Monthly Archive for October, 2007

‘The Outsider’ Takes New Approach to Storytelling

Published
on October 29, 2007
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At last week’s GameCity event, David Braben of Frontier Developments hosted a panel on storytelling in games, Gamasutra reported.

Braben’s The Outsider uses a contextual plot and conversation system in which the player, accused of murdering the President, plays off rival factions. Your reputation with these factions allows unique options in different situations.

Braben showed a short segment of the game in which a policeman bursts through a door to discover the player and immediately shouts at the fugitive main character to freeze for an arrest. At the same time, a rival faction comes in through another point in the room and pins both down with gun fire.

Using the contextual system, which gives players a quick choice of words snippets and phrases, Braben convinced the policeman to help fight the rival group. Now, because the encounter has made him friendlier with the police, they might, in later sections of the game, be persuaded to let the character slip by, or help him chase down other fleeing enemies.

Braben hopes that this realistic behavior, combined with the realistic physics that only motion sensors can provide, will draw the player deeper into the experience and relate him more with the characters and story.

Adding to the great “games as art” debate, Braben commented that games continue to be second-classed by mainstream media, under film and literature and alongside “action figures and cuddly toys.”

Braben called for a genius of this generation to move the industry forward in creative areas outside of graphics, adding, “We have a much more interesting medium for getting a story across.”

Downloadable Content for BioShock

Published
on October 19, 2007
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Ken Levine commented this week on downloadable content for BioShock. As the writer points out, BioShock with it’s very closed narrative is not the first game you’d associate with DLC.

For comparison, Half-Life 2’s episodic DLC works well with that game, extending the story after the cliffhanger ending. BioShock’s conclusion (at least the happy one I saw) tied up all the loose ends and left no room for post-plot antics. Another level just would not fit.

Bethesda has provided DLC for Oblivion since launch, with the final pack coming out next week. As an open-ended world, Oblivion readily facilitates the addition of new content, be it an expansion of the story, a new quest, a new weapon, or a new player house. The story in that game can be tackled at the player’s leisure, so it’s easy to add in a new level.

On the other hand, the Rapture of BioShock is such a tight experience that forces the player to move along a set path but in his own way. You can chose what skills to employ in combat and of course whether to save or harvest the little sisters, but you still run through the same number of levels and end up at the same boss. It’s an excellent way of telling a story, but leaves little leeway for a new level or expansion.

“Diablo II, to me, was a great model for an expansion, because it enhanced the original game, but also extended the game, too,” said Levine in an interview with Games for Windows magazine. “I’m not a really big fan of expanding things just by linearly adding to the experience, adding a new campaign, as much as I am of enhancing the original experience and adding replayability to that experience.”

“I think that certainly BioShock’s combat experience is great, but it could be broader. I’m a little more confused as far as how to expand the narrative experience,” he added.

The game is not fully linear, but there’s a definite starting and ending point, and the pacing is perfect. It could only be disrupted by attachments to the narrative. New plasmids though, that’s another story entirely. If they are implemented completely and don’t feel tacked on or useless, such DLC would be a welcome addition.

Millions of Voices Cry Out In Terror As EA Buys BioWare

Published
on October 12, 2007
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Like the child of a recently remarried parent, Mass Effect’s situation is dubious after EA purchased developer BioWare Corp. as well as Pandemic Studios yesterday. 1UP.com had some interesting speculation on the matter, taking into account EA’s relations with Pandemic and with previously purchased studios.

Mass Effect will still be published by Microsoft and remains exclusive to the Xbox 360. However, things aren’t so simple: BioWare plans to make Mass Effect the first game in a trilogy, and Microsoft has no contracted claim to the remaining games. EA is already set to publish Pandemic’s upcoming Mercenaries 2 game, and there’s no reason to doubt that they won’t want the same deal with BioWare.

Neither Microsoft’s statement nor an interview by 1UP with the CEO and the President of BioWare revealed anything definitive. So we turn to comparison. As the 1UP article points out, EA has already moved to put Valve’s The Orange Box on the PS3 even though Valve only developed an Xbox 360 and PC version internally. EA did so despite the outspoken criticisms of Sony by Valve’s Gabe Newell, and EA ported the Orange Box to the PS3 independently. Meaning: It’s possible that future games set in the Mass Effect universe could come out on other platforms.

Of course, the whole business of BioWare/Pandemic selling themselves to EA reeks of something. Close to two years ago, BioWare allied with Pandemic Studios under Elevation Partners, presumably to resist control by big publishing companies like EA, which has a reputation for stifling creativity in favor of generic but marketable products (not to mention for working their developers to the bone). But this isn’t a business blog.

So why does this matter?

Because BioWare is a tried and true team which has been making outstanding games for years, and EA is a polyglot borderline monopoly who’d rather make an extra buck than add depth and art to a gaming experience and who give little to no support to a game after launch.

Perhaps I’m overreacting. EA may recognize BioWare’s prowess and give them the leeway they deserve. BioWare execs said in an interview that their creativity was not threatened. But BioWare has always been one of my favorites, and I’d hate to see them go bad.

Game Concept Artists Assert Their Importance

Published
on October 7, 2007
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A feature on Gamasutra looks at the creative role of concept artists in gaming in the context of the new Into the Pixel art exhibition.

It’s somewhat startling how much influence concept artists have over the finished product.

“I was given free rein to create the world, so I dug deep, absorbed myself into my drawing and came up with the piñata idea, which really fueled the project,” Ryan Stevenson of Rare told Gamasutra. “As the only concept artist working on the game, it turned into an obsession and I designed every visual aspect of the Piñata universe—down to the pebbles and twigs.”

The article also contains some interesting musings on video games as an artform from the artists who would know best.

Lost Odyssey to Have 20 Hours of Cutscenes

Published
on October 3, 2007
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At a pre-Tokyo Game Show conference, Mistwalker’s Hironobu Sakaguchi revealed new information about the developer’s upcoming Xbox 360 JRPG Lost Odyssey.

One of the most surprising details Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, mentioned pertains to game length. He estimated that Lost Odyssey will take 40 hours to beat and includes 20 hours of event scenes. Essentially, it’s Xenosaga on steroids.

The game has a deep backstory, with the cursed main character having lived for no less than 1,000 years, and many event scenes explore his accrued memories. Interestingly, much of the backstory is explored via passages written by Japanese author Kiyoshi Shigematsu.

According to Sakaguchi, there are 34 written passages, and each takes between 5 and 10 minutes to read. That means as much as 6 of the game’s 20 hours of event scenes are reading.

I understand that a good story needs depth, and many a good game employ writing to explore it, including the recent Oblivion with its library of history books. But Sakaguchi may be going to far with this, entirely divorcing gameplay from what may be necessary developments in the story. It will be interesting to see how this game is received.

Lost Odyssey will release in Japan this December.

Story in Open World Games

Published
on October 3, 2007
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Gamasutra has a feature on 20 of the best open world games, an unquestionably popular genre with games like the Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto series in its ranks and one with an important approach to story.

Too often does story have a tacked-on feel in these games. In the Metroid and Castlevania games, you fight and explore your way to the boss, be it an alien or vampire. Most fantasy-themed game pit you against some evil overlord, hellspawned or otherwise, and his army of minions. The most ridiculous example of ridiculous plot comes from Blaster Master, in which your frog escapes and you have to find it. This isn’t the rule with open games, but there are few exceptions.

Open world games truly are one of the best places to exercise storylines. Not only can a good story serve as a loose guide through an otherwise daunting world (such as in the Baldur’s Gate series), but a good non-linear story gives background and depth to an otherwise large, liberated and tragically one-dimensional world.

Finding such a title is unfortunately rare, and the games are usually riddled with cliches. Grand Theft Auto’s tales come straight out of gangster flicks. The Gamasutra article mentions terms like “darkness” and “corruption,” “lathered liberally” over games like Metroid Prime 2 and 3.

It’s possible that this is inevitable. Open world games today, especially ones with the scope of Oblivion, require large teams and larger sums of cash, and exploring an unconventional world is a risky move. It’s interesting to compare the originality of setting in Morrowind–with its mushroom towns, terraced stone cities, tribal natives, and strange gods–to the more generic Medieval-fantasy one of Oblivion.