Tales from the Games Development Conference

Happy Monday. Here’s the latest in gaming, featuring a bunch of news from GDC and some not good, very bad soccer likenesses.

The good and bad of GDC

The Games Development Conference (GDC) took place last week in San Francisco. The conference is focused towards developers, but usually provides some interesting news on the industry. Here are the top headlines from the show.

Epic, creators of Fortnite, are giving creators an opportunity to make content for the game. They unveiled Unreal Editor for Fortnite, a programming platform that allows anyone with the technical skills to make content for the game. Creators who make content for the game will be rewarded monetarily. Endgadget breaks down the compensation:

“(Epic) will proportionately hand out 40 percent of net revenue from most real-money purchases to creators, including Epic. If your island is especially popular or keeps people coming back, you'll get a larger cut of Item Shop spending and related transactions.”

Read more on Polygon and Bloomberg.

Will AI create the NPC dialogue in your next game? If companies like Ubisoft, Unity and King can follow through on their announcements, they will. Ubisoft announced Ghostwriter, an AI program to help writers create dialogue for non-player characters (NPCs). The program learns from scriptwriters’ suggestions and offers suggestions for similar dialogue options. Check out the video above to find out more.

Elden Ring took home 2022 Game of the Year at the GDC awards show. You can view the full list of winners. GDC also presented its Pioneer Award posthumously to Mabel Addis, recognized as the first female game designer. John Romero, co-creator of DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake won the Lifetime Achievement Award. Read more about each here.

Finally it wasn’t all fun and games at GDC, especially if you were a woman in attendance. Multiple reports of sexism, abuse and drink spiking surfaced over the weekend. From The Gamer:

"Women at GDC this year have been belittled and undermined in their roles, been hit on relentlessly, and had their drinks spiked by predatory men," says game dev and GDC attendee Leena van Deventer. "Two women were even lured up to a hotel room by a man in a position of power for a 'pitch', where he then assaulted them."

A Yellow Card for EA

EA’s popular soccer game FIFA 23 finally included the National Women’s Soccer League teams in their yearly game. While fans were excited to play as their favorite soccer star, they might not recognize them.

NWSL players took to Twitter to discuss EA’s no good, very bad character models in the game. Many players look nothing like they do in real life, and some players were even whitewashed. Some of the tweets from players:

Read more about the controversy on Kotaku.

Side quests (more stories worth reading)

Valve announced Counter Strike 2, a free upgrade to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The update drops later this year.

If you picked up Resident Evil 4 on PlayStation 5, you may have noticed a flickering light issue. Capcom is working on a fix.

If you played the open beta of Diablo IV this past weekend on a PC with a NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti video card, you may have had some issues with the game. Or, it may have killed your video card. Read the latest about the issue, and what you can do if your card died.

The Athletic (subscription required) has a great piece about the history of Out of the Park Baseball.

We posted our first review! Check out our thoughts on World Championship Boxing Manager II.

New releases this week:

3/28: Crime Boss: Rockay City (PC)
3/28: MLB The Show 23 (PlayStation, Xbox and Switch)
3/30: Dredge (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC)
3/30: Anyaroth: The Queen’s Tyranny (Switch and PC)
3/30: The Last Worker (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC)

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