A little follow up to my Nintendo thread. My school held a career day today, and one of the available sessions was Game Design, hosted by several people from Microsoft Game Studios. Two of the guys there were working on the Marvel MMO, one guy was the art lead from FASA, and last but not least, Jason Major, the graphics lead for Halo 2 and Halo 3.
The presentation began with a slide-show of games MGS has worked on internally or externally - Zoo Tycoon 2, Age of Empires 4, the first screen I've seen of the Marvel MMO, etc. - oh and Halo Wars.
It was only on the screen for about a second, but sure enough, that was it. And boy did it look good. It looks like they are building on the AoE4 engine for this game, as they had very similar "looks." Also, the scale of the game seems to be more in line with Command and Conquer from what I could tell. The screen shot itself was of a desert/sandy scenario with scattered trees and a few warthogs, possibly a scorpion (remember, I only got a glance before it disappeared), and some platform thing with some blue lights around it. Again, from what I saw, it looked very sharp. I look forward to seeing more.
While most of the session focused on Game Design as a career, there were a few nice details revealed in Q&A.
The presentation began with a slide-show of games MGS has worked on internally or externally - Zoo Tycoon 2, Age of Empires 4, the first screen I've seen of the Marvel MMO, etc. - oh and Halo Wars.
It was only on the screen for about a second, but sure enough, that was it. And boy did it look good. It looks like they are building on the AoE4 engine for this game, as they had very similar "looks." Also, the scale of the game seems to be more in line with Command and Conquer from what I could tell. The screen shot itself was of a desert/sandy scenario with scattered trees and a few warthogs, possibly a scorpion (remember, I only got a glance before it disappeared), and some platform thing with some blue lights around it. Again, from what I saw, it looked very sharp. I look forward to seeing more.
While most of the session focused on Game Design as a career, there were a few nice details revealed in Q&A.
Jason Major finished up the graphics engine/tool set for Halo 3 and has now moved on to help with Alan Wake.
Reiteration that Halo 3 will be done when it's done after talking about how most games have cut content (and someone brought up Halo 2).
Jason Jones spent a very long time perfecting the grenades in Halo 1. (and then they screwed them up in 2 )