Yearly Archive for 2008

Stardock CEO Returns to PC Gaming’s Complicated Basics

Published
on November 17, 2008
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Stardock CEO Brad Wardell is devoted to reviving the classic era of PC gaming in all its excess. Stardock is currently developing Elemental: War of Magic for a 2010 release, a turn-based fantasy strategy game intended as a spiritual successor to the 1995 game Master of Magic.

Wardell talked about upcoming Stardock projects in a recent interview with Gamasutra and commented on the responsibilities of companies who take on old franchises.

“If you’re making a game that ends with ‘3,’ or Something: The Sequel, it should be similar to the original game,” Wardell told Gamasutra. “Don’t go off and say, ‘I have my own artistic vision.’ Okay, good — so call it something else. Don’t ride the coattails of the people who came before you to launch your own artistic vision.”

In the interview, Wardell also expressed interest in revisiting Toys For Bob’s Star Control II and Simtex’s classic series Master of Orion, last updated in 2003.

The CEO told Gamasutra that Stardock is building up a second full internal development team, and is tossing around various project ideas. “We’d like to do a roleplaying game too,” he said, pointing to BioWare classics like Baldur’s Gate II and Knights of the Old Republic as examples of the route he would like to take.

It would be “the same style of isometric gameplay — not first person — where I have a party that I’m interacting with,” he explained.

“I think there are a lot of people who want that. They want to have a party again. They want to have a Minsc-type character in there. You can’t have that interesting banter if it’s just one guy running around.”

Stardock earned a benevolent reputation among PC faithful after developing the excellent Galactic Civilizations II and publishing Ironclad Games’ Sins of a Solar Empire, both without any form of controversial copy protection or DRM. Their next published game, Gas Powered Games’ Demigod, comes out in early 2009.

It’s good to see a growing publishing house stay true to its roots and out to serve a small but ravenous audience of old school PC gamers.

The elaborate gameplay, structure and length of games like Baldur’s Gate II and Master of Orion got left behind by modern developers intent on mass appeal, and revivals like Gas Powered Games’ Supreme Commander fail to produce significant numbers.

Yet there’s something absolutely immersive about incredibly complicated gameplay, as anyone who tried out Steel Battalion’s unique mech controller will say. The spell system and character dynamics of Baldur’s Gate II brought that world to life, and the complicated micromanagement of Master of Orion gave the game’s universe political and economic verisimilitude.

If Stardock is truly pledged to bring back this wrongly abandoned aspect of PC gaming, then we should all be excited to see what they come up with.

REVIEW: ‘Fable II’ Needs More Than A Hero’s Sandbox

Published
on November 14, 2008
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Michael the Farmer has a bag of gold for you. Do you a) slice him in half, b) shoot him in the groin, c) light him on fire, or d) fart and do hand puppets until he gives it to you.

Fable II is made up of choices like this, all of them part of a long process of defining your blank slate hero, and the game is a major improvement over Molyneux’s first fairy tale simulator.

Combat is fun and occasionally strategic, with combat, ranged, and magic attacks. Quests offer diverse, story-driven objectives, from “clear the mine” to “break the girl’s heart.” Minigames, town interactions, and a robust bartering and land-buying economy fill the gaps and make Fable II’s world of Albion feel complete and realistic.

This world is a sandbox for your hero, who starts out an orphan and is raised by gypsies. Through actions and behavior — what you eat, what you wear, how you deal with an angry ghost or a group of slavers — you define what that hero is like and how the world views him.

Your actions swing you between good and evil, pure and corrupt, with many possible variations, and your appearance changes along with it. You also become funny or frightening depending on how you deal with people, and attractive or ugly depending on your clothes, tattoos, scars, and purity.

It’s a complicated system, but so’s life. In the end you’re left with a character who feels entirely unique and who was slowly simmered over 20 hours of gameplay and choices rather than 10 minutes in the character generation microwave.

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BioWare Pushes MMO Storytelling With ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’

Published
on November 13, 2008
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It came as no surprise that Electronic Arts, LucasArts, and BioWare put World of Warcraft on notice when they announced Star Wars: The Old Republic late last month.

Every MMO released this year has tried to distinguish itself from Blizzard’s monolith in some aspect, and with The Old Republic, BioWare is focusing on storytelling, their realm of expertise.

Developers from BioWare Austin talked about how they will address this chronically underserved aspect of the genre at a round-table discussion, covered by Joystiq. Most of all, they want to treat the player as seriously as if this were a single-player experience.

“You will never in the game go into a cantina and poke a random person to see if you can solve their problems and they’ll give you money,” said Lead Writer Daniel Erickson. “You will never have some stranger on the street ask you to save their cat. You do large, heroic things.

“I always tell my writers,” Erickson continued, “to imagine if the very first response you could ever choose to any quest they might pitch is, ‘Excuse me, I’m saving the world. Is this important?’”

According to BioWare, The Old Republic contains more dialog and content than all its past titles combined.

“If you roll a Jedi character and you play them from the first level to the last level, and then you roll a Sith and you play them from the first level to the last level, you will not see one repeated quest, line of dialogue, or piece of content,” said Erickson. “It is a 100% different story experience.”

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Can the ‘Mirror’s Edge’ Experiment Go Mainstream?

Published
on November 8, 2008
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Mirror’s Edge is proof that publisher Electronic Arts can still innovate, but will the unique take on FPS gameplay pay off?

“Executing an unbroken flow from A to B is what Mirror’s Edge is all about,” says Edge Magazine in a staff preview of the new game. “Stringing together a few moves increases your speed, and there’s a purity and zing to bouncing between surfaces and popping over a low handrail in one smooth motion.”

The gameplay, especially the focus on weapon-less combat, that has drawn so much critical praise could turn away casual FPS gamers used to running and gunning tactics that won’t work in Mirror’s Edge. Instead the game asks players to sprint past enemies and over obstacles and to leap without looking.

This style immerses you in the world and the adrenaline-rush of its main character, but it runs contrary to a generation of FPS instinct. “Overcoming inclinations toward caution and inertia in first-person should perhaps have been one of the tutorial’s priorities,” the Edge article comments.

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle — gameplay conventions become instincts among gamers and hard to break. A steep learning curve accompanies any deviation from the old ways, and experimental games often seem unpolished by comparison to the tried-and-true.

This makes Mirror’s Edge confusing initially. “Your first steps are bewildering, but they soon become bewitching and even oddly familiar,” says the Edge preview. “It isn’t an FPS, not as we think of them. It’s a Full-on Platformer, Stupid.”

Mirror’s Edge comes out next Tuesday on Windows, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360.

Make Your Own ‘Humble Origins’

Published
on November 5, 2008
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Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey can frame an epic tale or be a fallback for bad storytelling, says game writer Corvus on his blog.

“While good writers can use the monomyth structure to great effect and weave a compelling tale that is both familiar and new,” writes Corvus, “lazy writers stick so closely to the formula that they actually highlight the formula within the text itself.”

Corvus looks at how the “monomyth” was implemented in the first two Fallout games, Fable and its recent sequel, and Dungeon Siege, “the most obvious and transparent monomyth setup of them all.”

In the opening cinematic, the narrator states that a humble farmer is all that stands between the kingdom and encroaching chaos. Then you pick up your hoe and start smacking goblins — an activity that continues until Burt Reynolds becomes king.

I’ve written about the Hero’s Journey before, and about the “humble origins” of player-created heroes in games. Nearly always these characters start as orphans or amnesiacs, with no interesting past but what the player decides to give them.

The original Fallout, as Corvus points out, left it up to the player to decide why the protagonist was selected to leave the vault and why he chose to save the world. The Vault Dweller could be the strongest and most noble, or a cunning snake who broke free to enrich himself.

Fable, on the other hand, called the protagonist Hero, and made him weepingly seek vengeance for his family’s murder. The game’s climax is his fate, not something chosen as it is with the Vault Dweller.

Developers need to create new ways to set the player on the Hero’s Journey without feeling dominated by it. Mass Effect allowed the player to chose Commander Shepard’s birthplace and military background, which I think is a good start.

Tales of Gaming Horror and Woe

Published
on October 31, 2008
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Few know the dark history of the gaming industry — linked to terrorism, cursing gamers with bad hardware and athletes with bad knees, only to be buried deep in the New Mexico desert. These are button-mashing tales to chill the HP in your veins. Happy Halloween!

Saddam Hussein’s PS2-powered missiles

The holiday season in 2000 brought severe shortages of newly released Playstation 2. Some would say criminally severe.

According to a World Net Daily story later picked up by IGN, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein purchased 4,000 PS2 consoles to use their powerful graphics processors to guide missiles. Hussein chose the console in order to get around UN sanctions prohibiting the sale of computers to Iraq.

‘Applications for this system are potentially frightening,’ said an intelligence source. ‘One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV — a pilotless aircraft.’

Fearful western critics were quick to decry this warning as false. PS2s cannot be linked and used together without very complex programming, and UK intelligence dismissed World Net Daily’s claims.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if there really are 4,000 Playstation 2s stockpiled in the Iraqi wastes alongside all those missing weapons of mass destruction. Slowly their hive consciousness gains self-awareness and waits for the cold day of robot judgment.

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REVIEW: Don’t Forget ‘Dark Messiah’

Published
on October 28, 2008
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Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was released last October to mediocre reviews and slow sales, not surprising for a game based on an outdated strategy series with a small cult following. I picked up the year-old FPS/RPG hybrid while waiting for this season’s storm of new games and had a lot of fun with it.

Dark Messiah is an enjoyable ride reminiscent of Thief and Half-Life with rousing visuals and exhilerating gameplay.

The protagonist is an orphan named Sareth, raised and trained by an ominous-voiced wizard who sends him out to find magical artifacts. Eventually he learns more about his past and makes that eternal choice between good and evil.

The story is told through dialog, cinematics and old books you find lying around. Like Half-Life, the cut scenes are viewed through the main character’s eyes, but unlike Gordon Freeman, Sareth speaks, both to other characters and the succubus that lives in his head.

The voice acting is kind of bad for all the main characters, and the writing is not much better. Where Dark Messiah really shines is the fast, intuitive gameplay, which combines spells and sword-swinging combos.

Combat is a blast, and plays more like a Deus Ex shooter than a Morrowind RPG. Weapon combat is quick and satisfying, with fun animations and brutal fatalities and criticals. Stats matter — you can put points into combat, magic or stealth abilities depending on how you want to play.

Sareth can use the environment to his advantage by kicking unwary soldiers, orcs and necromancers off cliffs or into fires or spikes. Shovels, chairs and jars of oil offer makeshift weapons that can be picked up and thrown, or just cut ropes and drop chandeliers or debris on enemies.

These scripted traps are the only way to defeat larger monsters. They’re fun to find but can seem contrived, especially when every goblin camp has a platform covered in barrels with one shaky support.

Nevertheless the environments in Dark Messiah are nice to look at thanks to brilliant art design and a lot of fun to mess with. Each cluster of enemies can be approached in many different ways, depending Sareth’s abilities and what items are around.

The areas between combat play like Half-Life and force you to work your way through the level using keys and shooting ropes tied to arrows Batman style. They can get a little repetitive and confusing but are generally very fun.

Dark Messiah showcases some entertaining gameplay ideas, albeit with a cliched plot and characters, and makes me wish that Bethesda had used such innovative combat with Oblivion. The game is well worth a quick playthrough, especially when it currently costs $10 on Steam.

Where is Gaming’s ‘Citizen Kane’?

Published
on October 24, 2008
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In this month’s edition of Game Couch’s Blog Banter series, five bloggers answered the question: Does gaming have a Citizen Kane?

Orson Welles’ classic film was a technically innovative, personally deep and infinitely enjoyable masterpiece still watched again and again six decades after it was made.

“Are there any video games that possess a timeless appeal?” asked Lou Chou of Lou vs Video Games: Fight! “Games that, despite constant advances in technology, retain a game engine or narrative that will forever be relevant. If so, why?”

In answering his own question, Chou said that there are no timeless games, only revolutionary “artifacts” which developed concepts and gameplay elements that are then adapted by later titles. BioShock and Dead Space are better than their predecessors, System Shock and Resident Evil.

The bloggers at Game Couch said old games cannot be replayed like old films. People discover films like Citizen Kane through television, theaters and re-releases, said Game Couch, but “if you want to play Ico, you need the game disk and you need a PlayStation 2… Ico is a magnificent game — a work of art — but it’s essentially undiscoverable.”

Both dismissals are flawed, but not incorrect.

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Students Love ‘Fallout,’ Worry Over ‘Fallout 3′

Published
on October 22, 2008
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Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer has proven why we should be dissatisfied with Bethesda’s upcoming take on the Fallout franchise through the observations of newly initiated.

The Chosen One seeks the Garden of Eden Creation Kit in 'Fallout 2'He handed over Fallout and Fallout 2 to his class of mostly casual gamers, who initially struggled with the decade old world.

“After exiting the vault, they had no idea where to go or what to do. Their movements were limited for no apparent reason; “action points” made no sense; and they died within minutes nearly everywhere they went,” said Abbot.

The students had trouble grasping the SPECIAL system, action points, and the severe dangers of Fallout’s nonlinear world. The game did not coddle its players or hold their hand; it shoved them into a brutal landscape where many areas offered instant and unremitting death to the unwary Vault Dweller.

But those who stuck with the games found the wonderfully engaging experience that lurks under the surface. Abbott posted some of their observations:

What is interesting about the random encounters in the game is that not all of them are hostile encounters. The kind of encounter that is very rare in games is the neutral encounter where you encounter people fighting. You can help either side but even then sometimes they will just turn around and attack you when they beat whoever they were fighting. My favorite way to deal with these encounters is to wait till a few of them die, and then it’s looting corpses time. It’s amazing what kind of nice loot you can find on them. It’s also where I got my first gun.

What effect would the isolation of the vaults have on the society? And what would changed based on the nuclear apocalypse? It would be like taking all the data in the world and deleting random parts. It would cause mass chaos, especially once the original humans (from pre-nuking) die out. Or, alternatively, there could be a safe-haven somewhere. From a developing standpoint, how could that effect the game? Could it?

I just found out that the greeter at the Den tells you to be vewy vewy quiet he is hunting rabbits, and i just stopped and laughed for about fifteen mins.

Abbott’s students got it. The dangers and aimlessness of Fallout absorbed them into that world and the character they played, a Vault Dweller newly emerged into the savage wild. He asked his students what they thought about Bethesda’s Fallout 3, long criticized by the Fallout faithful.

After a long and productive conversation I asked them how they were feeling about Fallout 3. ‘They’re totally gonna screw up that game,’ said one student. ‘They’re gonna say shoot this guy in the eyeball, like they’re giving you all these choices, but you know they’re gonna make it run and gun. You’re gonna be running around blowing stuff up, and all the shooter players are gonna love it. But it won’t be Fallout. I promise you. It won’t be Fallout.’

It remains to be seen whether or not Bethesda’s effort, which comes out next week, will take the same road as its ten-year-old predecessors. The challenging qualities that made Fallout and Fallout 2 so immersive have fallen out of favor, as Iroquois Pliskin commented on his Versus CluClu Land blog.

“While the frequent and arbitrary death, along with the cluelessness, was a pretty intimidating at first, by the end I really came to appreciate the way that these elements work together to make this really unique experience,” commented Pliskin on Abbott’s blog.

“I’m not manically paranoid about the prospect of Bethesda reimagining the game’s mechanics,” Pliskin added. “I hope they don’t lose the basic hostility the original’s setting and mechanics, though. Even though it runs counter to the tendencies of modern design… I think it’s one of the things that makes Fallout unique as a series.”

I don’t see Bethesda creating a game as testing as the original Fallout. Oblivion featured leveled creature lists that made it impossible for the protagonist to face enemies beyond his means to defeat, and dialog rarely influenced the course of the game. That’s how mainstream games are made today, and Bethesda is making Fallout 3 for a mainstream audience.

Yet I also know that the developers can’t help but be influenced by the quality of Fallout and Fallout 2, and I hope they find a way to make a new generation of Vault Dwellers feel like small fish in big ponds filled with piranahs, like they’re lost and alone in a self-destructive and self-depricating world.

Site Update: New Features and Look

Published
on October 20, 2008
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The site has been granted an updated code and layout and new features. (Please notice the new site logo, which took all Sunday afternoon to Photoshop together.)

The new Calendar page displays upcoming releases that have storytelling potential along with information and links. Fallout 3 is the first entry and shows how game profiles will be laid out.

Despite featuring a very mainstream title right off the bat, I’d like to use the calendar to showcase smaller releases and mods. It should be up to date within a week.

The Resources page is a compendium of links, guides, and interviews for aspiring video game writers or journalists. This is a work in progress and so far has links on careers in game development and journalism.

Tags are in place, and the About page has a tag cloud for browsing pleasure. Enjoy.