Braid Release Date Announced

Braid is coming out on August 6th on XBLA.  Happy Birthday to me.

Linked Achievements

David Edery (whom you may know as the Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade) has an interesting post up about CliffyB’s announcement on Gears of War 2’s achievements being linked to things you did the original. 

This got me thinking about a concept that has so far been poorly explored, likely because there hasn’t been a good platform to launch it on until relatively recently.

If you recall the first time you saw Memento, there’s an experience of having an incomplete series of events handed to you.  You’re thrust into the middle of a series of events, and the logic of how you got there, and what’s going on, don’t become entirely clear until the end.  If you’ve ever read the Vlad Taltos series of books in the order they were published, you’ll experience something similar (or for that matter, read any other series of books with a sophisticated plot, out of chronological order).

It would be interesting to reproduce this sensation in game format - by having a series of games with linked content, as David describes.  Instead, however, of treating this content - hidden until certain events in a sequel are unlocked - as an easter egg, use it as the core of the design process.  Imagine a game where the central concept is the corruption of a timeline.  You play through the first game, thrust into the middle of a series of events, not really understanding what’s going on.  By the end of the first game, you have a grip on the immediate scenario, but there are a lot of plot holes.  Playing the second, or third game gives you a similar experience.  However, in each of these games, there are events you can trigger which will have causal effects in one of the other games, altering a timeline either before, or after the position in which you triggered it.  This effect unlocks further content in the other games, forcing you to go back to them and play that content.  The entire experience is understood only through playing all three games, and retracing what you’ve done with significant alterations.  Another alternative would be to run parallel dimensions at concurent timelines, so that the game mechanic would be the same, but instead of altering time, you alter space.

Creating a series of titles like this would be extremely high risk - if one of the titles doesn’t get made, the entire experience is ruined.  This is a risk that nearly nobody in the gaming industry is has so far been willing to undertake - and yet in other formats, notably television, this type of risk scenario is now common-place.  The risk could be mitigated by making the titles digital distributed at a lower price point through something like Xbox Live Arcade, and by using a common infrastructure such that most of the risk is entertained in the first title, and it will cost significantly less to make titles 2 and 3 (assuming a trilogy).

Now if only there were a large games company with significant financial backing that was trying to do something progressive and could afford to entertain some risk…

Shiny

I’ve added a dose of shiny to my site, so if you’ve been reading on RSS, come stop by in person.

Kongai

Apparently I’ve been busy, because Kongregate released Kongai at some point, and nobody told me. Kongai, if you recall, is an online collectible card game. Cards are earned by gaining achievements at weekly featured games, and remain linked to your account. It’s a neat way for a casual game portal to raise the barrier to exit, while at the same time increasing the value prop.

When did I start to sound like a corporate whore?

Lockdown

So by now, much has been made in the gaming press on the topic of the announcements Microsoft made at E3 last week. I’ve been toying with talking about those announcements all week, but I’m faced with several dilemmas.

Firstly, as my work for Xbox Live is not, shall we say, evangelical, I don’t feel that it’s my job to bolster support for their products simply because they pay my rent. That said, being publicly critical of moves made by Xbox Live could be what’s referred to as a career limiting move. This puts me in the odd position of not being able to be completely, ah, free with my words so to speak.

Secondly, while the new Xbox Experience has now been announced, I’m no longer embargoed from speaking about it. I have a lot of thoughts around the plethora of offerings that were announced last week, and what that means for the industry. The problem is that I don’t really know how much of it is mused on my own, and what’s based upon experience from being in there building it. Speaking about it, even though it’s been announced, could potentially cause me to accidentally disclose something I shouldn’t, which would result in very bad things for me.

So for now I think I’m going to have to settle with “I’m really excited to see the reaction to the stuff we’re working on over here” until I’m more comfortable with the limits of what I can say. Sadface.

Changing Countries on Xbox Live

You can’t.

I work for XBox Live, and I can’t do it either. For most people, this is not really an issue: On the whole, most people never stop living in the same country. Nevertheless, the experience is horrendous for those of us who do. For moves across the ocean, this will always be a painful process because of region restrictions on the DVDs that Xbox 360 games come on. There are a plethora of reasons, it turns out, why it’s also tricky to do it on the digital content side. The best you can presently do is the following:

1. Use the Content License Transfer Tool to move all the content associated with your account from Country 1 to the Xbox 360 you’re moving with (or onto your new one, if you’re selling the old and buying a new one when you get there).
2. Create a new account, with a new Billing Address, and a new Passport - all of which should be in Country 2.

Pros:

• You still have access to all the content you bought initially. You don’t need to repurchase anything.

Cons:

• Any time remaining on your Gold subscription is lost.
• You lose your gamerscore and all your achievements.

This is not really a solution, but at least with the content transfer tool you keep anything you paid for. If in the future a work-around becomes possible, I’ll be sure to post it.

Until then, my new American Gamertag is:

Changed from the Canadian:

Chrono Trigger on DS

via Gamasutra.

I’m just going to say this: It’s about fucking time. When are we going to see Mario RPG and Secret of Evermore?

In other news, I’ve just started with the Xbox Live Platform group this week, after much moving, which is why I haven’t posted in a while. Obviously you’re not going to hear anything out of me pertaining to that, but the future looks good.