Rainbow Six Siege, single, co-op, & competitive play

This weekend I’ve been playing the (I think) third and (definitely) final Beta before the game releases properly next Tuesday December 1st. I played the previous Beta also but didn’t share my thoughts. I just want to do so today as it follows nicely on from last week’s blog about First Person Shooter campaign modes dying off.

This isn’t a review of the game. The game isn’t out yet (so, technically this would be more of a Preview anyway) and I’ve only seen a fraction of what the game has to offer, so it wouldn’t be fair to judge. However, the fraction I saw was a huge chunk of what the gameplay is, and enough for me to make up my own mind about the game.

The Beta had three maps, which can be played in day or night modes. The final game launches with eleven but more will become available for free download. The Beta’s maps were the artistically-named ‘House’ (which everyone is probably familiar with by now from all the gameplay footage), ‘Kanal’ (it has a big cargo ship in the background but is set on the quays), and ‘Hereford’ (which is the base in the UK where Rainbow Six operate from in the original Tom Clancy novel).

View of the hostage and two terrorists from the small, wheeled, spy bot that all attackers get to use before and during rounds.

The maps didn’t offer much variety for my money. They’re all pretty strong levels, don’t get me wrong, but the gameplay, at least for a beginner, is pretty much the same wherever you are. Breach, clear, try not to get flanked, repeat. Each level will of course have its own quirks and characteristics, and when teams really get used to them and develop preferred approaches, that’s when we’ll see the levels really shine. But for now, I didn’t care which map I was on, which was good because none of the game modes let me choose what level to go to, not even single player!

Lone Wolf mode (Single Player)

This mode was new for the Open Beta. The closed beta a few months ago didn’t have it. When you select “Terrorist Hunt” mode, the game’s 5 player vs AI co-op mode, you can now choose to tackle it as a ‘lone wolf’. I was informed on the menu that the AI are a little less accurate and do a little less damage. I have to say, it didn’t feel like the case.

As I said last week, I prefer to play single player modes, so this was the first one I went to in the Beta. It’s exactly the same as the 5 player co-op mode. There are two bombs to be deactivated and the interior of the level’s buildings are full of enemies. Almost every room has enemies, and when you alert them by shooting, breaking a window, or just being seen, many of them will break out of windows and move around to flank you.

Suffice it to say, this makes the game extremely difficult to play on your own. You really need other players to watch your back. If you go down in co-op mode, there’s a chance that another player will revive you before you bleed out. Not so in this mode. And your health doesn’t recharge like in so many modern shooters (I’m not complaining, but it’s hard in Lone Wolf mode). Every bullet that hits your armour brings you that much closer to death, and you can’t take many hits either. If you’re ever surprised from two angles at once, or ever caught in the open, you’re pretty much done for.

Back to the wall + gun reloading + bomber comes around the corner = dead!

Add to that the heavies who have guns and explosive vests. They’ll charge you down and attempt to explode in your face. They were my most common cause of death. They take so many shots to kill that unless you spot them at the far end of a corridor and have a full clip of ammo, you’ll most often not have time to kill them before they get you. They do at least have a give-away Darth-Vader-breathing kind of sound that alerts you to stay on your toes.

Once I’d learned to allow for all of that, I finally managed to make my way to one of the two bombs on the map that have to be disarmed. These are always located in rooms with multiple entrances. Where there wasn’t an entrance before, there soon will be one. The AI spawn and start attacking from all directions, including second story windows and solid (looking) walls if they have to. As a single operative, it’s almost impossible to survive this stage. Indeed, I never did. If I had, I’d then have to do the same with the second bomb, with even less health than before due to all the bullet-sponging I’d have done at the first bomb site.

This was in ‘Normal’ difficulty. This is the easiest difficulty (go figure). There’s also ‘Hard’ and ‘Realistic’. I’m not a bad shooter player. I’ve twenty years of ‘training’ behind me. But even I couldn’t beat this mode. That said, I was using the default operative, as you have to earn points to unlock better/different operative who may have certain tech that makes the game easier (like heartbeat monitors. Are these real? They were in the original book, so that explains their presence in the game, but they amount to wall-hacking which gets you banned in other multiplayer games… anyway). But every class seems to get those robot spy droids, so it’s not like I couldn’t scout out rooms before getting to them, and still I couldn’t do it. Maybe heavier use of stun grenades might help me avoid those early hits and survive the later stages… hm.. must try again.

You know you don't have to respect his political views because he hides his face. — You know you don’t have to respect his political views because he hides his face.

Another massive criticism I have for this mode is that it still gives you that 30 second timer for multiplayer levels to choose your character and ‘vote’ on your insertion point for the level. If you want to take longer with nobody waiting on you, you should be able to. You also can’t select the game level! I imagine that these things might be patched in the final game, but they’re ridiculous restrictions for now, and when added to the fact that the mode hasn’t really been re-balanced for play by a single person (never mind giving the player AI squad mates of their own), the mode is almost worthless.

Co-Op

This is how Terrorist Hunt is meant to be played. 5 players versus the AI team, securing two bomb sites, covering each other, reviving each other, and using 5 diverse gadgets and abilities to find an optimal way towards the objective.

In theory.

In practice, if you log into a random game, you’re unlikely to find anybody co-operating or speaking to each other, so it kind of becomes like 5 players just thrown into the single player mode. This is typical of any co-op game really. Unless you log in with 4 other friends and agree to co-operate, you won’t be playing the game the way it’s really meant to be played.

If you do have said friends, the party-creation system seems solid, and this could then be a great co-op game to play, but I can’t speak to that yet.

I do like the AI though. They talk to each other intelligently (“move up, move up”, or “I heard a noise in the basement”) and that lets you respond a little to what they’re about to do. They’re also quite intelligent, and I’ve already mentioned how good they are at flanking you.

Multiplayer 5 v 5

This is the real game. This is what Ubisoft intends to become an e-sport and their Counterstrike-beater. The new trailer (above), while not gameplay, does manage to summarise the wide range of gameplay possibilities in a very short amount of time. Give it a watch.

There are modes where the attackers must either rescue a hostage, deactivate a bomb, or just wipe the enemy team. Hostage rescue was missing from the Beta, unfortunately.

The defending team has a short period at the start of each round to fortify doors, set up portable cover and barbed wire, barricade windows, and take positions. There’s nowhere near enough time or equipment to barricade the whole house, so they have to work together to fortify select rooms effectively. Technically, they’re also meant to communicate and decide on their defensive strategies, but you so rarely see any of that. This really is a game designed for serious players and clans.

During this time, the attackers can only control little wheeled spy robots and zip around the level trying to spot where the bombs, hostages, and enemies are. If the defenders see these robots, they can try to shoot them to remove the spy, but they’re hard to hit. The attackers should formulate their attack plan based on the information, but again… sigh..

This cringey, hyper-scripted, uber-rehearsed gameplay video from E3 2014 is how the game is meant to be played.

Quite cool, no? This is how it’s usually played..

“Guys wait! We should plan!” “lalala, can’t hear you! I got this!…. oh.. medic!”

I’ll re-iterate; This game could really be special if you have a small clan to play with. You’ll learn to work together, you’ll have a dedicated shield guy, a hacker, and become a really specialised crew, competing online against other skilled teams (a nice feature is that each of the 20 specialists on offer can only be picked by one player at a time, so you can’t all be the shield guy, and are forced to work together). What Ubisoft intend for the game to be is something really special, but I think most of the people who buy the game will never get that experience.

RealBlast Destruction Engine

As you may have known, or should probably have worked out from the videos by now, the destruction engine is the real star of the show. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Blowing through select doorways is common enough in other games, but in nothing else have I been walking down a corridor, happy enough with life, only to have the dry wall to my right start exploding in on me with random gunfire.

The fact that almost anything can be destroyed, including with simple gunfire or melee strikes, the fact that it all looks good and convincing, and the fact that that destruction effectively changes the layout of the level is what makes this game unique.

It can get fairly chaotic, but it’s far more realistic. It’s a lot more like being in an action movie than a traditional shooting game, at times. I love how, no matter how well you know a level, and what way you’d normally like to approach it, the ways in which defenders reinforce certain walls, or whether enemies are rappelling in from the roof or invading the basement can completely change the feel of the level, giving them all a lot of mileage.

I also love how a stray gunshot could open a spy hole in the exterior wall and your silent flanking manoeuvre could be scarpered by someone catching a lucky glimpse of you.

Plans have to be adapted on the fly, and communication is key. This could make the game great, but I think it also means it’s not really for casual players.

In Summary

I think we’ll see pro players get a lot out of this game (if they migrate from playing Counterstrike), and we’ll see a big e-sports community form around those pro teams. The game is exciting to watch, no doubt! It’s just actually not that fun to play! That’s totally my own opinion (and while Planetside 2 is one of my favourite games, I’m not really one for smaller competitive multiplayer games).

Moreso than other multiplayer game, this one really requires cooperation and communication; something casual gamers aren’t known for. I think the destruction engine is beautiful, and for that reason alone I think it will do well enough on sales to casual players, but I think these same people will tire of the competitive mode and drift into Terrorist Hunt with one or two friends before ultimately moving on. I won’t be one of the ones buying it. €60 is too much for me to drop on a game I don’t actually enjoy playing. I feel I got all I wanted from it in the two Betas. There are so many shooters I can play without spending new money.

If you want a similar single player game (though the destruction will never compare), try the old but fantastic SWAT 4. It’s still not on GOG or any digital outlet so you may have to get creative to find a copy, but do drop GOG a request to get it on their store. You never know. “Squeaky wheels”, and all..

Until next time..

First Person Shooter Campaigns Dying off?

I read an article during the week by Ryan McCaffrey at IGN (video format below) positing that the single-player first person shooter game might be dying off. It’s hard not to agree with Ryan’s points. While the ultimate fate of campaign modes in FPSs hasn’t been decided yet, we do see more and more shooters releasing without single-player modes, or with lame, half-assed campaigns. It’s a while since I’ve played something that really wowed me, and longer still since that was a game that didn’t feature multiplayer.

I just wanted to share my own thoughts on the questions raised by the IGN article, and hopefully get some of yours too. Note that that article and mine both focus on “first person shooters”. Not third person shooters, cover shooters, or first person RPGs. If you want to watch the IGN article before reading on, feel free:

What I love about Single-Player

So I love single player shooters. They’re pretty much my favourite genre (or have been, at least). When I started playing games I didn’t have internet access, and once I got it I was nearly 20 before connections in Ireland near my home were good enough to reliably play multiplayer. I grew up with single-player games and so developed a fondness for ones that draw you in as an individual; whether it’s with great gameplay or story, I don’t really mind. Preferably both!

I’m a gamer with limited time so I like to commit to some sort of journey for 6 – 20 hours and know that it will resolve satisfactorily and let me get back to my life. I’ve less interest in multiplayer games because they never end. You can sink way more time into them and merely wind up frustrated at your defeats or pissed off with hackers, griefers, trolls, n00bs, or just ignorant adolescents with big mouths. There’s also the danger of becoming addicted to the progression systems. I don’t like how I feel about myself when I’m working and I can’t wait to get back to the game just so I can unlock a new scope after about 3 more hours of online play. I’ve done it, mind you, and enjoyed it. There’s some great multiplayer experiences out there, but that’s just why I prefer the single player, anyway.

I’ve been feeling a lot in recent years that my interests are being under-served, as shooters become more and more focussed on online play. Take Call of Duty, for example. The biggest kid on the block! That series started as a WW2 shooter to beat Medal of Honor with the focus on the single player campaign. Multiplayer wasn’t a big genre yet, though the game had it. The campaign story was great! You could play it again and again. The same with CoD 2 and 3, and a few since.. CoD4 (Modern Warfare) had a stellar single player story, but it also had great multiplayer and that’s when the public started flocking to the series in earnest.

While I enjoyed the stories in Modern Warfare 2 & 3, and Black Ops 1, I feel (personally) that less and less time has been going into developing the single player sides of the games. They’re getting shorter and shorter, and the stories worse and worse.

Multiplayer used to be a bit of a sandbox where you take the levels and assets of the single player game and let players have fun with them after they finish the main game. Now it seems like the CoD games are developed the opposite way. More like “oh we need jetpacks and lasers for multiplayer. Cram them into the single player too and try make it make sense”. Ghosts’ story was pretty underwhelming. I can’t accuse them of cheaping out on the Advanced Warfare story (hiring Kevin Spacey and all) but the cracks were really showing in that story too. It just didn’t come together. Most of the marketing now focuses on selling the multiplayer.

The newest game, Black Ops 3, even shipped without the single player mode on Xbox 360 and PS3, proving which half of the game is the priority when compromises must be made. If players on those consoles buy the game anyway then Activision will have their “proof” that players don’t really care about story modes in shooters, as long as they have multiplayer.

The Business

I’m actually surprised that Activision and others haven’t scrapped story modes already. It’s an expensive side of the game to develop, needing the bulk of the writing, voice recording, direction, and set design, all for a mode that most players only get their 6 hours or so out of and then never play again. If players would still buy the game with multiplayer only, a lot of time and money could be saved in producing these annualised titles without single player.

Releasing both seems like splitting attention. I often cringe when I see games that are supposed to be primarily single-player experiences just tacking on multiplayer. Batman: Arkham Origins and Max Payne 3 arguably didn’t need multiplayer, and I’ve heard nobody say good things about them. Money was spent to create half-assed modes and the best reason I can think of for doing this is to justify the ‘full’ price tag. €60/€70 for a single-player only game is probably hard to justify. The same goes for multiplayer-only. Full priced games have usually had both modes, and publishers/retailers want to charge full price, so both branches of a game are usually developed to varying standards. I can’t justify spending €60 on the new Star Wars Battlefront, for instance, because it’s just multiplayer. Where’s my single player? Not to mention that the DLC pass is €50!! I protest! But I digress too..

Alien Isolation could have tacked on a ruinous multiplayer mode and upped their price from €50 to €60 but they stuck with single player only and crafted a masterpiece! Its 20 hours of play also justifies the price tag when compared with 6 hour games for the same money.

Alien Isolation wasn't really a shooter. Like my friend Niall said, the pistol is like — Alien Isolation wasn’t really a shooter. Like my friend Niall said, the pistol is like “throwing Tic Tacs at the alien”. Evasion was the only way to win.

I think it makes the most sense to make either a single player game, a multiplayer game, or some co-op half way point. Not as an absolute rule, mind you, but a developer can focus on making their primary game better, save costs by not developing a secondary side, and still charge 5/6 of the price without batting an eyelid. Battlefront are even charging a premium despite having no single player and a very shallow game overall. We know that developers are very keen to do what makes the most business sense wherever possible (especially the big boys!) so I’m surprised we haven’t seen more devs trimming the fat yet. I do believe it’s coming, though.

We Can Already See The Split

The point the IGN article made was that we are seeing more titles focus on just one side, but unfortunately, that seems to be almost exclusively the multiplayer side, prompting the article on whether single player shooters will become a thing of the past.

Star Wars Battlefront, Titanfall, Evolve, Rainbox Six Siege, and the upcoming Battleborn, LawBreakers, and Overwatch are all multiplayer only (some have some 1-4 vs bots, technically allowing “single” player, but have no story mode).

Even Halo, traditionally both a strong narrative game and a strong multiplayer game, has fallen with the rubbish (my opinion, yes, but come on!) Halo 4 story mode. Halo 5 has now been designed with the story mode focussed on being a multiplayer co-op experience, with squads of 4 in all story missions (I haven’t played yet, correct me if I’m partially wrong).

Halo 5. Master Chief is no longer such a lone wolf.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that single player first person shooters are dying off. I mentioned Alien Isolation earlier, and that’s not even a shooter. Deus Ex is a first person stealth-RPG with guns; not a shooter. Even Fallout 4 isn’t really a shooter, though I won’t argue if you want to treat it as one.

The only (AAA/ high quality/ high-exposure) games I can really place on the scales as honest-to-God single player shooters from recent years are the Metro and Wolfenstein: New Order games. All fantastic, by the way! Play them! They have no multiplayer at all, but instead focus on really high quality campaign modes (and challenge modes in Wolf).

Reasons to include single and multiplayer modes

Plenty of games are still doing both modes, and there will always be good reasons to have single and multiplayer modes. Multiplayer is where most of the time is spent by players, and it’s where developers can make more money with microtransactions or cost-effective DLC. But multiplayer-only worlds like the ones seen in Evolve and Titanfall lack depth and character. Single player modes are needed to lend credibility to a narrative setting and really create hardcore fans. Without emotional investment in the world, the setting is all just white noise. Sci-fi games in particular need single player to make their worlds come to life.

Something something, reason to shoot, don't care! — Something something, reason to shoot, don’t care!

The new DOOM game will have both modes, though how story-driven the campaign will be is unknown. DOOM’s story (and Quake‘s) was traditionally a mere paragraph of text followed by non-stop blasting action until another paragraph at the end.

Battlefield (originally multiplayer only, or single with bots) has had story modes for a while, but let’s be honest, they’re pretty crap. Battlefield 3’s story wasn’t up to much (how do you make nuking Paris lack drama) and my all-time most hated single player game is Battlefield 4. The Bad Company games were good though; humour helps.

The Far Cry games are still strong AAA single player shooters, it must be said, but are also trying to bring in more multiplayer elements with each title. Dying Light deserves an honourable mention as a primarily single player FPS from 2015, though.

The Real Question

Where the hell is Half Life 3?! HL1 & 2 were both total game changers for the genre. What will 3 have to say about all this, if it ever comes out?

Okay, the “Real” Real Question

While it may look like shooters are slowly moving towards being multiplayer-only games, we have to recognise that this creates a vacuum. A shortage of supply of narrative-driven single player shooters will be created, yet demand for these titles will presumably remain pretty steady. All sorts of games are made nowadays, serving all types of interests. While AAA studios have traditionally cornered the markets on shooters (because graphics are very important in first person games, and big studios can afford better graphics, models, and animations), what could smaller studios do with the genre if the bigger developers move on?

We might lose some scope and spectacle if single player shooters start becoming the domain of indie studios (and that will sadden me), but I don’t believe the genre will ever die out. It’s too much a main-stay of the games industry. Also, indies are the ones who take risks and create genuinely interesting new titles. There’s no particular difference between Black Ops 3, Modern Warfare, and Battlefield 3. Nothing major. They all offer the same basic gameplay. We could actually see some great new stuff!

What could indies do if they take over the single player first person shooter genre? Will it ever happen? Will the AAA studios ever totally cut out single player modes and would you stop buying their games if they did? I know I already have, as I’m less and less willing to spend €60 on a crappy 6 hour story when I could just replay Metro or Wolfenstain for my shooter fix.

Please discuss in the comments, anyway.

Until next time..

Making Crow’s Nest (part 4 of 4): “Sons of Sol” & “Crow’s Nest”

I'm still looking for an artist. Can you tell? — I’m still looking for an artist. Can you tell?

Hi! This is Part 3 of me offering some insight into the development of my game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.

In Part 1 I explained my pitch “Asteroids meets Total War”.
In Part 2 I talked about the games that are influencing the design of Crow’s Nest.
In Part 3 I discussed a design challenge that the game faces.

Now we’ve reached the final post of this ‘Making Crow’s Nest’ series. You may recall from Part 1 that these four posts were written together and scheduled to post while I was on some down time. Next week I’ll be back to blogging on more mainstream game topics.

Today I’m talking about what Sons of Sol and Crow’s Nest actually are. This will be a more autobiographical post than normal, so you have been warned. This tale will interweave a little bit with my previous blog on how I got into game development, which I was uneasy about writing but which people seemed to respond very positively to. This won’t be as much of downer, though, promise!

Together, “Sons of Sol” and “Crow’s Nest” are the working title for the game that I’m working on, which is my (and RetroNeo Games’) first game ever. Hopefully there’ll be no need to change those names, but these things happen sometimes in development. Better names come along or products with similar names get released before yours.

An Evil Empire

Sons of Sol actually began in 2012 not long after Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas. I was a life-long Star Wars fan. The films, games, and especially the books. My brother bought me one of the Expanded Universe (EU) novels in 1997 for my 10th birthday; a Han Solo trilogy one. From then and for the next 15 years, 4 out of every 5 books that I read were probably Star Wars books. I loved how the stories interconnected. I loved that a character could be introduced in one book, and survive fifteen fictional years, then be killed off when you least expect it.

There were a lot of bad books in the Expanded Universe, but far more good ones. I loved how you were rewarded for your time by seeing threads of stories affect each other decades apart. The rebels eventually take Coruscant, Han and Leia have three kids, these kids get dozens of their own books and become their own proper characters, grow to adulthood and war with each other, for example. There’s a book for more than every year of their lives. You can observe their whole character arcs from birth to… well.. if you put the time in. The EU was all internally consistent, and all canon. It all worked together.

There are a few early exceptions and a few game stories that don’t fit, but otherwise the EU really rewarded fans for their time. In 2012 I finished reading to the end of the Star Wars chronology. That’s 40 years of story after Return of the Jedi, not to mention the Clone Wars books and books set between and during the movies. I didn’t read all the books, but read most from the timeline of Episode 1-6 and beyond. None of the Old Republic stuff, though.

Anyway, I felt I’d achieved a monumental reading goal that I set myself in 2007 (before that I’d read the books a little randomly). Five years of reading little but Star Wars, and the stories I got out of it were great. No other franchise could achieve this (well, maybe Star Trek).

Then Disney bought Star Wars, and soon announced that there would be a new trilogy, but that they’d be throwing away all of that canon. The EU didn’t count any more. Timothy Zahn started with Heir To The Empire in 1994. 18 years of work and some great stories now didn’t count because Disney felt there was more money in movies and merchandise.

I’m not naive. I know there is. I know entertainment is a business, but I’m just trying to convey my disappointment at the news. They could have set new movies inside the EU, easily. Instead they threw it away for.. well, we don’t know yet. This blog is posting 1 month before the release of JJ Abrams’ Episode 7. We’ve no idea if the new movies will be good or if the stories will be better than the ones discarded. I’m still totally reserved at the time of writing this.

I also know that I now have two timelines. More Star Wars! Yay! Well, that’s just not how I feel about it. I’m allowed to feel disappointed, particularly after the loyalty I showed the franchise.

A Great Journey

Anyway, also around this time, I moved back to Ireland after unsuccessfully attempting to get a permanent visa in Australia. So I was back in Ireland and unemployed with no decent chances of starting a career any time soon. I decided to start writing science fiction to fill the Star-Wars-shaped hole in my soul (okay, I’m being overly dramatic. I’ll watch it. Sorry).

I was going to write a universe of my own that I would promise to keep consistent with itself. I didn’t believe that this would become a big thing, or even necessarily that I would get a single book published, but it occupied the time.

Building a Galaxy

I started watching tonnes of science fiction movies and documentaries and designing my universe. This took a long time. You have to design whole new physical rules for your world. You have to say “you can do this, but not this” and consider if that statement even makes sense. If you have one technology available, like artificial gravity without rotation, then you have to consider what else you can have. With that, for example, you’re kind of saying that the theory of ‘gravitons’ existing is correct, and that we’ve managed to develop technology to manipulate them. Well, keeping someone fixed to the deck in a spaceship (as seen in almost every sci fi movie and show ever) means that you can cause attraction towards a point. In that case, you can probably cause repulsion in the opposite direction. This would make hover technology a reality. Did I want hover cars and hover crates in my sci-fi? Because if not then I have to solve the artificial gravity problem in another way.

How long does it take to travel from one star system to another? That’s going to have a major impact on stories later on. Armies can’t reinforce one another in the middle of a battle if it takes two weeks to travel to the nearest star.

In the end, I came up with rules I was happy with. It’s a lot like Battlestar Galactica with some Mass Effect and Starship Troopers thrown in. A cold-hard-metal feel to things but with certain sci-fi tropes like artificial gravity. Warp speed is accomplished assuming that Alcubierre’s (real) theories are correct and realisable. There’s no light swords, weapons fire hard projectiles, and there are no shield technologies. Armour and photo-chromatic materials are all that you’ve got in battle. There’s also ABSOLUTELY NO TIME-TRAVEL OR ALTERNATE DIMENSIONS, EVER!!

Next I was writing broad story arcs and setting up so that the universe could grow wide, and so that you could have human factions appear in all parts of the galaxy. After all, it’s easier to dress the actors as humans than aliens. You’ve got to think forward! 😉 Look at Stargate!

I sketched out a 3 part story that told the tale of Earth’s first expansion beyond our solar system, our first contact with aliens, and our introduction to the wider galaxy. I designed alien races called the Cestral and the Skulaari, the latter being the villains, themed on terrifying sea creatures like giant squid and crustaceans. I even wrote a little language for these factions.

I Need a Name

This all took several months, and I got a job for a few months which led me to drop the writing project for a while. Then I lost the job and took the writing back up again. I started writing the real story, finally, and decided to call the story at large “Sons of Sol”, after conducting extensive web searches for similarly named things.

At the time, I found none. I bought the .com address and set up a wiki to lay some sort of claim to the name. I’ve since found some similarly named games, a Korean TV show called “Sons of Sol Pharmacy” and a hoody company with the very same name. Apparently, I’m still fine to be using the name, so for now I’ll keep it unless I can think of a name I like more.

In early 2013 I started studying tax in Ireland, believing this would be my route to eventual (permanent) employment. I worked hard at it, but I was unemployed and it was a part time course, so I still had some time to give to writing and designing the world. I also had been writing down game ideas as they came to me and designing them out in .txt files for fun. I never expected to make a game, though, as I didn’t want to study another degree course just to go into a risky profession.

A Flirtation with Games

One day I was very sick of studying this boring topic and posted on the forum Boards.ie to see if any game developers needed somebody with “great ideas” (I know, right?! haha) but who could also record audio, compose music, write, and manage the business/marketing side (okay, that’s a little better).

A guy called Rob Reinhardt in Dublin got back to me and he was actually interested in doing some collaborating. We struck up a friendship and met a few times, talking about games and what we might make together. I was only going to be involved part time as I was studying and hopefully going to get a normal job, but I’d help with the writing and other stuff as much as I could. I wasn’t looking for pay or anything.

Eventually, we decided to use Sons of Sol’s universe as a setting for a game. It would be a prequel for the book I was writing. The book focussed on the people of Earth (at first), but the game would focus on a lost human civilization called the Kolrir and how they came (secretly) to Earth, setting up the events of the book I was writing.

Nothing came of the game ultimately, but we’d designed a lot on paper for Sons of Sol: Exodus (that name would have to change if we’d done it because Sol: Exodus came out from somebody else).

An Earth-shattering Kaboom!

2014 rolled around. I got a job in tax.. for 6 weeks, then lost that one too. Rob and others had told me that Unity was easy to pick up and start using, so with game design now on the brain and no tax to work at or study, I started at Unity and learned how to do some basic programming through their tutorials. It was only a couple of months before I had a very early version of a space game up and running. I later returned to this very first game for Crow’s Nest.

I started going to gaming events in Dublin and meeting the great community here, as well as improving my own skills and looked into starting a company through the unemployment enterprise scheme.

The game that Rob and I had designed was still well beyond my skills still (probably his too. We weren’t good at ‘scope’) but the space game currently on my screen could work inside the Sons of Sol universe too. After all, I’d designed it very openly. I can plug in new civilizations wherever I like and the story still all holds together. I’d put a lot of time into the ‘Exodus’ story (with Rob) and thought it was solid, so I wanted to keep it in tact. I decided to write a prequel to the prequel and tell the story of the characters that you would meet in Exodus and call it “Crow’s Nest”.

My very own Game

The game would be ostensibly about a private military company from Kolrir protecting their territories from pirates. The ‘Crows Nest’, the lookout spot on a sail ship (like a pirate boat) sounded suitably pirate-y for a name. In space, though, particularly in another non-Earth culture, the crow’s nest wouldn’t really be a term in use, both because you can’t sit outside a spaceship, and the Kolrir culture may never have had sailing ships as far as we know. So in this case, the “Nest” would refer to a pirate base hidden inside a large asteroid, and “Crow” would be the pirate villain in question who owned that base.

I’ll fully admit that I didn’t finish a book, didn’t finish a game, and am now starting another game, but bear in mind that I saw writing the book as just killing time while unemployed. The first game was killing time in between studying. With the current game, I’ve formed RetroNeo Games as a company. This is now my job, and that’s a hell of a difference. I also now have the skills to make a game (or at least prototype it) by myself, without just being in a position where I’m giving ideas to other people. I have the time, ability, and drive to deliver Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.

The Future of Sons of Sol

I plan to release in early 2017. This will then be the first Sons of Sol product to exist, almost five years after I first created the universe. I hope people will like it!

I could take the same game and abandon the Sons of Sol name. It’ll make no difference to the players. They don’t know what Sons of Sol is! But I’ve a whole universe worth of stories to tell and why shouldn’t I make the game a Sons of Sol title? It fits. It works. But what if it’s bad and I wreck the name before I even begin?

Well, then I released a bad game, I guess. That’s the risk with any creative work. And it’s still better than releasing no game at all and Sons of Sol never getting its chance in the public domain. But I’ve worked too hard for years for no reward to approach this half-assed. Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is going to be my absolute best effort, and nobody can ask fairer than that. I’ll be a very proud daddy the day I finally release the game. And who knows, maybe I’ll get to those other story lines some day, either through game sequels, or finishing the novel. The novel was only a couple of chapters in, though, when I last left it. If that were to be finished now I’d be better off having a different writer do it while I make a game. And I could only do that if a Sons of Sol game were wildly successful and there was the interest in a book.

That’s extremely unlikely, I know, but it doesn’t bother me either way. I feel that if I can release one Sons of Sol title at this stage, I’ll be happy and it will all have been worth the effort.

Is he done yet?!

If you read this far, well done, and thanks very sincerely for your interest! Especially if you read all 4 parts. Sorry for the lack of images today, also. I’ve really got no pictures of this topic, though. Next week we’re back to non-Crow’s Nest gaming topics for the blog.

Until next time..

Making Crow’s Nest (part 3 of 4): A design challenge

Okay, not game-related but I can't resist a caption.. From left to right: Manager, Supervisor, new Job Bridge Intern, old Job Bridge Intern they're about to claim they can't afford to hire.

Hi! This is Part 3 of me offering some insight into the development of my game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.

In Part 1 I explained my pitch “Asteroids meets Total War”.
Last week in Part 2 I talked about the games that are influencing the design of Crow’s Nest.
This week I want to talk about one particular design challenge I’m facing: Meaningful Character Death.

Crow’s Nest is a space combat game meets a strategy game. You fly missions like Wing Commander or X-Wing missions (but in 2D) and then go back to a strategy map like XCOM or Total War. I spoke last week about how I’m very fond of the attachment to your soldiers that XCOM can create for the player. It adds a real tension and a greater range of emotions for the player when a soldier dies or barely escapes.

The Problem

I decided very early on that I wanted meaningful character death in my game. So I thought “fine, I’ll have you play as one character, and you have wingmen. Those characters can live or die or get captured by the enemy. After that they could stay captured or you could rescue them”.

That sounds reasonable enough, but there was something that I didn’t take into account. In my game’s battles, you control one character directly. You can give orders to your other wingmen but you have very little control over what they do beyond that. In XCOM, you’re the commander. You’re not on the field. You control every one of your soldiers individually, one at a time. You are responsible for everything that they do. Therefore, the consequences are yours alone to deal with. You can’t blame the game or the AI for making your beloved soldier do something stupid (usually) and getting themselves killed.

I only realised the full importance of this distinction when I watched the following interview. In it, Adam Sessler brings together Jake Solomon (lead designer on 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown and 2016’s XCOM 2) and Julian Gollop, the designer of the original XCOM from 1994. The whole interview is very interesting, but if you don’t want to watch it all, skip to 12:32 and watch for about two minutes.

Jake Solomon made the point that without turn-based gameplay you can’t have meaningful character death. I saw this and I thought “oh crap! He’s completely right”! If the player isn’t directly accountable for the decision that led to a soldier dying, then they won’t feel survivor’s guilt, or the guilt of having ordered somebody to their death. They’ll probably feel nothing, or worse, they’ll blame the game for the consequence. If that happens, the system may as well not be in the game. As I said, I think it’s a very powerful feature of XCOM that I want to try and emulate insofar as possible, so I have a problem.

Now, I haven’t built the system into the game yet, so it hasn’t been play-tested, but I am at the design stage for it, and I’m left considering what I can do for the best results.

Poking a hole in that theory

If I’m to bother implementing meaningful character death into Crow’s Nest (a real-time game), I need Solomon and Gollop to be (at least somewhat) incorrect. They’re far better game designers than me, so maybe it’s not possible, but if I could poke a breathing hole in the design-bag they’ve placed over my head, then I might be okay.

My starting point for designing around the problem is this: We know that we can develop strong emotional ties to fictional characters. This is why we can cry when Bambi’s mother dies or celebrate when Luke blows up the Death Star. Empathy is real, even if the character isn’t. Game of Thrones in particular proves that the unpredictability of death can have a great impact on fans and really raise the tension.

Real-life battles happen in real time (obviously, hence the word “real”), and while the commander’s soldiers will have been trained, they operate of their own volition. A commander doesn’t control them with their mind, or decide whether they run left around a barrel instead of right. But the tension they feel at ordering their troops into danger is no less real for the lack of direct control.

Perhaps, then, you don’t need total control over your units in a game in order to feel something for them. They are your team mates, after all, whether they’re AI or not. Maybe it’s possible to bring the emotions of XCOM to a real-time game, then. Maybe meaningful character death for Crow’s Nest is possible.

How?

XCOM lets you make an awful lot of decisions, and it gives you the time to make them so that you’ll feel (if it goes wrong) that you didn’t think the problem through well-enough. You’ll feel that it was your fault!

If XCOM shows us a formula for meaningful character death, then, it might look like this:

Quantity of player decisions + Time to make them = Meaningful Character Death

Time to make them

Let’s look at this part first. A real-time game doesn’t really offer you time, typically. But it can! Many RPGs will let you paused the action to give orders and then resume it to see them play out in real time. There’s an option! The problem with this is that is interrupts the action, and in Crow’s Nest, if you spend too long paused, you might forget that you were literally a half a second away from smashing into an asteroid before you paused.

So how about a compromise? The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (2013) was a real-time cover-based third-person shooter that tried to implement meaningful character death. It utterly failed because it was so story-driven that the main character (you) couldn’t die. If you did, you just went back to a checkpoint. Your squad mates could die, permanently, but if they did you could just get yourself killed, reload the checkpoint to before they were hit, and everybody’s happy again. That’s what they did wrong.

What they did right was their ‘pause’ system. Like the RPG system I mentioned, you could pause the action and issue orders, but it wasn’t really paused. Time was still moving, albeit very slowly. You had more time to make decisions, but the tension remained as you saw an enemy moving (very slowly) to flank your sniper and you tried to decide whether to order your him to move back or to take a headshot on the enemy before it was too late! That’s one way I could buy the player the “time” part of the formula.

I could just acknowledge that in real time you have to make quick decisions and just live with that, however, this will then allow the player to make far less decisions in the same amount of (game) time and so the formula is less healthy looking.

Quantity of Player Decisions

There’s a lot that I could do to give the player more decisions. In the combat demo I have currently available (see video above) there’s a lot that will be changed. In this demo you have infinite fuel, infinite (bullet) ammo, and recharging health. The enemies also come in equal waves each time.

First off, I intend that when you encounter the first enemies of a battle, they’ll call reinforcements, who’ll take a certain amount of time to get there, but who will be stronger that the first group. Think of it as a wave system, but where you don’t have to beat one to spawn the next one. It’s a truer reinforcement system. You want to deal with one problem before the next arrives.

Of course, different mission types could have different rules and spies might disable enemy communications, etc, but imagine that some missions as they go on get harder and harder, to the point that waves will spawn that you couldn’t possibly beat. This is one option that opens a lot of doors.

This set up would force you to chose to flee at some point. That choice alone means that if you or your allies die, you know you stayed one wave too long.

If I then make ammo, fuel, and health limited, then you have to choose if you and each of your wingmen have enough of those three resources left to take on the next set of reinforcements, or just run whenever you get the chance. That’s at least three choices that you make for each of three (or more) craft, every couple of minutes. That’s a lot of opportunity for the player to start blaming themselves if something goes wrong.

Other decisions would have been made before the battle. Do you take the more experienced pilots or train up rookies? Do you arm missiles, or save the weight to make the craft more agile? Did you invest in an armour upgrade last month or did that money go to set up a spy drone in an asteroid field where you suspect the enemy to be?

I could go on, but you can see that quantity of decisions shouldn’t be a problem, even in a real-time game.

The Real Trick; AI

Assuming we can get the formula balanced correctly, the whole thing hinges on whether or not the player will accept that, if a wing mate dies, the fault lay with their decisions. According to Gollop and Solomon, the player would blame the AI. I think that the more you stack decisions and input from the player, within an interface that allows them to make decisions in good time, the greater the chance you have of the player accepting the consequences of those decisions and arriving at our goal of meaningful character death.

Balancing the AI is the key ingredient, and this is where so many games have failed in the past. I may well fail here, too, but I don’t plan to make meaningful character death my game’s only selling point, so it wouldn’t be a fatal failure.

Your wing mates have to be good enough that they can survive on their own for a while against reasonable odds, but they can’t be so good that you can just let them beat the whole mission for you.

In the demo at the moment, because the Arrow Fighters are harder to hit, turn faster, and have recharging health, they’re actually capable of taking all of the kills if you do nothing. There aren’t enough enemies on the map at once to stop them, usually. This is an unbalanced demo, however.

The AI will run if they’re damaged, usually saving their lives. They’ll call to you for help, and if you don’t give it, the enemy might just catch up and kill your ally. This is already more intelligent behaviour than many games would bother giving to computer-controlled characters, and it’s essential to meaningful character death in a real-time game, but it’s not nearly enough.

Alien Isolation is known for its brilliant AI.

To be honest, I haven’t figured out the balance yet, and it will require a lot of play testing.

I’d like to caveat that all of the above is assuming that you actually do things to give those wing mates a personality. They have to have a face, a voice, a backstory that you are spoon fed during quieter moments, as well as skills, abilities, a record of confirmed kills, and a rank that progresses as they gain experience. They have to taunt the enemy when they get a kill. They have to call you for help. They even have to react to incoming enemies believably; either with confidence, or the realisation that they’re truly outmatched.

Some of those latter points are observable in the demo already, but most have yet to be implemented, and I only have one voice pack so far.

What say you?

This is an open problem, not a post-mortem. Moreso than with any other blog that I’ve posted, I’d really appreciate your opinions in the comments below. What do you think of my problem? What do you think of my proposed solutions? Have you anything you might recommend as other player decisions or wing mate behaviours? What pitfalls should I avoid? Are there games I should be looking at to see how they handled this problem? Thank you in advance.

Next week is the last of these posts focussing on Crow’s Nest (for now). I’ll be talking about what Sons of Sol and Crow’s Nest actually are (fictionally speaking) and how they came to be.

Until next time..

Making Crow’s Nest (part 2 of 4): Influences

Hi! This is part 2 of me offering some insight into the creation of Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest. In Part 1 I talked about my “Asteroids meets Total War” pitch and what, exactly, the hell that meant.

This week I’ll be basically talking about some of the games that are having a big influence on the development of Crow’s Nest. If you’re a space and/or strategy game fan, this may be of interest to you. Fair warning; there’s going to be a lot of Star Wars games in here!

These aren’t “games that are similar to my game”, but instead they make up more of a history of the games that I have personally played that influence Crow’s Nest in some way.

First up..

Asteroids (1979)

Last week I talked a bit about this and Total War as influences so I’ll be brief. Here is one of the very original space shooters, and a classic game. There’s the three-life formula with a single hit and you’re dead. There’s extra lives, speed, intensity, high scores, and great use of limited technology to deliver imaginative graphics. The key ingredient to itss addictiveness is the quick restart. You can instantly hop back in for another round to try and beat your previous high score. It’s a simple, but proven method of keeping players pumping in quarters (or nowadays, playing and seeing advertising).

The computer room in my school when I was a kid had this on some machines so I’d race through our typing lessons so that I could play. In years since I see it every now and again as a web link and I always click in for a few rounds. The thrill of dodging through asteroids at high speeds and evading incoming laser shots never gets old, and it’s a mechanic that I’m endeavouring to capture in Crow’s Nest.

Total War series

Again, I talked about Shogun specifically last week, but to reiterate, I loved the two-sided approach to a strategy game. Until Shogun, I’d only played strategy games like Command & Conquer (C&C) where you fight one battle at a time and it never influenced the next battle. It didn’t matter how many losses you took in exchange for victory, and if you lost you would just restart the level. In Total War, you finally could say “we may have lost this battle, but we’ll win the war” and it would mean something.

At the time, I was unaware that XCOM had been doing this since 1994, and there were probably several other games too, but this was my first and the experience of playing Shogun for the first time shaped how I would view games forever more. Now, as a designer, the strategic depth of Total War and games like it is something I want to incorporate into my games whenever possible.

I also liked how special units could affect the war. Diplomacy and assassinations could drastically change the course of the war. I’ve always kept in mind the influence that special units could and (I think) should have on a strategy game.

X-COM series

X-COM: Ufo Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) (1994)

There were a whole bunch of XCOM games starting with 1994’s original, but the series wasn’t well managed, wasn’t always in the hands of the original creators, and really took a dive until the 2012 remake by Firaxis and 2K, ‘XCOM: Enemy Unknown’. When the latter was announced, it was the first time I really noticed the series. I’d never played it. I picked up the original before the release of the remake, and played both games in 2012. My world changed!

I’d always avoided turn-based strategy games. I just had never liked the few examples I’d played. I thought they were too unrealistic because you wind up with two soldier just looking at each other instead of fighting. What I didn’t appreciate was that in the moments between the action, when you’re making your decisions like in a chess match (ironically, I loved chess), you’re getting a whole different type of gameplay. Instead of trying to simply react quickly like in an RTS, you’re really trying to solve a problem in the most efficient way possible (like a puzzle game) but with the added element of random chance getting in the way of your best laid plans. RTS games have this plus speed, but turn based games forego the speed in favour of really making you think about the consequences of your actions.

I’ll be talking next week about a design challenge that this posed to my game. The turn-based element buys you gravitas insofar as the player has made every move and so they have nobody to blame for the consequences. In any real-time game where you have allies, they’ll likely by controlled by the AI, and if they die you may be inclined to blame the designer or the AI, and not your own command skills.

Chances are they're not all coming back! — Chances are they’re not all coming back!

What I love about XCOM is the same thing that I love about Total War: persistence! The game allows you to fail and recover, not just restart. What XCOM does that Total War doesn’t really do is make you care about individual soldiers. In dealing with small squads over dozens of missions (and especially if you choose to name and customise them yourself) you get to form relationships with individual soldiers. Sending your best veteran sniper into a risky situation to try and rescue your best medic is a weighty decision that C&C or Total War can’t really deliver. The tension is immense because the consequences are permanent. That means that success is vastly more rewarding here than in normal games. You’re always glad to see troops come home alive. The range of emotions you can evoke in the player is what earns the XCOM series such devoted fans.

I also loved the base management, particularly in the original game (or the fan-made Xenonauts (2014)). Having to actually buy replacement rockets, bullets, grenades, and med packs may have been too heavy on the micromanagement side, but then again, a shortage of finances really affected your tactical options when you went into battle. You might fire a rocket to keep your troops safe from an ambush, but you wince as you see thousands of credits go up in smoke! Also in those games I loved that your home base could be attacked, but may not be. 2012’s XCOM and its expansion Enemy Within didn’t have this. EW had one mandatory base attack mission. In the other games you could attack enemy bases or leave them be, and they could do the same to you. Each side could have more than one base, but they were expensive to run. The decision was up to you!

I haven’t decided how many of these design influences will appear in the strategy layer of Crow’s Nest, but some of them definitely will.

Star Wars: X-Wing series (1993-1999)

Now we get to the combat influences! I’ve said before on this blog that 1993’s X-Wing was my first ever game. I played the hell out of it! Its sequels TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance were also hugely influential for me.

I must acknowledge that, like many of the Star Wars games, these were cashing in on the popularity of other games. Wing Commander (1990) paved the way for X-Wing. Lucasarts said “we could do that, but with iconic Star Wars ships, music, and sound. People will go insane for it!” So my influence’s influence was really Wing Commander, but I never actually played any of them until I backed Star Citizen and started looking up Chris Roberts’ older games.

Tragically, X-Wing Alliance (1999) remains the last game in this series, but it’s one of my favourite games of all time. The series centred around dogfighting in the Star Wars ships, exclusively in space. Alliance was the first one where you could fly bigger ships like the Millennium Falcon, jump sectors in hyperspace during a mission, or dock with craft to rearm or “board” them (you just sat in the turret while other people on your ship supposedly did the boarding, but it was still cool).

X-Wing Alliance (1999). Fly the Millennium Falcon against the second Death Star !

It had over 50 missions and (what I thought) was a great story set alongside the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, culminating in you (changing characters to Lando) flying the Millennium Falcon in the Battle of Endor, all the way inside the second Death Star!

Wing mates would take your orders, get chatty with you, call for help, and taunt the enemy! That’s not unique to this game, or anything, but it adds greatly to the atmosphere and it’s in Crow’s Nest too!

The briefings, the mission types, the dramatic set-pieces, the in-game reinforcements and dramatic turnings of the tide of battle are all fresh in my memory and are heavily influencing the way I’m designing the combat missions of Crow’s Nest. While Alliance was a linear game, and mine is more dynamic, I feel I can still deliver a lot of the same drama, action and intensity but with the added benefits of the tension gained from the possibility of loss.

The one major thing I wanted to change is that in 3D space you see very little of the battle. When an enemy goes past you you lose sight of them. When a big ship explodes spectacularly, you may not be looking in the right direction at the right time to see it. I wanted to take 3D space combat games and put them in 2D so you have greater situational awareness and can see more of the action! That’s my big departure, but otherwise, the combat in Crow’s Nest is heavily influenced by the X-Wing games; far more so than it is by your average top-down space shooter.

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998)

The original was out on the N64, and later the PC. Two sequels came out on the Gamecube too. These were also 3D Star Wars ship combat games, but now mostly focussed on planetary combat, against TIE Fighters & ground units, instead of TIE Fighters & Star Destroyers.

If you played these games and the current Crow’s Nest demo, my big take-away from Rogue Squadron should be obvious: The orders system.

You have two wing mates with you most of the time and they can largely take care of themselves, but you can give them a few orders on the D-pad. D-up is to “Form Up” and they increase your overall fire power by flying on your wing and shooting when you shoot. I’ve used this order directly (it’s not stealing if you declare the influence, right?) as well as the ability to keep your wing mates safe by telling them to retreat. Beyond that, the orders system starts to differ, but feeling like you’re not alone is important to a game where you play a fighter squadron, and Rogue Squadron handled it well!

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014)

Can anyone have played this game and not loved the nemesis system? This Lord of the Rings game has you play a human Ranger & elven ghost (sharing the same body) and travel around Mordor… eh, doing things.. revenge, mostly. It played a bit like the Batman Arkham games in the fighting systems and like many open world games otherwise, but the nemesis system stood it apart, and it even won a few Game Of The Year Awards.

In the picture above, you can see one of dozens of enemy commanders. These exist in a ranking hierarchy. You can “ally” with some of them and assist their rise to power in order to get rid of certain other nemeses in the game.

Each nemesis (as long as they’re alive, anyway) will remember having met and fought you, and they’ll comment on the result of that battle. As seen above, they all have different strengths and weaknesses. At first, these are unknown to you but you can interrogate underlings and rivals (forgive me if I’m not exactly right, there) to learn these traits. For example, a nemesis might have beaten you down the first three times you tried to fight him, then you learn he’s afraid of a ‘caragor’, so you show up riding on the back of one and he’ll flee with his tail between his legs! Another nemesis might hate caragors, and so this same tactic would only enrage him, boosting his stats!

This latter part of the system is something I’m interested in implementing into Crow’s Nest. You will benefit from spying on enemies by learning things about their movements, or what types of ships they favour using. You could just approach the battles blind, but intel gathering will pay off.

I don’t necessarily plan to have you ally with factions or control pirate groups, but I’m at least taking inspiration from the nemesis system insofar as learning about your enemy and having them remember you goes.

Honorable Mentions

Star Wars: Empire At War (2006)

This is one of my favourite strategy games ever, especially the two player competitive campaign, but there’s not so much I’m taking from it that I didn’t already credit Total War for.

Your armies persist across a galaxy map, space map, AND individual planetary maps. It’s very unlike Empire at War, though, because you control fewer units. The loss of the only Star Destroyer you may have in your fleet really hurts, even if you win the battle. You can steamroll the enemy for a while, but you’re taking losses as you go and will run out of steam, thus having less units left to defend your new territories from counter-attack.

The land maps also host buildings like Ion Cannons or Hypervelocity Guns which can be used by the defending team in the space battle above that planet. If you are wise, you might raid the planet with a small force (small raid forces can bypass the space battle) with the sole aim of destroying that one building before launching your space battle. If you hold the space above the planet, you can hit the land battle with bombing runs and orbital strikes. This interplay of systems is another great example of what multi-layered games can achieve.

X-COM: Interceptor (1998)

I only played this for the first time in 2015, and development on Crow’s Nest was already well underway. It’s not far off what I’m doing, as it turns out, but nobody thought this game was all that it could be either.

You command a base on a strategy map and manage its resources, as with other XCOM games, but instead of the turn-based battles you have a fighter ship battle. The problem is that these battles were nearly all the same and they got very repetitive.

The only influence I’m taking from this game is in what not to do. I need to ensure missions in Crow’s Nest are varied enough, and that there are real characters and stories playing out during the campaign. To what extent, I don’t yet know, but this is a good example of a game relying 100% on its systems producing all the gameplay.

Star Citizen (20??)

How can I make a space game in 2015 and not be influenced by Star Citizen/Squadron 42? That said, my game is a single-player war game, not a multiplayer space-everything game. I’m very excited for Star Citizen, but even moreso for the single-player side, ‘Squadron 42’. If we get to play S42 early next year I imagine it might influence Crow’s Nest somewhat, but probably not in many ways that X-Wing and Wing Commander haven’t already. If the game takes longer than that to come out, Crow’s Nest may already have been released. Time will tell.

So!

I could also mention FTL for its art style, actually, but the art in Crow’s Nest so far is just my placeholder stuff and I don’t believe that I can draw. I certainly won’t be the final artist, so it’s not worth mentioning visual influences at this stage, really.

I’ve found that when making a game, a lot of people will come and say “oh, you must have been influenced by this” or “have you played that”? There are so many games out there that chances are the answer will be “no, actually. I haven’t heard of that one”. I’ve listed my main influences here, and very few of them are actually 2D space games.

If there’s anything you think I should check out, either because it’s similar to what I’m doing or just because it rocks, please let me know!

Next week I’ll be focussing on a design challenge posed by trying to do some of what XCOM does in a real-time action game. If that sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the RetroNeo Games Facebook or Twitter accounts (link icons at the top and bottom of this page).

Until next time..

Making Crow’s Nest (part 1 of 4): My “Asteroids meets Total War” Pitch

I’ll be away over the next few weeks so I’ve decided to do a four-parter and schedule it to post at my normal times so my one-a-week blog goal remains unbroken. I’ve been going now for over 6 months now and wanted to at least see out the end of 2015 with an ‘undefeated streak’.

To that end, I’ll be turning the blog’s focus a little more inward and talking about how my game in development (Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest) came to be, what its influences are, the features of the game and certain design challenges that I’m facing. As it’s still in development and still just me on the team, this is all still in motion, but there should be good insights and new information for anyone who’s interested in reading. It will be interesting to compare these posts with a post-mortem for the game once it’s finally out, too.

So, with that out of the way..

What is Crow’s Nest?

I won’t wax lyrical here, you can check out the game’s page yourself, and either play the demo or watch the gameplay footage. Briefly, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is an upcoming tactical space shooter with a strategy layer. I’ve described it as “Asteroids meets Total War”.

You can see some gameplay from the playable PC demo below. It’s early in development and due out in Q1 2017.

How Does Asteroids meet Total War, exactly?

So my pitch for Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is that it’s “Asteroids meets Total War” and I’ve found that this can get people interested quite effectively. How does a top-down space shooter from the 1970s tie in with one of the largest, most successful strategy game series in the world; one which, until Total War: Warhammer was announced, was set exclusively in historical Earth periods with swords and spears and massive armies?

To be fair I could also describe the game as “Wing Commander meets Xcom”, but a pitch has to be as catchy as possible, n’est pas?

The similarities between Asteroids and Crow’s Nest are pretty plain to see. They both have a small, triangular space fighter flying around an asteroid field, and, quite importantly, the ships are driven by Newtonian physics, meaning if you stop accelerating you will keep drifting. There’s no drag in space so you can turn on the spot and shoot backwards, and to slow down you have to turn around and thrust in the opposite direction.

The similarities really end there, though. In Crow’s Nest the goal is not to kill asteroids for points, the screen isn’t locked in position, and both you and the asteroids can take more than one hit.

Then from here I started building up more of a squadron-based thing, adding wing mates, squad orders, and reasonably intelligent enemies, as well as the ability to communicate with your fleet for reinforcements. Here, I was taking inspiration from Star Wars games like Rogue Squadron and X-Wing. I’ll talk about games that influenced Crow’s Nest in a follow-up part.

The important take-away is that Crow’s Nest has an action/combat layer presented in a classic arcade-like style.

The trailer above is for Shogun, the first Total War game in 2000. I haven’t played them all, but I beat this one so I know it represents some of the ideas I’m going for. You command your chosen family dynasty in feudal Japan during the Sengoku Jidai period of history. It’s a game of two halves. There’s the tactical combat side where you command individual army units in a single battle. This half of the game is represented in Crow’s Nest as the ‘Asteroids’ part.

The other side of the game is the strategy layer, where you have a map of all of Japan and time passes months at a time. You move your armies around the country to reinforce or attack territories (Risk style) and then fight the tactical battles for those areas using only the units you brought with you. No Command & Conquer-style building during a battle! But in addition to this, you could send spies, assassins and emissaries around the world. You could negotiate for peace or assassinate an opposing general the night before a battle, weakening his forces when you face them in the tactical layer.

You could also bring your own character (the Daimyo) into battle for big morale bonuses, but if you died in battle, you were dead. If you didn’t have an adult male heir, it was game over! If you did, you basically had an ‘extra life’. Similarly, if you won a battle but lost all of your cavalry, they were gone! You no longer had them to move around the strategy layer. This interplay leant real gravitas to every little decision, and to every death. I love these mechanics and knew I wanted them for Crow’s Nest.

An early prototype for the strategy map in Crow's Nest. — An early prototype for the strategy map in Crow’s Nest.

My original idea was that you would control several fleets (as many as you could build/afford) in Crow’s Nest and defend a territory from pirate marauders. You would also send spies on missions to gather intel and attempt assassinations or to sabotage the enemy. When a tactical battle occurred, the losses and gains would persist back to the strategy layer. This is why I chose “Total War” as a suitable descriptor for my pitch.

As development went on, I decided that it might be better for you to control just a single fleet. This would make your flagship all the more precious to you, and prevent you from using steamroll tactics to the same extent. This way, even in the late game, battles would stay tense for the player. It would also limit the amount of pilots you have to dozens, not hundreds, and make their lives and progression matter more to you. This means that Xcom might be a better descriptor than Total War now, but as the strategy side in Crow’s Nest is still very early in development and prone to change, I haven’t decided whether to change the pitch yet.

Obviously, those four words aren’t my whole pitch, but they’re the short version.

What do you think of the pitch? Have you any experience pitching? Any advice? Would saying “Xcom” be better than “Total War”? Both franchises are currently doing well and get the point across to anyone who knows games.

Next Sunday, I’ll be posting Part 2, where I talk about the other games that have influenced the development of Crow’s Nest in a mini-review sort of way.

Until next time..

Links:

Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest page on RetroNeo Games
Development Log
Play the game in web browser (not Chrome)
Download PC version

Far Cry goes Primal

The next Far Cry game was revealed the week before last with the trailer above (well, after an elaborate time-wasting/hype-generating (?) live streamed cave painting thing). The noteworthy thing is that, for the first time, the game isn’t set in modern times, but in 10,000 BC!

You play Takkar, a hunter who’s lost his tribe to the bellies of sabre-tooth tigers and/or the now-squishy feet of woolly mammoths. The game takes place in a land called Oros, where you will climb the food chain and tame the wilds! Or something..

Coming so soon after the November 2014 release of Far Cry 4 (Primal will release in February 2016), many suspected that this was maybe a standalone expansion pack to that game, in the same way that Far Cry Blood Dragon was for Far Cry 3. But no, this is a full priced game, at $60 for PC.

Very little is known about the game yet, so for now let’s just give it some benefit of the doubt and assume that the game is of full length and going to be worth the money. If you’d like to gamble on that now, however, Ubisoft has you covered! You can of course pre-order immediately and get the Legend of the Mammoth content, whatever that is.

I’m not here to complain, though. I think this is a very bold move for Ubisoft and I’m very glad to see it happen. While I’m sure another team is busy cranking out Far Cry 5 somewhere, (which will be very similar to Far Cry 4, which was very similar to Far Cry 3) the Ubisoft Montreal team (with help) has stepped outside of the normal comfort zone of their franchise and tried something different. That at least has earned my respect and attention. Can you imagine Call of Duty setting their next game in a time period that had no guns?!

This also isn’t a magical or mythical 10,000 BC (to the best of our current knowledge). There are no dinosaurs, no magic, and seemingly no cop-outs. The game is discarding a lot of the things that the Far Cry series is known for. These would be:

luscious open-world environments (okay, check)
guns (oops)
explosions (doubtful)
fire physics (yeah, okay, probably)
vehicles (nope)
and -of late- wing suits (surely not) and riding elephants (probably).

What do they get in return for these sacrifices? Well, not a whole lot that we’ve seen so far. Spears and bows? The series already has bows and throwing knives. It also already had factions and crafting to a limited degree. Primal promises these things, but hopefully it’ll build them out in worthwhile ways.

We get mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, but we already had elephants, tigers, rhinos and sharks. There’s no massive difference there, except maybe scale. This also has me a little nervous. Those two animals are featured prominently in the trailer and marketing material. Presumably, this is them putting their best foot forward, as is the marketing way, but these are not particularly innovative creatures for the Far Cry series. The elephant was new to Far Cry 4 and was a point their marketers tried to sell relentlessly. I don’t think a mammoth and no guns will make many people splash out $60+ for the new game. But, as I said, we know little about the rest of the game yet. The video below offers some French-accented clues.

My Concerns

They won’t commit

PC Gamer had a good article about what they would and wouldn’t like to see and, like me, were also concerned that “no guns” doesn’t really mean no guns. Maybe you could put some ‘boom powder’ in a stick to shoot rocks and things. Yeah, that’s a gun! And a crap gun, at that! I hope they commit to the vision, otherwise there was no point in tying their hands by setting the game in the Stone Age. But hey, the game launches in 4 months. Whether such a feature (or any others) is in or out has been decided long ago and won’t change now.

I’m also concerned that they’ll stretch some leather hide into a wing-suit “because Far Cry needs wing suits now. Put in in”. If you do that, you also need a parachute, mate, and earliest credit for those goes to Leonardo Da Vinci. Just commit, and we’ll be fine.

That this will be anything like the movie

I don’t mean the terrible Far Cry movie, but the even more terrible 10,000 BC movie, with an honourable 8% on Rotter Tomatoes. Seriously, am I the only one who’s seen it? Nobody has mentioned it in connection with this game yet, so far as I can tell.

I’m not saying these two things are similar, but they are both set in 10,000 BC, open with a pack of hunters sneaking towards a herd of mammoths, have the hero’s tribe slaughtered, and relocate the hero to a jungle environment. I hope to God the similarities end there. The resemblance is uncanny! It can’t have been accidental, and I’d be very worried about anything taking story tips from 10,000 BC the movie.

Why I’m Optimistic

As I said, we know so little yet, and my concerns may be totally unfounded. My optimism is equally unwarranted, but Ubisoft wouldn’t have taken a bet on stripping away core gameplay pillars if they had nothing to prop the rest up with (I hope). We could see some great new stuff!

Melee Combat

In my swordfighting in games article last month I lamented how far melee combat in games had come (not far at all) over the years. The enemies in Far Cry Primal are known to not just to be wild beats, but also other hostile tribes, seen in the trailer wielding clubs. With no guns in the game, up-close combat is going to be very important. This could also be on my concerns list, because if we are expected to just repeat the tired old “step-back-to-avoid-enemy-swing, swing-yourself, step-in-to land-the-swing, repeat” formula this game will get old fast, and definitely mean that Ubisoft missed a trick. A AAA studio like them should be able to deliver us something interesting in a gun-less first person action game, and I hope they do! Blocking and different attacks at a minimum!

Boss Animals

In all other Far Cry games, taking down any hostile animal has simply been a matter of hitting it with enough bullets or explosives.. or cars.. or some combination thereof. If you look at something like Horizon: Zero Dawn, we can see multi-staged approaches to weakening enemies, avoiding their attacks, and hitting different critical areas. I find it hard to believe that killing a mammoth in this game will be as dumb as hitting him with 100 sharp sticks. I’m hoping (and not spending a penny if it’s not the case) that taking down the mammoth, the main feature on the box art, will involve avoiding its charges, luring it into traps, and/or tricking it into rising up on its hind legs so you can then attack the soft underbelly. Any less than something resembling that would just be phoning it in, and unworthy of a Far Cry game.

Factions

It’s known that you need to work with friendly tribe members to conquer other tribes. The problem with games marketing is that it can be deliberately vague when it’s trying to inflate a feature. For example, I could say about Far Cry 2, 3, and 4 that you work with certain groups to conquer other groups, and it’s only technically true. In a practical sense, you do everything, and there might be a couple of other guys around to get shot for you.

If this has been expanded upon in any meaningful way, like having squad orders or abilities, there could be something unique in the game. It wouldn’t be hard to do for a studio to do in this day and age, but I somehow don’t expect much from this feature.

Crafting

Same goes for crafting. Games 3 & 4 had crafting of limited items, but it wasn’t overly important. Crafting weapons and medicines for survival in the stone age would be very important. Ubisoft seem to be making a fuss over the crafting system so let’s hope there’s something to it.

I watched some commentary and the host didn't know what this was. Clearly a sabretooth Tiger skull with a dagger through it! Right? — I watched some commentary and the host didn’t know what this was. Clearly a sabretooth Tiger skull with a dagger through it! Right?

Finally

I do think the announcement of this new direction is newsworthy, as it’s a bold move! Charging $60 for a game that seems like it’s been in production not much longer than a year is also a bold move, but we’ll see what it’s worth as details emerge in the run up to a February 23rd, 2016 console release (March for PC). I’ve my gripes with all the Far Cry games (and especially the Crysis ones) but I’ve always been a fan of the series (except Crysis 2 & 3). I can’t imagine that Primal will be too disappointing to a life-long Far Cry fan like myself, but I’ve been wrong before..

Hopefully, though, we’ll be getting a unique First Person (non-)Shooter. Are you excited? Guarded? Totally cynical? Do you know anything about this that I don’t? (If you’re from the future you’re cheating!) Leave a comment!

Until next time..

PS Check out my own game Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest. A new combat demo has just gone up for browser play or PC download. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Star Wars: Battlefront (Beta). How is it?

It’s been some week for games news and I’d no shortage of choices for what to write about today. Far Cry Primal was annoucned, Star Citzen revealed a lot of news at Citizen Con last night, (including the fact that Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis and many others are acting for the single player story) and the Star Wars Battlefront Beta is in full swing. I decided to write on Battlefront in case it convinces anyone to give it a go tonight. It ends sometime tomorrow but it’s worth a look.

The game launches on November 17th in North America, and a few days after that in different regions. That’s just over a month away and means that this “Beta” is not really a beta in the usual sense of the word. The game is 99.9% complete. This is more of a demo of a few modes while they stress test servers for a smoother launch. They’re not (particularly, even though they have a survey) asking for gameplay suggestions. Any major features are now set in stone. This means that anything people see and don’t like in the Beta is probably still going to be there in the €60 release. Warts and all.

First, a brief history of Battlefront (3) and what led to this newest iteration.

In 2002, Dice and EA (the same pair responsible for this game) released Battlefield 1942, and have continued that very popular series ever since, with Battlefield Hardline being the most recent release.
In 2004, Lucasarts, as they have always been wont to do, hopped on the latest game craze with a Star Wars version of Battlefield called Star Wars Battlefront (1). This was well received and Battlefront 2 came out in 2005, but there’s been no new entries since.
Now, in 2015, Dice and EA, the makers of BattleFIELD are releasing the newest BattleFRONT game, with the same name as the original. Just to be confusing.

I’ve played all games in question, and the new Battlefront stands apart from all those others. Sure it’s a large multiplayer shooter set in large levels with vehicular combat, but it very much has its own take on things, so anyone fearing that it was just going to be a Star Wars skin on Battlefield can set those particular fears to rest.

How Is It Different?

Vehicles

The biggest departure from any of those games is that vehicles are now not lying empty on the map waiting for a driver. You find power-ups on the map for all sorts of things, including vehicles. The spawn points are semi-random. When you get one you can activate it to spawn a vehicle at the edge of the map and you hop right into it. You can’t exit the vehicle and are basically in it until you die (which won’t likely be too long).

This is a bold new take on a core mechanic of the Battle-x games. It has pros and cons. On the plus side, the vehicles can’t be damaged or stolen by the enemy team before they’re in use. This is a huge benefit to gameplay. It would annoy me to see Stormtroopers owning the sky by flying all the TIE fighters AND Rebel X-Wings on the map. This keeps the balance better, which is a huge plus.

On the downside, if you actually want to play primarily as a pilot or tank driver, the new Battlefront does not have you covered. There’s no practice mode (at least in the Beta) and you can never deliberately get a vehicle if you want one. In my first ten games I probably only flew two ships and drove one AT-ST, and my familiarity and skill with them were nil, so I couldn’t even enjoy them before being destroyed. You have to play hours of the game (mostly as infantry) if you want to start getting good in vehicles.

Heroes

Battlefront 2 (and I think #1) did have the hero feature, but we haven’t seen it in the Battlefield series. In it, you would gain control of an overpowered hero or villain like a Jedi or Sith if you reached a certain kill streak or points goal. You then had a limited amount of time to control a hero character. The heroes given depended on the map and would fit the theme for that time setting in Star Wars history, so Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker were never on the same map, but Luke and Vader were, or Anakin and Jango Fett were.

I’m not sure how careful Dice are being with that attention to detail. It’s a minor issue but fans have complained that on the Hoth level in the Beta, we see Luke from Return of the Jedi (so, a full Jedi with green lightsabre) fighting Vader, instead of a younger Luke in pilot or snow gear.

You also now get heroes the same way as vehicles, and they’re even more rare. I’ve played 7 hours and been a hero character twice, for about twenty seconds each time, and I still have no idea how to use their powers to good effect. Also, when they’re defeated, they just kneel down looking sad for a few seconds, then completely disappear in an instant. This is a very poor animation, as are many others on the heroes, and it seems that the game would be stronger without them at this point.

Iron Sights

It was reported earlier that there was no aim-down-sights feature to the game. There is now. Possibly it was added due to the unpopularity of that announcement. All guns seem to have the same sight (a low-zoom scope, with the sniper rifle’s zoom also being very low). Crouching also gives no aim or stability bonus, as it does in Battlefield. Jumping or running while shooting doesn’t seem to hurt the aim that much either, so this game is quite dumbed down (/made more accessible) in that regard.

No Single Player

The Battlefield games have mostly had story campaigns, or at least single player campaign modes. The two Battlefront games also had some single player options. The new game just seems to have a Survival mode which is a wave fighting mode that you can play solo or in co-op against AI bots. This is big negative for me. You can keep playing multiplayer matches forever if you like, but I like a game, particularly a €60 one, to also give me something to enjoy on my own with some narrative or strategy. I would have loved to see the Galactic Conquest mode from Battlefront 2 in here. Instead I’m basically looking at paying €60 to kill and die in equal measure for as much time as I like. It’s not always what I’m after, and I have plenty of other multiplayer shooters to go to if that’s what I want.

There is one other single-co-op mode but it’s not in the Beta.

Spectacle & Polish

The Walker Assault level of the Beta, set during the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back, is one of the best levels/experiences I’ve ever come across in a game. Dice have absolutely nailed the sounds and visuals! The clunking walkers, the punchy lasers, the snow crunching, the graphical fidelity, and then the level design itself all serve to craft one of the most immersive Star Wars experiences anyone has ever had. If you’re still reading and the Beta is still on, please just load up the game and run around the battle for a few minutes. This has to be experienced! I don’t know if I’d pay €60 for it, but for free, go for it!

The other two levels also look beautiful and all have interesting starship battles happening overhead as part of the scenery. The lengths they’ve gone to with immersion here are spectacular.

Frostbite Engine

There’s none of Dice’s trademark ‘levolution’ going on here, at least not in the Beta. The levels are pretty rigidly set up. And AT-ST in the Survival mode blew through a few boulders near me and I was actually surprised. It looked great, but the fact that I was surprised by environmental destruction happening in a Dice game shows that there’s not much of it going on here. Don’t expect falling skyscrapers or crumbling buildings. There may be more environmental destruction in other levels, but I thought they’d have shown it off a bit more in the beta if it was much of a feature.

No Server Browser

The game doesn’t let you choose where to play. You can form a party with friends, but you can’t choose your server, and this will probably annoy PC players in particular. However, I have to mention that from my desktop, I can launch the Beta, find a full Walker Assault server, and be on the ground shooting in literally under 1 minute. If the full game can accomplish close to those times, I don’t care about not having a server browser, and players would be far more likely to hop in for a few quick rounds. Loading times were some of the biggest obstacles to me returning to the Battlefield games after a few weeks.

More ‘Rule of Fun’

They’ve tried to make more of a game for everyone here. Opinions will vary on whether this is good or bad but I actually found myself enjoying the game more for the presence of certain unrealistic features, and I’d normally be a fan of realism.
For instance, there’s no friendly fire. Unrealistic? Sure. But it removes the ability for the inevitable assholes on your team to grief you too much. They also can’t steal your vehicles. I found myself less frustrated playing this than I have playing Battlefield games, which is a huge plus for me, even if the tactical considerations are lessened. A shooter with 40 people is not where I’ll go to get my tactical fix anyway, so for fun, this was a good move in my books.

They also put all your abilities on ‘star cards’ that you equip. You don’t automatically get grenades, but you can chose them as 1 of 3 possible power-ups. In here are also jetpacks, a one-round sniper rifle, other grenades, or a personal shield. You don’t carry grenade ammo, but instead they are on a simple cool-down before you can use another one. Your health also recharges fully moments after a firefight. This basically means that if you don’t die in a fight, you’ll have full health and ammo very shortly afterwards. This allows the game to keep flowing at a decent pace, I think. I’m in favour of it.

No Classes

All the other games had a character class that you choose from with your primary abilities. In the new Battlefront you’re basically all the assault character, but you can choose a variation on your primary weapon, and then choose 3 star cards to give yourself some level of customisation. This also serves to keep more people in the battle though and not hiding on the edges fulfilling repair or sniper roles. This does make for a better battle experience, even if it alienates some players who have a favourite class. There’s no medics or engineers here, and while they are mines, they are only available as random pick-ups on the map. You can’t plan for them.

No Revives, Quick Respawn

If you die, you die. There’s no bleed-out time, defibrillators or medic classes. You do respawn very quickly though, without a 30 second timer. Again, this keeps the game flowing, removes frustration and also stops the game getting stuck in situations where medics keep reviving somebody from around a corner. You can also spawn on your partner (you get only one, no squads) to get into the action sooner.
The levels are also well laid out and it never takes too long to find the action again.

No Map or Spotting

While you have a local radar to show objectives, team mates, and enemies who have fired recently, there is no larger level map. The Hoth map, and presumably others, are good at filtering you towards your goal, but early on I was confused as to where in the world I was at a given time. The ‘spot’ feature of recent Battlefield games is also not present. This is a simpler action game, and less of a strategic one.

Anyone familiar with Battle-x games will probably have realised that, while the core mechanic of shoot-the-enemy is still there, this game is quite different from its compatriots. For me, it’s pleasantly different, but not all will agree.

The Beta Itself

There are 3 modes you can play in the Beta.

Walker Assault

This is the 40-person Hoth level, and very addictive. The rounds are quick enough, the spectacle is amazing, and I kept going back for more, despite saying several times that “this” would be the last round. If this is representative of the game at large, I think this game might really have some legs. However, it’s very same-y. Apart from maybe missing out on playing a hero or vehicle, you’ve seen 95% of the gameplay after playing a couple of rounds on each side. There won’t be much variety and there’s not a lot of room for improvisation. It did keep me coming back, though, so what does that say?.. It’s addictive, anyway.

The only thing was that the Imperials nearly always win. It’s extremely difficult for the Rebels to destroy the 2 walkers in time. They have to hold an uplink station a fair while to start a Y-Wing strike. If they can do that, the Y-Wings only make the AT-AT “vulnerable”, and only for about 10-15 seconds. This window is your only chance to chip away at their (considerable) health. Snowspeeders (often the only way in a Star Wars game to take down an AT-AT, by tying up the legs) can for some reason only attempt the tow-cable manoeuvre during this vulnerable time. This is both non-canon, and extremely unbalanced in its current form. In my 7 hours of play, I only once saw the Rebels win, and I never saw a Snowspeeder successfully kill a Walker, though this may change as players become more used to the game and if the walkers’ health is adjusted by the developers. The walkers I saw die all died to blaster fire and grenades.

Drop Zone

I didn’t like this mode at all. Sixteen players fight with no vehicles in a volcanic, rocky map, over control of drop pods. It’s basically King of the Hill but each hill gets captured very quickly and then a new pod gets dropped. If you died at the pod, even with the instant respawn, I still never had time to run back and attempt to take it a second time before the timer was up. Also, on this map, the Empire team is at a clear disadvantage as their white armour makes them stick out like a sore thumb, while the rebels are harder to spot. The map is also very small with not much going on compared to Walker assault. I kept getting placed on teams that were outnumbered (like 8 vs 5 or 6) and there was no auto-balance. This inevitably meant that we lost every match 5-0 and it was no fun. Even if I was on the winning team, though, I wouldn’t think much of it.

The troubling thing is that if this is their 2nd-best multiplayer mode, then I don’t hold out much hope for the overall quality of the full game’s levels. Surely they’d only have put their better modes in the Beta?

Survival (Single or Co-op)

Those TIE Fighters in the shot aren't actually part of the level. They stay way off in the background as part of a looping battle animation. They don't get this close. — Those TIE Fighters in the shot aren’t actually part of the level. They stay way off in the background as part of a looping battle animation. They don’t get this close.

In the Beta, my friends weren’t online and you can only play co-op with friends, it appeared, so I had to play solo in ‘normal’ difficulty (only difficulty in the Beta). The Beta was limited to 6 waves, each increasing in difficulty. The final game will have ten I think. Even so, I didn’t die once, and to have another player making those waves even easier would be no fun at all, I think. The AI bots animate well but they die very quickly, don’t often stick together, and provide very little challenge unless you’re swarmed. Even the AT-STs aren’t that hard to beat as you can easily escape them with your jet pack, recharge your health and powerful attacks, and then come back around the canyon behind them to take off another chunk of their health.

The Full Game’s Other Modes

Multiplayer

There would appear to be seven multiplayer modes available in the full game. I said that I don’t think much of Drop Zone, but that Walker Assault is great! I believe Hoth isn’t the only level for this mode, because there’s also an Endor one in the trailer. I’m not sure if there are any more beyond that. Presumably with EA’s (almost) entire marketing push being focussed on Walker Assault, the other modes aren’t up to the same standards.

Supremacy: I believe this is like Conquest from many games. Your mileage may vary.
Blast: Don’t know.
Cargo: Don’t know.
Droid Run: I don’t know what this is but presumably is some sort of glorified escort mission. Hooray… no, wait.
Fighter Squadron. We’ve had a trailer for this. This seems to be the only mode that will satisfy those who were looking for some good Star Wars spaceship warfare, and even then it’s not in space (admittedly, planet surfaces are more interesting to look at than endless stars), and it’s not like the Space Levels of Battlefront 2, which featured ship-to-ship boarding, flagships, and smaller escort ships to be destroyed. Without playing this mode, I can’t guess how much fun it will or won’t be, but it is at least different. See the trailer below.

Single player (slash, co-op) only has 3 offerings; the aforementioned Survival, a Training Mode, and Battles. Training obviously won’t have much longevity in it, but I don’t know what Battles are.

In Summary

The Battlefront Beta is definitely worth playing. The Walker Assault mode is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a game, despite countless Star Wars games of the past having taken a shot at it.

The beta has some graphical glitches that may or may not be cleaned up by launch, but which aren’t deal breakers either.

The game is definitely its own monster. Managing to find a gameplay spot that stands apart from both Battlefield and the original Battlefront games gives this new release some validity. The graphical and audio quality push this even further. But the gameplay is now 90% focussed around close-range infantry combat, with vehicles and heroes only presented as rare bonuses to shake up your experience, rather than being legitimate roles.

The game is obviously timed to maximise sales by releasing only a few weeks before Christmas and the release of Episode 7 in cinemas. I do think that it will do well for all of these reasons, but does it deserve to?

From what I’ve seen of the Beta, the game only has one noteworthy mode, which I think has only two levels (Hoth and Endor). I’ve had my fill of Hoth in less than 7 hours of play, and Endor will probably not even keep me interested that long, having already experienced the mode broadly.

While there are six other multiplayer modes, and two single/co-op modes, none of them have been well advertised so I’m presuming that they’re not particularly worth mentioning. I feel like I’ve seen the best that the game has to offer already for free. And that much wasn’t worth €60 to me, personally.

I’ll definitely be waiting for reviews, and then probably sales, if I’m ever going to pick up this game. Still, though, it has its merits and I definitely think it’s worth a look. If you can get on the Beta tonight or if EA offer “Free Time” to play like they do with some other games, take advantage!

Until next time..

Those Misogynist Games

Duke Nukem Forever. Duke was never about being politically correct, though. He's a blatant satire taken to the nth degree.. — Duke Nukem Forever. Duke was never about being politically correct, though. He’s a blatant satire taken to the nth degree..

Here’s one I’ve been reluctant to do because it’s a topic I surely can’t win at as I risk exposing some hitherto undiscovered bigotry with every word. But sure, let’s give it a go. It concerns a conversation I had on the bus with a girl one night about two months ago. I thought of relating the conversation on the blog, then decided not to, but then a few days later I spotted the same girl again! This time I was on the bus and she was crossing the street so we didn’t meet. Regardless I decided that this total coincidence should be taken as a sign (it shouldn’t, but whatever) and I’d do this post. Since it happened a while back I’ll be paraphrasing a bit.

To start back at the start, I was on the 145 bus home from Dublin one night in August with Daniel Aherne from the Onikira team. We’d just come from dubLUDO, a meetup of Dublin game developers. We were chatting away on the bus and an Irish girl and a Filipino guy (yes, I did spell that correctly) got on and sat just behind us. The girl was quite chatty. She didn’t know the guy. She’d just sort of acquired him by talking at the bus stop and we were quickly added to the conversation. They’d come from a punk gig so we started talking music, then asked a little about the Philippines. Naturally enough she then asked where we’d come from. We said dubLUDO and in answer to her next question explained that, basically, “we make games”.

Her next question surprised me at the time, and I’ve thought about it a lot since.

“Oh, like misogynist games”?

That was her first response to us. I felt accused at first. So I then felt like I should be defensive. Of course I wasn’t personally under attack or being criticised, so reasoned discussion ensued. Dan and I explained in turn. My game (here) is very early on but is about spaceships and will have male and female characters. The player could be either, for all they know. In Onikira you slay demons as an ancient Japanese samurai, so you play a male, but you’ve a female mentor character too who teaches and guides the player character. Dan also explained that the last game he worked on had you playing as a priest in a Father Ted inspired kind of game.

'Onechambra' exists. But it's very overt about how much of a piss-take it is, so is it a problem?.. I don't even want to try answer that one. To be clear, yes, that's a fruit 'bikini'! — ‘Onechambra’ exists. But it’s very overt about how much of a piss-take it is, so is it a problem?.. I don’t even want to try answer that one. To be clear, yes, that’s a fruit ‘bikini’!

She thought our games all sounded cool and we enquired what sort of view she had of games. She said she didn’t play any but she’d know about the big ones like Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and Tomb Raider.

So I’m totally inside of the gaming world and I see all sorts of games. Progressive games. Poignant games. Sexist games. Games where you can play as a man or woman and have gay or straight (or interspecies; hey, I’m not one to judge!) relationships. Then puzzle games, games where you’re a robot, a God, a male, a female, an animal, a demon, elf, angel, alien or spaceship. I see all sorts of great and crappy games getting made and I can point to dozens or hundreds of games in my own library that you couldn’t accuse of being misogynist, some that are being overtly and deliberately progressive, and yes, a few that you could definitely accuse of being disrespectful to women (and men’s intelligence at the same time, in certain cases). So personally, I’m not overly worried about misogyny in gaming long term because I think we’re definitely headed in the right direction. Of course, I’m a straight white male, so I’m liable to be just totally wrong there, but for every (let’s say ‘recent’) game you can show me that perpetuates the stereotype that games are misogynist toys for ignorant boys, I’ll show you a dozen that don’t, and some that directly oppose that notion.

The girl I spoke to on the bus, though (let’s pretend one person is representative of a larger group for a moment) is totally outside the gaming world. We asked her why she went straight to the words “misogynist games” when we mentioned our livelihoods. She pointed to examples like Grand Theft Auto and Halo, where she just sees male characters, men in armour, men with guns, then women in jeopardy or dancing in strip clubs, etc. She said she thinks women aren’t powerful in games “except for like, Tomb Raider, and even then Lara Croft’s just shown as a sex symbol”. Of course, the reboots have changed Lara Croft’s image, which she was happy to learn.

Lara Croft, now with added trousers, narrower hips, no visible tummy, and smaller boobs.

Grand Theft Auto, okay, is never going to win prizes for sensitivity. It’s deliberate though. They market their games on controversy. However, we did all find it odd that in a game where you have 3 lead characters (GTA V), not one of them was female. Surely there was room. We’ve two white guys and one black guy (at least it wasn’t 3 white guys) but no women. Maybe Rockstar deserve some criticism there. These were all new characters written from scratch. They could have been anybody so why not write in a female character? We know GTA has female players. At least you can play as a female in multiplayer.

With Halo, Master Chief was a male character first written into existence in the late 90s, when male leads were absolutely the norm as games were still seen as something consumed mostly by boys. Halo then became a huge franchise and Master Chief became a gaming mascot. They won’t write him out of that series, or retcon him to be female, and he’ll still feature prominently on all marketing material, but they do add female characters (and powerful ones) into the Halo universe to make up for this while retaining the valuable Halo brand’s lead character. Miranda Keyes was a powerful female support character in Halo 2 & 3, and the leader of the Spartan squad in Halo 4 was female. Similarly, Gears of War (after the first one) started adding playable female soldiers, even if we still mostly had to follow Marcus Phoenix as the game’s charismatic (jk) lead.

8 males, one female, and pikachu (who I'm not sure about) — 8 males, one female, and pikachu (who I’m not sure about)

One big perceptual problem for games, as seen from the outside, I suppose, is that the big icons of gaming, the mascots, the characters that wind up in the windows of Game Stop on the high street, are almost all male. These mascots are seen by everybody as they’re used to sell the big games in the big shops, so people who aren’t playing more games still just see these male mascots and take away a certain perception of the games industry. Mario, Sonic, Master Chief, Agent 47 (Hitman), Batman; these are all mascots because their series have had the time to grow into global brands, but the characters were created when we were still thinking about games (and comics) audiences as almost entirely male. It takes many years (several successful games) to make an icon out of a mere lead character, so the ones we have currently are the ones that were created years ago to appeal to who we thought games consumers were at the time.

Thankfully, in recent years we’ve seen (a finally more sensible) Lara Croft, Amanda Ripley (Alien Isolation) and “femshep” (female option for Shepard from Mass Effect) in shop windows. Coming up to the release of Horizon Zero Dawn next year I expect to see Aloy (reportedly inspired by Ripley from Alien) there too. “Equal opportunities” in game shop windows is still archaic it seems, but I think it’s headed the right way. As I said, it can take a decade or more to create a real gaming mascot, and like it or not, brand familiarity sells! Therefore, it gets window space, and the general public may not see the changes as quickly as gamers will. Gone Home was never going to be in the window at Best Buy, but Horizon Zero Dawn probably will.

Non-sexualised strong female lead? Check! Look for Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 in 2016.. wish I had one now..

But games aren’t just about being male or female led story-based experiences. These types of games are possibly even outnumbered by ones where you play as a non-descript manager, commander, God, alien, robot, car, amorphous blob, or anything else (without even mentioning virtually every puzzle game). If all the games where the player had to play a certain gender suddenly disappeared, gaming would still be a wonderful and vibrant space. The Sims, Cities Skylines, Angry Birds, Forza, Civilization. All top gender-neutral games.

Back on the bus, we explained about the types of games we’d just seen under development in Ireland at dubLUDO. Guild of Dungeoneering was just out, where you control your male or female dungeon raiders. Owen Harris was creating Deep, a meditative VR experience. Floaty Ball (please click that link and vote for them on Greenlight) is a great 4-player party game where you just play as a floaty ball-thing! Hot-Shot Wreckers is a micro-machines-esque racing game. You play as a car. I didn’t recall even seeing a game that day that had a gender-specific player character. We also see more and more female students in the game colleges and in gaming jobs.

I hadn’t left dubLUDO worried about where the games industry was heading in years to come, let’s say that much. But the girl on the bus reminded me that we may have a long we to go before we shake the image we’ve earned in years gone by.

MGS V Spoiler: The sniper, Quiet. Oh no, it's cool! She breathes through her skin, right? So her outfit makes sense. - Mate, you'd have been better off just saying — MGS V Spoiler: The sniper, Quiet. Oh no, it’s cool! She breathes through her skin, right? So her outfit makes sense. – Mate, you’d have been better off just saying “we have a sexy sniper in the game because we know some of our players will find her hot as hell”.

There’s still shining examples of embarrassing bullshit out there (ahem.. QUIET!!) but at the same time, every (male) reviewer that I saw review The Phantom Pain loved the game and gameplay and thought that Quiet was an embarrassment to an otherwise great game. These reviewers were all younger than Hideo Kojima (The Phantom Pain’s creator, who in fairness, has created some great female characters in the Metal Gear series). I mention this because I think the tide is flowing strongly in the other direction and institutionalised sexism is on the way out as younger generations come in. Almost half of all gamers are female. Bigger marketing-oriented games companies are realising this and moving away from marketing their games solely towards teenaged boys. More and more games let you choose your character’s gender or have shared male and female leads (most RPGs, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead). I’ve heard teenaged male youtubers playing the Phantom Pain and they are dumbfounded at the “reason” for Quiet’s almost-nudity in the game. So even the demographic that a character like Quiet was made to appeal to isn’t so stupid as to blindly accept a transparent made-up reason for dressing down a female character.

A few rapid-fire reflections:

If a game has only a male playable character, is it automatically misogynist, or harmful? No, I don’t think so, and I don’t think any sensible person should. That would set an unreasonably low bar for defining the “bad games” (for want of a better word that I feel is eluding me).
Do I think female gamers deserve more lead characters they can relate to? Yes.
Do I feel uncomfortable when a game forces me to play as a girl even though I’m a boy? No! Perfect Dark is possibly my favourite N64 game actually, making it one of my all time favourite games.
By that same token, should girls then be fine with playing as males? I don’t think a male lead stops many girls from playing a game they want to play, but the imbalance in offerings is ridiculous, and the world is missing out on some great perspectives.
But do we really need to actively address the imbalance of male to female leads? I think so. If most games featured female leads I’d want to see more male-led ones in the world, so, yes. The opposite should be true also.
(I looked through my Steam library earlier) Was I surprised at how few games allowed me to play as a female vs those where you played only as a male? Yes. Shocked actually. The ratio is astounding.
Is it enough to let the player decide their gender? Not ‘enough’, no. I think it’s great that many games have taken the route of giving you a name like “Alex” or “Jesse” and just creating male and female character models. Let the player decide. It works well in the cases I’ve seen it used in. There’s nothing wrong with it, but..
Should there be games written with just female leads, then? Of course! Letting the player decide their gender limits our stories to human issues only. There are great stories waiting to be told from the female perspective. Movies haven’t shied away from female leads, and games can be even more powerful for making the player/viewer feel empathy. We should definitely have more games with female leads and strong stories. I’ve never seen a game (not saying it doesn’t exist somewhere though) that addresses the issue of miscarrying a child, for example. How would an empathic male player feel after playing through something like that? I’d love to find out. I’m not a parent, but Walking Dead Season 1 made me feel more like a father than any other experience I’ve ever had. Games are powerful, man!
Does it bug me to see male characters in full protective armour standing next to female characters in (what would appear to be) less protective armour? Yes! Bugs the crap out of me!

Nope. Not 'genius'. — Nope. Not ‘genius’.

Should there be more games like Gone Home? I don’t think it was a very engaging game, so not too like Gone Home, but seeing games explore more human issues is a good thing. The player character being female in that game doesn’t matter a whole lot to the story. It could have been an older brother character and still worked. The lead character is that game is arguably the absent sister.
Do I think it’s wrong to feature sexy characters in games to sell more copies? I don’t, personally. People like what they like; be it sleek cars, big guns, sexy women, dark men in smart suits, oily men in banana hammocks, colourful panoramic vistas, or the wonder of the solar system. All of these things appeal to human beings (some of them more than others based on gender/orientation) and I don’t see anything wrong (at a fundamental level) with acknowledging that and using it. Respect is key, as always, and I think that’s where the problems come in. But I think models, dancers and strippers should be allowed to use their bodies to earn a living. Why not? Who are we to tell them what they can’t do when they’re not hurting anybody? So why not let artists draw a computerised body to sell something else? It’s a huge topic, I know, but that would be my opening argument, I suppose.
Then, would I be interested in seeing a game like DOA Beach Volleyball but with an all-male cast instead of all-female? Yes, very interested! I hope it happens! Women like sexy men and men like sexy women, yet it’s nearly only sexy women used to sell products. I think that particular imbalance is silly, and agree that there’s some harm in it.

There's a market for this stuff, so it'll sell. Should we object or acknowledge? — There’s a market for this stuff, so it’ll sell. Should we object or acknowledge?

Does it bother me if I offend people? Yes. I don’t want to do that. I’d rather we all get along, I just know that’s not always possible. But please leave comments below if you want to educate me as to something. I’m receptive, not defensive.
Do I think some people are too sensitive? Definitely! Why else would someone yell back in response to a question (being ‘hangry’ is a common cause) or post murder and rape threats in response to an opinion? I was already accused of being sexist specifically for writing the Player Too series, where I simply document trying to get my girlfriend interested in playing games with me. Where the sexism is there will have to be pointed out to me. I didn’t get to speak to the accuser as they posted in a Facebook group, quickly flew off the handle, and got banned by the group’s admin. I never even saw it but was told the poster was a girl and she likely hadn’t had time to read the blog before she posted, as it was mere minutes after my own post with the blog link. Perhaps then, she saw the title or the first paragraph, took a wild guess as to the content of the blog, and went on the offensive. “TLDR. Must be evil. I should comment in case”. If that’s the case: Don’t be like that. Come on!

I was a bit surprised at the girl-on-the-bus’s statement, and even still am a bit after I considered her point of view. We’ve shown the games industry as a male-oriented and at times sexist domain in the past, but we’re making great progress too. The games industry is larger than the movie and music industries combined so why is our progress so invisible to non-gamers? It would be super-visible if we aggressively changed the genders of all our male mascots, but nobody is arguing for that. It shouldn’t happen. There’s nothing wrong with Mario, Sonic, or Master Chief themselves. They just don’t have enough female counterparts. It’s a sausage fest!

Sexism still exists in all walks of life and should be educated against, but it’s also diminishing (at least in my corner of the world). Accusations alienate and polarise. I think that true equality just takes time to fully arrive, and when it does it will still take time for everyone to accept that it has. Education and patience is the best way to get there.

What’s done is done. Mistakes have been made, but so have some great games and franchises. People will always disagree over what’s acceptable satire and what’s offensive. They’ll also disagree (for a long time at least) over what’s an acceptable use of the female (and male) body in commerce and entertainment. We’ll never all be on the same page, I don’t think, so accusations of misogyny and bigotry will probably always be levelled at somebody or another. Can we just acknowledge that we’re making progress in creating a more egalitarian industry, and agree to disagree (amicably) on the other stuff?

If everybody would feel less threatened, be more open to change, recognise that change is happening but takes time, would think before they speak, be more open to discussion and less quick to threaten then I think we could all make and play some great games together.

Further Reading: There’s a good, shorter article by somebody with a better planned-out approach to the subject here on Gamasutra.

Until next time..

Player Too: Episode 3 – The Talos Principle & Super Meat Boy

Hey. So it’s been a few weeks since the last episode of Player Too. To remind you, this is my documented approach to trying to introduce my girlfriend Claire, who identifies as not being a gamer, to the wonderful world of games. We try out games that might appeal to her inquisitive side, and that might have a lower skill-barrier to entry. Then we discuss the games themselves and, particularly, their value for developing a gaming interest in a self-proclaimed non-gamer.

Click the link if you want to catch up on Episode 2. In it I closed by saying we’d probably get into Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments or a Telltale Games series. While we’ve bought and just about started those (Game of Thrones by Telltale), we’re not far enough in to have enough to say about them. What we have played in the last few weeks is The Talos Principle and Super Meat Boy! For the first time, I played very little of the games and Claire chose to pick them up and play without me helping or watching or whatever. I think that’s progress!

The Talos Principle

So this is puzzle game. As I’ve said before, Claire is into mysteries, crosswords, sudoku, logic puzzles, etc. We figured this would be a good one to do. Having developed some walking skills in Gone Home we thought she could tackle this, maybe on her way to Portal, which does require a lot of skill. I’ve heard this game compared to Portal before, but the only similarities I can see is that they’re both first person puzzle games.

Graphically, this is the best game we’ve played so far. I heard Claire raving about how good it looked, then I came to check it out on her laptop and it was running everything on minimum. I loaded up the demo on my PC with my GTX970 and absolutely blew her mind! So, points there, but I think graphics are at their most important when you’re trying to sell a game through screenshots or videos. Once you’re in a flow, you don’t care what a game looks like, and gameplay trumps graphics for overall experience. Personal opinion disclaimer; whatever. I’m saying I don’t think good graphics will convert Claire to gaming. And they didn’t. She resumed play on her laptop happily enough.

She put about 12 hours into the game but has called it quits. I saw her solve a bunch of different puzzles and learn new mechanics, but in the end she was frustrated by a few things.

The story didn’t grab her at all. I also found the deity to be more annoying than intriguing. I can’t even say, from what I saw, that the story is drip-fed to you. It’s more like it’s totally withheld until presumably some later point that we didn’t reach. So without the story pulling you through those tougher puzzles, frustration sets in.

I think that with a puzzle game you should have one problem preventing your advancement. “I don’t know if I’ve figured this out correctly”. Then you use your skills and the mechanics you’ve been shown to test your hypothesis and either you were right, or you create a new hypothesis.

Claire and I both suffered from a second hindrance, though, which I feel is a fault of the game. “I don’t know if they’ve introduced a new mechanic”. I didn’t play much of the game but I beat the demo, and even in that I was frustrated when I found a puzzle had to be beaten by doing something with a fan. You assume that a fan blows something, and it does. So the device is introduced and you see it needs to blow something. However, you also need to know that the fan is weighty enough to function like a box does on pressure pads. So you actually had two things to figure out with a brand new device that wasn’t explained.

Apparently this occurs a bit more in the full game. It feels a bit like time wasting to me, where other games make a point of introducing new mechanics in easy to understand ways. We’re used to a device having a function in a game or puzzle. Figuring that out and then testing new hypotheses with no clue that there’s another function all along feels like a cheap way to make a puzzle harder. At least there are only a handful of different devices so this doesn’t hold the game back too much but regardless, I think many would agree that in a game, particularly a puzzle one, both new and old players should be clear about what the rules of the game are.

Okay, now how many things did you say I could do with this?..

Claire was also frustrated that she wasn’t always clear where she should go next to even find a new puzzle. This is her experience, as a new player. I’m not saying all players would find these same frustrations, particularly if they’re used to an open-world or hub-and-spoke model of game world. Maybe they would. I can’t say.

A third problem she had, as someone less experienced with a first-person control scheme was “I don’t know if I’ve figured this out but can’t pull it off because of my control skills, or if I haven’t figured it out yet”. This isn’t the game’s fault, but contributed to Claire’s frustration when combined with our afforementioned second problem. This led to a lot of attempts wasted trying to do something because she believed she needed to just up her skills to accomplish it, when really there was a new mechanic in play. Once or twice I was called in to see if she had it right, by manoeuvring around enemies with more finely tuned timing. I proved her hypothesis right and she moved on, but had been frustrated because of her skill level.

This is my fault for recommending the game at this stage, perhaps. I heard that the game didn’t demand much skill in terms of movement, but maybe we should have still come via The Stanley Parable to get some more movement experience first. Claire’s skills improved over her 12 hours of play, and she had some of the satisfaction you get from beating a puzzle game, but overall she didn’t enjoy it.

Claire’s Score: 7/10. Yes, I know the game frequently scores 9/10, but understand, there’s a value in knowing what a first-time (or thereabouts) gamer thinks of a game too, not just what the games press thinks. This is more a score of Claire’s personal enjoyment. She found herself frustrated by not knowing if she hadn’t figured a puzzle out correctly yet based on the current rules, if she hadn’t figured out a new mechanic quietly introduced, or if she had figured it out but couldn’t prove the hypothesis because of her skill level. All the same, she spent a lot of time with it and enjoyed it a lot. She says she could return to do the odd puzzle in the future.

A better story might have pulled her into the game, but it didn’t intrigue her (or me) in the slightest at the level we got to. She didn’t mind the deity character like I did, but he didn’t exactly interest her either.

Player Too Result: A bit of a fail. Claire retains an interest in puzzle games, but we’re still a fair ways off playing Portal. We need to up her first person control skills if she’s going to get the most out of what gaming has to offer. I may have introduced this game a little too soon. The Stanley Parable should help with this, and Sherlock Holmes should satisfy the puzzle game side in the meantime.

Super Meat Boy

So, I’ve just stated that Claire’s gaming skills may have hindered her enjoyment of The Talos Principle. How do you think she got on with Super Meat Boy, an extremely difficult skill-based platformer? Quite well, actually.

Her first reaction was quite comical, though. The face she made when seeing the blood splatter everywhere and hearing the squishy sound effects was.. well I thought she was going to throw up, let’s say that. She didn’t, however, and after a few minutes she started to find the pitter patter of bloody feet even a bit funny.

Claire really enjoyed this game, although she only has two hours on it so far and doesn’t really intend to go further. Again, the story isn’t really there, so you’re just left to enjoy the game level by level. I watched her get to grips with the controls (using a game pad for the first time since she was a kid, bar a few minutes with Race The Sun one time) and clear the first couple of levels. Then I left her to her own devices. When I returned she was stuck on the last level of Chapter 1. So that’s level 17 or so. She knew what to do (this game isn’t often hard that way), she just hadn’t gotten there yet.

She offered me a go and after a half dozen attempts I cleared it. I have to say that the game is a lot of fun, and that replay feature where you see all your failed attempts die alongside your one success is inspired! Claire then had a few goes at the boss level, then passed it to me and I beat him in about a half dozen goes again (probably more, let’s be honest). She had somehow managed to clear the first chapter without realising that tapping A gives a short jump, while holding it gives a longer, higher jump. This becomes quite important.

We then tried a few fan made levels which were infuriatingly difficult. We quit and returned to Chapter 2 where the levels were now set in a hospital (of sorts) and there were piles of syringes everywhere to kill you. We couldn’t figure out how to beat the first level (I tried jumping from a very specific spot but never felt like I had the right idea as I kept hitting a pile of syringes no matter what I did) so we skipped it and I played the next couple. At this stage, the syringes made Claire lose her mettle for the game and cast her back to the squeamishness she’d had at the start, so she decided that she was done with it. She liked what she’d played but felt she’d reached the limits of her skill and enjoyment as the difficulty was ramping up fast.

Claire’s Score: 7.5/10. She found this very entertaining, and gross! She often got full-bodied laughs out of her own death, but all the same she doesn’t intend to play more of the game. She found the difficulty a to get significantly beyond her as the game progressed and had no desire to die upon piles of needles come Chapter 2.

Player Too Result: Hard to say. Here we tried a platformer that’s supposed to be difficult and Claire did pretty well at it. Like I said, I only got a few levels further than her. So she’s becoming more confident in her ability to take control of a game and succeed. This would have been a barrier before in a “no, I couldn’t possibly” kind of way. We also got her using a game pad and finding the fun in death and a quick restart.

These things would all indicate good progress towards the realm of gaming, except that she doesn’t intend to play the game again. Would she like a similar style of platformer that was less gross and a tad less difficult? Perhaps. Do comment if you can recommend any, as they’re not my area of expertise. We played Bro Force together once before but it was just hopeless. This was before the Player Too project so maybe it’s worth trying that again. Or Nidhogg, perhaps. Fez? Braid? Do comment.

Pretty cool first boss level, with all the feels in the post-boss cutscene

So that’s it for the current episode. I’d like to state that Claire’s scores for games aren’t based on any particular criteria. They’re more like her personal enjoyment of the game, tempered by a bit of consideration for the objective merits of the game, whether she connected with them or not. They’re pretty arbitrary and I don’t encourage anyone to look back at older episodes and compare scores to conclude that Meat Boy is any better or worse than Race the Sun, for example. They’re basically the scores of a first time gamer, and by design, are becoming less meaningful as such since the aim of the Player Too series is to attempt to turn Claire into a gamer.

Basically, they’re just a bit of fun!

I can’t say if we’re any closer to turning Claire into a gamer this time, but her skills are definitely improving and she’s realising that there’s fun to be had in all types of games. So the project continues! Although we’ve learned to stay further away from blood and gore.

Next Time On Player Too: We’ve a lot of games to choose from for next time. We bought nearly all the Telltale games in that last Humble sale, as well as Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments and I’ve Fez and Luftrausers and Stealth Inc. 2 too! We will probably go with Sherlock and either the Stanley Parable or Game of Thrones (or both) for next time.

In the meantime, if you’ve any game recommendations or stories of how you brought a loved one into the world of gaming, do please share in the comments!

Until next time..

Click for Episode 2

Click for Episode 4