BAFTA Game Awards Results!

Yesterday, the British Academy Games Awards took place in Tobacco Dock, London and yours truly was sent to the red carpet to meet some of the stars. On subsequent pages below you’ll find chats with John Carmack, David Braben and Viva Seifert.

But first, here’s a rundown of the winners:

Best Game: Fallout 4

Best British Game: Batman: Arkham Knight

Artistic Achievement: Ori and the Blind Forest

Game Design: Bloodborne

Original Property: Until Dawn

Persistent Game: Prison Architect

Story: Life is Strange

AMD eSports Audience Award: SMITE

Ones to Watch: SUNDOWN

Fellowship: John Carmack

Everybody’s gone to the Rapture won three awards for Audio Achievement, Performer (Merle Dandridge as Kate Collins) and Music for the composition by Jessica Curry.

Her Story also scooped three awards for Sam Barlow winning the Debut Game, Game Innovation and Mobile & Handheld categories.

Rocket League was another triple winner taking home the Family Game, Multiplayer and Sport awards.

It seems reasonable to say that the BAFTA’s have a bit of a console slant to them this year, particularly when you consider the disastrous PC launch of Arkham Knight, coupled with the PS4 winners of Everybody’s gone to the Rapture (PS4 but coming to PC) and Bloodborne (PS4 exclusive).

WCCF chats to David Braben on the Red Carpet

It’s obviously been a big year for you on Elite with Horizons and CQC, decent numbers for you guys with all the new content that’s coming out?

DB: Yes well the latest numbers are from the end of the year of 1.4 million but I’m really proud of all the people that are engaging, the community goals and how many people are joining in on those is just great.

And additional content for the future? It’s obviously an evolving universe.

DB: We have engineers coming out quite soon now and I was playing that today so it’s all very exciting.

And space games in general? Obviously yourself and Chris Roberts came back with kickstarters at similar times, is this a big resurgent time for you guys?

DB: Oh definitely, there’s a lot of interest in the sort of galaxy we’ve created and everything but if you look at it, we’ve not had space games really for quite a while and they’re sort of back in vogue but also if you look at how many are coming through now.

That’s right, there have been quite a few here at EGX today, are you a big fan of playing space games then?

DB: Yes well, one of the problems of doing your own games is having time to play other people’s games is actually quite challenging so I haven’t played any of the latest space games. I think No Man’s Sky is out in a couple of months and there are a few others behind it and of course Star Citizen.

So what about the recent resurgence of so called “dead genres”. What do you think has caused this?

Well there are lots of separate parallels and the cyclical nature is one of the important things. I think one of the issues is that the games industry has been most run by big publishers and it’s a very difficult job. They would contract to companies like us so until recently Frontier was working principally with big publishers like Microsoft and Sony and Amazon of course. What’s happened is we’ve now started publishing our own games and what we’ve done is we’ve looked at places where they haven’t been well served by publishers but if you look at the reasons for example the space genre, there hasn’t been a big space game for a decade or more and that’s partly because when a publisher comes to greenlight one, the best and most sensible way for a publisher to determine how much to put into it is to look at the success of a similar game, downrate it a bit and look at what sort of return on investment they would get. The problem is that because the industry was much smaller when there was last one of these games, you end up with something that doesn’t add up, or rather that doing a first person shooter adds up better so those genres get left behind.

I don’t criticise the publishers for it, but what’s happened is new ways of verifying there is a market there like crowdfunding is very valid and also just having industry experience, publishers are a step removed from gaming whereas developers like us are all gamers and much more in touch with it.

WCCF chats to Viva Seifert on the Red Carpet

Lovely to see you and obviously big hopes tonight for Her Story. How was it working with Sam?

VS: Oh I LOVE working with Sam, we’ve worked together before so we know each other and it’s quite relaxing but of course this one particular game was more awkward and uncomfortable than ever, just him and I locked in a room with one little camera and an 80 page scripts so like “Thank you!” but that was the nature of the game. It was meant to be uncomfortable and awkward, you’re meant to be interrogated so it was like the perfect setting, but yeah. I’ll work with Sam again and again and again!

So how was it in filming, literally sit down there, read out, change, read more…?

VS: Yes, I mean he gave me the scripts a few months before then we’d read through and he sorted of guided me to where, why, what I was reading and also we had worked together before so he just let me do my thing and just started at the beginning for five days, Monday to Friday 9 – 5, we’d have half hour coffee breaks where we’d barely talk and were like zombies then back behind the camera.

And another one? Perhaps His Story with you behind the camera?

VS: Her Story 2, let’s go for that! Has Sam arrived yet? You can probe that one!

WCCF chats to John Carmack on the Red Carpet!

How do you think the Oculus Rift launch has gone, have you been pleased with the reception so far?

JC: You know, it always would have been better to get it out earlier. I don’t work on the PC as much as people think, most of my time is spent on the gear VR and the mobile products so inside Oculus much of my stuff has been cheering from the sidelines and a few of the key technical advancements like the asynchronous timewarp that I was a big champion of.

It’s gonna be a long haul, this is not just one battle. There’s a long campaign we’re gonna be waging for all of it but it’s exciting, it’s in people’s hands right now, the experiences that they’re getting are what was promised, this really is probably better than you would have expected if you went back three years to go to the kickstarter. What’s finally been delivered is really pretty damn good!

With regards to the future of the industry, where do you go from here?

JC: Oh there’s so much more to go, I mean for one thing you have the PC where you have these 500 watt machines and we’re trying to do the same thing on these 5 watt mobile devices so I’ve got a couple more orders of magnitude to fight through there.

But even on the PC we’ve got to get wider fields of view, more extended tracking range, untether things in different ways, new rendering techniques. There is years of work going forward on this and that’s what’s great you know, this is exactly where I should be.

Is the main challenge getting it into people’s hands for them to see what it’s all about?

JC: It is right now and of course the supply is constrained, we can’t get as many of them out as we want to and it isn’t something you can show a TV commercial for virtual reality very well, you can say “it’s like putting screens on your face” but that does not capture what is happening, you have to put it on and have the presence.

Have you seen the mixed reality videos?

JC: Yeah, those are a pretty neat idea, so even outside the actual aspect of making the games, there’s gonna be all these novel new things, you know the presentation of them and how we market them, it’s a brave new world in a lot of ways.

Are the people buying them now hardcore gamers?

JC: On the PC side certainly they’re very much targeted at the hardcore gamer, that was the Oculus original kickstarter push. On mobile it’s much more of a broad general consumer market you know with the photos and videos and broader media consumption as well as the gaming experiences but no doubt, PC skews more towards more towards gaming.

And how do you see the influence from Facebook since taking over?

JC: Well I was a big backer of the Facebook acquisition, it gave us a lot of the resources and the ability to do things, get the product out there the way we wanted, it was hugely helpful for hirings, allowing us to ramp up the company in different ways. Even more so on mobile, Facebook is really a perfect fit for that with the media gathering and distribution with integrating 360 videos and photos into the Facebook news feed, those are really important things.

Have you done much work with DX12 yet?

JC: Personally very little, we’ve got the whole Vulkan thing going on to both mobile and PC side of things. I have good things to say about DX12 in general but I haven’t actually sat down and written an engine in it or anything like that.

Any comment on Async compute?

JC: Async compute was something I pushed for for years. That was something where there was this obvious case where you wanna be able to branch away and do some of this stuff with the lower latency while, at least in the traditional world your graphics can chew 2 frames ahead, in VR we're much tighter about that but there’s plenty of opportunity where you really wanna use it for async timewarp where we wanna know, this happens within 2 milliseconds no matter what which is something that you could never do otherwise.

Many thanks and congratulations on your award tonight.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.