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Todd Howard and crew reveal the fun and difficult times to be had in game development.

Today’s slate of panels kicked off with “The Game of Making Games,” hosted by G4’s Blair Herter.  Ted Price of Insomniac, Jens Matthies of Machine Games, Todd Howard of Bethesda, and Raphael Colantonio of Arkane Studios made up the panel of noteworthy developers in what was primarily a Q & A session with the audience.  Herter started off by asking about each developer’s general game-making philosophy, which soon led to questions about axing faltering game elements during development no matter how much time was spent on creating them.  Herter threw out the term “killing your babies” about this design necessity and it became a recurring in-panel meme.

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2.0 is SO last year.

Despite the rough launch and nearly unanimous negative reviews from the media, Final Fantasy XIV continues. The game had such a rocky start that the company publicly apologized for the state that the game was released in and allowed players to play with no subscription fees for nearly a year. Producer Hiromichi Tanaka stepped down from his position on the game and recently left the company entirely. But just because FF XIV is down should not suggest that it’s out. The much-ballyhooed “2.0” version of the game is now a new subtitle. Final Fantasy XIV is dead. Long live Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.

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John Carmack pontificates on the future of virtual reality, the viability of Ouya, a completed id iOS game, and tons of other topics.

John Carmack gave his QuakeCon keynote this year which focused on his efforts and thoughts about virtual reality.  Following the release of Rage, Carmack allowed himself to let loose, buy some VR headsets and get his engineering mind locked in on a new technology.  Carmack spoke for over three hours, wandering away and then back time after time to the virtual reality theme.  His sleuthing and coding has led to the creation of a playable VR demo of Doom 3 (which he tried to temper expectations for).  Virtual reality has been portrayed by the media to be a realistic life simulator, but Carmack assures us that there is still plenty of work to be done.  These warnings led into musings on the state of display technology, cloud gaming, Ouya, and many other topics during a three hour one-man show that most audience members couldn’t endure ‘til the end.

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Apogee Software reveals a new first person shooter to the most concentrated form of the key demographic imaginable.

Apogee Software of Duke Nukem Trilogy fame took the stage first at QuakeCon 2012 to reveal their newest old-game-rebirth project, Rise of the Triad. This first person shooter has players battling not-Nazis (that look a lot like Nazis) called Triad. Rise of the Triad’s big reveal was extremely violent and clearly born of the makers of Duke Nukem.  The quick teaser trailer showed a brutal killing of someone begging for mercy as the crowd cheered, followed by many similar moments punctuated with some uh, impressive voice work yelling “f*ckin’ A!” and similar witticisms.

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Capcom announces a new campaign, and more.

If Resident Evil 6’s three campaigns didn’t sound like enough gameplay already, don’t worry, because Capcom has you covered. The company officially revealed yesterday that Resident Evil 6 will feature another campaign starring the recurring character, Ada Wong.

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