Ten years ago, Japanese video game publisher Tecmo had a brilliant money-spinning idea. It decided to take the female characters from its successful fighting game series Dead or Alive and put them into a beach volleyball simulation set on a tropical island. There would be a lot of bikinis and thanks to a then cutting edge graphics engine, a lot of bounce physics. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A new gaming franchise was born.
But now that same franchise is in trouble. Kind of.
It seemed to some that Koei Tecmo’s decision not to release the game in the West was due to fears of a feminist backlash
In November, a community moderator on the Dead or Alive Facebook page was answering questions about the possibility of a western release for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, the latest title in the series. The staff member informed fans that an official release was unlikely outside of Japan and Asia, and when pushed on the reasoning wrote: “Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision. Thank you.”
Unsurprisingly, the minor revelation was leapt on both by fans of the series and by libertarian cultural critics, who quickly blamed “social justice warriors” for inhibiting freedom of speech (and bikini wear) thanks to their incessant hand-wringing over sexism in the games industry. Internet forums and gaming subreddits enthusiastically linked the “announcement” with Nintendo’s recent decision to change some of the skimpy outfits in Wii U titles Xenoblade Chronicles X and Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water for western release. To some, it was a sure sign that authoritarian lefties were imposing their killjoy values on the industry.
But of course, things aren’t quite that simple. For a start, Japanese publishers have always edited explicit video game content for western audiences. Back in 1991, the original version of Final Fantasy IV featured a semi-naked dancer who was fully clothed for the US release, while popular Mega Drive brawlers such as Streets of Rage III and Mystic Defender saw scantily clad female characters dressed more modestly in western versions. This is not a new phenomenon.
It’s also not one guided purely by fears of a moral backlash. There is a historic awareness that western markets aren’t as exposed to the mass of anime and manga that heavily inform gaming content in Japan, and which comfortably embrace many seijin – or adult – subgenres that often seem weird beyond the domestic market. Indeed, when we appraise games like Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball in the west, we tend to do so beyond the context of Japan’s wider otaku culture. “The women in DoA belong in a particular niche – it’s the characters themselves that are popular,” argues sociologist Casey Brienza, who has written extensively on manga and anime. “There’s a huge culture around what are called ‘character goods’ – things like Hello Kitty – which become multiplied across different media, from comics to action figures.
“There are fetishes around physical types, like girls with big breasts, or around particular clothing or personality types, like the girl next door; there’s a fetish around girls who wear glasses (Meganekko), and blue hair became popular after the success of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion ... That’s why these video games are made - they cater to particular fans of very specific tropes. People who write academically about this in Japan focus on the way that [in otaku culture] the symbolic is often reiterated outside of any narrative frame. DoA is a good example of that: unlike, say, the Final Fantasy adventures, there’s no real story, it’s just about the characters – that’s the appeal”.
According to Brienza, this kind of introverted, compartmentalised sexuality has its roots in the vast sociological changes that have taken place in Japan over the last 30 years. “I think it’s about how unequal the country has become, gender-wise,” she says. “Women are still expected to quit their jobs when they get married and become full-time home makers – however, the concept of lifetime employment has broken down and that puts pressure on both men and women; the stereotype of man as sole breadwinner and the woman at home taking care of the kids doesn’t work financially. And because the country is still so rigid, it just means that young people don’t have serious relationships. They can’t make it work.”
The effects of this sociocultural crisis are manifested through pop culture. A popular manga genre for young women, for example, is Yaoi or “boy’s love”, in which young male characters indulge in homosexual relationships. “What’s appealing about it is that there are no women in the story,” says Brienza. “If you want a romantic fantasy, the culture is so rigid that a lot of young women cannot imagine a truly equal heterosexual relationship with a romantic partner.”
The equivalent for young men is the “moe” subgenre in anime, manga and games, where the focus is on sweetness and innocence of the protagonist and the protective feelings they engender. It is, according to Brienza, a direct response to the rise of the career woman, who doesn’t necessarily want to marry or have children. “That sort of femininity is threatening because the expectation is that you, as the man, will be the sole breadwinner and if you’re not, you’ve somehow failed,” she says. “In moe, we’re seeing the characters becoming younger and younger, but the attraction is not sexual, it’s sort of like the feeling you get when you see a puppy – that ‘oh my god it’s so cute’ appeal – but for guys. These characters evoke care and cuteness; it’s as though sex itself has become too threatening.”
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
12 things in Fallout 4 they don't tell you – but you really need to know
“We will all go together when we go,” sang the satirist Tom Lehrer of the nuclear arms race. “What a comforting fact that is to know.” But how wrong he was: Bethesda’s Fallout 4 gives us a post-apocalypse jam packed with survivors, mutations, and all sorts of opportunities for the entrepreneurial survivor.
Much of the appeal of a Bethesda game lies in creating your own adventure in the enormous spaces they provide, but Fallout 4’s many depths are poorly served by the tutorials – even central mechanics are explained with cursory text windows, soon forgotten, or sometimes never touched on at all.
Consequently, some of this world’s real magic can only be found by poking around. Here are some tips about where to look, starring our own character – who, entirely coincidentally, bears a passing resemblance to Jeremy Corbyn.
Much of the appeal of a Bethesda game lies in creating your own adventure in the enormous spaces they provide, but Fallout 4’s many depths are poorly served by the tutorials – even central mechanics are explained with cursory text windows, soon forgotten, or sometimes never touched on at all.
Consequently, some of this world’s real magic can only be found by poking around. Here are some tips about where to look, starring our own character – who, entirely coincidentally, bears a passing resemblance to Jeremy Corbyn.
1. Settlements
There’s a lot of fun in Fallout 4’s Settlements, and if you want to unlock them as quickly as possible, follow the Minutemen questline that starts in the game’s early stages. The first time you meet them everything ends up back at Sanctuary, which is a fine starting point – and even better when you find this hidden basement containing three gold bars and other lovely loot.
Two things are badly explained. The first is that you connect up your power supply by opening the workshop menu and looking for the “connect wire” prompt at the bottom of the screen: laugh all you want but this frustrated me for ages. The second is that once you’ve set up crops or trading stations, you need to assign settlers – also done using the workshop menu. Build a fetching bell like this to pull them all together easily.
This is key to supply lines, which I unlocked and then failed to use for about 10 hours. The upgrade description reads like it works automatically, but you have to assign a settler to cover specific routes – again, through the workshop menu once the option’s available. Some of this is lack of explanation, some is just bad interface design.
There’s a lot of fun in Fallout 4’s Settlements, and if you want to unlock them as quickly as possible, follow the Minutemen questline that starts in the game’s early stages. The first time you meet them everything ends up back at Sanctuary, which is a fine starting point – and even better when you find this hidden basement containing three gold bars and other lovely loot.
Two things are badly explained. The first is that you connect up your power supply by opening the workshop menu and looking for the “connect wire” prompt at the bottom of the screen: laugh all you want but this frustrated me for ages. The second is that once you’ve set up crops or trading stations, you need to assign settlers – also done using the workshop menu. Build a fetching bell like this to pull them all together easily.
This is key to supply lines, which I unlocked and then failed to use for about 10 hours. The upgrade description reads like it works automatically, but you have to assign a settler to cover specific routes – again, through the workshop menu once the option’s available. Some of this is lack of explanation, some is just bad interface design.
2. Massive Damage!
The size of your gun matters, but also incredibly important in Fallout 4 is what your enemy’s resistant to. It’s easy to ignore this but simple to check with the early ‘Awareness’ upgrade for your Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting Systems (VATs) – which shows symbols for the damage types alongside a defence value from low to high. Focusing on using the right weapon scores faster kills and saves wasted ammunition: it’s a critical skill.
The size of your gun matters, but also incredibly important in Fallout 4 is what your enemy’s resistant to. It’s easy to ignore this but simple to check with the early ‘Awareness’ upgrade for your Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting Systems (VATs) – which shows symbols for the damage types alongside a defence value from low to high. Focusing on using the right weapon scores faster kills and saves wasted ammunition: it’s a critical skill.
3. Hide!
At the top of the bad-explanation list goes the utility of the basic crouch. When you crouch an icon reading [hidden] will appear, indicating your character’s entered stealth mode – and Bethesda’s enemy AI is idiotic, so it’s much easier to hide in plain sight than you’d think. On top of this, if you’re spotted, crouch behind cover and your character will actually take cover – and can lean out at the edges to aim.
At the top of the bad-explanation list goes the utility of the basic crouch. When you crouch an icon reading [hidden] will appear, indicating your character’s entered stealth mode – and Bethesda’s enemy AI is idiotic, so it’s much easier to hide in plain sight than you’d think. On top of this, if you’re spotted, crouch behind cover and your character will actually take cover – and can lean out at the edges to aim.
4. The Lone-ish Wanderer
One of the biggest problems with Fallout 4 is the limited weight of items your character can carry. There are various workarounds for this (try cooking meat from the cow-like creatures, Brahmin) but by far the best is a trick built into the Lone Wanderer perk. This increases the damage your character can take and the maximum they can carry – as long as you don’t have a companion.
But! Right now, Dogmeat doesn’t count: you can take Lone Wanderer and toddle off with man’s best friend – both keeping the various perk bonuses intact and having a companion to store stuff with. If you’re just going out loot-hunting, there’s no more efficient setup. However, this is almost definitely a bug and is likely to be patched soon.
One of the biggest problems with Fallout 4 is the limited weight of items your character can carry. There are various workarounds for this (try cooking meat from the cow-like creatures, Brahmin) but by far the best is a trick built into the Lone Wanderer perk. This increases the damage your character can take and the maximum they can carry – as long as you don’t have a companion.
But! Right now, Dogmeat doesn’t count: you can take Lone Wanderer and toddle off with man’s best friend – both keeping the various perk bonuses intact and having a companion to store stuff with. If you’re just going out loot-hunting, there’s no more efficient setup. However, this is almost definitely a bug and is likely to be patched soon.
5. Here Boy
Fairly simple tip, but I wish I’d known this sooner. You can easily lose track of Dogmeat and, unlike other companions, he doesn’t come running to the bell. Always make sure to send Dogmeat to your main settlement and build a dog house for him – then whenever you need to find him, that’s where he’ll be. Makes sense I suppose.
Fairly simple tip, but I wish I’d known this sooner. You can easily lose track of Dogmeat and, unlike other companions, he doesn’t come running to the bell. Always make sure to send Dogmeat to your main settlement and build a dog house for him – then whenever you need to find him, that’s where he’ll be. Makes sense I suppose.
6. Magic Jaws
One final tip for this most noble of animals. On leaving Vault 111 at the start of the game you may have been taunted by the Cryolater, an insanely good gun held behind unbreakable glass with a master lock. To get inside, you will need to become an excellent lockpicker – meaning many hours of play stand between you and the weapon.
No such rules apply to our four-legged friend, however. You meet Dogmeat shortly after leaving Vault 111 and, if you return, can bag the Cryolater. First get Dogmeat to stand in its vicinity, then instruct him to search for items, making sure you’ve cleared everything else lootable. Et voila, the gun warps from the case to this magnificent beast’s jaws – and if you trade items, he’s even stored the ammo too. Good boy!
One final tip for this most noble of animals. On leaving Vault 111 at the start of the game you may have been taunted by the Cryolater, an insanely good gun held behind unbreakable glass with a master lock. To get inside, you will need to become an excellent lockpicker – meaning many hours of play stand between you and the weapon.
No such rules apply to our four-legged friend, however. You meet Dogmeat shortly after leaving Vault 111 and, if you return, can bag the Cryolater. First get Dogmeat to stand in its vicinity, then instruct him to search for items, making sure you’ve cleared everything else lootable. Et voila, the gun warps from the case to this magnificent beast’s jaws – and if you trade items, he’s even stored the ammo too. Good boy!
7. Mod smart
The Gun Nut perk is an essential early pickup, because with this (and later ammo-specific perks like Science!) you can turn a standard base weapon into something like the above. But a key, unexplained thing with weapon modifications is to strip the good ones from guns you don’t want – by replacing them with a lower-tier mod. If you just scrap or sell weapons, the mods go too, but if you strip them you can acquire and use mods you can’t yet create yourself.
8. Personalisation
Renaming your favourite guns can be done at any weapons bench, and allows you to further inhabit that roleplaying experience. On another note, if you want to give your power armour a natty flame look then head straight east from Vault 111 to the Robotics Disposal Ground, where there are a few nice surprises.
9. Colour co-ordination
Notice my Pip-Boy’s attractive white hue? From the game’s pause menu – not the Pip-Boy menu – choose “Display” and you can alter the colour of both the game’s heads-up display and the Pip-Boy interface. One of the best things about this is that the Pip-Boy’s built-in torch reflects your choice – and using white light makes it, to my eyes, much more useful in dark areas.
The Gun Nut perk is an essential early pickup, because with this (and later ammo-specific perks like Science!) you can turn a standard base weapon into something like the above. But a key, unexplained thing with weapon modifications is to strip the good ones from guns you don’t want – by replacing them with a lower-tier mod. If you just scrap or sell weapons, the mods go too, but if you strip them you can acquire and use mods you can’t yet create yourself.
8. Personalisation
Renaming your favourite guns can be done at any weapons bench, and allows you to further inhabit that roleplaying experience. On another note, if you want to give your power armour a natty flame look then head straight east from Vault 111 to the Robotics Disposal Ground, where there are a few nice surprises.
9. Colour co-ordination
Notice my Pip-Boy’s attractive white hue? From the game’s pause menu – not the Pip-Boy menu – choose “Display” and you can alter the colour of both the game’s heads-up display and the Pip-Boy interface. One of the best things about this is that the Pip-Boy’s built-in torch reflects your choice – and using white light makes it, to my eyes, much more useful in dark areas.
10. Hangover fuel
All the crafting elements of Fallout 4 can be a pain, but cooking provides all sorts of useful side-effects to replace expensive drugs and medications. Comrade Corbyn is fond, in particular, of drinking some vodka before a big fight – which means he’s always on the verge of alcoholism. But cook up a Radscorpion omelette and bingo, addiction cured, and we can start on the whiskey. Head to the radioactive desert that sprawls across the south-east of the map to get more ingredients than you can handle.
11. You can go back … if you want
Fallout 4’s world is huge but, if you want to re-visit a cleared location with everything re-spawned – from enemies to random loot – the same 30-day rule applies as did in Skyrim. Sit on a piece of furniture anywhere and you can ‘Wait’ for a set time to trigger this respawn manually, the only downside being you have to wait in 24 hour blocks. I’m not saying this is fun or even practical. But if you want to rinse an especially rich building again or replay an especially good fight, this is how.
12. Turn it off then on again
One of Fallout 4’s more serious issues is that you can sometimes end up in a situation like this – where the game has spawned a brahmin inside the house that’s trying to get outside and blocking my only exit. Most glitches aren’t nearly as bad but, if this happens, the classic IT solution applies: just saving and reloading respawns everything and should get your wasteland domination back on track.
All the crafting elements of Fallout 4 can be a pain, but cooking provides all sorts of useful side-effects to replace expensive drugs and medications. Comrade Corbyn is fond, in particular, of drinking some vodka before a big fight – which means he’s always on the verge of alcoholism. But cook up a Radscorpion omelette and bingo, addiction cured, and we can start on the whiskey. Head to the radioactive desert that sprawls across the south-east of the map to get more ingredients than you can handle.
11. You can go back … if you want
Fallout 4’s world is huge but, if you want to re-visit a cleared location with everything re-spawned – from enemies to random loot – the same 30-day rule applies as did in Skyrim. Sit on a piece of furniture anywhere and you can ‘Wait’ for a set time to trigger this respawn manually, the only downside being you have to wait in 24 hour blocks. I’m not saying this is fun or even practical. But if you want to rinse an especially rich building again or replay an especially good fight, this is how.
12. Turn it off then on again
One of Fallout 4’s more serious issues is that you can sometimes end up in a situation like this – where the game has spawned a brahmin inside the house that’s trying to get outside and blocking my only exit. Most glitches aren’t nearly as bad but, if this happens, the classic IT solution applies: just saving and reloading respawns everything and should get your wasteland domination back on track.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Meet Nina Freeman, the punk poet of gaming
The couple are entwined on a small bed in a dormitory room in New York City. Young and inexperienced, they fumble at each other’s clothes, his hands all over her. The camera draws in nearer, almost uncomfortably stark and intimate in the way of all mumblecore movies about the awkward first stages of a new relationship. But this is not an independent film. This is a video game, and the woman on the bed is played by its designer, Nina Freeman. It’s a long way from Call of Duty.
For the last five years, Freeman has been working with small teams of artists and programmers, making intensely personal games about sex and relationships. She came to prominence with the acclaimed How Do You Do It, an interactive skit about a little girl exploring the idea of sex by bashing a Barbie doll and Action Man together. In Ladylike, you control a conversation between a teenage girl and her mother during a drive to the mall. No matter what you say about school, boyfriends or clothes through a series of conversation options, the mum always disapproves. You literally can’t win.
Earlier this month Freeman released her latest project, a multilayered narrative game named Cibele. Developed with small studio Star Maid Games, it’s about the designer’s brief relationship with a man she met in the multiplayer adventure game, Final Fantasy XI, where hundreds of players gather and form online clans to slay monsters and discover treasure.
When you start Cibele, you find yourself accessing a simulation of Nina’s own computer desktop from the time of the affair, complete with folders full of her real photos, poems and live journal entries; but if you click on a specific icon you enter a role-playing game called Valtameri, a fictitious take on Final Fantasy, where you meet Blake, who leads his own in-game clan of fellow players. As you fight monsters in this synthetic adventure, you hear Nina talking with Blake on the phone and see short film sequences, showing her taking selfies and emailing them to him.
It’s a short but complex and self-reflexive experience; a game-within-a-game about the ways in which multiplayer role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy XI double as social arenas where players meet, flirt and gossip. “I wanted to explore the journey that these two went on together in the digital space,” says Freeman, who refers to the Nina of the game in the third-person. “It’s about what it’s like to have these intimate interactions through an online game; what it’s like to be the girl who is sending pictures to her lover over the internet and talking to him on the phone and longing for this physical interaction that feels almost out of reach.”
Although the character of Blake is fictitious, he represents the man Nina met, but is no longer in contact with. “He does know the game exists,” she says. “He got in touch with me and he was like, ‘It’s cool that you’re making this.’” To make things even more complex, his role in the game is played by Freeman’s partner, Emmett Butler, who also worked on the project. Did she find this strange?
“Emmett has worked with me on a number of personal games in the past,” she says. “So he had a good idea of what he was getting into. Filming the intimate scene at the end was a lot easier for both of us, since we know each other so well. Our roommate at the time actually filmed it – it was nice to be able to create that portion of the game with people I feel comfortable around. The voice actor for Blake was actually not Emmett, but a young man named Justin Briner who we worked with remotely. He was really great, too.”
For Freeman, video games have never been the solitary, isolating pastime of common stereotype. As a child in the sleepy coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, her favourite thing was to visit her friends Melanie and Brittany, hide out in their basement and play on a Nintendo console all day, until their parents kicked her out for the evening. Together they devoured games like Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, sharing the stories as they unfolded on screen. When she discovered Final Fantasy XI at the age of 14, it was a way of meeting up with friends – but also forging new relationships. In Cibele, the player can swap between playing Valtameri and chatting with other characters via simulated instant messaging, email and chat forums. It’s a clever approximation of how we now socially multitask online, seamlessly moving from one window to the next.
Freeman says that in our era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, this idea of the internet as just another romantic space is prevalent and natural. “For my generation online relationships are basically a normal part of life. A lot of people have contacted me after completing Cibele, saying: ‘Oh wow, this happened to me when I was playing World of Warcraft as a teenager. I was that young girl on the internet, trying to negotiate a relationship with someone I’d never met.’”
For some, the way Freeman explores her own experiences so personally through her games is extraordinary. But she sees many parallels with poetry, which she studied at New York’s Pace University under Charles North. He introduced her to the New York School: Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara. She worked for a while at legendary East Village live poetry venue the Poetry Project.
Later, two things happened: she started hanging out with a bunch of independent game developers who introduced her to offbeat, experimental titles like Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, about the transgender designer’s own transition, and Gone Home, about a burgeoning romance between two teenage girls. She also came down with a chronic illness. “I was suddenly surrounded by game makers,” she remembers, “and I thought, these games are poetry. So while I was sick I had a bunch of free time and taught myself how to program.”
Has she ever been concerned about the implications of putting herself out there so honestly? “Putting myself into these stories in a vulnerable way has definitely taken practice. I’m more and more comfortable with each project. I have learned to separate my present personal life from them, because it could be uncomfortable to feel like critics are talking about me when they talk about the game. Yes, they are talking about me, in a sense, but they are really talking about the character I created based on me. That distinction is important.”
Freeman and her collaborators Emmett Butler and Diego Garcia are now part of a vibrant new era of independent game design. The explosion of broadband internet access, together with the arrival of cheap development tools likeGameMaker and Twine, has meant that almost anyone can make a game now, put it online and find a global audience. Whereas big PlayStation titles require teams of hundreds and budgets of millions, a downloadable indie title can be built by one or two people on a cheap PC.
The result has been an explosion of idiosyncratic titles – but also the emergence of indie gaming scenes and venues. Games have effectively become the new punk rock – or, as Nina sees it, the new poetry: “I saw a lot of parallels with the Beats,” she says. “I was excited because what I found so inspiring in poetry was starting to happen in games.”
With Cibele now finished, Freeman is concentrating fully on her current project,Tacoma, the latest title from Gone Home creator the Fullbright Company. Nine months ago, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the team is based. Set on a lunar research station, this eerie adventure is an ambitious move for her. “I’ve never made a 3D game before,” she says. “Fullbright is one of the few studios that’s really exploring this idea of games as character-focused narrative spaces; it’s very much about letting the players explore stories rather than being controlled by them.”
But what of our rookie couple in Cibele? Is there a happy ever after to their hook-up? Not exactly. While Blake is confident and seductive online, he shies away from anything more than a single physical meeting: “I don’t think relationships are comfortable,” he tells Nina. It’s not hard to see this as a reflection on the alienation of online relationships but maybe it’s actually just about kids finding new ways to deal with social anxieties.
For the last five years, Freeman has been working with small teams of artists and programmers, making intensely personal games about sex and relationships. She came to prominence with the acclaimed How Do You Do It, an interactive skit about a little girl exploring the idea of sex by bashing a Barbie doll and Action Man together. In Ladylike, you control a conversation between a teenage girl and her mother during a drive to the mall. No matter what you say about school, boyfriends or clothes through a series of conversation options, the mum always disapproves. You literally can’t win.
Earlier this month Freeman released her latest project, a multilayered narrative game named Cibele. Developed with small studio Star Maid Games, it’s about the designer’s brief relationship with a man she met in the multiplayer adventure game, Final Fantasy XI, where hundreds of players gather and form online clans to slay monsters and discover treasure.
When you start Cibele, you find yourself accessing a simulation of Nina’s own computer desktop from the time of the affair, complete with folders full of her real photos, poems and live journal entries; but if you click on a specific icon you enter a role-playing game called Valtameri, a fictitious take on Final Fantasy, where you meet Blake, who leads his own in-game clan of fellow players. As you fight monsters in this synthetic adventure, you hear Nina talking with Blake on the phone and see short film sequences, showing her taking selfies and emailing them to him.
It’s a short but complex and self-reflexive experience; a game-within-a-game about the ways in which multiplayer role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy XI double as social arenas where players meet, flirt and gossip. “I wanted to explore the journey that these two went on together in the digital space,” says Freeman, who refers to the Nina of the game in the third-person. “It’s about what it’s like to have these intimate interactions through an online game; what it’s like to be the girl who is sending pictures to her lover over the internet and talking to him on the phone and longing for this physical interaction that feels almost out of reach.”
Although the character of Blake is fictitious, he represents the man Nina met, but is no longer in contact with. “He does know the game exists,” she says. “He got in touch with me and he was like, ‘It’s cool that you’re making this.’” To make things even more complex, his role in the game is played by Freeman’s partner, Emmett Butler, who also worked on the project. Did she find this strange?
“Emmett has worked with me on a number of personal games in the past,” she says. “So he had a good idea of what he was getting into. Filming the intimate scene at the end was a lot easier for both of us, since we know each other so well. Our roommate at the time actually filmed it – it was nice to be able to create that portion of the game with people I feel comfortable around. The voice actor for Blake was actually not Emmett, but a young man named Justin Briner who we worked with remotely. He was really great, too.”
For Freeman, video games have never been the solitary, isolating pastime of common stereotype. As a child in the sleepy coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, her favourite thing was to visit her friends Melanie and Brittany, hide out in their basement and play on a Nintendo console all day, until their parents kicked her out for the evening. Together they devoured games like Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, sharing the stories as they unfolded on screen. When she discovered Final Fantasy XI at the age of 14, it was a way of meeting up with friends – but also forging new relationships. In Cibele, the player can swap between playing Valtameri and chatting with other characters via simulated instant messaging, email and chat forums. It’s a clever approximation of how we now socially multitask online, seamlessly moving from one window to the next.
Freeman says that in our era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, this idea of the internet as just another romantic space is prevalent and natural. “For my generation online relationships are basically a normal part of life. A lot of people have contacted me after completing Cibele, saying: ‘Oh wow, this happened to me when I was playing World of Warcraft as a teenager. I was that young girl on the internet, trying to negotiate a relationship with someone I’d never met.’”
For some, the way Freeman explores her own experiences so personally through her games is extraordinary. But she sees many parallels with poetry, which she studied at New York’s Pace University under Charles North. He introduced her to the New York School: Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara. She worked for a while at legendary East Village live poetry venue the Poetry Project.
Later, two things happened: she started hanging out with a bunch of independent game developers who introduced her to offbeat, experimental titles like Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, about the transgender designer’s own transition, and Gone Home, about a burgeoning romance between two teenage girls. She also came down with a chronic illness. “I was suddenly surrounded by game makers,” she remembers, “and I thought, these games are poetry. So while I was sick I had a bunch of free time and taught myself how to program.”
Has she ever been concerned about the implications of putting herself out there so honestly? “Putting myself into these stories in a vulnerable way has definitely taken practice. I’m more and more comfortable with each project. I have learned to separate my present personal life from them, because it could be uncomfortable to feel like critics are talking about me when they talk about the game. Yes, they are talking about me, in a sense, but they are really talking about the character I created based on me. That distinction is important.”
Freeman and her collaborators Emmett Butler and Diego Garcia are now part of a vibrant new era of independent game design. The explosion of broadband internet access, together with the arrival of cheap development tools likeGameMaker and Twine, has meant that almost anyone can make a game now, put it online and find a global audience. Whereas big PlayStation titles require teams of hundreds and budgets of millions, a downloadable indie title can be built by one or two people on a cheap PC.
The result has been an explosion of idiosyncratic titles – but also the emergence of indie gaming scenes and venues. Games have effectively become the new punk rock – or, as Nina sees it, the new poetry: “I saw a lot of parallels with the Beats,” she says. “I was excited because what I found so inspiring in poetry was starting to happen in games.”
With Cibele now finished, Freeman is concentrating fully on her current project,Tacoma, the latest title from Gone Home creator the Fullbright Company. Nine months ago, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the team is based. Set on a lunar research station, this eerie adventure is an ambitious move for her. “I’ve never made a 3D game before,” she says. “Fullbright is one of the few studios that’s really exploring this idea of games as character-focused narrative spaces; it’s very much about letting the players explore stories rather than being controlled by them.”
But what of our rookie couple in Cibele? Is there a happy ever after to their hook-up? Not exactly. While Blake is confident and seductive online, he shies away from anything more than a single physical meeting: “I don’t think relationships are comfortable,” he tells Nina. It’s not hard to see this as a reflection on the alienation of online relationships but maybe it’s actually just about kids finding new ways to deal with social anxieties.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Rise of the Tomb Raider review – all action but too few risks
Despite her escalating body count, Lara Croft has no problem crossing borders. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the explorer’s second outing since a 2013 reboot which re-established her as a more vulnerable yet more violent warrior, she freely zips around the world – including an ill-advised stop-off in chaotic Syria.
The series, once an icon of the British video game industry, has also roamed; it’s now being co-built by long-time developer Crystal Dynamics and a Square Enix studio in tax-break friendly Canada (albeit with a team that includes the British writer, Rhianna Pratchett). Not only that, like the 2013 title upon which it builds, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game that has wandered some way from the roots that linger in its title. Not a lot of tomb raiding goes on in Tomb Raider these days. Instead, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a rip-roaring Saturday matinee of a video game, which has traded original ideas for popular ones.
Croft, voiced by Camilla Luddington, spends the majority of the game in freezing Siberia, where she skulks through the snow in search of an ancient, life-extending artefact supposedly lost to time in a forgotten city. More abstractly, Croft is chasing her late father, who once sought the same treasure. As well as answers, she also seeks resolution to unresolved issues to do with loss and deferred grief. Croft does this soul-searching through monologues, recited whenever she finds shelter at a campfire (the locations at which you may upgrade equipment, refill ammo supplies or craft new implements with which to combat the Siberian winter and the nefarious secret society known as Trinity, against whose agents you scuffle in the snow). Later, she also does this through conversation with a companion, who lends an ear if not, outside of the game’s cinematic cutscenes at least, a hand in her progress.
If Croft is in search of inner peace, she shows little care or consideration for her fellow human in the moment-to-moment play. Appearances deceive: this lithe, slender protagonist packs a serious punch, able to take out swarms of well-armed men, even those protected by Teflon body armour and six-foot-tall shields. Croft is able to knock up rudimentary explosive devices from tin cans or Molotov cocktails while cringing behind cover. She hurls them at her opponents with abandon, waiting for the flames to extinguish on their charred remains before plundering the body for ammunition or resources.
The juxtaposition in these games between the likeable, quipping hero we often find in word, and the bloodthirsty, ruthless killer we find in deed has become such a cliche that pointing it out has become a cliche itself. Nevertheless, the clanging incongruity remains, undiminished by familiarity, ludicrous in its continued repetition.
Familiar too, at least to players of the previous game, are your tasks, both primary and extra-curricular. Stealth follows light puzzling, follows light exploration, follows open battle, follows the kind of Indiana Jones set pieces in which you must, for example, flee a pursuing attack chopper, or a burning building. The linear design allows Crystal Dynamics to finely control the game’s rhythms, changing the pace and feel of the story through the nature of the challenges with which you’re presented. The recipe is undeniably compelling and well measured, but ultimately feels shallow.
Soon enough you learn to enter every new area and stab the analogue stick in order to instantly highlight items of interest – ammo crates, relics, rope-slides, climbable branches, frolicking animals who can be hunted and turned into resources. In this way you can read a location in seconds – there’s no need to slow down any more, survey your surroundings and figure out what you’re supposed to do. Mostly, you run from highlighted object to object, collecting, prising, climbing or reading your way through the to-do list that’s been laid out in front of you. There is, in nouveau-Tomb Raider, little true exploration or puzzle solving to do. Even on the toughest difficulty, this is a fast-food approximation of challenge.
It certainly slips down easily enough. Levels propel you forward with pitter-patter of manageable tasks, creating a sense of momentum. But there’s none of the enriching sense of accomplishment that one used to feel when working away at one of Tomb Raiders’ grand and exquisite environmental puzzles. As in the 2013 reboot, these are relegated to optional side-missions. You must discover the entrance to the tomb, perhaps accessed through some remote cave, or down a disused Soviet mineshaft, and then work out how to reach the treasure in its farthest depth, or tallest summit. Your reward is not only an upgraded ability, but also an honest sense of triumph. These are Rise of the Tomb Raider’s strongest moments.
On the evidence of these optional tombs, which are the closest the game comes to replicating the style and satisfaction of historical Tomb Raider, it’s clear that developer Crystal Dynamics is a home to masterly designers who would, surely, be able to deliver many games’-worth of memorable and delightful puzzles. But in the ever-accelerating homogenisation of the blockbuster video games, it seems as if they’ve been held back by the need for the game to hit the expected notes of the genre. Where once Tomb Raider led the field, now it merely rides with the pack, offering nudges of modest invention and improvement, but little to truly inspire and amaze.
The exception is, perhaps, Expeditions. Gone is the 2013’s game’s multiplayer mode, replaced by this score attack recasting of the main missions. Here you find new challenge goals and the chance to complete against friends and other players online. As in Halo 5, a new collectible card system adds modifiers to play. You buy (either with in-game currency or real world money) or win packs of cards. Each offers a bonus (eg better starting weapons) or a drawback (eg no ammunition), which comes with a counter-balancing penalty or multiplier to your subsequent score.
The harder you stack the odds against you, the greater the opportunity for glory. As you can equip multiple cards per run, there are many thousands of potential “load-outs” with which to fine-tune the balance between skill and risk. It’s a welcome diversion, and one that will provide, for some, additional interest and challenge after the main game is finished.
Rise of the Tomb Raider improves upon its predecessors formula. The skill tree, with which you improve Croft’s abilities, is larger and better defined. Most areas have additional challenges, and, in some locations, you can even take on freelance missions for other friendly characters you meet among the snow-dusted firs.
The game has undeniable breadth, then, but questionable depth. Like the Assassin’s Creed series, which places its bet on sprawl rather than texture, too often Rise of the Tomb Raider devolves into a gratuitous treasure hunt, where every piece of treasure is marked with a beam of light shooting up into the sky. If only this talented team had the chance to pursue a more singular vision.
As it is, Tomb Raider’s transformation from archaeological puzzle adventure to action blockbuster is complete. The result is a crowd-pleasing game, which offers only glimpses of what could be if this team were only allowed to take some braver risks with Croft’s next expedition.
The series, once an icon of the British video game industry, has also roamed; it’s now being co-built by long-time developer Crystal Dynamics and a Square Enix studio in tax-break friendly Canada (albeit with a team that includes the British writer, Rhianna Pratchett). Not only that, like the 2013 title upon which it builds, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game that has wandered some way from the roots that linger in its title. Not a lot of tomb raiding goes on in Tomb Raider these days. Instead, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a rip-roaring Saturday matinee of a video game, which has traded original ideas for popular ones.
Croft, voiced by Camilla Luddington, spends the majority of the game in freezing Siberia, where she skulks through the snow in search of an ancient, life-extending artefact supposedly lost to time in a forgotten city. More abstractly, Croft is chasing her late father, who once sought the same treasure. As well as answers, she also seeks resolution to unresolved issues to do with loss and deferred grief. Croft does this soul-searching through monologues, recited whenever she finds shelter at a campfire (the locations at which you may upgrade equipment, refill ammo supplies or craft new implements with which to combat the Siberian winter and the nefarious secret society known as Trinity, against whose agents you scuffle in the snow). Later, she also does this through conversation with a companion, who lends an ear if not, outside of the game’s cinematic cutscenes at least, a hand in her progress.
If Croft is in search of inner peace, she shows little care or consideration for her fellow human in the moment-to-moment play. Appearances deceive: this lithe, slender protagonist packs a serious punch, able to take out swarms of well-armed men, even those protected by Teflon body armour and six-foot-tall shields. Croft is able to knock up rudimentary explosive devices from tin cans or Molotov cocktails while cringing behind cover. She hurls them at her opponents with abandon, waiting for the flames to extinguish on their charred remains before plundering the body for ammunition or resources.
The juxtaposition in these games between the likeable, quipping hero we often find in word, and the bloodthirsty, ruthless killer we find in deed has become such a cliche that pointing it out has become a cliche itself. Nevertheless, the clanging incongruity remains, undiminished by familiarity, ludicrous in its continued repetition.
Familiar too, at least to players of the previous game, are your tasks, both primary and extra-curricular. Stealth follows light puzzling, follows light exploration, follows open battle, follows the kind of Indiana Jones set pieces in which you must, for example, flee a pursuing attack chopper, or a burning building. The linear design allows Crystal Dynamics to finely control the game’s rhythms, changing the pace and feel of the story through the nature of the challenges with which you’re presented. The recipe is undeniably compelling and well measured, but ultimately feels shallow.
Soon enough you learn to enter every new area and stab the analogue stick in order to instantly highlight items of interest – ammo crates, relics, rope-slides, climbable branches, frolicking animals who can be hunted and turned into resources. In this way you can read a location in seconds – there’s no need to slow down any more, survey your surroundings and figure out what you’re supposed to do. Mostly, you run from highlighted object to object, collecting, prising, climbing or reading your way through the to-do list that’s been laid out in front of you. There is, in nouveau-Tomb Raider, little true exploration or puzzle solving to do. Even on the toughest difficulty, this is a fast-food approximation of challenge.
It certainly slips down easily enough. Levels propel you forward with pitter-patter of manageable tasks, creating a sense of momentum. But there’s none of the enriching sense of accomplishment that one used to feel when working away at one of Tomb Raiders’ grand and exquisite environmental puzzles. As in the 2013 reboot, these are relegated to optional side-missions. You must discover the entrance to the tomb, perhaps accessed through some remote cave, or down a disused Soviet mineshaft, and then work out how to reach the treasure in its farthest depth, or tallest summit. Your reward is not only an upgraded ability, but also an honest sense of triumph. These are Rise of the Tomb Raider’s strongest moments.
On the evidence of these optional tombs, which are the closest the game comes to replicating the style and satisfaction of historical Tomb Raider, it’s clear that developer Crystal Dynamics is a home to masterly designers who would, surely, be able to deliver many games’-worth of memorable and delightful puzzles. But in the ever-accelerating homogenisation of the blockbuster video games, it seems as if they’ve been held back by the need for the game to hit the expected notes of the genre. Where once Tomb Raider led the field, now it merely rides with the pack, offering nudges of modest invention and improvement, but little to truly inspire and amaze.
The exception is, perhaps, Expeditions. Gone is the 2013’s game’s multiplayer mode, replaced by this score attack recasting of the main missions. Here you find new challenge goals and the chance to complete against friends and other players online. As in Halo 5, a new collectible card system adds modifiers to play. You buy (either with in-game currency or real world money) or win packs of cards. Each offers a bonus (eg better starting weapons) or a drawback (eg no ammunition), which comes with a counter-balancing penalty or multiplier to your subsequent score.
The harder you stack the odds against you, the greater the opportunity for glory. As you can equip multiple cards per run, there are many thousands of potential “load-outs” with which to fine-tune the balance between skill and risk. It’s a welcome diversion, and one that will provide, for some, additional interest and challenge after the main game is finished.
Rise of the Tomb Raider improves upon its predecessors formula. The skill tree, with which you improve Croft’s abilities, is larger and better defined. Most areas have additional challenges, and, in some locations, you can even take on freelance missions for other friendly characters you meet among the snow-dusted firs.
The game has undeniable breadth, then, but questionable depth. Like the Assassin’s Creed series, which places its bet on sprawl rather than texture, too often Rise of the Tomb Raider devolves into a gratuitous treasure hunt, where every piece of treasure is marked with a beam of light shooting up into the sky. If only this talented team had the chance to pursue a more singular vision.
As it is, Tomb Raider’s transformation from archaeological puzzle adventure to action blockbuster is complete. The result is a crowd-pleasing game, which offers only glimpses of what could be if this team were only allowed to take some braver risks with Croft’s next expedition.
Monday, November 9, 2015
Duncan Jones: 'Warcraft will right the wrongs of game movies'
When he was a child growing up in the 1980s, Duncan Jones would often stay up through the night, drawing maps on graph paper of places he’d only ever visited inside a computer screen. His father, David Bowieviewed his son’s arcane video game obsession with suspicion. “Like any parent he would say, ‘Why won’t you just get out of the house and play outside?’” Jones recalls.
Zowie, as he was known at the time, spent much of his early life on tour with his father. A peripatetic child, even one cushioned by the comforts of a rock star lifestyle, has to find home somewhere. For Jones, it was the video game worlds into which he disappeared each day. “Games have always presented an opportunity to escape,” he says. “But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.”
So when, in 2013, Legendary Pictures approached Jones with the offer to direct Warcraft: The Beginning, a film based on World of Warcraft, one of the highest-grossing (and, until recently, most popular) online video games, it was a straightforward decision. “Here was a unique opportunity to take a game that I knew well and loved and try to craft something that would invite an audience to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to give people a sense of why so many people play and care about the game.”
Launched in 2004, the title popularised the so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where players quest together across the internet, fighting monsters and, in many cases, forging enduring friendships with other players that spill into the world on the other side of the screen. Jones’s film will focus on two sides of a sprawling interspecies conflict, inspired by the game, and the story of Garona Halforcen, played by Paula Patton, a woman whose loyalties are split between the two sides.
A licensed blockbuster with a multitude of anxious stakeholders who hope that it will grow into a trilogy franchise is an entirely new proposition for the 44-year-old director of indie award-winner Moon and time-shanking thriller Source Code. Jones is undeterred by the challenge, and by the low regard in which most video game movie adaptations are held.
“I love games and I feel they’ve been sold short shrift in films so far,” he says. “It’s my generation’s opportunity to right that wrong.” Jones points out that in recent years comic book movies have enjoyed a “renaissance” of commercial and critical success. “There is no reason why video game-based movies shouldn’t be able to do the same thing.”
Jones has some personal experience of video game design. In 1999, David Bowie contributed to the story and soundtrack of sci-fi adventure The Nomad Soul, and made two cameo appearances. Bowie asked his son for feedback. “It was an interesting game,” says Jones, “but, you know, it’s always a little awkward when you’re playing a video game and then a giant version of your dad comes along.”
After graduating from film school in his 20s, Jones struggled to establish himself as a film director and spent 18 months at a London-based game studio where he worked as an assistant designer for Demis Hassabis, the artificial intelligence maven who now works on Google’s clandestine brain project. It was during that time he became a regular visitor to Azeroth, World of Warcraft’s fictional universe.
It is a decade since the film of the game was originally announced, with Sam Raimi as director. World of Warcraft was close to its most populous; in 2008 it accounted for 62% of the global subscription-based video game market. 12 million players paid a monthly subscription to reside in Azeroth (more than live in Greece, Portugal or Belgium.) There has, however, been something of an exodus in recent years as players have moved on to new pastures such as Guild Wars 2 and League of Legends. Last week World of Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard, announced that only 5.5 million remain in the game today (a population that is still comparable to Finland).
Jones, who replaced Raimi as the film’s director in 2012, is not worried about the drop-off in the game’s audience. Nor is he concerned that the fantasy quest that underpins its narrative is one with which every Tolkien fan is wearily familiar. Rather than telling a straightforward tale of good versus evil, Jones has instead opted to find heroes on each side of the conflict. “The protagonists on each side are noble and empathetic,” he says. “They have reasons for doing what they’re doing that we understand. Both the humans and the orcs present rich cultures in their own right, with people you care about and people who are obnoxious.”
Stylistically, the film also distinguishes itself from, say, Lord of the Rings’s New Zealand mountain ranges, or Game of Thrones’s Northern Ireland vistas, with a far smaller world. “In the game you travel from one area to another fairly quickly,” says Jones. “You move from fields of wheat to lush forests and the shift is immediate. We wanted to get across the idea that space is limited.”
Before Warcraft comes out, Jones is trying to squeeze in a pet project called Mute, an indie science fiction movie about a speechless bartender searching for his missing partner in a cyberpunk city. This may be Jones’s last opportunity to do such work for a while – if Warcraft: The Beginning is successful, two more will follow. Jones shows no regret at the prospect of being creatively tied up for the foreseeable future.
“You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story. Be it a video game, comic book or cheque book, the question always is: what story do you have to tell?”
Zowie, as he was known at the time, spent much of his early life on tour with his father. A peripatetic child, even one cushioned by the comforts of a rock star lifestyle, has to find home somewhere. For Jones, it was the video game worlds into which he disappeared each day. “Games have always presented an opportunity to escape,” he says. “But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.”
So when, in 2013, Legendary Pictures approached Jones with the offer to direct Warcraft: The Beginning, a film based on World of Warcraft, one of the highest-grossing (and, until recently, most popular) online video games, it was a straightforward decision. “Here was a unique opportunity to take a game that I knew well and loved and try to craft something that would invite an audience to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to give people a sense of why so many people play and care about the game.”
Launched in 2004, the title popularised the so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where players quest together across the internet, fighting monsters and, in many cases, forging enduring friendships with other players that spill into the world on the other side of the screen. Jones’s film will focus on two sides of a sprawling interspecies conflict, inspired by the game, and the story of Garona Halforcen, played by Paula Patton, a woman whose loyalties are split between the two sides.
A licensed blockbuster with a multitude of anxious stakeholders who hope that it will grow into a trilogy franchise is an entirely new proposition for the 44-year-old director of indie award-winner Moon and time-shanking thriller Source Code. Jones is undeterred by the challenge, and by the low regard in which most video game movie adaptations are held.
“I love games and I feel they’ve been sold short shrift in films so far,” he says. “It’s my generation’s opportunity to right that wrong.” Jones points out that in recent years comic book movies have enjoyed a “renaissance” of commercial and critical success. “There is no reason why video game-based movies shouldn’t be able to do the same thing.”
Jones has some personal experience of video game design. In 1999, David Bowie contributed to the story and soundtrack of sci-fi adventure The Nomad Soul, and made two cameo appearances. Bowie asked his son for feedback. “It was an interesting game,” says Jones, “but, you know, it’s always a little awkward when you’re playing a video game and then a giant version of your dad comes along.”
After graduating from film school in his 20s, Jones struggled to establish himself as a film director and spent 18 months at a London-based game studio where he worked as an assistant designer for Demis Hassabis, the artificial intelligence maven who now works on Google’s clandestine brain project. It was during that time he became a regular visitor to Azeroth, World of Warcraft’s fictional universe.
It is a decade since the film of the game was originally announced, with Sam Raimi as director. World of Warcraft was close to its most populous; in 2008 it accounted for 62% of the global subscription-based video game market. 12 million players paid a monthly subscription to reside in Azeroth (more than live in Greece, Portugal or Belgium.) There has, however, been something of an exodus in recent years as players have moved on to new pastures such as Guild Wars 2 and League of Legends. Last week World of Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard, announced that only 5.5 million remain in the game today (a population that is still comparable to Finland).
Jones, who replaced Raimi as the film’s director in 2012, is not worried about the drop-off in the game’s audience. Nor is he concerned that the fantasy quest that underpins its narrative is one with which every Tolkien fan is wearily familiar. Rather than telling a straightforward tale of good versus evil, Jones has instead opted to find heroes on each side of the conflict. “The protagonists on each side are noble and empathetic,” he says. “They have reasons for doing what they’re doing that we understand. Both the humans and the orcs present rich cultures in their own right, with people you care about and people who are obnoxious.”
Stylistically, the film also distinguishes itself from, say, Lord of the Rings’s New Zealand mountain ranges, or Game of Thrones’s Northern Ireland vistas, with a far smaller world. “In the game you travel from one area to another fairly quickly,” says Jones. “You move from fields of wheat to lush forests and the shift is immediate. We wanted to get across the idea that space is limited.”
Before Warcraft comes out, Jones is trying to squeeze in a pet project called Mute, an indie science fiction movie about a speechless bartender searching for his missing partner in a cyberpunk city. This may be Jones’s last opportunity to do such work for a while – if Warcraft: The Beginning is successful, two more will follow. Jones shows no regret at the prospect of being creatively tied up for the foreseeable future.
“You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story. Be it a video game, comic book or cheque book, the question always is: what story do you have to tell?”
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
UK maker of Candy Crush bought by US's Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn
King Digital Entertainment, the British creator of the hit smartphone game Candy Crush Saga, has been bought for $5.9bn (£3.8bn) in a deal that will mean a payday of more than $1.2bn for co-founders Mel Morris and Riccardo Zacconi.
King is being acquired by Activision Blizzard, the US video game maker behind World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. The US group will pay $18 in cash for each King share – 16% more than the UK company’s closing price on Monday – in the biggest takeover in the British tech sector since Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in an ill-fated £7bn deal in August 2011.
Morris, the former chairman who left the company last year and is now owner of Derby County FC, has an 11.3% stake in King worth $666m at the $18 price. Zacconi, the chief executive, stands to bank $561m, and will stay on at the company. The deal will also make cash multimillionaires of other top executives.
Activision Blizzard’s games are played on consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation – and it said buying King would give it a place in the rapidly growing mobile games market.
It added that 60 % of King’s players were female, and that the combined company would have more than 500 million monthly active users across the world.
King floated on the New York Stock Exchange in March last year with a valuation of almost $8bn, making it the most valuable British business of the tech craze. Candy Crush had become wildly popular, racking up a billion plays a day on smartphones for the company, based in London’s West End.
But the confectionery-themed game, in which players must make lines of sweets disappear from a grid by lining up three or more of the same colour, was no longer a top 10 download at the time of flotation. King’s shares fell on their first day of trading as traders decided it was a one-product company, even though the business has 200 games.
The game still makes up about a third of King’s revenues and the shares have never got back to the $22.50 they were sold for. The sale to Activision Blizzard means those who bought at the time of flotation have made a loss.
The flotation made multimillionaires on paper of the company’s leadership team, including Morris, but their fortunes were tied up in shares. The British entrepreneur used his wealth to become the sole owner of Derby County, his local football club, in September after selling almost 2% of King.
At the time of the flotation, Morris’s stake had a paper value of about $875m. Chief operating officer Stephane Kurgan and chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson will receive $150m and $309m respectively.
Zacconi and his team will run King as a separate business within Activision Blizzard. He said: “We will combine our expertise in mobile and free-to-play with Activision Blizzard’s world-class brands and proven track record of building and sustaining the most successful franchises, to bring the best games in the world to millions of players worldwide.”
Sweet returns
The takeover is the second time Morris, 59, has made millions from the sale of a technology business. The self-made tycoon left school at 16 and by 20 he was working as a management consultant. After a spell in the US, Morris, moved back to his home town of Derby.
Already a serial entrepreneur with a hardwood flooring company and a Spanish property business, in 1998 he turned his matchmaking agency into an internet dating site, uDate, the sale of which netted him £20m four years later.
Morris spent some of that money on a stake in Derby County, later sold, and part of it on establishing King Digital. He was persuaded to invest by Zacconi, who had worked at uDate. Toby Rowland, the son of the Lonrho tycoon Tiny Rowland, who helped run the dating site, also put money into King.
Now Morris has bought all of Derby County. He acquired 22% of his boyhood club in May last year after the Championship play-off defeat to Queens Park Rangers.
Morris, worth £400m according to the Sunday Times Rich List, stood down as chairman of King after its flotation but kept a stake of about 12%, most of which he has kept.
Zacconi is an Italian former management consultant who joined the digital industry during the dotcom boom of the late 90s. He missed out on a potential fortune when Spray, the Swedish web portal he worked at, delayed its flotation and the dotcom bubble burst. At the sale price of $18 a share for King, his stake is worth $561m.
Knutsson cofounded Spray, where he met Zacconi. He claims to have designed most of King’s worst games but he struck gold when Candy Crush emerged from his Stockholm studio. He banks $309m at the announced sale price.
Kurgan, who is Belgian and has an MBA from France’s elite Insead, joined King from Tideway, a data-centre management business. His stake is worth approximately $150m.
King is being acquired by Activision Blizzard, the US video game maker behind World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. The US group will pay $18 in cash for each King share – 16% more than the UK company’s closing price on Monday – in the biggest takeover in the British tech sector since Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in an ill-fated £7bn deal in August 2011.
Morris, the former chairman who left the company last year and is now owner of Derby County FC, has an 11.3% stake in King worth $666m at the $18 price. Zacconi, the chief executive, stands to bank $561m, and will stay on at the company. The deal will also make cash multimillionaires of other top executives.
Activision Blizzard’s games are played on consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation – and it said buying King would give it a place in the rapidly growing mobile games market.
It added that 60 % of King’s players were female, and that the combined company would have more than 500 million monthly active users across the world.
King floated on the New York Stock Exchange in March last year with a valuation of almost $8bn, making it the most valuable British business of the tech craze. Candy Crush had become wildly popular, racking up a billion plays a day on smartphones for the company, based in London’s West End.
But the confectionery-themed game, in which players must make lines of sweets disappear from a grid by lining up three or more of the same colour, was no longer a top 10 download at the time of flotation. King’s shares fell on their first day of trading as traders decided it was a one-product company, even though the business has 200 games.
The game still makes up about a third of King’s revenues and the shares have never got back to the $22.50 they were sold for. The sale to Activision Blizzard means those who bought at the time of flotation have made a loss.
The flotation made multimillionaires on paper of the company’s leadership team, including Morris, but their fortunes were tied up in shares. The British entrepreneur used his wealth to become the sole owner of Derby County, his local football club, in September after selling almost 2% of King.
At the time of the flotation, Morris’s stake had a paper value of about $875m. Chief operating officer Stephane Kurgan and chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson will receive $150m and $309m respectively.
Zacconi and his team will run King as a separate business within Activision Blizzard. He said: “We will combine our expertise in mobile and free-to-play with Activision Blizzard’s world-class brands and proven track record of building and sustaining the most successful franchises, to bring the best games in the world to millions of players worldwide.”
Sweet returns
The takeover is the second time Morris, 59, has made millions from the sale of a technology business. The self-made tycoon left school at 16 and by 20 he was working as a management consultant. After a spell in the US, Morris, moved back to his home town of Derby.
Already a serial entrepreneur with a hardwood flooring company and a Spanish property business, in 1998 he turned his matchmaking agency into an internet dating site, uDate, the sale of which netted him £20m four years later.
Morris spent some of that money on a stake in Derby County, later sold, and part of it on establishing King Digital. He was persuaded to invest by Zacconi, who had worked at uDate. Toby Rowland, the son of the Lonrho tycoon Tiny Rowland, who helped run the dating site, also put money into King.
Now Morris has bought all of Derby County. He acquired 22% of his boyhood club in May last year after the Championship play-off defeat to Queens Park Rangers.
Morris, worth £400m according to the Sunday Times Rich List, stood down as chairman of King after its flotation but kept a stake of about 12%, most of which he has kept.
Zacconi is an Italian former management consultant who joined the digital industry during the dotcom boom of the late 90s. He missed out on a potential fortune when Spray, the Swedish web portal he worked at, delayed its flotation and the dotcom bubble burst. At the sale price of $18 a share for King, his stake is worth $561m.
Knutsson cofounded Spray, where he met Zacconi. He claims to have designed most of King’s worst games but he struck gold when Candy Crush emerged from his Stockholm studio. He banks $309m at the announced sale price.
Kurgan, who is Belgian and has an MBA from France’s elite Insead, joined King from Tideway, a data-centre management business. His stake is worth approximately $150m.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Uncharted 4: a hands-on first look at the five-on-five multiplayer
While Sony was understandably keen to talk up Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End during Paris Games Week, we’re going to have to wait a while longer for information on the main story campaign. For now, the focus of attention is firmly on the game’s five-on-five multiplayer mode.
Via a public showing, a behind closed doors presentation and a chance to go hands-on with an early version, we were able to get a good look at how this supplementary element will turn out.
Those expecting a grand reinvention of the Uncharted multiplayer formula (a range of team-based shooter modes, with some “search and destroy”-style derivatives) will be disappointed, but it was never really likely to happen. Instead, Naughty Dog has stuck with its familiar blueprint while bringing in a few interesting elements from the online Factions component in the Last of Us.
What this means is mechanics such as upgradeable abilities, character classes, a “downed” state and the ability to purchase weapons and related upgrades during a match with cash earned from knockouts, assists and all the things you are rewarded for in online shooters.
While each of the above changes how Uncharted 4’s multiplayer plays, it’s the purchasing and downed state that mix things up the most. The former allows your arsenal to be ever-evolving: string a few takedowns together and you can afford an upgrade to, say, your explosive weapon, reducing its cool-down period and allowing you to use it more often.
The downed state kicks in when a player is, well, downed – basically, mortally wounded a la Gears of War. While crawling around on the verge of death, they can continue to be attacked, resulting in a KO – or they can be revived by a teammate if there are any in the vicinity. It’s a simple addition, but one that shifts Uncharted 4’s multiplayer from a stop-start staccato game of firearm whack-a-mole to one where teamwork and sticking together actually matters – and helps.
Back with the purchasable upgrades, this leads us into a couple of other new elements Naughty Dog has added, rather than cribbed from another of its series. One is the ability to employ sidekicks: pay a fee (which increases each time you use that particular sidekick), place your beamed-in helper with a press of L1 and watch as they go about their business in various ways.
One sidekick, for example, is a sniper – placed strategically atop higher ground and around a blind corner, we found our hired help hitting plenty of the opposition with her shots. Not as powerful as player-controlled snipers, she was best used as an ambush unit to confuse other players, allowing you to move in and finish the job.
Another sidekick is the hunter; this unit spawns in and immediately sets out tracking down the closest enemy player. Once found, he approaches them quickly – and usually stealthily, though we did notice some poor choices on the AI’s part here – before grabbing them and leaving them open to attack from you or your teammates.
Backing up these supporting sidekicks are a bunch of new supporting magical items. These supernatural relics run the gamut of Uncharted’s history, from the first game to the present day, and all offer an impressive, useful and expensive super power to unleash during a match.
The Wrath of El Dorado is one Naughty Dog was keen to show off , taking the form of the giant golden statue from the original Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, this particular relic unleashes a bunch of angry spirits all around it, which pursue and attack any nearby enemies. Used to clear out enemy-held bottlenecks, it’s something we admittedly saw more in the promotional videos than in-game. Perhaps people were too worried about its intense magical powers? Or maybe we just weren’t sure how useful it would be in these early days encounters.
It’s not all angry attacks though, with the Cintamani Stone – Uncharted 2’s object of desire – offering a different magical approach for players. Now this one we did see employed quite a lot: once engaged, it coats an area with a blue flame, reviving downed teammates and speeding up the recovery efforts of those not instantly brought back by its powers.
None of these new additions felt overpowered or – importantly – out of place. In fact, the addition of supernatural powers is something that probably should have gone into Uncharted’s multiplayer some years ago, what with the main campaign focusing so heavily on these definitely-not-Indiana-Jones relics.
Aside from the updated and introduced elements, playing Uncharted 4’s multiplayer is an instantly familiar experience. Though it has its idiosyncrasies and neat little features to get your head around, if you’ve played a third-person shooter in the past few years you’ll be running and gunning (and climbing) with the best of them.
Navigation has the sort of looseness you do feel in the Uncharted games, with characters ducking heads and listing left and right rather than turning like human tanks, latching on to cover but breaking from it just as easily.
What has changed – for the better – is how the character you choose to control makes his or her way over obstacles. It’s not quite on a par with Mirror’s Edge parkour, but the free running at play does make for a quicker, more vital pace to proceedings. This pace is something Naughty Dog was keen to point out it aims to maintain, to the point that Uncharted 4 will run at 900p resolution in multiplayer, in order to preserve the 60 frames per second yardstick (for comparison, single player will be 1080p and run at 30 frames per second).
It’s a concession that, from some time with the game, does appear to be to the game’s benefit. That general sense of smoothness keeps things flowing, and the purring, slightly-lower-resolution engine is backed up by some smart mechanics.
Climbing – a separate element from the free running-like traversal of levels – is quick and easy, which makes sense as nobody wants to be shot in the backside while trying to scale a three metre high wall. The same goes for Uncharted 4’s new way to get around, the rope/grappling hook combo, which can be employed with a quick press of the L1 button in order to swing, Indiana Jones-like, across chasms.
The ability to emulate tree-swinging apes also brings with it new tactical opportunities, very much like those seen in an earlier trailer for Uncharted 4’s single-player. Basically, if some of your team can run distraction efforts, there are times when you’re able to utilise your rope swing to get behind the opposition.
We were able to use this as a genuine, workable tactic in a couple of the matches we played. It’s sure to be something the player base gets used to and learns to counter (or at least pay attention to), but for the time being it was effective and, honestly, good fun. It’s a simple touch, but one open to all manner of different strategic uses – flanking, escape, looking like a cool archaeologist – and does help highlight a depth to Uncharted 4’s multiplayer that might not otherwise have been expected.
That’s not to say this is a shooter that needs more brains than reflexes and effective use of explosives, but giving the player another tool to take advantage of – and the ability to engage in some thrilling death from above moments as you swing above your opponent before dropping on top of them with a melee attack – does broaden the player’s choice somewhat.
There are other elements Uncharted 4’s multiplayer has in common with its contemporaries, ones which divide opinion. Naughty Dog has confirmed the in-game purchases will be present in Uncharted 4 from day one, though lead multiplayer designer Robert Cogburn maintained this would “generally” be for cosmetic items. “We are definitely not for the mentality of gating gameplay mechanics,” he told assembled journalists, “It’s not something we at Naughty Dog want to do. [It’s] generally for cosmetic stuff.”
That “generally” does stand out, and Cogburn’s confirmation of Naughty Dog Points – Uncharted 4’s in-game virtual currency – raises the question of whether this videogame cash will be available for purchase with real money. One thing that was clarified, however, was that the Points can be used to unlock items in Uncharted 4’s multiplayer: “With that virtual currency there’ll be no gameplay items that you can’t unlock,” Cogburn said.
This would appear to be the most effort Naughty Dog has put into an Uncharted multiplayer mode to date. Beginning as a pleasant aside in Uncharted 2 before developing into a decent attraction in its own right by Uncharted 3, the push the studio is putting into Uncharted 4’s multiplayer mode is apparent for anyone to see.
Whether it will be engaging enough to keep people playing beyond a few days or weeks after Uncharted 4’s launch will be another story altogether, though. The fundamentals are solid, if unspectacular, and while there are plenty of elements we’ve not see in an Uncharted title before, none of it is actually new to competitive multiplayer.
Cautious optimism is the best approach for a proposal like this: the meat of Uncharted 4 is always going to be in its single-player campaign, but the sheer endeavour Naughty Dog is putting behind its online push makes this a part of Uncharted 4 that might end up a dark horse.
Via a public showing, a behind closed doors presentation and a chance to go hands-on with an early version, we were able to get a good look at how this supplementary element will turn out.
Those expecting a grand reinvention of the Uncharted multiplayer formula (a range of team-based shooter modes, with some “search and destroy”-style derivatives) will be disappointed, but it was never really likely to happen. Instead, Naughty Dog has stuck with its familiar blueprint while bringing in a few interesting elements from the online Factions component in the Last of Us.
What this means is mechanics such as upgradeable abilities, character classes, a “downed” state and the ability to purchase weapons and related upgrades during a match with cash earned from knockouts, assists and all the things you are rewarded for in online shooters.
While each of the above changes how Uncharted 4’s multiplayer plays, it’s the purchasing and downed state that mix things up the most. The former allows your arsenal to be ever-evolving: string a few takedowns together and you can afford an upgrade to, say, your explosive weapon, reducing its cool-down period and allowing you to use it more often.
The downed state kicks in when a player is, well, downed – basically, mortally wounded a la Gears of War. While crawling around on the verge of death, they can continue to be attacked, resulting in a KO – or they can be revived by a teammate if there are any in the vicinity. It’s a simple addition, but one that shifts Uncharted 4’s multiplayer from a stop-start staccato game of firearm whack-a-mole to one where teamwork and sticking together actually matters – and helps.
Back with the purchasable upgrades, this leads us into a couple of other new elements Naughty Dog has added, rather than cribbed from another of its series. One is the ability to employ sidekicks: pay a fee (which increases each time you use that particular sidekick), place your beamed-in helper with a press of L1 and watch as they go about their business in various ways.
One sidekick, for example, is a sniper – placed strategically atop higher ground and around a blind corner, we found our hired help hitting plenty of the opposition with her shots. Not as powerful as player-controlled snipers, she was best used as an ambush unit to confuse other players, allowing you to move in and finish the job.
Another sidekick is the hunter; this unit spawns in and immediately sets out tracking down the closest enemy player. Once found, he approaches them quickly – and usually stealthily, though we did notice some poor choices on the AI’s part here – before grabbing them and leaving them open to attack from you or your teammates.
Backing up these supporting sidekicks are a bunch of new supporting magical items. These supernatural relics run the gamut of Uncharted’s history, from the first game to the present day, and all offer an impressive, useful and expensive super power to unleash during a match.
The Wrath of El Dorado is one Naughty Dog was keen to show off , taking the form of the giant golden statue from the original Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, this particular relic unleashes a bunch of angry spirits all around it, which pursue and attack any nearby enemies. Used to clear out enemy-held bottlenecks, it’s something we admittedly saw more in the promotional videos than in-game. Perhaps people were too worried about its intense magical powers? Or maybe we just weren’t sure how useful it would be in these early days encounters.
It’s not all angry attacks though, with the Cintamani Stone – Uncharted 2’s object of desire – offering a different magical approach for players. Now this one we did see employed quite a lot: once engaged, it coats an area with a blue flame, reviving downed teammates and speeding up the recovery efforts of those not instantly brought back by its powers.
None of these new additions felt overpowered or – importantly – out of place. In fact, the addition of supernatural powers is something that probably should have gone into Uncharted’s multiplayer some years ago, what with the main campaign focusing so heavily on these definitely-not-Indiana-Jones relics.
Aside from the updated and introduced elements, playing Uncharted 4’s multiplayer is an instantly familiar experience. Though it has its idiosyncrasies and neat little features to get your head around, if you’ve played a third-person shooter in the past few years you’ll be running and gunning (and climbing) with the best of them.
Navigation has the sort of looseness you do feel in the Uncharted games, with characters ducking heads and listing left and right rather than turning like human tanks, latching on to cover but breaking from it just as easily.
What has changed – for the better – is how the character you choose to control makes his or her way over obstacles. It’s not quite on a par with Mirror’s Edge parkour, but the free running at play does make for a quicker, more vital pace to proceedings. This pace is something Naughty Dog was keen to point out it aims to maintain, to the point that Uncharted 4 will run at 900p resolution in multiplayer, in order to preserve the 60 frames per second yardstick (for comparison, single player will be 1080p and run at 30 frames per second).
It’s a concession that, from some time with the game, does appear to be to the game’s benefit. That general sense of smoothness keeps things flowing, and the purring, slightly-lower-resolution engine is backed up by some smart mechanics.
Climbing – a separate element from the free running-like traversal of levels – is quick and easy, which makes sense as nobody wants to be shot in the backside while trying to scale a three metre high wall. The same goes for Uncharted 4’s new way to get around, the rope/grappling hook combo, which can be employed with a quick press of the L1 button in order to swing, Indiana Jones-like, across chasms.
The ability to emulate tree-swinging apes also brings with it new tactical opportunities, very much like those seen in an earlier trailer for Uncharted 4’s single-player. Basically, if some of your team can run distraction efforts, there are times when you’re able to utilise your rope swing to get behind the opposition.
We were able to use this as a genuine, workable tactic in a couple of the matches we played. It’s sure to be something the player base gets used to and learns to counter (or at least pay attention to), but for the time being it was effective and, honestly, good fun. It’s a simple touch, but one open to all manner of different strategic uses – flanking, escape, looking like a cool archaeologist – and does help highlight a depth to Uncharted 4’s multiplayer that might not otherwise have been expected.
That’s not to say this is a shooter that needs more brains than reflexes and effective use of explosives, but giving the player another tool to take advantage of – and the ability to engage in some thrilling death from above moments as you swing above your opponent before dropping on top of them with a melee attack – does broaden the player’s choice somewhat.
There are other elements Uncharted 4’s multiplayer has in common with its contemporaries, ones which divide opinion. Naughty Dog has confirmed the in-game purchases will be present in Uncharted 4 from day one, though lead multiplayer designer Robert Cogburn maintained this would “generally” be for cosmetic items. “We are definitely not for the mentality of gating gameplay mechanics,” he told assembled journalists, “It’s not something we at Naughty Dog want to do. [It’s] generally for cosmetic stuff.”
That “generally” does stand out, and Cogburn’s confirmation of Naughty Dog Points – Uncharted 4’s in-game virtual currency – raises the question of whether this videogame cash will be available for purchase with real money. One thing that was clarified, however, was that the Points can be used to unlock items in Uncharted 4’s multiplayer: “With that virtual currency there’ll be no gameplay items that you can’t unlock,” Cogburn said.
This would appear to be the most effort Naughty Dog has put into an Uncharted multiplayer mode to date. Beginning as a pleasant aside in Uncharted 2 before developing into a decent attraction in its own right by Uncharted 3, the push the studio is putting into Uncharted 4’s multiplayer mode is apparent for anyone to see.
Whether it will be engaging enough to keep people playing beyond a few days or weeks after Uncharted 4’s launch will be another story altogether, though. The fundamentals are solid, if unspectacular, and while there are plenty of elements we’ve not see in an Uncharted title before, none of it is actually new to competitive multiplayer.
Cautious optimism is the best approach for a proposal like this: the meat of Uncharted 4 is always going to be in its single-player campaign, but the sheer endeavour Naughty Dog is putting behind its online push makes this a part of Uncharted 4 that might end up a dark horse.
Monday, October 26, 2015
GoldenEye on N64: Miyamoto wanted to tone down the killing
GoldenEye 007 was one of the greatest games of the 90s, and revolutionised the idea of the first-person shooter on consoles – but Nintendo was hugely concerned about its depiction of violence, game director Martin Hollis has revealed.
In a fascinating talk at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, the veteran designer explained how Twycross-based developer Rare was determined to forge a creative partnership with the Japanese company. After several approaches, the studio was finally visited by Genyo Takeda, the director behind the Punch-Out!!titles. “He went back to his hotel room, and when he came back for more meetings the next day, Rare had made a new version of Punch-Out!! over night, using their Silicon Graphics workstations and featuring huge rendered sprites. I imagine it impressed him a great deal.” A development deal was duly offered.
After producing the fighting game Killer Instinct, Rare was then offered the chance to make a game based around the GoldenEye movie, or “Bond 17” as it was known at the time. “Tim Stamper told me to write a design document,” says Hollis. “So I went away and thought about it for a month and wrote a ten-page document. And then I was making GoldenEye.”
According to Hollis, the game was originally much more graphic in its depiction of violence. “Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge. For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”
He went on to explain that, towards the end of development, the team received a fax from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, with a series of suggestions for the game. “One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible. I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”
Instead of this, Hollis added a credits sequence into the game, introducing all the characters, almost as though they were being portrayed by actors. “It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice,” he explained. “The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”
Hollis also admitted that the team borrowed the idea of having multiple objectives on each level from Super Mario 64. “I studiously tried to learn what Nintendo was. I played [Zelda] Link to the Past from beginning to end – I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Then Mario 64 came out during the development of GoldenEye and we were clearly influenced by that game. Ours was much more open as a result.”
Hollis spoke at length about his great admiration for Nintendo. “I value the idea – which I do see as quite strongly a Japanese idea – of respect to the player and trying to see into their mind and their life,” he said. “We have jargon for it nowadays: ‘user-centric design’. Nintendo thought about where the player would be when they played the game and who would be with them at the time.”
But it’s not just the players. Hollis argues that Nintendo also respects the creators, even when it might be financially detrimental. Apparently, Rare was asked if it would consider making a game based on the next James Bond film, but the studio turned it down. “I thought about this and was not sure I’d really want to,” said Hollis. “We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No’. We sent the message back, ‘The answer is no. We don’t plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film’. And that was it.”
Years later, Hollis still seems surprised at how easily Nintendo accepted their refusal. “It must have grossed, I don’t know, $400m or something. You might’ve thought that on a commercial basis someone at Nintendo, even lower down or higher up or whatever, would’ve said, “Well, are you sure?”, but out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it.”
Instead of making another James Bond game, Hollis moved on to work on Perfect Dark, which he says was “definitely a spiritual sequel”. While he left Rare 14 months into the game’s development, he was there for the important decisions.
“I wanted to make a game that starred a woman. Partly it was Nikita, the film by Luc Besson, and also Dishonored, a 1930s movie starring a spy who was a woman, and a general sort of sensibility that I thought it would be interesting to have a woman be the centre of attention. We constructed this character, to the very best of our ability, to be the centrepiece of the game.”
Joanna Dark was born of the best intentions – even her name comes from Jeanne D’Arc, or Joan of Arc – but her game inevitably made less of an impression than GoldenEye. If there are people who think Joanna Dark was less interesting than her male predecessor, Hollis has an explanation: “It’s very tough in a first-person shooter to develop a personality or a backstory, and what Bond brings you is honestly a lot more. You hear the theme tune and you’re right there.”
In a fascinating talk at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, the veteran designer explained how Twycross-based developer Rare was determined to forge a creative partnership with the Japanese company. After several approaches, the studio was finally visited by Genyo Takeda, the director behind the Punch-Out!!titles. “He went back to his hotel room, and when he came back for more meetings the next day, Rare had made a new version of Punch-Out!! over night, using their Silicon Graphics workstations and featuring huge rendered sprites. I imagine it impressed him a great deal.” A development deal was duly offered.
After producing the fighting game Killer Instinct, Rare was then offered the chance to make a game based around the GoldenEye movie, or “Bond 17” as it was known at the time. “Tim Stamper told me to write a design document,” says Hollis. “So I went away and thought about it for a month and wrote a ten-page document. And then I was making GoldenEye.”
According to Hollis, the game was originally much more graphic in its depiction of violence. “Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge. For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”
He went on to explain that, towards the end of development, the team received a fax from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, with a series of suggestions for the game. “One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible. I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”
Instead of this, Hollis added a credits sequence into the game, introducing all the characters, almost as though they were being portrayed by actors. “It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice,” he explained. “The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”
Hollis also admitted that the team borrowed the idea of having multiple objectives on each level from Super Mario 64. “I studiously tried to learn what Nintendo was. I played [Zelda] Link to the Past from beginning to end – I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Then Mario 64 came out during the development of GoldenEye and we were clearly influenced by that game. Ours was much more open as a result.”
Hollis spoke at length about his great admiration for Nintendo. “I value the idea – which I do see as quite strongly a Japanese idea – of respect to the player and trying to see into their mind and their life,” he said. “We have jargon for it nowadays: ‘user-centric design’. Nintendo thought about where the player would be when they played the game and who would be with them at the time.”
But it’s not just the players. Hollis argues that Nintendo also respects the creators, even when it might be financially detrimental. Apparently, Rare was asked if it would consider making a game based on the next James Bond film, but the studio turned it down. “I thought about this and was not sure I’d really want to,” said Hollis. “We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No’. We sent the message back, ‘The answer is no. We don’t plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film’. And that was it.”
Years later, Hollis still seems surprised at how easily Nintendo accepted their refusal. “It must have grossed, I don’t know, $400m or something. You might’ve thought that on a commercial basis someone at Nintendo, even lower down or higher up or whatever, would’ve said, “Well, are you sure?”, but out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it.”
Instead of making another James Bond game, Hollis moved on to work on Perfect Dark, which he says was “definitely a spiritual sequel”. While he left Rare 14 months into the game’s development, he was there for the important decisions.
“I wanted to make a game that starred a woman. Partly it was Nikita, the film by Luc Besson, and also Dishonored, a 1930s movie starring a spy who was a woman, and a general sort of sensibility that I thought it would be interesting to have a woman be the centre of attention. We constructed this character, to the very best of our ability, to be the centrepiece of the game.”
Joanna Dark was born of the best intentions – even her name comes from Jeanne D’Arc, or Joan of Arc – but her game inevitably made less of an impression than GoldenEye. If there are people who think Joanna Dark was less interesting than her male predecessor, Hollis has an explanation: “It’s very tough in a first-person shooter to develop a personality or a backstory, and what Bond brings you is honestly a lot more. You hear the theme tune and you’re right there.”
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate review – a historical failure
2015 has been a transformative year for open-world games, with standout releases like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain revolutionising individual tenets of the genre, from narrative depth to mechanical breadth. Unfortunately, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is not one of those progressive titles, and instead of continuing this year’s trend of pushing toward higher expectations from triple-A blockbusters, Syndicate suffers from a litany of legacy issues that run the gamut from design to technical.
With a new studio, Ubisoft Quebec, making its Assassin’s debut, Syndicate does occasionally suggest a desire to affect change in an annual juggernaut so large that it can barely be steered. However, the team seems essentially powerless when placed under such monumental time pressure. The small shifts toward better worlds, characters, and in particular sharper writing, get lost among problems that have pervaded the series since its peak in 2009.
Syndicate’s romanticised rendition of 1860s London is certainly impressive – a smoky sprawl filled with cockney guttersnipes and towering chimneys. It is by far the largest Assassin’s world to date.
The enjoyable Horrible Histories approach to London works well. Each district, from the grimy slums of Whitechapel to the stately grandeur of Westminster, feels distinct – visually, at least – and London has a dank sheen that does look glorious under a cloud-covered rainy evening. Hopping across the Thames, bustling with a constant stream of tugs and barges, or using the new rope launcher to speedily rappel up Big Ben or St Paul’s Cathedral; this is a place that seems more familiar than 12th-Century Jerusalem or the archipelago of the Caribbean, and that familiarity leads to a sense of discovery.
But below the Victorian streets, the technical foundations are creaking. Syndicate is not nearly the technical disaster that last year’s Unity was, but frequent slowdown and texture pop-in are both fairly common on PS4, especially when travelling around in a horse and cart, where a disgusting motion blur literally attempts to disguise the fact the world is struggling to keep up with itself.
In story terms, the narrative fog swirls around Crawford Starrick, the latest Head of the Hydra that is the Templar regime; longtime enemies of the Assassins and all-round bad news. Starrick himself – shallow, softly spoken, sinisterly unhinged and clearly torn straight from Ubisoft’s Villain Handbook – is propped up on the shoulders of a ruthless network of powerful Templars controlling the capital, and he enforces his grasp with his violent street gang, The Blighters.
This simplicity, of a bad guy with his henchmen poised in positions of power, plays perfectly into Syndicate’s streamlined approach – it even omits the futuristic sections that plagued previous games, presenting these as infrequent and snappy cut-scenes for narrative context, and to confirm that the series’ perpetual pratt Sean Hastings is still alive-and-snarking in the present day. The game’s two new assassins – Jacob and Evie Frye – act as two sides of the same coin, creating narrative dynamism and some of the series’ best dialogue. Jacob, brash and cocky, wants to take Starrick head on, so founds a gang called The Rooks to take on The Blighters, while Evie, the more level-headed and intriguing of the two, is more interested in the search for ancient scientific artifacts Pieces of Eden, taking her adventure off in other directions.
It’s a strong setup, which quickly falls to pieces. The Rooks themselves don’t add much to proceedings – these AI companions, upgradeable using the experience and resources you earn through completing missions and exploring the world, feel more like a bothersome distraction than a compelling timesink. A whole host of side activities then further continues the series’ preference for quantity over quality. Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens and even Florence Nightingale, all excellently depicted, each have unique, occasionally interesting tasks to dole out, but none escape the underlying problems.
Then there are more minor assassinations to lessen Starrick’s grasp on the city: liberation missions have you freeing innocent child workers; there are investigations into sinister urban myths like Spring-Heeled Jack; and there are plenty of bounty hunts. The latter are particularly irritating, forcing you to kidnap key targets before marching them to a destination against their will. This quickly becomes another lesson in frustration as you try to manage one NPC while killing off a dozen more that appear on your way from A to B. And with its new levelling system, Syndicate essentially forces you to play these repetitive sideshows to level up enough to continue the main quest. In channeling you through the game this way – through activities that feel so throwaway, so hopelessly incapable of creating more excitement about the things you’re doing rather than the long-dead people you’re seeing – any compulsion disappears down the fetid Thames.
All of this would be easier to swallow if the simple act of playing didn’t feel so broken. The controls are a relic of the crusades (literally, as this is where the series began), and have become unsatisfying and woefully imprecise. All contextual actions are mapped to the same three buttons, which makes it the luck of the draw as to whether you do the action you want to, or the one the game thinks you want to. Firing your gun is the same button as dodging enemy bullets under timed prompts; opening boxes next to ledges is the same as jumping down off ledges if you’re accidentally holding the action button at the same time, as you often are; and bundling kidnapped targets into carriages is the same button as getting on to that carriage and driving off.
The game’s stealth is worse, relying so heavily on these broken controls that it’s almost impossible to pull off takedowns with satisfaction, instead leaving you fumbling against the set of world rules that oppose you at almost every turn. The main assassinations, unique set-pieces that punctuate the end of each narrative chapter, are some of the series’ most diverse - Lambeth Asylum, Cannon Street Station, St Paul’s - but are underpinned by this complete lack of finesse. Where Metal Gear Solid V filled its world with opportunities to feel empowered for using its emerging opportunities, Syndicate goes all the way toward making experimentation feel like a chore. It punishes you with getting stuck on scenery, objectives that don’t prompt progression mid-mission, and an imprecise quick-aim system that on one occasion auto-targeted our assassination target - not the half-dozen or so low-level thugs standing next to him - with a hallucinogenic dart, sending him into a frenzy so he was impossible to kill and complete the objective, forcing a complete restart.
When the stealth inevitably falls down, the game’s combat is repetitive, requiring you to hammer the same button with an occasional counter against identical NPCs. This was more forgivable in previous games, where a carefully executed counter attack let you slice open your enemies within a couple of sword clashes and string together kills, but neither of Syndicate’s assassins feel particularly lethal. You’ll hit individual enemies dozens upon dozens of times, smacking them round the face, stabbing them in the neck, twisting their arms, breaking their arms, smacking them some more and only then deliver the killing blow. While the intention was clearly for Syndicate to be a scrappier brawler, complete with knuckle dusters, canes and kukri blades, it comes off as loose and weightless. It just isn’t fun.
That dearth of fun is the crux here. As the series finally begins to carve out an identity for itself, shed the dead-weight of its futuristic fluff of a sub-plot, and really let fly with its caricatural depiction of human history, it’s simultaneously failing to keep up with even middling mechanical, technical and design standards. With searing irony, the series feels more historic with each profit-driven iteration.
With a new studio, Ubisoft Quebec, making its Assassin’s debut, Syndicate does occasionally suggest a desire to affect change in an annual juggernaut so large that it can barely be steered. However, the team seems essentially powerless when placed under such monumental time pressure. The small shifts toward better worlds, characters, and in particular sharper writing, get lost among problems that have pervaded the series since its peak in 2009.
Syndicate’s romanticised rendition of 1860s London is certainly impressive – a smoky sprawl filled with cockney guttersnipes and towering chimneys. It is by far the largest Assassin’s world to date.
The enjoyable Horrible Histories approach to London works well. Each district, from the grimy slums of Whitechapel to the stately grandeur of Westminster, feels distinct – visually, at least – and London has a dank sheen that does look glorious under a cloud-covered rainy evening. Hopping across the Thames, bustling with a constant stream of tugs and barges, or using the new rope launcher to speedily rappel up Big Ben or St Paul’s Cathedral; this is a place that seems more familiar than 12th-Century Jerusalem or the archipelago of the Caribbean, and that familiarity leads to a sense of discovery.
But below the Victorian streets, the technical foundations are creaking. Syndicate is not nearly the technical disaster that last year’s Unity was, but frequent slowdown and texture pop-in are both fairly common on PS4, especially when travelling around in a horse and cart, where a disgusting motion blur literally attempts to disguise the fact the world is struggling to keep up with itself.
In story terms, the narrative fog swirls around Crawford Starrick, the latest Head of the Hydra that is the Templar regime; longtime enemies of the Assassins and all-round bad news. Starrick himself – shallow, softly spoken, sinisterly unhinged and clearly torn straight from Ubisoft’s Villain Handbook – is propped up on the shoulders of a ruthless network of powerful Templars controlling the capital, and he enforces his grasp with his violent street gang, The Blighters.
This simplicity, of a bad guy with his henchmen poised in positions of power, plays perfectly into Syndicate’s streamlined approach – it even omits the futuristic sections that plagued previous games, presenting these as infrequent and snappy cut-scenes for narrative context, and to confirm that the series’ perpetual pratt Sean Hastings is still alive-and-snarking in the present day. The game’s two new assassins – Jacob and Evie Frye – act as two sides of the same coin, creating narrative dynamism and some of the series’ best dialogue. Jacob, brash and cocky, wants to take Starrick head on, so founds a gang called The Rooks to take on The Blighters, while Evie, the more level-headed and intriguing of the two, is more interested in the search for ancient scientific artifacts Pieces of Eden, taking her adventure off in other directions.
It’s a strong setup, which quickly falls to pieces. The Rooks themselves don’t add much to proceedings – these AI companions, upgradeable using the experience and resources you earn through completing missions and exploring the world, feel more like a bothersome distraction than a compelling timesink. A whole host of side activities then further continues the series’ preference for quantity over quality. Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens and even Florence Nightingale, all excellently depicted, each have unique, occasionally interesting tasks to dole out, but none escape the underlying problems.
Then there are more minor assassinations to lessen Starrick’s grasp on the city: liberation missions have you freeing innocent child workers; there are investigations into sinister urban myths like Spring-Heeled Jack; and there are plenty of bounty hunts. The latter are particularly irritating, forcing you to kidnap key targets before marching them to a destination against their will. This quickly becomes another lesson in frustration as you try to manage one NPC while killing off a dozen more that appear on your way from A to B. And with its new levelling system, Syndicate essentially forces you to play these repetitive sideshows to level up enough to continue the main quest. In channeling you through the game this way – through activities that feel so throwaway, so hopelessly incapable of creating more excitement about the things you’re doing rather than the long-dead people you’re seeing – any compulsion disappears down the fetid Thames.
All of this would be easier to swallow if the simple act of playing didn’t feel so broken. The controls are a relic of the crusades (literally, as this is where the series began), and have become unsatisfying and woefully imprecise. All contextual actions are mapped to the same three buttons, which makes it the luck of the draw as to whether you do the action you want to, or the one the game thinks you want to. Firing your gun is the same button as dodging enemy bullets under timed prompts; opening boxes next to ledges is the same as jumping down off ledges if you’re accidentally holding the action button at the same time, as you often are; and bundling kidnapped targets into carriages is the same button as getting on to that carriage and driving off.
The game’s stealth is worse, relying so heavily on these broken controls that it’s almost impossible to pull off takedowns with satisfaction, instead leaving you fumbling against the set of world rules that oppose you at almost every turn. The main assassinations, unique set-pieces that punctuate the end of each narrative chapter, are some of the series’ most diverse - Lambeth Asylum, Cannon Street Station, St Paul’s - but are underpinned by this complete lack of finesse. Where Metal Gear Solid V filled its world with opportunities to feel empowered for using its emerging opportunities, Syndicate goes all the way toward making experimentation feel like a chore. It punishes you with getting stuck on scenery, objectives that don’t prompt progression mid-mission, and an imprecise quick-aim system that on one occasion auto-targeted our assassination target - not the half-dozen or so low-level thugs standing next to him - with a hallucinogenic dart, sending him into a frenzy so he was impossible to kill and complete the objective, forcing a complete restart.
When the stealth inevitably falls down, the game’s combat is repetitive, requiring you to hammer the same button with an occasional counter against identical NPCs. This was more forgivable in previous games, where a carefully executed counter attack let you slice open your enemies within a couple of sword clashes and string together kills, but neither of Syndicate’s assassins feel particularly lethal. You’ll hit individual enemies dozens upon dozens of times, smacking them round the face, stabbing them in the neck, twisting their arms, breaking their arms, smacking them some more and only then deliver the killing blow. While the intention was clearly for Syndicate to be a scrappier brawler, complete with knuckle dusters, canes and kukri blades, it comes off as loose and weightless. It just isn’t fun.
That dearth of fun is the crux here. As the series finally begins to carve out an identity for itself, shed the dead-weight of its futuristic fluff of a sub-plot, and really let fly with its caricatural depiction of human history, it’s simultaneously failing to keep up with even middling mechanical, technical and design standards. With searing irony, the series feels more historic with each profit-driven iteration.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
PewDiePie: how the YouTube king clocked up 40m fans and 10bn views
With 40 million fans, YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg could have his pick of broadcasters if he decided to move into television. But the man whose channel has more than 10bn video views plans to stick with his online community.
Television is just another promotional channel for his online work, rather than the next rung of the entertainment ladder, he argues.
“I started doing YouTube videos and that’s what I want to keep doing. It seems like maybe some traditional or old media feel intimidated by YouTube being a new medium,” Kjellberg said.
“I feel like we are the lucky ones doing YouTube. So I’m going to keep doing what’s fun.”
Kjellberg launched his YouTube channel in 2010, and has built a huge audience for his vlogs and “Let’s Play” videos, in which he plays a variety of games.
In 2014, his videos were watched nearly 4.1bn times and according to documents filed in the Brighton-based Swede’s homeland, the 25-year-old earned $7.4m (£4.8m).
Now, the traditional media world has come calling – and with it more mainstream attention. Kjellberg released his first book this week, This Book Loves You, through a publishing deal with Penguin Random House, and was recently a guest on high-profile US TV show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“It’s been a certain group that knows about me, for sure. A lot of people are still like, ‘What is a PewDiePie?’ But it really is interesting to see, as one of the bigger names on YouTube, that right now there’s a transition phase where YouTube is becoming more popular and accepted as a medium by itself,” said Kjellberg.
The online fandom for its stars extends to the offline world too: 1,400 fans turned up to Kjellberg’s book signing in London last weekend, while he has been mobbed when appearing at online-video industry award ceremonies.
“I see the numbers that are there online: a lot of people watching and commenting. But you go to these events and think, ‘Oh shit! It’s actually real.’ It’s a really big transition,” he said.
That transition has also seen Kjellberg become an ambassador of sorts for gaming in general, and the genre of Let’s Play videos in particular. His Late Show appearance came shortly after a rival chat show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, mocked the phenomenon. Colbert, by contrast, treated Kjellberg and his viewers with respect.
“It’s so easy to make fun of because it’s new and different. But once you get into it and understand it more, you realise that it is something cool and awesome,” he said.
Kjellberg is mulling over his next moves, including a plan to experiment with new formats beyond Let’s Play videos on YouTube, perhaps with live streaming that could bring him closer to traditional television, but in his own way.
“A lot of people keep a looser approach to live streaming: they can just play games and don’t have to worry about editing. That doesn’t seem that appealing to me,” he said. “I’d do it shorter and really make a show out of it.”
Kjellberg is also preparing to make a scripted horror series with the producer of The Walking Dead, funded by YouTube for its newly-announced YouTube Red subscription service.
He is also learning to exert his growing influence on the platforms he operates on, from criticising YouTube for its often-toxic comments section in 2014, to bucking the dominant trend in the apps industry for “freemium” games that make their money from in-app purchases – Candy Crush Saga being the most famous example.
Kjellberg’s mobile game Legend of the Brofist costs £3.99 up front, with no in-app purchases. “I don’t think that all games that have in-game purchases are bad, but we didn’t think it would fit the kind of game we wanted to make. It was cool to maybe change people’s approach to mobile games: they don’t always have to be Flappy Bird,” he said.
That game was a sudden (if short-lived) craze in early 2014: Kjellberg’s videos of Flappy Bird were watched by tens of millions of people, sparking its initial surge in downloads.
It was an early sign that PewDiePie and his fellow YouTube gamers are the new influencers in the games industry, capable of turning obscure, independent games into hits.
“People think that YouTube is going to replace games journalism. I don’t think that at all: they both have a place, and a different approach to promoting games,” said Kjellberg.
“But when I released my own game, it was really cool to see exactly what the impact of just one video of a game could do. It’s clear that if a YouTuber plays a game, sales go up. That’s just how it is.”
Penguin Random House is hoping it will be a similar story for This Book Loves You, which follows chart-topping books from fellow YouTubers Zoe “Zoella” Sugg and Alfie Deyes.
But unlike Sugg’s novel, Girl Online, Kjellberg’s book takes the form of a collection of mock-inspirational quotes, spoofing the kind of over-solemn memes widely shared on Facebook.
The idea plays firmly to his core fans, who he said played a key role in the original idea for the book.
Kjellberg’s communication with his fans has had to evolve from the days when he published his personal email address for them to contact.
“That would be impossible now, it would just be ridiculous!” he said, of the likely deluge of emails. “But I think they know I still care and take their feedback incredibly seriously.”
Like a number of other YouTubers, Kjellberg has successfully mobilised his online audience for charitable purposes, raising $446,000 (£288,294) for Charity: Water in 2013 and $630,000 (£407,232) for Save the Children in 2014 through crowdfunding campaigns.
Television is just another promotional channel for his online work, rather than the next rung of the entertainment ladder, he argues.
“I started doing YouTube videos and that’s what I want to keep doing. It seems like maybe some traditional or old media feel intimidated by YouTube being a new medium,” Kjellberg said.
“I feel like we are the lucky ones doing YouTube. So I’m going to keep doing what’s fun.”
Kjellberg launched his YouTube channel in 2010, and has built a huge audience for his vlogs and “Let’s Play” videos, in which he plays a variety of games.
In 2014, his videos were watched nearly 4.1bn times and according to documents filed in the Brighton-based Swede’s homeland, the 25-year-old earned $7.4m (£4.8m).
Now, the traditional media world has come calling – and with it more mainstream attention. Kjellberg released his first book this week, This Book Loves You, through a publishing deal with Penguin Random House, and was recently a guest on high-profile US TV show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“It’s been a certain group that knows about me, for sure. A lot of people are still like, ‘What is a PewDiePie?’ But it really is interesting to see, as one of the bigger names on YouTube, that right now there’s a transition phase where YouTube is becoming more popular and accepted as a medium by itself,” said Kjellberg.
The online fandom for its stars extends to the offline world too: 1,400 fans turned up to Kjellberg’s book signing in London last weekend, while he has been mobbed when appearing at online-video industry award ceremonies.
“I see the numbers that are there online: a lot of people watching and commenting. But you go to these events and think, ‘Oh shit! It’s actually real.’ It’s a really big transition,” he said.
That transition has also seen Kjellberg become an ambassador of sorts for gaming in general, and the genre of Let’s Play videos in particular. His Late Show appearance came shortly after a rival chat show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, mocked the phenomenon. Colbert, by contrast, treated Kjellberg and his viewers with respect.
“It’s so easy to make fun of because it’s new and different. But once you get into it and understand it more, you realise that it is something cool and awesome,” he said.
Kjellberg is mulling over his next moves, including a plan to experiment with new formats beyond Let’s Play videos on YouTube, perhaps with live streaming that could bring him closer to traditional television, but in his own way.
“A lot of people keep a looser approach to live streaming: they can just play games and don’t have to worry about editing. That doesn’t seem that appealing to me,” he said. “I’d do it shorter and really make a show out of it.”
Kjellberg is also preparing to make a scripted horror series with the producer of The Walking Dead, funded by YouTube for its newly-announced YouTube Red subscription service.
He is also learning to exert his growing influence on the platforms he operates on, from criticising YouTube for its often-toxic comments section in 2014, to bucking the dominant trend in the apps industry for “freemium” games that make their money from in-app purchases – Candy Crush Saga being the most famous example.
Kjellberg’s mobile game Legend of the Brofist costs £3.99 up front, with no in-app purchases. “I don’t think that all games that have in-game purchases are bad, but we didn’t think it would fit the kind of game we wanted to make. It was cool to maybe change people’s approach to mobile games: they don’t always have to be Flappy Bird,” he said.
That game was a sudden (if short-lived) craze in early 2014: Kjellberg’s videos of Flappy Bird were watched by tens of millions of people, sparking its initial surge in downloads.
It was an early sign that PewDiePie and his fellow YouTube gamers are the new influencers in the games industry, capable of turning obscure, independent games into hits.
“People think that YouTube is going to replace games journalism. I don’t think that at all: they both have a place, and a different approach to promoting games,” said Kjellberg.
“But when I released my own game, it was really cool to see exactly what the impact of just one video of a game could do. It’s clear that if a YouTuber plays a game, sales go up. That’s just how it is.”
Penguin Random House is hoping it will be a similar story for This Book Loves You, which follows chart-topping books from fellow YouTubers Zoe “Zoella” Sugg and Alfie Deyes.
But unlike Sugg’s novel, Girl Online, Kjellberg’s book takes the form of a collection of mock-inspirational quotes, spoofing the kind of over-solemn memes widely shared on Facebook.
The idea plays firmly to his core fans, who he said played a key role in the original idea for the book.
Kjellberg’s communication with his fans has had to evolve from the days when he published his personal email address for them to contact.
“That would be impossible now, it would just be ridiculous!” he said, of the likely deluge of emails. “But I think they know I still care and take their feedback incredibly seriously.”
Like a number of other YouTubers, Kjellberg has successfully mobilised his online audience for charitable purposes, raising $446,000 (£288,294) for Charity: Water in 2013 and $630,000 (£407,232) for Save the Children in 2014 through crowdfunding campaigns.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Steam Machine – is this the future of living room gaming?
For years, PC manufacturers have been desperate to get their machines into our living rooms. They’ve tried producing smaller sexier devices, aping the design sensibilities of dedicated games consoles and they’ve tried making them look functional and discreet like DVD players or set-top boxes. But largely, they have failed: most of us still keep our PCs on a desk, in a bedroom, study or office space.
Then in 2013, after years of rumours and speculation, Valve, the company behind the dominant online PC gaming store Steam, announced that it was making a new bid for the living room with its own PC-based console, the Steam Machine. However, it wouldn’t manufacture the console itself, and there wouldn’t just be one version. Keeping to the open philosophy of the PC market, there would be multiple manufacturers, making their own versions, with different specifications. The uniting factor would be that every Steam Machine would run a Linux-based operating system named SteamOS, and that they’d all come with the dedicatedSteam controller – an innovative combination of traditional console joypad and computer mouse, developed in-house at Valve.
In November, the first dozen or so Steam Machine derivatives will hit stores, with units from Alienware, Origin and Falcon Northwest, among others. As expected, the specifications vary widely, from the entry level Alienware with an Intel i3 processor and Nvidia Geforce GTX graphics to the super high-end Falcon Northwest with Intel i7-4790K and Titan-class Nvidia GPU (GameSpot has all the specs). But the question on everyone’s lips is: what are these things for? Why do we need them?
Both the PS4 and the Xbox One are essentially PCs – they feature the same multi-core central processors, dedicated graphics chips and mammoth hard drives as desktop computers. “In fact, they’re getting more PC-like every year,” says Valve programmer Robin Walker, who once helped design seminal shooter Team Fortress but is now one of the leads on the design of the Steam Controller. “They’re trying to solve problems that we solved years ago”.
Valve’s business development specialist Erik Johnson concurs. “PC manufacturers have just had to sit there and watch a bunch of closed systems continuously get shipped into living rooms and they’ve had no part in that business, even though it’s pretty much a PC in all of these machines. And you can’t tell companies like Dell that the big problem is form factor – they’re like ‘dude, we can build anything you want!’ It’s about software. We had this theory that to get the PC into the living room we needed a user interface and a controller that works with the TV. I think we were right about that, but we were wrong about how hard it would be.”
Four years ago, Valve launched Big Picture, a special version of its Steam storefront, designed to run on a television. The new mode is essentially a “10 foot interface”. In other words an onscreen menu system designed to be viewed on a living room screen typically 10 feet away from the user; it’s the concept you find on your Sky or Virgin Media box, or indeed your games console. It meant Steam users could plug their laptop into the TV via HDMI, then browse and play games on their massive LCD screen rather than a desktop monitor. And it’s a tweaked and updated version of Big Picture that provides the UI for every Steam Machine.
And it works pretty well. Power up the Alienware Steam Machine for example, and you don’t get a standard PC desktop with tiny icons and a mouse cursor. Instead, you get what looks like a games console front-end. A Steam Machine logo appears, then you go through a familiar console set-up procedure, providing your region, letting it know the size of your TV, and signing into your Steam account.
Then you’re into the main user interface, which looks like the PS4 UI. A row of icons along the top offer all your settings, download and mail functions, while a larger row of options offers access to the Steam store, your library of games and the community features. Select Store, and all the browsing options you know from the PC version (searching by popularity, release, genre etc) are all there pretty accessible. Of course, you can go into settings and switch to a traditional Linux desktop if you want but, basically, this thing looks, runs and handles like a games console.
The most interesting element though is the controller. Valve has spent over three years designing something that can work with both joypad-centred games such as shooters and action adventures, and mouse-driven titles including strategy simulations. The end result has two large trackpads, as well as a single analogue thumb stick and multiple buttons on the fascia, shoulders and even on the innerside of the two “handles”. It’s also highly customisable – players are able to configure button settings for older Steam titles that don’t directly support the pad, and then share them online so that others don’t have to bother.
In practise, it takes a bit to get used to, but it does work. We tried Civilization V, using the right trackpad as a mouse cursor and it feels intuitive, helped a great deal by the detailed haptic sensor array beneath the trackpad, which provides little blips of tactic feedback, aping the friction you feel as you whizz a mouse over a surface.
As for shooters, during our demo, we got to try Just Cause 3 which is one of the forthcoming titles designed with Steam Controller compatibility in mind. Here, the analogue stick handles movement, while the right touchpad is used for aiming, which is incredibly accurate but also very, very sensitive. We spent a lot of time firing wildly around the screen, which – when your character has a rocket launcher and they’re standing on top of a flying aircraft – can be dangerous. Again, though, everything can be tweaked and customised, and its likely dedicated gamers will find their own way to tune the system.
And like the PS4 controller, Valve has also added motion detection in the form of a gyroscope for extra versatility. “We’ve found a lot of our hardcore FPS players are starting to map that to mouse input,” says Walker. “The gyro feeds mouse input in, and the right pad generates mouse input as well, and the controller synthesises those two inputs before it sends them to the game. So with something like CounterStrike, where you care about aim a lot, you use your right pad for large scale movement, turns etc, and your gyroscope for very fine aim on top of that. This was not something we expected, it’s not what the design was for, but they’re finding that mix of large scale and very fine movement is working for them”.
Then in 2013, after years of rumours and speculation, Valve, the company behind the dominant online PC gaming store Steam, announced that it was making a new bid for the living room with its own PC-based console, the Steam Machine. However, it wouldn’t manufacture the console itself, and there wouldn’t just be one version. Keeping to the open philosophy of the PC market, there would be multiple manufacturers, making their own versions, with different specifications. The uniting factor would be that every Steam Machine would run a Linux-based operating system named SteamOS, and that they’d all come with the dedicatedSteam controller – an innovative combination of traditional console joypad and computer mouse, developed in-house at Valve.
In November, the first dozen or so Steam Machine derivatives will hit stores, with units from Alienware, Origin and Falcon Northwest, among others. As expected, the specifications vary widely, from the entry level Alienware with an Intel i3 processor and Nvidia Geforce GTX graphics to the super high-end Falcon Northwest with Intel i7-4790K and Titan-class Nvidia GPU (GameSpot has all the specs). But the question on everyone’s lips is: what are these things for? Why do we need them?
Both the PS4 and the Xbox One are essentially PCs – they feature the same multi-core central processors, dedicated graphics chips and mammoth hard drives as desktop computers. “In fact, they’re getting more PC-like every year,” says Valve programmer Robin Walker, who once helped design seminal shooter Team Fortress but is now one of the leads on the design of the Steam Controller. “They’re trying to solve problems that we solved years ago”.
Valve’s business development specialist Erik Johnson concurs. “PC manufacturers have just had to sit there and watch a bunch of closed systems continuously get shipped into living rooms and they’ve had no part in that business, even though it’s pretty much a PC in all of these machines. And you can’t tell companies like Dell that the big problem is form factor – they’re like ‘dude, we can build anything you want!’ It’s about software. We had this theory that to get the PC into the living room we needed a user interface and a controller that works with the TV. I think we were right about that, but we were wrong about how hard it would be.”
Four years ago, Valve launched Big Picture, a special version of its Steam storefront, designed to run on a television. The new mode is essentially a “10 foot interface”. In other words an onscreen menu system designed to be viewed on a living room screen typically 10 feet away from the user; it’s the concept you find on your Sky or Virgin Media box, or indeed your games console. It meant Steam users could plug their laptop into the TV via HDMI, then browse and play games on their massive LCD screen rather than a desktop monitor. And it’s a tweaked and updated version of Big Picture that provides the UI for every Steam Machine.
And it works pretty well. Power up the Alienware Steam Machine for example, and you don’t get a standard PC desktop with tiny icons and a mouse cursor. Instead, you get what looks like a games console front-end. A Steam Machine logo appears, then you go through a familiar console set-up procedure, providing your region, letting it know the size of your TV, and signing into your Steam account.
Then you’re into the main user interface, which looks like the PS4 UI. A row of icons along the top offer all your settings, download and mail functions, while a larger row of options offers access to the Steam store, your library of games and the community features. Select Store, and all the browsing options you know from the PC version (searching by popularity, release, genre etc) are all there pretty accessible. Of course, you can go into settings and switch to a traditional Linux desktop if you want but, basically, this thing looks, runs and handles like a games console.
The most interesting element though is the controller. Valve has spent over three years designing something that can work with both joypad-centred games such as shooters and action adventures, and mouse-driven titles including strategy simulations. The end result has two large trackpads, as well as a single analogue thumb stick and multiple buttons on the fascia, shoulders and even on the innerside of the two “handles”. It’s also highly customisable – players are able to configure button settings for older Steam titles that don’t directly support the pad, and then share them online so that others don’t have to bother.
In practise, it takes a bit to get used to, but it does work. We tried Civilization V, using the right trackpad as a mouse cursor and it feels intuitive, helped a great deal by the detailed haptic sensor array beneath the trackpad, which provides little blips of tactic feedback, aping the friction you feel as you whizz a mouse over a surface.
As for shooters, during our demo, we got to try Just Cause 3 which is one of the forthcoming titles designed with Steam Controller compatibility in mind. Here, the analogue stick handles movement, while the right touchpad is used for aiming, which is incredibly accurate but also very, very sensitive. We spent a lot of time firing wildly around the screen, which – when your character has a rocket launcher and they’re standing on top of a flying aircraft – can be dangerous. Again, though, everything can be tweaked and customised, and its likely dedicated gamers will find their own way to tune the system.
And like the PS4 controller, Valve has also added motion detection in the form of a gyroscope for extra versatility. “We’ve found a lot of our hardcore FPS players are starting to map that to mouse input,” says Walker. “The gyro feeds mouse input in, and the right pad generates mouse input as well, and the controller synthesises those two inputs before it sends them to the game. So with something like CounterStrike, where you care about aim a lot, you use your right pad for large scale movement, turns etc, and your gyroscope for very fine aim on top of that. This was not something we expected, it’s not what the design was for, but they’re finding that mix of large scale and very fine movement is working for them”.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Stephen Colbert's love of gaming culture scores points with his viewers
Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live, will be a guest on tonight’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. While the two hosts have very similar jobs, they could not be farther apart in terms of their awareness of the diversifying American media landscape.
This summer, Kimmel decided to pick an unnecessary, multi-episode fight with the video game community. The feud culminated in Kimmel having popular online gaming personalities Markiplier and MissesMae on his show in an attempt to mend fences – and stop the mean YouTube comments – but even that got condescending when Kimmel and his guests engaged in an awkward three-way hug that ended with Kimmel suggesting they should “try being around other humans every once in a while.”
On Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the musical guest wasn’t a stylish indie rock band with an album to promote. It was The Legend Of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, a 74-piece orchestra who performs music from Nintendo’s iconic video game series. Earlier this month, one of Colbert’s conversation partners was Sean Murray, who doesn’t have a new film or TV series on the horizon: Murray is one of the creators of the upcoming space exploration video game No Man’s Sky, and he guided Colbert through a live gameplay demoon air. PewDiePie, YouTube’s most popular gaming personality and highest-earning user, also guested on The Late Show a few weeks ago.
Kimmel still sees gamers as awkward, non-athletic, basement-dwelling nerds who forgot long ago what fresh air and human interaction feel like – a dated stereotype that has been proven to be inaccurate. Colbert, who has been praised for breaking new ground in late night TV, understands that video games have become the fourth pillar of entertainment – alongside movies, TV and music –and that this large and expanding audience deserves proportionate recognition.
It is estimated that the revenues of the video game industry worldwide will reach about $91.5bn when 2015 comes to an end, while live and recorded music revenues are estimated at about $47bn, movies at around $104bn, and television subscriptions at well over $200bn.
Conan O’Brien also understands that video games are a legitimate entertainment medium and has taken steps to demonstrate it. Conan hosts has its own weekly livestreaming program and a favourite recurring sketch on the show is Clueless Gamer – but it is Colbert who is the bridge between nerd culture and “what’s cool”. He became one of television’s biggest personalities on The Colbert Report, all while challenging James Franco to JRR Tolkien trivia contestsand starring in a comic book series, and his profile has only expanded since taking over for David Letterman at CBS.
Most importantly, despite being the oldest host in late night television at 51, Colbert relates to his young, video game-playing audience – one of the youngest in late night – because he is a self-proclaimed nerd who understands that his interests didn’t always demand widespread attention like they do now, and that his nerd peers, the early adopters of the new normal, deserve their time in the spotlight.
“I was a nerd when nerd was nerd,” he told Time in August. “OK? All right? There was no reward. No one catered to us. We weren’t a demographic. We were a punching bag and a punch line. There was a movie called Revenge of the Nerds because the nerds needed revenge because of all of the things that were happening to them. That’s a cultural artifact that people need to understand.”
While talking to Markiplier and MissesMae, Kimmel showed some humility and admitted that he is “old” and “out of touch”, but Colbert has proven that being older is no excuse for being out of touch, especially when having a firm understanding of popular interests is such a crucial part of your job.
This summer, Kimmel decided to pick an unnecessary, multi-episode fight with the video game community. The feud culminated in Kimmel having popular online gaming personalities Markiplier and MissesMae on his show in an attempt to mend fences – and stop the mean YouTube comments – but even that got condescending when Kimmel and his guests engaged in an awkward three-way hug that ended with Kimmel suggesting they should “try being around other humans every once in a while.”
On Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the musical guest wasn’t a stylish indie rock band with an album to promote. It was The Legend Of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, a 74-piece orchestra who performs music from Nintendo’s iconic video game series. Earlier this month, one of Colbert’s conversation partners was Sean Murray, who doesn’t have a new film or TV series on the horizon: Murray is one of the creators of the upcoming space exploration video game No Man’s Sky, and he guided Colbert through a live gameplay demoon air. PewDiePie, YouTube’s most popular gaming personality and highest-earning user, also guested on The Late Show a few weeks ago.
Kimmel still sees gamers as awkward, non-athletic, basement-dwelling nerds who forgot long ago what fresh air and human interaction feel like – a dated stereotype that has been proven to be inaccurate. Colbert, who has been praised for breaking new ground in late night TV, understands that video games have become the fourth pillar of entertainment – alongside movies, TV and music –and that this large and expanding audience deserves proportionate recognition.
It is estimated that the revenues of the video game industry worldwide will reach about $91.5bn when 2015 comes to an end, while live and recorded music revenues are estimated at about $47bn, movies at around $104bn, and television subscriptions at well over $200bn.
Conan O’Brien also understands that video games are a legitimate entertainment medium and has taken steps to demonstrate it. Conan hosts has its own weekly livestreaming program and a favourite recurring sketch on the show is Clueless Gamer – but it is Colbert who is the bridge between nerd culture and “what’s cool”. He became one of television’s biggest personalities on The Colbert Report, all while challenging James Franco to JRR Tolkien trivia contestsand starring in a comic book series, and his profile has only expanded since taking over for David Letterman at CBS.
Most importantly, despite being the oldest host in late night television at 51, Colbert relates to his young, video game-playing audience – one of the youngest in late night – because he is a self-proclaimed nerd who understands that his interests didn’t always demand widespread attention like they do now, and that his nerd peers, the early adopters of the new normal, deserve their time in the spotlight.
“I was a nerd when nerd was nerd,” he told Time in August. “OK? All right? There was no reward. No one catered to us. We weren’t a demographic. We were a punching bag and a punch line. There was a movie called Revenge of the Nerds because the nerds needed revenge because of all of the things that were happening to them. That’s a cultural artifact that people need to understand.”
While talking to Markiplier and MissesMae, Kimmel showed some humility and admitted that he is “old” and “out of touch”, but Colbert has proven that being older is no excuse for being out of touch, especially when having a firm understanding of popular interests is such a crucial part of your job.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Minecraft: Story Mode Episode 1 review: a treat for young fans
It’s untrue to suggest that Minecraft doesn’t have a story: it has thousands. It’s just that the vast majority of them weren’t made up by the game’s developer Mojang.
One of the reasons millions of children love playing Minecraft is that it’s a digital set for their own stories, whether they’re playing alone or with friends. Meanwhile, popular YouTubers like The Diamond Minecart and Stampy have built huge online audiences by spinning their own yarns within the game.
This is why Mojang’s moves into storytelling – through spin-off game Minecraft: Story Mode and the in-development Minecraft movie – is a fascinating risk. It’s one the company is well aware of too.
“We don’t want any story that we make, whether it’s a movie or a book, to create some sort of ‘this is the official Minecraft, this is how you play the game’ thing,” chief operating officer Vu Bui told the Guardian in October 2014.
“When coming up with a story, we want to make sure it is just a story within Minecraft, as opposed to the story within Minecraft.”
So, Minecraft: Story Mode is a – not the – story set within Minecraft, created in partnership with developer Telltale Games – well respected for its adventure games based on The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Borderlands and other properties.
Like those this will be an episodic adventure, told over five episodes, TV-style. The first – The Order of the Stone – was released this week for PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and PS3 and PS4, with Android and iOS versions to follow.
The story is set within the world of Minecraft, focusing on a group of friends (and a pet pig) trying to track down a team of famous adventurers in order to save the world. You play a character named Jesse who can be a boy or a girl – a change from the original male-only plan – and one of three races.
For the most part, the gameplay involves watching the story unfold, while being prompted regularly with multiple-choice conversational or action questions.
There are also action sequences and fight scenes every so often, although nothing hugely challenging: this game wants you to find your way through its story, rather than to kill you off if you can’t hit a key or button fast enough. A good thing, because the combat is one of the game’s least fun features.
It’s all about the branching narrative, too: rather than shepherding you through a single storyline, there are real choices to be made that will affect what you see and do, and how the other characters react to you.
While some scenes do involve walking around, the general restriction on your movement and actions can feel jarring, given that it’s an accurate representation of Minecraft that you’re walking around in. No diving out of the plot progression to dig a home out of a hillside here.
That said, there are lots of references that will delight Minecraft veterans young and old alike: from Jesse’s wooden sword breaking at exactly the wrong moment, to neatly-worked pig and chicken jokes. Story Mode is steeped in Minecraft culture, but handles it with a light, humorous touch.
The first episode clocks in at around two hours, with four more to come. At $24.99 (just over £16) that feels good value, especially thinking about children’s likely desire to replay the game to discover the bits they missed first time round.
Adults may be put off by the game’s length and relatively high amount of watching rather than playing. But for children, Minecraft: Story Mode looks the perfect midpoint between playing Minecraft and watching Minecraft videos on YouTube.
A new story in the world that they love, but one in which they’re participating, not just watching – which isn’t afraid to raise some sensitive issues around topics such as friendship. Roll on episode two.
One of the reasons millions of children love playing Minecraft is that it’s a digital set for their own stories, whether they’re playing alone or with friends. Meanwhile, popular YouTubers like The Diamond Minecart and Stampy have built huge online audiences by spinning their own yarns within the game.
This is why Mojang’s moves into storytelling – through spin-off game Minecraft: Story Mode and the in-development Minecraft movie – is a fascinating risk. It’s one the company is well aware of too.
“We don’t want any story that we make, whether it’s a movie or a book, to create some sort of ‘this is the official Minecraft, this is how you play the game’ thing,” chief operating officer Vu Bui told the Guardian in October 2014.
“When coming up with a story, we want to make sure it is just a story within Minecraft, as opposed to the story within Minecraft.”
So, Minecraft: Story Mode is a – not the – story set within Minecraft, created in partnership with developer Telltale Games – well respected for its adventure games based on The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Borderlands and other properties.
Like those this will be an episodic adventure, told over five episodes, TV-style. The first – The Order of the Stone – was released this week for PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and PS3 and PS4, with Android and iOS versions to follow.
The story is set within the world of Minecraft, focusing on a group of friends (and a pet pig) trying to track down a team of famous adventurers in order to save the world. You play a character named Jesse who can be a boy or a girl – a change from the original male-only plan – and one of three races.
For the most part, the gameplay involves watching the story unfold, while being prompted regularly with multiple-choice conversational or action questions.
There are also action sequences and fight scenes every so often, although nothing hugely challenging: this game wants you to find your way through its story, rather than to kill you off if you can’t hit a key or button fast enough. A good thing, because the combat is one of the game’s least fun features.
It’s all about the branching narrative, too: rather than shepherding you through a single storyline, there are real choices to be made that will affect what you see and do, and how the other characters react to you.
While some scenes do involve walking around, the general restriction on your movement and actions can feel jarring, given that it’s an accurate representation of Minecraft that you’re walking around in. No diving out of the plot progression to dig a home out of a hillside here.
That said, there are lots of references that will delight Minecraft veterans young and old alike: from Jesse’s wooden sword breaking at exactly the wrong moment, to neatly-worked pig and chicken jokes. Story Mode is steeped in Minecraft culture, but handles it with a light, humorous touch.
The first episode clocks in at around two hours, with four more to come. At $24.99 (just over £16) that feels good value, especially thinking about children’s likely desire to replay the game to discover the bits they missed first time round.
Adults may be put off by the game’s length and relatively high amount of watching rather than playing. But for children, Minecraft: Story Mode looks the perfect midpoint between playing Minecraft and watching Minecraft videos on YouTube.
A new story in the world that they love, but one in which they’re participating, not just watching – which isn’t afraid to raise some sensitive issues around topics such as friendship. Roll on episode two.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Star Wars Battlefront: what the biggest beta test in EA's history told us
It was, according to Electronic Arts, the biggest beta test in the publisher’s history. Over nine million people turned out this week to try an early version of Star Wars: Battlefront, the online multiplayer shooter set for release on 17 November. Most came away with some fun stories and a few huge questions.
One thing pretty much everyone agreed on was that this game nails Star Wars. The recreation of Hoth is visually astounding, with its glittering snowscapes and bustling rebel base – and the design of the storm troopers, the guns and the spacecraft is near perfect. The audio too, is wonderful, capturing all the well-known sound effects, from the whine of a swooping Tie-Fighter to the almost mournful laser blast of the AT-ST walkers. There is also thrilling use of the John Williams score, bringing in the main theme at certain points and never failing to produce a rush of adrenaline and nostalgia.
“Star Wars – what’s bigger?” says Niklas Fegraeus, design director at developer Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (Dice), speaking to us on the eve of the Beta’s launch. “One of the main goals of the game is to be a Star Wars experience – that’s a huge thing. The whole franchise is enjoyed by so many different types of people – of course we want to give them something to enjoy, we want them to be able to just jump into the game and have fun.”
This brings us to the key complaint coming out of the beta experience: that the combat is too shallow. The four available laser guns, though exhibiting different specs, all look and feel the same, and success seemed hugely reliant on levelling up and grabbing the better items, rather than learning the maps and figuring out how to coordinate attacks with teammates. Right now, the distribution of power-ups over the map surface, which give access to sentry guns, defence shields and other goodies (replacing the genre’s now conventional “kill streak” style rewards), takes away the usual rhythm and sense of progress within a bout.
Of course, what the beta also lacked was the character progression element of the full game, which will hopefully allow players to personalise their avatars with specific skills – perhaps along the traditional lines of medic, sniper and assault – thereby fleshing out the strategic play. But then Dice keeps stressing that this isn’t a Battlefield game for Battlefield fans, it’s a Star Wars game for Star Wars fans. In truth, as we mentioned after playing the game at E3, the dynamics of the combat do very much reflect the feel of the Battlefield series – just with many of the more complex load-out options, progression systems and tactical elements (like squads and commanders) removed.
Fegraeus assures us however, that there will be something there for the more dedicated gaming audience – though that does seem to come down to the breadth of game modes, rather than the depth. “It’s just this large palette of experiences very closely tied to iconic Star Wars stuff that you can play,” he says, “I think that gives not only a big appeal to a lot of people - that’s the intent, we want Star Wars fans to feel like this is something for them - but at the same time, if you’re an advanced player and you want to be very tactical or competitive or whatever, there are modes for that too. It gives you options and choices when it comes to what you want to play.”
There were two key multiplayer modes available in the beta: the snappy Drop Zone, set on the new planet of Sullust; and Walker Assault, the more in-depth 20 vs 20 conflict on the surface of Hoth. Drop Zone is a take on Battlefield’s standard Conquest mode in which teams compete to secure key areas of the map – except here, the areas are escape pods that drop on to the surface in random positions, forcing a much more fluid, improvisational approach. Also, participants set the capture process off by holding down a button, but they don’t have to remain in the immediate vicinity for long, making defence more open and tactical. During the beta, this is where most players started out, engaging in the quick skirmishes and levelling up their characters to unlock the better guns and equipment such as grenades, one-shot sniper rifles and jet packs.
Walker Assault, however, was the beta’s true showcase mode. Here, two sides – rebel and imperial – face off in a recreation of the Empire Strikes Back’s opening assault. The rebels are required to reach a set of uplinks and get them running, in order to triangulate Y-Wing bomber strikes on the advancing might of the imperial AT-AT walkers. The Empire has to stop the rebel scum, while slowly watching its walking mega-tanks plod into the battle.
It’s a simple setup, but it proved exciting. With so many people involved, so much going on and so many options in attack or defence, it’s hard not to get caught up in the spectacle. Sure, manning a turret and blasting at distant enemies isn’t anything remotely original in an online shooter. Yes, it’s the sort of thing where there are objectives most players will ignore, leading to a quick defeat. No, you can’t have full control over an AT-AT.
That wasn’t the only problem some beta players had with the Hoth experience. Some felt 40 players (and no AI soldiers) isn’t nearly enough to recreate an epic battle. Others pointed to the currently borked spawn system that often shoves you into the game mere centimetres from an enemy, thereby ensuring your quick demise. The hero system, which lets you grab a power-up to transform into Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, is fun, but again, there’s no sense of progressing toward the chance to experience this honour - you just have to be in the right place at the right time to pick up a token.
But once again, Fegraeus makes the same point: this is the Star Wars “battle fantasy” that Dice wants Battlefront to convey. Away from unlocking better weapons and grenades, the idea is that everyone gets a go at the fun stuff – the cool vehicles and the classic characters.
“We have lots of experience when it comes to these large scale designs, so we use a lot of that experience,” says Fegraeus of the overall Hoth experience. “But at the same time, it’s a great challenge for us to make something that really speaks Star Wars, being in that universe and working in that universe’s rules.
“... It’s been the really exciting part of the challenge – just diving into this universe and learning its ins and outs and kinks, and trying to make something that speaks to that, so it becomes a true Star Wars experience. We really started with this foundational idea of ‘let’s let people jump in to their Star Wars battle fantasy and play it their way’,” he says, “That has been the guiding principle, and that hasn’t changed at all.”
If that’s the guiding principle, then the beta is definitely a success of sorts. Taking control of a TIie Interceptor, carrying out strafing runs on fleeing members of the New Republic; swooping low and fast in a Snowspeeder (while dropping in the odd “I’ve found them, repeat, I’ve found them”); prancing about in full control of an AT-ST walker - there’s always plenty going on and plenty to do (even if the controls of the flying craft are currently a little unintuitive and weird, so dog-fighting with an X-wing can often feel a bit like trying to parallel park a Reliant Robin with two flat tyres).
Star Wars: Battlefront, then, is true to the source material; everything it does fitswith what you would expect. The problem could be that the underlying action is so familiar – we’ve had over a decade of the Call of Duty and Battlefield titles now, and they have rigidly defined the military FPS experience that Battlefront adheres to. It’s risky to draw too many conclusions from what is essentially a technical test not a demo, but if the beta is anything to go by, those who aren’t utterly seduced by the chance to fight as rebels or stormtroopers raiding Tatooine and blowing up snow bases may even – gulp – find themselves tiring of a highly recognisable shooter.
Perhaps the plan with Star Wars: Battlefront is to use it as a platform for future bolt-ons and additions; a constantly updating and evolving world of online Star Wars shooter-playsets, riddled with settings and characters from the entire franchise, old and new. In other words, the Destiny model. Indeed, we’ve already discovered that the season pass, which gives access to four forthcoming expansion packs, will cost $40. When you consider there’s no single-player Campaign experience beyond a series of short missions, it’s a relatively high price to play for those Star Wars fans unused to the dynamics of the online multiplayer marketplace.
On the subject of downloadable content (DLC), Fegraeus reminds us of what we already know – Battlefront is getting a piece of freebie in December, offering players a look at the battle of Jakku. But he won’t say more. “We wanted to have something that acted as a bridge, something that tied into the new Star Wars that’s coming,” he says. “The DLC is essentially the events that led to the way that planet looks in Episode VII. You’ve seen it on the trailer, with the huge crashed star destroyer in the desert. We’ll support the game post-launch, and we’ll listen to what the community says.”
Battlefront is going to do well, we all know that. It will see plenty of DLC and it will be a whole new franchise for publishing giant EA to exploit. But the real question is whether or not it will offer more than just a Star Wars skinning of Battlefield Lite.
One thing pretty much everyone agreed on was that this game nails Star Wars. The recreation of Hoth is visually astounding, with its glittering snowscapes and bustling rebel base – and the design of the storm troopers, the guns and the spacecraft is near perfect. The audio too, is wonderful, capturing all the well-known sound effects, from the whine of a swooping Tie-Fighter to the almost mournful laser blast of the AT-ST walkers. There is also thrilling use of the John Williams score, bringing in the main theme at certain points and never failing to produce a rush of adrenaline and nostalgia.
“Star Wars – what’s bigger?” says Niklas Fegraeus, design director at developer Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (Dice), speaking to us on the eve of the Beta’s launch. “One of the main goals of the game is to be a Star Wars experience – that’s a huge thing. The whole franchise is enjoyed by so many different types of people – of course we want to give them something to enjoy, we want them to be able to just jump into the game and have fun.”
This brings us to the key complaint coming out of the beta experience: that the combat is too shallow. The four available laser guns, though exhibiting different specs, all look and feel the same, and success seemed hugely reliant on levelling up and grabbing the better items, rather than learning the maps and figuring out how to coordinate attacks with teammates. Right now, the distribution of power-ups over the map surface, which give access to sentry guns, defence shields and other goodies (replacing the genre’s now conventional “kill streak” style rewards), takes away the usual rhythm and sense of progress within a bout.
Of course, what the beta also lacked was the character progression element of the full game, which will hopefully allow players to personalise their avatars with specific skills – perhaps along the traditional lines of medic, sniper and assault – thereby fleshing out the strategic play. But then Dice keeps stressing that this isn’t a Battlefield game for Battlefield fans, it’s a Star Wars game for Star Wars fans. In truth, as we mentioned after playing the game at E3, the dynamics of the combat do very much reflect the feel of the Battlefield series – just with many of the more complex load-out options, progression systems and tactical elements (like squads and commanders) removed.
Fegraeus assures us however, that there will be something there for the more dedicated gaming audience – though that does seem to come down to the breadth of game modes, rather than the depth. “It’s just this large palette of experiences very closely tied to iconic Star Wars stuff that you can play,” he says, “I think that gives not only a big appeal to a lot of people - that’s the intent, we want Star Wars fans to feel like this is something for them - but at the same time, if you’re an advanced player and you want to be very tactical or competitive or whatever, there are modes for that too. It gives you options and choices when it comes to what you want to play.”
There were two key multiplayer modes available in the beta: the snappy Drop Zone, set on the new planet of Sullust; and Walker Assault, the more in-depth 20 vs 20 conflict on the surface of Hoth. Drop Zone is a take on Battlefield’s standard Conquest mode in which teams compete to secure key areas of the map – except here, the areas are escape pods that drop on to the surface in random positions, forcing a much more fluid, improvisational approach. Also, participants set the capture process off by holding down a button, but they don’t have to remain in the immediate vicinity for long, making defence more open and tactical. During the beta, this is where most players started out, engaging in the quick skirmishes and levelling up their characters to unlock the better guns and equipment such as grenades, one-shot sniper rifles and jet packs.
Walker Assault, however, was the beta’s true showcase mode. Here, two sides – rebel and imperial – face off in a recreation of the Empire Strikes Back’s opening assault. The rebels are required to reach a set of uplinks and get them running, in order to triangulate Y-Wing bomber strikes on the advancing might of the imperial AT-AT walkers. The Empire has to stop the rebel scum, while slowly watching its walking mega-tanks plod into the battle.
It’s a simple setup, but it proved exciting. With so many people involved, so much going on and so many options in attack or defence, it’s hard not to get caught up in the spectacle. Sure, manning a turret and blasting at distant enemies isn’t anything remotely original in an online shooter. Yes, it’s the sort of thing where there are objectives most players will ignore, leading to a quick defeat. No, you can’t have full control over an AT-AT.
That wasn’t the only problem some beta players had with the Hoth experience. Some felt 40 players (and no AI soldiers) isn’t nearly enough to recreate an epic battle. Others pointed to the currently borked spawn system that often shoves you into the game mere centimetres from an enemy, thereby ensuring your quick demise. The hero system, which lets you grab a power-up to transform into Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, is fun, but again, there’s no sense of progressing toward the chance to experience this honour - you just have to be in the right place at the right time to pick up a token.
But once again, Fegraeus makes the same point: this is the Star Wars “battle fantasy” that Dice wants Battlefront to convey. Away from unlocking better weapons and grenades, the idea is that everyone gets a go at the fun stuff – the cool vehicles and the classic characters.
“We have lots of experience when it comes to these large scale designs, so we use a lot of that experience,” says Fegraeus of the overall Hoth experience. “But at the same time, it’s a great challenge for us to make something that really speaks Star Wars, being in that universe and working in that universe’s rules.
“... It’s been the really exciting part of the challenge – just diving into this universe and learning its ins and outs and kinks, and trying to make something that speaks to that, so it becomes a true Star Wars experience. We really started with this foundational idea of ‘let’s let people jump in to their Star Wars battle fantasy and play it their way’,” he says, “That has been the guiding principle, and that hasn’t changed at all.”
If that’s the guiding principle, then the beta is definitely a success of sorts. Taking control of a TIie Interceptor, carrying out strafing runs on fleeing members of the New Republic; swooping low and fast in a Snowspeeder (while dropping in the odd “I’ve found them, repeat, I’ve found them”); prancing about in full control of an AT-ST walker - there’s always plenty going on and plenty to do (even if the controls of the flying craft are currently a little unintuitive and weird, so dog-fighting with an X-wing can often feel a bit like trying to parallel park a Reliant Robin with two flat tyres).
Star Wars: Battlefront, then, is true to the source material; everything it does fitswith what you would expect. The problem could be that the underlying action is so familiar – we’ve had over a decade of the Call of Duty and Battlefield titles now, and they have rigidly defined the military FPS experience that Battlefront adheres to. It’s risky to draw too many conclusions from what is essentially a technical test not a demo, but if the beta is anything to go by, those who aren’t utterly seduced by the chance to fight as rebels or stormtroopers raiding Tatooine and blowing up snow bases may even – gulp – find themselves tiring of a highly recognisable shooter.
Perhaps the plan with Star Wars: Battlefront is to use it as a platform for future bolt-ons and additions; a constantly updating and evolving world of online Star Wars shooter-playsets, riddled with settings and characters from the entire franchise, old and new. In other words, the Destiny model. Indeed, we’ve already discovered that the season pass, which gives access to four forthcoming expansion packs, will cost $40. When you consider there’s no single-player Campaign experience beyond a series of short missions, it’s a relatively high price to play for those Star Wars fans unused to the dynamics of the online multiplayer marketplace.
On the subject of downloadable content (DLC), Fegraeus reminds us of what we already know – Battlefront is getting a piece of freebie in December, offering players a look at the battle of Jakku. But he won’t say more. “We wanted to have something that acted as a bridge, something that tied into the new Star Wars that’s coming,” he says. “The DLC is essentially the events that led to the way that planet looks in Episode VII. You’ve seen it on the trailer, with the huge crashed star destroyer in the desert. We’ll support the game post-launch, and we’ll listen to what the community says.”
Battlefront is going to do well, we all know that. It will see plenty of DLC and it will be a whole new franchise for publishing giant EA to exploit. But the real question is whether or not it will offer more than just a Star Wars skinning of Battlefield Lite.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 – five things we've learned about the campaign
It’s just a month until Activision unleashes the latest title in its blockbusting Call of Duty series. And while we’ve seen plenty of information on how Black Ops 3 is tweaking the multiplayer experience, there’s been much less focus on the single-player campaign mode.
Set 40 years after the events of Black Ops 2, the world is now divided into a patchwork of international alliances, all investigating advanced cybernetic and bio-augmentation technologies. The narrative follows a group of robotically enhanced super soldiers, investigating the disappearance of a CIA operative in Singapore, as well as a huge data leak of military secrets.
During a reveal event in April, developer Treyarch announced that the campaign would be a four-player co-op mode with large, open environments – it even promised a more complex story in which multiple playthroughs may be required to get the full picture.
But how does this play out in practice? Recently, we got to play a demo of the Campaign mode – here’s what we discovered.
It turns out, co-operative play isn’t just an option – playing with up to three friends, or with others online, will be the core campaign experience. It’s the first time co-op has featured in Call of Duty since World at War, and this time each player will be bringing in their own individual rank progression and class customisations as well as the game’s new features: tactical rigs (which provide physical boosts like longer jumps and sprinting times) and cybercores (which provide special skills).
The latter are pretty interesting. There are three different categories: Cybercore Chaos is all about destruction, with options such as Immolation, which uses enemy explosives like grenades and enables you to destroy robots; Cybercore Martial is more about the player – Active Camo, for example allows you to become invisible for a short amount of time; finally Cybercore Control is all about hacking, allowing you to, say, take control of an enemy robot or aircraft. The latter means you’ll be able to undertake aerial raids whenever you want, not just when the scripted mission demands it.
Furthmore, each player’s configurations will be based on the decisions they have made throughout their campaign experience: the more you play, the more cybercores, weapon attachments and other pieces of equipment you’re able to unlock and utilise. What we’ll hopefully see then are parties of players with very different experiences and abilities, having to use those disparate skills together – almost like an RPG guild.
To emphasis this sense of cooperation, more experienced players will be able to lend advanced weapons to their friends, allowing them to compete in missions that they aren’t yet equipped for. Once the level is over, the gun is returned. It’s an interesting attempt to encourage social play beyond simply turning up at the start of a mission with a bunch of strangers and no intention of working together.
The DNI (Direct Neural Interface) is a major new feature
Black Ops 3 is set in 2065 and there have been a major advances in robotic and bionic technology since the Black Ops 2 timeline – as we saw in the “Ember” trailer. Direct neural interfacing, part of a new Tactical Mode accessed via the d-pad, let’s you tap into the visual stream from any of your team mates. In other words, you can see what they see. The idea is, it’ll allow you to identify enemy types and dangerous locations on the map; it will also show, via an augmented reality HUD, where your grenade will land at the current throwing angle.
What we found from the demo is that it could well open a whole new level of tactics. If you want all your teammates to see the location of every enemy in the area, you can place one of your team on a high vantage point – they can then move safely through the area or at least figure out the best way to engage every situation. It’s also possible to find out which enemies can see you, based on the colour layered over the area you’re in. This could prove especially useful on higher difficulties as you’ll know key areas to avoid altogether.
Again, the idea is to get players thinking together, rather than simply making separate run-n-gun forays into each mission. The problem is, that’s kind of how a lot of people play Call of Duty – this isn’t Ghost Recon, after all. Treyarch seems to be aiming for a big culture change in CoD play – it’ll be interesting to see if the level design and co-operative tools are really sophisticated enough to bring this level of strategic planing into play.
The Safe House is a fun extra – with hidden features
Before players enter each mission, they access the Safe House, an area in which they can customise their character, set class loadouts, learn more about the upcoming objectives as well as show off achievements to friends.
Within the Safe House every player has their own “Bunkroom” which contains a wardrobe for character customisation, a little like GTA Online, and a Medal Case, which holds awards you’ve earned after completing tasks in the campaign. You also have a trunk to stores collectible, which you can use to personalise your Bunkroom. Any of your co-op friends can work into your room and view your customised layout. It’s another little RPG feature, which doesn’t add huge amounts to the actual gameplay experience, but just enhances that sense of playing alongside other people, and actually having an existence within the game’s universe.
Each safe house also contains a computer terminal, or PDV, like the computer found in Black Ops 1, giving access to background information (in fact, it houses 100 times more files that its predecessor). There’s background info on the events between Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 3, as well as hidden Easter egg’s and a few surprise game modes. There was an arcade-style zombie mini-game in Black Ops 1, so could potentially expect something very similar to that...
There’s a whole new difficulty setting
Forget Veteran, in Realistic mode, players will only have a single point of health, meaning the slightest damage will bring you down, whether that’s being caught on the edge of a grenade blast or taking a pistol round that’s been fired through a wall. Of course, the whole notion of ‘realism’ is rather stretched in a game set forty years in the future and featuring bio-augmented super soldiers battling intelligent robot tanks, but this is going to be a major challenge for fans. What next? Call of Duty permadeath?
You can skip to the end of the Campaign mode if you like
Set 40 years after the events of Black Ops 2, the world is now divided into a patchwork of international alliances, all investigating advanced cybernetic and bio-augmentation technologies. The narrative follows a group of robotically enhanced super soldiers, investigating the disappearance of a CIA operative in Singapore, as well as a huge data leak of military secrets.
During a reveal event in April, developer Treyarch announced that the campaign would be a four-player co-op mode with large, open environments – it even promised a more complex story in which multiple playthroughs may be required to get the full picture.
But how does this play out in practice? Recently, we got to play a demo of the Campaign mode – here’s what we discovered.
It turns out, co-operative play isn’t just an option – playing with up to three friends, or with others online, will be the core campaign experience. It’s the first time co-op has featured in Call of Duty since World at War, and this time each player will be bringing in their own individual rank progression and class customisations as well as the game’s new features: tactical rigs (which provide physical boosts like longer jumps and sprinting times) and cybercores (which provide special skills).
The latter are pretty interesting. There are three different categories: Cybercore Chaos is all about destruction, with options such as Immolation, which uses enemy explosives like grenades and enables you to destroy robots; Cybercore Martial is more about the player – Active Camo, for example allows you to become invisible for a short amount of time; finally Cybercore Control is all about hacking, allowing you to, say, take control of an enemy robot or aircraft. The latter means you’ll be able to undertake aerial raids whenever you want, not just when the scripted mission demands it.
Furthmore, each player’s configurations will be based on the decisions they have made throughout their campaign experience: the more you play, the more cybercores, weapon attachments and other pieces of equipment you’re able to unlock and utilise. What we’ll hopefully see then are parties of players with very different experiences and abilities, having to use those disparate skills together – almost like an RPG guild.
To emphasis this sense of cooperation, more experienced players will be able to lend advanced weapons to their friends, allowing them to compete in missions that they aren’t yet equipped for. Once the level is over, the gun is returned. It’s an interesting attempt to encourage social play beyond simply turning up at the start of a mission with a bunch of strangers and no intention of working together.
The DNI (Direct Neural Interface) is a major new feature
Black Ops 3 is set in 2065 and there have been a major advances in robotic and bionic technology since the Black Ops 2 timeline – as we saw in the “Ember” trailer. Direct neural interfacing, part of a new Tactical Mode accessed via the d-pad, let’s you tap into the visual stream from any of your team mates. In other words, you can see what they see. The idea is, it’ll allow you to identify enemy types and dangerous locations on the map; it will also show, via an augmented reality HUD, where your grenade will land at the current throwing angle.
What we found from the demo is that it could well open a whole new level of tactics. If you want all your teammates to see the location of every enemy in the area, you can place one of your team on a high vantage point – they can then move safely through the area or at least figure out the best way to engage every situation. It’s also possible to find out which enemies can see you, based on the colour layered over the area you’re in. This could prove especially useful on higher difficulties as you’ll know key areas to avoid altogether.
Again, the idea is to get players thinking together, rather than simply making separate run-n-gun forays into each mission. The problem is, that’s kind of how a lot of people play Call of Duty – this isn’t Ghost Recon, after all. Treyarch seems to be aiming for a big culture change in CoD play – it’ll be interesting to see if the level design and co-operative tools are really sophisticated enough to bring this level of strategic planing into play.
The Safe House is a fun extra – with hidden features
Before players enter each mission, they access the Safe House, an area in which they can customise their character, set class loadouts, learn more about the upcoming objectives as well as show off achievements to friends.
Within the Safe House every player has their own “Bunkroom” which contains a wardrobe for character customisation, a little like GTA Online, and a Medal Case, which holds awards you’ve earned after completing tasks in the campaign. You also have a trunk to stores collectible, which you can use to personalise your Bunkroom. Any of your co-op friends can work into your room and view your customised layout. It’s another little RPG feature, which doesn’t add huge amounts to the actual gameplay experience, but just enhances that sense of playing alongside other people, and actually having an existence within the game’s universe.
Each safe house also contains a computer terminal, or PDV, like the computer found in Black Ops 1, giving access to background information (in fact, it houses 100 times more files that its predecessor). There’s background info on the events between Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 3, as well as hidden Easter egg’s and a few surprise game modes. There was an arcade-style zombie mini-game in Black Ops 1, so could potentially expect something very similar to that...
There’s a whole new difficulty setting
Forget Veteran, in Realistic mode, players will only have a single point of health, meaning the slightest damage will bring you down, whether that’s being caught on the edge of a grenade blast or taking a pistol round that’s been fired through a wall. Of course, the whole notion of ‘realism’ is rather stretched in a game set forty years in the future and featuring bio-augmented super soldiers battling intelligent robot tanks, but this is going to be a major challenge for fans. What next? Call of Duty permadeath?
You can skip to the end of the Campaign mode if you like
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