Nestor’s Video Games

No header image today, as it’s totally undeserved.

Here’s a story about game design, marketing, management, and all other things related.

So there I am, same time last week. A friend of mine pops in, “yo, there’s spore on the intratubes”. Not like I stray from the tubes when it comes to software, but Spore always seemed as something grand, a creation worth of years of developement, and best people in the industry bending their minds around to make it work. So I said - “no, thanks, I’m picking up the legit copy on Friday, hell, I might actually get a collectioner’s edition while I’m at it”. “Lol ur dumb” was the reply. Little did I know how much truth it held.

My problem started at the local “big” retailer, when their call center couldn’t figure out if they will actually have the game on site and on time. Next day I just went to the local “big” store, and they had exactly one copy of Spore, and one of Spore GE. I picked the collectioner’s, I love artbooks and “making of”. Kind of a work thing, really. And I paid almost twice the price of “The Witcher” , and more than a half more than BF2142 was worth on launch day.  But hey, “industry” hotshots like me can afford that.

So I went home with the nicely heavy box. Apparently fully localized in Polish. Unpacked the thing. The poster they have promised turned out to be an A4 sheet of generic spore art on a mediocre glossy paper. It had white lines when unfolded for the first time. Yay. Then I pop in the DVD, and start installing.  Since EA figured out it would be awesome to install some support crap no one ever reads, in a million of files, in all languages on earth, on a DVD with seek speed of 1sec per file, it took some 20 minutes to install that, and the 4gb of data files were copied within the next 2 minutes. Woo.

Since it took so long, I actually had the time to go through the artbook. And.. oh my. The first thing I’ve noticed, was that there’s a lot of misspelled texts in Polish localization in the artbook, sometimes the synopsis text is cut in the middle without continuation. Sometimes some art is missing. And the art itself.. well.. let me tell you, it’s nowhere near what I’ve seen in WOW / TBC artbooks. In fact, majority of the spore “artbook” consists of game screenshots and some maya renders. There are some sketches there, but since the book is in a B5 format, you need a sodding hubble telescope to view those. And there’s not a lot of those either. Dissapointed, totally. There are some DVDs with the thing too, they’re actually pretty nice quality and there’s some interesting material on evolution, so it’s not all wasted.

Now the game. Thankfully it installed and launched ok. From what I’ve seen on the support forums, it’s not to be taken for granted. I’m trying to register with my EA account, which I had to establish for my Battlefield games. “Key not recognized”. Well duh, at least it installed. Let’s skip it and play the thing.

I spend the next 5 or so hours, evolving my Tauren wannabe creatures from a single cell, to a race of space faring, and clubbering cow-men. Cool. A mix of many games, sometimes funny, sometimes challenging. The editors are pretty nice. The graphics.. well, I was promised procedural textures and other fancy stuff, and here I’m looking at some mid-LOD textures while zoomed in close. The pixels, they burn, especially when played on my 40″ panel. But then I look at the box, and it’s a MAC/PC dualboot DvD. I guess they picked up the lowest common denominator for the graphics, thanks Steve, thanks a lot for your overpriced and underpowered MacBooks, you did us a great favor here.

After advancing to the space stage, getting some achievements, and getting bored playing “Frontier:Elite Lite” (not like it’s a bad thing in itself) I figured it’s a good time to get into what was supposed to be the biggest thing in Spore.

USER GENERATED CONTENT

Oh yeah, I can’t wait to download penis monsters and nigger-creatures straight from 4chan’s /b/. I also made some stuff of my own, so people can enjoy my shoddy AT-AT and Slivers.

I’m not registered though. Blimey! Let’s do that again.

“The key used with this game cannot be validated.”

Alright, I’ll make a new EA account and go from there.

“The key used with this game cannot be validated.”

Good it actually let me install and play this game. Let’s hope to google and see what I can find. Uh-huh, EA europe support forums. Whoosh.  Now, that’s a lot of angry posts for a game that’s supposed to be THE major title for EA this year. Now that I think of it, this forum is actually like Spore was supposed to be. A load of user generated content, but it’s filled with problems, not creatures. All kinds of colors, users, problems. Circus! Apparently there’s a bunch of people with the same problem as me. I try all the “workarounds” generated by people. It doesn’t work. Oh well, it’s friday, and it’s the launch day. I’m getting some sleep.

The weekend passes with no word from EA, only with more and more ranting from the users. Then monday, then tuesday. The EA guy who was active on the forums on friday is nowhere to be found, after he must’ve noticed that the fans hit the shitpile.

So here I am, with the game which was supposed to be vastly populated by user content. And I can’t activate it. There’s no word from EA, there’s DRM written all over the place, nothing is improving, and I paid twice the price of a normal PC game for it. Did I mention you can basically install it only three times? And you need a working connection to activate it? And you can have only one user per one copy? No? Now I did. And a lot of “family” users are not very happy about it.

This kinda brings me to the point, after a very long rant. Namely, why in the god’s name would I buy legit games again, especially from EA? I mean, seriously? The problems with Mass Effect were only the tip of the iceberg you can get with spore. There’s no support, there are draconian safety measures, and it hurts ONLY the paying customers. Christ. I could’ve gotten the game two days early, for free, with DRM removed, and have the EXACT functionality I have now.  Not to mention that I wouldn’t have to witness the horrible editing abomination the “artbook” is. All that on top of another EA fiasco, which is Warhammer Online european beta, which apparently can’t get its servers and auth systems up either. Maybe EA needs some manager with an E-Viagra pump to get those floppies going?

I know it’s gonna sound awkward from an ex-Blizz employee, but if all games had support and service quality like World of Warcraft, the userbase of online and other services would double pretty fast.

How can you launch a multimillion dollar franchise such as spore, with so much marketing and effort put into it, and forget to test the performance of the key feature on the CORE platform is just beyond me. There’s just no justification. Why doesn’t EA have its own servers colocated around the world for the services? Why don’t they have COMMUNITY staff to keep people informed and get the feedback up into the organisation? It’s hilarious how the biggest (well, maybe not anymore, high five Acti-Blizzard!) game publisher can be so totally incompetent when it comes to support, maintenance and roll-out of their prime games.

Maybe I should just hire myself there and tell people to test stuff before it’s deployed, and tell them to do contingency planning because the worst WILL happen, and most likely it has already happened but we do not know about it yet.

There’s Crysis:Warhead around the corner, and I’m not sure whether I should pick it up or download it. And no, by download I don’t mean EA Store..

Loveless - Act IV

My friend, the fates are cruel
There are no dreams, no honor remains
The arrow has left the bow of the goddess

Today’s rant will be about death in games. When it’s ok, and when it’s bad.

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In the recent news on Gamasutra we have learned that Iron Lore, the developers of Diablo2 clone “Titan Quest” and its subsequent expansion pack have closed their doors. Things like this happen from time to time, but some time later we learned from a THQ exec on Kotaku that this happened mainly due to ‘rampant piracy peaking 80% of the PC market’.

There’s a lively discussion in the linked Kotaku thread, so I’ll try to sum up what I think about the whole PC piracy destroying the world thing.

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In every designer’s and producer’s life, there comes a time when someone strolls by and cuts half of your game. You loose morale, time you’ve worked on, and you die a bit inside.

Why does someone come and wreck your project? Well, mostly because they care for it. They usually are some sort of executive, either yours or the publisher’s. They’re not even connected with the project. Suprisingly, it’s quite an important factor.

How can they care, if they ‘destroy’ my project? They can see the big picture, they take the game into their paws at some point, and get a fresh, unbiased look at it. They can see wether it’s fun or, if it’s promising or not. Maybe even if you did some progress since the last time.

What usually happens, is that you, your team, and the other person managing the project fall too much in love with your own brilliance and creation, that you justify every design step you make along the way. Graphic design, level layouts, core mechanics. You can play it fine, the coders can play it fine, and the secretary downstairs can even install it by herself! A spawn of pure awesomness and genius, the next blockbuster!

Not.

What you really need is to focus your test. You need to come up with several different mechanics, and prototype them in a short period of time. Next, take some people who belong to your target audience, and test these prototypes with them. Explain the rules shortly, and watch them play. Don’t tell them what to do, other than the general mechanics. Let them work  their way up and observe their reactions. See how they play, listen and most importantly note everything they say, so they have a proper feeling that their feedback is appreciated. Once you have a couple of tests, you can see which prototype should move forward and be refined. When you polish the prototype enough, do another round of testing on a different set of people and see their reactions.

If you do not have time scheduled for such early testing, you might find yourself in deep trouble somewhere around alpha stage, when the execs get their hands on the product and the next thing you know is that there’s an email from your boss waiting in your inbox, subtly titled “WTF is this shit?!”. That’s an exaggeration of course, what usually happens is that you and all the managers of the project sit around the table and scratch your heads why this project went in the wrong direction even though the flaws are so clear. Then you figure out how to change it. Usually you’ll have to re-design some part of the game, and if you’re on a tight schedule that’s set in stone already, this means some heavy crunch time for the whole team.

Of course, these tests cannot be carried always, in the mobile games industry you usually have barely enough time to code the actual game and ship it, because the schedules are so tight, and games are usually tied to some real world events (movie release, imporant race, xmas season) and the Gold Master dates cannot be pushed back. In such cases you just need to absolutely make sure that you get the idea right from the very start, otherwise it’s a lot of fiddling with the code and schedules.

Why am I ranting about it? Half of my game just got axed at alpha, because we simply approched the idea from a wrong angle. But that’s ok..

We’ll do what we must, because we can.

It’s been a while since my last post. A lot of things happened, life was busy, the usual stuff.

Today’s chapter is on project management using Scrum in Milestone driven projects. An approach deemed by Ken Schwaber (one of creators of scrum) as totally unsuited for this methodology.

The key difference here is that scrum aims to achieve a complete product release at the end of each sprint. The usual case is that you have a good software base to build new features on. With games it’s a bit different, aspecially with the kind of games that we do, which have development lifecycle of 3-6 months. Here you need to develop a few features in parallel and it’s not always possible to have the whole team working on a single task. Usually tasks in the team are so specific that rarely two people work on the same thing.

Here’s what I do with one of my teams, with a 5 month long project.

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Masterpiece! Breakthrough! Spiritual successor to Diablo! Game of the year! Blah, blah, blaaah.. Is it really?

I don’t remember when I had so mixed feelings about the game last time. Hellgate is just odd, let’s start by saying that it’s at most a mediocre game, due to many reasons, however there is some compelling simplcity in the gameplay that keeps me hooked up to it for few hours now.

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Aye Girls and Guys, Crysis pre-release demo is out, and its awesome. Even more awesome than sorcerors of Tzeench hovering on A FLYING DISC!

I’ll cut the crap like usual, since you can get the genesis of the title and all the lubricant you want from any regular gaming site, I’ll try to concentrate on what’s new and important here.

I couldn’t not mention the graphics, they’re simply stunning. Once again crytek managed to squeeze out everything from our hardware. Thanks to some good people on a certain forum I’ve managed to run all DX10 features on my XP. With my 8800GTS 320, C2D E6600 and 2 gigs of ram, the game runs with steady 30fps. No FSAA, Medium textures, everything else Very High. The sunbeams, the HDR, the destructible foliage, it’s awesome.

As you can see with the images, it’s simply stunning. Very realistic, very nice, lots of land to explore. I won’t go through all the features, but the volumetric effects and the heat disortion are very nice, depth of field on gun irons adds even more to realism.

Enough of blabbering about how awesome the graphics are, because there’s no arguing here.

Let’s talk gameplay instead. Crytek made a good step here with redefining the fps shooter. Partly because it’s a part of game ‘lore’, partly because it was just the right thing to do. Normally the two most important items in FPS games are guns/ammo and health packs. How many times you’ve just gone through that goddamn gunfight and you’re left with 10hp? A lot. Next thing you know, you need to make a dash through an open area where you are required to absorb at least one shot, yay, after 50 loads you’ve finally made it.

Crysis resolves it by simply replenishing your health by using the powers of your predat.. er.. spiderman suit. It regens all the attributes slowly, and if you’ll wait long enough, you’ll be full HP again. Very welcome, very needed. And it’s not like it makes the game too easy.. or well.. at least one of the games. What? Yeah, Crysis seems to be two games in one. One called “Normal” and one called “Delta”. I think those were supposed to be difficulty levels, but they’re apparently game mode switches.

First time I’ve got my hands on the demo, I’ve played through it on “Normal”. Long story short, you’re there, and there’s a lot of bad korean (kekek zergrush) guys who apparently don’t like your imperial ass. As per generic FPS shooter, you run into the camp and start blasting them away with your guns. You don’t even need to use much of your suit, except the occasional hiding here and there or a jumping mario puzzle to get on top of some rocks. Many times I couldn’t believe what I’ve gone through. Granades, dozens of marines, heavy machine gun fire, I just took cover, regened and went back killing them. You’re like rambo, super awesome and immortal. Sure you can die if you’re dumb enough, but having played some FPS in your life, you shouldn’t have much problem staying afloat. To think of it, my main problem was the ammount of ammo, as I was always on short.

Fun fun, but that got BORING. Since I’ve had some time to burn, why not try the hardest level possible. So yeah, we’re starting again, the starting peak, someone spotted me, who cares, 3 seconds later I was dead. Hooo! Something is not right here! The guys on the motorboats have hawk-eye implants and can see you from a mile away, the soldiers are very social, and their eyesight is not bad either. Generally, on this mode, a single well placed grunt can wreck you. I had to change my approach to the game as it was more challenging. Soon I’ve found out it’s more like playing a Predator (yeah, the alien hunter one). You run around silently, stealth every now and then, pop out take out a stray lamb and hide again. Running around undetected and taking the soldiers one by one is great fun, and it’s very challenging. You even get to use the sleeping darts you have in your gun to make some tactical advances. If you’ve already beaten Crysis, try this mode, as it’s very challenging and fun, and helps you to rediscover the gameplay anew.

What concerns me with Crysis is actually the game plot. You have a lot of fun shooting the koreans, and then you run into a ship, in the middle of a fricking jungle, hit with what appears to be “a motherfucking freeze ray”. Yeah, frozen ship, on a tropical island. How cool is that? Shortly after one of your buddies is being kidnapped by something that looks like a bastard cross of HL2 Stalker and Matrix Setinel. Long story short, Aliens. Or undead robots, or whatever. The point is, that most likely in the later game, you’ll be fighting some odd un-life forms, that won’t go down to a single headshot, will start blazing lasers at you, and the whole predator-like gameplay will turn to another mindless shooter. Not mentioning the fact, that YET AGAIN Crytek screwed up a perfectly good game plot. Yeah, FarCry was awesome until you ran into fricking mutants and in a dark jungle. What’s wrong with battling asians on a tropical island hiding under the bush. It’s relaxing. A lot of sun, sandy beaches, blue sky, and gallons of blood.

I simply don’t understand why it always has to delve into some sci-fi theme about mysterious powers from outer space that have to be blown with cartloads of C4 each, because otherwise they won’t go down. Everything in a dark scenery or better yet - an underground cave.

But it’s only a demo, Waaah Waaah Waaah! Cry the fanboys. Yeah, I’m quite aware of it. I know it’s a demo, I know things may change, but my gut feeling tells me they won’t. I’ll be battling cold metal drones equipped with freezerays, freeze bolts, frost novas and water elementals, and the squishy soldiers will be only a memory. I do hope that I will be wrong.

Before we conclude, there’s one notable mention here. The AI. It’s good. The soldiers act natural, cooperate with each other, take cover, prone, run away, and do all other stuff you would expect them to do. Hell, they’re even stupid realistically. Playing on max difficulty doesn’t make them clairvoyant and they don’t swarm your position, they still obey the rules of the game and die if you want them to. If you attack them from behind with a silenced gun, they’ll run around confused, trying to hide from something that would in fact attack them from the front, it’s very nice and refreshing to see.

So, Crysis in a nutshell : Great Graphics, Great Game System, Great AI, Great Physics, Great Gameplay, Supposedly Shoddy story.

Definately worth a try if you have a rig that can handle it.

Cloak engaged..

Bienvenue !

Quick recap, in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years (or played MMOs like me) : The Orange Box is out! What is it? It’s a nice compilation of recent Valve games, supposedly worth the buck.

Personally, I wasn’t really hyped about it, hell, I tried to ignore all the buzz about it for a long time, being swamped with MMO games and all that. So I launched steam the other day, and what do I see? 5 great games for just $45. Since I was really into playing Portal, I gave it a shot. And it was money well spent. You get HL2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

I’ll be brief on the reviews, as you can find gazillions of those on any website around the intertubes.

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As of today, I am no longer an employee of Blizzard Europe.

Capt’n Scuuvry aka Scuuvrah has set sail for new adventures and will be plunderin’ the games market as an Associate Producer in the near future.

It has been a great 13 months for me, I’ve made new friends, I’ve learned to hate players, and I could give anger management training now. It was definately a great experience to see how games are run from the inside, how they operate, and what kind of hell on earth can players cause. Or the developers, like.. the shoulders..

It feels a bit odd that I’m not working there anymore, but I have to move forward in my career, and being a game producer is a better perspective than being a GM.

If you’re thinking of applying for a GM, it’s a nice and not-that-hard job, if you want to work in customer support, that is. France is.. well.. a bit odd.. and french. It takes time to get used to it. You can get some great experience here and some new options will certainly open for you after a time, but bear in mind that working here is not a “Get out of europe free card”

That’s right! There are finally some fruits of the labor. Click on thumbnails below for zoom.

So far the map engine can render any tiles, with any geometry complexity, and any ammount of textures on them. In addition it renders Quake2 .md2 models, along with animation. There’s a character that can run around, and should be able to bump into stuff in the next couple of days.

The fun event tonight was that apparently .md2 models are using front face culling, and I had to re-do all tiles in 3dsmax and flip normals around, or it looked like utter poop.

I’ve found a very nice and supposedly free texture pack in the net, which is basically Quake2 hi-res texture project. That should be more than enough to color my world.

So far so good, let’s see what the coming week will bring. Until next time!