1999 was a banner year for me. I got accepted to NYU, I fell in love and the Sega Dreamcast was on store shelves. Indeed, all was right with the world.
As it happens, I wasn't the only one riding high at the end of the millennia. While I was busy crushing people's hopes and dreams in Soul Caliber, the fine men and women of Irrational Games were no doubt popping bottles of Moet in celebration of all the critical acclaim their newly released title, System Shock 2, was garnering. And rightfully so. An ambitious melding of survival horror, FPS and RPG elements, System Shock 2 was a towering triumph by every measurable standard. Tantamount to the game's success was the emphasis it placed on resource management and meaningful player choices - two things that have been increasingly absent from games in the 21st century.
Irrational is hoping to remedy that issue later this year when they release Bioshock Infinite with a newly revealed difficulty setting. Dubbed "1999" as a tip of the hat to their PC gaming classic, the new mode will purportedly require you to make judicious use of your ammunition and make hard, impactful choices regarding how to specialize your character over the course of the game. Irrational's full announcement can be found here. While they don't give any solid specifics about exactly how the minute to minute mechanics are being altered it's clear they haven't settled for the commonly used shortcut of simply upping the damage you take while decreasing the amount you dish out.
This is actually a pretty big deal in my opinion. Over the last 15 years our industry has slowly dropped the wall of exclusivity we used to huddle behind and embraced a policy of inclusiveness. The term "gamer" hardly paints a clear picture of a specific kind of individual any longer, as the age/gender/ethnicity range of people who play in some form or another has widened dramatically. With such a massive influx of new players who lack decades of experience or the energy to improve their skills, it only seems logical that developers would start making their games more forgiving in order to make sure their product appeals to the largest possible pool of consumers. This is one of the great truths of modern gaming. It honestly isn't worth lamenting or discussing any more than it already has been. It is what it is.
But there is a problem here, and it isn't one that I hear anyone talking about, and no, it isn't as simple as "games aren't hard enough anymore". You can go to any message board on the web and hear tons of those complaints, largely from grumpy old gamers like myself who just like sounding grizzly and battle-hardened. But it's largely untrue. Games today are plenty hard. Even something as mind numbing and broadly appealing as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 can be hard. Turn the difficulty all the way up and watch how quickly you get killed for peeking out of cover at the wrong second. I can assure you that Doom was never nearly so punishing.
However, the reason Doom is a much better game (despite being almost 20 years older) is that it actively engages the mind of the player by requiring them to observe and comprehend many more nuances in order to succeed, regardless of how good of a shot you are. You tote around up to 7 different weapons, some of which share a common ammo pool, some of which don't. They all have quirks that make them well suited to different types of engagements and even specific enemy types. Each member of the game's varied bestiary exhibits different behaviors and when faced with a mixed group, you need to assess the relative threat levels of each and decide which ones to take out in what order, and how. You need to factor ammo levels for each weapon into your strategy too, conserving the rarest and most valuable ammo for emergencies or specific kinds of scenarios.
Simply put, modern shooters don't ask you to think like this. Sure, there are different guns. But all of them kill 95% of the fodder sent after you efficiently. It doesn't matter if it's a shotgun, an uzi, an AR or an SMG, if you put the cursor over the bad guy and pull the trigger, he dies. Ammo? May as well be unlimited. Each one of the endless number of corpses you walk over has ammo for you. Don't misunderstand, the games can be PLENTY challenging due to how quickly you can be killed and how good your aim needs to be, but they never make you think and they only seldom call on you to make tactical decisions, no matter how far to the right you push that difficulty slider.
This is a point I have a particularly tough time making to people when trying to explain why most forms of "casual" gaming don't appeal to me. The popular notion is that old timers like myself find this tidal wave of new players threatening, and that we write off super accessible games as some sort of a response to having our identity as "gamers" challenged. I'm willing to concede that there's a bit of that in there for some of us, but it's far from the whole picture. The real issue is that as layers of nuance get removed or marginalized in importance, games require less thought and strategy to play. While that's great for people who are just getting started, it translates into a lot less fun for people who have enjoyed ever escalating levels of sophistication for over two decades.
When Obsidian included a special "Hardcore" mode in Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, they showed that they "get it", and now Irrational joins their ranks in that regard. Ken Levine's studio has a lot of clout in this business and Bioshock Infinite is poised to be one of the years biggest titles. Hopefully "1999 Mode" will bring the right sort of challenge to the table and send a clear message to other developers: Veteran gamers don't want to die more, we want to THINK more, and developers who go the extra mile to cater to us will be rewarded with our dollars and our loyalty.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Optional Reality
As a grown man who has had a brief opportunity to run a business, the necessary evils required to be successful within a capitalist system are not lost on me. In order to truly prosper in such a jungle, one must be capable of not only revising some of their morals, but of bending their very perception of reality at times. Angry customers are really just "passionate about your product". Employees who know and exercise their rights under labor laws are "disengaged", and so forth. I get it. It's an ugly world out there, and there are infinity ways for the void to swallow you and your business up, which means you have to be willing to play a little ball in order to keep your head above water.
Someone needs to let Electronic Arts, and Taiwan based electronics manufacturer, Foxconn know that reality can only be bent so far.
Today, in a move that should surprise approximately NOBODY, Bioware, the formerly proud, independent studio turned EA sock puppet, announced that the PC version of their upcoming blockbuster-to-be, Mass Effect 3 would require EA's digital distribution platform, Origin in order to be played - regardless of whether it was purchased digitally or from a brick and mortar outfit. Despite the fact that Origin is a complete disaster of a service, this isn't the part that truly angers me.
No, the part that really gets my goat is Bioware towing the proverbial line for EA, claiming that Steam, the industry leading digital distribution service run by Valve, imposes Terms of Service (ToS) that are simply too obtrusive for them to be bothered with. This should be insulting to any video game fan with something grey and squishy between their ears. Not only is their statement a near word for word regurgitation of a statement EA made to defend their now famous snubbing of Steam during the release of Battlefield 3 last year, it also reeks of an incomprehensible disconnect from reality.
While EA has been quick to support other digital distribution services that they feel confident they can out-muscle, such as Impulse or Direct2Drive, the one they have chosen to exclude from their major releases for the better part of the last year is the only one with the user base to stand up to them. While I expect no less from a company that habitually buys it's way out of having to compete, it's astounding to me that they actually expect us to buy their ruse.
Publishers and developers in this industry don't exactly have muzzles on them when it comes to what they think about their business partnerships. For instance, it's common knowledge that Xbox Live can be a painful service to deal with, featuring regulations on everything from pricing to certification. So one would think that if Valve's service was as much of a hindrance to "directly supporting the players" as EA has repeatedly stated, someone (besides Valve's most well funded and devious competitor in digital distribution) might have said something. So far the only complaints are coming from the one company who stands to gain by making them.
For once, it isn't the corporate greed that's killing me here, it really isn't. If EA just came out themselves and said, "we have a competing product and it doesn't make sense for us to bolster our competitor's product with our software" I could entirely swallow that. It would still be an utterly moronic, short-sighted decision, but at least I wouldn't feel like EA was asking me to wear a baseball cap with a propeller on it while standing in the corner. But in this "no reality" zone EA exists in, hiding behind one of their wholly owned dev studios will TOTALLY throw us off the trail. I can see John Riccitiello giving the order, "Have the Bioware guys say it, nerds LIKE them. Don't they make all those games with the lightsabers and the dragon-elf-dwarf-whoosits?"
On a sadder note, some of you may have seen a story on the net over the past week about an electronics manufacturing plant in Wuhan, China, owned by Taiwanese manufacturing giant, Foxconn. Destructoid covered it in detail last week but the basics are as such: a large group of employees at this plant in Wuhan had been refused a pay raise and were given the option to either quit with compensation or continue working. 300 of them decided to leave, but were then refused the compensation promised, at which point they convened on the roof of the plant and threatened mass suicide. Thankfully, with the intervention of the town's Mayor, the crisis was averted.
It was a detail I found in 2 different articles covering the story that made it frightfully relevant to the post you are reading now.
Apparently, back in 2010, Foxconn experienced a rash of suicides. 14 men and women threw themselves from the top of their respective manufacturing plants and perished. One top ranking Foxconn employee was quoted as saying, "No matter how hard we try, such things will continue to happen." In that spirit, the company proceeded to put safety nets around the outside of all their manufacturing plants to prevent employees from voluntarily plummeting to their demise.
I would like to believe that I don't have to point out how shocking of a disconnect from reality that represents. But for those who are high ranking officers of a multi-national corporation, or are otherwise afflicted with some form of mental illness, I'll play through. At some point, in some cavernous conference room on the top floor of some corporate HQ in the sky, a VP of Foxconn raised his hand and said, "Excuse me sir, but I'm afraid that 14 of our employees felt so entrapped and undervalued that they committed suicide by jumping off the tops of some of our manufacturing plants." Then, some shriveled up prune of a man, probably wearing a robe of black sack-cloth, pondered for a moment, slowly sucked in what little air his decrepit lungs could hold and wheezed back, "Well, I guess we should put up some nets, so they can't do that any longer." Then a bunch of people, ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS, all looked at one another and nodded in agreement.
I guess severing your link to tangible, human reality is just the cost of entry if you wish to manufacture products for Apple, Microsoft and Sony. Success is apparently a rare strain of insanity.
Someone needs to let Electronic Arts, and Taiwan based electronics manufacturer, Foxconn know that reality can only be bent so far.
Today, in a move that should surprise approximately NOBODY, Bioware, the formerly proud, independent studio turned EA sock puppet, announced that the PC version of their upcoming blockbuster-to-be, Mass Effect 3 would require EA's digital distribution platform, Origin in order to be played - regardless of whether it was purchased digitally or from a brick and mortar outfit. Despite the fact that Origin is a complete disaster of a service, this isn't the part that truly angers me.
No, the part that really gets my goat is Bioware towing the proverbial line for EA, claiming that Steam, the industry leading digital distribution service run by Valve, imposes Terms of Service (ToS) that are simply too obtrusive for them to be bothered with. This should be insulting to any video game fan with something grey and squishy between their ears. Not only is their statement a near word for word regurgitation of a statement EA made to defend their now famous snubbing of Steam during the release of Battlefield 3 last year, it also reeks of an incomprehensible disconnect from reality.
While EA has been quick to support other digital distribution services that they feel confident they can out-muscle, such as Impulse or Direct2Drive, the one they have chosen to exclude from their major releases for the better part of the last year is the only one with the user base to stand up to them. While I expect no less from a company that habitually buys it's way out of having to compete, it's astounding to me that they actually expect us to buy their ruse.
Publishers and developers in this industry don't exactly have muzzles on them when it comes to what they think about their business partnerships. For instance, it's common knowledge that Xbox Live can be a painful service to deal with, featuring regulations on everything from pricing to certification. So one would think that if Valve's service was as much of a hindrance to "directly supporting the players" as EA has repeatedly stated, someone (besides Valve's most well funded and devious competitor in digital distribution) might have said something. So far the only complaints are coming from the one company who stands to gain by making them.
For once, it isn't the corporate greed that's killing me here, it really isn't. If EA just came out themselves and said, "we have a competing product and it doesn't make sense for us to bolster our competitor's product with our software" I could entirely swallow that. It would still be an utterly moronic, short-sighted decision, but at least I wouldn't feel like EA was asking me to wear a baseball cap with a propeller on it while standing in the corner. But in this "no reality" zone EA exists in, hiding behind one of their wholly owned dev studios will TOTALLY throw us off the trail. I can see John Riccitiello giving the order, "Have the Bioware guys say it, nerds LIKE them. Don't they make all those games with the lightsabers and the dragon-elf-dwarf-whoosits?"
On a sadder note, some of you may have seen a story on the net over the past week about an electronics manufacturing plant in Wuhan, China, owned by Taiwanese manufacturing giant, Foxconn. Destructoid covered it in detail last week but the basics are as such: a large group of employees at this plant in Wuhan had been refused a pay raise and were given the option to either quit with compensation or continue working. 300 of them decided to leave, but were then refused the compensation promised, at which point they convened on the roof of the plant and threatened mass suicide. Thankfully, with the intervention of the town's Mayor, the crisis was averted.
It was a detail I found in 2 different articles covering the story that made it frightfully relevant to the post you are reading now.
Apparently, back in 2010, Foxconn experienced a rash of suicides. 14 men and women threw themselves from the top of their respective manufacturing plants and perished. One top ranking Foxconn employee was quoted as saying, "No matter how hard we try, such things will continue to happen." In that spirit, the company proceeded to put safety nets around the outside of all their manufacturing plants to prevent employees from voluntarily plummeting to their demise.
I would like to believe that I don't have to point out how shocking of a disconnect from reality that represents. But for those who are high ranking officers of a multi-national corporation, or are otherwise afflicted with some form of mental illness, I'll play through. At some point, in some cavernous conference room on the top floor of some corporate HQ in the sky, a VP of Foxconn raised his hand and said, "Excuse me sir, but I'm afraid that 14 of our employees felt so entrapped and undervalued that they committed suicide by jumping off the tops of some of our manufacturing plants." Then, some shriveled up prune of a man, probably wearing a robe of black sack-cloth, pondered for a moment, slowly sucked in what little air his decrepit lungs could hold and wheezed back, "Well, I guess we should put up some nets, so they can't do that any longer." Then a bunch of people, ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS, all looked at one another and nodded in agreement.
I guess severing your link to tangible, human reality is just the cost of entry if you wish to manufacture products for Apple, Microsoft and Sony. Success is apparently a rare strain of insanity.
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