Darkspore!

I’ve played Diablo II and never got into it… Eventually sold my copy for ten bucks to a guy who’d been banned on his previous CD key. I played Titan’s Quest for maybe an hour, and I don’t even know where that went. Never tried Torchlight or Deathspank or any of the other Diablo-esque games that have come out (actually I tried Hellgate: London a little bit), because they just never hooked me on the “collect rare lootz” premise.

        Spore was… ok. I played it long enough to get to the space part, and promptly wanted to leave. Controlling the creatures themselves was really the best stage. So as a game it didn’t really get me. The animation and random creature generation, even the creature editor itself, that stuff was all great. But it wasn’t a whole lot of fun, when you include all the various stages.

        Darkspore, first of all, is an inevitability considering they probably didn’t make any money off of Spore. They’ve got amazing procedural generation (clearly a hot topic recently) for both the creation of random creatures and animating them, so why not make use of it? I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the game’s assets were made by a guy pressing the “generate horrific monstrosities” button and then picking the five coolest ones out of the thousand possibilities that came up. From a business point of view, they’ve hit the jackpot, because the Spore creature editor will probably always be cool.

        As a game, though, it’s actually pretty sweet. You’re a Crogenitor (pffffft), and what that really means is you’re one of the demi-gods blessed with the ability to genetically modify powerful mutants. The game doesn’t say this, but you know that it’s true. In your role as “the last surviving god-thing from Spore,” you control a squad of Genetic Heroes (read: deadly mutant creatures) and you upgrade them using the various shiny pieces of equipment you find while running around murdering things.

        The heroes have subtypes (Necro, Plasma, Bio, Quantum, stuff like that) which decide their powers (summon ghosts, stun guys, create minions, slow down time) and then classes (Ravager, Sentinel, etc.) which determine your main stats and attack type (strength and melee attacks, dexterity and melee attacks, mind and long range, etc.). Then they have some detailed backstory stuff I didn’t read, which may or may not have been randomly generated too. The equipment you find is equipped to them in the same way body parts were in Spore, and I think you can find new body parts as well eventually. And of course the equipment has all sorts of stat boosts and cool adjectives like “Laseth’s Thunder Claws of Sharpness” and there’s a few levels of rarity. You can gamble your equipment by beating progressively harder levels one after another - double or nothing, essentially. Beating multiple levels in a row also increases the odds of getting rare (rarer?) items.

        Collecting some ugly little staff that claims to be a mystical bone wand, but really looks like every other staff, isn’t very engaging. Collecting energy claws, mystical hoods, cybernetic implants, crystal growths, etc. etc. and “equipping” them through the creature editor, however, is a whole lot more awesome. Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s that they took the good parts of Spore and the good parts of Diablo, but I actually liked playing Darkspore. That’s pretty good, since I didn’t like either of those games. I don’t know if I’ll buy it, but the beta’s free until friday, so go check it out. We can team up and stuff and maybe that would be cool?

        (some dumb people in the game’s chat were like ‘wait is this game free to play’ and 'screw it if they want a monthly subscription’ because they don’t realize it’s a normal retail game lol)

        The game has a campaign mode, with extra unlockable difficulty levels (and, I assume, better lootz) with co-op that increases the shiny stuff you and your team members get. It also has PvP (unlockable through a purchase at like level 9 or something) and I don’t know how that works. I have no idea if the full game is going to have more in it? I assume the campaign is going to the only single-player mode, which is ok I guess but it’s not like it has much of a story or anything. You’ll be hard-pressed to remember what the cutscenes tell you after five minutes of murder.

        Anyway! As I said, free until friday, we can team up and stuff if our schedules work out. In fact, I’m free tonight… but it’ll take like two hours to download. I’m ok with this multiplayer because it’s co-op and everyone wins.

QUICK HITS

I’ve got a bunch of things I want to say, but not a whole lot to say about them. Not enough to make individual posts, but too much to say in a facebook status update. So I’m shamelessly stealing the term ‘quick hits’ from The Electric Hydra podcast (or internet radio show) and presenting a bunch of stuff to you, with shiny bullet points for your reading pleasure.

• I want to make a game about peace keeping space marines. Non-lethal weapons only. You have to save people from violence and help them and build intergalactic wells or something. Why not?
• Procedural content is probably the way of the future, and there’s a great quote in there about games like modern Call of Duty being “the pinnacle of effort-based development.” What that says to me is this: there is also a limit to what we can produce through sheer effort, simply because anything beyond that is too expensive, or takes too much effort, or just isn’t viable for whatever particular reason. No one is going to make a game with a $100 MILLION dollar budget, unless they’re absolutely guaranteed to make money on it, which means selling an absolutely astounding amount of copies. Procedural content generation means a whole lot of different things, but primarily, it means making a game like Assassin’s Creed II for the cost of whatever tools you use to generate the cities and assassination targets.
• Slightly related to the above point, and mentioned in the second article (on the word content - yes there’s a slight space in the hyperlinks, you should notice this stuff, but I shouldn’t do it in the first place) is user generated content, sometimes called “procedural gameplay.” Stuff like Far Cry 2 perma-death runs, or the stories people make out of MineCraft, in which awesome play experiences are had by the players simply by making use of the systems a game makes available. This is also cheap, but slightly different from generation of procedural content.
• Ubisoft is hiring someone to help write an encyclopedia for Assassin’s Creed, and I REALLY SERIOUSLY WANT TO APPLY but I’m nervous, afraid of using resources like the Assassin’s Creed wikia and wikipedia itself, etc. etc. Being an adult is haaaaaaaaaaaaaaard.
• There exists a NES rip-off of Final Fantasy VII.
• A NES version, with the complete story and most of the features (Vincent and Yuffie missing, for example) of the PS1 game Final Fantasy VII.
• FF VII for the NES was originally available only in Chinese. So a bunch of Chinese programmers converted FF VII into Assembly and 8-bit sprites.
• A translation for this game exists. I’m too lazy to dig through the internet and find a ROM of it, but you can play it through this forum and if you REALLY WANT you can post a bunch on the forum and download it.
• The game probably sucks and playing it on that forum’s arcade thing is probably terrible, but you can play FF VII as a NES game.
• Bad games exist, and they probably shouldn’t, but some people just want to make money, not good games
• Why should your game exist?
• A Carleton graduate posted an article on AltDevBlogADay. I kinda want to say something, but I really can’t think of any good reason for doing that except that he went to the same university I’m attending. Along with like 20,000 other people. I’m definitely mentioning it to Jim Davies at the last meeting with his lab on monday though.
• I actually really like reading reasonably short post-mortems, and here’s an interesting one.

The moral of the story is you should probably read AltDevBlogADay. I love the idea of “GDC all year round” because there are a ton of awesome people with great stuff to say who wouldn’t get a spot to speak at a conference because they aren’t famous. And they sure as hell wouldn’t be given an hour to talk about best comment coding practices or the glory of “scripting languages” that don’t need to be compiled for ten minutes in order to test minute changes.

How the AAA Sequel Industry Left Me Behind

Note: This isn’t anywhere near as good as I imagined it would be. Send me your ideas for making it better! You may think it’s ok, but I can guarantee it wouldn’t make the front page on Destructoid, and THAT is what I had in mind. Probably asking too much there.

There’s a pretty unfortunate trend in big-budget games these days: creative new IPs don’t sell, and sequels do. So every game that comes out is a “franchise opportunity” if it sells well, and it’s abandoned if it doesn’t. Rather than publish something like Brutal Legend, publishers like Activision will put their money where they see potential profit: Call of Duty and Prototype. They’re allowed to do that, of course, because video games are a business and businesses want to make money. But they’re leaving gamers like me behind.

        When Dead Space 2, Mass Effect 2 (and soon Mass Effect 3), Uncharted 2 (and soon Uncharted 3) come out, you can’t spend two minutes on the internet without hearing about how great they are. I’d love to play them, but there’s one problem: I haven’t played the previous games. I just don’t want to play sequels without playing the previous games and understanding the context and the characters. That’s even more true for games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age where you literally transfer your character from the previous games to the new one.

        I barely have time to play one game, and I certainly don’t have the time to play one game and its prequel (or two). So instead I buy games like Stacking, Costume Quest, Inside a Star Filled Sky, Super Meat Boy - games I can play in short sessions and know I’m still making progress. Or I play freeware games like Desktop Dungeons or Cave Story. Five minutes here, five minutes there, half an hour during a boring computer science class… That’s how I game these days.

        So when I look at the list of releases for 2011, discounting any sequels to games I haven’t played, here’s what I see that I might like to play: Okamiden, Portal 2, The Witcher 2, inFamous 2, Resistance 3… Then there’s five times as many sequels I’ll never play. I’m sure they’re great games, but they’re great games for someone else. Maybe Dragon Age II will be unanimously declared the Game of the Year, but I’d have to play Dragon Age: Origins first in order to enjoy it.

        Of course, I’m part of the problem too. There are still new games coming out in 2011, but none of them really catch my eye… because they’re new IPs and I don’t know if I’ll like them. If I have to buy only one game, like most gamers these days, I end up going for the sequel I know I’ll like over Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, or Singularity, or any of the other good new IPs that came out last year. That’s how I got into this situation in the first place. Dead Space, BioShock, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Uncharted, God of War, all those AAA games that are still getting sequels years later - I looked at them, wasn’t sure I’d like them, and played my part in the vicious cycle.

        I’m not here to make dire predictions about the future of the industry. I can’t honestly say “we need more new IPs to keep the industry alive,” because people like me will keep those games from selling. I can’t honestly say “sequels are killing the industry,” because if it weren’t for those games, there wouldn’t be any money to fund new IPs. But I’m buying fewer and fewer games, and the games I do buy aren’t the AAA titles. What’s to stop Call of Duty or Uncharted from being the next Guitar Hero? How many sequels can they make before people stop buying them?

Why pirates should have access to DLC

A little while ago, Crysis 2 was leaked in its entirety onto the internet a while in advance of its release. Then Killzone 3 was leaked - a PS3 game. Not that PS3 games haven’t been on the internet for years, but now that people can (theoretically) actually PLAY them, it’s serious business.

        So all kinds of noise and hoopla was made over piracy and arguments were had. You know the drill. Over on Destructoid, Jim Sterling made the point that game developers only have one source of revenue - retail sales of their games. Other industries, like movies and music, can make money through multiple avenues - theaters and DVD for movies, live shows and merchandise for bands, etc. But that’s not really true, now that we have easy ways to sell additional content to players. I forget whether Jim actually mentioned that, though he probably did, but I’m in “work mode” at the moment so I’m not going to risk getting distracted while I look it up.

        Everyone feels kind of cheated when “downloadable content” comes out for a new game that’s really just a code to unlock content that’s already on the disc. Generally that just happens with console games, since PC gamers would probably just dig the content up on their own, but anyway. Fact is that DLC for an existing game is incredibly cheap to make and market, compared to making a brand new game, and it has way higher profit margins. Even if you only sell $5 map packs to 1% of your player base, it takes a fraction of the time to create those maps. As long as it’s actually adding content to the game, DLC is great for giving players more of what they want, assuming they like the game enough to spend more money on it. DLC can also be sold to people who bought used.

        No matter how you look at it, DLC is really, really profitable. Most studios need to turn a profit in order to keep making games. Conclusion: Most studios now churn out DLC for their games.

        The PC game market is different in a number of ways from console games - there’s no retail used game market, but by contrast, they have piracy to deal with. Usually pirates will get their hands on DLC and make patched versions of games that can play the DLC, but if you pirated the game and want to buy DLC, you can’t. Why not? Yes, they don’t “own” the game as far as Steam and whatever other online authentication system is concerned, but getting $5 from a customer is better than getting no dollars.

        Somehow I don’t think this is going to fly with anyone staunchly against piracy, because they want you to buy the game in the first place. It really depends on the distribution and authentication systems, though, because clearly you can’t register DLC with your Steam account without having the game registered.

        Alternatively, game developers should have tip boxes (like developers on Kongregate have) so people can send them five bucks any time they steal DLC. That works too.