Archive for February, 2012
Spoiler Territory: Saint’s Row: The Third
Feb 17th
Site contributor Tyler Martin has come up with a great concept for a series of articles. By it’s nature (and as you can tell from its title), this will deal with spoilers for Saints Row: The Third. You’ve officially been warned.
Ask any writer: endings are hard. To create a conclusion that feels satisfying after hours of investment by the audience, an author needs to reward the diligent, paying attention to every clue without punishing the more mild and passive consumer who may have missed a step along the way. It’s a problem in nearly every story-telling medium and possibly even more so in games. If a game isn’t fun, players likely won’t bother to finish it, regardless of the narrative. Not only does a developer need to tie up all the loose story threads, they need to do it in a way that is challenging and fits with the gameplay style. Games should finish in a way that is satisfying from a narrative and a design perspective; if either is lacking, then the ending feels anti-climactic — or worse, it can make the player feel cheated. And the developer must do all this while often leaving room for a sequel or franchise expansion to satiate their publisher. Because of the high degree of difficulty and number of plates that must be balanced, games that get the ending right deserve to be praised. One such game is Volition, Inc.’s ‘Saints Row: The Third.’
On first glance, the ‘Saints Row’ games look like a ‘Grand Theft Auto’ imitation with excessively sophomoric humor. The game reaches a superb balance, however, and in the open-world action genre, hilarious bugs, absurd A.I. routines and responses are a regular occurrence. What Volition did was create a setting and a narrative that matches the absurdity of its gameplay and design.
A common flaw in open world titles is the game-breaking moment that ruins the player’s immersion, either through some bug or cognitive dissonance between the story and play style. The ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and ‘Elder Scrolls’ series are rife with moments like these. In Saints Row, these moments are all but impossible. The setting of Steelport could never be confused with an actual locale; it isn’t a place, it’s a digital playground. A criminal gang are national celebrities with soft drinks and bobble-head figures, a local game show is centered around killing sprees perpetrated by individuals in mascot costumes, and the mayor is Burt Reynolds. From the start, nothing is sacred and nothing will ever be taken seriously.
It was a risky proposition, as Volition created an experience where they constantly needed to keep upping the ante, crafting more insane missions that were equally impressive and entertaining. There are two possible endings, and Saints Row: The Third succeeds in creating fantastic game endings in both.
Being okay with sucking at Hero Academy
Feb 16th
Hero Academy is one of the "it" games for iOS right now. Doug happens to be really bad at it.
I suck at Hero Academy.
I’ve played a half-dozen games against site contributor Tyler and lost each of them. I’ve started playing another friend, too, and have summarily lost to him as well. As I write this I’m in the process of starting another game, surely to be lost. Hero Academy isn’t a simple game — it’s a turn-based strategy-ish game that uses asynchronous multiplayer and the shuffling of your deck to keep you on your toes. I’m consistently over-aggressive and trying to rein that in is proving difficult. Plus every game is against a human, making things even trickier. The turn-based nature of combat allows you to plot out what to do next — and to contemplate how it all went wrong.
Why do I keep coming back, though? Well, it’s fun. But what does that mean? Many people smarter than me have done studies and a conclusion to draw is that playing games we enjoy taps into pleasure centers in our brains. Do something right in a game, get a little squirt of happiness into your nervous system (or, suggested in the above article, get MORE than on average from other activities). This, writ large, is gaming.
So playing games feeds into a chemical dependency. But what I like and what you like are very different things – taste is, of course, relative – and how we define fun is what drives variety. I’m loving trying to solve the riddle of Hero Academy, especially as unwrapping Tyler’s strategy makes learning almost double the work compared with a single-player game. AI routines aren’t quite good enough yet to change strategies completely or also mess around with your head. I may not be successful right now, but I’m enjoying the process and hopefully will be successful sooner than later. My brain likes what it gets from this game; it clicks. It’s why I like the Kairosoft games on iPhone, it’s why I like Tiny Tower, and it’s why I put endless hours into soccer and racing games on consoles.
Perfect like the 2008 Detroit Lions.
Sometimes, however, my synapses don’t click with games, and that can be frustrating. Even more so, it’s frustrating when they’re games that so many people love. It’s really sad to admit as a hardcore gamer, but I haven’t played all the way through a Zelda game ever; I’ve only finished one JRPG, and only ever started one Final Fantasy game. Ditto with Starcraft, Pokemon, Half-Life, and Call of Duty. It’s not that these are bad games or not games I could like; they just don’t grab me. Other games lock me in a vice and suck the life out of me. There’s a reason why I put hundreds of hours into Konami’s Pro Evo Soccer games.
Does this make me a bad gamer? I’m conflicted. Is it enough to give something a chance? Does it mean I’m inherently broken if I don’t get sucked in by games that are universally praised as great?
It’s an interesting and difficult question to ponder. But in the meantime, I’ll continue playing Hero Academy and (most likely) losing.
Why Double Fine’s Kickstarter project matters
Feb 12th
The Post-Publisher Era
As with all industries, the internet has turned the video game economy on its head. Ask anybody with a broadband connection and an internet-ready entertainment device how they consume most of their entertainment and it’s pretty likely that they’re getting a good chunk of their media through direct-download systems. Whether it’s movies and television through Netflix or Hulu or game downloads via Xbox Live or PlayStation Network, content providers are quickly learning just how lucrative a direct point-of-sale connection to their consumer base can be.
An entire new subset of the games industry has come to thrive in this new marketplace — the mid-budget indie game. Tiny developers like Playdead and Number None were able to have a dramatic effect on the gaming space with their stunningly creative and highly polished games. And in looking at the mobile space, there’s a much more diverse and, in my opinion, profound transformation taking place in gaming with an inexpensive, low-friction ecosystem for consumers to dive into.
But there’s an even more profound transformation taking place in the PC-gaming space. Indie poster-child Mojang has seen an unprecedented success with Minecraft, which has sold nearly five million copies at a going rate of nearly $27 as of this writing. Considering this is the work of just a handful of people, the return on a game like Minecraft is dizzying to anyone who follows the machinations of the games industry — and nothing short of inspiring to an up-and-coming developer.
So What About Double Fine?
Double Fine’s no stranger to the downloadable space, having released a quartet of creative, fun titles over the various digital distros in the last year or so, but this latest venture with Kickstarter is something else entirely.
The project is simply known as Double Fine Adventure. The details are relatively sparse, but if you’re familiar with Double Fine’s history and the track record of veteran designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, the premise is damn exciting:
- A classic point-and-click adventure game developed by Tim Schafer and a small team within Double fine
- An ongoing documentary covering the game’s production produced by 2 Player Productions, famous for producing the first season of Penny Arcade: The Series and the upcoming Minecraft documentary
- An entirely fan-funded endeavor that bypasses the traditional developer-publisher system; instead, the fans cover the costs and Double Fine releases directly through Steam
Personally, I can’t wait to play this game and to follow along with the documentary-style updates. But what’s got me most excited is how a relatively well-established game developer has decided to eschew the traditional publisher relationship and all the benefits that come along with it in favor of charting its own course. The barrier to releasing a game on Steam is relatively small, so much so that it’s probably a safe wager that people would be willing to fork over $15 directly to a developer in exchange for a cool new game that targets a “dead” genre with a small but highly devoted band of supporters.
Double Fine’s initial goal: $400,000, with $300,000 going to the game’s development and $100,000 funding the documentary. And now, less than a week since the Kickstarter went live, they’ve more than quadrupled that fundraising target with a month left to go.
I have a feeling Double Fine knew they’d hit the $400,000 mark with some time to spare. But I don’t think anyone saw this happening. As an idealist and as somebody who tends to sympathize with the sort of people who give a shit about supporting high-quality work, it’s been wonderful watching the dollar total rise daily. I couldn’t have been happier to fork over $30 to guarantee a copy of the game and its soundtrack as well as a high-definition download of the documentary series. As a kid who grew up playing Schafer’s classic point-and-click adventures until I’d nearly memorized their entire scripts, there’s something so comforting to know there are throngs of people out there who remember just how great an experience that style of play can be.
So Now What?
I don’t know. I guess we’ll see what happens. Double Fine certainly isn’t the first company to raise money for a game on Kickstarter, but it’s by far the most visible — and it’s had what has to be the greatest financial success in doing so.
There’s been a lot of talk about what this means for the future of games, such as:
* Are publishers necessary any more? (Yeah, probably)
* Will we see more well-known game devs reaching out to fans directly to finance games? (Absolutely)
* Is this a good thing for game developers? (I think so)
The social internet is a wildly transformative beast, and Double Fine’s Kickstarter experiment is solid proof of that. This sort of thing never could have happened even four years ago. But today it’s 2012, and more than ever, people have the power to share the things they care about with the people they know. Word-of-mouth has always been a force to be reckoned with, but as this Kickstarter shows, it’s now moving with unprecedented virality. There’s a nimbleness to the way that word about this game spread that no publisher could ever hope to replicate, even with a multimillion-dollar advertising budget and countless purchased cover stories in the gaming press.
It’s only going to get more interesting from here.