Botanicula
Looking at Amanita Design’s earlier works, Botanicula is much more similar to Samorost than Machinarium. As such, it is a bit hard to know what to think of it. Gameplay-wise it is an exercise in pixelhunting to find illogical solutions to odd problems, but since the problems are so odd and the solutions so unexpected the game has an immense amount of charm.
And Amanita Design certainly knows how to make a charming game, Botanicula is their best work to date in this regard. Even if the gameplay had been awful, playing through the game would still be worth it to see the wordless story unfold. And it is hardly awful, just not interesting enough to be a challenge in its own.
Machinarium had a logically consistent world and while it still had some typical adventure-game-frustration moments, progression usually felt like solving puzzles rather than randomly clicking. It is nice to see that Amanita keeps evolving their storytelling but in terms of gameplay they have shown that they can do better.
Fez
Back when Fez was in early development, some people on the Tigsource forums mentioned that the idea was kind of similar to the PSP game Crush - Terry then mentioned that the ideas are fundamentally dissimilar. While there is a lot of overlap between the puzzles elements used in the two games, the limitations added by Fez feel like they made the concept tighter and more fun to play. More importantly, it helps that Fez manages to be a lot better at everything from macro design to aesthetics. For a good example of the difference good atmosphere makes, compare Fez and Crush.
On a grand scale, Fez feels like an exploration game where the actual exploration is almost only limited to what the player knows as opposed to any skills gained by playing the game. While this sort of reduces the replay value, it works remarkably well for a first playthrough and the game has a very fitting aesthetic and soundtrack that help drive home the feeling of exploring a world. In a way, it is not unlike Knytt.
Fez flirts a lot with older games - some of the art styles and elements are directly inspired by existing titles, game objects work similarly to how they do in other games and entire levels use mechanics that you rarely see modern games utilize. It is mostly a joy to behold the subtler things, but occasionally it becomes a bit much - occasionally you will come up to sections demanding reflexes and precision jumping, rather than changing the pace the game shifts completely from a puzzle game to an action platformer for no reason.
In addition to that, Fez is a really broad game - everything and anything can be a puzzle or a clue, oftentimes you need to take notes or solve puzzles outside of the game space in order to make sense of the information presented to you. While it helps a lot in making the world seem more alive, at times it felt like the proposed solutions mosty felt cumbersome and gimmicky.
Ultimately the tricky things are things I chose to do after the game had officially “ended”, though, and there is a good reason for that - Fez is a great game that you want to explore to its fullest. It is a bold game that manages to tie together a long legacy with out-of-the-box puzzles and still have its own identity - more than usual I feel that the things I do not agree with are because of my individual taste rather than the game having deficiencies.
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
When we were developing Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, the scope of the game was not clear until months before release. It started as the Special Edition of Escape from Butcher Bay with high-resolution art and a multiplayer mode, then we added another chapter with a few hours of single-player gameplay which got expanded to a really long new chapter and after a few more times of expanding the scope we had enough content to call it a sequel. Now, constantly adding more things is economically smarter than the common practice of being overambitious and having to cut content - we could have stopped working at any time and still had something we could release. The problem is that since we were adding things without having a good sense of the size of the game, cohesion suffered and since we could not explore it to the depth we should have it sometimes felt like shallow tasks that were repeated.
While Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is intended to be short; an episode of the Outer Limits when the original game was a season of Twin Peaks, I get the same shallow feeling from it. Alan Wake was a mystery that only revealed small parts over the course of the game, not knowing how it would end for the most of it made it interesting. American Nightmare, on the other hand, reveals itself as a freakish scenario from the beginning (not unlike the DLC for the first Alan Wake) and after playing less than half of the game the rest of it feels pretty obvious.
It also feels distinctively cheaper. The large vistas, vehicle sections and spooky environments of Alan Wake are gone, and the presentation details that were not quite there before, the animations and voice acting, are even worse now. Overall, the game feels constrained and doesn’t do a very good job of hiding it.
It is a lot better than the DLC though. Gameplay is more solid than the first game, and the story does have some interesting details that could have been expanded upon to make a better game. Remedy are doing something that is fairly unique so it might be the case that they just haven’t find the right way of doing it yet. It wouldn’t be the first time an episodic game series increases dramatically in quality after the first few episodes, so I am keeping my hopes up.
Mass Effect 3
The first time Mass Effect 3 annoyed me was when I learned about the galactic readiness - having to play multiplayer in order to see the best ending. As it turns out, you didn’t really have to do that. Also, the multiplayer was surprisingly good - not really varied enough to be fun all the way to advance two characters to level 20, but a solid shooter experience making good use of the customization and class gameplay. I had a lot higher expectations on the rest of the game which probably is why I chose to highlight the multiplayer as the good part.
First of all, the game feels rushed and is very buggy. I lost count on how many times it crashed, there were blatant animation issues in every other cutscene and entire multiplayer matches could be ruined by a single lag spike. Mass Effect 2 was nowhere near this bad so I wonder where it went wrong - beside the multiplayer there are very few notable new features.
In addition, the gameplay has taken a step down. Mass Effect 2 was far from the perfect shooter, but it had the basics right so I was kind of hoping that they would just keep the compelling core of class-based third-person cover shooting and fix the shooting bits… To be fair, the extended class system adds a lot of interesting variety while keeping the skill tree simple, but the cover shooting has taken a turn for the worse. Levels are littered with covers that will not actually protect you from incoming fire, or covers that will not allow you to fire back at the enemy. Some high-end enemies have attacks that instantly kill you, adding nothing but frustration to the fighting. Thankfully, the multiplayer levels are properly designed and enemies make more sense there.
The important part, of course, is the narrative. To me it wasn’t really about the ending, it was about the entire course of the game - the game is first and foremost about the conclusion of the galactic war. This is the core of what makes the approach taken in Mass Effect 3 bland to me - the game was never about the grand scenes and inevitable conclusion, but about the characters and your own choices. Mass Effect 3 offers a comparatively linear experience and attempts to replace the characterization found in Mass Effect 2 with visually impressive battles and pre-set moments of dramatic tension - the problem is it doesn’t really work.
Some of the events in the game felt really out of place in regards to how I had played, others (like enemies who were supposed to be frightening) just meshed really poorly with how the gameplay presented them. The thing that made the first Mass Effect games great were the choices, how the greatest narrative moments in the game were made much greater because the player could change the outcome. In Mass Effect 3, the Paragon/Renegade system is all but gone and the longer you make it the less the game cares about your choices. It’s not bad by normal videogame narrative standards - I thought Dragon Age: Origins had the same problem where the endgame ignored everything that had previously happened - but Bioware have shown that they can use different story structures that fit the medium better so it seems like they could have done more.
In the end, Mass Effect 3 is a good game that is in the unfortunate position of being the sequel to a great game.
The yearly IGF controversy
There’s always something, it seems - I suppose that it being big enough to have detractors is a sign of success. This year the integrity of the judging process is called into question by developers the Rotting Cartridge.
Competitions like the IGF can be great fun for all involved, but the stress and hardships can easily get to you no matter what your part is. If you are arranging, it becomes a matter of putting together a big event while placing your trust in a large number of developers to produce entries, and a large number of professionals to judge them fairly - neither of which you can be sure of. Judging can be an arduous and thankless task where disappointed entrants will press you for information on why they did not win. Being an entrant has the chance of giving some payout but it can feel more like a lottery where you have no idea if your game was judged fairly or disliked because of the personal taste of the judge who happened to be assigned.
I have been on all sides of this so going into it I figured I would not want to take sides, but I can’t remain completely neutral. Sure, the judges could have taken their duties more seriously and at least made sure to pass them on if they couldn’t live up to their promise. And yes, the people behind it all should have had accounted for an increase in entries and maybe been a little more professional about responding to the criticism. In the end though, I have to agree that fundamentally the IGF is a competition and if even the developers themselves did not expect to be nominated for anything then maybe they should not be too disappointed when they were not. If they’re just after publicity or focus testers, there are better ways to spend $100. Complaining about the possibility of games being ignored feels like a poor argument, to their credit the Rotting Cartridge mostly advocates more transparency in the judging process which I certainly can see no fault in.
As the chart above shows, the IGF has been growing more and more every year since 2005 (and before that for as long as there are records) so I do not think things like this will affect the success of it. Even bigger events like the Oscars have it worse since it is fully up to the movie makers to make sure that members of the academy get to see their movies and a lot reportedly vote without having seen all of the movies in their category. Considering that publishers and platform holders seem to be in love with “award-winning” developers and metacritic scores, I do sometimes wish IGF and others would consider the impact they are making more thoroughly. Bringing in politics into it would remove focus from the games though, and that would undermine the integrity of the competition more than anything.
In other GDC related news, developer Scott Anderson started a blog about the failure of the Shadow Physics project, even though he claims not to have learned a lot from it I am looking forward to an interesting read. I also enjoyed reading about the Great Middleware debate, it brings up a few points on both sides that may seem obvious but are surprisingly unknown. I’ll hopefully get back to that at some point.
Radiant Historia
Radiant Historia fundamentally has a very evolutionary approach to game design - it does not turn any JRPG concept on its head but gives you fresh additions to several of them. It does this with finesse, being a game crafted with a tried-and-true base it sports more than enough variations to the formula to keep it interesting.
Like so many other good game stories, Radiant Historia starts with an intrigue and a mystery that is unraveled over the course of the game. Like good stories in general, it has levels - the world slowly being turned to desert is, for the most part, used as a backdrop for a political thriller which is in turn used as a backdrop for more personal stories. To its credit, it keeps the solemn tone throughout the game and never resorts to cutesy comic relief characters.
Tied into the story is the concept of time travel - I have noticed that how many contradictions we tolerate within this theme is a highly personal affair, but at least for me Radiant Historia gets it right. Proper explanations are provided and more importantly it meshes very well with gameplay. Without disturbing the plot too much the game manages to solve the problem of avoiding missable quests without forcing the world to be mostly static, no small feat. The gameplay supports it, allowing you to fast-forward past things you are not interested in seeing again and not falling into the trap of destroying your progress for narrative consistency.
The fighting is a real treat too, some RPGs make a big deal out of positioning your characters when fighting but I think this is the first one I have seen where it is all about positioning the enemy. Clearing battles is always a small puzzle about trying to shuffle individual enemies around the battlefield to inflict as much damage as possible and it stays interesting until the end.
The systems are not without flaws, the points where you can choose to replay a part of the story are occasionally very sparse and even with fast-forwarding you can find yourself spending a good 20 minutes on replaying the story when clearing a small fetch quest. I do not care for the graphics - sprites on low-poly backgrounds with low-res textures just does not look better than detailed pixelart and I can’t understand why people insist on doing it. The story gets a bit trite toward the end when the machinations of the world and motivations of the antagonist are finally revealed. Really, though - these things are issues in most every JRPG and Radiant Historia handles them better than the average.
For a few years of my life, at least every other game I played was a JRPG so there is a ring of familiarity associated with the genre tropes. As such, when I like a game as much as I do Radiant Historia I wonder how much of it is just from comfort and nostalgia. On the other hand most gamers have made up their mind about JRPGs already so saying that Radiant Historia is a very good one should be enough to sell the game to people who would enjoy it.
On the Blackout
… I have little to add to this, really. There are people more articulate, more affected and more informed on the subject than me that have written about it, but since I made a statement about it already I will ramble on a little more. Again, like any other posts in this blog these are my personal opinions and should not be attributed to any previous or former employers of mine.
I happened to catch a newscast this morning where the reporter mentioned the protests in a pejorative manner. They did add a disclaimer at the end saying that the broadcasting company had already thrown in their support with the bills - all fair, Wikipedia raised the same issue with objective reporting in their blackout. The interesting part was that at the end they said that the proponents of SOPA and PIPA was not heard as much since they “did not have as easy a time reaching their audience”. Coming from a TV-broadcasted news show I found this very amusing.
There is a big disconnect between media were people are just the recipients of the product and where they are an active part in the process, which may be why swapping civil liberties for a chance to maybe, possibly help curb piracy seems like a good idea to some but atrocious to others. If the end user is good for nothing but pay for the final product, I can sort of see why you would expect them to trust you and not the other way around. Trust that the power given to the media organisations (let’s stop pretending that this is about all IP holders) will not be misused, but without trusting the majority of the audience to have good intentions. I can see the kind of reasoning behind it, but if you consider that we are talking about actual people and you are trying to sell something to them, it becomes ridiculous.
There are many reasons to dislike these bills originating from it-security, economic, entrepeneurial or simply moral standpoints. I have multiple personal reasons to dislike them but this establishment where the end user is supposed to have faith in the content providers without receiving anything in return is probably my biggest reason for it. I wrote about the chilling effect nonspecific IP legislation already has a while back, should they pass I expect SOPA and PIPA to make it much worse.
Backworlds
So, the game Juha and I made for Assemblee a couple of years back felt like a good idea - we both wanted to continue working on it to really explore the depth we could bring it to. We have been working on it since, but until recently the work was mostly exploratory. We did not have any clear goals in mind, at most a vague direction.
We have now reached a point where we have a good idea of what we want to do and how we want to achieve it - to that end, we launched the backworlds.com website and the indiegogo campaign to fund development. I am guessing if it all goes well I will have more opportunity to discuss what has happened during the last two years and - more importantly - what the game is about and how it comes to be.
I can reveal one thing though - we changed the name to Backworlds. The ’s’ is new.
Expatriate
I made some big decisions in 2010, but it was not until this year that I had to come to terms with what they meant. It has certainly been an experience so far and I am still adapting, I have hardly played any big releases for the last 8 months and I do not know if that is a cause or an effect. Originally, this made me reluctant to write this, but since year-end “best-of” lists tend to have more games released in Q4 it might be for the best that I got most of my playing done in Q1.
In direct opposition to how the development world is moving, I have actually played *less* smaller games this year. It is something that shall be remedied for 2012, but for now these are my 2011 favorites;
Bulletstorm, a lot of people whose opinions I respect have dismissed it as juvenile crap based solely on narrative and presentation. While I agree these are important parts in a videogame, I think they serve a purpose in providing a unified whole that allows for radio-controlled dinosaurs, giant monsters and killing by cactus. There is a skillfully designed shooter there, and I am not sure a more serious presentation would have allowed it to deliver such joy.
Dragon Age 2, I actually liked it better than the first game in all aspects. Sure, it lacked the gravitas of a plot essentially about saving the world but it was different. The story does not revolve around a person, group or quest but rather focuses on how different factions forced to live in the same town tries to coexist. It is more about Kirkwall itself than anything else, and I found this immensely refreshing.
Deus Ex - Human Evolution, no-one I know have argued that it is a bad game. It certainly could be - it is graphically inferior many other games, the design is uneven both in terms of core functionality and levels and even the lauded story has some contrived parts. But it also has a intricate and well-built setting as well as the backdrop for a deep and meaningful story.
… An honorable mention goes to Radiant Historia, but I am not done with it yet and some JRPGs really turn sour towards the end so I’m playing it safe.
the Legend of Zelda - Skyward Sword
Near the start of Skyward Sword, Link is told rather bluntly that him being born under a lucky star will likely be enough for him to beat his more hard-working classmates, and rightly so. The skewed morality gave me pause - did someone actually think this was a good theme, or did they simply do the best they could with a mythos that was set in stone? I got the same feeling for a lot of things with the game - be it the design, interface, art… The craftsmanship was great, but the origin of the ideas were dated and coarse.
At this point I should probably mention that I had to run through it in three days instead of taking the time to explore, which is certainly not how you get enjoyment out of any Zelda game. I did like it (and I wish I could spend another three days or so just exploring the game) but I had hoped for more and this is to be considered an exploration as to why.
Perhaps because of the series’ 25th anniversary, Skyward Sword feels like a combination of the earlier, overworld-style Zelda games and the grand ocean of Wind Waker. There are some nods to earlier games and the variation in gameplay is astounding even for a Zelda title. The broad focus might have contributed to what I feel are some core elements not being quite there though. The mechanics of certain enemies can put you in situations where you will die far too quickly to figure out what to do. Some parts of the quest feel like they’re just there to waste my time rather than being fun to play. The camera is good overall, but too ambitiously intelligent and more often than not ends up behind something. The controls are incoherent both with earlier games and within this one - and that is not even mentioning the wiimote controls.
One thing that is interesting with Skyward Sword is how the comparison to Twilight Princess says something about gimmicks in gameplay. Twilight Princess was developed for the Gamecube and was a relatively “pure” game whereas Skyward Sword is developed around the wii controls - most enemies and virtually every boss requires you to slash in different directions. While this works okay most of the time, it is not as quick or precise as pressing a button by far. The gimmick is fun for awhile, sure, but we get a game that is slower, less exact and more constrained in several ways - the funky controls take up so much place that it is less of a “Zelda” game.
I would like to say that a return to form would be a better strategy for Nintendo, but drawing the line between doing too little and too much in terms of innovation is a hard thing. And it might be that people like me, the people who played the original Zelda before it had sequels on other platforms, are just not the right people to appease for a game that expects you to sink in 50+ hours exploring for exploration’s sake.