Nothing is true, everything is permitted

I finished playing Assassin’s Creed last night at about 4 am, and I feel decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.

Marketing

I’ve been waiting for this game for what seems like forever. From the first moment I saw the game, I thought to myself that this was going to be a game that was truely groundbreaking. Taking the lessons Ubisoft learned with Splinter Cell and spinning them off into some wild combination of Hitman and Prince of Persia. You know the feeling you get when you see a commercial for a comedy, and it’s really funny, but when you go to watch the movie, you find out that every single funny moment in the movie was in the commercial, thus making the movie not only rarely good to begin with, but now even those moments are ruined for you?

Ubisoft could have done that, but they didn’t. Superb marketing, Grape job. Big A+ Sticker

Parkour

The whole Parkour thing is awesome. The sandbox thing was very appropriate for this game and the sheer ability to climb up nearly everything was done in an exemplary fashion. Unlike say, Spiderman, who can climb up pretty much any surface, Altair needs handholds - but can make handholds out of pretty much anything. What this means is that when he’s climbing, he’s climbing the way a real human climbs. The walls aren’t just a big sheet of chain-link fence that game be translated across. I can’t imagine how much time they must of spent on this, but it’s really, really awesome, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with stealth games that don’t allow you to do this ever again. The freerunning is also awesome, and it’s a lot of fun to try to lose guards chasing you by doing your thing. The weird part about this is that it doesn’t seem to just be your thing… guards in full armor are almost as manuverable as you are. This kind of takes the wind out of my sails as a bad-ass assassin, but cool nonetheless. The major complaint I would have with the freerunning is the controls. When you’re trying to jump towards a pole, if the direction you’re aiming with an analog stick is more than about 5 degrees off, Altair decides that what you really wanted to do was jump four stories down to the ground. The section of the game in the docks is especially annoying due to this problem, as instead of nearly killing yourself from a four storey drop, you land in the water 2 feet below you and drown. What kind of asshole can scale massive buildings, is a Parkour master, and can’t fucking swim?

Social Stealth

I was really excited about this idea. The idea that you’re hidden when you’re doing things that are socially acceptable is really neat, I just would have liked to see it explored more. There are exactly four ways to hide from the guards - You can hide in these weird little huts that are on the roof and stand out like an eyesore (how do the guards not poke their head in?). You can hide in a pile of hay. You can sit down on a bench and blend in with other people, or you can fall in with some wander scholars. Now, I would note that only two of the above are actually social stealth conditions. The other two are real, I’m hiding somewhere you can’t see me conditions. Scholars appear so rarely and benches hard to pick out that I almost always ended up in a pile of hay or the hut anyway. To make any significant distance (because the cities are massive, you have to freerun like a mofo. While people comment about this, it doesn’t seem to actually bother anyone - other than the guards I inevitably end up throwing off the roof. You’re either sword out in the streets, or just walking along doing nothing in particular. I suppose when Ubisoft said they were doing this big social stealth thing I expected it to be a little more elaborate.

Fighting and AI

Some of the reviews for this game make complaints about the AI. If that’s your opinion… wow, you’re retarded. In my view, the AI is very REALISTIC, which is kind of the whole point of AI in the first place. Yeah, the guards on the roofs don’t immediately kill you for being on the roof. You know those ladders that are everywhere, that would indicate to me that theoretically citizens can get up here too. Ever been in a building at night when you’re not supposed to be there? Does the security guard draw and open fire the second he sees you?

Let’s look at some examples of good AI. Contrary to what you might think, climbing up the side of a building onto a rooftop rarely buys you an escape right away from the guards. Because they follow you up the side of the building. If it’s too hard for them, they’ve usually found another route anyway, so you’re still not out of the woods. If you get somewhere they really can’t get to, they start throwing rocks at you to knock you down.

The fighting system is awesome. Unlike many games which are a huge festival of hack and slash, Altair fights the way a skilled swordsman should fight when outnumbered. Likewise the enemies don’t swing at you all at once, but look for opportunities to break your guard. The sheer number of animations (all of which are beautiful) are astounding.

Now the problem with this is that it’s way, way too easy. Altair can take a ridiculous number of hits, while each soldier, even the ones who are generally on a similar level to Altair are getting their throats slashed and stomachs impaled. In an earlier preview of the game it was indicated that Altair was not supposed to be a tank who could take lots of damage. These fights are in fact easy enough that it’s generally simpler to kill all the guards after you instead of run and hide from them.

This is a bad design decision. The two main pillars for this game are social stealth and freerunning. The latter is usually a means to break the line of sight with your persuers so you can do the former. Allowing Altair to get into massive brawls in which he sweeps the floor is completely at odds with this model.

Story

I’m not even going to discuss it, other than to say it’s terrific, one of the most intricate and crafted plots seen in a video game yet. My only real gripe is that Altair starts the game as an arrogant jerk, and as he progresses becomes more and more wise and lucid… by killing people?  Nevertheless, they’ve got some cool order-vs-chaos-nothing-is-black-or-white stuff going on, so points for that.

Overall Gameplay

Okay, I’ve sung my praises. I had to make myself finish this game, and I largely did so because Penny-Arcade told me I had to. This game had so much potential, and the things they did right were really innovative and well polished. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is just paste around these mechanics. Here is an outline of how the entire game will go:

1. Get mission from boss, go to appropriate city
2. Find Assassin’s Bureau, go talk to dude in there.
3. Spend the next 45 minutes climbing up to the top of the 12 or so towers in area, some of which seem to be replicas of each other
4. Spend the next 45 minutes doing exciting investigation activities such as “Sitting on a bench and targeting that guy”, “Walking behind someone and pushing a button”, or the classic favorite “Finding 20 flags in 3 minutes”. What is up with that, why do these assassin’s keep losing their flags all over hell’s half acre and requiring that they be cleaned up in less than 3 minutes?
5. Find every single citizen being mugged and save them. They will utter one of 3 or 4 lines of dialog. There are somewhere between 6 and 15 of these guys in every mission.
6. Go back to the Assassin’s Bureau, get authorization to kill
7. Wander over to your target, listen to him talk for a while, use ’social stealth’ (read: scholars) to get near him and shove a knife in his back
8. Run away, or just kill every guard you see

The information you obtain in the investigations is rarely useful, and extremely tedious. You’ll be bored of doing it before the end of the first mission. Tidbits like “Hey, there’s some scholars nearby that you can probably use to get close” are really inane. What’s really disappointing though is that there’s very little differentiation between the scenarios for killing the target. One has to make the comparison to Hitman at this point. In Hitman, every single kill is a unique experience, the whole level exists to provide many different ways to execute the hit, some of which are better than others. In Assassin’s Creed, you basically just have to run up and kill the guy (since you’re going to alert the guards anyway), and the ’stealthy’ solution is almost always hiding with some scholars to get close and then kill him, and otherwise involves jumping down off a wall behind the guy.

Overall I’m disappointed with the title. Ubisoft clearly made some very costly investments into getting the engine for the fighting and parkour down well. This game was not really a safe bet, they’re doing some new and unique things here. I feel bad that they did take a unique take at the stealth action genre but completely fouled up the execution on the gameplay part of things. And really the crux of it is that it’s a game, and the gameplay should be more important than anything else. Everything but the gameplay experience is absolutely top knotch in Assassin’s Creed, and perhaps for the second one they can take the engine they’ve built and build an assassination experience that is not a tedious chore. Major points for unique ways of killing or approaching each individual target.

Erik Wolpaw

When I played Psychonauts, I knew that the writers for that game were some of my favorite people. After playing Portal, I decided that perhaps Valve had some writers who were actually my favorite people, and I just wasn’t aware of that fact at the time I played Psychonauts. Now I’ve discovered that in fact a union of the two above groups exists and I can stop getting all emotional about it and crying in the bathroom at work every half hour. Seriously.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an interview with Erik Wolpaw, who is clearly sane in the same way that John Cleese is. When I eventually decide that I have manacled to the evicerating chain of corporate too long and start my own company, you have a standing job offer from me.

P.S. Ben Croshaw, you’re welcome to join too. I hope you two will play nice together in my future nation-state of gaming.

P.P.S.  If you were under the impression that perhaps you, dear reader, were my favorite person, or that I “Like you the best”, you’re wrong.

Eh?

Research study shows that Canada is awesome, and all game developers should move there immediately.  Full text is available here.

Bungie Leaves Microsoft

I can’t believe the rumours were true.  I don’t know the full story behind the motivations and the details of the break-up, but it appears that Microsoft now owns a minority equity share in the new privately held company, Bungie LLC.  Microsoft retains rights to the Halo franchise, but Bungie is now free to do as they like.

Personally, I think this hurts Microsoft.  The teams that make your games are the best assets you can hold onto, and you can make much more money as a company when you’re the publisher, developer, and console manufacturer.  For all the talk, it would seem that Bungie felt that Microsoft was constraining their creative control over their products.  Just over a week after releasing the title that will put Microsoft’s Entertainment Division in the black for the first time, to announce the split is a bad image.  Still, it would looks like there’s not a lot of hard feelings, and the two companies will have a strong relationship in the future.  If the choice was between letting Bungie leave and maintaining a strong relationship or refusing and having your key players quit and start it anyway, losing that relationship, the former is obviously better.

So here’s to you Bungie, it was fun while it lasted, and hopes that you create in the future as many wonderful things as you had while you were here.

Note:  Everything said here is speculation, I don’t actually know anything. =)

Metaplace

So yesterday there was a brief announcement by a certain Raph Koster.  If you’re not familiar with the name, Raph has acted as Sony Online Entertainment’s Chief Creative Officer for the past few years working on titles such as Star Wars: Galaxies and Everquest II.  Before that he was the lead designer for the highly successful Ultima Online at Origin Systems.  Raph left SOE last year to found a company called Areae, and has been tight lipped about what exactly he was doing there, at least until yesterday when the cat ran screaming out of the bag.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

The platform should allow you to set up a world with basic chat and a map to work on in under five minutes.  Although it’s not clear how the content generation will work, the platform seems to be designed to integrated tightly with the web, allowing objects to script content feeds from outside of the game, thus allowing users to shatter the walled garden which is typical in most video games (Missing since January anyone?).  While I find it instinctively unlikely to occur in the near future, Areae claims one could build a game bigger than World of Warcraft on Metaplace.  While clients are currently limited to forms of 2-D graphics such as 2.5D Heightfields, isometric views, top-down 2D, etc., the expectation is that a 3-D client will continue to be developed.  Areae is itself developing an MMO based on the Metaplace platform, but nothing is known about it presently.  Pricing information doesn’t seem to be discussed, the flavour of the language indicates cheap as free is not out of the question.

I see really interesting potential for ARGs developed on this platform.  A game with tie-ins to dynamic content generated from real-life events based on RSS feeds (fully supported) could be very interesting.  I’m extremely curious as to how well this platform will work.  At the end of the day, much of the difficulty in broad-based game design is in the creation of content and assets which require specialized skills.  XNA tries a related problem that Metaplace is attacking, but neither seems to intuitively deal with the issue that asset creation is difficult for normal humans. 

If you’re not convinced, having Cory Doctorow on the advisory board is a sufficient condition for being awesome.

Project Management in Video Games

Heather Maxwell Chandler wrote an article posted on Gamasutra this morning on the value of Project Management in Video Game Design.  I found this existence of this article somewhat suprising.  Video Games are from a development standpoint, complex on the level of Enterprise-level business applications.  Furthermore to make a really great video game, into the complex land of code must be integrated concepts of gameplay design, artwork, sound, music, artificial intelligence, and so forth.  In short, making a game is hard.

 So how can a large team of people, most of whom own a greatly varying supply of skillsets manage to possibly put togethera game worth half a damn without using project management techniques?  I understand that there is likely a history of “Business Analyst Style” Project Managers who feel that, in the words of Abraham Maslow, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.  Obviously the management techniques which have been have been honed in the business world to deal with highly structured process models are not going to be directly applicable to a creative work such as a video game, but to go the complete other direction would, I think, also be madness.

This article seems to suggest that the latter is exactly the case in much of the industry, which I find difficult to believe (although it would explain why 80 hour work weeks seem to be so common).  Could anybody who’s had some experience in the industry comment on that?

All that is good in the world

Yesterday I attended a recruiting session given by Denis Dyack and some of the team from Silicon Knights here at the University of Waterloo. I don’t think I made a complete fool of myself, but it was definitely one of the first times in my life I’ve managed to stutter and ramble in anxiety, so I guess I must have liked what they had to say. While I’m not interested in writing a plug for SK, I will say that many of the things they said over the course of that two hours resonated strongly with me. There’s a lot of issues with working the games industry that are hard to judge without actually working in it, despite the amount of blogs you read or development magazines you might subscribe to. SK strikes me as a place where they strongly and fundamentally understand a lot of these issues in a way I agree with, and I thought I’d go through a few of them.

Employee Recognition

Much of the games industry has a reputation for being essentially a meat grinder: taking fresh graduates, putting them into high-stress, long hour positions and running them until they burn out, at which time they’re replaced by fresh employees. I really believe that if you’re going to create great games, you need great people. Game design is an incredibly complex and sophisticated process, and much like any other medium that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, the people in the company are the ones that make it happen. If you don’t make those employees feel like what they do matters, and that they are valued, you’re going to lose them. You might be able to make money churning shit out the door, but nobody is going to celebrate it. Why not reach for the sky.

Lateral Movement

The baby boomer generation has been known for finding a company and sticking with them for their entire lives. Generation X is characterized by the opposite, hoping from company to company and job to job as suits their fancy. Generation Y, the current generation of new graduates and the one I happened to belong to is characterized by a mix of the two. Gen Y wants to stay with one company, but they want to do different things. Gen Y wants all the advantages of changing up your job, keeping it fresh, while retaining the benefits of staying in one organization long-term. Making it easy to move around in the company will attract Gen Y, help keep your employees interested in what they do, and at the same time groom people who are familiar with the whole of the game making process.

Continuing Education

Once upon a time, it was very rare to get a Bachelor’s Degree, much less a Bachelor’s Degree in a field such as Math or Engineering. In Canada, there are approximately 65,000 Professional Engineers. Presently, there are around 27,000 students in an accredited Engineering program. Clearly, the marginal value of the Bachelor’s degree declines significantly when the market is flooded, and a large number of us for these reasons, as well as the joy of learning, are interested in pursuing a Master’s or PhD. Supporting your employees in pursuing higher education, and arranging it so that their jobs are open when they finish can help infuse the organization with much more rare and sophisticated talent, and when your business is making compelling content and pushing hardware to its limits, there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

Games as High Art

It’s been said that games may one day be the dominant form of entertainment. Certainly as the generations who grew up with video games age, console systems will become as prevalent as cable subscriptions. However in order to truly bring video games into their own, developers will have to start making more games which are on par with Hollywood blockbusters, as well as classic critically acclaimed films. There’s a lot of mumbling about this going on right now. Certainly some developers have made piles of money and games which are really fun to play, while largely ignoring story. To me, this is similar to making movies like ‘The Wedding Crashers”. The movie made a lot of money, and was hilarious to watch, but you’re not really pushing the medium forward, it’s not the type of thing people will write about for years to come. If you want high art, you’re going to have to have solid writing. John Carmack once said that story in a video game is like story in porn, it’s expected to be there, but isn’t really important. I think Carmack has done incredible things for the Industry, and he deserves credit for that, but that quote definitely speaks to his games. They’re fun to look at, maybe even fun to play, but they don’t touch you on an emotional level the way something like Ragnar Tornquist’s The Longest Journey does. If we want games to be high art, they have to be more than eye-candy, you have to feel something when you play them, you should be left thinking about them while you’re falling asleep at night…

Anyway, these are all thoughts that popped into my mind while I was listening to the Silicon Knights team talk. I hope that they manage to drive in that direction.

Western Perspective on Japanese Game Development

Ryan Winterhalt has an interesting article about what it’s like to be a westerner working in the Japanese games industry over at Gamasutra.  Definitely worth a read.

Meta-metacritic

Many of you may be aware of a lovely little enterprise called Metacritic. Essentially what they do is compile reviews from sites they feel are respectable and speak with a certain level of knowledge regarding their particular subject matter, and aggregate these reviews into a single Metascore. This theoretically averages out any individual biases to get a better feel for what the general concensus is on any particular medium (the one we would be interested in being, of course, video games). They’ve been doing this for some time, and this will not be new to many people. Many organizations use Metacritic as their main scoring mechanism (most notably, Steam). While this is all good and wonderful for figuring out what the best games are, or how good any given game is, I propose a ‘more different’ use of the data.

Convieniently, Metacritic has a giant list of every game they’ve got reviews for, on each platform. Each game on the list links to a page about that game, which contains various information, such as the developer, publisher, release date, ESRB rating, and so on. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the best Development shop in the world is. For PC. For PS3. Overall. If you only count games made in the last 4 years. If you count all games ever. Best Developer of the 80s. Best Developer who makes Mature titles.

Want to mash up those names with MobyGames? Best Developer based in Canada. Best Game Designer.

I think it would be a project of academic interest, and as far as I can tell, nobody has ever tried to come up with who the best studios or game designers are based on anything but personal opinion. Arguably using Metascores is also personal opinion, but it’s averaged out personal opinion based on the final product of their labors rather than any emotional opinion about the studios themselves. I’ll post a link on here when my Proof of Concept is done, and feel free to send me a line if you have any ideas about neat uses for this information, or good ideas about how it should be done.

Will Wright and Brian Eno

Whilst I was working down in California this summer, I had the opportunity to see a facinating talk/conversation between Will Wright and Brian Eno. This talk, hosted by the Long Now Foundation, was one of those times in your life where much of what they say haunted your mind on the train-ride home, and you would spend days thinking about it. Certainly an interesting experience. And now, due to the magic of the internet and FORA.tv, you too can share in that pleasure.

Enjoy,

View Will Wright and Brian Eno on FORA.tv

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