gdc

This is my first change to sit down and blog all day, but the day is going great. Later tonight I’ll collect all the links and interviews that have went live so far and post them so you can keep track of the interviews.

Just got back from 1up / EGM / GFW studios over at Ziff Davis Media where I sat down and talked a few of their reporters and participated in the 1up Yours podcast. It was a good show where we talked about a lot of FPS-centric community items, such as “what keeps a community involved over a long period of time” , “How to keep the game fresh”, and “how to not intimidate new players once it’s already popular”.

Also did a great interview with Playstation Universe, international press, and a few others.

while on the show floor I also ran into Devin from 360sync.com and sat down for lunch and a quick interview to chat about the community, Call of Duty 4, and gaming in general.

Gotta run, have a TV interview at 5:30 a few blocks away, I’ll write more tonight after the GDC Choice awards!

Since I’ll be at GDC all week with limited Internet Access (only when I get back to the hotel), I’m going to be doing a series of Quick Updates when I get a chance, such as this. Nothing long, just a quick snapshot of what I’m doing or about to go do, and then at night when I get a chance to really sit down, I’ll do a daily recap of how the day went and anything exciting you guys might want to know about.

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  Next week is going to be a busy one, I’ll be at GDC from Tuesday - Friday in San Francisco. Most of my time will be taken up with press interviews and I’m sure DLC is going to be a big subject for conversation. To prepare I’m going to be playing the hell out of all the early concepts and versions of the new maps we have playable over the weekend. We’ve been play testing them recently, where we play normal matches so the designer of that level can see how it plays, see if it’s too easy to plant on A in S&D or too hard to defend B on Domination, or there needs to be a window here, or cover point there. Play and tweak, play and tweak.

I’ll update more in a bit, gotta get home for a IW vs. Gearheads of War match we were challenged to in Domination on CoD4 tonight. I’ll let you know how badly we beat them.

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is coming up next week and I’ll be in San Francisco all week. While I’m up there though I’ll be stopping by the 1up Yours Show along with Bungie’s community manager Brian Jarrard to talk video games…. and stuff. I plan on playing it by ear for the most part (those tend to be the most entertaining interviews) as well as discussing community involvement I’m sure.

1up Yours plans to be doing daily shows the week of GDC and look to have a lot of great guests all week long. Details on the show below, and hit the jump for the full schedule straight from the producer’s blog.

WEDNESDAY, 2/20

1UP Yours: “Shoot ‘em Up”
Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward & Brian Jarrard, Bungie

With our two games respectively battling it out for the #1 spot on Xbox Live, I’d say it might be an interesting show to see the different approaches each of our studios take. I’ll of course have a recap next week after the show.

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Once again, Major Nelson has posted the Top Games on Xbox Live stats for the week of 2/4 and as I called it last week (post), Call of Duty 4 is managing to stay at #1 as the most played game on Xbox Live thanks to everyone’s continued support!

We won’t let you guys down in terms of returning the support either as we have already shipped the Xbox 360 feature patch off to certification with a few new features I talked about yesterday (New Quick Mute Option), as well as some increased spawn locations on maps, and general connectivity improvements that I forgot to mention last post. As well as are still working hard on the new DLC maps. I can’t let out details on them just yet, but I can say that I may just have a new favorite map (sorry Crash) within this batch of new maps.

I can tell you that I’ll be heading up to GDC (Game Developers Conference) next week (Tuesday - Friday) attending the 1up Awards and hanging out with some of my friends in the gaming press, so I wouldn’t be surprised if DLC was the subject of the trip. As the maps are already a lot of fun and look amazing, so I’m anxious to finally start talking about them.

Other than that, once I get back from GDC in San Francisco next week, it’ll almost be time for SXSW where I’ll be talking about Pro Gaming and Pro Gamers, which is lines up nicely with the recent MLG announcement.

That’s it for news, for a rant about Team Killing in Hardcore, keep reading.

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