Fable: The Journey at E3, Peter Molyneux's Legacy and Controversy as a Designer.

Wrapping up a week of E3 coverage, I've got one final article about video games, and then it is back to normal with gaming articles popping up now and again instead of every single day. Microsoft had the most tepid of showings of the big three console manufacturers, mostly pitching Kinect-based titles and sequels. Like clockwork, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios trotted out in order to announce... a sequel, that uses Kinect for the Xbox 360. Now, it is easy to hate on Molyneux, and a lot of geeks are at the moment. Since Black and White, and throughout the development of the Fable franchise, he's caught a bad rap for exaggerating features and engaging in wild hyperbole about upcoming games, to the disappointment of fans when the titles hit shelves. The games are good, just not the revolutionary titles created through his overhyping. Let's not forget, however, that the man has been one of the most influential designers in video gaming, and was a titan in the industry before he became a target for nerds to vent their rage upon.

We were promised a world where every decision mattered. What we got was... kicking chickens.

Okay, before I get into trying to restore the image of one of the more vilified game designers through careful application of a history lesson, I'd be remiss in not talking about the elephant in the living room. The Fable franchise is a series of okay action-RPGs with elements like property and business ownership, marriage and family, and choices based on “good” or “evil” actions. I followed the development of the original game, bought into the hype and bought Fable for Xbox on launch day. Hoo boy, was I disappointed. So many features on the cutting room floor. Subplots set up and never paid off in the story. All these things you could do outside of completing quests, but never any real reason given to want to do them. I briefly played the two sequels, saw an improved (but still flawed) story, prettier graphics and some of the same problems. Most of what distinguishes the game from any other action-RPG is superfluous content that doesn't feel like it belongs there. Will Fable: The Journey be any different, or is it more of the same, with Kinect support as the newest gimmick?

Whew, that's out of the way. I want to believe in Fable: The Journey, but I fear that I know better. The reason so many geeks hate on Molyneux is tied to Fable. Black and White (which I liked, personally) had features missing or changed, but it was good enough that all would have been forgiven, until gamers felt betrayed and cheated by Fable, then the minor issues with Black and White were looked back on with a less favorable set of eyes. Unfortunately, the memories of gamers with regard to this single designer don't extend back far enough, and recent games have meant that his earlier triumphs are all but forgotten. I am, of course, speaking about his time with Bullfrog Studios.

Theme Park, one of the most imitated games from Bullfrog, Molyneux was Project Lead.

A short list of the best of Peter Molyneux's time at Bullfrog:

• Populous (1989): One of the very first, and still probably the best of all the “God-sim” games, players guide a civilization to build, develop and worship while expanding their culture and reproducing in order to conquer an enemy civilization. The terrain was deformable, and many godlike powers including miracles and plagues were at the player's disposal.
• Syndicate (1993): A top-down isometric strategy game set in a corporate dystopia with cyberpunk elements. Control of cybernetic agents acting as assassins, recruiters (through drugs and mind control) and defenders of the corporate Syndicate with a detailed story, Syndicate influenced the design of many Real Time Strategy games that followed it.
• Theme Park (1994): The original “Tycoon”-style business simulator game, imitated countless times using different businesses as the focus (or the same, in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon), Theme Park put the player in the hands of a combination designer/owner of an Amusement Park, managing rides, concession stands, park employees and tickets/promotions to build and profit by keeping guests happy and spending money.
• Magic Carpet (1994): Technically ahead of its time at release, Magic Carpet was a 3D first-person action/RPG with an Arabian Nights flavor. Players controlled a wizard who could fly around a landscape fighting monsters, accumulating power to learn stronger magics and fight rival magic users with spells. Unique for the time were the real-time terrain-changing/destroying effects possible with the magics, and the deformable/destructible terrain lent toward the beefy system requirements that held the game back as a commercial hit.
• Dungeon Keeper (1997): Another simulation game in a style later imitated by others, Dungeon Keeper took traditional roleplaying video games featuring heroes invading dungeons to slay creatures and collect treasure, and turned the genre on its ear. Players control the evil “Dungeon Keeper”, training monsters, digging rooms, setting traps and piling up treasure to lure adventurers to their doom.

Dungeon Keeper was hilarious, you had to keep monsters happy, trained, equipped and fed.

I'd love to see some of the boundless creativity and innovation from Molyneux's early career return to modern gaming, and I do think that the focus on where some of the Lionhead titles have fallen short of expectations have set him up for criticism. The tech demo for Microsoft's Kinect, “Milo” which so many people hoped would be a full game shows that the potential is still there, the studio just needs to execute on traditional strengths. I'd welcome a return to the simulation genre, pushing new technologies and new ideas. I liked some of the things about Fable, but I think I, like so many others, are hoping so much for the next Syndicate or Theme Park, that it is easy to forget about those early great games and ask “What have you done for me lately?” in our disappointment.

The games get prettier, sure... but can they recapture what made Peter Molyneux a great designer? 

Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG - Bioware at E3 2011, Almost Ready for Launch!

We're closing in on the end of E3 week here, and even a fairly ho-hum show has some gems, even if the best parts aren't surprise announcements. Bioware is closing in on a launch for their long awaited take on the MMORPG genre with Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is all sorts of exciting for me. I love Bioware RPGs, even the ones that disappoint me do so because I want more. My first-ever MMO was Star Wars Galaxies, though I didn't do much in it besides crafting and building structures. I also have a great deal of affection for how Bioware in particular handles the Star Wars setting, and I'm ready to see them make the leap from single-player experience to MMORPG.

A Star Wars MMO, and not a Gungan to be seen. Meesa glad to hear that.

Gaming in the Star Wars Universe is tough even for a developer writing for the single player game. If your game is set in the time of the films, there are all sorts of obstacles. Large-scale epic stories that this setting does best don't lend themselves well to a time period where we all know who is responsible for all of the major events. Add to that the fact that many people want to play a Jedi, but hate the prequels, and there just aren't very many Jedi around during the Rebellion Era. Stories are told in the background of established events, and they are mostly meaningless, or the fact that no mention of this plot worked its way into the films strains plausibility.

Add in the challenges of a persistent multiplayer world, and the challenges are nearly insurmountable. Bioware addressed this problem years ago when they developed Knights of the Old Republic. A gripping story, plenty of Jedi, room to play without disturbing canon, the distant past of the Star Wars Universe is ripe for development. Any character or element that is created new that doesn't have a specific place in canon? No problem, that bit was lost in the shadows of the distant past, the way details often are. Bioware gave their typical treatment to the setting too, with party members with their own attitudes, motivations and stories, and if you treat them right, you get to explore those tales with sidequests of a personal nature to your companions. Tabletop RPG geeks also loved that the combat system was based on the D&D-inspired D20 system.

If the lighting-fast block and parry of lightsaber combat actually is modeled correctly while still
feeling like MMO-style combat, it should be really, really cool.

How can the key elements of this setting be brought into the very different gameplay style of the MMORPG, without losing what makes Bioware games special? The developers have talked about this at length, focusing on a story told for each individual player that is just as important as the group experience. Bioware RPGs focus on individual actions having consequences, and those consequences having a direct impact on the gameplay experience. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the first choice to be made is whether to play as Sith or Republic, which will also affect choice of classes (more on this in a bit) and starting areas. Though individual characters have the freedom to make “good” or “evil” choices, the morality of the Sith Empire isn't subjective, the developers have said that it won't be a “good guys from a certain perspective” thing, Sith are evil.

In both solo questing and group “dungeons” the impact of individual decision making is built in, with dialogue options (while talking with fully voice-acted NPCs, a first for an MMO) and “choice points” built into missions and quests. It's pretty obvious how this works for a single player quest, but the multiplayer missions and how they've made that work is the turning point that has made me decide to put down World of Warcraft, if only for a little while, when this finally releases. Rather than having a party leader make all the decisions, or making them up to party vote or some such nonsense, the narrative in individual missions provides key points, one for each player, to make a decision that will affect the rest of the mission, with consequences for all. If this can be pulled off without creating too much conflict or arguing with other team members after the fact, it is brilliant.

So, what can you play in Star Wars: The Old Republic? So far, for sure we've seen human, Twi'lek (like the dancing girl in Jabba's Palace) and Zabrak (think Darth Maul) as races in promos, and as I mentioned before, your classes are based on your faction. Both factions have four classes at launch, which doesn't seem like very many as compared to many other games, but the customization of powers and abilities as characters level supposedly will make this a non-issue. (We'll see.) For the Republic, the available classes are Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Trooper and Smuggler. For the Sith, there are Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter. To my way of thinking, that looks like two flavors of Jedi for each, one dull sounding class (Trooper and Agent... really?) and one non-Jedi but still awesome class for each side.

Of course, not everyone will have a lightsaber. With the existence of the Smuggler,
though, expect this guy to be rare on launch day.

I have a lot of hope for this game, though I don't think it is a “WoW Killer,” if such a thing is even possible anymore. I want to see the focus on storytelling change the landscape of a style of gaming where story is secondary currently, players groan as they skip quest text and suffer through cinema scenes so they can kill something else and take its stuff. I really hope that Bioware can tell a story compelling enough to make gamers demand that kind of narrative out of their MMORPG experience. One thing I do know for certain if that I'll be giving it a shot at release. I'll be doing the bidding of those who pay the best for a talented Bounty Hunter... the Sith of Korriban.


One last bit of site-related news, I'm now on Tumblr at unemployedgeek.tumblr.com, posting small updates on topics I've covered here or stories too short for a full article, tidbits about myself, links to these articles and reblogs of interesting tidbits I find around the web that are relevant to my interests. Check me out there, and I encourage tumblr users to reblog anything you find on my tumblr if you like it!  I'm also @DocStout on Twitter, and of course, I have the Facebook link at the side of this very page. Slowly moving into Web2.0 as though I were an actual young person!

The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim at E3, and a look back at the series.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about Nintendo's keynote address, and promised more E3 coverage. So far, the rest of the show hasn't done much to impress me, Sony announced a new handheld console that doesn't do anything for me at the moment, they'll need great titles as proof-of-concept as a legitimate challenger to Nintendo's stranglehold on that market. And Microsoft announced Halo 4. Whee. Some of the coolest stuff I've seen is a little more information on a game I already knew about, from a series I already love. The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim is Bethesda's newest RPG offering, and the soon-to-be-released game marks a series that's been consistently good throughout its 17-year history. I've written about Bethesda's tackling of the Fallout series before, but I want to specifically look at Skyrim in particular, and the Elder Scrolls Games in general.

Can Bethesda keep a string of hits going with the prevailing winds blowing against classic RPGs?

The first Elder Scrolls game was called Arena, released in 1994, it was originally supposed to be a fantasy Gladatorial combat game with traveling teams, and sidequests between the arena matches. In development, however, the RPG elements took over, the engine moved into a First Person perspective, and the Arena combats seemed more and more 'tacked on' until they were dropped altogether. The game was late to publication, full of bugs and critically panned, but the world established there gave it a cult following, and enough of a fanbase to support a sequel.

Daggerfall (TES II) embraced the few things that worked about Arena, and was a game massive in scope and ambition. The continent the game is set in was twice the size of Great Britain, with over 15,000 towns and settlements and 750,000 NPCs to interact with. Players could explore many, many different dungeons, own property, become a vampire or werewolf if infected by those creatures, and the story had six endings so different that reconciling them for another sequel required Divine Intervention. Complaints about the breadth of the game at the expense of depth, as most of the nearly half a million square kilometers of space was randomly or procedurally generated by the computer, so none of the locations or characters not in major quest locations had very much to them.

There really wasn't anything quite like it at the time, or since.

The third Elder Scrolls RPG, Morrowind, was released to nervous anticipation by fans of the series. It was so much smaller than Daggerfall, did that mean it was dumbed-down, or a step backward? Upon release, fans weren't disappointed. The sandbox, open-exploration concepts in earlier games were present, but they were enhanced by packing the terrain in with carefully thought-out features. Instead of hundreds of miles of randomly-generated terrain with a few static landmarks, ten square miles (26 km) of well-developed dungeons, settlements and other locations with planned monsters and characters worth interacting with. Factions and guilds to quest for and advance in as well as a main story that was in many ways even better than Arena's or Daggerfall's made Morrowind really something special. Due to Bethesda's release of a development kit to the modding community, this game is still being played today, nearly ten years after release.

Oblivion was about twice the size of Morrowind, featured a complete overhaul of the graphics engine, and refined the option to zoom out from first-person to play in a third-person perspective, though the animations were a little clunky and awkward in this mode, though they were improved from the same feat in Morrowind. The fourth game continued to refine some of the elements that made the first three games in the series great, and allowed dungeons randomly littered throughout the world to scale up as characters became more powerful. Monsters would get stronger, dropped loot would get better. The freedom to explore any area you could see, steal any item, kill any NPC (though some would make the game's main quest unfinishable) and customize spells and weapons improved. One downside to Oblivion, however, were the hellish portals that needed to be closed to complete the main quest. Inside each was a depressingly similar generic “hellish” dungeon to trudge through and hit the magic “self-destruct” button at the end.

Typically cutting-edge visuals for the time in each game usually means that a
new Elder Scrolls game is time for a new computer.

Each of the Elder Scrolls Games since Daggerfall has worked on being more “epic” in scale and ambitiousness of content, with thousands of pages of text forming the many, many books that can be found in each world, rounding out the lore and history of the setting. The worlds are getting bigger as new games appear in the series, but deeper at the same time, so we won't be seeing more miles of empty fields like we had in Daggerfall, but instead an ever-increasing and continually interesting game world. Expanding on this promise to keep getting bigger and better at the same time, we have the newest game in the series, Skyrim.

The focus on the return of dragons to the world of the Elder Scrolls is a powerful one, with a lot of the early demos shown at E3 putting the great wyrms, and specific fights against them on display. The powerful “dragon shout” abilities garnered from defeating the winged titans give characters abilities themed on draconian powers including fire-breathing. The third-person engine and animations have been greatly improved, making that perspective a more attractive choice for play, and the complete redesign of all user interface, menus, inventory and character options is aimed at accessibility. Having seen the gorgeous graphics and read about the planned scope of the world, and some of the great moments in preview videos like a dragon suddenly swooping down and snatching up a humanoid opponent fighting the character, and dropping his mangled body some distance away... I'm excited for it.

There are a few parts of the announcement that give me pause, however. Skyrim is being developed specifically as a console game for the Xbox360 and PS3, and they'll work backward from that for a PC port. “PC port of a console game” is a phrase that gives many PC gamers the jibblies, and for good reason. All the talk of streamlining and accessibility is a great idea, until you realize that games in the past that have attempted to do this did so at the expense of depth and have greatly disappointed their fans in the process. (I'm looking at YOU, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2.) I'm going to remain optimistic, as I remember the panic when the size of the world for Morrowind was revealed to Daggerfall fans, and how unfounded that turned out to be.  

Nintendo's Wii U, Keynote address and Nintendo Innovations/Gimmicks Throughout the Years.

This week marks one of the “big deal” annual events for any video gamer. The Electronic Entertainment Exposition, or E3, which has become the big tradeshow for the video game industry. I was all rip-rarin' to go and report on the events at this year's show and then I looked around and saw what virtually every blogger who's ever played a video game is doing. So, expect more video-game posts this week, but I'll try to put my own spin on them. Today was the Nintendo keynote address, and yeah, I want to at least mention the new console they debuted, but I'm not going to parrot the same information that several hundred other blogs put up a few hours ago, I want to go in a different direction. Nintendo has had its successes and failures with hardware innovation, I want to talk about the “gimmick” behind the Wii U (Yep, that's what they named the new system,) and revisit the gimmicks Nintendo has introduced in the past, what worked... and what didn't.

In about 2 years, all us video gamers will either be enthralled by, or mocking this thing.

The biggest new feature for Nintendo's Wii U is the controller, a tablet-style thing that looks like an overgrown iPhone with controller buttons on the side, and a screen that splits the difference between smartphone screens and, say, an iPad. The screen on the controller will interact with the TV screen to use techniques used in Augmented Reality gaming, “Zoom in” features, maybe inventory/information screens for RPGs like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for Gamecube, which required a Gameboy Advance for each player. The innovative controller is being paired with strong system specs and at-launch third-party support to try to attract back the “hardcore gamers” who didn't care for the family-friendly Wii. I applaud this effort, and if they really can retain the audience they attracted with the Wii and get the love of the traditional video gamer back, they may win the next-generation console wars before anyone else fires a shot.

The thing about Nintendo's hardware gimmicks is that their success is tied to how well supported they are by software, and how much using them makes gameplay more fun. We've seen games for the Nintendo DS handheld that tacked on support for the secondary touch screen “because it was there,” same deal with the motion control of the Wii. It doesn't matter how cool a technology is for a game console if there aren't any games that support it, or worse, if most of the games that support it do so in an awkward, clunky way that actually detracts from playing a game. Here's Nintendo's list of hits and misses:

Nintendo Entertainment System Era:

This is where it all began for most of us, Nintendo's first mass-market console and the one that put them on the map. Nintendo had 2 unusual peripherals at launch, one more near the end of the system's life-cycle, for a score by my count of one incredible hit, and two misses.

Convinced a generation to buy the "futuristic console that is nothing like Atari,"
 then ignored robots and sold us Mario.

The Light Zapper (HIT): The original home console light gun. Shooting games with a toy gun you fire at the screen, and things on-screen die. Even without a huge number of games supporting this, the ones that used it were great, and needed it to play.

R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy (MISS): Ah, R.O.B. No one knew what to do with you. This accessory looked cool, but no one really developed games that used him beyond Gyromite and Stack-Up, but his inclusion allowed Nintendo to show how different they were from, say, Atari, which was responsible for the first great video game crash only a few years earlier.

The Power Glove (MISS): Expensive, cool looking, utterly extraneous. A programmable glove controller that was imprecise and once again, only got 2 games that supported it: Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler. Aside from appearing in the 1989 film The Wizard, with Fred Savage, this was a dud.

Nintendo 64 Era:

This is where someone might be thinking, “Hey, Doc... you skipped a generation!” Well, so did Nintendo. Super NES accessories were few and far between, there was a version of the Zapper, but Nintendo was busy at the time innovating with handhelds (more on that later.) They got back to being kooky with their main console with the N64, and innovations were centered on the unusual controller.

For a controller that had so many important features, it really was kind of terrible.

N64 Controller (Mixed Bag): This weird looking three grip controller popularized analog sticks and behind the controller triggers, but its unwieldy shape and many unnecessary buttons put it at the top spot on a lot of peoples “Worst Controller” lists.

The Controller Pak (MISS): A memory pak that plugged into the controller. One big problem. Almost no cartridges used it in favor of battery pak saving on the cartridge itself.

Rumble Pak (HIT): Another controller plug-in. Force-feedback vibration, now standard, though built-in to virtually every modern controller.

Handhelds and Miscellany:

Nintendo practically invented handheld video games, from the days of Game-N-Watch, the original Gameboy, and subsequent systems, they've been virtually without serious competition in this area.

Tell me this doesn't look like something Darth Vader might use to discern the location of the
Rebel Base from captured prisoners.

Nintendo Virtual Boy (MISS): Yikes, people still call Nintendo out for this one. Heavy, it strapped to your head, hurt people's eyes because the graphics were greyscale inexplicably done in RED, and the games weren't even good. The only upside... if you still have one that works, it is worth a bundle.

Nintendo DS (HIT): This was mocked on announcement, but a year after launch, the DS critics went mostly silent. Two screens, stylus/touchscreen gameplay... this little handheld broke new ground, and some of what it did first is found in all smartphone mobile gaming.

Nintendo 3DS (Jury Still Out, I'm gonna call it Probable MISS): Another “gimmick” handheld, the cool thing being that it can do 3D without glasses. Problem is, it makes a lot of people sick/hurts their eyes after playing for more than a few minutes, and 3D is a crazy battery drain. You can turn it off and keep playing, but if that's true, what's the point of the system?

They can't all be hits, but Nintendo keeps swinging for the fences, and knocks a few out  of the park.

The best remaining modern example of Nintendo's innovating is, of course, the Wii, as the Gamecube Era didn't really see anything crazy aside from a cord allowing the Gameboy Advance to be hooked in to a controller port. Wii's motion controller and its phenomenal worldwide success (and subsequent imitation by both Sony and Microsoft) is a well-documented phenomenon, that brings us up to date. The only question that remains... will Wii U be another Wii-style Hit, or will it be an expensive and unnecessary gimmick like the Virtual Boy? What do you think?