E3, now starting even earlier, kicked off with Electronic Arts’ EA Play press conference on Saturday. There was a lot of Star Wars. It’s EA, so of course there was the sports and bombast of various flavors, but droids, lightsabers, and Darths loomed large over the proceedings.
There was a taste of Madden 18‘s first-ever cinematic and playable story campaign, Longshot, which seems to take cues from the work already being done in other sports titles. We saw a glimpses of NBA Live 18‘s gameplay. EA Sports was keen to let everyone know that Cristiano Ronaldo supplied mo-cap for FIFA 18.
With the obligatory sports titles out of the way, EA demonstrated how much Need for Speed Payback could look like The Crew mashed together with The Fast and Furious movies sprinkled with a dash of Burnout spice. Battlefield 1 piped up to ask everyone not to forget about it. Josef Fares, the writer and director of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, presented a first look at his cooperative story game A Way Out. BioWare teased a snippet of Anthem, their new game. EA was so excited to let everyone know that Anthem was a “new IP” that you could almost see the disappointment of Mass Effect Andromeda peel away and float into space.
Finally, they got to the headliner of the show: Star Wars Battlefront II. With stormtroopers and fanfare EA kicked off a thirty-minute extravaganza of Lucasfilm videogaming. Their preview began with a mea culpa of sorts; by sheepishly acknowledging the criticism of Battlefront’s absent story campaign and map packs that split the community. All corrected this time around. An epic campaign story! All post-launch maps and modes for free! More charcater customization options! Remember that bit in the Star Wars prequel trilogy when there was a running gun battle on Queen Amidala’s home planet? Throw Han Solo, Yoda, Rey, and Boba Fett into it. Eschewing any sense of timeline coherency, EA and DICE have opted to let fans play with their toys like they did as kids. Why can’t Han Solo fight Separatist droids on Theed? This isn’t Star Trek! No one cares if it doesn’t make any sense!
Dear Anonymous Jerkwad,
It’s been a long time since CD Projekt RED first announced Cyberpunk 2077 in 2013. You were probably still anticipating The Witcher 3, when that awesomely evocative trailer hit the web and shattered your world like it did for everyone else. But, you could wait. You still had Geralt to look forward to, and besides, the Mass Effect series was filling your need for hot sci-fi RPG action. Then CD Project RED said Cyberpunk was going to miss its late 2016 launch. And recently, Mass Effect: Andromeda turned out a bit broken. So, like many people in your position, an unfocused petty rage slowly built up towards CD Project RED. They were holding out on you! There they were in Poland play-testing their Cyberpunk work in progress, while you had to sit in your parents’ unfinished basement scamming people out of Counter-Strike skins. How unfair!
You did the only thing you knew to do. You crept into their network, (virtually, of course) dodged all their Black Ice and stole a bunch of Cyberpunk 2077 files. Then, because you didn’t have the skills necessary to do anything productive or creative, you sent the studio a ransom demand. Surely, this would turn out well. CD Projekt RED would send you money to save their files, and they might even see what a badass decker you could be. At the very least, your shut-in online acquaintances would have to acknowledge your chutzpah.
No, you buffoon. Take a lesson from Axel Gembe, the chap that stole Half-Life 2’s files from Valve in 2003. Not only did the studio not hire Gembe as he hoped, the authorities put Gembe on the “Let’s Make An Example Out of This Idiot” list, and every gamer on the planet immediately hated him for endangering their beloved Half-Life sequel. Axel Gembe will always be that jackass that almost killed Valve.
That’s you now. You’re the guy that’s screwing up CD Projekt RED and Cyberpunk 2077. No one thinks you’re cool. Nobody admires your skills. CD Projekt RED told you to pound sand and now you’ve got a pile of virtual stuff that’s only useful as evidence to use against you.
What can you do now? Run away. Go off the grid. Live somewhere in Chiba City. There are legions of Witcher and Cyberpunk fans that want to flatline you, and they all have access to the matrix. Your only hope is to go away for a long time and hope Cyberpunk 2077 comes out on schedule and is mind-blowingly terrific despite your attempt to sabotage it. Hire on as merchant marine for the Marcus Garvey. Hopefully, everyone will just forget about you. Years down the road, maybe after The Great Crash, tentatively fire up an antique Ono-Sendai and try to play Cyberpunk 2077 off a Gibson Archive before the Psycho Squad zeroes in on your signal.
What Remains of Edith Finch is one of those quiet games like Gone Home or Firewatch that spur conversations about narrative, art, and even gaming itself. While detractors are quick to toss it into the “walking simulator” pile, supporters say the key to enjoying it is letting the story of the Edith and the Finch family unfold naturally through the environments and the puzzles. They point to the Finch house and draw the stories of the Finches out of character vignettes nestled in the objects. Here, a tale of great-grandmother Edie. There, a yarn from uncle Gregory.
Ian Bogost, video game philosopher and creator of Cow Clicker, posits that story shouldn’t matter. In his essay in The Atlantic, Bogost argues that the industry obsession with being a narrative medium is in opposition to video gaming’s strength. Games are at their best when they present a new way of contextualizing the world.
At stake is not whether a game can tell a good story or even a better story than books or films or television. Rather, what it looks like when a game uses the materials of games to make those materials visible, operable, and beautiful.
Anyone who played Cow Clicker can tell you story is paramount. Cow Clicker wasn’t just an aimless trifle in which players clicked an image of a cow to watch numbers get bigger. It was about gamers defying logic and even Ian Bogost’s own expectations. It was about people clicking on enough cows that it went beyond a sick joke and became a phenomenon that had to be artificially stopped by the creator. It’s about gamers “beating” the game. Woo! We won!
If your character in Mass Effect: Andromeda is Scott Ryder and you were disappointed that you couldn’t have a romantic relationship with Jaal, then the 1.08 patch for the game is going to be good news for you. Once your game is updated, you’ll be able to get sweaty with the angaran resistance observer. BioWare assures fans that this change wasn’t done lightly. They consulted with members of the community and weighed the feedback they received before moving forward. That’s fine, but when are we going to get a Krogan as a love interest? This is a series in which you can woo an alien with such a weakened immune system that coupling with a dirty human should be a death sentence, but somehow that works. Let’s get some nookie from Wrex!
In other Mass Effect news, Kotaku has a report that alleges that most of the game’s development took place in the last 18 months prior to launch. Issues cited by studio sources include difficulties adapting the Frostbite engine, a change in project management, staffing problems, and communication challenges with geographically distant offices.
The Xbox One backwards compatibility program has been scooting along since November 2015. During the launch, Microsoft hailed it as one of the biggest requests from Xbox gamers. Certainly, gamers are willing to defend the feature. The forum to request new Xbox 360 BC additions lists hundreds of thousands of votes per title. Purchases of landmark games like Red Dead Redemption or Call of Duty: Black Ops II are strong enough to push them into current sales charts when they launch on the compatibility service. It’s a huge win for gamers in principle, but is it actually used much?
According to data compiled by Ars Technica, the answer is “not really.” In fact, looking at the total time that Xbox players spend across all services the console offers, it amounts to 1.5% of everyone’s activity. That’s not a lot of return on investment in sheer user time, but intangibles like marketing and retention may hold value to Microsoft beyond those disparaging figures. Everyone seems to want it, but very few people take advantage of backwards compatibility. Maybe Sony’s global sales executive Jim Ryan was on to something when he asked Time “Why would anybody play this?” in regards to how older games look on newer consoles.
All right, I know this is kind of petty, but I’m going to have to get it off my chest sooner or later. And I might as well lump in a couple of reservations I have about this episode. I figure there’s going to be enough effusive praise on down the line.
So let’s have a little naysaying, handwringing, and moralizing. Continue reading →
Menaphos, the largest new area added to RuneScape, is now live. The venerable free-to-play MMO which has been trucking along since 2001, has expanded organically over the years, so Menaphos is a bit of new thing for the game. Instead of a progression of bits and bobs, developer Jagex is releasing one cohesive package of new content that includes two new cities, about 40 hours of quests, new skills, and new loot. Unlike the 2014 update of the Elvish lands of Prifddinas, which was previously the “largest” addition to the game, Menaphos is completely new content. Lead designer David Osborne told PCGamesN that Menaphos marks a change in the way Jagex will release content.
“We’re used to drip-feeding good, additive pieces of content weekly, but this is about bringing all of that together to give players something they can really immerse themselves in – a long-form story, a lot of skilling and combat content, an expansion to a level cap – all the things you’d want or expect from an expansion.”
Menaphos for RuneScape is available now.
You didn’t watch this for our sake, did you? We would feel awful about that. At the 1:24 mark, we unmask our favorite face reveals.
Next week: The Mummy
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For someone (i.e. me) who hasn’t read any of the Culture series, or even any Iain Banks, Player of Games is a real eye-opener. Banks is a deft and imaginative writer. This is a series I’m eager to explore further.
But as a commentary on games from thirty years ago, it doesn’t have much to offer. Continue reading →
It might sound trite to relate this war movie, written with keen insight by someone who served during the invasion of Iraq, to a videogame. But consider that the videogame in question was also written by someone with keen insight into the wars America has fought since 2002 (actually, since 1965).
I’m going to list a few facets of our situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each of these is a part of the story in Sand Castle and a gameplay mechanic in Afghanistan ’11. It’s going to sound disjointed, so you’ll have to trust me they come together as a narrative in both the movie and videogame.
Here goes: Continue reading →
Ever since the Nintendo Switch was announced, one of the big questions people had was how chat would work on the new console? Nintendo’s answer has been a bit vague and disappointing. Essentially, the company told everyone to wait for the launch of a separate phone app in late 2017. Did this mean voice chat wouldn’t be handled natively on the console? Thanks to peripheral manufacturer Hori, we now know how this will look, at least on early solutions. It’s not pretty. The upcoming Hori Switch Splatoon 2 headset plugs into the Switch portable unit and your phone at the same time via a cable splitter. It’s a mess of cables and plugs, but at least the splitter is being manufactured to look like a stylized squid. You can have your in-game Splatoon 2 character wear a set of the same headphones, so there’s that.
From the screenshots, you might expect Danger Zone will inherit the mantle Criterion shrugged off as they made their crashing games less about crashing and more about racing. If I recall correctly, that was somewhere around Burnout 2. But it was great while it lasted. Now, at last, someone appreciates what Burnout could have — should have! — been.
Or not. Continue reading →
Tokyo 42 and Hover: Revolt of Gamers (pictured) are distinct types of games, the former based on teensy Crusder-style micro-gunplay with the slightest touch of Hitman, the latter based on nostalgia for Jet Set Radio in a post-rollerblading era. But they’re both futuristic open-worlds bathed in bright bright colors, the likes of which you haven’t seen since the invention of neon pink (some time in the 80s, no doubt). They both came out today, which makes this the most colorful Wednesday on record. And based on preliminary faffing about, I can vouch for both being made by people who know what they’re doing.
Bohemia Interactive, the studio behind the Arma series, is jumping into the free-to-play multiplayer shooter space with Argo. The project, initially started in November 2016, is ready for release on Steam in a few weeks. It’s a 5-on-5 competitive or 10-player cooperative shooter that will be entirely free for all players. There will be an optional $10 DLC offered that will give owners new animations for the match ending MVP screen, cosmetic gear, premium server access, and the ability to use vehicles in the editor. That editor will be a “trimmed down” version of the full Arma 3 scenario editor, which supports the initial vision of Argo as an incubator platform for Arma development.
Argo will launch on Steam on June 22nd.
What do you show and what do you imply? What do you spell out and what do you leave to the imagination? What’s in the frame and what’s outside the frame? These are questions a filmmaker constantly considers. Every single moment is an answer to those questions.
The Wire has some interesting answers this episode. Continue reading →
