The remarkable thing about the Battleblock Theater trailer is that it does nothing to make me want to play the game — egad, that looks like a lot of pointless jumping about — but it’s nevertheless hilarious. It makes me want to get the game on goodwill for the trailer alone.
Of course, I already want to get the game because developer Behemoth amply proved themselves with Castle Crashers, so the trailer’s effectiveness is redundant.
Despite strides in the industry for equality and inclusiveness, the salary gap between the genders continues to be an issue according to an annual survey recently conducted by Game Developer Magazine. The data, reprinted by The Border House, shows a wide compensation gulf between the sexes.
Men earn more than women in the same jobs as artists, testers, designers, producers, audio techs, and as business professionals. The only area in which women earn slightly more is in programming, but they account for less than 5% of the positions. There are far less women than men working in the gaming industry at all levels.
It was noted that the data did not include how long the participants had been at their jobs, so it can be assumed that one of the likely factors for the disparity is that women have less tenure as their male counterparts.
Jonathan Blow, the outspoken designer of Braid, has some thoughts about Bioshock Infinite’s combat and regenerating shields in general. This is one of those longstanding debates in gaming like save anywhere or checkpoints, mouse & keyboard or controller, and Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. The fight between people that like regenerating health or shields and the people that like scrounging for health pickups has been going since Halo, but fighting in Columbia seems to have brought the discussion back in a way that I haven’t seen before.
Playing Infinite, I realize that Halo-style recharging shields are actually a huge mistake in shooter design. But all shooters use them now. Since people are going to ask: There are two problems; one is about emotional pacing, one is about gameplay crispness and fairness. With shields, you are always doing okay in the medium and long term. They low-pass filter the emotional high of surviving a tight situation. You can have a tight situation on the order of 10 seconds, but not on the order of 5 minutes, which matters more.
The crispness problem is: In order to provide difficulty, designers now have to overwhelm your shields all the time, which means designing situations that are spammy (get hit from all directions so you can’t process what is going on). These are confusing and not fun. These feel messy to play but they happen all the time because they have to. Or, like Infinite does, have super attacks that take away all your shields at once *and* 1/3 of your health, which feels steeply unfair.
Also, shields train the player to ignore getting hit most of the time, which becomes grating at the end when guys start hitting hard. (You trained the players for one thing but then gave them another!) I think shooters are much stronger experiences when it matters if you got hit. In shield games you get hit all the time, like flies buzzing.
(Credit to Kotaku for putting the tweets into a format humans can read.)
Tom Chick, Nick Diamon, and Jason “It’s a-me, Luigi!” McMaster discuss whether the marketing for Bioshock Infinite hurt some of the sense of discovery. If you’ve seen the trailers and read the previews, don’t worry about spoilers. And if you haven’t, Tom Chick From the Future shows up to tell you how to skip past spoilers. We also talk about the death of LucasArts, the potential death of id, the ongoing life of Castle Crashers developer Behemoth, the multiplayer delights of Luigi’s Mansion, the non-delights of a new game about depression, and something vaguely French called Sang-Froid: A Tale of Werewolves.
One of the reasons I love GDC is that it’s a forum for the most valuable voices and the least heard voices in the conversation about videogames: the developers who make them, who struggle with how to make them better, and who see first-hand the violence when ideas meet execution. For instance, this important observation about Bioshock Infinite’s opening comes from someone who makes videogames:
When I reach the second floor of the lighthouse, I am supposed to have a moment there. A moment of shock, I assume. A tortured man, apparently dead, is sitting in a chair. But my first thought is…
“Oooh shiny!”
Because when you enter the room with the corpse, two big shiny coins are winking at you from the nearby table. The table right next to the corpse.
Adrian Chmielarz neatly dissects how Bioshock Infinite is a brilliant exercise in storytelling, but a disappointing world design, especially compared to its predecessors. And it’s particularly apt coming from Mr. Chmielarz, whose Painkiller is a brilliant exercise in good game design, and an absolute non-entity when it comes to world design. You can — and should — read his comments here.
“I beg you, game,” he asks, “please do not reward me for not doing the right thing and for doing the silly thing of playing the game instead of behaving like I am in a different world.” When this happens in God of War: Ascension — walk to places the camera doesn’t show to find treasure — it’s no great loss. But when this happens in a narrative powerhouse like Bioshock Infinite, or Deus Ex, or Mass Effect, the damage done is considerable. Eating cotton candy out of the trash is no big deal in a Mario game. Doing it in front of Elizabeth just feels weird.
I wish more people who made videogames also talked publicly and frankly about videogames other than the ones they’re making.
Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, which might be one of the shrewdest indie stratey games I’ve played since Atom Zombie Smasher, comes out this Friday. The game was supposedly created by a Canadian studio. Supposedly.
Disney has closed LucasArts. Let that sink in for a minute. LucasArts, part of the old guard of videogaming is no more. Oh, it will live on in the same sad way Atari does. As a licensing enitity and copyright holder.
“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”
I could drop a smart one-liner here about the Force not being with them, or that they “did not choose wisely” but I’ll hold off and just say that at least I’ll always have my memories of flying for the Luftwaffe, stalking the walkways of Nar Shaddaa, and going to Atlantis.
Digital Foundry always has the craziest tech-heavy breakdowns of in-game graphics and console hardware. Take a gander at some of the technobabble in their latest article that covers the differences between the PS4 Unreal Engine 4 tech demo and the one created for the PC:
While the lack of real-time GI is a bit of a blow, we get the impression that this really heavy tech proved too much for the new console hardware (and bearing in mind the power of the PS4, an array of lower/mid-range PC graphics cards too) because it’s been replaced with an enhanced solution of the “baked”, pre-computed lighting system used in Unreal Engine 3: Lightmass. This works in combination with a form of real-time global illumination on objects – not exactly a new approach, as the same basic principles were in place on Halo 3.
That’s a serious paragraph that means a lot to people that care about these kinds of things. All I know is that my PS4 version of Gears of War 4 is going to look great!
Doom 4 and Id software’s future may be in serious trouble according to sources that spoke to Kotaku. Tales of mismanagement, publisher conflict, and neverending project churn are not new in the gaming industry, but Id Software is the grandaddy developer of shooting things so it would be a shame to see them shuttered like any number of upstart companies we’ve seen over the years.
Two sources told me that earlier this year, frustrated with the lack of progress on Doom 4, ZeniMax came to Id with an ultimatum: make something happen, or else. The specifics of the threat are unclear, but there are plenty of rumors floating around Dallas, Texas, where Id is based.
An upcoming 1.08 update for Diablo III — there’s no ETA yet, but it’s available now on the pubic test servers — will recalculate the value of co-op sessions by providing an incentive to team up with other players: extra experience points! This will presumably make up for the inherent inefficiency of multiple players not being able to get their acts together. From technical designer Wyatt Cheng’s developer journal entry:
We’re still working on the details of what that buff is going to be, but at the moment we’re looking at 10% more XP per extra player in the game for a maximum bonus of 30% more XP in a 4-player game. This bonus will be multiplicative with MP bonuses. For example: suppose you are playing on MP10 with an XP bonus in Inferno of 510%. This means a monster is worth 610% of its normal XP (510% more). If you are playing in a 4-player game the monster will be worth 793% as much XP as normal. On top of this, you will also earn a flat 10% Gold Find and 10% Magic Find for each additional player in the game, and this bonus can exceed the 300% Gold Find and Magic Find caps.
Furthermore, when I’ve found something worth attacking, folks will know even though they’re back in town breaking down their blues with Haedrig.
Starting in 1.0.8, when a player deals damage to or takes damage from an Elite pack or Treasure Goblin for the first time, a notification will be sent out to the entire party to let your teammates know what you’ve found. This will be accompanied by a “combat” icon on the mini-map so other players in your group can locate those enemies. On top of that, we’re also going to put a combat icon over your banner in town. This way, players who are in town will know that you’re fighting an Elite pack or Treasure Goblin and be able to quickly determine whose banner to take to get right into the action.
Rockstar’s fifth installment of their bank robbing, assaulting, pimpin’ open-world havoc creator series finally has an official cover. I’m sure it accurately reflects the pensive journey of a man navigating life’s small emotional moments.
Check it out after the jump in all its criminal glory! Continue reading →
I’d love to check out Defiance, but until they let me invert my mouse, I can’t hit anything. That’s not a good problem to have in a shooter.
In what might be one of the oddest launch bugs I’ve ever seen, Defiance apparently won’t let you change any settings if you’re using a monitor that runs at a refresh rate higher than 100Mhz, even if you drop the refresh rate. As soon as I try to access the settings screen, the game drops to the desktop. I can’t rebind keys, change graphics settings, or invert my mouse as God intended. I mean, seriously, who pushes up to look up? What is this, a desktop cursor?
The latest Tom vs Bruce has just gone live. The game is a solitaire boardgame called Nemo’s War.
…games tell the best stories when they don’t overtly try to tell any story at all, and cushions it with the background of a great story you can conjure up in your mind any time you want, which is Verne’s book about a mysterious captain who travels the seas in a futuristic submarine and has adventures while pretty much being a badass.
Part one is available here, with parts two and three tomorrow and Thursday. May the best Nemo win!
There’s a certain comfort food quality to God of War: Ascension. It’s all very familiar, even though it’s pretty much run out of recognizable mythological trappings. The stuff I recognize is straight-up repeats from the previous games; the best of the rest of the stuff achieves a gratifying “WTF?” quality. The opening boss is named something like Heckle Donkies. He’s just a bunch of arms and a gross face that seems to have dropped in for a visit from Bayonetta. He’s funky, but ultimately no different from any other God of War boss. X X X X X X, circle circle circle circle, circle, square, X.
But what I like best about this newest God of War is how it’s willing to concede that Kratos is no longer what makes these games good.
The last corporate partnership (i.e. product placement) in a SimCity game was with British Petroleum in SimCity Societies, which was before the Gulf oil spill. You can see the BP logo here, standing out from the rest of the city’s simlish signage.
Since then, BP isn’t really a great way to express consumer friendly green sentiments. So Electronic Arts has sold your eyeballs to Nissan instead. Now Nissan billboards appear around your city, just like Nissan ads appear in Origin. If you click on them, you can download a special Nissan electric car recharging station which spreads happiness. It’s basically just a park. For cars. A car park. Cute.
Frankly, I’d rather have McDonald’s logos, like in The Sims.
