EA and Blizzard Square Off On PC Gaming's Health
EA's Peter Moore wrote a short blog essay the other day explaining why, in his eyes (and, we can assume, by the party line at EA for everyone who is not Wil Wright), PC gaming is pretty much dead. He brings up market decline, piracy, the change of the business model to online or downloadable games (and doesn't seem to commit to wanting to change EA's business model to suit), and just overall Return-On-Investment concerns. Ultimately, it all comes down to business - PC games don't make EA (much) money - not as much as they can make on the consoles.

And on the flip side, in a Eurogamer interview, Blizzard's chief exec Mike Morhaime explains why PC Gaming is alive, vibrant, and growing. He sites an incredible install base, extremely high margins (because you don't need to pay your tithe to the console manufacturer), growing revenue (!), and growth in every category except the traditional retail channels dominated by companies like EA. And he notes that Blizzard's primary forcus remains the PC.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun offers its usual witty commentary on Peter Moore's allegations in an article called, "Peter Moore Hates Your PC," and on Mike Morhaime's comments in "PC 'Far From Declining' Says Blizzard Boss." But I can pretty much sum it all up here:

Okay. So maybe Moore is right. I mean, it's been how long since Blizzard created a non-MMO PC game? Six years? So maybe Blizzard is going to release Diablo III and Starcraft II on the PC to the sound of chirping crickets. They'll sell maybe 100 copies of each, and see millions of copies pirated, and learn their lesson. They'll abandon PC gaming forever except to milk massively multiplayer strategies.

It could happen.

Or, they may discover that if you actually make a quality PC game focused on the PC gaming experience, rather than some half-hearted port from the console with the belief that mindless button-mashing can simply be mapped to the keyboard with no shame, that the game will actually, you know, SELL.

Or something.

I mean, yeah. They've got a problem. Diablo III has to compete with Diablo I and II. Starcraft II has to compete with the original. That's an ugly secret of why console development is more lucrative than the PC. It's been noted that, as the console becomes "mature," its sales begin to strongly resemble that of the PC market. A generational change in consoles effectively hits the ol' reset button for game developers, and the first 3 or 4 years make it easy to make money. You don't have to compete with the back-catalog.

And Moore didn't admit to some other facts of game development life. Like the fact that it's something like twice as hard to make a PC game than a console game. And it usually requires about 10x the customer support. On consoles, you don't have to worry about tons of different screen resolutions, hardware compatability, what O.S. version the player is running, what security settings are turned on, what other programs are running in the background, how much adware and other crap is tanking the machine's performance, alt-tabbing to another window, whether or not they've got a mouse-wheel, how much RAM they have, how much VRAM their video card has and whether it was made before 2004, whether they are running on a laptop or desktop, whether they are using a QWERTY keyboard or something else, and so forth, and so on.

And Moore is discussing this subject in the context of pumping out crappy PC ports of their console sports franchises. Now, I'm going to assume that he "gets it." He even talks about "lean forward" versus "lean back" gaming between the platforms. PC gaming is a fundamentally different experience than the consoles, and the PC gamer is in a different audience. This means that you can't just make the PC one of the "platforms" for a game and expect it make buttloads of money. You might do better than break even, but it is not a winning strategy.

I mean, I bought Guitar Hero III for the XBox 360, not the PC. I don't think I'd like it for the PC. I'm in a different mindset in front of a console than in front of the PC.

I applaud Blizzard and Valve for their efforts to make top-quality PC games, first and foremost. Even if it makes us indies have to work for it a little harder.

Labels: Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:00 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Rock Guitar Band Hero
I got today "off" of work - well, half of it off, at least. The half after 4:00 AM. I spent most of the rest of the morning sleeping. Sorry for the delay in posting today.

With the hours I've been keeping this week, I never got around to picking up Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. And... I probably won't be. This'll be the first Guitar Hero game I won't be buying. Maybe I'll rent it at some point. And I don't think I'll be getting Guitar Hero World Tour this winter.

It's not that I'm uninterested in the songs or anything. But the boss-battles were a big turn-off for me with Guitar Hero III, I've got plenty to keep me occupied with Rock Band and the previous GH games (hey, I'm still nowhere near finishing any of the games on Expert). And then Rock Band II was announced for this fall with the magical words, "Backwards Compatability for Downloadable Content." Since I'll probably be near $100 spent on downloadable music for Rock Band, it'll be nice not to have to swap discs. And Guitar Hero World Tour sounds like... dare I say it... a Rock Band Wannabe. I might bite if the Rock Band controllers were compatible with GHWT, but I suspect this will not be the case. The compatibility issues right now are bad enough amongst the guitars without the space-consuming drum sets.

And if that wasn't enough to sate my musician poseur thirst and hunger for opportunity to crank up the hard rock, there's the upcoming "Guitar Rising" game from independent game development studio Game Tank, for which I already have a decent controller. I have high hopes for this one.

So... I guess this means "the king is dead, long live the king." The Guitar Hero franchise was absolutely amazing for a couple of years. But I guess the time has come to part ways. It's been fun!

Labels: Guitar Hero, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:49 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Favorite Abusively Difficult Games
After our discussion yesterday, numerous (but not all) folk suggested that people who preferred more challenging "do it yourself"-ness in games were in the minority. I admitted that I, too, get frustrated in games, and while I usually do not want to be led by the nose, I often find myself saying, "Okay, I give, what am I supposed to do now?" For me - figuring it out for myself and conquering the tough challenges on my own is a big part of the fun. But there's a fine line between "fun" and "frustration" when it comes to difficulty or confusion level, often related to the quality of the game.

This got me thinking about really hard games. I'm talking the practically abusive games that we love. The ones where you think the designer(s) had some kind of passive-aggressive hatred of players, and wanted to punish them. The kinds of games that seemed to want to bend you over, spank you with a pledge paddle, and make you say, "Thank you sir! May I have another?"

You don't see many of them these days. At least, you don't see many of them where there isn't some kind of difficulty level setting so you can dial it down to taste. I have been playing a couple of old Nintendo games from the 8- and 16-bit era, and noted that designers of the era still had that coin-op arcade-game mentality, killing the player within two minutes as if the NES needed a constant diet of quarters.

But some games are worse than others. Even some arcade games just seemed to reach out and almost physically pimp-slap the player. At least, they did to me. Maybe it was just because I sucked. But, for some reason, a few of them I still loved, in spite of our abusive relationship. The games turned my crank as they beat me to a pulp. I never really grew to be their master, but in some cases I played long enough and hard enough that I could at least hold my own for a while.

Here are the most abusively difficult games that I still loved in spite of - or because of - the punishment they doled out on me:

Sinistar
I heard in an interview with one of the developers that this arcade game was originally a lot easier, but the manufacturer was worried that it would not suck down the quarters fast enough. So they cranked up the difficulty to a level for release, and now simply beating the first level is something of an accomplishment. I think I've made it to level three once or twice. Once Sinistar becomes "live," you'd better pray you've created enough Sinibombs, because that giant space station with a face will hunt you through the entire map, knocking asteroids out of his way, and then EATING YOU. In space. The game is sheer evil, and is one of my favorites from the arcade.

"Beware, I live!"

The Bard's Tale
Okay, I'd forgotten about how horribly difficult this one was just to get started on. If you decided to create your own party - one without the bard's starting gear of a magic horn (am I remembering this correctly? Help me out here, guys... it's been a while), you ended up facing some kind of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" thing where the survivors of a dozen failed attempts to get through the first two hours of the game would end up getting together into some kind of "super-party" which actually had a prayer of making it through fifth level or something. Again, the details are sketchy, and I don't remember how easy it was to save or load games. But I imagine the overpowered default starting party came about as a result of playtesting, when the QA guys screamed bloody murder about how they would NEVER see the end of the game.

Falcon 4.0
The game had a manual with lessons in it that mirrored actual flight school for F-16 "drivers," co-written by an actual F-16 instructor. And you needed to go through them, because the game was hopelessly complicated. Just getting your missiles armed and ready to fire and in a radar mode where they could actually hit something took some serious effort. In real life, this all makes sense, because you don't want pilots accidentally thumbing the "A" button and sending a missile off to blow up whatever little passenger plane happens to be within 20 miles in front of them.

The first time I got into a particular type of stall, I swore the game was bugged, because it didn't behave anything like a real aircraft. I later discovered a whole chapter in the manual devoted to this condition, which arises because the F-16's on-board computer gets confused by the fact the plane is going "backwards" (it's dropping tail-first). You have to first hit the "manual override" button to disable the fly-by-wire interpretations of your control inputs. So, I guess you could say it's a bug, but it's actually an accurate simulation of a real-world bug and standard operating procedure of the F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Add to this some enemy missiles that were practically impossible to dodge, bombs that would blow YOU up if you dropped them too low, insanely complex operating procedures for locking and firing a maverick missile at a tank, landing gear that felt like it was made out of glass and required HOURS of practice just to learn how to land properly, and a dynamic campaign that felt like drinking from a firehose with sheer task overload, and you had a torture device masquerading as entertainment. Amazingly, I thought this was incredible fun. I still do. Blowing up a tank in a video game is no big deal. Blowing one up in Falcon 4.0 was an accomplishment that almost made you believe the Air Force could set you in a cockpit of the real thing tomorrow.

(Incidentally, Lock-On: Modern Air Combat is just as psychotic in its adherence to realism, though I haven't really gotten into it like I got into Falcon 4.0 back in the day.

Streak
This was a game created by my old company, Singletrac. I wasn't on the development team, but I loved the game. Streak was Singletrac's poorly-marketed attempt to go with a new publisher (our new owners) and IP with what we'd learned from Jet Moto. The game was about hoverboard racing, and your maximum speed was based on "confidence" that you built up by doing ridiculously tricky and risky stunts in the middle of a race. And yeah, there were other games that came later and stole our thunder (and got accolades for their innovation), but we were there first. But the game was also pretty vicious in its difficulty level. It was designed, tested, and produced by veterans of the Jet Moto series, and they made a game which was moderately challenging for them. Which meant practically impossible to unlock the last levels for anybody else. But I loved the game. Maybe because I was a Jet Moto development veteran who thought the game was only somewhat too difficult.

Suspended
Sheer evil in a text adventure, by Infocom. You played some dude in suspended animation, who is supposed to be the "brains" of a facility that controls a terra-formed planet. However, you are stuck inside your chamber, unable to physically interract with the world. Instead, you control a handful of robots, each with dramatically unique capabilities and temperments. For example, only one robot has visual sensors and can actually "see" a room. Only one other can hear what's going on. One can perform diagnostics on the machinery, but it always recites its findings in the form of abstract-sounding poetry.

You wake up with the planet in a state of crisis because the machinery falling apart. There are a whole bunch of colonists who are trying to break into the facility to kill you and replace you with another controller. So you have a limited number of turns to use these robots to repair the damage and make things right again. If it sounds nuts, that's because it is. I can't recall how many times I played this game before giving up, unsure if I'd really made any progress.

Okay. There's my list. There are plenty of harder games I've played that I considered (anybody else play one of the first graphic adventure games, "The Wizard and the Princess," by Sierra? Nasty ultra-lethal maze in practically the first room! Well, first location in the desert), but they weren't games I really liked as much as these.

So - your turn. What are your favorite, abusively difficult games? Do you have any?

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:13 AM (Permalink) 19 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Is Freedom Not Fun?
Randy Smith, lead designer at EA, has an article on Next Generation about how choice and consequences are out of vogue in today's game designs. He cites Ultima V as his example - a game that freely let you shoot yourself in the foot, go off the beaten path, make bad choices, and get clobbered by them.

Smith states, "Today, this sort of thing is considered bad and wrong, and we’ve developed some of our most sophisticated design around preventing it... Why do we do all this? Because games are supposed to be fun, and fun only happens when you are pointed directly towards it, when it’s neither too easy nor too hard to get, and when you’re told ‘good job’ upon acquiring it. We’ve brilliantly succeeded in eliminating the interstitials, stripping away everything but fun."

Is this a good thing? Is this the right thing? Randy brings up the "games as art" argument, and suggests that being led around onto exactly the right path, rendering our choices irrelevent, might not be the evolutionary Utopia of gaming that we really want. Smith continues, "I worry that in the course of evolution we created a philosophical divide with exploration, choice, and consequence on one side and goals, scores, and balance on the other. I’m not sure the two sides are equally vital for producing unique, relevant works. Are we so hooked on the escapist fantasy of an uncomplicated life, of reverting to the safety of childhood, that no other games should be made? Have we explored alternatives?"

In her commentary article "Hold My Hand," Scorpia contends that stripping away choice and marking the path for the player every step of the way doesn't necessarily refine the "fun," either. "is so much direction really a good thing? Does having to think about the game and what we’re doing somehow take away from the 'fun'? I certainly enjoyed playing Ultima IV. But it wouldn’t have been as much of a pleasure had Hawkwind (or anyone else) been directing me through the game. "

Later, in comments, she notes "Funny, when I first started gaming - and with some pretty tough adventure games - I never felt intimidated. And back then, I wasn’t doing it professionally, either."

Going back to the discussion yesterday, is this just a matter of audience? The games of yesteryear certainly had technical limits as to how much they could "guide" the player - they even had to pack crucial data into manuals for lack of RAM on the system. But in the 1980's (the era of Ultima IV and V and many text adventures), the gamer was a niche audience. Today, games are mainstream.

Perhaps only a small niche of players like figuring this stuff out for themselves?

I don't know. I'm sort of a middle-of-the-road gamer. My gaming history is littered with titles that I never completed because I got stuck at some point --- stuck, frustrated, and the game ceased to be fun. However, some of the most fun I've had in games has come from puzzling my way through challenges. I absolutely loved solving the Babel-Fish puzzle in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I have a threshold of pain and confusion where I really do want some hand-holding and some good guidance. But I'm much happier - and having more fun - when I am able to tackle those challenges on my own.

I had way more fun white water rafting as a kid than riding roller coasters, too. Am I just an exception? A niche?

Or should this be the next evolutionary change games take a "helping hand" rather than hand-holding*. I think I'd really prefer that. Maybe I would have finished Ultima V if that were the case...



* Of course, this assumes that the game is actually made in such a way that it allows players to chart their own course. Due to development costs for content, designers are loathe to create any aspect of the game world that the player isn't required to see.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:16 PM (Permalink) 10 comments links to this post

 
Growing Better, Growing Stale, or Jumping the Shark
There has been lots of what we might politely refer to as "discussion" concerning Bethesda's upcoming Fallout 3, which - at first blush - seems like a radical departure in gameplay, though setting and flavor faithfulness remains to be seen. Said dialog between the die-hard fans of the previous Fallout games and the new faithful of Bethesda's excellent Elder Scrolls series is, to quote Dr. Stephen Franklin in Babylon 5, "... the kind of conversation that can only end in a gunshot."

Sounds kinda like my own concerns about 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons not feeling like a new edition of a beloved old game, huh?

Contrasting this to the newly-announced Diablo III game and the gameplay footage that has been revealed, Solivagant has an opinion piece on Destructiod entitled, "Diablo 3 Versus Fallout 3: How To Make a Proper Sequel." In a nutshell, he claims that Diablo 3 appears a solid and faithful addition to the series, while Fallout 3 seems a force-fit that he describes as an Oblivion mod.

I'm not sure I share his opinion on this, but this really opens up a can of worms (and words) about what a sequel should and should not do, doesn't it?

In the first few seconds of the gameplay video for Diablo 3, I was a little skeptical.

Now, I have enjoyed both preceding games, though neither qualifies as a favorite RPG. I still fire up Diablo 2 from time to time and get hooked for a few weeks. Admittedly, I've never taken a character above 50th level, but I have a LOT of characters. I've even had a few "hardcore" characters, too, which was an insidious but fun perma-death mode. The nastiness of it was that it was almost impossible to die until the final boss of the first chapter, after you've invested three good hours into your character.

Watching the gameplay video, I was forced to admit that yes, this looked pretty dang fun, and yes - it looked like a Diablo... a worthy addition to the franchise. Of course, part of that is Blizzard. I haven't seen them make a misstep (well, RELEASE one, at least) since I first encountered two guys sitting forlornly at a booth at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in '95 trying to promote "Warcraft: Orcs Versus Humans." Who'da thunk?

The point is... at least, when I thought I had one... that people like sequels for a reason. They seek the comfort of the familiar, but they want it fresh. That's why they tune into the same TV shows, season after season - as long as the show can present them with familiar characters and setting so that they don't have to start over learning a new world. But the viewers want something to keep the series fresh... not just re-runs and re-hashes of the same material.

Ditto with sequels. The reason gamers are going nuts about the coming of Diablo III and the makers of Titan Quest went out of business is because Diablo is comfortable and familiar. Now it is kinda freaky that a game full of torture, death, and horror is comfortable and familiar, but there you are. But they do not just want Diablo II with better graphics, as much as some claim they'd be happy with that.

So where do you draw the line? In the battle between "fresh and new" and "familiar and comfortable," where is too far? TV writers probably battle over that question on a weekly basis, trying to keep the show from getting stale without having Fonzie jump a shark.

In this case, however, I think it is a question of intended audience. Blizzard is proceeding under the expectation that the previous audience is still there for Diablo 3. They still have a critical mass of fans, even though Diablo 2 was released back in the day where games like Baldur's Gate II was Big News and could be a major commercial success. After all, the game has spawned a host of imitators, and some of those have succeeded in successive years. So the style of gameplay is still in vogue.

I think Bethesda is laboring under the belief (probably correctly) that the audience for the old Fallout games is no longer there in sufficient numbers to achieve commercial success - at least not with today's mainstream game budgets. Like the 2004 release of "The Bard's Tale," they seem to be shooting for not so much of a sequel as a re-make... a "re-imagining" of the universe, delivering their own vision of a universe they loved to a new audience.

But the video game industry is still so young that the originals being remade haven't had much time to gather dust. Fallout 2 is "only" ten years old, which is ancient by video game standards, but it's really not much older than the Playstation 2. This is hardly the first franchise to receive a radical overhaul, particularly as beloved franchises from the 8- and 16-bit era are being reincarnated in the 3D era, and as series that have gone stale have attempted to reinvent themselves.

Metroid Prime. X-Com Apocalypse. Fallout 3. Diablo 3. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Ultima 8. Return to Zork. And so on. Game series do have to keep reinventing themselves, or they can grow pretty stale. Popular opinion amongst fans is that this is what happened to the later Might & Magic RPGs, for example. But at what point does a sequel "go too far"? Where does it become a remake or simply a brand name slapped on a different game series? Should we have remakes or a radical "reinventing" of a series that is a decade or less old? What is your own tolerance for change?

Discuss this on the forum thread! Or not.

Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:03 PM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Diablo 3
It's Official!

Cool. 3D environments. And... the traditional insane swarms of enemies.

Sign me up!

Labels: Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:51 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Frayed Knights: The Tower of Almost Certain Death
I haven't been quite as regular with my postings about the development of the comedy-based indie RPG Frayed Knights of late, but the game does continue development, if not quite as quickly as it was the last few weeks before the pilot milestone. Obviously, we need a new milestone schedule. But I thought I'd provide a little bit of background on the world at large and chapters / adventures / locations in development.

Naturally, all of this information may change, and could conceivably not appear in the game at all. But here we go anyway. This week: The Tower of Almost Certain Death!

Originally, this tower was called the "Tower of Certain Death" by those few locals and adventurers who knew of its existence. Every once in a while some local youths from nearby towns who fancied themselves as adventurerers would discover legends of the tower, and mount an expedition to find and sack it.

Of the few expeditions that found the tower, most ended in the entry chamber, not with death, but with a lot of ale-drinking and graffitti-drawing to mark the accomplishment. Then the expedition would return home with tales of surviving the Tower of Certain Death.

At this point, jokes circulated renaming the old tower the "Tower of ALMOST Certain Death," as it was clear that merely entering the tower did not lead to instant demise. Those who remembered the old stories warned that it was actually ascending to the top of the tower that resulted in certain death, but as the young trespassers who had survived entry chamber parties maintained, the tower was in such poor condition that a lethal fall from the top when the floor gave out was a certainty.

However, the tower eventually attracted a group of down-on-their-luck adventurers. They discovered that the upper floors of the tower were not only in far better condition than the youthful entry-level explorers had guessed, but that they were inhabited - after a fashion. The former owner of the tower - a Wizard named Thermistale - had performed an experiment which failed spectacularly, transforming him and his apprentices into ageless, mindless monsters. Besides these entities, the tower had animated statues and traps designed to foil interlopers and government inspectors. And a great deal of the wizard's treasure had remained intact.

Once the "Tower of Almost Certain Death" had been successfully sacked, nobody bothered going there anymore. Those few who tried found that the tower was well and truly looted, with nothing remaining of remote interest to make it worth the trip. After twenty years, it faded from memory.

Rumors have recently surfaced that the tower has new inhabitants, though speculation rages as to whether or not the new inhabitants are monsters or a flock of birds.

Labels: Frayed Knights

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:55 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
We Threw a Class Action Lawsuit, But Nobody Came!
Remember the Hot Coffee case? The big scandal that rocked the games biz? The one that causes the latest uproar that has given politicians and madmen ammunition to snipe at the games industry for years? The New York Times reports that the settlement has been reached for all of the meager 2,676 people (out of millions who bought the game) who joined the class action lawsuit. The total defense fees, including settlement but not including charitable contributions (which the company may have been planning on making anyway), amounted to around $30,000.

That makes it a lot harder for the lawyers to recoup the $1.3 million in expenses they are claiming, doesn't it?

My take on this? Okay, Hot Coffee was a major screw-up, no question about it. And I really have to question the maturity and taste of the people involved in it who actually implemented it and ... until a point ... thought it was a good idea.

But I think this case indicates that for the game's intended audience, it was largely a non-issue. The people who were really freaked out over it were non-gamers who neither played it nor bought it for someone in their family to play. And it seems like a sizeable subset of the people in the class-action thought that the graphic violence that was part of the core gameplay was okay for their underage little darlings... they just objected to the possibility that said angel could log into the Internet, bypass all the porn that's there, and instead download and install a patch that would enable them to see non-anatomically correct sex.

To be honest, I'd have expected a lot more people to have participated in the class action lawsuit, too. But really, the issue itself isn't really over leaving content in that would change the rating from M to AO (I mean, that's a difference of ONE YEAR... meaning 17-year-olds couldn't buy it for themselves). It's really about people - parents and family, mainly - not understanding or caring what the ratings mean, and thus making uninformed decisions, in spite of the best efforts of the ESRB and retailers to make this clear. And I think that's really only something that will be resolved with time and persistence.

Hat Tip to Game Politics for the scoop.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:05 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
RPG Design: Breaking Up the Routine
The party is hired by a village to take out some local bandits. To encourage the bandits to attack, the party disguises itself as poor villagers. The bandits come in search of easy prey, and find that the party is quite capable of defending itself. The bandits are dispatched. The village has a celebration, and offers the party a meager reward for their fine services.

Does this sound like a pretty straightforward - and, dare I suggest, boring - adventure for a party of adventurers? Maybe.

But in "Our Mrs. Reynolds," episode six of the short-lived (but critically acclaimed) science fiction TV series "Firefly", all this - and more - takes place before the opening credits. And then the real story begins.

Not that the whole bandit-hunting adventure couldn't have been an episode on its own. I mean, Captain Mal dressed as a pioneer woman telling the bandit leader, "I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end you" is worth the episode all by itself. But the whole point was that this particular caper went off without a hitch - an actual routine mission - and so wasn't worth more than a passing mention. The fireworks start as an indirect result of its successful conclusion.

Yet in computer roleplaying games (and, true, most pen & paper RPGs), we are constantly facing the routine. We get the endless battles of similar opponents. We get the bandit story instead of... the , uh, sexy nubile hijacker scoundrel claiming to have gotten married to one of the crew during the previous drunken night of revelry incorporating little-known and subtle marriage rites. And we don't get Jane putting Vera the Big Gun in a space suit.

There are two reasons for this:

#1 - Coming up with those more elaborate, twisty stories is hard.

#2 - Generating such stories that survive contact with the player without ramming it down the player's throat is even harder.

Which I've harped on before. But it's making me ponder. Just a bit. Oblivion did a pretty good job of throwing plenty of twists and bends in what sounded like otherwise straightforward, conventional quests. But could more be done? Granted, stories like Our Mrs Reynolds will need to be carefully hand-crafted plotlines in games. But how do we get around the routine?

To give credit where credit is due, 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons has gone to great lengths to help make combats unique by making the battlefield, movement, and variants on enemies in mass quantities pretty interesting. Those tactical combinations can mix things up nicely. But those aren't really story-based twists, those are variations.

I guess the routine is defined by the fact that it is - well - routine. But a good story skips or breezes past those parts, letting the audience understand that "time passes" and routine events do indeed happen without doing a full accounting. But maybe the hesitancy for many players to try RPGs is that it too often revels in that tedium, "the grind."

But is there a better way to handle that what we do now? Can we breeze past the "grind" aspects more easily in single-player RPGs? Can we throw some interesting story elements into even a "typical" combat by introducing a vulnerable hostage or something into what would otherwise be a simple "speedbump" encounter? Can we jump to the part about the sexy nubile hijacker instead of battling Orc Group #300?

And most interestingly (to the game developer side of me): can we do it algorithmically or some other way that does not require 100 designers working 70 hour weeks for 5 years to give us a solid 10 hours of gameplay?

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:26 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Allergies
When I was a teenager, I used to mock people with allergies. Not badly, but I'd happily announce how I wasn't allergic to anything.

Karma sucks.

We recently purchased bicycles (partly for exercise, partly as a response to skyrocketing oil prices), and last night I rode bikes with my youngest daughter to the library, which is only about a mile away. Besides getting a little sore after the uphill leg - I haven't regularly ridden a bike in half a lifetime - I got massive lungfuls of nature. In addition to what I'd received a little earlier doing some evening yard work. Without having taken any allergy medicines.

By the time I did take any, I was nearly dead. My eyes were puffy. I'm not sure WHAT I was trying to write for the blog. I was trying to play a retro RPG (Lands of Lore), but couldn't keep with it. I had to crash. Still feeling it first thing this morning, as I write this, though I'm better.

So - be careful who you mock, because these things have a way of interfering with gaming!
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:09 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Fourth Edition, or D&D?
But I finally had time to spend reading the new Player's Handbook (or, rather, the "Arcane, Divine and Martial Heroes" Player's Handbook... publisher Wizards of the Coast is spreading the joy across multiple Player's Handbooks) for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. It's been impossible for me to be untainted... people have been talking about this thing since last August, and I've heard plenty of praise and damnation heaped upon the new edition, and so it's been impossible to form my own opinions in a vacuum. And one can't truly offer an informed opinion on the matter without playing through it once.

I may never have an informed, unbiased opinion. So I'll venture the following, which you can discard at your leisure:

On the plus side, it looks like a pretty fun game.

But I had a pretty venomous post written where I had an imaginary product-kickoff meeting where a man in a suit told the designers to turn that "one miniatures game" into an RPG, and make it play like one of their successful collectable-trading-card games, so they could market it like their lucrative businesses. Oh, and make it enough like that Warcraft thing so they could sell it to those guys, too. When one of the designers objected that there was already a Dungeons & Dragons RPG, the suit demanded that they make things different enough so that they couldn't be sued.

And that pretty much describes my attitude towards the game. If it didn't say, "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, I would think it was a well-produced third-party fantasy role-playing game. I'd also ask if they sold cards to go with character actions, as the character abilities are defined very carefully in color-coded strips that resemble deed cards in Monopoly. They scream out for playing as part of an "action deck", with some cards that return to your hand immediately after being played, others that are played only once per combat, and others that are played once per day. I imagine we'll see those once the launch mania is over.

When I got to reading up on the Wizard class - which bears pretty much zero resemblance to the Dungeons & Dragons magic-user / wizard and has a lot more in common with the sorceress in the arcade game Gauntlet (or the late-3.5-era Warlock class - I realized that this was not Dungeons & Dragons. It is a game that could potentially co-exist with Dungeons & Dragons if the publisher didn't have a vested interest in burying the older games where they might never be found again. But there is a bigger gulf between this game and D&D than between the old and new incarnations of Battlestar Galactica.

Now, granted - the potential market amongst Magic the Gathering players and World of Warcraft players is far more lucrative than the fairly small, cheapskate population of pen & paper RPG players. From a business perspective, I can totally see where Wizards of the Coast is going with this. It's a whole new game, folks, but D&D it isn't. And for a lot of people (including, it sounds, Wizards of the Coast themselves), that's a good thing.

I can't fault their logic. They felt they needed to reinvent themselves and the industry, because the old model was broken from the start. And they'd do far better to bring in the brand name to get them there. Hey, my wife's Taurus S.E. doesn't bear much resemblance to the Model T or a Mustang, but they are all a Ford. And I would never be one to proclaim the kludgey game mechanics of ANY of the previous editions of D&D as being somehow sacred. I change 'em and flavor them to taste all the time.

But this thing is not an upgrade. It's not even a lateral shift. It's a completely different game. I'd love to give 4th edition a try sometime, but we're already busy playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Labels: Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:39 AM (Permalink) 25 comments links to this post

 
King of Kong
Besides watching plays and hiking canyons, during my little two day escape, we also watched King of Kong (subtitled "A Fistful of Quarters") . I had been looking forward to this documentary for a while, and was just told that it was available on Netflix as both a DVD and as an "Instant Play" streaming video.

King of Kong shows the secret, seedy underbelly of the underground competitive retro-arcade gaming scene. Well, okay, not quite. The geeky competitive retro-arcade gaming scene. Surrounding, in particular, the game of Donkey Kong.

Billy Mitchell is, in this case, the home-town hero who enjoyed his claim to fame in the wild popularity of arcade gaming in the 1980's, and has enjoyed a twenty-year record as the world's best. And he comes across as being pretty ruthless and petty when it comes to using his influence with the tiny 'establishment' to protect his long-standing authority and records. Steve Wiebe is the outsider, the not-so-young gun who believes he's got what it takes to become number one, fighting not only one of the most challenging and popular arcade games in history, but an "establishment" that has invested in Mitchell as their hero, and seems to be unwilling to allow this interloper to dethrone their reigning champion.

Petty? Silly? Lame? Laughable? You know, even as a ... well, formerly hardcore gamer and a huge fan of retro-gaming, that was what went through my mind the first half hour of the movie. The posturing and interviews and big talk of aging geeks for whom the golden era of the arcade game never died sounded like a joke, like a parody of sports heroes. But they were plainly, completely serious. At first, it seemed almost like a deadpan "mockumentary," a This Is Spinal Tap style bit of silliness with Twin Galaxies chief Walter Day proclaiming the utter gravity and importance of this competition with the full conviction of over two decades of his life's work poured into it.

But you know what? Fifteen minutes later, we were sucked in. We were still laughing at points, but the meaning started hitting home. Maybe we weren't talking about big professional sports heroes. It doesn't matter if you are talking about the Olympics or world championship Chess tournaments, or a high-school volleyball finals or the regional debate team championship, the story of competition between people who care about can be intriguing, and they can have power to infuse their own meaning into their efforts. And it works.

Yeah, there was drama. The stakes may be small and intensely personal, but they do grow a bit larger when the Guinness Book of World Records gets involved. It's exciting. It's frustrating. It's the whole "thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" pitched by ABC's Wild World of Sports when I was a child, but surrounding an upright cabinet of Mario's first game (back when he was only anonymously referred to as the "jumpman.")

And it's all about arcade games.

In the end, I have to recommend the movie highly to anyone with a passing interest in video. Just get it, watch it, laugh at it, and see if towards the end you aren't cheering and pissed and thrilled and even interested in firing up a game of Donkey Kong and seeing how you rank.

My highest recorded score is still only 16,900, so I think Wiebe and Mitchell don't have much to worry about from me at the moment.

Labels: Movies, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:53 PM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Real Life: Bryce and Cyrano
I took a couple of days off this week (whew!) for a brief vacation. I spent today with family at Bryce Canyon. My first thought upon seeing it - under a beautiful, cloudless noon-day sky - was that it looked like an impossible painting. Just too phenomenal to be real.

Computer graphics have nothing on this kind of awesome. Nor do photos come anywhere close to doing it justice.

Last night, we saw the preview performance of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Shakespearean Festival. They do include some non-Shakespearean plays in the festival. While familiar with the story, I'd never seen it performed live before --- although I enjoyed the Steve Martin & Daryl Hannah movie, "Roxanne," based on the play. As the very first performance following their dress rehearsal, the play had some glitches and rough edges to work out. But it was likewise... awesome. It was very touching and powerful in a way that seems just out of reach of any movie.

I guess it pays to get out of the basement and office cubical and experience real life for a little bit.

Labels: Geek Life

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:28 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Favorite Deaths
In video games, death is simply the game's way of telling you, "Neener, neener!"

It's frequently a meaningless penalty requiring you to reload or, in older games, simply an expenditure of "lives." In the new 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, it sounds like (at epic levels) its something your characters are more-or-less expected to endure on an almost daily basis (Yeah, that's always sounded silly to me).

But sometimes... sometimes... it brings a smile to my face. Or is simply memorable for one reason or another. Sometimes its a little more than an annoying game mechanic. Sometimes it is spectacular. Here are four of my favorites:

Death #1 - Zork
Text adventure games - particularly the old Infocom games - often had great deaths in 'em. But leaving it at only one, what sticks out in my mind was an item that was described as resembling a tube of toothpaste. Attempting to brush my teeth with it revealed that it was an industrial-strength adhesive which killed me in a very amusing paragraph.

Death #2 - Karateka
The whole game, Jordan Mechner's precursor to the Prince of Persia series, centered around rescuing the princess. However, after defeating all the minions and the final boss, you enter the princess's cell. If you run to her arms, the two of you embraced in an early 80's version of a cinematic, and the game came to a satisfying conclusion.

If you approached her in a martial stance, she let her open arms drop. Come closer, prepared for battle, and she kicked you in the head. And killed you in one shot. You do not MESS with this princess! I think I fell out of my chair laughing when this one happened to me. And I always wondered how in the heck the villain managed to capture this deadly gal in the first place.

Death #3 - X-Com
I swear, the AI for the aliens in this game was programmed to be vicious. Whenever you'd pull out a grenade, you had to prime it and then throw it. I never had enough time units to do both on the same turn. The aliens seemed to ALWAYS target the guy with the primed grenade.

In this occasion, the dude with the primed grenade had just gotten off the ship, and was bunched up with a bunch of other squaddies at the base of the ship's ramp. They shot him. He dropped the primed grenade.

Boom! I lost half my squaddies before the third turn of combat.

Death #4 - EverQuest
I could fill this thing with MMO deaths. But here's just one: We were resting after a combat in North Ro. In the early days of EverQuest, there were Sand Giants in North Ro. A few months later, you'd almost never see them, because they'd be killed by players within two minutes of appearing. But back then --- they ravaged the population, as there was almost nobody over level 20 on the entire server.

I was 9th level. We were chatting with each other while resting (via text). My only warning was to see my companions stand up and run away, suddenly. I guess I hadn't heard the 20 foot tall giant sneaking up behind me. I'd also never seen that much damage done in a single blow at that point! And my companions could either type out a warning, or escape with their own lives. I couldn't blame them for their sudden, silent abandonment.

Okay, there are my favorite "death scenes" in games. What have you got?

Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:22 AM (Permalink) 12 comments links to this post

 
Game Industry Skill Crisis Its Own Fault
GamesIndustry.biz has posted an article about how the majority of "game development" programs offered by schools are leaving students ill-equipped to deal with the actual requirements of a game development career.

Industry Skills Message Hits Mainstream News

According to Matthew Jeffries, Head of European recruiting for EA, "If you look at the gaming degrees, a lot of them have been put together quite hastily and don't prepare graduates for a career in the industry... So the problem is that game degrees are almost like the latest fashion accessory - all the universities are running to set them up, but the students aren't being prepared in terms of the skill sets they have."

David "Elite" Braben complains that there is a lack of candidates with degrees in math, physics, and computer science.

Putting on my crusty ol' semi-disgruntled veteran cap, I've got my own comments to add about this "crisis" of skills in incoming recruits.

First of all, the games business isn't competitive in the job market. I don't know about science and math, but computer science graduates can easily make 15% more working outside of the games business. So you can work in a boring 9-5ish job (with some crunch, acknowledged) cranking out C# code for ASP.NET pages with plenty of time to play games and raise a family, or you can be paid $10,000 a year LESS to work in an industry with quality-of-life issues that make it sound like a sweatshop. But you get to make games.

That's a choice that is only interesting to real die-hard gamers for whom the coolness factor (and the lack of a dress code or early-morning hours) outweighs the hard hours and poor compensation. On the other hand, a "game design" degree is hard to leverage into anything outside of this industry.

Secondly - I'm not sure that technical degrees are great indicators of success in the game development field. Yes, I think programmers need to have a solid grasp of trigonometry and basic physics as well as programming concepts. But is having someone with a PhD in Physics on the team going to make or break a game? Unlikely.

The approach from the publishers and upper management these days is to make game development an assembly line widget factory anyway. Meanwhile, middle-management tends to rely upon heroics by team members, which is probably where the desire for more heroicly-inclined workers comes from. There's a fundamental disconnect in how the process is supposed to work, and more skilled workers aren't going to make that big of a difference cranking out the latest Third-Person Shooter Clone With a Movie License.

Finally - and most importantly - the "churn rate" in game studios and big publishers is a far, far bigger problem than finding better fresh-faced, eager-beaver recruits who have huge technical skills and a love of games that surpasses their instinct for survival and propagation. These companies are complaining about having to provide additional trading to new employees, but then they burn these guys out within 2-5 years and discard them with all the emotional attachment associated with tossing a used Kleenex.

The retention rates in the games industry are improving, I think, but they still suck. And a part of me wonders if the improved retention rate isn't coming from these game degrees that leave graduates trapped in the games biz.

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:44 AM (Permalink) 14 comments links to this post

 
Steven Peeler Talks Indie with RPS
Rock Paper Shotgun has a very cool interview with indie RPG author Steven Peeler, the guy behind the awesomelicious Depths of Peril. Some bits of trivia coming out of the interview:

* As I expected, Steven is the only full-time guy at Soldak Entertainment. The other names in the credits are contractors.

* Shortly before leaving Ritual, he pitched another RPG design - a very tense, scary, first-person-perspective RPG. Nothing like Depths of Peril.

* Soldak is not his first start-up company (or his first start-up company working on RPGs)

* His inspiration comes from an outstanding list of classic, old-school RPGs --- and Dungeons & Dragons.

* He's got another top-secret project that's "pretty far along now," but not talkin' about it yet.

He also talks about his decision to go indie after being pretty up the programmer hierarchy at a major development studio, where he came up with the design of Depths of Peril, the difficulties inherent in creating such a dynamic-world game, and much more.

If I were to teach a class in making indie RPGs, I'd put this article on the "required reading" list.

RPS Interview With Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment

Labels: Indie Evangelism, Interviews, programming, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:10 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post