I don’t know if you want to chalk this up to insensitivity, or ironically prophetic, or just plain dumb about what ads you’re running on the front page of your newly acquired and gutted site.

Whatever it is, it earns an “oh, UGO.”  And at the very least a /facepalm.

Full sized image of the front page is here.

One of the things that I was thinking about but not writing about during my month under the bus was some further thoughts about Fallout 3 and the lack of nudity in it I wrote about earlier.  A friend of mine threw the pointedly “why are you always talking about slavery and nudity?” Pervert card at me, and in preparing my defense/rebuttal I realized something about our ratings system and the games we play.

There are no adult games.

And no, for crying out loud, I’m not talking about teh pr0ns.

I just want an adult game.  I feel that we don’t truly have them.  We have games with Adult Themes.  We have games with a tiny smattering of nudity.  We have games with gore.  Lifelike violence.  Language.  But what we don’t have, is a title that can encompass all of these things (if it wants to).  We don’t have an “R” rated game.  I know there’s been a lot of pieces written about this subject matter before, what with folks asking why we have a different ratings system from films, and even folks defending our current ESRB system.  Even Penny Arcade did an ad series for them.  Hell, I’ve defended the ESRB on numerous occasions, because as long as it’s in place and we enforce its standards, we keep Congress from breathing down our necks and regulating us.  They’re our friends.

But.

I think we deserve better.  I come back to Ebert’s original stance of “Videogames are not art” a lot.  I try and get in his head and understand why he’d say it.  I once took the stand that videogames are art, and I still stand by that, but sometimes, I can see where Ebert’s coming from.  I think.

My main problem is that our “M” rating is not an R.  I think we’ve lulled ourselves into the idea that it is analogous, that T = PG/PG-13-ish.  E = G.  M = R.  Most of those equations are pretty accurate.  The Mature = Restricted one, though, is a bit off.  And that bit can mean quite a lot.

I’ve gone on at length about how much I miss the nudity, sex, and promiscuity in Fallout3.  It just doesn’t feel like a desperate enough world without it.  Who are we kidding, really, that we live in a world that has human slavery and cannibalism, but only one female prostitute who merely lays down with you?  I know that the Lead Designer, Emil, said that there’s a line he won’t cross (killing kids, and I agree with him), but I don’t think that the lack of nudity was a free willed decision.  I have a feeling it was an enforced one…

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First off:  SPOILER WARNING.  If you haven’t finished Prince of Persia yet (the one released in 2008), either stop reading now, or have the ending and the entire game ruined for you.  You’ve been warned.

I was a bit surprised this week to hear a few folks in the newly dubbed “Brainysphere” talking about how much they don’t care for the new Prince in Prince of Persia.  Some felt they should have shut off the game before the final ending, others simply felt he was too shallow a vessel (but hopefully feel differently now that they’ve finished the game).  Still others out there felt that a quip-slinging wise-guy with a middle-of-America accent was somehow an insult to gamers and irresponsible in general.

The first thing that surprised me about the dislike was that I’ve never really found The Prince to be all that deep.  Do we require our hero in this series to be anything more than a fun platform hopper?  This Prince really isn’t all that far of a stretch from the Sands of Time Prince, is it?  Maybe with some updates for the current decade?  I’m not saying we can’t or shouldn’t have a deep hero, but I think The Prince is just deep enough, for reasons that I’ll get into in just a bit.  But the bottom line here for me was that my expectations were low.  This is an “everyman” game here.  It’s shallow level hopping gameplay, by and large, that needs to appeal to mass audiences.  I wasn’t really expecting a magnum opus with legendary characters or performances.

The second thing that surprised me was that people were aiming their indignation at The Prince.  If I had to nitpic anything in the game, I’d start with the game-world and the gameplay in general, and start by asking questions along the lines of…

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Awhile ago, after that 2nd Prince of Persia game on the Xbox came out, I heard that the PoP team was going to be split into two teams, and they would be working on separate projects.  The first fruit of this Ubi team bisection we saw was Assassin’s Creed.  The second offering (from the 2nd team) just hit the market this past month, and it is the newest installment in the Prince of Persia franchise.

What’s interesting to me about these two titles isn’t what makes them so similar (Arabian Parkours), but rather what keeps them unique from each other.  Often, when designing a game from the blue sky “pitch” standpoint, we are often asked “what makes this game different from all of the other games out there in this genre?”  Ubi gave themselves a bit of an interesting challenge here, and I think they delivered somewhat amicably on the problem.

On the one hand, we had Assassin’s Creed.  Through a lot of tech and animation effort, we were given this wonderful rooftop exploration vehicle.  True, I didn’t like it when it’s animation driven, or the fact that it’s too easy to run around the world, but what they delivered on was an abundance of fun exploration.  Nevermind the fact that you’re not much of an assassin, this was the more “serious” of the “PoP Gameplay” cousins.

On the other hand, we were recently delivered Prince of Persia.  Again, through a lot of animation (and probably level design) effort, we get something more “true” to the PoP Gameplay model.  Rediculously vertical level design seemingly built for a race of upright howler monkeys who no longer require floors and have rings installed in their ceilings “just in case” the actual floors do in fact give way in later generations.  I remember when it was announced, I wondered, “how are they going to set themselves apart from Assassin’s Creed?”  It turns out they made the inverse gameplay environment interaction model.

If Creed is all sandbox exploration and no user required button/world interaction, PoP is linear level design and is entirely built around user driven world interacts.  In Creed we can go around something, over it, under it, or completely avoid it altogether on the ground.  In PoP, we are forced to head down one (okay two if you go the long way) hallway, and navigate it the way it was designed to (by that race of Howler Monkey People).

Graphed, they look a little like this:

Which one’s better?  Hard to say.  I think the point here is that neither one’s better than the other.  Although sales figures will eventually say how the consumers voted here, and with Creed having some rediculous lead (what is it now, 6 Million units?), I don’t know if the new PoP will ever catch up.

That said, Prince of Persia is the first game I finished in 2008, and I felt driven to finish it.  It may have been the fact that the rental was due back by 12/31, but come 9pm of 12/30 I parkoured towards the ending so fast I eventually got a Speed Demon achievement.  I was shocked at how much I enjoyed PoP.  I expected to hate it, what with it being so linear, but I found that even though I’d done every single interaction 100 times before, there was something so very satisfying about being in control of every interaction.  I quite playing Creed at about the halfway point once I realized that there wasn’t really any new content to be had.  The same crowd missions were available, and the “boss” assassinations were less assassinations and more just elaborate guard fights.

Thinking about this further, I’ve found that I’ve given up on just about every open ended game out there that I played last year.  GTA IV.  Fallout3.  Creed.  There comes a point in time where I just don’t want to move about their open endedness anymore, and I wonder if maybe the focused intensity of a linear level design is what kept me coming back for more.  There really are only “breathers” to be had in PoP; there are no long stretches with relatively nothing to do.  The only long walks are the ones between the temple and the fertile grounds themselves.  It demands your attention, constantly, and rewards your attention with some pretty sweet action and a metric fuck-ton of beautiful artwork.

I’ve lamented the ease of world navigation in Creed before, and wished there could be more world interaction to it.  I know we’re not going to get it, but what I wish we could have, with all of my heart, is for Ubi to re-combine these two teams again, and give us Prince of Creed.  Assassin’s Prince.  Whatever.  Just give me open world exploration with multiple parkouring/climbing/exploration puzzles that involve more user interaction than just pushing a joystick in the direction we want to move in.  I’d seriously love to see something in the middle ground here.  PoP’s interactions with Creed’s real-world exploration.

Doubt I’ll ever get to see it, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

ETA:  Oh great, I go looking for verification that the teams split and find an article where the PoP Producer pretty much lays out how they tried to stay out of each other’s IP.  :P

Talent:  he has it.  Freddie25 plays an accoustic version of the Windwaker theme, playing every instrument on a different video track.  You’ve seen this kind of thing before, but this is just…sweet.

Awhile back, while I was living under a bus, I saw an article on Joystiq which pointed to a much larger article on Gamasutra, which in essence, said “new IP for EA fails.”

They’re referring of course to the less than stellar launch of EA’s new IP this quarter of Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space.  While both articles seem to paint the failing economy and the consumer’s lack of faith in spending money they might not have combined with the fact that “new IP is hard to sell” as the culprits, I think they’re missing the larger point as to why they fell short.

I’m pretty sure it isn’t the fact that they’re new IP.  New IP is certainly difficult to get people to buy, if you compare it to selling a sequel, such as Madden, as the graph above (liberally stolen from Joystiq who stole it from Gamasutra) implies.  But the problem is that a blanket statement like that is patently false, and pretty easy to shoot holes in.  Left 4 Dead sold pretty well (450k on Xbox 360 alone, and Valve never releases the Steam sales #s, so who knows how much better it did there).  Spore has sold upwards of two million units.  Both are new IP, so we can see that EA doesn’t have much of a problem publishing new IP or getting consumer traction with them.  If we look to previous years IP, we can see that Gears of War (the original) sold what, three million units?  Assassin’s Creed sold something like six million units.  Even lame duck new IPs like Kane and Lynch sold well over a million.

So it’s probably not that they’re new IP.  Mirror’s Edge was marketed out the wazoo, what with multiple comic books, flash animated web trailers, ads everywhere, and I’m sure their internet “buzz” rating was high considering all of the pieces written about the main character and the first person nature of the parkouring.  Dead Space had a pretty high anticipation rate, at least in the quick straw poll amongst my friends and co-workers, so, why didn’t people buy it?

The problem with this notion, is that I think people did buy them.  They bought them both used.  My team in particular grabbed Dead Space for competitive analysis used a mere four days after it had launched.  This is pretty much a death knell for any title, as the vast majority of your sales occurs within the first two weeks following launch.  To have those numbers crippled by used sales is horrible, but there’s a reason why it happened.

Both games are relatively short single player games.  Sure, sure, there’s some time trial business in Mirror’s Edge, but I don’t think that’s a big draw for a lot of folks who bought it.  There is no great value to a repeat playthrough, especially since there is little to no branching content in either title, and it’s my opinion that neither title was particularly innovative, either (I’m going to suffer the slings and arrows for this opinion, but I’ll elaborate in a later piece).  So, I don’t think there was a very large retention rate amongst consumers who didbuy it new.  They probably burned through the game in a two or three night playthrough, felt it wasn’t worth the $64 they paid for it, traded them in and got something else for their money while the title still retained a high trade-in value, and moved on.  Meanwhile, people who missed out on the launch bandwagon were able to buy the title used less than a week after it hit the shelves.

While I would like to turn this into a hit piece on why used games are bad for the industry, I’m instead going to take the route that I can impact and point out that we as developers need to deliver content that’s worth keeping.  This means a single player campaign that lasts significantly longer than 6-10 hours, if there isn’t any multiplayer content.  Games like Spore and Fallout3 do this quite amicably, with something in the neighborhood of 25-50 hours of content.  Both titles also have a decently high replay rate, as it’s nearly impossible to explore all of the game’s content on a single playthrough.

Other Q4 titles such as Gears 2 or CoD:WaW have a high consumer retention value due to the extensive multiplayer aspects of the titles (and the fact that they’re sequels to highly successful franchises goes a long way to boot), so there isn’t a ton of used titles to be found, especially during the critical first month of sales.

There’s some kind of secret formula here, one that should hopefully keep your title out of the hands of the used stockpiles, and while oversimplified, it goes something like this:

• Single Player Content ~ 12 hours
• Co-op or other networked non-competitive online play
• Rich compelling multiplayer content, append-able with DLC

That’s pretty much the CoD/Gears/Halo/L4D formula up there.  The Spore/Fallout/Oblivion/Final Fantasy example is much more simplistic:

• Single Player Content > 25 hours

I’m not saying I’m any kind of rocket scienctist for throwing these formulas up here; tons of people are already rolling their eyes at them.

The point here is that you just can’t release a game that takes 6 hours to play and expect people to throw out $64 for it.  I’m sure both titles are at a reduced price now, but they launched at full retail price.  I don’t care how new and innovative you think your IP is (and let’s be honest, neither Dead Space nor Mirror’s Edge was horribly innovative or changed the game space we play or develop in), if you don’t deliver the consumer “their money’s worth” they’re going to not give you all of their money, or worse, they’re going to make sure you don’t make it (intentionally or no) by returning your game as a used title and buying something else.

Consumers wouldn’t accept a movie that cost $10 to get into but only lasted for 40 minutes.  Why should we expect gamers to latch onto a retail model that delivers a similar value?

New IP here isn’t the problem.  A small value per dollar is.

First off, I apologize for being away for so long.  I don’t think I’ve ever let this place go without a post for 20 days, and I don’t intend to do it again.  I really miss writing here, and it’s been probably the second thing I’ve missed the most, just behind seeing my family on a semi-regular basis.  After having such an incredible first year, I really didn’t want to start off Year Two with nearly a month of absence.

Unfortunately I got thrown under a crunch bus at work last month, and then while I was getting back up and about to start writing again a second crunch bus came along (this one included weekends!), and as I stood in the street dazed and seeing stars, the massive layoff bus blitzed by, narrowly missing me, although when I wasn’t looking the restructuring double decker bus blindsided me.  I’m lucky to still have a job, even if it’s doing something I haven’t done in a few years.  Added bonus of crunch bus trampling:  25% loss in overall health quality.

And while I was dodging/getting hit by metaphorical busses, my main home PC (the one I typically write and make graphics on) got hit with some awesome ransomware.  Fun times!  I’ve just now got it back up and running after a complete drive wipe, and I hope to have the graphics software operational within the next couple of days.  Oh yes, I’m afraid this battlestation will be quite operational when Santa arrives.

At any rate, I apologize again for throwing a bunch of excuses up here instead of an actual piece.  I really needed to start writing something just to get the “juices flowing” again.  I’ve got a handful of pieces that I’ve been positively dying to share with you from this past month, so please, don’t turn off your RSS feeds just yet.

I hope you don’t mind the staleness of them; the fresh perspective on the topics should help overcome the lapsed date on the side.

More coming soon.  This week even!  I swears.

Now if I can just find my FTP access notes…

Just a quick update to point out that everyone who hasn’t already figured this out needs to go and read Jason Brownlee’s piece on how the Left 4 Dead opening movie is a passive tutorial mode for the game.  Everything you see in the opening movie is a depiction of how things work in-game.  It’s so effective he didn’t even realize he already knew how to play the game the first time he started playing.

I hope it’s a trend that future games can use to entertain and educate players rather than forcing us through boring rote tutorial levels.

Also, it’s nice to see Brownlee writing about games again.

So, a funny thing happened on the way to the safe-room in Left 4 Dead.  We kinda discovered a new way to play it.

It happened purely by uncommunicative circumstance when we were playing the Left 4 Dead demo a couple of weeks ago at work, and ever since then it’s pretty much changed how we play the game, possibly for the better, but certainly for the hilarious.

We had pretty much cake-walked our way through the first streets of No Mercy on Expert, and my buddy and I were bringing up the rear on the safe-house. The other two members of our party had already made it inside. As I approached the door, I noticed that Zoey (the buddy) had turned around and was waiting at the door for me to make it through. Just then, I heard a new hoarde rushing down the stairs at us, and realized that

1. We could probably take them without going inside, and
2. Zoey wasn’t going inside, instead standing and shooting at the horde

Good buddy that I am, I decided that I’d turn and fight as well.  Shoulder to shoulder we stood, pushing back the wave of the infected, allies in the war against this scourge of humanity.  Our solidarity, unbreakable.  Our resolve, steadfast.  Our aim, tru–hey wait where’d Zoey go?  Oh shi–Zoey went back inside, well, I might as well just back my way into the door while firing and–

Wait, why is there a wall here at my back where the door should be?  ZOEY CLOSED THE DOOR.  OH GOD, YOU BASTARD.  And then the horde was upon me, knocking me to the floor.  Zoey, pal that he was, “helped” by racking up his score a bit and shooting some of the horde off of me by firing through the window, but in the end, it wasn’t enough.  Even with my valiant last stand, I succumbed to their mauling (and the hilarious curb stomping), and died.

Of course, the Survivors still “won” and I was resurrected in the very room I was denied entry to.  We all laughed pretty damn hard at what had happened, and I am pretty ashamed to admit I used some language typically used by kids on Xbox Live, but for everyone who witnessed it, we realized that we had a new game on our hands.

Since we only play on Expert, we need to play as a team in order to survive.  We’re there for each other, we have each other’s backs throughout the entire stage, but man, once we know that door is within reach?  It’s every survivor for themselves.  We know that it only takes one person to make it through the door to complete the level, and now everyone wants to be the first guy through the door and lock everyone else out.  The betrayal is comically delicious, and it now seems to happen every time.

So the next time we played through the demo with that same crew, I at least knew what was going to happen at the door.  Everyone else hadn’t figured it out yet, but there went Zoey, trying to be the first one through the door.  Sure enough, as soon as he reached it, the door closed in our faces.  I didn’t even try the handle.  I could see Zoey’s head peeping out through the window, so I shot it.  With my shotgun.  This knocked Zoey to the ground, and now I could successfully open the door from the outside (you might be able to do this anyway, but I wasn’t going to take any chances).

Once we were all inside, everyone else kept trying to help Zoey back up to his feet, while I continued to shotgun Zoey to the ground ’till he was dead.  Of course, he just respawned back inside the safe-room, and we all laughed some more and continued on to what can only be described as an epic finish to the second level.

We’d never been able to finish the subway part of the No Mercy demo on Expert.  We almost always got owned by the tank that would invariably show up.  Maybe killing Zoey before the level ended made our total health low enough to keep a tank from spawning, but either way, one didn’t show up this time, and for the first time ever we were finally seeing the second floor of the electrical substation room.

My health was getting dangerously low that round, and so I grabbed the sniper rifle as I knew I was going to be “hanging back” due to my horrible limp, and wanted to still be able to help everyone else push the front.  I had no idea just how horrible that limp was going to get, and was shocked to see myself bleed out ’till I only had one hit point remaining.  Let me tell you, you’re always bringing up the rear when you’ve got only one hit point.  You.  Move.  So.  SLLLLllooooowwwwwww.

Our group was pretty haggard looking.  I don’t think there was a person not limping.  Collectively I don’t even think we had 100 health between the four of us put together.  But damn it, we were going to race to that door if it killed us.  Some folks didn’t know just how prophetic that would turn out to be.

Zoey and Francis were in the lead, gimping their way for the door, when Francis had the bright idea to blow up the gas can hanging on the wall before you round the corner to the door.  Unfortunately, he and Zoey were standing too close to it, and the resulting explosion knocked them both to the floor.  I didn’t see this happen, because I was still trying to use both hands to get my busted legs up the stairs one at a time.  As I rounded the corner, I could see that Bill had his back to me, and Zoey and Louis were still alive but on the other side of the firewall that separated us.

I don’t know what Bill was thinking.  Maybe he could feel my sniper rifle aiming at his back, my finger ever so gently squeeeeezing that trigger, maybe he knew he was the “man in the middle.”  Maybe he was just feeling desperate.  Bill just ran through the fire, and baby, he burned.  I’m not sure if he was running from me, trying to be the first through the door, or stupidly trying to save Zoey or Francis (who would have shot him had he come close enough).  Either way, Bill burned. 

Meanwhile, both Zoey and Francis bled out at the exact same moment.  Normally, I’d be pretty ecstatic right then, seeing as my Louis was about to be the only survivor.  Only I still only had the one hit point, and I had what felt like a hundred yard crawl ahead of me to make it to the door.  Even just one lone horde zombie could kill me at this point if he got in a lucky shot, and so there I was, laughing hysterically as I limped, hobbled, and dragged myself to the saferoom, and went from being the loser with one hit point in the rear, the guy “Most Likely to Die in a Horror Movie,” to the last man standing, triumphantly, in a locked safe-room.

This has become my preferred way to play L4D now, and I wish it could be a special mode.  Basically, give extra health and ammo to the guy who can successfully keep everyone else out of the safe-room at the end of a round and close the door on them.

The reason I love it so much is because it turns the game design of “stay together” on its ear, and creates this moment where your primary goal of helping your buddies is switched off and a competitive mode of “kill everyone” is switched on.  You even start thinking about it halfway through the level.  Do you really want to use your health on your buddy?  He looks like he still has half his health, and he’s just going to try and kill you when you all reach the door, anyway.  Maybe it would be better to just ignore his health request and let him die before you get to the door?  You’ll even start jockeying for position when you know the door is close.  You either want to be waaaaayyyy out front where nobody else can get you (which is in itself a dangerous place to be, since you don’t want to be alone), or you want to be in 2nd or 3rd place, so you can knock off the guy(s) in front and still get the door closed before 4th place gets there.  You typically don’t want to be in 4th place, which is almost a sure-fire place to be in if you want to be locked out, unless you know everyone has low health and will wind up incapacitating each other before anyone gets through the door.

The bottom line is it creates this sort of “Mad Mad World” self-interest greed that should be present in some small way in a group of four people all from different walks of life who are forced together out of necessity in order to stay alive.  I’m not saying that people are horrible; I love the game design of L4D that forces you to stick together, but I just love how our new game of “locking your buddies out” has created a new level of intensity to the door.  It’s created a very real fear of “not making it” that just wasn’t there for me in the game’s original inception.

And it’s certainly created quite a few laughs and water cooler recaps.

ETA:  Crap, it appears anyone outside the door can just open it.  Anyone want to start a petition to Valve to incorporate a new “Betrayal” game mode? :D

Holy crap.

Has it been a year?  Already?  To be perfectly honest, when I started this, I had only a small expectation that it would make it a full year.  Typically I give up on personal pet projects much sooner than that, often tossing them aside for some other lofty and typically unreachable goal given my total lack of free time.

And yet, here we are.  It feels pretty good to know that not only has this worked out, but that I feel like I’ve got at least another year’s worth of this in me.  Who knows, mabye I can keep this up indefinitely.  But enough of the crazy talk.

Like all anniversary posts everywhere, I’m going to throw some stats up here, because I’m pretty proud of these.  I didn’t give myself any real goals when I started this, only that I dreamed it would be pretty killer to have a million visitors in my first year, and while I don’t think I quite hit that mark, I’m proud as hell about these stats.

• Pageviews:  1,057,440
• Posts: 174
• Comments:  965
• RSS Subscribers:  233

I wanted to say thanks to all the folks who’ve linked here, posted pieces to digg/stumble/reddit, read, and/or commented in the past year.  Sometimes, just your love of the site or an insightful or heartfelt comment is enough to make the attention whore part of me want to keep posting when I feel like I have “more important” things to be doing.  So thank you, from the cerebral part of me who doesn’t mind being goaded on once in awhile by a few excitement pheremones.

Here’s to what was an incredible year, and I’m looking forward to next year already.

/toast

Of course, I suppose I should spruce the place up a bit.  This design is so 2007.