Game Developer’s Conference 2012: Top 5 Highlights

This year's first edition of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) was held in San Francisco, California, from March 5 to 9.

This will now be followed by the GDC Europe 2012 in Cologne, Germany, from August 13 to 15.

The aim of GDC is to reveal new games, insights on all the popular and latest games that will benefit the big audience amassed during the event.

Here are the top five highlights from this edition of the GDC.

Assassin's Creed III: The upcoming Assassin's Creed game has been the talk of the internet for months and lot of theories were rumored about the new game, along with leaked game art and other random information.

Now it is known that the game will be arriving Oct. 30 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U and Microsoft Windows. Developers Ubisoft had invited a very limited number of journalists and media personals to view the game in action during the GDC 2012. However, it was later reported that Ubisoft had agreed to show a glimpse of the gameplay on the condition that nothing was to be revealed about the game before the end of the month.

Whatever is known about the game at the moment tells us that the story is set between the years 1753 and 1783 with a new protagonist, Connor (previous protagonists Altair ibn La-Ahad and Ezio Auditore da Firenze have been replaced). The war between the Templars and the Assassins has now moved to colonial America.

More information about the game will be available after March 20.

Rare Apology from Deus Ex: Human Revolution's Director: A rare feat was witnessed at the GDC this year. Francois Lapikas, director of Deus Ex: Human Revolution which was one of the most popular games last year, came in front of the massive crowd and apologized for the amount of criticism the game had brought with its flawed boss fights where the players have been dragged into baseless firefights numerous times. Lapikas agreed that the developers should have put in more work into the game to get rid of such problems. How many times have we seen that in the past? Never really.

Portal 2's Missing Factors: Portal 2 writers Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek came out during the San Francisco edition of the GDC and revealed all the details that were omitted from the game.

According to the reports from GDC, it has been known that during the early stages of the game, it was fashioned as a 1980s prequel with no Chell or GlaDOS. It was also revealed that certain structures called F-Stop had been positioned in the place of portals. It was also decided that Wheatley would later be killed and as many as six more personality cores would be introduced for players to interact with.

GlassBox Engine for SimCity: A new engine was introduced for the very popular simulation game SimCity that will make the game more natural and take a physical approach towards the city-building factors.

The new GlassBox engine will actually simulate the mathematical factors of the game which has been the core of the game all these years. For example, a normal factory, under the influence of the new engine, will not just generate money for the sake of the game, but will actually require workers for the factory.

The workers will be given a shout out by the factories who will then drive to the factory, park their cars in the parking lot and will make actual products which will be then picked up by trucks and delivered to their respective stores. Though, at the moment, the idea is just a set of coding, the new engine is expected sooner rather than later.

Insight into Bastion: Greg Kasavin of SuperGiant Games has revealed that the Bastion team wanted the game to be on a depressing note, but nonetheless amazing. The real theory was to create something depressing like a road but with elements of magic in it. The music and sound effects specialist of the game, Darren Korb, also revealed the sounds for the game was recorded in a small New York apartment. Even the sounds of animals dying in the game were original and personally recorded by Korb.

(Information from Gamesradar.com)