GameDevBlog

A More Refined Drug Metaphor

I'm playing Eve Online right now.  In the background.  The autopilot is flying my ship for me while I wait.  Which is nice because it gives me time to update my blog, check my e-mail, play with my daughter, eat...  Talk about sandwich gameplay.

I love the idea of MMO's...but I've yet to find one I like.  I have a theory why this is.

They call it "Evercrack" - but it's not.  If anything, console games are the crack.  You buy the DVD (or "vial"), you put it in the console (or "crack pipe"), and you get an intense, but short, game experience (or "high").  Ten to twenty hours of gaming later you come down, and need to buy another vial.  Much like the crack market, the executives keep all the money from the console games and the foot soldiers live with their mothers.

Compared to console games, playing an MMO is like thoughtfully chewing on the leaf of the cocaine tree.  You still get a high, but it's subtle.  And you can do it while you do other things.

(BTW, before anybody griefs me, it's a metaphor, people!  I don't think games are as addictive as drugs.  Well, maybe as addictive as caffeine.  But that's it.  I've said this before.)

Anyhow, I won't give up on Eve yet.  Are there any other Eve players out there?  My character in game is "Pod Jamie" if you want to group or whatever it is that Eve players call it.

Are Videogame Stocks the New Bowling Stocks?

Just learned from *The Wisdom of Crowds* that there was a "Bowling Company Stock Bubble" in the fifties.  After the invention of the automatic pin-setting machine, bowling company stocks were the darlings of Wall Street.  Predictions about how the market would continue to expand at an amazing rate, yada. 

Right now, we may be in a videogame stock bubble:  Take Two, EA, and Activision stock have been pretty much tracking each other for years now, continually beating the market by a wide margin.  Wall Street continues to predict that the industry will expand.

But what if videogames are like bowling?  A fad buoyed along by some new technology that will lose its interest in a year or several?

I don't really believe it--bowling was just one game, but videogames are...lots of games--but I do admit that maybe it's a possibility.

John Hall died

I just found out that John Hall, one of the guys who worked on Spider-Man with me, died yesterday - his cancer killed him - it came as a shock to me, because everytime I talked to him he seemed to have such faith that he was either out of the woods or he'd get out of the woods soon. 

I've been rereading his blog about cancer - http://overcode.yak.net/3.

For some reason, one of the things that really gets to me is he mentions reading the Harry Potter series and I'm bummed that he'll never get to find out how it ends.  I'm sure that was the last fucking thing on his mind, of all the zillions of things he'll never get to do that was probably pretty low on the list, but there it is.

One thing about John was he kept working, on and off, on Ultimate Spider-Man, during the course of his illness.  How awesome is that?  I'd probably curl up and mope in my home all day.  I hope everybody loves that game just for John's sake:  he could have spent the last years of his life doing other stuff, but he kept working on Ultimate Spider-Man.

I Haven't Posted In Forever

My last post made Blogged Out a while ago and I haven't posted anything since. 

Um, what to talk about?

How about the upcoming deluge of old movie-license games? 

You know, Godfather, Taxi Driver, Scarface, Reservoir Dogs, The Warriors, From Russia With Love...

I imagine the idea here is that a publisher sees that movie titles do well and asks themselves, "Why does it have to be a current movie?  Why not *any* movie?"  And I'm not sure, but it seems like EA may have led the charge with Godfather.  Hey, they're rich, and they can afford to make mistakes.  All these people imitating EA may be in for a surprise, though.  The thing that makes doing a game based on a current movie so lucrative is that Hollywood is spending millions upon millions of dollars to wash people's brains with the IP.  The movie is one of the top things in public consciousness the week it comes out.  These old movies - no.

That said, they'll still probably do better than some brand new out-of-nowhere IP, which almost always tanks.

Individually, what do I think of these games-out-of-movies?  I think Godfather and Taxi Driver are ridiculous.  (Sorry Chris S., if you're reading this.)  Maybe in a decade or two we'll have the technology to do a full-on character-driven drama justice, but not today.  I met the guy who put the Reservoir Dogs thing together and he was very excited about it because it tested well - and sure, I can see that, Reservoir Dogs is right up your 18-25 demographic, whereas a big chunk of the guys who liked Godfather and Taxi Driver aren't even gamers.  But where's the game in Reservoir Dogs?  That I don't see.  From Russia With Love, there you can do the standard movie-to-action-game translation, and ditto with The Warriors, which was practically a videogame already.

And...that's really all I had to say about that.  Here's my prediction:  none of these games will sell over a million units.  (Oh, and I mean according to TRST, which is always a smaller-than-actual number, but it's the numbers I'm used to.)

The "You Win" Button

What do Devil May Cry 3 and Batman Begins have in common?

They have in common the fact that my feelings for the games are completely divorced from what the rest of the world seems to think about the games.

It seems the world generally really likes DMC3.  84% on Metacritic, with an insanely high 8.8 in the user votes section (I suspect manipulation of some kind - 8.8 is really quite out of control) and a respectable 7.8 on Gamefly's user votes.  Although I liked the first Devil May Cry -- maybe I had more patience back then -- I have no interest in slugging my way through the same endless stream of minions to finally get another shot at the boss fight only to lose it again.  Rumor is that in Japan there's a super-easy mode that they cut for the States version.  I wonder what's going on in their heads when they make such a decision.  And it's a good combat system, very snappy, but essentially a "stuff" game - give the players a big pile of "stuff" to try out as they search for dominant strategies.  No depth here;  just breadth.  (Most game reviewers don't seem to know the difference - add another attack move and they say it makes the system deeper.)

Flip side of the coin, a game considered by the world to be too easy, Batman Begins.  66% on Gamerankings, 6.6 / 7.0 in the user rankings, 6.8 / 7.0 on the Gamefly user rankings.  I just played the game this weekend, and enjoyed it immensely.  I couldn't help thinking, "If I was designing a Batman game, this is how I'd do it.  Splinter Cell inside, Burnout 3 outside."  (Except I'd make it a seamless, continuous world, of course, so you could go back and forth from Batmobiling to action/adventuring at will...)  So I look at the reviews and wonder why it is considered so resoundingly mediocre.  It's easily the best Batman game ever made.

The sites I looked at all seemed to complain about the same thing.  Which leads me to suspect some kind of groupthink collusion among game reviewers rather than this necessarily being the game's main problem, but supposing it is:

I guess Batman Begins is what happens when you take gameplay testing to its final extreme.  They rarely let the player ask, "What am I supposed to do now?"  Intrusive widgets appear on your heads-up display and tell you which buttons to press at what time.  It's one of those games that plays you rather than letting you play it.  And in so doing, they've somehow crossed over the line from Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, the linear game that everyone loves to Batman Begins, the linear game that everyone (except me, because I loved it) feels ambivalent about.  It's a very fine line!  PoP did just about everything *but* tell you what buttons to press (with the premonition points and the cutscenes examining the key features of the terrain you were supposed to travel on next).

I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, it's great that reviewer's tastes are becoming so refined they can tell the difference between a thrill ride game where you're pressing the "You Win" button over and over again and everything else.  On the other hand...I had such a good time playing Batman Begins that I'm wondering if this hardcore aesthetic really represents.  Can't I enjoy my mindless pleasure?  The experience of feeling like Batman?

Maybe we're witnessing the death of the linear action-adventure.  Much like with the PC adventure games of the last decade, where the market stopped growing and could no longer justify the larger budgets that games seemed to require, maybe the action-adventure market is capping out at around a million people - and with budgets continuing to rise, sales of just a million are no longer going to satisfy publishers.  One day soon we'll be down to open-environment sandbox games and FPS's and nothing else.