So one of this year’s biggest releases will be Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain due for a PS4 and XB1 release on September 1st, and for the PC on September 15th. There’s been no shortage of drama and spectacle surrounding the game, but I’d just like to focus on the Hayter-Sutherland aspect.
To briefly sum up the aforementioned spectacle first, though, I’ll just do a short summary.
Producers Konami have axed director Hideo Kojima as an executive from their company, making him a contract employee until the game is released and presumably ending their working relationship thereafter.
There have been huge, dramatic trailers released at each of the last three annual E3 shows, and several more besides.
It’s been unpopularly announced that the full-priced game will include micro transactions.
The game is reported to be gigantic; one of the biggest and most alive game worlds ever created and definitely the biggest Metal Gear game made so far. Production has been so big and taken so long, in fact, that the prologue to the game, Ground Zeroes, was released separately in March 2014 as a stop-gap game that could be beaten in an hour. A unique move, for sure, and again, not one without its detractors.
One could add that Kojima said of most of the last big Metal Gear games that they would be his “last game” and that’s always turned out to be untrue. Well, until now I suppose. He’s not likely to be working with Konami again and they own the franchise despite it being Kojima’s baby.
The game’s earliest controversy though was replacing the lead character Snake’s voice actor from David Hayter, who’s always voiced the Snake character (well, since Snake had a voice, at least), to Kiefer Sutherland, who portrays bad-ass, gruff, violent freedom-protector Jack Bauer in 24. This has been known since 2013 and it hasn’t sat well with fans who see it as a betrayal, particularly since Hayter was never consulted or informed of the change and learned about it at the same time as the general public. Dick move, Kojima.
Hayter has been commendably mature about the move. In a video interview from March this year (linked below) around the 15 minute mark, you can hear him say that he’s glad it took someone like Kiefer Sutherland to replace him in the role. The role obviously meant a lot to him though. Later (around 27:20) in the same interview when asked what he thought of the Phantom Pain in general and whether he’d play it he said that he wouldn’t play it as it would be “too painful”.
There have been no shortage of rumours and theories that Hayter will make an appearance in the game but he and Kojima have denied this several times in no uncertain terms and I think it’s just wishful thinking by the fans. The move has netted far more bad will than good so it seems extremely unlikely that they would continue to hide his involvement, if there were any to hide.
I remember Kojima saying that they wanted someone more dramatic for the role of Snake for this project. Sure, okay. That’s your prerogative as a director but you could have let Hayter down a bit more respectfully. He’s been Snake for 15 years. I had no sympathy, then, for Kojima when hearing earlier this year that Konami were basically firing him.
But I digress, my point was that I’m coming around to the thinking that a new voice was important for this game. This game is set in the 1980s. The very first Metal Gear game was made in the 80’s and featured Solid Snake (a clone of legendary soldier Big Boss) fighting the villain Big Boss.
In Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid (MGS), MGS2 (partly), and MGS 4 we play as Solid Snake , the clone and hero in settings from the 1980s onwards. In MGS 3, Portable Ops, Peace Walker and now MGS V we play as the original Snake who becomes Big Boss from the 1960s to the 1980s. In game-world time, Peace Walker is the last part of the story before V (which is itself Ground Zeroes AND the Phantom Pain) where Snake is still the hero, and presumably by the end of The Phantom Pain, our beloved Snake has to become the villain. Therefore, we’re bound to see some very marked changes in Snake’s character. We know from trailers and screenshots that mutilation and injury will have a part to play, but so too could the voice. This is bound to be a dramatic chapter in a dramatic game series and Kojima wants to play to that.
The MGS games have always tried to be two things. One; cinematic, dramatic stories and two; grotesquely self-aware, exploding the fourth wall at every given opportunity. It’s hard to be both. It never sat perfectly well for me and I think that with Phantom Pain they’re gunning more for the dramatic elements. For me, I somewhat agree that Hayter wouldn’t be a great choice to deliver on the drama. Check out the video below for synopsis of Hayter’s Snake portrayals over the series.
I think he’s a great actor, and it’s a very distinct voice. It’s a classic by now! But for the last few games the voice has struck me as a little over the top, and seeing them lined up together like this highlights that. It’s become less realistic and more exaggerated, verging on silly at times. This likely wouldn’t work well for a villain. We’ve become so accustomed to Snake’s character as the hero with Hayter’s voice. Assuming that he has some difficult choices to make and evil things to do in Phantom Pain to become the villain Big Boss, it could seem too out of character for the Snake we’ve become so familiar with. That voice has also been party to the fourth-wall breaches I mentioned earlier and maybe the association would be too much. The character has to undergo huge changes over the course of this game. Why not the voice too? Would be be able to follow Hayter through those changes?
We already have a good example of the change in Snake’s character. There’s a bajillion trailers for The Phantom Pain but I refer you to “Quiet Trailer” below. In it, we see Snake do a good guy thing by ordering the men not to shoot Quiet, but also the foreshadowing of evil deeds with what he says afterwards. Also, notice the camera works here to show Snake’s “bad side” as he delivers the line. The shrapnel injury in his skull already looks like a devil’s horn.
How about that? Can you imagine David Hayter delivering those lines? I honestly can’t. If you’d like to try you can watch the Ground Zeroes ending with Sutherland’s Snake voice replaced with some old lines of Hayter’s. I know the lines are out of context, but even so I don’t think the tone fits.
What I’m getting at is, maybe Kojima made the right call. As director it’s totally his decision, but it sure rubbed fans up the wrong way, and he definitely handled the switch like a world class prick, but for the game as art, I’m starting to think it was the right call. I never cared about the change quite as much as hard core MGS fans did. I just kind of cringed at Sutherland doing basically a Jack Bauer in the new MGS game (I’m a big fan of 24 bear in mind, nothing against it or Sutherland in general) seemingly just because he’s a bigger name than Hayter. I saw it more as a marketing decision than an artistic one, which bugged me, but I’m definitely starting to see the artistic merit to the decision.
That said, I still love Hayter’s classic Snake, and feel for him in the situation he’s in. Particularly with idiots constantly bugging him to confess that he’s in the new game somewhere secretly, or even more wildly, that Sutherland’s Snake isn’t the real Snake and we’ll see Hayter in Phantom Pain as the real Snake after some plot twist. Leave the guy alone, like! He can only say ‘no’ so many different ways, and he’s made it clear that, while he acknowledges the merit of directorial discretion, he still feels pained by the loss of the role. Read his statement from 2013 here.
Where did it all go wrong?
That’s all for this week. What do you think of the switch? Has what I suggested occurred to you before and what do you think of it? Do discuss. There’s comment boxes below for a reason. Peace! (walker)
Firstly, I won’t be apologising for that pun, so moving on..
I intended for my blog this week to be a simple review of the game, as I haven’t done a review on this blog yet and I’d had a lot of negative topics recently so that I wanted to start balancing them out. However, there’s far too much to talk about here that doing a simple review would be missing the opportunity to take this game as a case study on a whole load of issues.
I do want to separate the discussion though because basically there’s Arkham Knight as a game, a piece of art, and secondly as a product and its associated business decisions, and I definitely think that they deserve to be separated.
The Review Stuff
I wasn’t going to buy the game because of its pricing (more on that later) but found it at a hefty discount and so picked it up. I played it on PC with an nVidia GTX 970 graphics card, 16GB of RAM, an AMD 6300 3.5GHz processor and normal HDD hard drive. A good PC, but not top of the line either. I also did have the latest nVidia driver released the night before the game and tailored specifically to fixing a lot of issues with Arkham Knight. The game ran fine for me and didn’t affect my enjoyment, so I won’t discuss that aspect in the review part.
This may be controversial, but I liked the Batmobile! Let’s start with that. Many reviewers say that it’s a huge flaw, crowbarred-in as an extra selling point, that the drone combat and puzzles that get you to use it seem forced and aren’t that much fun, and that you’re faster navigating the city without it. I disagree, mostly.. Let’s be clear; the Batmobile wasn’t an afterthought and wasn’t done cheaply. It’s fully developed, has its own upgrade tree, feels good to drive (maybe TOO good for something that weighty) and results in a lot of fun high-explosive gameplay that is the kind of thing we play games for in the first place, and Rocksteady fully committed to making it a part of the game. I can’t fault them for doing that. They could have gone half-assed but didn’t. The Batmobile plays as much a part in the game as the Predator levels or big-room fist fights do, which basically adds a fully-developed pillar to the game. The question is; “did the game need it”? Most are saying no, but I say yes. We’ve had Asylum, City, and Origins which have largely been the same game with new story each time (even if City opened the game into a more open-world style) and this formula was definitely getting tired by Origins. I’m glad they risked going for something new, and I’m glad it was the Batmobile. I’ve wanted to drive it ever since the first time you see it in Asylum. If they didn’t try it we’d all be slating them for going ‘Assassin’s Creed’ on the series, now wouldn’t we? For not taking risks!
Avoid the lines to win drone fights. This turned me off the first time I saw a video, but when it comes to playing it you’ll be glad that the batcomputer predicts firing lines. You’ll still take a lot of hits and would be totally screwed without this and the Batmobile’s other abilities.
The drone fights can get repetitive, yes, but so can the Predator or combat sections, especially if you’re trying for 100% completion. Most of the drone combat I did was in optional side-missions, but the main story paces all the gameplay pillars pretty well and making things go boom-crash is fun now and again!
Also, city traversal isn’t slower in the Batmobile unless you’ve to reach a bridge to cross a river, so there! It just depends where you’re going. The Riddler challenges are tedious, and often involve the Batmobile, but they were tedious in all 4 games if you ask me so I can’t fault the car for that. I will fault the game for including over 250 trophies to collect though. And collection them is required to put the Riddler in jail and get the ‘full’ ending. 250 is too many when not a single one of them is fun to do! They’re the biggest chore and the biggest flaw in all 4 games, but they’re optional.
My one Batmobile-gripe is that despite all efforts by the team to show the Batmobile as a non-lethal weapon (because Batman don’t kill) there were tonnes of situations where I said “there’s no way that guy survived that” and I just had to get over it and enjoy the game.
So that’s the car, the big new selling point, and I liked it.
Story-wise, I think the game’s fantastic, and through all the Arkham Games (except maybe Origins) it’s been the primary thing driving me on. This is a dramatic and well-written conclusion to Rocksteady’s Arkham trilogy (i say ‘trilogy’ because Origins wasn’t a Rocksteady game, though Knight does give it the nod several times throughout, making it is canon). I won’t give spoilers but there’s plenty of drama going on, and it’s not all driven by discovering who the Arkham Knight must be. There’s lots of nods to and borrowings from the comics alongside new content. There are several set-pieces that I enjoyed. Rather than take me out of the game they enhanced the drama and I ate them up! The story also results in a number of sections where the entire game gets one major shift in how you have to approach it for a while, before returning to normal so you can continue your normal sandbox experience. More so than any of the other Arkham titles (possible exception of the first, Asylum) this game understands pacing and variety, and again, people may not realise that the Batmobile helps out in spades with this.
I couldn’t stop playing until I learned the Arkham Knight’s true identity! I had my short list, but was never sure.
The drama leads me to talk about boss fights. They’re still present, and varied, and I played several where I thought they must be the last fight of the game, because the stakes were getting so high. When the game didn’t end it drove me straight onto the next one. I couldn’t stop! This is huge praise for a story-driven game.
I loved how the Joker’s legacy/ghost affects Batman and the world in this game, too. Spoiler here until end of paragraph: And no, he’s not the Arkham Knight. That would be stupid. So Rocksteady didn’t do it. Because Rocksteady are smarter than Splash Damage.
I do have to say that the other games had more memorable boss fights, though. Too many of these were glorified drone or Predator sections, but all the same, none were bad. Just none were as good as the Copperhead or Deathstroke fights from Origins or the famous Mr.Freeze fight from City. There are also slightly less of the supervillains in this game because the Arkham Knight and militia take up a large chunk of the missions, but this isn’t to the game’s detriment I felt.
Graphically (assuming here that you’re on console or it’s worked on your PC) this game is gorgeous with so many wind, rain, paper, rubbish, and environmental destruction effects going on. I can understand plainly why performance has suffered slightly in places for how beautiful the game is, and the trade off is well-worth it. I never suffered enough of a slowdown to affect my experience and the visuals stunned me repeatedly. Add to this the musical score, the idle conversations between and about all the various gangs and militia members, and the top class voice acting from Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Jonathan Banks and John Noble, you have a game dripping with atmosphere. The complete removal of loading screens is a major help here too, and Origin’s fast-travel system has been removed, forcing you to traverse enemy-occupied streets to get where you’re going. The only downside to that is there’s no Batcave any more, but I didn’t even realise that until half way through the game as GCPD and a couple of other locations stand in for the Batcave’s functionality. The police station fills up with all the people you’ve captured or rescued too, which is a great touch!
Gotham city is gigantic, beautiful, alive, and full of enemy aerial drones (which are fun to land on and explode) and watchtowers set up on skyscrapers.
Lastly the combat. In each game Rocksteady expanded on their excellent combat system and improved it without losing the balance. With Origins, Splash Damage were so afraid to change Rocksteady’s formula, to their discredit, and the only memorable change they attempted was shock gloves, which were overpowered and unbalanced the combat.
Knight removes the shock gloves (you can find them in GCPD’s evidence room with a tongue-in-cheek explanation as to why Batman didn’t keep them) and adds a number of new enemy types, enemy actions, and a few new player skills to counter them. Also, the upgrade tree is vast, and even after finishing the game I don’t have all combat abilities and gadgets, so more so than the other games this is one where you really choose and develop your own fighting style.
The Predator sections have been touched up as well with enemies now able to learn your tactics (better than before), flush you out of vents with incendiary grenades, pair off into teams to thwart your ambushes, place mines and gun turrets, and control UAV drones which can also attack you. Don’t worry though, you have the tools the handle the new behaviours if you use your brain and “be the Batman”. This has really made the section of the game that most bored me previously into a fresh experience.
All round, I think this game is a great sequel (a rare thing), a great end to Rocksteady’s trilogy, a well-paced and very-well balanced game, and a great example of what AAA publishers can do when they set their minds to it.
The other games may have had some snow, but the rain effects on top of everything else make it readily apparent that you’re playing a next-gen game. PC owners may not appreciate that statement as they don’t like sharing space with console owners but they still have to understand that there’s a common performance bar that has to be aimed for when making million dollar games.
I don’t really have a personal scoring system in place but Metacritic, if I average-out the PS4 and XB1 scores, comes to 85% and I think that’s fair.
I just think that a lot of people, myself included, were far too ready to hate this game for other reasons. I’ll now explore those reasons without having tarnished the game itself as a piece of art that hundreds of honest developers poured their hearts and souls into.
All the other stuff
Warner Brothers published this game, and have made a lot of enemies with their policies in the last few years. Arkham Origins (the most recent Batman release in 2013) came out the gate with a host of bugs and issues, and Warner Bros. basically said they wouldn’t be fixing them because they were working on DLC for the game. Which is ludicrous! They expect people to pay more when what they’ve already paid for isn’t working!
Then, short on good will, they are charging €40 for the Season Pass (six months of DLC content) for Arkham Knight. This is 2/3 of the price of the main game, and brings it up to €100 all-in. Granted there were discounts for getting them together at €80, but still it’s a very high price for the Batgirl mini-story and a few racetracks and skins. Further, I don’t want to be drip fed my €40 back in six monthly instalments. I’d like to play the whole game this week please, and move on. I wasn’t going to buy the game myself in protest, but I did find it (with Season Pass) for €30 on Kinguin.net and relented.
The practice of working on DLC and charging more for the content before the game is even out and/or working properly is hugely unpopular with consumers, and, paradoxically, hugely widespread with developers. It takes developer time out of making a working product, so that they can ask for more money for 1.2 or 1.5 inferior products, instead of one good one. They carve up one game’s content into the game, plus pre-order bonus content, plus later DLC content. Consumers lose nearly every time and they had no recourse. Even with the ‘Premium Edition pre-order’ that I picked up, I somehow didn’t get the Harley Quinn pre-order story DLC bonus thing, which apparently wasn’t included in the more expensive version, only in the normal version. Just wtf?! Paying more up front in this case gets you less of a game on release than if you paid less!
No I don’t want to pay extra for this, thanks.
In walks Steam’s brand new refund policy, the hero we deserved. This deserves its own blog post as there are many angles on it. I’m not praising Steam for finally giving users a basic consumer right, but I’m glad they have.
The ability for a buyer to return a product for any reason (within limits, as laid out here) means that if a game is released in a sorry state, the buyer can simply return it. This at last pushes developers to stop releasing games in a sorry state, and here Arkham Knight is hugely important.
After less than two days, the PC version of Arkham Knight was voluntarily removed from sale on Steam by Warner Brothers. Why? Because the game wasn’t fit to be released on PC in the first place. Not yet. As I said, I had no problems, but users with AMD graphics cards or just more average PCs found the game literally unplayable in many cases, or severely disappointing performance-wise. PC gamers tend to have an elitist, snobbish reputation, and having a game run less well than on a console rubbed a lot of them up the wrong way. The Steam user reviews for the game are “Mostly Negative” (I challenge you to find a positive one) and refunds were being demanded in droves.
Testament to the botching of its release this header box on the game’s Steam page says both that the game was released on June 23rd, and that it will be available in Fall 2015. 11,000 users are not happy.
With my finely-functioning game I’m actually in the minority on this one, and I still experienced a few bugs and body textures that never rendered properly when I got in-close. You always find some bugs in big games. There’s a certain leeway granted, which I granted, but the game has to actually work! Hours before it went on sale, Warner Brothers ramped up the recommended minimum settings for the game, which is a huge deal if you bought it expecting that you could run it, and then were told that you couldn’t. It’s unacceptable, frankly, and until Steam refunds came along, I’m sure Warner Bros. would have taken a “tough shit” approach to customer care.
But they didn’t. Instead they removed the game from sale. You can read their press release on why here but essentially it’s been removed until it works, with no clue as to how long that will take beyond “Fall 2015”.
I have literally never seen this, and I don’t think anyone else has either. That’s PC gaming history right there, no exaggeration.
I’d like to mention that Rocksteady didn’t handle the PC port, and don’t deserve all the ire here. Iron Galaxy Studios did the port (or were still in the middle of it, it sounds like) and Warner Bros chose to publish it rather than push the PC release date back. The game had already suffered lengthy delays in production, but unfinished is unfinished!
Okay, so bad decision there, obviously. It was a farce and will go down in gaming history as one of the most catastrophic releases of all time. I can’t actually think of another game that’s been removed from sale after release for performance reasons, and examples of games that should have been are in no short supply. Assassin’s Creed Unity, Sim City and Battlefield 4 all leap readily to mind. But Warner Bros. are owning up to it. They removed their own game from sale and even linked readers to the Steam refund page directly in the press release. Would they be so eager to appease if not for Steam refunds? Hell no, would be my guess. But they are, and deserve a modicum of credit for that, at least.
Consumer faith in the industry, particularly in the bigger publishers, is at an all-time low. Delays, DLC, and broken releases are now expected and it’s hard to look at big upcoming releases like Battlefront with anything better than very cautious optimism, never mind fanatical hype. Publishers were incentivised, through the unavailability of any refund policies, to release unfinished games and move onto the next one, letting the game’s problems get fixed in a later patch, or by the modding community, or just never. This feels like the first time in recent memory that we can put a point on the consumer’s side of the scoreboard. Hopefully this will force publishing houses to cop on already! We need more faith in the industry because if consumer good will keeps being abused the way it has been, people will not be pre-ordering big games, will buy them less often, and expensive AAA games like Arkham Knight would simply not get made any more.
“Cut the crap, Publisher. This is my city”.
I, for one, am glad that Arkham Knight exists, glad that it had a botched PC release, glad that it was taken off sale, and am hopeful that this marks a turning point in publisher behaviour and consumer confidence.
If it does, who better to have saved us than Batman?
Wow! What an E3! This was my first year with a working situation that allowed me to stay up and watch the conferences, as well as follow the show closely online during the week. The general consensus it that this was the best E3 for many years. It’s also my first E3 since I started a blog, so it seemed a good topic for this week. I’m just going to sum up the news and games that have me the most excited. I’m pretty much exclusively a PC gamer, but I won’t focus solely on PC here either and I’ll go pretty broad. First up: VR and AR (virtual and augmented reality).
Oculus Rift
The Oculus Rift consumer version, with Oculus Touch. Click to see Oculus’ press conference. Video will start at the Touch reveal
On June 11th, the week before E3 actually started, Oculus held their own press conference and finally revealed the consumer version of the Rift, as seen above. I had a previous blog on how Oculus was seemingly lagging behind their competitors now, despite starting the new VR race, and that they needed some big announcements to catch up. Well they caught up!
The demonstrated final consumer version comes with plentiful size adjustments and detachable headphones.
A big announcement was their partnership with Microsoft. All Oculus Rifts sold will come with a wireless Xbox One controller. This is huge as developers can target a single input device that they know all users will have.
There will be an online store for your Oculus games, which will include the ability to demo the games before buying them, in recognition of the fact that a traditional video trailer can tell you very little about what a virtual experience will be like.
Price was not announced, and the release date is still a vague “1st Quarter, 2016”.
The huge reveal was their main input device (not the Xbox controller), the Oculus Touch. Clicking the pic above will take you to that part of their press conference. It looks like a controller split in two, which allows each hand to move freely in the virtual space, and without any wires. It also features haptic feedback (vibration, for touch sensation) and a ring of sensors that accurately track your finger movements, for great control or “social interaction” (use your imaginations there). It’s set to release a few months after the primary Rift launch, but accounts from people using it at E3 are very positive, saying it’s on par with or better than Valve or Sony’s input offerings.
Microsoft HoloLens
Click for Microsoft’s E3 press conference HoloLens segment. See the crowd go nuts about 1 minute in and feel the goosebumps. The future is here!
Microsoft stole the show at E3 with their HoloLens, winning IGN’s “Coolest Tech” award for the show. If you didn’t click the picture to view their Minecraft demo, do it now! I’ll wait.. or if you’re not interested just skip this whole section, but you’re missing out. It’s hard to convey what the experience is like without having it for yourself, and so I first viewed that part of the conference with a bit of scepticism, but by all later reports, what people saw through the camera at the press conference is exactly the same experience as when people got to try for themselves later. This is an incredible technology. On the show floor they also had a (very tailored, admittedly) Halo experience with the HoloLens which you can catch a glimpse of here.
The only negative report was that the viewing window on the Lens was very narrow, in that you lost the effect in your peripheral vision, but this is still in the prototype phase with no release date, remember.
So, moving onto games, what has people excited?
Star Wars Battlefront
EA FINALLY revealed gameplay from SW Battlefront at their press conference. And it looks good!
Winning IGN’s Game Of The Show award, Battlefront wowed with its long overdue gameplay reveal. Considering we’ve had 3 trailers without a second of gameplay up until now and they were already cheekily taking pre-orders, this was long overdue. Personally I had wondered what they could have been hiding. The game had received a lot of negative press up until now but they finally put out something positive.
As you can see from the gameplay video (click the pic), DICE have really nailed the sights and sounds of Star Wars. In terms of gameplay, this map looks a lot like the Battlefield franchise’s Rush maps, but there’s a lot going on here to be excited about and it seems to feel more like a Star Wars game than a Battlefield one, which is important.
What Battlefield doesn’t have (any more, at least) but Battlefront does, is bot support, meaning you can actually play in single player mode, which is a big plus for me, personally, as I don’t always like relying on servers and the decent behaviour of other gamers.
This other video shows off a wave-survival mode which looks decent. Again, the graphics and animations are something to be excited about, and this was running on Playstation 4, not PC, so you can expect these visuals to be typical.
Release: Nov 17th, 2015 Platforms: PC, PS4, XB1
DOOM
Click for Bethesda’s DOOM gameplay reveal
Bethesda kicked off E3 on the Sunday night (before E3 officially starts, technically) with their first ever E3 press conference, and it was a major event, widely lauded as the best conference of E3.
DOOM gameplay was revealed at the very start of their conference and can be seen above. They’re clearly going for speed, action, gore, violence, and frantic over-the-top gameplay. I was never a major Doom player but this strikes me as exactly the kind of game Doom fans were hoping for when we saw the (ridiculous) ten second trailer only a few weeks ago, as opposed to a survival-horror (whatever that currently means).
The game features a single player campaign, multiplayer, and a very detailed in-game level/scenario editor. This could be the big arena shooter for years to come, at least until we see the next Unreal Tournament.
Release: Spring 2016 Platforms: PC, PS4, XB1
Fallout 4
Click for Bethesda’s 30-minute presentation on Fallout 4 (and Fallout Shelter)
The main reason people give Bethesda the credit for best show of E3, was the reveal of Fallout 4. I’ll admit that I never played the other Fallout games (I know, shame, shame) but even I could feel the excitement as Todd Howard showed off his new baby. I’m super-pumped for this. The game looks incredible. It looks like a game-changer just as Skyrim did. Incidentally I’d never played an Elder Scrolls game until Skyrim but like many others, I was an instant convert. Bethesda are really hitting their stride when it comes to making RPGs more accessible and exciting to the masses while still keeping their core audience.
You’re better off watching the video but let me try to bullet-point some stuff here:
You can play as a man or woman.
You can play in the world before the bombs fall and the main game commences.
You set the appearance of the male and female couple at the start with an intuitive-looking editor, and the game then interprets the appearance of each and generates what the couples’ child looks like (like GTA V does for your multiplayer character).
The special edition comes with a real plastic ‘pip-boy’ arm band that you can wear and put your phone into. Why?
Because there’s a companion app for the game that lets you manage inventory, etc through your phone, though you can still do it in-game.
As an aside, nearly, Howard mentioned that they’d also developed Fallout Shelter in which you manage a (you’ll never guess) fallout shelter and its survivors, The shelter looks a lot like the 2012 Xcom’s “ant hill” base management. The game is free but has micro-transactions, is so far only on Apple devices, but will come to Android, and is currently outselling even Candy Crush.
Back to Fallout 4, you can craft your own bases and villages, and defend them with turrets, lights, traps and more, all of which require power management. It’s like Rust or DayZ inside Fallout 4, though you don’t even have to participate at all.
The game is set in post-apocalyptic Boston, and is a huge huge game world.
You can have a dog (Alsation) companion who they DON’T kill on you for normally-predictable dramatic effect.
The game won IGN’s Best PC Game award AND their Best RPG award for E3 2015.
Release: Nov 10th, 2015 Platforms: PC, PS4, XB1
No Man’s Sky
Click for No Man’s Sky demo at Sony’s press conference
No Man’s Sky, which doesn’t often step into the light of day, showed off some more gameplay this year at Sony’s conference, and also appeared during the brand new PC Gaming conference on the Wednesday. It also picked up IGN’s Best Adventure Game E3 award.
Previously the game was going to be a timed Playstation 4 exclusive, and then likely to release on PC, but Sean Murray of Hello Games announced that the game will release for PC and PS4 at the same time! What that time is, we still don’t know, as Murray apologetically explained that they couldn’t yet announce a release date (though they had wanted to do so at E3).
Release: Expect to see it released before the next E3. I’m betting 9-12 months. Platforms: PC, PS4
For Honor
Click for gameplay
Yeah so we’re going with the North American spelling, since this is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal.
This was one of those unexpected treats. This brand new IP from Ubisoft annoucned during their press conference is centred around medieval sword fighting between vikings, knights, and samurai, because why not? The gameplay demo above shows off a lot, but essentially two teams of four players fight for control points (in the demonstrated game mode, at least). Dozens of NPC warriors are there as sword-fodder but the main fights happen between players using the “Art of War” control system, which looks like it uses the triggers and control sticks to attack and defend from different angles. Watching your opponent’s body language is key here. Players can also call in arrow and catapult strikes on their enemies.
There will be several modes, though, including a single-player campaign.
I’m excited about this one, as I always am when I see attempts at sword fighting done right. We’ll have to see how this one plays next year. Chivalry was okay but still usually devolved into button mashing, with the available nuances lost. Mount & Blade: Warband has the best sword fighting I’ve seen in a game to date, though the upcoming Kingdom Come: Deliverance also looks to have an interesting take on it.
Release: unknown Platforms: PC, PS4, XB1
Xcom 2
Click for 25 minute gameplay demo & interview
So I’m particularly excited about this one as 2012’s Xcom Enemy Unknown is one of my all-time favourite games, and my own game in development is heavily influenced by the Xcom series. A (non-gameplay) trailer was released the week before E3 but we saw some gameplay at E3.
The game is set twenty years after Enemy Unknown and the story is based on what happened if you failed (as many of us did) and the aliens took over the Earth. Xcom is now a (moreso than before) guerilla organisation fighting from a now mobile base.
The aliens themselves are much tougher, each like a mini-boss, but your grunt enemies are now human(ish?) soldiers called the Advent who are baically stormtroopers for the dark and evil alien administration. Collaborators. Traitors. So it’s fine 🙂
A big new change is that the maps are procedurally generated, meaning you never quite know what to expect, or what’s around the next corner. A fault with EU was that after a while the (wonderfully created, but limited) maps started repeating themselves and you sort of knew how best to approach the area each time. Not so, anymore.
You can now engage in melee combat, carry injured soldiers off of the battlefield, destroy floors and ceilings (only walls before), and call for your own extraction zones. You also have procedural objectives on the map and you can complete missions by taking these objectives and fleeing without having to kill every enemy, which should make for some awfully exciting sprints for the evac zone.
Release: November 2015 Platforms: PC only
At this point, I’m going to shift gears. I could talk all day about what has me excited from E3, and for two days if I talked about games that others care about even if they’re not quite for me, but I’m just going buzz through the rest.
I recommend you skim this section for titles that interest you and click the links for trailers and more info.
Unless I state otherwise, chances are the games are for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Playstation 4 exclusive (though I REALLY hope it comes to PC) Horizon: Zero Dawn is the most worth mentioning. It’s a new IP set on post-post-apocalyptic Earth when humans have reverted to tribal social structures and machines have evolved into dinosaur-like wildlife. It sounds silly and looks silly at first, but there’s something really special going on here. It was nominated for all sorts of awards and won IGN’s Best Playstation 4 Game of E3.
Sea of Thieves is a new multiplayer pirate game from Rare that looks pretty awesome, though so far it seems like it’s only coming to Xbox.
Rare also announced Rare Replay which is a 30th Anniversary celebration of Rare’s career making games, giving you 30 old Rare titles for $30 on the Xbox One. Most of these titles were from Rare’s heavyweight days as N64 champions and are well worth playing or replaying.
Just Cause 3 is looking very silly, explosive and fun. Everything a game wants to be and could be if it took itself less seriously. This game is just about awesome explosions and stunts, and isn’t trying to be anything else.
Microsoft announced that Xbox One will soon have backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 games, and with a host of exclusive titles coming soon, they’re hoping to convert many 360 users to the new console. Will Playstation follow suit? I hope so, but there’s no official word one way or the other.
Starfox Zero for Nintendo Wii U is getting a mixed reception. I looks graphically very appealing but requires heavy use of the gamepad for your targeting, while the TV screen shows off the wider, more cinematic views. Will you spend most of the game looking away from the TV? I don’t know, but it looks gorgeous to me. The game is neither a prequel, sequel, nor reboot, apparently. It just.. “is”.. I guess.
There’s a new Hitman game on the way, which is looking like taking some of the wind out of Assassin’s Creed’s sails in the next year.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided is looking good if you’re a Deus Ex fan. We’re still following Adam Jensen, marking the first time we repeat a protagonist in the series. It looks a lot like 2011’s Human Revolution, but moreso, if that makes sense.
We continue our march towards Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain‘s November release (we hope it’s not delayed) with another 40 minute video of gameplay, though there’s barely anything new in this video if you’ve been following previous gameplay footage.
We’ve an announcement trailer for Mass Effect Andromeda but there’s no gameplay, very little info other than that you’re a new hero in a new galaxy, and the game’s still a long way off.
Gears Of War 4 is coming to Xbox One (the trailer says “Gears 4”) but it’s confirmed that “of war” will still be in the title. This gameplay looks stupid to me. Where the hell does the super-massive storm come from and go to all of a sudden? It’s a two minute super storm that just serves to make the heroes go into a building. That kind of lazy design really turns me off.
Gears of War 1 is getting a HD remake and coming to XB1 AND the PC, for once, with a multiplayer element based on Gears 3. This marks Gears’ first appearance away from an Xbox console. August 25th is the Xbox release, but there’s no date for the PC release yet.
Switching to Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy series of games, there’s three games to talk about. Firstly, Rainbow Six: Siege continues to look great and a single-player element is confirmed, though sadly there are no AI squad-mates to accompany you, so it probably isn’t really worth talking about next to the multiplayer experience.
Secondly, The Division showed off a new so-so-scripted gameplay demo, which really disappointed me and many others. Basically, every player winds up betraying and fucking over every other player until one is left, and now the game basically looks like DayZ without the zombies. By this I mean “just not fun to play with people”, which is the whole point. Graphically, it looks less impressive than it seemed before, also, and I think that the general consensus is that the ball has been dropped on this one. The game was probably delayed too many times and just missed the boat, though that remains to be seen, come release next March.
If The Division dropped the ball, though, new announcement Ghost Recon Wildlands picked it up! It’s a 4 player co-op experience in a huge open world in which you approach your targets your way. Plan your approach, set up a sniper, booby-trap a vehicle, whatever. This one actually looks quite fun (if you’ve 3 competent friends who want to play with you).
Final Fantasy VII is getting a remake, so the rumour mill can finally stop churning!
Similarly, The Last Guardian is finally seen again, and its cute giant-bird-puppy looks incredibly well animated.
Cuphead for the Xbox One has an incredible retro-Disney animation style and is really worth looking at.
Another beautiful indie game worth looking at is Unravel, who EA have picked up as part of their “we care about the little guys too” quota.
Shenmue 3 was announced, though I never heard of its predecessors, sorry. It was declared as a Kickstarter campaign that broke Kickstarter in minutes. Needless to say, it’s already successful.
Dark Souls 3 was announced but hasn’t made any real waves so far.
We saw some footage of Rise Of The Tomb Raider, which is an Xbox exclusive. From the gameplay video this may as well be a movie as it’s so scripted and on-the-rails. Apparently the game does actually contain tombs and puzzles though.
The new Mirror’s Edge is called Catalyst and is prequel. Very little is known but it’s confirmed that this time you can’t use guns at all. In the original you could take an enemy’s gun and just fire off what was in the clip, but not reload or keep the gun.
The multiplayer team shooter Rising Storm is getting a sequel set in Vietnam, The original was set in WW2. I wonder if they’re just following what DICE did with Battlefield more than 10 years ago. If the next one is set in 2142, we’ll know.
Arma III is getting a huge new island expansion called Tanoa.
Thanks for reading. I hope my E3 summation gave you something to get excited about. I’ll be back to more opinionated blogging next week. Until next time..
It’s that time of year again. Assuming you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Summer! Meaning the Sun is out, and you’re likely incarcerating yourself inside buying dozens of ludicrously cheap games and racing to put enough hours into them to feel like you’ve gotten your 99c of value before the next flash sale pops up 6 hours later.
That’s right! It’s the Summer Sales. I’d have said Steam Summer Sale but GOG are currently doing one too and Humble just finished up with one also – not that you’d know as, without scrolling, I can see the word ‘sale’ three times on the Humble home page right now.
For laughs, and I haven’t planned this in advance (having written the blog title after the article), I’m going to give you, dear reader, 100 HP (hit points / health – but if you don’t know that you’re probably not reading this blog), and each time we discover damage, I’ll subtract HP and see if you make it through this blog-dungeon intact.
I’m going to subtract -7HP now for the aforementioned time of year and the fact that Summer sales are making you miss good weather. If you live in Australia I’m still subtracting those points because it’s probably sunny and warm there too right now, chances are.
To set the scene, there are two major sales periods on Steam annually; Summer and Winter. These sales are huge, nearly everything gets a discount, and they last about 10 days. The rest of the year there is something on sale every day, and the weekends are always worth looking at too for free-weekends where you can install the game and play it normally for free all weekend, then buy it at a hefty discount if you want. Humble Bundles are always selling games, though the selection is far more limited, and GOG are a quickly-growing competitor to Steam who are following suit with very regular sales as well as larger seasonal ones. In short, if you don’t have to play a game on day-one, and you keep an eye on these sites or just drop in for the big sales, you need never pay full price for a game. Ever!
Great for us, sure, in the short term, but let’s look at the problems this might cause.
As consumers, and I’m as guilty as anyone here, we don’t often pay full price for games any more. This means that retailers and developers can expect to never really get full price. Considering that games make us gamers happy, and developers and retailers make and sell the games while they’re happy (financially speaking) to do so, we can agree that it’s best that everyone is as happy as possible. Lower selling prices make consumers happier (supposedly, we’ll look at that) but can thin out developers’ profits, making them less happy, when we want to be aiming for win-win. In the past year, there’s only one game that I’ve bought at full price, and that’s GTA V for the PC. It wasn’t offered on sale, wasn’t likely to be soon, and I’d been wanting to play it for years while it was out on consoles, but waited for the PC version. Furthermore it’s actually worth the money by any measure. Amazing game! Apart from that, though, I couldn’t tell you the last game I paid full price for, and I’ve bought new AAA games like Far Cry 4, Alien Isolation, Watchdogs and Wolfenstein. I suppose I paid “full price” for Sid Meier’s Starships, but that was only €15 (actually, my 1-sentence review: Just about worth €15 but there’s not a full game there).
The reason for this is not that I wouldn’t pay full price for some of the games I have bought, but because I don’t need to. I’m still busy playing the last lot of games I got on sale by the time the next one comes around, and I’m mostly pretty good at limiting what I buy to what I’m actually going to play. Many people buy games on sale and never play them at all. This is bad for the games as innocuous art pieces, as nobody is enjoying them. Poor games. -6HP there. It’s bad for the consumer too as they will regret their purchase. €1 wasted is still money wasted, after all. Even if they do get around to playing them, until they do they’ve added a task to their mental To-Do list and this adds to our stress levels. Whichever of the two is your problem, that’s -11HP.
You’d think that for consumers, particularly cash-strapped ones, that it’s great there are so many sales, and in a way it is. For the same money we get to play more games. We like games and we like saving money. But the amount of games most of us want to play is far longer than the amount of games that we can play, especially if we want to both do the game justice and get maximum value for ourselves by completing it! I could easily argue here that the benefit to consumers is illusory. The cake is a lie! For me, who likes to beat games I feel it is, though I acknowledge that people might buy games cheaply in a shotgun approach, try them all for a little bit, and play the one they found themselves to like. I just find it hard not to fuss over the games left underplayed. Whichever your problem there I think you’ll find games are taking up more of your time than they perhaps ought to. The lowered price point makes them “too cheap not to buy” and you’re going waste hours playing games that you know aren’t really for you (everyone has their own taste) just because people recommend it, though they’re maybe an RPG player and you’re an action guy. -9HP for leisure hours spent doing something you knew you didn’t really want to do. (edit: I’m all for trying new games, but sometimes you just already know, you know?)
Moving on, are the sales good for the vendors? Sales obviously have their origins in the physical goods industries, where vendors need to clear stock either before it perishes, or just to clear room for newer seasonal stock. Sales make sense there. They make zero sense for digital distribution, looking at it that way. Bricks and mortar game shops had discount bins because they needed to clear the shelves of ageing stock, not to give gamers better value or to boost sales particularly. It’s likely that the marketers, in their divine, short-sighted wisdom, decided to apply sales to the online stores purely because of the psychological effect it has on consumers. People are more likely to buy something if it’s discounted, and to feel good about it. This would have started as 10% off, say, but if you look on Steam today, you can find multiple titles, some of them really good games, with 90% off! It’s a race to the bottom! Once your competitor is doing sales, you have to do them too, and do them better, if you can! So Steam and GOG, for example, now have to out-do each other in discounts every day of the year, and especially at the arbitrarily-set bi-annual mega sales times. So while they may have increased volumes of sales, the cash-value of each sale is lowered, and so even for them, they’re potentially doing themselves more harm than good in the long run. -11HP for opening that Pandora’s Box, because that monkey won’t go back in his cage too easily.. not to mix metaphors or anything.
Following on from that is the stupidest example of all of this. The meta-sales games. I don’t want to get too into it because I’ve never wasted my time with the nonsense, but during Steam’s big sales, you can get reward cards for voting on what sales are next, or buying games on sale, or other random stuff. The rules change each time as they try newer and stupider ways of making a game out of the very selling of games. Essentially you turn the cards into badges, or gems, when you collect enough, and you use those to.. craft more badges? Or something? Oh and you’re on a team now.. and can trade the cards with other people so you can… what?! Look, I feel I did it all the justice it deserved with that explanation and I’m not looking further into it. All I know is that somebody actually buys these stupid cards so I can actually sell the ones I get (for doing nothing) for about 10c a go to some joker, and thus I get maybe €1 store credit when all’s said and done that I can put towards my next purchase. That’s after Steam’s commission, of course, clever bastards. Make something out of nothing, give it to somebody for doing nothing, then get someone else to pay you and the the first somebody just so they can be the one to have that nothing. Genius! That’s the easiest to understand version anyway. But the existence of such a system is ludicrous! Constantly selling the product (which is games, Steam! remember?) so low has made even the sales unexciting and Steam feel they have to jazz them up with this marketing tripe. GOG’s current equivalent makes more sense, at least. If you spend a certain amount during the sale period, you’ll get a free game. A higher amount means another, better free game. This, at least, I can understand, but it’s symptomatic of the race to the bottom and it really hits me hard in the sense part of my brain. Let’s say -15HP. (edit: have you figured out that my numbers are arbitrary yet? I’m not even rolling a dice here!)
What is this shite?! Click the picture to go read the full rules.. if you want to..
Having established that serious gamers like myself would actually pay full price for many games but never really have to, it’s clear that games are becoming less and less valuable. I actually now always check how long a game will take to beat before I consider buying it on sale. I’d like the experience, but not if it takes more than 8 hours. Kid-me would hate me for that. -5HP for making your kid-self cry with your first-world “problems”.
Finally, I want to look at it from the developers’ viewpoint. Games are very expensive to make, and individual games being less valuable means you can’t count on getting your RRP (recommended retail price) for each unit. Or even close to it! So AAA publishers releasing the big games, in the knowledge that many people must have them on day one, are pushing that RRP higher and higher, and adding on day-one DLC and season passes. A standard game is pushing past €60 now, while with DLC and a Season Pass for more of it, games like Evolve can break the €100 mark. Arkham City is €80 if I want to play the ‘whole game’. Which I do. But I’m not going to pay that much. -18HP for either taking more from our wallets, pushing games out of our price range, or withholding content behind a pay wall.
Batman can’t save you when soaring prices, season passes, and day-1 DLC join forces!
It also tends to normalise the games that are being made, with big studios less and less likely to take risks because they need to know what their sales are likely to be for a given game-formula. This results in less interesting games coming out from the AAA side. Ever wonder why Assassin’s Creed is (debatably) the same game every year? -5HP.
Wait a second; rising prices, less and less value per unit currency, product not worth what you’re paying for it? Sounds familiar, particularly if you bought a house between 1990 and 2007. It’s not unrealistic to suppose that the AAA bubble might be going to burst in the next few years. It’s worth noting that EA actually shy away from doing too many of these major sales on Origin. They know the harm that the perpetual sale is doing to their sector and they’re not contributing, or trying not to. They do seem extremely unwilling to takes risks with their games franchises though (unless you count risking shipping them as unfinished buggy messes).
On the indie side, where a full price game is rarely more than €20 and DLC is rare, they don’t have far to go to the bottom. Before long they might not be able to count on selling at more than €5 per unit average (and that’s before vendor commission – often 30% – and before all other costs) on their €20 RRP game. (As a disclaimer, the numbers are my own fabrication as I’m hypothesising on the future.) -9HP for making it harder on the little guy. It’s notoriously hard to make a living as an indie game developer unless you have that big success. Indies need to stand out to have that success though, so on the positive side, this does at least result in more interesting games being made, rather than a normalisation (if you exclude the myriad zombie survival games out there). This would be true with or without sales though so I can’t really add back any HP, sorry. Healing spell failed!
Final tally: Since we had 100HP to begin with we’re still alive, but we’ve taken some serious hits. I didn’t plan the numbers, I just took points based on how bad I reckoned things were relative to each other. Interesting that we got as low as 4HP remaining.
In all areas of life, it’s very hard to be a responsible consumer. We know we should recycle, we don’t want to support slave labour or animal cruelty, or the killing of the bees, or the harming of our beloved industries, but it’s not always easy to see how we’re doing these things as the end consumer. I do think we should stop and think once in a while instead of always jumping for the carrot. Do I have a useful suggestion though? No. Am I going to stop buying games on sale? No, probably not, although I’ll buy them full price if I’m ready for a new game and it’s not on sale.
Short of all parties agreeing to stop sales and get back to selling games at reasonable recommended retail prices (and there are laws against collusion like that, see ‘cartels’) I think we’ll just have to ride this wave until it crashes into the shore and see what the industry looks like after that. Change is not always a bad thing, after all, even if it can be painful. Just make no mistake, these perpetual sales are definitely driving a change in how we perceive, play, purchase, and create games, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. We behave like the consumer is king, but even the all-consuming bushfire can run out of fuel and burn itself out.
I really wanted to blog about Xcom 2 which was announced during the week and has me super-excited, but I thought it was a better time for this one. My blogs are usually opinion pieces on games or tech. Today I’m going more personal and autobiographical. After being told that the subject matter here would make for an interesting talk (I’m still going on faith on that, dear reader) I applied to give it at State of Play 2015 in DIT, Dublin. It wasn’t picked (thankfully, because there were some really great talks on that night) but what follows is more or less the content intended for that.
So last Tuesday (June 2nd, 2015) I got this in the post. It’s a confirmation from the Companies Registration Office in Ireland that the indie games studio name I registered is unique, approved, and now mine. This means I’m a sole trader, trading under the name RetroNeo Games. I’d sent in my application a week before.
I won’t say I’d always wanted to start my own business as I was usually happy if working for a decent employer, but I had been open to it if the right idea came along too, so I was now well-chuffed!
I’d already bought the .com and reserved the Twitter and Facebook handles (all that is coming soon) so it was a real enough idea to me already, but the confirmation was sweet! As you can see in the picture, the form was actually approved on May 30th. This was huge for me. A real “ha! fuck you!” victory moment, and I’ll tell you why.
May 30th is one year on from the lowest I’ve ever been in my entire life. On that day in 2014 I wanted to die, very sincerely, and it took a while to level out again. I was in a new job in a Tax/Accountancy firm in Donnybrook and had just that week made the move from Greystones (90 mins commute each way) to an expensive apartment 10 minutes walk from work so I could have more time to study entering the final stage of my Chartered Tax Adviser exams. I liked the new job. It was permanent with upward mobility and challenging work. I was getting on okay with people. Being outgoing. It was good. I went in to work a bit hung over (not the bad part) as the night before the whole office had been celebrating. The guy who’d done my interview (and phoned to offer me the job before I even got home that day) 6 weeks before had been named Managing Partner after his dad retired and all was positive as he spoke about how he wanted to grow and expand the firm. I was thinking this was great because I soon wouldn’t be the last-in and prone to be first-out at any moment as had happened in previous jobs when funds were low. Plus the guy who liked me was now in charge, basically.
That afternoon he fired me.
No reason was given. I’d never had a tiff with anyone. I hadn’t gotten a single complaint about my work. I know I hadn’t done or said anything stupid at the work party. They knew I’d no plans to travel or move jobs. I was solid. And I wasn’t even the last-in any more as a younger guy (also named Kevin. Considering our manager was a third Kevin, it was a very confusing room to work in) had just been hired. I was totally shocked. I agonised about what it could have been for months, but I never found out. Legally they don’t have to give a reason until you work somewhere 12 months. It was mental torture. Whatsmore they knew I was moving house that very week and chose the Friday to tell me (as firms often do). I had murder-suicide revenge fantasies for weeks. Months! Every time I pass the office on the bus line since I still want to burn the place down.
Hm.. needs more petrol.. Probably click the picture if you feel like this too often though.
That might seem extreme but everybody’s different and context is everything. To me I lost a lot more than a job. It was kind of the loss of all hope to me. One year before that firing I’d been unemployed and decided I needed to study again (already had a Commerce Degree) if I wanted a stable job. I’d already tried a year in Australia so that was no longer an option. I was thinking of going to Pulse to study games for two years but it was very expensive and not too likely to end in a job. In the end I chose the “safer” option of studying tax for 2 years, building on from my degree, instead of starting a new one. This would cost €5000 approx for all 3 parts, assuming I didn’t fail and repeat stages (50% do by the way).
So from mid-2013 to mid-2014 I treated tax study as my day job (apart from 4 months where I did temp work and studied in the evenings), and took lectures on the weekends (only time they were on). This was kind of rough because I saw very little of my friends on the weekends that year, and they were mostly working during the week (in mostly temporary jobs, typical of our demographic). I stuck it out though, got the 2nd highest results in Part 1, and passed Part 2 (way harder) first time (50% fail, remember). All that time I’d been applying for Tax Traineeships and I think I did six interviews until eventually I got the job in Donnybrook. I couldn’t get into the bigger places because I didn’t have a 1st in my initial degree, and I’d interviewed with most of the Dublin firms who were hiring already (they typically won’t interview someone ever again) so I was running out of places to go and thought that this (extremely boring) “safe” course that I’d spent my savings on wasn’t going to pay off. So getting the Donnybrook job felt like my last chance. Annoyingly I turned down two interviews that were offered while I was working there. After I was fired I had one more offer for (the hated) Job Bridge version of the same job elsewhere, but even the Law Society of Ireland advise not to take them, saying it’s demeaning to the profession, particularly after you spend thousands on your education to be the skilled applicant that they want, just to work for free. I wasn’t about to work 60 hour weeks in crunch time, after spending thousands to be the ideal candidate, and then studying on the weekends for no money.
Further, the house I’d just moved to was also the first place I’d lived alone with my partner in nearly three years. For financial reasons we’d lived with friends or entirely separately over the previous few years, and so that was another thing snatched from us with that sentence “we just don’t feel you’re the right fit for us” (whatever that means). I won’t say I’ve had the worst recession by any stretch, but it’s definitely been rough. I’ve been 6 hours a week part time, emigrated, lost several jobs, been mostly un or under-employed, failed to get a permanent visa in South Australia and heartbreakingly had to leave a great job and life, got and had to give up two adorable puppies after that, lived separately from my partner, moved home, and for the few months of work I did have I was often commuting around 3 hours per day. I’d already moved house 6 times, twice that year, with 2 more to come because of the firing. There were more personal concerns also that I’ll spare us all. People have it worse, I know, but I was finally out of all of that, and for no given reason it was taken away.
Ishi and Weiler. Simultaneously the two most loving and boldest puppies ever. Now with a garden and family of their own.
So I spent the June bank holiday weekend catatonic in bed. I eventually set up my computer and played some Hitman and Max Payne 3 to focus my mind away from the dark places. I’d cancelled the house warming, talked to the landlord and prepared to move house again.
Once I was lucid enough to concentrate again, I downloaded and started taking tutorials in Unity3D. I figured I should have just followed my heart in the first place, because look at where my head had left me. I’ve always been a big gamer and wanted to make games, but everybody says that, don’t they? It’s not smart to do that, is it? Well I figured that since the next most attractive option at that stage was looking out the balcony at the ground three floors down for hours and hours, I may as well remember that the ground will always be there and spend some time doing what I’d always denied myself. I was going to learn how to make games, and finally see if it was for me. Money wasn’t a factor because there seemed to be no alternatives that were going to pay me anyway.
I really got into it! I found that I loved the magic of bringing something to life on the screen. It satisfied that same creative side of me that had loved playing in a band or running a burlesque show, neither of which I’d done much of since moving to Australia in 2011, three years previous. Also, I loved solving logic problems in the scripting. In school I’d loved French and been fond of Maths and Physics so language and logic seemed to be things for me and I took to programming Unity games in C# like a duck to water. Not that I or my career guidance teachers had ever copped this back in school. I realised immediately that I should have done computer science in college instead of business. I’d certainly be working now if I had. But there was enough online material that I could keep teaching myself and so I kept going. A family friend told me that I didn’t need to go to college to study game design if I worked hard on it myself and made games! I’ve a very nagging ‘sensible’ voice in my head that had never let me get into games, but the hard fall along with that advice and a newly discovered passion for something silenced that voice. I’d stay up past 4 in the morning, having made games all day, to continue making games.
I’d finally found what I wanted to do with my life.
It’s never too late, but it’s only getting later
For the second half of 2014, I was a man on fire. I spent every waking minute learning all I could to catch up on years of “wasted time”. They say education is never wasted, but the €4k and 1 year I spent learning tax was definitely wasted. Ask me anything. I can’t remember it now. I put everything I was learning into a single project, pretty much. A top-down space shooter. I called it “Sons of Sol” which was a sci-fi universe I’d invented myself and started writing a novel in while unemployed in 2012-2013 after discovering that Disney were throwing out all the Star Wars canon that I was such a fan of.
I loved making games but I’d nothing to show people. I’d months spent on a single okay piece of a game, but had never finished something. If you’re a victim of this, make sure you get over it. The single piece of advice I hear most often for aspiring game developers is to “make games and finish them” and I have to fully agree. Try out Cow-Spiracy for a fun example of what you can do quickly. I made it in 48 hours with a friend.
In November 2014 I went to my first DubLUDO event with a couple of friends I already knew from the scene. DubLUDO is a regular-enough meetup of Irish game developers and was probably the closest thing the game dev community had to an organised structure in Ireland until Imirt was founded last month. At it I heard Brenda Romero (with husband John Romero) speak about game design documents, which was an issue I was then agonising over. Suffice it to say, she put my mind to rest. I also learned from others just how much she was doing for Irish game developers (I won’t detail, but it’s a lot!) and she’s now on the provisional board of the aforementioned Imirt, which aims to promote Ireland abroad as a place for game development and represent for the community as a whole. I was very impressed and am ever-grateful to her and everyone who’s championing Irish game development. It gave me faith to start my own business, but we’ll get to that.
Click for Fulbright article. And here’s Brenda’s Twitter and John’s Twitter .
The community I met at DubLUDO and that I’ve come to know over the past few months are so friendly, accepting, and alive!! It’s invigorating and it pulled me further and further from the dark place. There’s a real buzz about the scene which gives me hope for the future. For my future and the future of Irish game development, which I hope are closely linked.
At the community Christmas party I met Paul Conway (the one in BitSmith making Frank n’ John, not the one working on Darkside Detective and doing art for Gunman Taco Truck with Romero’s son Donovan, though both Pauls are lovely, and all those games are awesome). Anyway Paul#1 gave me the advice to start this site and throw a few games up on it as a portfolio. Short but finished games. Paul’s advice helped me to no end. He gave me a focus. A direction! A week later ended 2014, and though I’d had the lowest point of my life in that year, I didn’t kick it out the door as I had with 2012 and 2013. Both rough years. But things were finally looking up.
In January 2015 I did the 48 hour global game jam, and started attending 1 Game a Month jam hosted by Colm Larkin who’s making Guild of Dengeoneering. (edit: you quickly see how in Ireland everyone knows everyone and chances are they’re working on something amazing and artistic. Small, talented country!)
These jams helped me fill up my site and all games can be played here. I also “finished” my original prototype for Sons of Sol in January and moved on to learn how to make other types of games. It’s also at that link.
Claire’s anniversary present to me with my game’s spaceships on them! That’s what support looks like. If you’re wondering, support tastes like cupcakes.
In the meantime all these great Irish games above (and Onikira too) are coming out this year, bodies are forming, the iDig games-music festival (with Video Games Live) happened in March and is becoming annual which in turn has copped Enterprise Ireland onto the viability of the games industry, and it feels like such a positive time to be an Irish indie. All these good vibes and the knowledge that I couldn’t possibly go do anything else with my life now has rescued me and given me the confidence to start my own business. I can’t thank the community enough for getting me here. To where I’m happy and alive again. I absolutely have to thank my partner Claire here too, because without her support and confidence this past year, I wouldn’t likely have stayed the course.
During the first half of this year I set about applying for Irish welfare’s Start Your Own Business scheme, which gives you guaranteed welfare income for two years while you set about your business, subject to the approval of your business plan. Mine was approved in May and the same morning as the meeting I had for it was the morning I thought of the name RetroNeo Games. The remarkable thing was that that day (I was told it was very likely to be approved), I stopped identifying myself as unemployed-with-a-hobby and started identifying myself as an indie game developer. That’s my job now!
I’m going to make “Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest” as RetroNeo Games and I’m going to give it no less than everything I’ve got! This post has been the first half of a story. The next two years might make it a triumphant success story or just a sad, boring one. If you want to follow its progress though you can follow me on Twitter, or bookmark retroneogames.com (site coming soon).
I know I could fail. I know I have to steel myself against the possibility of a huge let down and further financial hardship, but at this stage, I’ve survived worse, and I can’t look back now!
This is what I want to do with my life, and no fucker in a suit (note: I’ve nothing against suits. I like suits) is going to stop me!
.. yes and no. Not especially. But I’m going to, so I guess the answer is “maybe”?… I’m talking about violence in video games through the lens of the latest ‘offender’ Hatred.
I normally start my blogs with a link to the site or something to get you grounded, but here I’m just going to link the trailer and warn you if you haven’t seen it, that it contains very disturbing imagery and themes. That goes for this blog post too.
Click for Hatred’s trailer. Viewer discretion VERY advised.
So if you didn’t know, Hatred is a video game (isometric twin-stick style shooter) set to release this coming Tuesday (June 2nd, 2015) , developed by Polish developers ‘Destructive Creations’. It’s the latest game to court huge controversy. It’s doing it deliberately. To bait you (even the game and studio names were chosen for maximum effect). To get publicity. To make sales. Because Destructive Creations is a business. How are they doing this?
Hatred is a mass shootings simulator.
We can say it’s lots of other things but that’s the most controversial and accurate term. The game is rated AO (Adults Only) by the American ESRB. Games streaming service Twitch have just recently (since that rating) released rules stating that AO games cannot be streamed on their service. AO games also won’t be stocked by big chains like Walmart. Interestingly, the list of AO rated games is actually very short. Only one of the Grand Theft Auto games, one of the Manhunt games, and none of the Postal or Mortal Kombat games are on there. Mostly, AO games have sex themes, while extreme violence usually gets a Mature (M) rating. So something about this game is really getting peoples’ backs up.
At time of writing, Playstation and Xbox are also not carrying the game, and neither are Good Old Games (GOG) for the PC. All that works in the game’s favour because Steam are selling the game. Meaning everybody’s heard of it, and can still buy it.
Let me just get a few things out of the way because they’re not my focus here:
Private companies choosing not to carry/broadcast a game is not censorship. It’s a business decision by a private company, no matter how big they are.
Video games do not cause people to be violent. Scientific research shows the opposite, in fact. Get over it. That fight was lost ten years ago when Marilyn Manson and Eminem failed to convince your children to commit mass suicide while playing Grand Theft Auto. It’s done.
Violent games have always existed, just the graphics have gotten better.
This is not even the first game about slaughtering civilian humans for the pure perverse sake of it. Postal, Carmageddon and Manhunt already exist with multiple games in each franchise. Hatred has been (not unfairly) described as a remake of Postal.
Grand Theft Auto is a silly game which is not ABOUT killing civilians, even though you can. That’s very different.
Games are art. Super-art, in fact, since they combine music, storytelling, digital sculpture, painting/drawing, language and physics. Artists in other media are generally allowed tackle whatever subject they want. Games being interactive is the difference between games and several (but not all) other art forms but this shouldn’t exclude it from being allowed to tackle the same subject matter because the interactive perspective can be used to great and valuable effect.
The old adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” is bull! There is. Such an absolute statement can’t be true. Absolute statements are always incorrect. Always! Including this one!
psst.. Obi-Wan! That’s an absolute statement. You’re a Jedi! Act like it!
God I’m feeling pundit-y today. Okay let’s go with it.
With Hatred, the developers have deliberately set out to gain maximum exposure through controversy, and to weather the bad publicity by taking the good with it. They made a calculated risk, which to date has paid off. Before anybody knows if there’s a good GAME here, they at least know it exists as a product, and there is definitely a sick little niche audience, as well as support from entrenched “games as art” and “you can’t censor us” camps.
The move could have backfired, let’s be clear. When the game first went up for approval on Steam Greenlight, the backlash began and it was removed by Steam. Cries of foul play abounded and Steam chief executive Gabe Newell publicly returned the game to Greenlight and apologised for its removal. If Steam had refused to carry the title, it would basically have been game over, but the gamble paid off, with massive free publicity (some good, some bad, not all bad).
So those are facts. How about some opinions.
Firstly, on a tangent, the amount of fraudulent and scam stuff on Steam that they SHOULD be removing is too long for them to be picking on legit games from legit studios, if you ask me. No matter how controversial. The protagonist here is at least an equal-opportunities psychopath and the game uses original assets. But that’s a blog for another day.
I wouldn’t have made this tasteless a game, personally, but I think its greatest sin is that it actually looks a bit boring and repetitive. By way of disclaimer, it’s not out yet and I haven’t played it but I’ve watched gameplay videos from Gamespot and numerous other Youtubers with review copies. The controls look like they could have used work. Some people don’t like the art style, though I have to say that I do. The world is dark. Black and white. This reflects your character’s clouded and binary viewpoint quite artistically I think. The destruction physics also look quite tasty, so kudos there.
The most shocking part of the game is definitely its executions. The only way to get back your health is to walk up to an injured person and ‘Execute’ them, which will give you one of several extremely cold and violent, up-close-and-personal kills from a close-in camera view. Since this is how you get health, you have to do them to play the game. While there’s a large number of execution animations, they are still limited, and they quickly desensitise you, since you’re doing them mechanically as often as possible to boost your health, you’ve already seen most of them before after just a few minutes. Speaking objectively, I think it’s a bad gameplay move, as it makes their chief (and most visceral) mechanic lose its edge and get boring before the first level is even over. Then you’re just left with a twin-stick shooter. The targets may as well be zombies at this stage.. almost.
Not that the executions don’t shock. They absolutely do!! Head stomping, stabbing (in various ways), guns in the mouth, all while the victims moan or beg for their lives. It’s horrific, but there’s nothing here that you can’t see in movies, or haven’t seen worse of in other games. This game doesn’t even seem to have dismemberment either (see Soldier of Fortune series) but I’ll allow that I could just not have seen it. I think it’s just blood and bodies. So what’s so extra-chilling about it?
For me, and I guess anyone else who has an ounce of social awareness, it’s that the victims are total innocents, not soldiers, terrorists, aliens or zombies, and that cold-blooded killings and executions like these require a special brand of evil and have really happened to real people. And this time you’re the perpetrator. Consider Columbine, the Washington Sniper attacks, the shootings at the Dark Knight Rises showing in Colorado, or the 2011 Anders Behring Breivik attacks in Norway. I’ve linked them because I think it’s important to learn and remember these things. And here I’ve only looked back 16 years max, and only gone with non-politically and non-religiously motivated individuals (or pairs) using guns for their massacres. This means I’ve excluded the Boston marathon bombings, Charlie Hebdo, and Kenyan shopping mall attacks. And that’s without even having to think hard. Always pointed out is that non-political mass shootings seem more prevalent in the United States for whatever reason. Even in Norway, Breivik claimed he was targeting the Labor party. And forgetting about our Western orientation, we live in a world where ISIS do this sort of thing every day. We should get disgusted once in a while and think about the violence real people suffer.
Columbine High School security cam footage.
Should this subject be banned from video games, movies, art, music? Absolutely not! See my point 6 above. I think that war movies, for example, should be made and some of them should be made as violent and realistic as possible. We shouldn’t enjoy them as action movies. We should fear them as warnings and revere them as real-life horror stories. Fury and Saving Private Ryan stand out. Recently, on Memorial Day, Brenda Romero posted a video of her uncle John Bacon, who served in the US 101st Airborne on D-day, talking about his experiences and the movie Saving Private Ryan. Speaking about the violence of the movie (to paraphrase) he said it was good. That it’s important for people to know “what we did”. Which I took to mean, what they saw, suffered, and did themselves. I do think that it’s important that these movies and games are made.
I don’t play war games like action movies. I play them like war movies. I regret every German, Italian or Japanese soldier who comes on screen and has to die so that I can live and go home (odd how you never play the Axis in single-player shooters). Most of them weren’t bad people. Sure, there absolutely were war crimes (on ALL sides) but the great human tragedies were that individuals who never wanted to get caught up in a war for any reason, had to go and fight and/or die. Sure, some wanted to. They wanted to defend their loved ones. Or were brainwashed by what they were told the enemy were doing and would do! Or some just wanted to go and see what killing a foreigner was like (let’s not pretend there weren’t a few).
I know not everybody sees war games like I do, but they should really try to consider that perspective if they haven’t before. Playing the D-day landings in Medal of Honour: Allied Assault is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in gaming (and not just for the difficulty of the game itself). Just try make yourself get out from behind those tank traps!
I think my reasoning for war games and movies transfers logically onto murder simulators. They should be disgusting, violent, cruel, disturbing, and they should be made. Occasionally. Not for entertainment (though profit is fine, people have to eat) but for education. So we don’t forget. Not so that we get desensitised (see my point 2 above. Ripping somebody’s guts out in Mortal Kombat won’t make you any less likely to feel nauseated if you see somebody get a nasty cut chopping onions) but so that we are aware and might try to prevent tragedies like this in the future. Think hard about what you want out of that 2nd Amendment, America.
As for Hatred. Do I think Destructive Creations had such noble goals? Not as such. Some team members may have. But below is a statement from the company’s website. Basically they say they’re trying to buck trends, offend people, make you think (okay, good) and that it’s “just a game” so don’t take it so seriously. That last one actually gets my own back up, as it trivialises every point that I’m trying to make, and damages the industry every time somebody says it. Like saying “I don’t believe in fairies”.
Click to see this on company’s website. PS I take things seriously. It seems the fairest way to take them to me.
To tie this off, Hatred is deliberately controversial but not unique or ground-breaking. Hatred should make you think and disgust you and if not then you’re one sick ignorant puppy. Hatred is trying to get your back up and make you talk about it to anybody who’ll listen (and you’re probably falling for it). Hatred is a game I’m giving free publicity to because I wanted to discuss some ignored angles for the better-hood of the games industry and gamers. Hatred is self aware with a tiny tiny pinch of humour thrown in, but it’s not funny. Hatred as a game looks visually interesting, but a little boring otherwise. Hatred is releasing this week and price isn’t confirmed but conjecture puts it around €30.
Hatred should make you stop and think. But don’t hate or laud it because of what it is. Because what it ISN’T is unique, an incredible game, or deliberately making any particularly important statements. Buy it if you like. But please know all that.
In a world where we see everything through a computer-screen-tinted glasses and think everything is entertainment, games like this are tapping on the glass and seeing are you still human. Think about it.
STARFIGHTER INC. by Impeller Studios, is currently in the middle of its Kickstarter campaign, with over $150,000 raised of its $250,000 target with 13 days to go. It’s billed as the spiritual successor to Lucasarts’ X-Wing PC games from the 1990s. David Wessman, a designer on each of the 4 X-Wing games is lead designer of a quite meritorious team who want to bring back the flare of the series.
The nineties were a great time for Lucasarts and for Star Wars. See my previous blog on the May 4th Star Wars game sales. You’ll see that most of my top recommended games were from the last millennium. Rebellion, Dark Forces series, Rogue Squadron and the X-Wing series made me proud to be a sci-fi fan and a gamer. The Star Wars novels were expanding the universe in (sometimes) interesting new directions. Lucasarts were even doing well with their non-Star Wars games like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. Everyone was eagerly looking forward to the new prequels (Episode 1 didn’t come out until 1999 and until then it was generally a very positive time). So it’s safe to say that the nostalgia-factor is strong with this one, and Impeller Studios are banking on that nostalgia to make their Kickstarter campaign a success.
My first ever game with my first ever PC was X-Wing, which came on 5 floppy discs. I believe it was 1994, I was 7, and I played the shit out of it! One of my favourite ever games is still X-Wing Alliance, which was sadly the last entry in the series, all the way back in 1999. The fact that the series stopped there has always been a huge regret for me and other gamers. Admittedly it was a good high-note to end on, but still. I’ve always wanted another one, and nothing has satisfied.
Things are definitely changing for Star Wars since Disney’s acquisition of the franchise in 2012, but I’m still not fully convinced that this will be good for Star Wars, or that it’ll produce the games we’ve all been craving. The entire Expanded Universe (books fiction) was the baby thrown out with the bathwater, the promising 1313 was cancelled, and so far we’ve seen 3 trailers for the new EA Battlefront game without 1 second of gameplay footage. I’m not passing judgement yet, just withholding it. I’ve been hurt before! At least the deal can’t turn out worse for Star Wars. Disney will either breathe new life into the horse, or just take over the flogging, but they can’t kill it again (1313 excluded).
What would sell me, personally, is if the movies are good and we get a new X-Wing (or Empire at War or Republic Commando) game. The free-to-play multiplayer-only Attack Squadrons was (thankfully) cancelled in Beta stage with the developers saying it was “so we can focus on other game experiences” (article here). There was hope that the other experiences mentioned might be an X-wing game, but one year later, and with Wessman working on Starfighter Inc. the chances of that are looking slimmer.
With Star Citizen’s success spurring on a rebirth for the space-sim genre, maybe we will still see an official Star Wars space game again, but for now it looks like X-Wing fans shouldn’t hold their breath. So, should they pin their hopes on Starfighter Inc?
The Impeller Studios team.
My problem is that while the later X-Wing games DID have multiplayer, the games were single player story experiences, with dramatic and varied missions through which you lived out your space hero fantasies. You didn’t get killed by better players every 30 seconds and respawn. That shatters the hero fantasy. X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter was the exception in the story-driven franchise but even its expansion pack had story content. Starfighter Inc. is just planned as a multiplayer game. I hate that! To me, that’ll be fun for a couple of hours, but be nowhere near the X-Wing experience that I’ve been craving, and I imagine many fans will agree with me. Impeller are banking on the good will and nostalgia of X-Wing fans to give this project its legs, but for me, one of the world’s largest X-Wing fans, they’re not successfully speaking to that nostalgia. They’re making just another space deathmatch game. I care little that Wessman is working on it if he’s not delivering the kind of game I know him for. I love Far Cry (kinda) and Crysis (1, only) but the fact that Jack Mamais is on the team doesn’t matter much to me either because this game isn’t a First Person Shooter!
I want the game that X-Wing should be 16 years on from X-Wing Alliance. That game had over 50 single player missions, ships with gun positions (like the Millennium Falcon), hyperspace trips in-mission, re-arming on capital ships in-mission, and boarding enemy ships. Kinda. You docked and then sat in the turret for x amount of time while you heard your commandos board the station and do the interesting stuff over the radio.
Starfighter Inc. has… well, all that, but except the missions. Its main selling points are the things X-Wing Alliance had 16 years ago, but without an interesting narrative context to put them in. Multiplayer matches and levelling up your ship can be great, but they’re a very different type of game. Wessman describes the game as “World of Tanks meets Counter-Strike in space”. Both of those games are multiplayer team games where you level up your stats, but they’re clearly trying to appeal to the nostalgia of X-Wing fans to carry them through, with Wessman also saying “this game is the next X-Wing”.
X-Wing Alliance was the first game to let you fly the Millennium Falcon and fight the entire Battle of Endor, including the run inside the second Death Star!
Now, there is a single-player campaign stretch-goal to mention, but it’s the $10,500,000 goal. Right now it’s looking questionable whether they’ll reach their first goal of $250,000 so I doubt very much that this game will be “the next X-Wing”. It’s also using Newtonian physics. Popular nowadays, for sure, and more realistic, but X-Wing didn’t have this. In those games you flew like you were in an atmosphere and would get into turning battles with other craft. That was how the game felt to play. Newtonian physics completely changes the tactics of a dogfighting game in space because you can always turn to face your enemy, even if it means you’re suddenly flying relatively backwards. So it’s questionable if even the dogfighting part in the multiplayer will feel reminiscent of X-Wing at all.
To my eyes, this game is promising to deliver basically what the Arena Commander part of Star Citizen is already delivering, only much later. From their video, Starfighter Inc. looks to be extremely early in development. What I want from a spiritual X-Wing successor is a solid, dramatic, narrative-driven single player (or co-op) campaign game with big ships, little ships, and incredible set pieces. The first episode of Squadron 42 (Star Citizen’s single-player side) is supposedly going to be out late this year and will supposedly have about 20 hours of gameplay. I expect delays, but still, it’s much more likely to deliver the spiritual successor to X-Wing (well, Wing Commander if we’re going to get technical there) that I’ve wanted for 16 years than Starfighter Inc. is.
So, sorry Impeller Studios. I want to want this game. I really want it to be X-Wing’s spiritual successor. I also fully understand the decision to model your game on the hyper-successful World of Tanks and Counter-Strike, but I don’t think I want this. I’ll support for a small amount. I’d love to see you eventually put out single-player content, but I don’t feel that this game is X-Wing’s spiritual successor. I wish you luck with it. I’ll be sure to play it if it does succeed, and I hope it does. I think it’ll be fun and more quality space shooters are a good thing in a world that’s been starved of them, but without a single player campaign as the primary focus, I think you’re missing the mark with what X-Wing fans wanted. For me, at least, you are.
I’ve come across something of a conundrum recently. It’s a confounding discrepancy between advice given by professionals in the music and games industries on what’s essentially the same issue.
That advice is about talking and deciding upon money at the early stages of a project; forming your team.
I’m in games now but I was actively into music as a guitar player/songwriter before. In 2010 I did Hot Press magazine’s Music Industry Explained course of lectures. A number of industry experts, including Jackie Hayden, discussed areas of the music industry and a number of them said that when forming a band, you want to be clear about where the money (if and when there is any) is going to go. Especially if you’re forming with your friends, as is usually the case. So many bands have broken up as soon as they start to make money because they never agreed how much they’d all get if money ever came up. The singer might assume he should get more because he writes the songs, even though he’s always late for practice, while the guitarist has effectively booked all gigs and handled the press (managing the band) and assumes he deserves a manager’s cut, while the loyal and punctual drummer (no pun intended) just assumed there were 5 of them taking a 5 way split.
It happens so much and the advice is to nip this in the bud. There’s no right way to do it. An even split is probably the safest thing to assume but the writer should get more as he’s producing the material, perhaps, and the guy managing is doing a double job, so what’s fair? You just have to agree first, and the advice is, agree in writing! Preferably with a solicitor/lawyer involved.
U2 with manager Paul Mc Guinness. Click for Paul’s Wikipedia page to learn more.
As a case study, it might interest people to know that Larry Mullen Jr. formed U2. Bono still acknowledges that it’s Larry’s band and doesn’t just make the decisions as front-man. But they all agreed early on to split any money evenly, and a very smart decision they made was to give manager Paul Mc Guinness an equal split too. So all of U2’s profits go evenly to 5 people, not 4, and look how successful they are. I should say “went” because Mc Guinness stepped down in 2013, but he managed U2 from the very beginning.
My good friend Sally Ó Dúnlaing, a fantastic singer who’s still neck-deep in the music scene was telling me about the “change a word, take a third” rule of thumb in the industry. This amounts to if you contribute anything to a song, you take a share of the song in the form of a co-producer credit. This is how big pop songs can wind up having 15 writers and 16 producers under a single artist’s name (Beyoncé, say). The point is that the music industry seems to have this figured out and they know how they’re going to get paid.
Conversely, the game industry, and especially the indie game industry is in its infancy relative to the music world and maybe haven’t seen as many legal battles over this stuff. Although forming a small indie team and working for a year or two on a game is directly comparable with (and even comes under a lot of the same entertainment-law areas as) forming a band and working on an EP for the same amount of time, I’ve been given advice by both amateurs and professionals in the game scene to “not talk about money until there’s money to talk about”. Why is this? I actually don’t have an answer. It’s more of an open question and maybe you’d be kind enough to post in the comments if you have an insight.
As a wider poll, I asked a Facebook group of indie developers for their advice on the topic. I got mixed advice. One or two did say it’s very important to agree early on. Others said to “form with your friends” (not that this is guaranteed to prevent disputes) and others to start working assuming an equal share and then see how much work people are putting in. Another said to talk when the game is 30-50% done.
Even researching other blogs and guides specifically on forming indie games teams didn’t net me a single answer. Advice ranged from “just pay them, you own the rest”, to “equal share” to “divide by hours worked”. There doesn’t seem to be a “right” answer, as with music, but the advice in music is at least consistent. “Sort it out early”.
Personally I come from a background where I studied a commerce degree (a couple of legal classes included), was involved in the music and burlesque scenes in Ireland as a musician, songwriter and producer, studied Irish tax (more law) and am now getting into the games industry. My education tells me to be super clear about this stuff early on. I acknowledge that you maybe are forming with friends and don’t want to alienate them so how you go about the discussion may need to be considered carefully.
But when everyone knows where they stand, and if where they stand is acceptable to them, then you have a focussed and motivated team. Without that clarity, or at least an element of trust and respect keeping the team together and happy, you’re likely doomed. Even with a motivated and talented team, the odds of making a successful game or album are slim enough that you may never come to worrying about sharing profits, but at least you’ve got a fighting chance.
That’s my opinion anyway, but I’d love to hear what you think, particularly if you’ve opinions on why the industries seem to differ so much in their opinions on this stuff, or if you don’t think that they do and my experience has been a statistical anomaly.
.. well, if you do get it, then maybe you know already, but Oculus VR have just put out a statement this week saying that the consumer version of their Oculus Rift virtual reality headset (final, ready one) will be available some time in the first three months of 2016, with pre-orders being taken at the end of this year. More info on pricing and features will likely be revealed at E3 in June.
My immediate reaction to this was “what’s taking them so long? They’re losing market share”. Oculus had its successful Kickstarter campaign in late 2012. Okay so inventing a new type of hardware that you blindfold yourself with and move around virtual worlds in without throwing up is something that hasn’t been done before and takes time. Nobody expected it to be fast, but it takes lots of time apparently, and nobody yet knows how much because the headsets aren’t finished yet. From a consumer perspective, I initially expected to have one some time in 2014, then they were going to be available in 2015, and now, supposedly, sometime in early 2016. To be fair, Oculus’ stance has always been that they’ll release it “when it’s ready” and fair play to them for their caution. They’ve stated that they don’t want to kill the potential VR market by releasing a bad product, which is basically why VR never took off in the 90s.
So as to development, the things that have taken them so long basically come down to investigating every possible hardware and software avenue of reducing latency. Latency is the delay between you moving, and you seeing the world move around you on-screen. Real life has zero latency, so that’s what your inner ear expects. VR has several milliseconds worth at the best of times, and this is what causes motion sickness. One of the crucial things that Oculus did in their process was to partner with Samsung, so they could have the use of their proprietary OLED screen technology, used in Galaxy devices, which, without me getting technical, makes looking at VR easier/faster/less nauseating.
VR isn’t all about games. Check out this meditative VR experience, Deep, in which you control the relaxing experience with deep diaphragmatic breathing. Click the image to open in new window.
After doing that, though, it seems they diverted their attention partly towards getting the Samsung Gear VR headset developed. A prototype version (Innovator Edition) is currently available to consumers, with the full version set for a late 2015 release. Pricing is about £169, or around €200, but it only works with a Galaxy Note 4 or the S6 (different version of headset) which you slot into the devices. If you don’t have the phone, this makes the headset something like an €800 prospect though. Software for the device is somewhat limited but there’s enough to play with already with so much more on the way. We see with mobile apps and games how the mobile phone is king and PC and console experiences simply must take the back seat. The Oculus Rift product will undoubtedly lose some of its potential buyers to its mobile-arena sibling, but can cornering both sides of the market be called a bad strategy? Did this segue give other companies the time to get their own offerings up and running before Oculus?
Oculus undoubtedly spearheaded the new VR initiative. Their Kickstarter campaign in late 2012, asking for $250k, raised almost $2.5m, and the world took note. Facebook acquired Oculus for $2bn in 2014 and then the world really copped on. Since then there have been a slew of announcements of similar products, with most major tech brands having an offering (even if Google’s seems to be just a piece of cardboard for your phone).
The real pity about Oculus’ 2016 release date is that Oculus, arguably the driving force that has made VR a virtual (pun intended) reality won’t even be the first to market in their tier.
Valve (have you heard of ‘Steam’? Yes you have) have partnered with HTC, one of Samsung’s top mobile competitors, to bring us the HTC (re)Vive, which is compatible with the Steam gaming platform. The Vive had a very strong reveal in March, with all reports being that the current prototype is blowing Oculus’ older Crystal Cove (Dev Kit 2) prototype out of the water. Not that that is any indication of the final quality, but it does put the Vive on the map.
Sony have revealed their Project Morpheus headset for Playstation 4 which will also release in early 2016, and Microsoft have their HoloLens offering, which you can see through. The HoloLens augments your view, instead of replacing it. Quite a different product but in a nearby field, without a release date as of yet.
Each set has their own particular input devices, not all of which have been seen yet. Prices for the headsets and controllers haven’t been announced but the Oculus is expected to be cheaper than the Vive at approx $300 vs $450. If this is the case, will the lower price and Facebook’s backing be enough for Oculus to keep market share waiting for them into 2016, while people are already playing with the Vive? Likely it will, but being beaten to market when they proved that there was a viable market in the first place has got to sting Oculus’ pride, as well as their bottom line.
I, for one, am very excited that the VR age has nearly arrived, but I’ll probably, like many, be adopting a wait-and-see approach before deciding which project to drop the big bucks into some time in the middle of next year.
What do you think? What games can you not wait to try in VR? Do you care at all? Do discuss in the comments.
May the 4th is almost upon us, and that means Star Wars games are going on sale! What’s interesting this year is that a lot of older PC games have also just come available. Games from before the Playstation or Xbox even existed!! So I want to talk about what games to pick up in the sales this weekend and where to buy them for the best value.
DISCLAIMER: I’m just focusing on PC games and the deals between Steam and GOG (Good Old Games). Both companies’ sales last from now until May 7th, and there is no indication that there’ll be any better deals on the actual May 4th, but you may want to wait until the 4th to be sure. I’ll be talking about the best deals as they stand today; May 1st.
Easy stuff first. Star Wars Rebel Assault 1&2 have just become available for the first time ever in the last few days, and are only available on GOG. They’re not part of any other offer, so they’re a simple decision. Buy them or don’t. I used to be all about RA2 but never played the first. I’m definitely picking this up. These are rail shooter adventure games, with, following your character, Rookie One (yes, that’s his name)’s unique story in the Star Wars universe as told through hours of FMV cutscenes. I can’t say how well they hold up, but they’re definitely an item of interest that you don’t see a whole lot of on the PC any more.
The next two offers involve the Xwing games. Definitely worth picking up one of these deals. X-Wing was the first game I ever owned (along with Commander Keen IV) so for nostalgia alone, I must own it. But 1999’s X-Wing Alliance is my all time favourite space combat sim. Just a fantastic game all around. Look up reviews yourself if you want as I won’t attempt to review each game here. Also be aware that some of the games may require a joystick, some work with keyboard/mouse if desired, and gamepads may/may not be supported. Check it out on the individual pages if you’re concerned.
Steam’s offering (left) is the cheaper at €25.19, but GOG’s Blaster Bundle (right) offers 3 more games for an extra €11.74. These are Rogue Squadron (of N64 fame) in which you fly the Star Wars ships in atmospheric battles, Galactic Battlegrounds which is a decent RTS that came before the fantastic Empire At War, and Rebellion (known back then as Supremacy in the UK/Ireland for some reason) which is a massive strategy game where you command either the Rebels or Empire and build bases and fleets throughout the galaxy. This was nowhere near as popular as I think it deserves to have been and sadly the style hasn’t really been repeated to the same degree in any strategy game I’ve played since. Look it up. For my money, the extra 3 games are well worth the extra €11.74, so I wholeheartedly recommend GOG’s Blaster Bundle. Some of my all-time favourite games in here.
The last one might be a little tricky if, like me, you already own many of the games from these collections, and/or don’t want some. You prefer to buy some of these individually but I’ll be analysing them as whole packages only. They’re both the biggest collections that either company are offering and they’re both 77% off the normal price, down to €21-odd euro.
For the same money, both packages offer you the all 5 Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games, both deals including Mysteries of the Sith (these are the Star Wars first person shooter and lightsabre games, following Kyle Katarn – mostly), Empire At War & Forces of Corruption (my all time favourite RTS. Play the 2 player galactic conquest mode of a Sunday afternoon. Best fun you’ll ever have), Battlefront 2 (think Star Wars meets/steals Battlefield), Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 (KOTOR 1 is one of the best rated RPGs of all time. 93% Metacritic), Republic Commando (best Star Wars shooter if you ask me, with great squad mechanics), and Star Fighter (like the aforementioned Rogue Squadron but came later and was for Episode 1. I haven’t played it yet so I can’t say more).
However, Steam’s bundle (left), for €0.31 less, also gives you The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes and The Force Unleashed 1 & 2. Of them I could only really say that The Force Unleashed 1 is regarded as being worth a play, and even then it’s tedious, but they’re effectively for nothing, so why not. Apparently you can’t gift the extra copies to anybody, though. They simply disappear. The law needs to change on this, but that’s for another day.
The only reason not to choose Steam then is that GOG’s sales are DRM-free, if that matters to you. Sort of like buying free-trade coffee. You won’t deny it’s better, but it may or may not actually bother you personally when it comes down to it.
I hope this guide was helpful. The only hard part left is what to play first. Personally I’m going to start on the Rebel Assault games as a warm up. They’re shorter. Republic Commando is also short enough. If you get into the Xwing or KOTOR games, don’t expect to come out the other side for a few weeks!
