Playing Romero’s New Game

Okay sorry, you’ve been click baited a little. I haven’t played John Romero’s new shooter – of course I haven’t! The ‘game’ I refer to is following the stealth marketing campaign that surrounds the new shooter, and uncovering its mysteries.

Once a month I take time out of developing my Asteroids-like game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest to blog on gaming news. I’ve been following this story with great curiosity recently.

Last weekend I did a hefty amount of research into Hoxar, the mysterious (and fictional) augmented reality company that lies at the heart of this mystery. During this past week a lot has been hinted and teased, including the fact that “On April 25th at 11 am EDT, the full details of Night Work’s upcoming game will be revealed”.

What I’m writing down today is a summary of what’s happened, what’s known, and (a little bit) what I think the new Romero shooter is going to be. While I may be proven wrong in just two days, this is something of a snapshot in time for posterity’s sake. Plus if I’m right, I’ll seem like an awesome games journalist and PC Gamer should probably think about giving me a job (if they’re reading.. hint hint).

The one thing I’ll give you for free before we kick off is that the new game is NOT called ‘Hoxar’. A reliable source high up in the studio confirmed that to me.

The Return

On April 20th, John Romero’s YouTube Channel released the video above and the gaming press have picked it up. It’s the most visible element in the campaign leading to the announcement of the new shooter.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve already seen it and know its significance, but hopefully I’ll tell you some things you don’t know.

Adrian Carmack opens the video, playing a role analogous to Rey from Star Wars Episode 7. Adrian (artist) was the co-founder of id Software with John Romero, Tom Hall and John Carmack (no relation) where they pioneered the shooter genre with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He’s also credited with coining the term “gibs” – short for “giblets”.

None of the original four co-founders work at id any more and to the best of my knowledge, Romero and Adrian haven’t done a game together since Quake in 1996.
The same source that I mentioned before has confirmed that Adrian is involved in the production of the new shooter – not just this teaser.

In the video, Adrian’s ‘Rey’ character approaches Romero’s ‘Luke Skywalker’ and proffers him a keyboard and mouse (lightsaber), initiating Romero’s “Return”. John Romero hasn’t stopped working in games, so the presumption is that, instead of a return to game development, it’s a return specifically to the genre that they pioneered together – First Person Shooters.

As proof, The Return points towards the new Night Work Games Ltd whose currently sparse website does prominently display the text “A NEW FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER IS BEING BUILT AT NIGHT WORK GAMES LTD. IN GALWAY, IRELAND”.

According to the same site “Night Work Games Ltd. is the dark and violent subsidiary of Romero Games Ltd”, which is also now based in Galway.

As trivia; the video was created by 2 Player Productions, the same team that did the Double Fine Documentary and Minecraft: The Story of Mojang. Apparently, hearing that Romero was now based in Ireland, they decided to mimic the famous scene from the end of The Force Awakens. The final scene from Episode 7 was filmed on Sceilig Mhicíl (Skellig Michael) in County Kerry off the West coast of Ireland. This video was filmed in Connemara, about 200km North of the Skelligs, and on the mainland.

Adrian Carmack has also had an Irish base of operations for a little while, having bought a 5-star hotel in County Laois in 2014.

Hoxar

Anyone who signed up to the Night Work Games newsletter or who’s been following John or Brenda Romero’s Twitter feeds will have caught wind of something called ‘Hoxar’. It’s been floating around for a few weeks before we knew anything about Night Work Games or The Return.

Shack News seem to have scooped the Hoxar story on April 15th, with Romero confirming (in a way) the validity via Twitter.

Hoxar’s website (registered in February this year), at a casual glance, appears to be just some technology company interested in revolutionary VR. But if you read a little into it, you realise that they’re calling VR (which is only just getting started) “a thing of the past”.

The biggest clue that they’re not real is probably that their technology has “sight, sound, smell, and touch components”.. nobody in their right minds is working on smellovision. That train has sailed. (although – that’s what they said about VR..)

If you Google Image search any of the photos on the site you can see that they come from stock photo websites or similar, and you won’t find any of the supposed employees on LinkedIn or anywhere else.

A lot of detail has gone into the site, and there’s even job openings. Apparently, a PR company is helping with this game, so presumably this whole Hoxar thing is part of their brief while Night Work Games makes the actual game.

What the company supposedly do is develop “BLACKROOM”, an extremely (impossibly) advanced virtual reality experience that doesn’t require any headsets. It includes advanced AI and uses hoxels (holographic pixels). It has entertainment, therapeutic, and military applications. The kicker though is their PMT (Predictive Memory Technology). Read the site’s info itself if you want, but essentially, in the fiction, it reads people’s memories and extrapolates more realistic experiences based on what the user would expect to happen.

The Social Media Fiction

Again, you can track it all down in detail yourself but in short; Through the Hoxar Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as their various newsletters, they’ve told us of how their tests with the technology are proceeding. A woman got to reunite with her dead mother and find closure – great!

There was also a military test that went wrong and is basically being examined – not so great! But this is why you test! Nothing to worry a bout..

This smacks of the kind of thing you hear on the TV or radio at the start of a horror movie before the hero turns it off, thinking nothing of it, only to have it start chewing on his or her leg thirty minutes later.

Hoxar certainly seems to be this game’s equivalent of Doom‘s UAC (Union Aerospace Corporation). When will the scientists learn?!

The other thing to note is that the dates mentioned in all posts are in April 2036. Presumably, many people have glanced right past the dates, not noticing that there’s one digit out of place. So while we’re getting ‘live’ updates every other day, the fiction presumes that we’re in 2036.

The Invitation

In the Hoxar newsletter of April 24th, they have a post about Curse of the Ebon Raven, an “entertainment HoloSim” horror game so intense that nobody has yet made it through.

The end of the announcement said “To arrange an engagement, contact please contact Thexder Roy at thexder@hoxar-inc.com”.

I find this curious because it’s the only mention of this so far, and the game is about to be announced in two days. I’m not sure where they can go with this one (unless the hauntings turn out to be real! – ooooohhh). Nevertheless, I bit, and answered the email. To my surprise, I got a response. See below.

This email was sent out 1 minute after yesterday’s newsletter from Night Work Games. A minute is 60 seconds. 6 times 10. Ignore 10. 6. The first, second, and third numbers in ‘666’, the number of the beast! Coincidence? Wake up people!!

Okay so I’m not sure what to make of that one, but I know I’m not flying to Scottsdale to drive up 3 miles of road to an empty construction site. I put this down to just an extra level of detail to the crafting of the game’s mystique, and I have to say that I’m impressed. The reason I say that is actually my next point.

The Address

One of the most curious things that I found (and I haven’t seen any other media mention it so far) is the company address. Other media have rightly claimed that the company is registered in Scottsdale, Arizona (note that the company name isn’t trademarked with the USPTO, which would have been done for a real company of this size), but they haven’t examined the address.

11666 East Del Cielo Drive. The 666 seems like an obvious hint towards devilish themes (‘del cielo’ means ‘from the sky’), but it goes deeper than that. This is remote. 5 miles outside of Scottsdale, and 3 miles from the nearest road that the Google Street View car has visited.

Because I couldn’t get a look through Street View, I used the satellite photos (I feel like such a spy! I love living in the future!). See the photos below.

There’s nothing there! How curious. There is a reasonably sizeable structure built into the side of the hill a little bit down the road. If I was feeling particularly conspiratorial, I’d accuse it of being a bunker built into the hillside. This is a real satellite photo, remember. You can go to Google Maps and find this yourself.

Companies can put their addresses into Google Maps, so I think it’s probable that 11666 was deliberately placed there by the game’s marketers, and not that the address was pre-existing. But, that said, you can also find results for 11665, 11664, etc. If you explore the satellite views on the way up this road, there are a few (very large, very nice) homes built nearby.

I do think there’s something to this, but I couldn’t say what, exactly. Why didn’t Romero and co just completely make up an address? It didn’t have to be searchable on Google Maps. It wouldn’t be the first conspiracy theory to come out of the deserts of the Western United States though. Most likely it’s all just part of the theme building and the fact that it’s searchable is just another layer of game-detail for the curious gamer to appreciate. It’s good design to reward Explorer-type players, because they spread stories about their findings (like I am now) and hype the game for just a small amount of content creation.

The Timing

How ready could this game be? Is it just starting out or has it been happening for years under our noses? In 2012, John Romero told Eurogamer “Yes, I’m definitely going to be making another shooter and it will be on PC first,” he explained. Read the article here. If the game he mentioned in that article is the one he’s about to announce, it could almost be done.
It would also mean that it was developed in the US, since that’s where the Romeros were based until moving to Ireland in 2015, a decision they apparently only made after visiting Ireland in 2014. Night Work Games is based in Ireland, as I’ve mentioned.

Could it be a coincidence that this new game will be announced to the world less than 3 weeks before the new Doom game releases on May 13th?

May will also see the release of shooters Homefront: The Revolution (single & multi player open world game), Overwatch and Battleborn (both largely multiplayer ‘cutesy’ shooters). This year will also give us Cliff Bleszinski’s Lawbreakers as well as possibly the new Unreal Tournament, the original of which Bleszinski also created.

I find the timing curious. It’s doubtful that those big titles were looking over their shoulder for what Romero could be doing, since he’s been involved more in mobile and social games for years. Gearbox were more concerned with what Blizzard were doing, and vice versa. Then rises a phoenix from the ashes. A small new company (like id was) set to blow the comfortable competition out of the water.. maybe..

I speculate, but regardless of whether the timing was deliberate or not, the new Doom and the new Romero shooter will definitely be compared. If Romero’s shooter is actually close to releasing, the two games will be locking horns in a comic-book style grudge match for the ages. This could be a real life Batman vs Superman for games (though hopefully good).

What type of shooter could it be?

Theme?

Well this is all speculation now, but the Hoxar stuff certainly hints at experimental technology gone wrong and has military and horror overtones. Doom and Quake certainly match those descriptions. Add to that the fact that Adrian Carmack is involved and I’d certainly say that we’re looking at some sort of demonic, mutant, or alien sci-fi horror shooter.

Indeed, Night Work Games’ website background is the surface of the moon, and the ‘o’ in ‘Work’ is a picture of the moon. Of course this could just be in reference to “Night”, but it’s quite possible that it’s a double entendre, since this studio has only recently been founded in order to put out this one specific game.

Single or Multi Player?

There’s no way in Hell that John Romero is teasing a “Return” to the first person shooter if it doesn’t at least include multiplayer Deathmatch. Call that confirmed right now!
The aforementioned Eurogamer article from 2012 did say “Romero also hinted at a “MMO-ish” style of play, with a persistent world and data” so if that’s anything to go by we can expect some PvP action, but hopefully also the option for some solo quests.

Tech Level?

Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake were all famous for pushing technical boundaries, and while Hoxar hints at high-tech augmented reality, I think the obvious fallacy of that site doesn’t point us reliably at a cutting-edge technology or a VR based game. It still could be, but I don’t think anything hints at it.

The original id games were all driven by John Carmack’s ground-breaking tech, but he’s currently working with Oculus and has been for years. It seems very unlikely that he’s involved or that this will be a VR shooter.

On the other hand, it’s stated that this is a PC FPS, with no mention of consoles. Could this be because it’ll require a high-end PC to run? It does seem possible.

Style?

Romero has said over the past few years that he craves the speed and skill of the old shooters, and that modern cover shooters don’t satisfy him, so we can certainly expect this game to be fast and have heavy retro influences. I wish it would be sprite-based, like Doom, but Romero said in the Eurogamer article that it won’t be.

I’m sure of one thing, though: Knowing John Romero’s renowned penchant for spectacle and his love of first person shooters, we can expect this to be something special!

In Conclusion

Stealth marketing campaigns are fun (if you care about the content). In effect, they’re the meta-game already begun.

For anyone who’s been participating, they’re basically playing the prologue of the game. Sure, it happens to be a detective game and not a shooter, but the slow building of anticipation, and the excitement when you read into a new clue and imagine the implications – that’s marketing gamified! Romero has always been an exceptional game designer, able to empathise with the player’s experience.

The Hoxar campaign is, to me, early evidence of a legendary game designer back in the saddle, and I’m excited to see what news comes on Monday, April 25th 2016, at 8am Pacific Time, 11am Eastern, or 4pm Irish.

Until next time..

Far Cry Primal. Where to start?!

Far Cry Primal is coming out of nowhere and is really worth keeping an eye on! It was first revealed in October, less than two months ago, and it’s releasing on February 23rd (March for PC), just over two months hence (Achievement Unlocked: “Use ‘hence’ in the blog). The short time from reveal to release is bucking the trend of super-long hype periods, and it worked very well for Fallout 4 this year. At the time of Primal’s announcement I did a post on why I was optimistic, but also what I was concerned about. You can read it here.

Ubisoft unveiled their second trailer on Thursday night at The Game Awards, which was immediately followed by a slew of gameplay videos from various press outlets who had played it in the days prior. Presumably a press embargo was lifted at this stage.

The new trailer is shown at the top of this page and shows a lot more of the game in action, giving us a better feel for what to expect. The press videos on YouTube are worth watching as they’re mostly uninterrupted gameplay, which is a more honest representation. There are videos from outlets like Angry Joe, PC Gamer, and Game Trailers as well as the one below from the developers themselves (in case you want to see only what they want you to see).

Expansion or Sequel?

Given that Far Cry 4 only came out a year ago, and that it’s not an annualised series (like Ubisoft’s favourite child Assassin’s Creed), people figured this would be more of an expansion along the lines of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a single-player only short campaign which had the decency to release at a discounted price, to reflect the fact that it’s not a full game.

Developers at Ubisoft Montreal are insisting that this is “the next Far Cry game”, and are charging full price for it. I’ve a massive problem with this. You can hear from the gameplay videos I linked above that none of the other press really believe this about the game, and neither do I. Graphically, this game is the same as Far Cry 4. It uses the same UI elements (see the alert indicators and map icons?), same engine, and many of the same animal and human animations. Sure, there are new models (a brown bear is now a cave bear, a tiger is now a sabertooth tiger, an elephant is now a woolly mammoth, and the honey badger is.. well, still a honey badger) and a new map, but that’s exactly what Blood Dragon did, and it acknowledged that it was a short game and charged accordingly.

I feel they’re trying to pull the wool over our eyes with the pricing. It remains to be seen just how long the game is, so I’m not willing to guess what a fair price is, but charging the same as they did for Far Cry 4, for half a new game with no multiplayer is not the fair price. I want to play this game, and I want to support the new direction they’re attempting, but I firmly believe that every time you spend money you’re casting a vote for the type of world you want to live in, and I don’t want to live in a world where games companies charge us more and more for less and less. I’ll wait for a sale or something, but I’ve a big problem with their pricing.

That minimap and UI are looking extremely familiar, not to mention the tiger's running animation. — That minimap and UI are looking extremely familiar, not to mention the tiger’s running animation.

No guns, but you don’t even need to play

I feared that they couldn’t really commit to using no guns in a game series that is built on gun action, but it seems they have. Bows and arrows and spears rightly take the place of pistols and rifles, and (from what I’ve seen so far) they’re not stupid rapid-fire versions of the weapons. They work quickly, but there’s still a pull back delay and the projectile seems to have to travel the distance to hit its target, rather than being as rapid as a bullet. This means that learning to hit moving targets at a distance might actually take some skill and be an actual challenge.

However, no fear of actually needing to play the game yourself, it seems. As with The Phantom Pain you can pretty much let your companions do all of the work for you. I’m sure there are certain enemy types and locations with lots of enemies where your sabertooth or cave bear might meet their end before they can clear the entire enemy presence for you, but from what the videos show, it looks like you can just find a wild animal, feed it meat, and hold a button to own it forever. It’s not even a more challenging quick-time event that might have leant tension to staring down a giant wild animal to tame it. You just hold the button. This is too dumbed down for my liking, especially when it appears that if your tamed animal does die you can just resurrect it with meat or some other resource (according to PC Gamer’s video and some of the animal UI we’ve seen, anyway).

There are over a dozen animals you can have play the game for you, but why would you pick anything less than the giant cave bear or sabertooth? It looks like a game design failure to me, to have the animals be so overpowered, but maybe there’s a progression system that means you can’t tame the bigger animals until further in the game, meaning you actually have to fear the wild ones early on and do some killing yourself. Hopefully. The larger animals also take the place of vehicles in the game, allowing you to ride around on them

The owl can what??

This won’t bother everyone, but it bothers me. You are a beast tamer, so you can control an owl. It takes the place of binoculars when scouting enemy positions. You can fly around from the owl’s perspective, though, see what it sees, and tag enemies. This is a bit silly, but okay, gameplay has to come first sometimes. But I hate when ‘the rule of fun’ goes so far as to shatter immersion and make you say “ah come off it, ref!”.. or something..whatever you say, yourself.

The owl can be upgraded to drop fire bombs and other items onto the enemy troops, or dive bomb and rip somebody’s throat out directly. Maybe if it was even one bomb, that would be okay, but it can somehow carry and drop multiple ones.

A parallel: The Phantom Pain kept taking me out of the (otherwise brilliantly tense and immersive) experience by jumping the shark repeatedly. Upgrading D-Dog to allow him to attach Fulton Balloons to enemies was too far, and this after the upgrade to let him carry a knife! Why would a wolf carry a knife in its mouth?! But I digest..

Owl control mode. Notice the 3 unlockable weapons on the right. How can an owl carry 3 things??

I’m still sold!

If there were more games like this, I wouldn’t be as excited for the game as I am. Far Cry is a series that I think has lots of problems. Even in hard mode the games are rarely challenging. Your character is just too strong to start with and only becomes more so. While stripping away your machine guns and grenade launchers was a bold move, letting animals do all the damage for you seems like even less fun, ultimately. But I’m partly assuming the worst there, as well. It could be very well balanced and there might be nuances to the systems that make varied approaches worth while (though ‘nuance’ isn’t a word I’d traditionally associate with the Far Cry series).

But we have to give credit where credit is due. This is a AAA publisher, the same one who’s deathly afraid to significantly innovate on Assassin’s Creed, trying something drastically different with one of their next-biggest franchises. While they’re doing a money grab by declaring that it’s a full game, this also means that they can’t shy away from it later by saying “oh, that was just a side-experiment; a joke, like Blood Dragon“, which again shows a very unexpected commitment to a new idea.

If you asked almost anyone what the Far Cry series was about they’d say something along the lines of guns, fire, explosions, vehicles, action, (more recently for the series) flying, power fantasy, and maybe ‘exploration’ further down this list. Ubisoft Montreal is saying that exploration is actually what the series is about at its core, and they want to take us to the original frontier for mankind, leaving behind helicopters, wingsuits, cars, rocket launchers, and the guns (while retaining crafting, the grappling hook, melee combat, skill upgrades, and grenade-like items).

Developers inform us that the map is ” really big”.. so there you have it…

I have to say I respect that, despite disagreeing with their pricing and some gameplay choices. I’m torn because I want to support new ideas, but not AAA greed. I may wait for a sale, buy it on a discount game codes site, or start a petition to drop the price… don’t laugh, somebody actually should. We should voice our concerns as consumers, not just pay-up-or-pirate.

I wrote two weeks ago about how first person shooter campaigns look to be dying off. Far Cry has been one of the few series holding back the tide, and here’s their newer game with no multiplayer at all. I want to support this game. I want it to succeed. It could see a reverse in that trend and encourage big developers to take risks with their first person franchises. Imagine Call of Duty set during the times of ancient Rome. Come on!!!! You can be sure Activision will be watching Primal very carefully.

Anyway, them’s my thoughts. Do be sure to check back on the site next week as I’ll have a very exciting post! An interview with legendary games composer Frank Klepacki of Command and Conquer fame!! Don’t miss it!

Until next time..

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lone Wolf mode (Single Player)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Op

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

In theory.

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

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

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

Multiplayer 5 v 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RealBlast Destruction Engine

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary

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

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

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

Until next time..

First Person Shooter Campaigns Dying off?

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

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

What I love about Single-Player

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Business

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

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

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

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

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

We Can Already See The Split

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reasons to include single and multiplayer modes

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Question

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

Okay, the “Real” Real Question

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

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

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

Please discuss in the comments, anyway.

Until next time..

Never played DOOM

So this is kind of a 40 year old virgin situation. It’s 2015, I’m a 28 year old gamer and now game designer, first person shooters are probably my favourite game genre, and I’ve never played DOOM. It’s been out for 22 years now and is a piece of gaming, nay, world history. I’m also even a history fan so no excuses there! Even with the 40 year old virgin you can’t say Steve Carrel’s character had 40 years to have sex, because you’d have to reach adolescence to even be capable of it, whereas I was playing games since I was 7. So let’s say that at twenty-odd years of missing out, your life is starting to turn into comedy movie material. I had to rectify this situation, fast!

I should say that I’ve seen it played a little at friends houses as a kid (but if you haven’t gotten your hands on it, you haven’t played it, in the same way as watching porn won’t pop your cherry for you). I’ve also played Star Wars Dark Forces which was a blatant DOOM copy cat, but I haven’t played the original.

I’ve also never played the Quake series, Hexen or Daikatana. You might think I had something against id Software, John Romero, or any affiliates, but that’s not true as I did always love Wolfenstein (1992) and Commander Keen. In fact I think Keen IV was the very first video game I ever played. Anyway, I’ve decided to rectify this situation and took to Steam and GOG two weeks ago to see which games I could pick up and work my way through (mental note: add Unreal 1 to that list).

My mom would never have bought me this game anyway.

I bought “Doom Classic Complete” (because I’m a grown up and can do what I want, mom! I might just stay up all night playing it too!) and loaded up the Ultimate Doom version of the first game. I remember thinking the game was scary when I was younger, and I know that older games didn’t hold your hand at all when it came to difficulty, so even though I’d have no hesitation playing Call of Duty on the hardest setting, I loaded up the “I’m too young to die” difficulty (easiest) and hopped in. I do have to say that I never died unless crushed in a trap though, so I probably should have started higher, but it still got me for plenty of jump-scares, and I beat Alien Isolation on Hard mode. There might be something to this DOOM..

I knew how different the game was to modern, polished shooters, but marvelled immediately at how much they owed to this, the second ever FPS game (at least the second where it’s humans shooting guns, not tanks or wizards – I’m counting Wolfenstein 3D as the first). The weapon bobs as you move and recoils as you shoot. The sounds give the guns a real punchy weight. Barrels explode if shot (even chain reactions are possible and actively designed into the levels). The death animations, while already established in Wolf, are visceral, gorey and lively, with soldiers leaping and spinning, and generally surpass their predecessor. These are things that I’ve seen missing even from a small handful of games made nowadays (okay never the AAA titles but still). With twenty years to learn from the masters, none of these things should be ignored with modern shooters, yet we can still find poor animations, static guns with lame shooting sounds, and otherwise very little attention to detail. DOOM was a benchmark game at the time, sure, but to place it alongside some shooters made today by teams larger than that of id software in 1993 DOOM could still beat them hands down. Why?

Well, all of those things I mentioned above make the game FUN to play, no matter what else you’ve played in your life. That, and the shotgun! Oh my God the shotgun is PERFECT!! I’ve never played with it before. It was like seeing the Light of God (albeit a violent, vengeful God… like the Old Testament one). I thought I’d seen a few good shotguns in games but nothing like this. I had as much fun playing with this shotgun as I did shooting clay pigeons with a real one! The game holds out on you for a few minutes, making you make do with the pistol to get you used to taking a few shots to put down an enemy, and then BAM! It grants superpowers worthy of Superman.. if Superman had a shotgun! It’s not even the best weapon in the game, but it’s one of the ones you’ll use the most.

It’s got a real weight to it, again through its sound, but also through its cocking animation, which is all it needs to be, and must have blown minds in 1993. The rate of fire is just fast enough not to be frustrating, but slow enough that you are really rewarded for lining your shot up perfectly before pulling the trigger, then seeing the weapon’s wide spread and heavy damage one-shot the game’s lower-difficulty enemies and send them spinning! It’s a perfectly tuned weapon for a game as fast paced as DOOM. You still have to check those corners and be wary of ambushes so as not to die, as the shotgun can only help you in the direction you’re facing, but it is just a thing of beauty. It made the game what it is, no doubt.

While the shiny effect is permanently on that shotgun, not due to dynamic lighting, you have to admit that it's a beautiful looking gun for a pixel-art game from 1993. — While the shiny effect is permanently on that shotgun, not due to dynamic lighting, you have to admit that it’s a beautiful looking gun for a pixel-art game from 1993.

In terms of level design, my praise has to slow down just a fraction. The levels get very clever, don’t get me wrong, and they develop a language of their own with the player as to what they might be able to expect from a given area, but let’s just say games have come a long way in this area. DOOM actually has a sliver of a story to it. Supposedly I’m on a moon base, then in hell later on, but you can barely tell the difference, and the moon base does not feel like a place where anybody could actually set up a research or military installation. There’s some computer screens around, sure, but this place is a maze, has no railings over its mandatory acid pits, is full of secret rooms, and it has no windows! Must be a moon with a Southern Californian climate, then. I spent most of the game following my personal rule for if I ever get lost in a maze. Follow the left well all around, with no breaks, and you’ll get everywhere within the maze eventually, including to the exit. It works, though teleporters, key coded doors and ledge-drops kind of mess with my rule a bit. This meant that I never finished a single level in any less than x3 the recommended ‘par time’ for the level, often more, and I’d still usually have found 0% of the secret rooms. This is an old skool game based on replayability and high-scores, for sure!

The movement speed of the game is immense also. I played with the WASD keys and the mouse. It was strange not to be able to look up, but instead moving the mouse forwards actually moved the character. Holding W, moving the mouse up, and then (when I discovered it) the Sprint key, made for some laughably fast corridor traversals. The W key on its own makes you move faster than any human possibly could run. It’s interesting though. That’s just how shooters were back then. In an upcoming blog (or series of blogs) I’ll be talking about how various limitations led to the creation of a lot of the game mechanics we’re familiar with. I posit that the lack of a cover system or other good way to get out of the way of bullets made boosting the player’s speed a necessity. It would be interesting to hear an original developer’s comments on this. There must be an interview somewhere.. The speed could also be to reduce frustration while backtracking through the impossibly labyrinthine levels, though.

Anyway, I did beat the game’s original chapters on my low difficulty (though there’s a wealth of extra levels and modded levels to play also) in just a few days of playing one or two levels per day. So I’ve popped my cherry. And it was good! I have to say I really enjoyed the game. So much so that I loaded up Doom 2 straight away (on a higher difficulty) and, upon discovering the Super Shotgun, got over-excited and… well, I’ll drop the dangerous metaphor there and just go literal, saying that I played way past my bed time (well I’m an adult, I can do what I want, but still) and I think I beat half of the game in a single sitting. It’s harder to tell because Doom 2 doesn’t give you a map of completion after each level. But that Super Shotgun… with the newer high-res pixel graphics (of 1994) are just so sweet, dude!

How crazy is it to play a new game that’s 21 years old and still get excited about its graphical improvements?!?! That’s got to be the magic of DOOM right there, or at least it’s evidence of it. Pixel art is a timeless style, I think, and I’ve chosen to use it for my own game. Incidentally, you can play the latest build of Sons of Sol (still in very early development) here.

Awww! Just! Yes! If you don't get it I won't be able to convince you unless you play it, but, phwoar! Yeah my mom would NEVER have let me buy this when I was a kid. She's probably not too happy that I've played it now, either :P — Awww! Just! Yes! If you don’t get it I won’t be able to convince you unless you play it, but, phwoar! Yeah my mom would NEVER have let me buy this when I was a kid. She’s probably not too happy that I’ve played it now, either 😛

If you’ve never played the game and you’re a shooter fan, I have to recommend DOOM. It’s nowhere near as difficult to go back to as other games I’ve tried (like Command and Conquer (1995)) and it’s a piece of gaming history! Deservedly so! Find out for yourself. After Doom 2 I think I’ll move on to Quake. I hear NIN (Nine Inch Nails, the band) did the whole soundtrack! *smiles manically*

Until next time..

PS In researching for today’s blog post, I came across a nice short documentary with id Software co-founder John Romero about id’s early games, which heavily featured DOOM. Give it a look below.

PPS [written at a later date] Less than a month later, I’d play my first ever multiplayer game of Doom… AGAINST JOHN ROMERO!! Read how that went here.