So I am a few days behind, but I had to comment on this one. EA is charging a few bucks to unlock guns in Battlefield: Bad Company. This is isn’t real downloadable content since it will already be on the disc. It is pretty much just people paying for cheat codes. People are pissed about this, but I’m not so sure they should be.
In single player I should have access to everything on the disc. I paid for it, so I should experience it however I like. Whatever I do in the game does not interefere with anyone else’s enjoyment. So in this case if a game is single player and at full price it is unbearable to have to pay to unlock stuff, but for an online game… one like Battlefield the game has a deep experience system where players have to play for hours and hours to gain access to unlock stuff I think it actually is OK.
Not everyone has the 100s of real world hours it can take to gain access to the highest levels in games. In World of Warcraft how do people get around this? They hire people in 3rd world countries to do the grinding for them! Just search google for World of Warcraft power leveling and the 6 million plus results might convince you that more than a few people want to pay to get access to the highest level content in a game wihtout having to work for it themselves! Yeah these people aren’t “playing the game right” they are “cheaters” whatever… so are all those baseball players that get roided up. People want to win. They will do whatever they can to have a competitive edge, and as long as that edge isn’t completely changing the game experience of others (like a magical “you lose” button) then I am actually fine with it.
Look at it another way, as a game creator why on earth would I want someone else to make a cut off of my game like how the WoW Chinese gold miners do? This sensibility should hold true of EA and the indie guys too. Take Line Rider for instance. This game has user created movies like this one that have generated millions of views… on youtube! The creators of Line Rider don’t get any of that potential revenue, because they didn’t build in a good system to host movies themselves. A separate example of this is when SOE banned all ebay auctions and took over auctions of items of Everquest II on their own Station Exchange site. There might be more to the story on that one, because while I was researching this post I discovered Sony is actually getting out of the auction biz and moving everyone over to a new site called Live Gamer…. But the idea is if you create a game that has other services built around it you should think long and hard about running some of those services instead of letting the free market do it for you.
I briefly checked out the Battlefield: Bad Company beta and they actually aren’t letting people buy items they could unlock through leveling up. These are just guns that you can get in the special edition of the game. That is actually worse to me than selling unlocks, because in this scenario the only way you can get the guns is by giving EA more money. Using cash to pay for the freedom to get guns without spending time is fine by me (is it wrong of me to equate cash with freedom, or do I just know too many rich people that get to do whatever the hell they want?), but I still want the option to invest time instead of money.
With Magic: The Gathering there is a low initial price point and a large amount of luck involved (both in the game and in what cards you can get when you buy new booster packs). So that is another way microtransactions could work in games where straight up breaking the rules isn’t allowed, but stacking the deck is more than OK. Unlike Magic, there is such a high price point just to start playing Battlefield: Bad Company it is going to be tough for them to ever justify selling small items even if those items themselves come at low individual prices. Actually the game seems kind of rubbish so why I am getting so worked up about this in the first place?
I have been miserable at posting lately, but the game I am working on is only a few weeks away from being done. We are at the phase of the project now where you don’t want to touch anything for fear of accidentally creating new problems when fixing the old ones, yet you’ve got to keep polishing every last thing you can. So just tons of playing the game and trying to figure out what is most important to do. It’s probably my least favorite time on any project, but being so close to putting out a game gets me through it… and this one is pretty incredible!
In personal gaming news, I finally dug out my now moldy PSP. It took about an hour to change my 1.5 firmware to Dark Alex’s latest and greatest and then I was ready to try out some new games. That DarkAlex guy is still amazing! I can’t believe after all this time Sony still hasn’t managed to stop him from liberating PSPs everywhere.
For the last year or so I wanted nothing to do with my PSP since there really weren’t any games I wanted to play on it, but now there is the new God of War, Patapon, and FF:Crisis Core along with Echochrome, Flow, and R-Type Tactics coming sometime soon.
So far I’ve just picked up Patapon. I really enjoyed LocoRoco and was very excited to just play a similar game that could take me to some Japanese DMT induced multiverse. Well looks like I should have listened to my man Bart on this one when he hated on the game, because so far Patapon is doing nothing for me. The fundamental problem with Patapon is that the player is a slave to the drum. By that I mean you must execute the appropriate beat and you can not deviate from it. No solos or freestyle music making in this game. I think this is totally a Japanese cultural thing. Patapon is a drumming game, and you don’t exactly get any big drum solos in traditional Taiko drumming! I hated having to just follow the same beat over and over, which is a shame, because the game is pretty charming in most other regards.
The Sims has made so much money for EA that they have dedicated an entire division of their company to milking expanding the Sims product line. I got in on the beta for their latest Sims project, The Sims Carnival. This is yet another flash web portal site, but the hook with this one is that all the flash games on it come with an easy game creation wizard for players to modify any of the existing games. The tweaks seem very limited, but it seems at least as good as those old shoot’em up construction kits, and this one is free. You can also upload your own custom flash games if you already have made one and just want to throw it on this portal for some reason.
I have no idea what this portal has to do with the Sims. In a few of the examples the graphics are created using the Sims 2 machinima tools, but those all seem to be made by EA employees. The site is still in a limited beta so I don’t want to judge the dearth of content too harshly, but there isn’t any kind of community yet formed on the site. I still haven’t seen what other similar game creation sites stack up, but for ease of use this site is great. For making great content… I’m not so convinced, but you can make a game about as easy as you can make an e-greeting card which is pretty cool.
Metaplace is a similar, but seemingly much more abitious service to Sims Carnival. They are asking users to stress test one of their games this Saturday, March 8 at 12:00pm (noon) PST so check that out if you want a sneak peek at where web gaming may be heading.
After last month you should know that I don’t care for bosses very much at all these days, but if you are going to have bosses in your game at least understand the basics. There was a 20 minute boss design session at GDC presented by Scott Rogers. It was 95% tips on making a good boss and 5% on why you shouldn’t bother in the first place. Scott definitely knows a thing or two about bosses, and gives some pretty practical advice on making traditional bosses. The slides have been posted on Scott’s blog here.
If that still isn’t enough boss design tips for you check out this older presentation on generic boss design from a designer at Vicarious Visions which I remember thinking was pretty good when I originally read it. Try and use this information for good not evil… and don’t ever follow tradition too closely if you want anyone to pay attention to your work. The famous bosses are almost always the ones that break convention.
Funny enough after I go and bash Shadow of the Colossus for not having any gameplay in my original boss post, someone goes and writes a very popular piece about how genius the controls of that game are. I still think the game is much more enjoyable to watch than to play, and reading through the comments of that Destructiod article I see I’m not the only one with that observation. However I am definitely in the minority of not loving the game.
I’m still trying to catch up on GDC sessions so expect more notes soon. I started reading through Clint Hocking’s love letter to Trespasser, but only made it 10 pages in.
I wasn’t at GDC, and haven’t done my usual reading of session notes and harassing speakers to send me their slides, but I have been listening to the latest GDC news and gossip so here is my take.
XNA Game Studio Is A Trap
If you are an amateur or independent developer that actually wants to make games that people will play it doesn’t seem like XNA Game Studio is a good idea. Yes, you will get some great tools from Microsoft, but it just isn’t worth it.
Having some distribution on 360 is good (Sony was always missing this with their PS1 and PS2 home dev kits), but not good enough. If you want good distribution just make a flash game. If you use flash you can have whatever content you want, reach a far larger audience, and have something that is already more cross platform than XNA Game Studio.
Tools they provide are good… but if you aren’t great a programming you are still better off with flash or even virtools (the new stuff they showed at GDC looks pretty impressive). If you are a good programmer and want to mess around with something for fun it will give you good experience why not sign up with the Garage Game guys? XNA links into the Torque game engine so why not just skip XNA all together and not be shackled by Microsoft?
Is anyone really excited about making games for Zune? Anyone? Really? Ok I did find one blog post saying how cool it was, but that dude works for Microsoft!
More Fable 2 Yapping
Once again Sir Peter Molyneux is hyping up Fable 2 like crazy. Not really sure why people get excited about this stuff anymore. The big surprise this year of being able to earn gold for Fable 2 by playing a Xbox Live Arcade game sounds about exciting to me as oh I don’t know… say playing a mini game on the Sega Dreamcast VMU to collect money to spend in Powerstone. Guess no one remembers that. Doesn’t really matter that it has been done before that doesn’t make it less cool, it just isn’t that exciting to me to begin with. I’m sure not everyone will agree with me here. It sounds a lot like what Raph Koster was talking about last year with how huge WoW would be if only people could play it as an RSS feed on their Zunes… or something like that. Guess I shouldn’t bitch I’m buying it anyway day one (Fable 2 that is, not the gold mining mini game) since the girlfriend loved the first one.
Sony Home
Sony showed a little of their “Second Life” style online interface. I always thought the Second Life references were really dumb when it applies to home since Home shows zero signs of having any of the freedom or creativity (or horrible frame rate and constant spam and pyramid schemes) of Second Life. Well I heard a rumor that does make Home more like Second Life. A certain company that builds advertising spaces in Second Life is going to be the exclusive outside vendor of Home spaces to the game publishers. Cool so we get all of the ads of Second Life with none of the user generated content. Sounds like some awful VRML mall fantasy from the 90s come true.
So GDC is here and that means that The Path will be playable if you are lucky enough to be there. I’m not at GDC, but I did find this new gameplay video of The Path and hosted it up on youtube. If you want to grab the high res version you can find it here. Any video game that has little goth girls weeping in graveyards is strange enough to have my attention.
Fast forward to 01:16 for gothic weeping!
The DS has a new adventure gamey type title, Professor Layton and The Curious Village. I played it for a bit, and it really can’t be called an adventure game. It is more like a version of Games magazine with some story added on top. Kind of neat in a bite sized chunks, which is perfect for a handheld. If it catches on Scott Kim should come out with a ripoff of it. He could reach into his archives and crap out something like this in a few hours! Well at least the puzzle bits… The production values in Professor Layton are ridiculously good for a DS game which does add a lot to the overall package.
I tried out a couple of betas recently to see what is going on in the PC online world.
Nexon has another Korean MMO that they are bringing to North American shores. The game is called Mabinogi. You start out in heaven where a girl in a black dress with dramatically bouncing hooters tells you to go into the city. From there you can attack raccoons and hit trees before going about farming and dungeon crawling. Seems pretty terrible to me. Their big innovation is that quests now have timers associated with them, so you can’t just go up to every ped with an exclamation mark over her head and horde quests. Not something that interest me in the slightest. Check out the movie below if you need more reasons not to play this game:
Next up is the latest web portal from the Garage Game guys. I love these dudes, because they made Tribes and have somehow found a way to be independent (at least until they sold out to IAC) for years now. Their new site, Instant Action promises high quality games played from within your web browser. In the beta they have a version of Marble Blast, a really primitive tank game, and a couple of other casual games. Their promised revamped version of Tribes is yet to be seen. Still it is cool that the games are multiplayer and have nice buddy list integration all through the web site, but the platform is better than the actual games at the moment. Seems like they have a brief headstart in this area before Battlefield Heroes and Quake Live come out, after those hit we should get a nice sense of just how advanced 3D browser based games are going to be in the near term.
I’ve never bought into the reports issued by the ESA or IIPA that claim things like piracy costs the industry $3 billion dollars in lost sales. It always seemed to me that the biggest pirates were either a) kids that couldn’t afford the games anyway or b) collectors that want every single release no matter what it is. In both of these cases these pirates might buy an occasional game, but in no way could they ever afford to buy all the games they download. Yet each pirate copy = a lost sale according to the ESA.
This article up on Gamasutra explains the change in sales that Reflexive discovered based on how effective their anti-piracy efforts were. The article isn’t very long, but basically they barely lost any sales when they stopped piracy. Now their games such as (Wik & the Fable of Souls) aren’t exactly premier products so I’m not really surprised that they would be stolen much more frequently than purchased. That is very much in line with the M.O. of the collector type pirate I described above. Now maybe if an AAA title released similar stats about how the game did before and after it was cracked they would see a bigger increase in sales since players would be more likely to buy these games in the first place, but big publishers aren’t going to release that kind of info.
Boss fights suck! Simpile right? We all know that, but they are still out there ruining games. When I say boss fight, I am talking about traditional boss fights that go something like this:
Fight a big giant creature/enemy.
Learn the pattern of attacks and hit the weak spot.
Once the boss is knocked down to X amount of health then it starts up a new pattern.
Learn the new pattern of attacks and hit the weak spot.
Rinse and repeat for however many times the designer cruelly forces you to go through this. This is traditionally 3 times, but can be many more.
Boss fights originated in shooters. Shooters are all about pattern recognition and spectacle so boss fights continue to be appropriate to for that kind of game. Bosses made there way to fighting games in the arcades (Final Fight, The Simpsons, TMNT, etc.) where they provided spectacle and a climatic moment to each level for sure, but the fun factor was decidedly less than their shooter counter parts. Bosses continued to be a huge factor in arcade games largely because arcade games are designed to eat money just as much as they are about providing fun for the player.
Nintendo pretty much “perfected” the modern action adventure game type boss that has to be defeated three separate times. The number three is culturally significant to Japan. In their culture doing something right three times in a row is the same as doing it right a thousand or a million times. Basically if you beat that boss three times you’ve proved you could beat it forever. This style of bosses has been blindly copied by the West, much to the detriment of game design in my opinion. We have moved away from this trend, but it still rears its ugly head in Western (Bioshock) and Eastern games (Super Mario Galaxy) alike. (more…)
I’ve had plenty of reasons to hate the ESRB in the past, but I discovered a whole new one…
Today a bunch of fan mail ended up on my desk. I opened up three of the letters. Judging based on handwriting, grammar, spelling, and punctuation these letters were all written by very young fans. All three of the letters were about some of our M rated games. I asked if it was ok to send these kids a quick reply and some stickers or other promo items we had just lying around the office. Well it turns out I can’t do that, because that could be interpreted as marketing to underage fans! I loved getting mail as a kid, and figured I could at least really brighten up a kids day by sending a simple response. Damn this sucks!
There probably is a safe way to send out a response, but I’m not a lawyer and is it really worth the risk? It certainly isn’t to my employer!
If any of you legal eagles out there want to find me a loophole you can read the full ESRB guidelines here.
