The Zone

Today was pretty hectic as I kept running between the Game Developer Conference on the 2nd floor of the convention centre and the 6th floor, which housed the main showroom floor. Now that the Game Developer Conferences are over, I can now mainly concentrate on the showroom floor though I already have a fairly good impression of most of the games so far.

I managed to talk to the producers of EA's upcoming titles Burnout paradise and Battlefield: Bad Company earlier today, and was walked through the titles. Being a big fan of the Burnout series, I was a little concerned when I heard the news that they were planning to make it an 'open world' map and that most of the standard user interfaces and menu bar were gone.

After the demo, I'm happy to report that Burnout Paradise is shaping up to be a solid Burnout title in the series. The producer demonstrated how seamless it was to connect wirelessly to multiplayer without having to go out of the game, and how even when both players are at different locations in the city, they're still able to compete with each other through other performing a series of mini achievements (longest drift, racing traffic, etc). The graphics look sharp and crisp on the PS3 and the game runs at a smooth 60fps. Definitely a title to look out for when it comes out sometime later this year.  

The other EA title that I got to watch in action was Battlefield: Bad Company. Built on an entirely new engine called Frostbite, I wasn't so much impressed with Bad Company's graphics (looks amazing by the way) but more by its physics engine, especially with explosions and blast. In the demo, we were able to blast a hole in the wall of a house and enter through there and use it as cover. It's unscripted and totally dynamic, so it's quite possible to destroy an entire house if you have the ammo and weaponry. The same goes for the trees in the game, and anything that looks destructible. 

Bad Company also takes a cue from the Battlefield games in that how you want to complete a mission or map is entirely up to you as you may start off with your basic kit of weapons or enemy soldiers may carry useful weaponry that can aid you in your task. Speaking of enemy soldiers, while the demo didn't show that they had capable AI (the build is still very early in the works), they are able to destroy buildings as well, so if you're taking cover in a house and the enemy is using a tank, then your cover can easily be blown to bits in a matter of seconds.

Our demo tester willingly acknowledged the weaknesses of the previous Battlefield games on consoles since they were direct ports from PCs, which is why they decided to go with an entirely new engine from the ground up with Bad Company. With the game optimized for console controls, this should hopefully address the previous qualms that Battlefield fans had. He also didn't rule out a PC port of Bad Company in the future.

I don't normally pay much attention to the Battlefield series but now that Bad Company appears to have a decent single-player storyline, I'm willing to check it out. Plus I want to blow some stuff up too.