Archive for the 'News' Category

Impressive Top 15 List of RPG Characters

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on September 21, 2008
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Characters are the heart of any story, and twenty years of computer and console gaming have yielded plenty of memorable ones.

Last month Ian and Reid at ConfuseReviews.com compiled a list of their fifteen favorite RPG characters, with barely five slots going to BioWare’s ilk.

Part of [the depth of RPGs] comes through in the characters you meet in any adventurous stat-building type game; sometimes cheery, sometimes spooky, often dreadfully bland but occasionally intriguing characters who make the grunt work of RPGs and the fight after fight after fight seem worth it. The characters are what make the stories work — they’re the role part of role-playing.

It’s not bad as Top # lists go, including a good mix of nostalgia-inspiring heroes like Frog from Chrono Trigger, barely remembered niche weirdos like Cassius Curio of Morrowind, and a few unknowns like Stan the titular king from Okage Shadow King.

The game’s main character, a ludicrously trodden-upon boy with the worst parents in the world, ends up with evil king Stan possessing his shadow as part of a bargain to “save” his sister. The rest of the game unfolds as a quest to smite the lesser demons that have arisen since Stan’s banishment and taken sections of his former power, so in essence he becomes a whiny has-been of a demon lord trying desperately to be taken seriously as he slowly regains his former glory.

I’ll definitely have to play that one.

AGDC: ‘Tomb Raider: Underworld’ Developer Pushes Refined Storytelling

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on September 19, 2008
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In a presentation at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Eric Lindstrom, creative director of Tomb Raider: Underworld, pushed for new storytelling techniques and more emphasis on story during development, reports Gamasutra.

Lindstrom doesn’t mean to tackle the problem of innovative interactive storytelling — because others are working on that. He’s talking about using the basic tools that have been used in other media, which “are not being used at all, or not being used effectively, and there’s no reason why they can’t.”

Here’s his mini-manifesto:

Stop saying that storytelling is less important than game mechanics. “There are lots of people who say this, but they don’t really mean it.”

Start putting storytelling on par with other pillars of game creation. “There are plenty of people out there who say this is true, but when push comes to shove, it’s not true.”

Stop hiding behind the word “interactive”. “If there’s really one thing to take away today — it’s that ‘oh, but it’s interactive’ is used as an excuse for bad storytelling all the time, and it just doesn’t wash.”

Start training and employing storytelling experts. “Hollywood knows how to write dialogue more than anybody in the industry on average. The last 10 movies I saw, seven of them had pretty crappy dialogue — so it’s not going to be perfect on average. But you’re going to find more people who understand storytelling.”

These points are good ones, but, as Lindstrom admits, these goals are really only ways of perfecting current storytelling techniques rather, which have not advanced much since the big games of the 1990s, and they don’t progress new strategies. A good Hollywood writer could work out the plot holes and cliches and help put together a satisfying climax, but only someone with writing and game development experience can integrate story into gameplay, so the two work together rather than being seperated into the game and the ensuing cut scenes.

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AGDC: Sterling’s Keynote Address Calls For Creativity

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on September 16, 2008
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The Austin Game Developer’s Conference kicked off today with a future-thinking keynote address by author Bruce Sterling that urged creative, iconoclastic approaches to game design.

Sterling’s credentials as a writer of science fiction and one of the prime movers behind the cyberpunk genre lent themselves to his unusual speech, where he posed as a student of his 89-year-old self who had traveled back in time from 2043 to tell us where gaming was headed.

After showing off his nanotechnology and General Electric Pocket Mediator, Sterling described an intensely dystopian future for the video gaming industry, run by money, for money, and with no potential for risky ingenuity or real creative development among the factories of nameless developers. Games in 2043 are trite and consumer friendly with simple, boring gameplay lodged in the real world.

To prevent this future, said Sterling, the industry needs “creative disruption, radical innovations, provocative cultural change.”

Sterling called for visionaries, revolutionaries and auteurs from among the developers gathered in Austin. “This is your great struggle, and that is what you face,” he said. “That is what you owe to your predecessors and those who will come after you. You’ve got your place in the great parade and it’s all yours.”

Look forward to more news from the Austin GDC as it pertains to creative storytelling in games.

‘Fallout 3′ Lacks Mod Support At Launch

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on September 3, 2008
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In a Joystiq interview from last weekend’s PAX, Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard confirmed that Fallout 3 will not include support for player modifications when it launches on October 28.

“We don’t [have MOD support at launch], we want to but we have our hands so full with getting the game out and getting tools out there that work well for people and with the game is a pretty big undertaking,” Howard said. “We definitely want to do it, but we can’t yet commit to doing it or when it will happen.”

Howard did promise DLC content for Fallout 3 on both the PC and Xbox 360. He also comments on the current console generation and the Fallout legacy in the Joystiq interview.

Bethesda’s last game, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, included a level editing program that enabled a big community of modders who are still expanding on the game’s scope. Player made content such — dungeons, items, characters and quests — has kept Oblivion, and its predecessor Morrowind, alive and kicking long after their release.

Dyack Says Cut-Scenes Need More Interactivity

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on September 1, 2008
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Cut scenes establish story at the expense of interactivity. Is it worth it? Denis Dyack, creator of Too Human, says yes.

In a column for Edge Online, Dyack says that developers need to rethink the ways they use cut scenes. The article needs some editing, but there are several useful insights from an industry veteran who values good storytelling.

“Over the last five to ten years, so many games have been released where cut scenes are absolutely meaningless,” writes Dyack. “They don’t contribute to the content and don’t contribute to the characters. They’re almost like some kind of reward for completing the level, and that makes absolutely no sense.”

Dyack goes on to say that his recently released RPG epic Too Human blurs the line between cut scenes and gameplay by allowing the player to move through them a la the Half-Life games.

These are regular episodes of dialogue and action — sometimes overlapping gameplay like BioShock’s recorded tapes and sometimes allowing you to play through them like the fallout scene of Call of Duty 4. They are not fully interactive.

Fully interactive means something that does not simply add a free camera to a scripted event. To have interactive storytelling and not just an interactive lense, we need dynamic scenes that include player choice and input in more than just viewpoint.

Dyack concluded his column, “I’d still say that we’re taking baby steps in the area of bringing cinematics in games, but we’re moving in the right direction. The industry is pushing the medium, elevating it so people really get more unique experiences out of videogames than they would from any other entertainment medium.”

I hope he’s right, and I hope that more people are willing to experiment.

‘BioShock 2′ Creative Director Sees Demand For ‘Challenging Material’

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on August 23, 2008
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Gameplayer has a great interview with BioShock 2’s creative director Jordan Thomas that covers the storytelling strengths of one of last year’s best games.

With BioShock, “2K Boston and 2K Australia wanted to build an action-narrative epic that would show respect for the player’s intelligence without forcing them to think exactly like the design team in order to ‘win,’” said Thomas.

“BioShock plays well, I think, to some of the strengths of games as a medium. Most of the first game’s story is unmitigated, meaning you get to live through or discover it directly, in the manner of a forensic anthropologist, as opposed to ‘visiting storyland’ from time to time and then returning to the entirely unrelated game experience.” added Thomas.

“If anything, we’d like to deliver an even more consistently integrated experience with any future games in the series. We hope to maintain a rich narrative atmosphere while allowing for the player to author key aspects of his or her identity with a large degree of expressive freedom. To me, that’s what BioShock is all about.”

Thomas is heading production of BioShock 2 at 2k Marin, which took up the franchise from their sister studios 2k Boston/2k Australia. Some of the original BioShock team is working with Thomas on the sequel, but the first game’s creative director Ken Levine is notably absent from the helm.

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‘Diablo 3′ Designer Responds to Criticism

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on August 6, 2008
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Lead Diablo 3 designer Jay Wilson addressed the concerns of some fans that the art style of Blizzard’s newest game deviates from its forebears, but refused to give into their demands.

“We’re very happy with how the art style is,” said Wilson in an interview with MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John. “The art team’s happy. The company’s happy. We really like this art style, and we’re not changing it.”

Outspoken critics struck immediately after the Diablo 3 screenshots and trailer were revealed last month, complaining that the brighter colors made the game cartoony and violated the dark spirit of the franchise. Protests have not died down since and led to an online petition with over 54,000 signatures.

Some critics used Photoshop to edit Diablo 3 art into what they thought it should look like.

Fan-edited screenshot of “Diablo 3.″

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Sleep With Everyone In Obsidian’s ‘Alpha Protocol’

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on July 29, 2008
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Obsidian Entertainment has always been in BioWare’s coattails. They followed BioWare releases with sequels for Knights of the Old Republic in 2004 and Neverwinter Nights in 2006.

Their upcoming action-based CIA yarn Alpha Protocol is the companies first new intellectual property, marking a break from BioWare and outdoing the RPG behemoth in an unusual respect: sex scenes.

Alpha Protocol promises explicit sexual relations with not just two, but all of the game’s female characters. MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John talked with Senior Producer Ryan Rucinski about Alpha Protocol’s explicit intimacy.

There are several factions in the game that you can ally with or fight against, so the women Thorton meets can become collaborators or enemies. As a government operative, the player can acquire missions and assistance from the ladies Thorton’s wooed. But piss them off — by dating other girls, for instance — and there’s hell to pay.

‘It all depends on how you treat them,’ Rucinski said. If you have a strong relationship with female characters, they may help with missions. However, he told me that some of them are ‘bats–t insane’ and can get you into trouble. ‘One may ask you to assassinate a high-level person,’ he added. ‘Maybe that’s not something you want to do, but she’s really hot. But there are obvious repercussions.’

[Thorton] can ‘get’ all of the game’s women if he wanted to. Rucinski told me it was possible to have sex with all the females, and that the sex scenes were similar to how Mass Effect treated its intimate moments. But he was quick to assure me that, ‘It’s a mature game, it’s not [adults only].’

Alpha Protocol, which comes out next February, has achievements for being a ladies man, and for avoiding relationships altogether.

Like a good Hollywood flick, relationships in Mass Effect were well told and treated respectfully before things got dirty. Alpha Effect has a lot to live up to if it wants to avoid being written off as unnecessary smut as BioWare’s space opera almost was.

‘Chrono Trigger,’ ‘Final Fantasy,’ And More At E3

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on July 17, 2008
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SquareEnix spilled some juicy news at this week’s E3 with heavy implications for the console front. Their game line-up indicates a shift away from Sony and the Playstation consoles. AgtFox at Evil Avatar has the press release.

First on the list is a re-release of the RPG classic Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS, with a new dungeon and wireless play. That game never gets old, and I look forward to playing it when its released towards the end of the year. SquareEnix is also porting Dragon Quest IV to the DS in September.

The release also provides more information on the strangely titled Infinite Undiscovery, an Xbox 360 exclusive tailored to more Western RPG sensibilities. The game, to be released in September, boasts a medieval setting and real time combat, as well as a dynamic world and situational battles that change depending on player choice, an unusual feature for SquareEnix.

The Last Remnant also differs from the classic RPG formula and centers around large-scale battles. This game will come out on both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, although the PS3 release date has yet to be announced.

Two Star Ocean games appeared in the missive with 2009 release dates: Second Evolution for the PSP and The Last Hope, a prequel that sticks to the franchise’s traditional mechanics and is exclusive to the Xbox 360.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Final Fantasy XIII will be released on the Xbox 360, and on the same day as the Playstation 3 release. There has been no other news about the upcoming game so far. The loss of exclusivity is a severe blow for Sony, for whom Final Fantasy has been a core franchise since the birth of the Playstation.

With major releases scheduled for the DS, PSP, and especially the Xbox 360 and an absence of Playstation 3 news, other than the loss of exclusivity, SquareEnix appears to be moving away from their classic ally, or at least going multiplatform. This is good news for anyone who wants to enjoy J-RPGs without a Playstation.

BioWare Unveils Two Trailers for ‘Dragon Age’

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on July 13, 2008
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BioWare released two trailers for their upcoming computer RPG Dragon Age: Origins this week.

The first trailer shows the beginnings of a rain-soaked battle between humans and an army of monsters. The second starts off the same, but includes some more combat sequences.

Neither trailer shows any gameplay or story features, and the graphics look incomplete. More information on BioWare’s new game should come from this week’s E3.

Dragon Age: Origins is scheduled for an early 2009 release on PC and is the first in a new franchise for BioWare. Billed as the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, the game is set in an open, epic fantasy world with a strong party element, and will hopefully be more complex than the studio’s recent console games.