty deep in development right now. We'd like to optimize, but that could potentially mess with launch time. If we can do it without affecting the date our game comes out, we will.

How does the game fit into the series?

Retribution fits nicely between Resistance 1 and Resistance 2. It's a continuation of the European campaign, whereas Resistance 2 is the start of the American campaign. You are James Grayson and you're going in to destroy another Chimeran tower. We wanted the story to deal with some pretty deep, dark stuff. Lots of drama and mystery. The game starts with your brother being infected and you're forced to kill him, for example.

Is there a multiplayer mode?

Absolutely. We've got lots of cool multiplayer stuff which we'll be announcing soon.

Last weekend at PAX, we sat down with Bryan Intihar, the Community Manager / Hand Model (yes, that is on his business card) for Insomniac to go over Resistance 2. We were able to get some fascinating details about the secretive co-op mode (drop-in/drop-out confirmed!), as well as some interesting story tidbits (evidently this time around, Hale remembers he can talk).

To start things off, could you give us a quick rundown of changes from the first Resistance?

Sure, there's a lot of course -- but in terms of the campaign we've put a lot more emphasis on Nathan Hale and that comes through in the story and how we're presenting the story. In R1, it was much more of a narrative approach with Rachel Parker telling the story, giving it a third-person feel. This time around it's all about Hale.

Combat Arms employs a clearly visible player ranking system in order to tie together rank rewards, the in-game currency, and the socialization aspects.

Kim and Yang noted that this balance between purchased items and off-the-rack choices didn't exist in the original Korean version of the game. As previously mentioned, the Korean gamers were looking for a more "arcade-y" experience. Grenades had flares to make them easier to track, mines had blinking lights, and every purchased item was a pure win for the player -- why not buy in that environment. As Kim put it, "American players have a definite concept of what is fair and what isn't," and they were determined to cater to that.

Yang noted that the despite changes from the Korean version, Combat Arms retains the "jump-in-and-out" gameplay that made this take on the genre so popular there. Nexon believes Americans will respond (and are responding) to this vision of what an FPS could be, based primarily on the "feel" of the game. As an example, Min Kim noted the simple feature that you can run in the game:

"If you press the shift button you actually run. That is not an option in a lot of other FPSs so it feels a lot faster and a lot of people like that. It's one of those things that is not easy to market; you can't say: 'hey you press the shift button you go really fast' on the back of a box. They don't know what that means until they start playing it."


After talking through the game as a concept, we sat down to play a few rounds -- dying numerous times to both Kim and Yang as they schooled us on the game's public servers. (Protip: Anyone interested in jumping into the game can already do so. Nexon has had an amazingly positive reaction, and had to increase their server capacity unexpectedly fast to deal with demand.)

During our back-and-forth matches, Yang stated that Nexon's planning to update the game on a regular basis. The company has been regularly releasing a patch to the game every two weeks since the game's beta began. Every update will add new weaponry, while a new map or game type will be added every month or two.

That endless state of updates driven by player demand will likely never stop for the game, and neither will the game's "test" state. After the interview, we spoke with Nexon representative Robert Holtzman to clarify when the game would be going with a hard launch. He laughed, and noted that the game might never get one -- given the title's popularity already, Nexon plans to continue to expand through word of mouth advertising and constant improvements.

Overall, we walked away from Combat Arms very impressed. Given the game's region of origin and the stigma of a free-to-play titles, Nexon's offering is a surprisingly fun and impressively attractive offering. It's a fast-action title that will please the twitch-happy mindless shooter fan just as easily as one looking for a more tactical approach. On top of it all, it deftly ties online clan gaming and Web 2.0 sensibilities together with ranks, formal groups, and eventually social networking plugins.

Given the unique blend of MMO and FPS in Combat Arms' DNA, it was intriguing and enlightening to see what the game has become. And it's always hard to turn down the offer of free.

We recently had the chance to check out Combat Arms, the free-to-play online FPS brought to US shores by Nexon of America. Nexon is best known in the states for its unique side-scrolling MMORPG Maple Story. Despite the company's grounding in the MMO genre, Nexon chooses to see itself as a purveyor of online games in general. From online racing in Kart Rider to virtual karaoke in Audition, the company publishes or develops a multitude of multiplayer experiences. Its extension to first-person shooters, in that light, makes a great deal of sense.

What's surprising is not that Nexon has chosen to jump into the FPS genre, but that the offering is as good as it is. The company has combined elements of mindless combat shooters like XIII with the multiplayer tactical orientation of a game like Counter-Strike. In doing so, it's delivered a title that can be as explosion- or strategy-focused as players want. And, of course, it wouldn't be Nexon without some unique twists -- namely, the incorporation of its successful microtransaction-based business model.