A Thought

The number of games out right now means you're probably picking at most three or four, with plans to double-back for the rest later. Games are almost too good now. (How many times am I going to march through Horde mode? Probably a few more times.) You feel left out when you put off one game for another, leaving a little room in for real life.

Read the gaming sites, you see it's also a good time to make video games The industry is holding its own in this economy. And yet, when an industry is doing well, even during an economic downturn, it takes success as a sign that it should be doing better. If we're making this much money, we certainly deserve to be making twice as much.

Marty O'Donnell feels that proceeds from a second-hand sale of Halo 3 should be given to Bungie, which would pretty much cripple the used sale market and deny our right to sell something we paid for. Epic Games' Mike Capps even floated the idea that you should have to pay to download the endings to games, that the boss fights should be paid-DLC.

Game developers work 24 hours a day. It's a grueling job. What's funny is, the guys complaining are probably two of the richest guys in the industry. "If only gamers had fewer rights! Who wrote that copyright law?"

Blezinski drives a Lambo. Not sure how or why I know this, but I do. Capitalism.

While the industry works out a way to get its hands on our resale dollars, it's taking more legitimate steps to separate us from our money. Which brings me to the NXE.

Now that the new dashboard update is officially out, I'd like to make a request to all 2O2P gamers, whom I believe to be the smartest people on XBL.

Do not buy clothes for your doll!

You've probably read that the XBL avatars will be able to wear custom pixels in the form of clothing. That this clothing will be sold for MS points, 250-350 each, (I am guessing this high, since the best of the stuff will be licensed by game makers).

A Fallout 3 helmet.
A Bioshock diver's suit.
A COD4 sniper ghillie suit.

Gear for your avatar?

Clothes for your doll.

Microsoft has a predominantly male population dressing up avatar dolls. This we must live with. And the avatars do serve a function, to make XBL more visual. That I understand. It's a good goal, and seems to work well. In fact, the reason I'm saying "don't buy clothes" is precisely because the avatars are sort of cute and disarming.

They're also kind of vanilla, effeminate, softer looking. The minute a company presents a way to make them tougher and more unique, you know the temptation's going to be there to fork over $4-5 to do it. And that gets me back to the video game industry making more money.

I still haven't bought one of the premium-priced XBLA games from this summer. I don't see why Braid deserves $5 more than Geometry Wars 2. Braid is artistic, very stylish. But is it more of a value? Is it a game-and-a-half? The precedent of paying more did not sit well with me. If MS sees a $15-price point moving product, they're going to look at 95% of the other XBLA games and think, "don't we deserve more here than $10?"

At least we're taking about games. The avatars: complete window dressing. Not one dollar that goes into tarting up our avatar dolls will go into our enjoyment of games. OK, in Kingdom For Keflings you could probably wear your Fallout 3 helmet while you're stomping on people. But you know what I mean.

The video game industry is doing well because it offers great value to us. The industry deserves its success, and we're the ones making it successful. I bet we're all spending more on video games than we used to. I have more games I haven't completed than I want to tell you about. (Mostly bought used, I tell myself....)

Moving forward, the biggest opportunity for the video game industry, beyond the huge epic games which take 2-3 years to make, is the snarky little transaction, like the upcoming avatar-gear, or non-functional DLC like the Dead Space skins that came out last week. (You could spend $26 on Dead Space DLC, or half the price of the actual game.)

We don't have to buy clothes for our dolls. We can say, no thanks. The doll is fine. It shows that I'm online. It's sort of customizable. But I'm going to pass on the opportunity to pay for virtual clothing.

If we all did it, then we wouldn't worry about keeping up with xXxSnipzxXx who has the Silent Hill dripping-bloody dagger. These are next-gen Barbies. Our own families need clothes. Games are one thing. But these are not games. These are dolls. Let's end the madness before it begins!

The NXE is the start of a great new cycle of video gaming. Maybe we use the opportunity to take a look at all the macro and micro-transactions taking place within our favorite hobby.

I'm sure some of you remember this news story a few years back. A cleaning woman in the south who made very little money, after a long life was able to donate a couple million dollars to a university. The donation made the news everywhere. The woman had no formal education herself, just saved her money. I'm never going to be that woman. But it does make you think.

Posted by LilGideon @ 11:29 am EDT | Permalink | 7 Comments

COD: Developers At War

A couple of posts ago, I got after Treyarch a bit over the World At War beta. It felt like a step backwards in some ways from Call Of Duty 4, a step sideways in others. (All said, It is a fun game. I would buy it for thirty bucks.) What I was most surprised over, though, was the shameless way Treyarch was piggy-backing on Infinity Ward's game in the gaming blogs.

"World At War, built on the COD4 engine." It's the first thing you hear from Treyarch. It makes sense, of course. COD4 was huge. But if Treyarch spent two years on World At War, there should be something a lot bigger to lead off with. The Rainbow Six Vegas series was built on the Unreal 3 engine, but that's not even in the top three things you hear about the RSV games.

In my post I kinda questioned how good Treyarch could be as a developer, being so quick to promote their game based on another developer's game (their arch-rivals, no less). The best creative people are fiercely stubborn about being original. Bungie, Epic, Infinity Ward. Their self-confidence and near-arrogance is what we like about them. They demand a lot from themselves and they seem to always deliver.

I had no knowledge that Infinity Ward was feeling chafed over all this "built on the COD4 engine" business. But apparently, they are. The IW blogger "IAMfourzerotwo" fired off a pretty nasty blog post, letting everyone know how unhappy he is at how World At War being marketed. I can't repeat what he wrote. This is a family blog You can see it here. Rare to see how someone feels from behind the scenes. And to go after your parent company's VP, wow.

http://www.fourzerotwo.com/2008/11/07/noah-heller-stop-doing-interviews/

Look past the harsh language and you can see, he has a point. He's calling out Noah Heller, not Treyarch. But if you were Treyarch, you should be saying the same thing. "Our game can stand on its own." Why aren't they saying that. Again, none of this has to do with how the game plays. I'm sure it'll be COD, regardless. But it is fascinating to see how the gaming industry is dealing with these multiple developers working on the same franchise.

*

Another thing Treyarch is doing. For months they talked how they strive to make their games historically accurate. How they felt compelled to go back to World War Two because there were so many stories left untold. Hearing Treyarch in interviews you began to see them as pseudo-historians, bring these battles to life for a new generation.

Then the beta came out. Then the pre-orders were canceled. Then Gears 2 came out. Now, Treyarch has changed course with a new trailer for COD:World At War, called "Slo-Mo." You have to see this thing. I'm sure many of you will be like, cool. Good trailer. But the message of this thing couldn't be further away from what Treyarch was saying about historical accuracy. Now it's, destroy, kill, no rules... An aggro approach. You can tell these game trailers are not rated by anybody, like movie trailers, rated by the MPAA. They can make it as over-the-top as they want, which I have a huge problem with. Not the game necessarily, but the marketing of it.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/42425.html

The marketing of this game has been a disaster, mainly because Treyarch isn't doing anything original, just letting Activision sell their game for them based off of COD4. Everyone knows that's not enough to sell the number of copies as COD4. But we all knew this going-back-to-WW2 thing was a mistake in the first place, and now it's all unraveling.

The huge problem I have with marketing games as violent-bloodbaths is that it drags us down as a society. I know, you're probably laughing at that. But I sit here thinking, we're marketing this as entertainment. What's so entertaining about shoving a pistol in someone's face and pulling the trigger, repeatedly. (An image from the World At War trailer.)

Yes, I know it's violence-fantasy. I know it's satisfying on some level. I don't even mind it being possible to do in the game itself. Violence is conflict, and necessary for an FPS to work. But when we get advertisements that show wanton cruelty, bloodlust and all that, it cheapens us. It appeals to the basest part of people. Teamwork, skill, surprise, these are also parts of the FPS experience and much more the reason any of us play these games. The blood-and-guts approach is pretty insulting, actually. Like that's how all us gamers tick.

These developers who do this, they're going after the only audience enthralled with violence, the teenage boy who isn't supposed to be playing the game. It's the old wink-wink. It makes me so mad that I have to separate the marketing from the game, like I had to do with Gears 2, when all Cliff Blezinski could talk about was how amped-up the violence was. I tuned him out and bought the game, and you know what? I turned off the gore and forgot and didn't miss it. It's the gameplay, not the gore, not the edginess that wears off after ten minutes. It's the gameplay that makes Gears 2 great. And it's probably the gameplay that makes World At War a good game, the only problem being, it's Infinity Ward's gameplay. I hope more developers focus on that obvious point.

And as gamers, I hope we can get tougher on some aspects of gaming, like having developers pander to us with marketing spin (built on COD4 engine), or go after our kids with violent trailers. It's not hypocrical to criticize some things about gaming and still buy the games. These games aren't painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They ain't art, and even if you think they are, it's fair to be sharp about what we're playing and why. My blog isn't all that popular on here, partly because I write a novel every time, but probably also because I'm challenging some conventions of games, and possibly sound like I'm down on gaming. It's because I like this community and because I want to be proud of the games I play that I ask a bit more of these very talented developers. They know when they're mailing it in, spinning, or going for the easy fix. They need to keep the fan, the parent and the consumer in mind more than they sometimes do.

Posted by LilGideon @ 8:24 pm EDT | Permalink | 7 Comments

Real Challenge?

I jumped into Call Of Duty: World At War yesterday (that just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it). I'm in Free-For-All, running around with the pea-shooter they give you when you're a Level 7. I can barely scratch my opponents with this thing, the Thompson, I think. I'll unload a clip into someone at 50 feet, and they'll scoot around a corner. Realism, gotta love it.

In the Kill Cam (wait, Nemesis Cam) I can see the weapons my Level 44 opponents are using. Of course, these heavy guns spit out bullets. The guns are so rapid-fire, guys don't even have to target me very well. The game actually allows them to get lazier as they level up. Which got me thinking.

Why do all the newer FPS games (Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Call Of Duty 4, Battlefield:Bad Company, and now Call Of Duty: World At War), why do they give the supposed-l33t players better weapons as they put hundreds of hours into the game? Shouldn't skilled players actually want weapons that are harder to use as they get better at playing?

I think game makers have this whole thing backwards. What a challenging FPS should do is start everyone with the best weapons, a good submachine gun (not that Thompson). Then, as you rank up, you're given a harder weapon to use, a bolt-action rifle, for example. This would give the good players a new challenge.

Let's face it, bad players need easy weapons, not guys who have put two solid weeks into a shooter.

Halo 3 gets this right. When you're new to the game, you generally avoid the sniper rifle. It's too hard to aim, scope, zoom when you're new. You're liable to get killed standing there fiddling with it. But as you gain confidence with the game mechanics, you pick up the sniper more often. Then you search for it. You drop your AR in a second to pick it up.

Many players would probably feel robbed if a shooter rewarded their skill with tougher weapons. I suspect most gamers want the ego boost of destroying lower-level players, and they'll play the game for a hundred hours just so they can be cock of the walk in this one game.

On the other hand, this philosophy of reducing your weapon's power and effectiveness would separate the elite players from the stat-padders. It would give great players a chance to keep improving their skills with trickier weapons, and also give new players a reason to step on the battlefield, because they'd get a powerful gun that gave them a chance. Then, as they got better at the game, they would trade in their gun for something less powerful.

In Call Of Duty: World At War (it doesn't get any shorter the more you type it) I started using the bolt-action rifle, because it had the most kick for my class. Since it was Free-For-All, I heard a guy in the mic complain when he was killed by it, because I guess he thought it was an embarrassing way to die. I did enjoy the skill it took to aim and only get to fire 3 or 4 bullets. Downing someone with it was more satisfying than if I'd been in COD4 using a P90. (Which I don't have, either, being only a Level 33.)

Starting World At War back in Kindergarden, ranking-up in another FPS, where the main challenge is, "put a ton of hours into our game," I'm getting bored with that. I'm also time-strapped, which is why I mainly play Halo 3, because it doesn't withhold weapons from anyone. In a game with a "ranking down" concept, I would be interested to see how the great players found ways to dominate. I'm not saying, "For Level 55's, pistols only." The drop-off in weapon-effectiveness wouldn't have to be that extreme. Something in the middle.

What say you? Would you play a multi-player game that gave you harder weapons as you got better? Or is a routine leveling-up system the only way to go in FPS?

Posted by LilGideon @ 10:53 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

The Downside Of Doing Everything Right

When Treyarch announced that Call Of Duty 5, or World At War, was going to be a World War 2 game, most players groaned. Then when Treyarch released the game trailers, showing a sharp battlefield and all the visual mayhem we've come to expect from the series, many of us were optimistic. Then Treyarch released the playable beta, and those of us who were invited to play knew we were just a few matches away from an automatic pre-order. It hasn't worked out that way, though. I think most of us are back to groaning.

That's not to say the beta is bad. Getting invited to play a free game is never bad, especially one built like Call Of Duty 4. When I'm asked for impressions, at some point I say, "I'm sure the game will be fun if someone buys it." The fact that the game is new means a lot, new maps, new experiences, and a new co-op mode that was a huge omission in the last tour. And this week Treyarch pulled a Nazi zombie mode out of its hat, timely news considering that Left 4 Dead is also coming out and now some players can get their undead fix through COD instead. Also, there's nothing gained in slagging a game someone else has $60 into. (My post below about Fallout 3 did not knock the game itself, since I haven't played it, but questioned the marketing approach Bethesda has taken with promoting the game. I understand that "evil" choices are a staple of RPG gameplay. That doesn't mean it's the the plot line to get the game into my hands.) Mainly, I do think Treyarch's new game is worth full price for those who are willing to overlook its problems in search of the new and slightly different.

For many of us, though, Treyarch erred. The beta reveals a light, comical "war is hell" approach that Kubrick mastered and then Hollywood turned into a cliche. This tone is a huge departure from the CNN-inspired "imbedded" feel of COD4, which frankly, makes war feel like hell in a very real way, especially when you know we have our countrymen and women stationed over there right now living that life. You can't play COD4 without thinking, this is more than a game. Its paranoid violence is that intrusive. Infinity Ward followed the rules we've seen many times, improved them and then kinda broke them, leaving someone else to figure out how they did it and how to do it better next time.

Spend a few hours with Treyarch's new game, and you can see that they did not try to figure out how to do it better. Hearing Treyarch's game designers talk, I'm convinced Treyarch did not even try to improve the game. They promote their own game as "built on the COD4 engine." The next time you hear Mercedes announce a car "built on a BMW platform...." You'll never hear it, even if there was platform sharing between the two companies. (Mercedes and BMW are collaborating on some things, so this does happen behind the scenes.)

There's a pride within certain companies that prevents them from basing their success on anyone else. I'm not saying that Treyarch does not have pride in its game. COD:WAW shows a lot of detail and care, no question. The approach they took, though, was small to begin with, which was to improve on the success of Infinity Ward's game. Yes, it's all Call Of Duty. They're both playing for the same team, etc. But they're still two separate companies, responsible for the games they make. One can't lean on the success of another and expect to make a game that goes beyond the expectations the previous game set up. We've seen a lot of this gameplay before. It can only be new once, meaning, can only be worth $60 once.

If Treyarch wanted to make WAW an irony-filled gonzo excursion into the warped minds of grizzled GI's (taking a cue from the voice acting), then take that somewhere.

I think Treyarch made a mistake in accepting this assignment from Activision. "Make your next game based on this game." They did an admirable job. The dogs are a clever idea. The dogs, and... hmmm... Kiefer Sutherland's hammy voice? And does the gameplay feel like an arcade mode, everything fast and springy? The perk emblems on the screen do look pretty. And the beta maps are tight, if really really small. But does anyone else feel the sound design is just too quiet?

Having worked in a creative field for a long time, I've often been asked to "do what that guy did, your own way. Run with it!" And many times, I did. I didn't have a choice at the time. I wasn't working for the company that changed things, but one of its followers. Treyarch appears to be in this position. They did everything that Activision asked them to do, delivered a game based on the game of another developer. They did it pretty well. They even did it pretty fast. They probably made Activision happy (so far).

We're in the same position, in whatever we do for a living, pressured to follow others, rewarded for it, until it doesn't work anymore, then blamed for the failure. I wonder if Treyarch will get knocked if COD:WAW doesn't sell... strike that, when it doesn't sell as many copies as COD4. With all the heavyweight games coming out, it may sell half the copies, or even a third. Treyarch will get blamed, when I think their only mistake was taking on the job, a situation I can relate to. Selling out is simply making the wrong people happy.

Posted by LilGideon @ 11:34 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

Where's The Love?

Bethesda has posted five gameplay videos for Fallout 3 on Xbox Live. The videos (mild spoilers ahead) show a sequence of gameplay, from leaving the vault, to visiting a town called Megaton, to accepting a quest to blow up said town, to learning how to target enemy body parts and scavange dead bodies, to delivering a detonator to a rich industrialist and then being given the honor of personally blowing up the town of Megaton, and as a reward, witnessing a beautifully-rendered mushroom cloud rise over the dystopian landscape.

Geez.

I knew Fallout 3 was set in a post-apocalypse Washington, D.C. I didn't expect to see Julie Andrews twirling atop a mound of rubble, singing her do-re-mi's. I did expect some gritty gameplay. But Bethesda chose what seems to be Fallout 3's most unpleasant storyline option to sell its game to the uninformed masses.

Yes, they did show the player's "karma" go down when the character blew up Megaton, Like Fable, there is a type of morality system at work in Fallout 3. Did they have to showcase the harshest possible actions in these gameplay trailers, though? Couldn't the character have disarmed the bomb instead of activating it? What's the point of blowing up that town?

(Yeah, I know. It's cool to destroy stuff. It's just, these grim options are not usually advertised by the game maker. They're usually left for the player to discover and decide on yay or nay. As RPG's go, it was an aggro choice for a game trailer.)

I was not surprised att the bleakness of the landscape, which was impressive. The artful graphics were already selling me on the game, and the promise of a massive, immersive storyline. But the level of amorality on display in the game, and what can be seen popping up in the newer crop of games, we have to agree stretches the definition of fun.

Like Gears of War and its successor, we have headshots in Fallout 3 that remove the head from the torso and spray a gooey grape jelly-like substance from the newly-created stump. All the while, in the Live videos we have a narrator matter-of-factly pointing out the ways that you can kill and dismember characters and even how you can slip a live grenade into a NPC's back pocket. From the videos, it seems the character you play in Fallout 3 is a type of merchant-of-death, killing before he is killed, oh, and he's also on a redemptive quest to find his father. How sweet.

I'm not saying I'm a lily-white gamer. I've bought many of the games that are out there, including vicerally-nasty games like Bioshock and Gears of War. But it seems that violent gameplay isn't enough anymore, now we have to show just how sociopathic you can get in a world that's fully-formed and ready to make you feel you're doing the stuff for real.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still see games as games, which means, as child's play, somewhat innocent entertainment. Halo 3 is a perfect example of this. You can assassinate, and pwn, but you feel like you're on a playground. It seems to me there's a new generation of games trying to turn games into something else, something darker, something like the mythical death simulator that freaked-out parents accused Doom 2 of being back in the early 90's. We all laughed at that, because the blocky sprites in Doom 2 were hardly to be taken seriously.

I still believe in rooting for the good guy, in being given the opportunity to make bad choices, but choosing to save the town more often than not. Fallout 3 may celebrate that in the game, I don't know. The developer seemed to think the negative storyline was more compelling, and that's the storyline my wife watched with me. If I were ever to buy the game, I'd have her to look at me thinking, what kind of charge is he getting out of that? (The wanton F-bombs in the trailers, almost forgot those.) I'm not saying anyone who buys this game is a sociopath, far from it. I know the gamers on 2Old2Play are the smartest gamers out there. It just bothers me. Any way you look at it, the stakes are being raised in M-rated games.

Posted by LilGideon @ 1:13 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments