quite of few did, lol never thought there would be people from iceland on this site or I would have probably picked a different username lol

Below In Depth Look

There are currently two (proper) Below trailers in existence, and one of them is a four minute video of a tiny hooded warrior contentedly smoking an even tinier pipe, while cloud shadows drift across sparse clifftop meadows. Where the average trailer for a game like Battlefield bombards you with highlights, obliging a mental step back, here the delicacy of the presentation has the opposite effect: you find yourself zooming the view to ponder the significance of every little detail. That was the case for me, anyway. Mileages may vary.

Capybara is walking a tricky line with Below. The studio's reluctance to spoil things ahead of release is admirable - and enticing, if you're the sort who gets worked up over an inexplicably placed rune in Skyrim - but there's the risk that less sentimental players may lose interest. A month or two after the game's unveiling, I spoke to co-founder Nathan Vella about Capy's relationship with Microsoft, how Below compares to the delightful Sword and Sworcery, why inaccessible games are back in fashion, and how you market a game without giving everything away.

Below is kind of [creative director] Chris extending some of the stuff from Sworcery; taking some of the influences and the stuff that excited him about it, moving it into this genre and taking a step away from it, but also including some of the same inspirations and stuff. In a weird way, Below is also kind of a reaction to Sworcery, in the sense that there is no text whatsoever in Below. There's no tutorials, there's no explanations, there's no menus, there's no... It's basically just the game itself. That's not saying there isn't a story or there aren't... details or information, but it's just presented in a very different way.

And so along with that, it's us trying to do social components or the idea of, I guess, what you could call the co-operative or communal efforts of exploration in a different way. For Sworcery, it was really a purely single-player experience that was meant to be shared via Twitter, whereas Below is... it's not just a single player experience. There is a multiplayer component that's meant to be pretty important to the game, and that's part of how we want to allow people to share their experiences.

Is it the case that finding out what this actually consists of is part of the fun?

Yeah. Again I think when we talk about Below, the big catchword or the big drive is exploration. Exploration, because it's a Sword and Shield game - exploration comes part and parcel with survival. So, if you're exploring, part of your main goal is to survive, and surviving allows for further exploration. And if you survive long enough and explore enough, that's when the discovery component comes in.

That's when players will start learning more about the world they're in, the history of it, their goals as the player in these depths - all that stuff will come. You get to explore all that yourself, we're not holding your hand. We're not holding your hand in terms of gameplay, but we're also not holding your hand in terms of the story of the game. It's yours to explore and hopefully to discover.

Do you think these online features make more sense when they're built into the universe, rather than kept distinct?

Yeah - one of the things that I'm not such a huge fan of is [the mentality that says] "Unique Selling Points - put down five bullet points on why your game is special." For us, it's like they're all tied so tightly, and I think we're trying really hard to tie them even tighter with Below. There are separate components, there is combat, there is exploration, there is a story - but because we're not explaining it to you, because we're not at all holding your hand, because you're going into it hopefully with a slight hint that you're going to die frequently, hopefully you'll see them as a whole

And I think we're... it's a very difficult thing to look at when you're so used to approaching it from the bullet-point mindset. But at the same time it has flowed pretty naturally through the game and I think having no text - that kind of reinforces it for us, because you're thinking "OK, these things kind of have to come together because there's no words there to explain it to you, the player."

Communicating these things without text must be even more of a challenge given the size of the player character.

The story and the world is all about you going through and discovering. I think when it comes to the scale of the character, that's one of the things that we're using - you are a small character in a giant, almost unending depth. It's a very direct one-to-one: you are small, you are weak. Those kinds of things are very direct.

It's funny how being powerful in a game doesn't always make you feel powerful. People no longer seem to sympathise with characters who are big and tough.

Yeah, I think that's actually something that we're taking to heart. That's what interests us, almost - that was part of what I think made Sword and Sworcery kind of special. This is a game that we've been talking about internally for many, many years. Our Creative Director had the concept for it so goddamn long ago, and it wasn't the right time, or it didn't have the right people or it didn't have the right... basically, nothing had come together.

When we got the concept for it, and when we were talking about it originally, we were... it was pre-Demon Soul's, pre-Dark Souls, pre-Spelunky, pre-FTL, pre- all these games that ended up demonstrating that people are very interested in difficult games, games that are about pitting the player against almost insurmountable odds and acknowledging that they're going to fail frequently, but the challenge ends up being something deeper - that's very much at the heart of Below.

And the roguelike experience, or, to be very correct, the roguelike-like experience - it was something where I think people who love a certain type of game love a certain type of challenge, love a certain type of diving into certain systems, love feeling like a real accomplishment, like when you get to the City of Gold in Spelunky. It's a very significant feeling of accomplishment, rather than when you make it through a game that has held your hand - the feeling isn't the same. Although you still feel pretty damn awesome beating a game that's easy, you feel way more awesome... it's about living up to that challenge.

I think the equivalent of that in Dark Souls is reaching Anor Londo - the whole mood completely changes, there's sunlight everywhere. I felt very much like I'd passed a threshold when I got to that bit.

I really think there's something very powerful about not knowing what's coming next. I think with a lot of "normal" games - and that sounds a lot more dismissive than I mean - but, it's almost clear what's coming next, there's some kind of cutscene that introduces you to where you are, then you get some dialogue between characters, then you know there's going to be four or five levels in that area and then at the end of that there's going to be this kind of finishing cutscene and then...

I think with stuff like - anything that has a procedurally generated or randomly generated dungeons, but also a game that doesn't introduce things to you in a narrative sense, or in a 'Hey you, listen to what I'm going to tell you whether or not you want to know this' sense - I feel like it's going to keep people on their toes a little bit more, and then the feeling of exploration and of discovery hopefully will be more impactful or more meaningful.

Do you think preserving that element of mystery is possible when you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the game? How do you go about creating ambiguity without deterring a large percentage of the potential audience?

I think there's definitely a lot of ways to do that. I think it requires a lot of outside of the box promotional thinking in that - I don't know if that's something that's going to come in the short term or in the long term but, a lot of smaller studios, independent or not, have proven out a lot of really interesting ideas of how game promotion can work. And I think part of it is about opening up and letting people in and inviting anybody who's interested to be part of the process.

But then the flipside of it is also inviting them into the parts that aren't going to ruin their experience. We're not going to basically mollycoddle them or baby them, as if they're unintelligent and need schooling, or a certain number of explosions, or voice acting. And I think that's a real challenge, that's a real concrete-hard thing to do, but I think there is a way to do it.

Hopefully we'll figure out in the small scale with Below. We're giving away a lot of information behind the scenes, but at face value it's... there are two relatively short, simple trailers. And that's kind of how we like it, it's about showing the aesthetic, and if people are interested in the art style or interested in another game by [composer] Jim Guthrie, or interested in our studio doing our crazy weird take on Roguelike-meets-Zelda-meets-I don't even know what, then we're kind of inviting them in but we're not - there's a whole ton about this game that we're not talking about yet, and then there's a whole ton about the game I don't think that we're ever going to talk about. And hopefully people will do the talking for us when they see it in the game.

And maybe that's part of... maybe I just talked my way into explaining how you do big-budget games where you're not giving everything away in advance. Maybe you rely on the players to do the word-of-mouth promotion for you, rather than spending the twenty million dollars up-front and just hoping that bombast and dubstep trailers will push it.

So no Dubstep trailers for Below then?

I think we're going to start doing dubstep trailer versions for everything, ever! I do a lot of video post production myself, that was my job before Capy started, and... there's just something hilariously fun about editing to Dubstep!

Good to hear! On the subject of music - in Sword and Sworcery the soundtrack is woven very carefully into how you play, with the rhythm-matching battles and so on. Is that going to be the case with Below too or is it more traditionally scored?

I think it's impossible for Jim to do anything traditional. He's an idea guy, he's not just someone you call up and say: "We need exactly sixty minutes of this type of music, go Jim!" - he's got a lot of ideas.

Below is going to be fundamentally different from Sworcery because Sworcery started with Jim's music first and we built on top of it, whereas in this case Jim is building music alongside or even on top of Below, but there's definitely going to be a really big push from us and from Jim to do something special with it again.

Now that we've got experience working together, it makes it almost a little bit easier for us to be critical, to try and find things that could be better, to really spend the time defining the tone and the mood and the atmosphere, and how that plays with the scale of the character or the size of the worlds, or the fact that every dungeon, or almost every dungeon, is just a single screen.

And all these things are going to hopefully push Jim in a completely different direction, and we hope that the stuff we already have and the stuff that we use in the trailers - it's not his typical stuff, that's for sure, and I think that's part of the fun. There's definitely going to be things that are very Jim Guthrie, but at the same time... I'm personally very hopeful for it, seeing another different direction that he can take because, hell, the guy can do anything really. We call him the Maestro for a reason.

Will he appear in Below as a character this time?

I would really love to do that! We'll see what Chris has to say but... that was a really special moment in Sworcery for me and I think for a lot of people, so it'd be funny to do some kind of nod to that, but who knows?

OK. You've mentioned Dark Souls as a reference point for the combat, and I can see from the fact that you only have two weapons, and the shield is so important. The idea seems to be that you're exploring quite a limited selection of very carefully chosen moves. Is that the case? Or will there be loads of combos?

No, I mean it's meant to be depth in the sense that... there are more weapons than a sword and shield, but the sword and the shield is kind of the prototypical example that we use. In the trailer, you can see there's bows and arrows, there's a guy carrying an axe, there's actually a whole bunch of weapons in the trailers, but the game is not going to be a loot haul. It's not Torchlight or Diablo, weapons have a much more substantial meaning.

In that sense we are... I kind of hate giving alternate game examples in a way because it seems like the easy way out, but Wind Waker is a game we draw some inspiration from. A lot of it is about situation - it's having multiple options and knowing when to play defensive, when to have your shield up and try to poke from around your shield, or when to run in and do a lunging strike, or when to equip your ranged weapon, if you want to play with a ranged weapon, when to use your two-handed weapon or...

I think that's where the depth kind of comes from. You don't have 45 different options, you have eight or something... I'm just throwing numbers out there, hypothetically. But the combinations of those options are much more meaningful, much more impactful when they require you to play the right card at the right time, and pay attention to the situations that you're put in. If you just run through the game hack and slashing, you will die, and you will die quickly. If you're extremely smart about it you can probably balance between smashing buttons and playing very intelligently, but if you're just mashing buttons you're not going to last very long. I think that in a lot of cases, complexity actually takes away from depth. It means that you're building up systems that require way more and therefore every individual thing becomes less important.

Will there be progression or experience systems or anything like that?

Nathan: We're not really talking about that now, but I will say that there are definitely stronger weapons, there are better shields, there are different ways of playing attack and defence that will open up as things progress. But it's not really meant to be an RPG, with layers of menus. You don't have a treasure chest strapped onto your back carrying 45 different things, where you can hotswap between all this different stuff.

Will there be bosses?

Nathan: That's a... I'm not going to say no because that would be silly, but there's a lot more to that than I can let on right now. There are definitely going to be big moments in the game, that I can say!

One of the things I like about Sword and Sworcery is that you have a female lead in a stereotypically male role, and you don't make a big deal out of it. How did that come about, and do you have any thoughts about the gender imbalance in terms of protagonists at large?

When Superbrothers started putting together the story, that was just the way that it was. There wasn't this kind of big discussion or decision, that was just the story that Superbrothers [had imagined]. I think it was just a case of saying "this is the way the game is". I don't think we had any real discussion about it because I don't really think it needs much discussion. When you have a story that's whole, and you have a protagonist that you feel fits that story or is the natural protagonist for that story, it doesn't need to be a highlight. We were almost a little surprised that it was a big deal anyway, and we kind of hoped that it wouldn't be a big deal - that it would just be something like, "Yeah, of course. That's the way that it is."

So I think maybe - without trying to over-simplify it because I do think that there are certain components of inherent sexism in game protagonists these days - I think that the way it gets dealt with the best, the way that it gets dealt with the easiest, is just honestly by putting a character into the game that you feel passionate about putting into the game. Players react very positively to a developer's intentions, and if the intention is to make it a bullet on a list of selling points, players are smart and they will notice that, and they will highlight it. If they feel it's something that was at the core of the storytelling from the beginning... there's a good chance that players will barely even notice, and that is a highlight, I think, for me.

How has it been, working with Microsoft? Wouldn't you rather publish your own stuff?

I think there's a huge push in gaming, on the independent side, in the media, and so on, about the value of self-publishing, and we obviously have bought into that pretty hard though the Apple store and through Steam or PS3. But I think we've also had a very positive relationship with the Microsoft Studios folks.

We had no intentions of doing anything really big with Super Time Force until they came out of nowhere and started really believing in that game and saying "Hey, this is a super-rad game and we know you've only been working on it for a few weeks. We're not going to do anything to that, we're going to let you have it however you want, but we want it on Xbox Live Arcade". That was a pretty eye-opening thing for us.

I think there's a lot of really [good] reasons why people want self-publishing: they want control of their IP, they want control of their destiny. But when you have a really strong partnership and... well, I can't speak for other studios' experiences, I can't confirm or deny the goods and the bads, all I know is my real experience of working with the guys at MS Studios, and they've been very supportive. I have nothing but positive things to say about those guys. When we told them "Hey, we want to keep working on Time Force as a pet project": no big deal, didn't faze them at all. When we said we wanted to fund our own stuff: no big deal, didn't faze them at all.

They're our partners, but we still control our destiny, and I think that's a great foundation for a relationship, so... I think there's lots of possible paths to success for an independent studio, and to me the marquee or key point of being independent is choosing the path that you feel is best for your studio at the time, not being beholden to someone else to decide the path for you. So that's the path that we're on. We've made some choices, we've made some decisions - some things have motivated those decisions but... I still feel very much in control of our destiny, that's the key point.

That's something that I think is very important: acknowledging the fact that even the most mainstream of videogame players, they've got a nose for stuff, they're intelligent and they can tell when something is genuine or not. I think that's part of the attraction for a lot of smaller independent games, in that a lot of it comes from a very honest viewpoint.

Undead Labs(State of Decay Devs) Want to Create Something New and Fresh for XBO

As revealed last week, Seattle-based Undead Labs is making several new games for Microsoft Studios. One of them is presumably a sequel to State of Decay, the developer's flawed but engrossing and very, very popular zombie survival game for Xbox Live Arcade - back in June 2013, Undead Labs stated that such a project would "clearly" release on Xbox One. Further details are hard to come, naturally, but studio founder Jeff Strain has made a number of illuminating remarks in a new interview with Gamasutra.

State of Decay on console was conceived as a precursor to a fully-fledged MMO on PC. The idea doesn't appear to have faded away. "One of the uncracked nuts in the industry, when I look across where everything is, is that persistent online worlds have always been and largely continue to be the realm of the PC," Strain observed.

"The foundation and history of our team is in the MMO world - more broadly in the online gaming world. I was at Blizzard for five years, from 1995 to 2000, heavily involved in the genesis of BattleNet and the transition of all our games to being very focused on online. And of course many of the people here were principal developers at ArenaNet, did all the Guild Wars games. So that's kind of in our DNA.

"And the long-range plans for Undead Labs is to move back into that PC space. But by focusing on the console side initially, it allowed us to think about things like long-range designs and player interactions that weren't based on the standard PC MMO template, which we've all become very familiar with over the past decade.

"Instead, it really challenged us to think about ways that we could create games that had that kind of communal play experience but that weren't rooted in something that was exclusively PC-centric. So I think that was a big part of it: [asking ourselves] where do we want to go in the next ten years and how do we achieve that goal of building something new and fresh which still captures all the power of online worlds."

Undead Labs now feels that these are visions it can realise on console and PC simultaneously, thanks to the trimming down of Xbox Live publishing procedures, and the reworking of the platform to better support service-based games.

"We're big believers in the digital distribution channel," Strain commented. "Steam has obviously been very successful in that space, and digital distribution was certainly the hallmark of what Xbox Live Arcade was - although historically there have been very specific constraints from Microsoft on what an Arcade title could be, in terms of the footprint on the player's hard drive, the resources that could be allocated to it, even things like Achievements and Gamerscore. These were intentional, explicit constraints.

"I'm not privy to any of Microsoft's internal plans for the future of digital distribution, I only know what's been said publicly. But I think it's clear to everybody that moving forward into the Xbox One generation that distinction [between Arcade and other downloadable titles] is going to fade away.

"For us, when we look at the future of our games both on PC and on console, it's not just about digital distribution but the ability to have games that have a live service model behind them. Games that are a continual experience rather than a throw-it-over-the-wall product. Whether you want to call that our MMO heritage, or just the kinds of games that people are playing and where the industry is going, this is what's exciting to us.

"So when we're looking at our next round and what we're doing in terms of development, we see the PC and the Xbox One as very peered platforms - different playerbases and different content expectations - but for the first time we can and want to be delivering strongly a shared, consistent experience across both platforms."

This last sentence could be construed as a hint at cross-platform multiplayer, which would suit us down to the ground. Microsoft's Phil Spencer has said that allowing PC and Xbox One users to play together "makes a lot of sense".

http://www.oxm.co.uk/69810/state-of-decay-studio-wants-to-build-something-new-and-fresh-for-xbox-one/

Endimyon

with a Y :) same as my gamertag

hey guys.... I have been on the xbox.com weby and I remember you could see some fun graphs of your use of the Xbox (how much gaming, media consuption ploted on a nice graph) but I can't find the page anymore anybody knows where it's at or if still exists???

On the Xbox Live Rewards page

Thanks, I never knew about that feature. Purchased and ready to download now! xD

Ey boyos, I am finishing my exams tomorrow. I have two days worth of Gold (Maybe four, I purchased Mass Effect 3 and a Two-Day-Gold card came, but I don't know if it has been used); anyone up to play something at the weekend?

That horrible person above you by the username of Raven is a big Mass Effect fan.  If i were you id avoid raven though.  Raven is an ashley hater and everybody knows Ashley is the best character.  I said so and that makes it fact!  I will hear nothing else on this topic xP

Kaidan > Ashley, but I'll be damned given the fact that I had to sacrifice Kaidan and save Ashley since K. went activating the bomb and Ash kept the survivors from Virmire with her.