GDC 2023: all the latest from the Game Developers Conference

For the most part, AI is exceptionally bad at illustrating hands. They come out six-fingered or four-fingered or, even worse, just some wispy ends that fade into the background. AI has been programming large Western 1940s-era smiles onto people of various cultures. It’s been reshaping images we know and refitting them according to prompts. Depending on the data that it’s fed, though, sometimes AI has solutions, and sometimes it doesn’t. 

Video game developers and AI companies want to use these AI tools to streamline game development and make it faster. They claim it could help solve the problem of video game crunch and automate some of the most tedious parts of game development. But at the same time, wary developers warn that the new technology is advancing at a rate that could make it even harder to break into the industry, which is notoriously underpaid and challenging to enter.

MapleStory is the rare 2003 game that’s still going to this day, despite its reputation for being a pay-to-win grind fest. So perhaps it’s fitting that its developers want to bring the title to the blockchain next, complete with non-fungible tokens, its own cryptocurrency, and the possibility of playable Bored Apes.

A lot of games have died in the timeframe that MapleStory has existed. I grew up playing the side-scrolling multiplayer game in elementary school and decided to revisit it in college. Back in 2015, I was surprised to find the game still had a robust community powered by a few “whales,” or people who tend to spend significant amounts of real money on the game.

We’re racing toward a world where Fortnite and Roblox could rival Steam and the App Store in terms of the size of their game libraries. Both have growing ecosystems of millions of players who build and spend time in custom battle royales, chat rooms, and all kinds of other games. We’re looking at the fight for what could be the next YouTube. 

While the two giants may be the biggest in the space, they are far from the only companies building out a catalog of tools that make the jump from game playing to game making far simpler than traditional game engines Unity or Unreal. All sorts of platforms, including the browser-based dot big bang and the top-down-focused CliCli, are looking for a piece of a market that already holds the attention of hundreds of millions of players. 

Minecraft Legends is a strategy spinoff of Minecraft — but it might also be the next competitive multiplayer craze. I had a chance to spend a few hours with the game last month at GDC in San Francisco, and while it seems like it has a solid campaign to dig into, I had a lot more fun with the team-based multiplayer. It’s kind of like Minecraft mashed with League of Legends and StarCraft, and in the one match I played, it involved a lot of yelling (in a good way).

Legends is built on the same “bedrock” engine as the main Minecraft game, and the two look pretty much identical. You control a blocky little character running through a similarly blocky world. The difference here is what you’re doing. To get acclimated, I first played around two hours of the campaign. Here, you’re basically exploring a big procedurally generated map filled with enemy camps to destroy and cities under siege that need liberating.

The line for the “Many Dimensions of Kirby” panel at GDC was so long that it stretched from the doors of the conference room, wrapped around the third floor of the main hall of the Moscone Center, and continued out onto the roof. The presentation was given by Kirby’s stepdads, general director for the Kirby franchise Shinya Kumazaki and director of Kirby and the Forgotten Land Tatsuya Kamiyama. It covered the design challenges the team at HAL Laboratory faced trying to make 3D action Kirby games. But more than that, the presentation and my subsequent chat with the two directors afterward revealed a bit of insight into the mind and ethos of Kirby: 

You are what you eat.

While detective stories are a mainstay in the worlds of film, television, and literature, they’re comparatively niche when it comes to video games. And with a few notable exceptions, the most beloved detective games tend to be visual novels. Kazutaka Kodaka loves detective stories and is best known for the dark adventure series Danganronpa. But for his studio’s next project, Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, he decided to take things in a slightly different direction. “Mystery games tend to be dull because it’s mostly reading text,” Kodaka says. “But for this we created a world where you can solve various kinds of mysteries and roam around freely.”

Rain Code is described as a “lucid-noir” detective game. It takes place in a sort of cyberpunk city called Kanai Ward, which is rendered as a 3D world where it never seems to stop raining. Players take on the role of an amnesiac sleuth solving mysteries throughout the city as part of a global detective group. Aside from having various locations to explore, there are a few other things that should make Rain Code feel different from other detective games. For one thing, you’ll partner up with other detectives who have special powers that just so happen to be useful for solving crimes: one can rewind time and another can visualize how a crime scene looked at the moment it was discovered.

Depending on who you ask, the biggest video game last year wasn’t the award-winning Elden Ring: it was actually Wordle. The word game continued to take the world by storm in 2022, beating out Queen Elizabeth and the election results in search volume. It was purchased by The New York Times in January 2022, and though its user growth has plateaued, it still has more daily active users than other newspaper offerings like the crossword puzzle or sudoku.

“When we bought Wordle, our main mission was don’t break anything. Just let it keep going,” said Zoe Bell, executive producer at The New York Times, in an interview. “Then over time, we shifted into this mindset of anything we do has to provide player value. So we’re not going to be trying to squeeze players.”

Rod Humble knows a bit about life sim games. He spent years as an executive at EA helping steer The Sims franchise before leaving to join Second Life maker Linden Lab. So when it came for his new studio, Paradox Tectonic, to try its hand at the genre, he knew exactly what he wanted to change. “What the genre needed was less constraints,” Humble says.

The studio’s first release, Life by You, was officially unveiled last week ahead of the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It looks similar to The Sims but with a few important differences. For one thing, in place of the iconic (and fictional) Simlish, Life by You utilizes a procedurally generated real-language system for dialogue. It’s also a much more in-depth simulation. According to Humble, every single character in the game’s fictional city is fully simulated. They have jobs, homes, relationships, and the same basic needs as your own player character (i.e., they need to eat, sleep, and pee).

Epic Games is changing the way Fortnite creators are paid, and it could have a transformative effect on the ecosystem of the game. Now, 40 percent of all the money Epic rakes in from Fortnite — hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions — is up for grabs.

Last week, Epic introduced what it calls “Creator Economy 2.0.” Under the new system, Epic will pay out 40 percent of Fortnite’s net revenues each month to creators based on how much players engage with their islands. That means 40 percent of the money Epic makes from things like V-Bucks, its Fortnite Crew subscription, and in-game outfits (like for crossovers like YouTube superstar MrBeast and Resident Evil characters) — all of that goes into the pool.

When thousands of developers descend into one place, you know there are going to be some excellent games to check out. That was definitely the case over the past week. We’ve been attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and in addition to watching press conferences and attending talks, we’ve also had plenty of opportunity to go hands-on with some intriguing indie games. And there’s a lot to be excited about — so we gathered our favorites (in no particular order) right here. Most of these are due out later in 2023, so plan your free time accordingly.

Cozy games are all the rage right now, and Fae Farm looks to mix that space up a little with some dungeon crawling. It’s a cute farming game — think Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon — but with magical elements thrown in. So in addition to doing wholesome things like growing crops, catching fish, and going on dates, you’ll also get quests that involve going to dungeons in a fairy world where you hop around looking for magic keys and fighting enemies that include sentient violins.

At its State of Unreal event at GDC, Epic announced... a lot of different things. There were animation tools for virtual humans, a sprawling digital asset marketplace, a new Fortnite creator economy, an Unreal Engine-powered creation tool for Fortnite, and more. But to wrap up the keynote, Epic’s outspoken CEO, Tim Sweeney, took some time to talk about one of his favorite topics, the metaverse, which is something the company is putting a lot of money into.

Right after the event, I had the chance to sit down with Sweeney, as well as Epic’s executive VP Saxs Persson, to talk about just what the heck a metaverse is and how it might work in practice. This involved a lengthy discussion about everything from interoperability standards to how Epic’s most popular products — including Fortnite and the Unreal Engine — fit into this potential future. (There were also a few swipes at Apple, as expected.)

Epic Games has just wrapped its State of Unreal 2023 keynote, where it showed off new enhancements coming to Unreal Engine 5.2, stunning new MetaHuman technology, a big push to unify its disparate assets marketplaces, and Fortnite’s long-awaited Unreal Editor tools. Given the popularity of Unreal Engine and Fortnite, the day’s announcements could have a major impact on the games we play in the future.

Here are the biggest announcements from the show.

Epic Games’ next big plan for the metaverse is to unify all of its disparate asset marketplaces under one brand, Fab. The new store will include assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Quixel Bridge, Artstation Marketplace, and Sketchfab, and Epic will give creators 88 percent of earnings on the store, like it does for the Epic Games Store.

“In the old days, every game developer built all of the content in their product from the ground up. Increasingly, content marketplaces such as Unreal Engine Marketplace and Unity’s Asset Store have provided huge libraries of content which game developers can license from independent content creators and use in their games,” Epic said in a blog post. “We think this trend will grow significantly as creators of experiences across Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft and other 3D worlds look to these marketplaces as sources of metaverse content, and as players increasingly build out and customize their own 3D spaces online.”

Epic Games is trying to make a better economy for Fortnite creators with what its calls “Creator Economy 2.0,” which it announced at its State of Unreal keynote on Wednesday.

Previously, Epic creators participated in the company’s “Support-A-Creator” program. In the program, creators were issued individual codes, and if somebody bought something in the Fortnite store with that code, that creator would get 5 percent of your purchase. But the significant downside of that model is that creators would have to promote their code and just hope that people would remember to use it when making purchases.

Epic Games finally showed off the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at its State of Unreal 2023 presentation on Wednesday. It’s a new PC application that’s set to launch Wednesday on the Epic Games Store as a public beta, and it will also feature a new scripting language called “Verse.”

UEFN has “many of the same features” Epic uses to make Fortnite proper, the company said in a video demo. You’ll be able to import custom assets to create worlds that may end up looking nothing like Fortnite’s usual cartoony vibe. In a live demo onstage, Epic showed a gritty, largely brown world, which significantly contrasts with the brightly-colored Fortnite player characters. Epic also wants interoperability between Fortnite and Unreal Engine assets so that you can bring your work across projects.

Epic will soon let you animate your MetaHumans. The company first launched the MetaHuman creator tools in 2021 as a way of streamlining the process of making more realistic human characters. During its State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023, the company showed off new animation tools that make it possible to create realistic facial animations using only video captured from an iPhone.

Epic showed this off with a live demonstration featuring the actor behind the upcoming game Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. It was a short clip, with the actor speaking directly into the camera, but it appeared to be rendered both quickly and accurately. Even more impressive, the company then showed off the same animations captured onstage used to bring another MetaHuman character to life. The animator is launching this summer.