Letters from the front
I think, given the content of earlier entries, I’m going to have to make a qualifying statement before beginning this post.
I don’t hate Peter Molyneux.
I don’t even dislike him. I’ve got at least some enjoyment from all of his games1, and a great deal of enjoyment from some of them. His games tend to be technologically innovation, and artistically pleasing. Too often they don’t tie their good ideas and good looks into good gameplay mechanics, but hey, you can’t have everything.
His comments, however, frequently annoy me, because they often seem to reveal either an ignorance of, or disregard for, the ways game design has changed in the past couple of decades, and of the advances that other developers have been making.
Which leads me to my point. Apparently, Peter Molyneux sent out a note with review copies of Fable 2, asking reviewers to “Please, please, please” get a non-gamer to play the game, observe what they did and how their world turns out.
The problem here is that, for a whole host of reasons, and regardless of whether it was designed with the non-gamer in mind or not, Fable 2 is not a game that’s going to appeal to the casual market.
1) It’s on the Xbox 360
Much as Microsoft (and Sony) might wish otherwise, non-gamers don’t own gaming consoles. Who’s going to blow £200+ on top of the line gaming hardware just to use Xbox Live Arcade? Some of them might own a Wii. But if you really want casual gamers, you go for the PC, and make sure it can be played on any machine capable of running Windows XP.
2) It’s a full price release
The other thing non-gamer’s don’t do is blow £50 on a game2. That’s new pair of trainers, or a weeks groceries for a couple, or two nights down the pub. £20-£25 (one night in the pub, a reasonable two course meal) is the upper limit if you want the casuals to come streaming in. £10 is ideal, because that drops you into the realm of the impulse buy3.
3) Movement and camera control in 3D is essential to the game
One of the reasons for the success of the Wii is that Wii Sports removes the need for 3D, dual analouge camera control. For those of us who have spent over a decade getting accustomed to dual analouge control it comes naturally, but most people picking up a game for the first time struggle with it, particularly with syncing character movement with camera direction. If you don’t play games, and you pick up something with this steep learning curve, you’re probably not going to enjoy it, conclude that gaming isn’t for you, and go on your way.
4) It’s a Fantasy RPG
Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings films may have made fantasy at least moderatly cool these days, but RPGs, or anything else with the whiff of dragons, rule books, and dice with a number of sides other than six is still seen as some sort of weird social aberration to be avoided at all costs. A good portion of those who don’t feel this way are also already video gamers, and thus not the people who can truly appreciate Fable 2. Apparently.
5) Violence is central to the game
Although there may be lots of enjoyable4 padding like buying houses and dancing for the townspeople, advancing the story in Fable 2 ultimately involves repeatedly bashing your fellow sentient creatures with sharp metal sticks. As a general rule, if you want the broad audience, you have to avoid using violence as the driving activity of the game.
Given the above, much as Mr Molyneux might like to get the non-gamers perspective, they just aren’t the people that are going to be buying Fable 2, so it seems rather skewed to base reviews on that point of view. Indeed, I’m not really convinced that someone not familiar with gaming would actually enjoy Fable 2 that much even if they didn’t have to pay for it.
Peter Molyneux really should realise this. If he doesn’t, then he also doesn’t understand that much about the casual market, or even the gaming market in general. If he does already appreciate it, then the letter starts to look like an attempt to guard himself against accusations of shallowness in Fable 25.
On an unrelated note, I’ve been made aware that the links to the footnotes only work for the most reccent blog post: otherwise they bring you back to that footnote number in the top post. I’ll try and find some ingenius solution, but until then either view the posts one at or time, or scroll down to see footnotes in older entries.
1Or at least, the games of produced by Bullfrog and Lionhead. Let’s not fall into the trap of assuming that because he happens to be the public face of the company, Peter Molyneux single-handedly puts these games together.
2For the console they don’t own, but we’re moving on from that point.
3As we all know, any purchase of under £10 (no matter how many individual £10 purchases are made), has no impact on your budget.
4Behold my restraint at not putting that word in parenthesis.
5Wrongly, because a good casual game should be simple to learn, but have depth to the gameplay. Again, most of the Wii Sports games provide good examples of this, as does the recently released World of Goo (which if you have a human soul in your body you should be downloading right now, but that’s another post).
A Moral Dilemma
Last Friday, I found myself standing facing a choice of epic proportions. In one hand I held a copy of Spore, in the other The Force Unleashed1. It was a knotty problem. Spore, innovative, different, trying new things even if it didn’t always succeed. Leaving it on the shelf in favour of The Force Unleashed would put me in a category with all those people who consigned Sacrifice, Giants and Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath to a slow, wasting demise in PC World bargain bins. I would be One Of Them. Part Of The Problem.
On the other hand, I really wanted to hurl stormtroopers around with the Force.
In the end, I went with the only available option, and bought them both.
I’m damn glad I didn’t pass over Spore in favour of TFU. TFU on the Wii was ultimately a disappointing experience (and I wasn’t expecting that much from it to begin with). It’s a shame, because when it works, its brilliantly fun. The controls on the Wii give a great sense of physical connection with the game2. Thrusting forwards with the nuncuck to do a Force push just feels badass.
Once the novelty of the controls wears off, however, the cracks quickly start to show. It’s galling, because so many of the mistakes feel like things that ought to be covered in Game Design 101. Like the colour pallet. Why is every enemy that isn’t a stormtrooper exactly the same colour as the background? And why are those colours invariably grey and brown3?
It uses invisible walls in the worst way, with platforms that are low enough to jump to, but you can’t land on because the game designers decided…actually, I don’t know what they decided: I really cant see how it would have caused any gameplay problems whatsoever. If it really was essential that the player not be able to jump to them, then just make the bloody platforms higher.
How about the fact every battle against something large and stompy, be it an AT-ST, Rancor, Basilisk War Droid, whatever, plays out in exactly the same way, with you running in a circle whilst throwing handy crates and barrels at it? Or the way that, despite never actually raising the difficulty in a significant way, enemies become ridiculously, frustratingly lightsaber-and-lightening resistant as the game progresses? I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Spore, on the other hand, has been an absolute joy. I suspect part of the reason I got so much enjoyment out of it was the fact that I hadn’t spent too much time studying previews and interviews before the game released, so although I was expecting it to be good, I hadn’t really formed any opinions on how it was likely to play.
It’s basically a giant, galactic Lego set, and I really like the shared content: there’s a great sense of discovery in knowing that every weird alien you encounter was created by another player. The internet has expressed its displeasure that the end game seems to be largely a clone of Star Control 2, but given that Star Control 2 frequently makes it into the top ten of ‘Greatest Games of All Time’ lists4, and no one seems to have been inclined to rip it off in the intervening 16 years, I say ‘good job’. If people hadn’t started ripping off Doom, we’d never have got Half Life 2. Ripping off good ideas and improving on them is the heart and soul of creative industry.
On that note, you can download the original Star Control 2 here. It’s well worth it, SC 2 is one of the few retro games I can still play without poor graphics and controls causing me to smash the keyboard.
1Indeed, the Wii version of TFU, in all its buggy, ugly, glory, so I couldn’t even kid myself that I’d just be buying it to check of the fancy new physics technology.
2I mean sure, the camera is dodgy, and the lightsaber attacks sometimes feel a little on the loose side, but that’s pretty much the price of admission for a 3D action game on the Wii.
3With the notable exception of the Felucia levels, which are blue and brown.
4Probably. If it doesn’t, it should.
In-Creed-able
In the end, it was the sword fighting that won me over.
Games have been notoriously rubbish at really capturing the essence of a duel. What should be a tense ballet of parry and counter, dodge and feint, instead look like a pair of nine-year-olds hitting each other with cardboard tubes. It should be about timing and skill, with a fight settled by that one perfect blow, not slowing wearing away at an infeasibly colossal health bar with a endless series of hits.
But yesterday, finally, I saw sword fighting done the way it ought to be, and I just couldn’t help myself any longer.
Yes, yesterday my herculean will finally broke, my icy heart melted, and I made my pre-order for Assassin’s Creed.
Hardly news worthy, you might think. After all, the game has been receiving glowing previews from all corners, and the level of press excitement about the game is high. I, however, had been holding myself above the hype, telling anyone that would listen that the open world dynamic was merely a gimmick, the control scheme sounded awkward and the mysterious sci-fi sub-plot would be bollocks.
Two of those three fears have been pretty much put to rest. It seems that Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed’s developers) have integrated the free-form, open world system nicely with the overall gameplay, and the more I hear about the controls, where different face buttons control the actions of various limbs, the more I like the sound of them.
The whole sci-fi plot still bothers me, though.
For those who haven’t been keeping up with Assassin’s Creed, allow me to recap. The game is set in the Holy Land during the late 1100’s, during the third crusade. You play an assassin named Altair, attempting to forge some kind of peace in the land by eliminating some of the nastier figures on either side of the conflict. So far so good; its a cool character and an interesting period of history.
What’s worrying is the fact the, beyond this, the game is going to contain some form of sci-fi influence. What that will be we’re not sure, and bets are divided between time travel, genetic engineering and virtual reality, but it will certainly be there: more recent videos have highlighted some jarringly futuristic elements in the games hud.
I cannot, for the life of me, think of any good reason for slapping this extra layer of complexity onto what already seems like an interesting, exciting story. All it seems likely to do is complicate things and damage the suspension of disbelief. Sure, I can see how it might sound cool when the game designers first came up with it. Historical fiction and sci-fi? What’s not to love! But in practise I can’t see it working, I can’t think of a compelling reason for it’s inclusion, and frankly I think Ubisoft’s scriptwriters should have strangled the idea at birth.
Here’s hopping it’s low key enough for me to ignore it and concentrate on a stonking historical adventure…and that I don’t have to play out the final levels in a steel bunker or something equally as disappointing.
Gaming Wisdom of the Crafty Banana 