E3
I'm sitting in my living room watching the TV show 24 in one of my few relaxing moments and thought it would be a good time to post some thoughts on E3. Speaking of 24, it's very interesting how many threads of the story match-up with the various conspiracy theories related to our current administration. So the question is whether the show is mirroring pop culture myth or reality? Maybe it's a mix of both...
Back to E3. Our program manager responsibile for getting the E3 build pulled together and getting that build onto all of the machines on the show foor and in meeting rooms kicked butt! That was a huge effort and he did a great job dealing with all of it.
The show went very well (IMO) even though we used a pre-beta build. What frustrates me is that I regularly enjoy better performance and visuals on my Dell XPS laptop than we had on the show floor. What's up with that?
We had a lot of people flow through the booth all day everyday. We were hidden in the back corner of the Microsoft booth, but we were found by those that wanted to find us. I took some pictures of the booth, but they are no better than what has already been posted, so I'll skip that.
We met with the press, with Flight Sim fans, and thanks to Nvidia we also met traditional hardcore gamers. What I am most happy about is that after flying a mission, all of these folks said "That was really fun!" Considering that was our goal, we met that goal with flying colors. As all of you already know, we had 5 missions on display. One of them (the sailplane mission) we built in a few hours specifically to show on the Elumens dish, but it won't ship with the product. The Learjet mission flying through floating targets over Moffet Airfield was another last minute addition and was added simply because it's fun to fly and combines speed and attitude control, situational awareness, and can be completed in about 4 minutes. It also shows off how I can light your engines on fire at will :). Again this is another mission that will not ship in the product as is. Another mission in the ultralight is also an E3 only mission in it's presented form. Like the Learjet mission, it's fun to fly, shows off some nice graphics and elements in the product, and it's a quick experience for the show floor. Lastly, the helicopter oil rig mission was also modified for the show in that it started very close to the rig, whereas in the full mission, the helicopter is piloted from the refinery to the rig and back. That was too long of a mission to show at E3, so we focused on the rig instead. The Red Bull course was already quick, fast and fun, so it needed no special E3 treatment.
I must have flown the Red Bull course 50 times both with the joystick and the universal controller (Xbox 360 controller) as a live attract mode. I swear I could have flown it with my eyes closed. My best time flying on the show floor was 1 minute and 46 seconds. The "official" course record is 1:50, so I feel pretty good about that. The best time from an attendee was 2:12 which is amazing considering he had only been flying it for about 30 minutes (the Sim HQ reviewer). I'm sure he will beat my best time with just a little more practice!
So why am I telling you all of this? Simple, it's important to understand we picked quick, fun, and game-like missions to showcase at E3. The vast majority of our missions are more "serious" than these, but for the right users they are all fun! As I've said in the past on this blog, we are taking a balanced approach to game design and that means creating missions that appeal to a wide diversity of users. What appeals at E3 and what is appropriate to show at E3 may be different than what you or other users will find engaging.
I met with a few Flight Simulator fans who were obviously pumping us for information. I really enjoyed talking to all of them and I think they really enjoyed playing the missions and talking with us. It's easy to discount missions thinking they will make FSX too much of a game, but it's so simple and easy to just not play them and do what you've always done if you don't like them.
In following up with reading forum posts on the weekend, it seems some people are starting to "get" what missions mean for the product, and are starting to develop ideas on what they or their favorite add-on developers will do with them. I'm completely convinced that what you will get as add-on missions will blow our stuff away as they will focus on fewer missions that may have greater detail than we can do with over 50 in the box. I can't wait to see what they do.
Some of you have wondered if the missions will have random elements in place. I will tell you that you absolutely CAN drive random events. You can have missions that branch all over the place, and I'm sure some add-ons will do just that. So now I need to explain a basic design 101 concept. Number one, keep it simple. If you go crazy with a wide variety of random events, the mission is anything but simple. When the complexity goes up, it's harder to ensure the mission plays well, is of high quality, and doesn't have some strange logic breakdown. I would rather have a clear path with clear goals that I know plays well and works correctly out of the box. I would expect that pilots will fly a mission and once they are successful, never fly it again. The exceptions will be missions that have branches, secret objects, or timing elements that encourage replay. That said, we do have branching missions...
Bottom line, E3 was all about missions. Before long you'll get more information about the rest of the product. Now I have to get back to work and finish what we've started.
