Or pretty much any game with zombies.
-Tom
There are some very visceral moments in the Witcher 3 as well.
This week, I spoke with Ernest Adams on my podcast concluding a two part discussion with him. We talked about game design and then spend the remaining half hour on the subject of how the Game Industry is becoming more gender inclusive and our problems with the Gamergate movement. We kept things largely PG, but we talked about some of the failings we had with the bullet points of the movement.
Anyone else have any of their own articles to pimp? Someone interview the designer of level four of that wii FPS where you shoot the fish?
I want to go to there. What is this game?!
My favorite bit:
January 28 - Xbox One copies of BloodDeath are sent to press for review. The review embargo is set by Electronic Soft for February 10. No press outlet, whether online or in print, is permitted under pain of death to publish their thoughts about the game before this time.
January 29 - Several popular YouTube personalities, given early copies of the game by Electronic Soft, enthusiastically play their way through DeathBlood from start to finish in front of an audience of millions.
Yep, that about sums it up.
First I laughed but as the article went on I just sat in silence and contemplated the sad state of affairs in gaming industry.
The Real Stories Behind E3s Glossy Game Demos.
For BioShock Infinite, the scripting was incredibly specific, down to when enemies fired a gun.
“If we were going to show the game at that state, for it to make any kind of good showing, we really needed to do [scripting],” said Elliott. “It would have been far more misleading to have the AIs doing what they’re naturally doing in that circumstance because, of course, we were going to improve that inevitably.”
But Elliott admitted the studio struggled with out to convey their ambition without promising a game they couldn’t deliver. While he’s proud of the demo—”it’s almost like a piece of cinema”—he admits it represented a version of the game that was slightly more idealistic.
Take, for example, a sequence in which Booker ditches Elizabeth to deal with a zeppelin that’s shown up in the area because his cover’s been blown. The game conveys a sprawling cityscape in which the zeppelin was summoned because the player had screwed up, and you’re forced to grapple with an entire city coming down on you because of a single mistake. It presented a version of BioShock Infinite more dynamic and open ended than what shipped.
“All that we legitimately hoped to deliver on,” he said.
When E3 was over, Irrational tried to get the demo running on consoles. Until then, most development had taken place on high-end PCs that could handle everything being dreamed up. The final game, however, had to ship on the rapidly aging PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
“Due to memory constraints, it was like…uh oh,” laughed Elliott. “This is not going to happen.”
Reading this reminds me that the industry has gotten a little better about countdowns to teasers lately. The part that hits closest to home lately is the amusing lack of opsec with the LinkedIn pages and Twitter posts. Plus PR drones that refuse to go off script once they’re faced with the reality of leaks.
We knew about this years ago, and yet there was no viral “downgrade” meme. Maybe fewer people cared.
He’s wrong tho. He doesn’t understand what most of the video game industry is. It’s not selling games, it’s selling interactive fantasies and escapism. That’s why graphics and sound matter.
There’s a LOT more money in escapist fantasy than there is in games. The interactivity only heightens the escapist fantasy bit for the most part.
While he’s proud of the demo—”it’s almost like a piece of cinema”—
Irrational were a great bastion of player’s agency and interaction. “Like a piece of cinema” sentence for a video game ISN’T something good to say.
I agree when it comes to the games they make. But the E3 demo was just a sales tool, and it’s perfectly viable to describe it as a piece of cinema. It’s like a movie trailer, designed to evoke a certain feel. And furthermore, Irrational has done a great job with that type of sales tool going back at least to the original Bioshock. The gameplay demo at E3 was all smoke and mirrors, but it was an amazing example of how to introduce what the developers were trying to achieve: the world, the tone, the gameplay, just the overall look and feel.
-Tom
I don’t agree with that author’s logic, but I do think there is a subsection of video game followers (I’m not sure I would call them “fans”) that place an unreasonable amount of importance on graphics and tech. Let’s take the silly Witcher 3 downgrade dust-up for example. That was a bunch of sturm and drang over nothing. The game is terrific despite any reduction in graphics quality from one build to the next. Would it be as highly regarded if it looked like the first Unreal game? Probably not.
At the end of the day, that’s what I care about. Is the game any good? Are the graphics in service of what the game creators are trying to do?
Some of my favorite games have graphics that were well behind the leading edge of tech when they launched. The crucial bit is whether or not they used their art direction to further the game. Super Meat Boy’s look is perfect as-is. Same with Mass Effect 3 or Crysis or The Sims. The art works regardless of how badass the tech was behind it.
But that’s where his argument falls down. You’re not going to tell the story that was told in Bioshock without pushing some polygons.
Nailed it.
That has a zillion polygons. They just happen to be prerendered ones.
That is (mostly) hand drawn, baby. Very few polygons.
http://stasisgame.com/web/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=33
Tremendous artist!
There’s no doubt that the isometric Bioshock mock-up looks really good. You’re still going to have a difficult time telling Bioshock’s story that way because the whole point was making the player view things through the protagonist’s eyes. The reveal is going to have a lot less impact in anything other than a first-person view.