Recap GDC Europe and Gamescom

The last three days I attended the GDC Europe in the hope of gathering inspiration and knowledge for my game projects. As this year's GDC Europe was held in Cologne, it saved me the effort of travelling. This convenience and my interest in the topic given, I made my decision to sign up a few weeks ago very fast. This week the event the eagerly awaited event finally arrived, it certainly had its up and downs, but this is a learning process for the event companies as well, so I think there will be a lot of improvements next year in all the areas that that weren't planned quite as well as you might expect from such a conference.

That said I will try to briefly sum up the highlights of the gdc. There were several major keynotes scattered over the days.


On monday Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli gave a speech on the future of gaming graphics. He outlined the history of his company, described the differences and developments of Crytek's engine and also provided a few interesting details about their upcoming grapihcs engine.

There's a nice article on Gamasutra for anyone who likes to know more details.

As one of the main sponsors and in search for potential customers of their middleware, Crytek had a big presence on the conference.
I have to admit that I don't like Crytek a lot because I really did not get much fun out of the games they created.
I do however highly respect what they achieved in a short time and how they were able to stun the world with great visuals.




The next great keynote was on monday as well and held by Matias Myllyrinne of Remedy. As I really enjoyed the May Payne games and am eagerly awaiting Alan Wake since its announcement (in fact it was one of the very good reasons for me to buy the Xbox 360 at its launch) I was delighted to experience Myllrinne's great talk about the rise of Remedy and his vision for games in general and Alan Wake in particular.


Again, there's a a nice article over at Gamasutra summing up this keynote.


The third amazing keynote and speech was held by David Cage of Quantic Dream.

I didn't know what to expect from this man so it was a very positive surprise to hear his visions about game design and how he likes to approch this topic. I liked the idea of the game Fahrenheit and although it certainly had its weaknesses, it was a very interesting experiment and in my opinion it's very important that there are people in the game industry that are willing to experiment and take risks. Speculation about his upcoming title Heavy Rain run through the press since its announcement and, as far as I can tell from tell from my playtesting later on the gamescom on wednesday, the direction Quantic Dream is taking with Heavy Rain seems to be really paying off. The gaming experience is totally different, it seems to be great interactive narrative and art and playing this game will probably be a very rewarding experience. And the end of the keynote was very certain that if David Cage can write the stories for his games only half as well as his speech was constructed, then Heavy Rain will definiteley be one of the outstanding hit games this year.

For more information, Gamasutra has a great article again.

From my point of view this sums up the most important talks, but there were a lot more very interesting ones. Peter Molyneux had a nice keynote on the aspect of choice in games, CCP announced there upcoming title, a first person shooter and strategy game, that is closely tied to Eve Online, and there were a lot of sessions about success stories, business approaches, development topics and so on.

As I am a programmer I feel that the number of development sessions fell a bit short but there still were some interesting ones as well.

This sums up the GDC part and brings us the GAMESCOM. The biggest game conference in europe, this year for the first year in Cologne, started on wednesday, the same day that was the last day of the GDC.
So I took some hours between the (for me) relevant sessions and the late afternoon to explore the great circus that is the gamescom. Three big halls are devoted to "entertainment" and really all the big names were there.

Blizzard had a very impressive installment where players could already get into gaming with the upcoming Starcraft II und Diablo III. With Blizzard's amazingly huge fan base, the run on the seats where you could play these games was already incredible and probably was just a fraction of the big rush when the gamescom opens for all visitors from thurday (today) till sunday.






I was able to play Dragon Age, my personal highest anticipated title this year and was totally blown away by the game depths Bioware seems to has managed (at least this was my first impression from about half an hour playing) to compose into this title.
At Sony's booth I surprisingly found that they had two chapters of Heavy Rain available for play which was even in between the conference chaos an absolut joy to experience.
Of course all the other big upcoming titles were there, either ready to play or as a demo, Mass Effect 2, Command and Conquer 4, Uncharted 2, Forza Motorsport 3, to name just a few.
A lot of impressive Rockband and Guitar Hero installments, where visitors could perform "live on stage" added nicely to the atmosphere.