Last week The Game Developers Conference or GDC, for those in the know, was held in San Francisco, California. GDC is an annual conference where game developers, publishers and media get together to discuss where the game industry is headed and what they have learned from the past. There are many presentations on a wide variety of topics, from industry luminaries to brand new indie developers. Usually not much comes out at this conference in the way of gaming news, but there were a few videos and announcements last week.
The first big game announcement was for Assassin’s Creed III. The cover art was leaked at the beginning of the week. Then Ubisoft released this trailer for the game.
The trailer shows off the setting for the game which is during the American Revolution, and the main character is a Native American colonist. They also show George Washington at the end of the clip so he will play an important role in the game. The trailer also reveals the release date which is October 30. Finally, Game Informer came out with the main article going into more detail on Assassin’s Creed III.
Also last week Ken Levine of Irrational games sat down to talk about a new enemy type in Bioshock Infinite which is called the heavy hitter, the first of which is the motorized patriot. The Motorized Patriot is a George Washington looking robot with a Gatling gun called the peppermill which is a weapon that can be picked up and used. Here is the video of Irrational Games explaining the enemy.
Another video released during the conference was from Quantic Dream, the developer who made Heavy Rain. The video is entitled Kara and is a tech demo to show off the new motion capture engine that they developed to capture total performance rather than just voice, or just motion. It is supposed to make characters more human. It may show off part of what the next deals with or it may just be a tech demo. We will have to wait and see what Quantic Dream has in store for us when they announce their next project. Here is the Kara video.
The last thing that I saw announced was from EA Maxis, which is the official announcement for the next installment of SimCity, which is just called that so it must be some sort of reboot of the franchise. It is set to come out sometime in 2013, so there is a long time to get more details about the game and what all is different. I have heard that there will be some online connectivity but I’m not sure what that will entail. Here is the trailer for the game.
