Archive for the 'News' Category

Please Reattach the Controller

Published
on January 30, 2009
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Down the Wall is now officially on hiatus. I leave tomorrow with my backpack and boots for a whirlwind adventure through Europe, the Middle-East, and Asia and won’t come around the world again for a year. I’ll chronicle my trip at a new blog called Where is Jon?, and Down the Wall will have to wait until I return.

This blog has been a great experience for me and a lot of fun. I think I’ve found a good niche for myself amidst all the gaming blogs. Preparations and partings have kept me from regularly updating this site for the last month and a half, but I fully intend to continue writing here whenever I get back.

So salud, adios, goodbye, farewell, and all that jazz. Thanks for reading.

‘Fallout 3′ Procures Mods and DLC

Published
on December 13, 2008
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Bethesda’s Fallout 3 mod creator, nicknamed the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, went online this week.

The new Web site has the mod tools available and a library of how-to articles. Fallout 3 Nexus is a good community source for new content.

Bethesda has a history of good mod support for Morrowind and Oblivion as well as downloadable content, and Fallout 3 is getting the same treatment.

Three downloadable packages have been announced — “Operation: Anchorage,” which simulates a battle between the US and China, will come out next month, followed by “The Pitt” and the new city of Pittsburgh in February and “Broken Steel,” a continuation of the main quest, in March.

IGN has an in-depth interview with Producer Jeff Gardiner about January’s “Operation: Anchorage.”

“The Chinese red army is everywhere, and the player will first have to secure the surrounding mountain side and then fight their way into the Chinese base,” summarized Gardiner.

“The player will have to use a lot of their standard combat skills, along with several new tools that will only be available in the downloadable content. These include interactive Strike Teams under the player’s command and unique armor, weapons, and other exotic gadgets.”

The packs are exclusive to the Xbox 360 and PC, and they will cost $10 a piece. 

Despite the price tag, I think Bethesda’s new DLC is exactly what it should be: four to five hours of content that supplements the main quest and expands on the story and gameplay of the core game. They are substantial, experimental mini-expansions rather than superfluous aesthetics like Oblivion’s infamous horse armor.

As Gardiner said in the interview, “It’s important to our team to use DLC as a way for us to flex our creativity, to try new things and answer the ‘wouldn’t have been cool if we did this?’ question that always comes up towards a games completion — when it’s too late to try them!”

Steven Spielberg Skips the Cutscenes

Published
on December 9, 2008
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Blockbuster King turned game developer Steven Spielberg talked about his hatred of cutscenes that interrupt gameplay in an interview with Yahoo! Games.

The thing that doesn’t work for me in these games are the little movies where they attempt to tell a story in between the playable levels. That’s where there hasn’t been a synergy between storytelling and gaming. They go to a lot of trouble to do these [motion-capture] movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it’s under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things. And that has not found its way into a universal narrative.

Spielberg complained specifically about games like Battlefield: Bad Company where you can’t skip the cutscenes. His perspective comes from almost four decades of movie storytelling, and shows the importance of delivering a cohesive narrative through gameplay rather than cinematics.

“I think filmmakers are learning things from video games,” said Spielberg. “Movies are starting to look more and more like videogames, like the digital introductory teasers videogames give you before they turn control over to the player.” He added that Wanted and The Bourne Ultimatum show “a lot of video game saavy.”

Spielberg also talked about his own game projects in the interview. His puzzle game Boom Blox surprised a lot of gamers with its lack of narrative when it came out for the Wii in May. The director’s next project, LMNO, is “more of a movie-type story game” and revolves around an ex-secret agent.

Congratulations NaNoWriMo Winners

Published
on November 30, 2008
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Congratulations to everyone who cleared their schedule this November to participate in National Novel Writing Month. It’s a great way for aspiring writers to challenge their ability and pump out a good work-in-progress at the same time.

I managed to finish my science fiction novel this weekend after doing 10,000 words in two days.

For those unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, the contest is held every year and charges participants with writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Be sure to sign up for next year if you’re interested in participating.

Now to get back to pumpkin pie and what’s turning out to be the best season for gaming on record.

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.

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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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.

Down the Wall Down for Site Upgrades

Published
on October 18, 2008
in News
. Closed

I’ll be updating the WordPress platform and the layout for this blog over the weekend. A new look and new features should be up on Monday.

MMO Players Love Underdog Role, Says Daedalus Project Poll

Published
on October 10, 2008
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Massively multiplayer online games are all about choosing a role for your character to fill in a complete and crowded world, and a new study at the always fascinating Daedalus Project asks MMO players eight questions about the roles they love to role-play.

The most interesting finding had to do with game factions.

“In many games where there are warring factions, disparities between the faction populations typically arise,” said the report. Rebels outnumbered Imperials in Star Wars Galaxies, there are more Alliance than Horde in World of Warcraft, and so far Destruction is destroying Order in Warhammer Online.

Yet the 80% of respondents in the Daedalus Project poll said they would prefer to take up arms for the minority side if given a choice. Who wouldn’t want to play the desperate partisan struggling against overwhelming odds? Or maybe they just want to avoid waiting in line for player vs player battlegrounds.

Another interesting conclusion came from gender choices in character creation. According to the poll, men are four times as likely as women to create a character of the opposite gender, with 26% of men admitting to gender-bending.

When it comes to character classes, things stayed pretty even between the four archetypes of warrior, cleric, mage and archer. “The stereotypical gender difference is also seen,” found the report. “Men prefer to be warriors while women prefer to be healers. There were no gender differences in the archer or mage classes.”

The poll also asked participants about their favorite settings and which roles they preferred in specific settings. It’s worth taking a look at, if just for the comparison between male and female players.

Award-Winning Developer Says Storytelling On the Rise

Published
on September 28, 2008
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Developer Dave Ellis sees a bright future for storytelling in gaming, he said in a Joystiq interview.

“Game writing is only going to get better as time goes on. Players are getting used to good writing, and soon they won’t settle for less,” said Ellis, the 2008 recipient of the WGA award for video game writing.

Ellis is a designer with Vicious Cycle, and his most recent project, Dead Head Fred for the PSP, earned him the Writer’s Guild of America award. He will be the keynote speaker at a Writer’s Guild Foundation workshop on game writing next month.

“Today, we’re looking at a couple of exciting developments. First, story-driven games are becoming more popular. Developers are realizing that writing needs just as much attention as the graphics and other gameplay elements, especially when the story and characters play a key role in the game,” Ellis said.

“Second, technology has reached the point where truly interactive storytelling is emerging. The story can evolve through the gameplay, and it can be affected by the player’s actions — at least to a certain extent.”

Ellis recognized the limitations of current storytelling techniques, which limit the player to established choices even in open world games.

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