Harshest game review ... ever

Extra Credits excoriates Call of Juarez, the Cartel.

+1

Saints Row: The Third - "Shock and Awesome" trailer

Why is it that any game that mocks CoD and BF immediately gets my attention? It's just a trailer, for Pete's sake.

But still, it's a pretty awesome trailer:

CCP responds ... well

Very well, indeed. I have no prognostications to offer, but the message is pitch-perfect:

A LETTER TO THE FOLLOWERS OF EVE 

reported by CCP Hellmar | 2011.10.05 17:29:00 | NEW | Comments 

Dear Followers of EVE Online, 

The past few months have been very humbling for me. I've done much soul searching, and what follows is my sincere effort to clear the air with all of you. Please bear with me as I find my way through. 

The estrangement from CCP that many of you have been feeling of late is my fault, and for that I am truly sorry. There are many contributing factors, but in the end it is I who must shoulder the responsibility for much of what has happened. In short, my zeal for pushing EVE to her true potential made me lose sight of doing the simple things right. I was impatient when I should have been cautious, defiant when I should have been conciliatory and arrogant when I should have been humble. 

This soul searching took me back to when EVE was just an idea. Bringing her to life in 2003 was, in many people's minds, impossible. But we found a way because EVE is something unique in the world. Getting her to 100,000 subscribers was an even more fantastical feat. Before long, we were launching in China, making DUST 514, merging with White Wolf to build World of Darkness, building Carbon, growing the company to 600 people, increasing our subscriber count beyond that of the population of Iceland and on and on, one resounding success after the next despite earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and even a world economic collapse. 

Somewhere along the way, I began taking success for granted. As hubris set in, I became less inclined to listen to pleas for caution. Red flags raised by very smart people both at CCP and in the community went unheeded because of my stubborn refusal to allow adversity to gain purchase on our plans. Mistakes, even when they were acknowledged, often went unanalyzed, leaving the door open for them to be repeated. 

You have spoken, loudly and clearly, with your words and with your actions. And there were definitely moments in recent history when I wish I would have listened more and taken a different path. 

I was wrong and I admit it. 

Captain's Quarters 

Without establishments and meaningful activities to engage in, forcing players into a mandatory single-player Captain’s Quarters experience was a mistake. I mentioned earlier the perils of not getting the simple things right. Removing ship spinning was a negligent oversight and a clear sign that we had fallen out of touch with our community. The interiors for Incarna were so scoped down by our launch window that CQ was essentially a prototype feature that we foolishly promoted as a full-blown expansion. We underestimated our development time, set impractical or misleading expectations, and added insult to injury by removing something in which players were emotionally invested. 

I fully empathize with your disappointment in CCP. We would have been much better off positioning Incarna as an optional technology preview that interested players could have experienced and helped us to refine. The tragedy here is that the team really did build solid technology and great art to support what you can see and did it in way that sets a strong foundation for building out the rest. The fact is, in spite of our missteps, they delivered some of the most amazing interior rendering and character technology in the industry, and their efforts deserve praise. The fact we didn't leverage their achievement more effectively is my fault. 

Virtual Goods 

Next we arrive at our rather underwhelming virtual goods rollout. There was hardly anything to purchase initially, let alone to put the cost of the infamous monocle in perspective. The last thing we wanted to do was create the perception that all items in the store would be in that price range. Quite frankly, it was rather pointless to begin with because we did not have a multiuser environment in which players could show off their purchases. It was another feature that we rushed out the door before it was ready. 

We also didn't do enough to assure you that this wasn’t the beginning of a "pay to win" scenario in EVE. Let me be blunt: Unless the MMO business changes radically, our virtual goods strategy for EVE Online will remain limited in scope and focus on vanity items, or as we said after the CSM visit this summer: The investment of money in EVE should not give you an unfair advantage over the investment of time. 

Though the introduction was clearly flawed, our plans for virtual goods are intended to make your playing experience better, not to disrupt it. From a strategic perspective, we had to take these first steps because monthly subscriptions are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. The culture of online gaming is changing, just as the notion of digital ownership did with music. If we don't evolve our technology, our game design and our revenue model, then we risk obsolescence, and we just can't allow that to happen to EVE or to our community. 

Incarna 

For the same reasons, Incarna—the real one with actual meaningful gameplay in it— will be a big step towards the future. For an experience that relies so much on emergence and human interaction, it's remarkable that it's taken us this long to actually put a face on it. Once Incarna hits its stride, EVE will be more personal, and thus more accessible to general audiences. Visual self-expression in a virtual setting is a core psychological component of gaming; most people need to see their avatars, or something vaguely humanoid, or else they don’t connect with the game. We were behind the curve and it needs to be addressed for the sake of EVE's longevity. We have the technology. Now we need time to add the content that will bring more meaning to the gameplay—again, without disrupting the space combat simulator that many of you are, or at least were, very much in love with—and without delaying crucial improvements that this core experience desperately needs. 

A Humbler, Stronger CCP 

I'm sharing these revelations with you now because it's taken this long to transform them into action. From all this self-reflection, a genesis of renewal has taken root, a personal and professional commitment to restore the partnership of trust upon which our success depends, and a plan that sets the foundation for us to sensibly guide EVE to her fullest potential.  In the coming days and weeks, the details of this plan and what it means for you will be unveiled. Part of what led us down this path is the fact we have not communicated well. This blog, and those that will follow, will hopefully demonstrate our conviction to transparency.   

Good things are coming. They always do when you learn from your mistakes. In 2007, we faced a similar crisis of confidence, and it resulted in the creation of the CSM. We're a better company because of it. In the last months, we've taken a hard look at everything, including my leadership. What I can say for now is that we've taken action to ensure these mistakes are never repeated. We have reexamined our processes, hired experienced industry professionals for key leadership positions, reassessed our priorities, moved personnel around and, above all else, recognized our limitations. 

For me, the most frustrating aspect of this is that after all this time, as far as EVE has come and in spite of everything that's happened, I fervently believe with all my heart that we've not even scratched the surface of EVE's potential. My personal failing is not reconciling that passion with pragmatism. We've been trying to expand the EVE universe in several directions at once, and I need to do a better job of pursuing that vision without diluting or marginalizing the things that are great—or could be great—about the game right now. Nullsec space needs to be fixed. Factional warfare needs to be fixed. The game needs new ships. We need to do a better job of nurturing our new players and making EVE the intriguing, boundless universe it has the potential to be. 

We really do have something that no one else has. EVE is still unique in the real and virtual world. This is our vision for her, and we want so badly to take you there. But getting there is not an entitlement. It will take hard work, open communication and, above all else, collaboration with you. The greatest lesson for me is the realization that EVE belongs to you, and we at CCP are just the hosts of your experience. When we channel our passion for EVE constructively, we can make this vision a reality together. 

But enough talk from me. We all know that much quoted phrase, "It's not what you say, it's what you do," that will make the difference here. From now on, CCP will focus on doing what we say and saying what we do. That is the path to restoring trust and moving forward. 

Regards, 

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO 

CCP Hellmar  

P.S.Please comment on our forums or on Twitter @HilmarVeigar

Aliens: Colonial Marines E3 presentation

Looks pretty tense.

Woody Allen on "the Darkness"

Call of Complacency

The man's name is Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, and he wrote this article, entitled: "How to make Call of Duty worth your respect." This sentence sums it up nicely:

"If you [Bobby Kotick] aren't prepared to take a few creative risks, with all your millions on billions, who the hell will?"

I certainly agree with him, but I'm looking forward to what I expect to be the title of a follow-up post: "Why CoD Elite is such a clusterf*ck." 

Creative complacency is its own punishment, but there are worse things on the horizon.

To know them is to love them

DOTA isn't my cup of tea, but Valve's blog posts are often worth reading even if you don't give a sh*t about the particular game:

Our original plan was to spend the next year or so in beta, adding new features and slowly growing the number of heroes until we reached a level of parity with Dota 1, at which point we'd release Dota 2 to the world. But the feedback we're seeing everywhere is that people just want to play it, even though there's still a ton of heroes yet to be implemented. We've also seen that the folks who are already in the beta are chomping at the bit to show everyone else some of the fun games they've had. So we decided our original plan was dumb.

SOURCE

ROHOS: a question of FOV

The gates to Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad have been thrown wide. That means you can download it from Steam right now, people. Many players reported that the beta performed much better after the most recent (September 8) patch, so we can hope that the full game will be in fair working order this evening. 

Do note, however, that Tripwire has rolled-back support for horizontal fields of view ("hFOV") other than 75 degrees for the release build. That does not mean you won't be able to set your own hFOV, but it does mean you might have problems if you choose to tinker with that particular setting.  Note also that the 75 hFOV applies only to 4:3 aspect ratio monitors.  On a 16:9 setup, the view angle equates to somewhere between 85 and 91. Eyefinity users should be able to get 120 degrees or better.

Tripwire's Ramm-Jaeger explained the decision on the dev's official forums:

I'll reiterate and expand on what Yoshiro said. The ability to adjust the FOV between 70-90, as well as the ability to set different FOV zoom for ironsights were features that were added very late in the dev. Mostly I did it as a personal favor to Zetsumei, and I stayed late one nite and worked til almost 2 in the morning one evening to get those features added into the game (unplanned and unscheduled features). Both of the features ended up causing a lot of bugs. We spent a LOT of time trying to fix the bugs (too much time to be honest) and decided to pull official support for these last minute features.  

The game was developed for 5 years with a default FOV of 70 (on a 4:3 monitor, which is actually 80+ FOV on a widescreen monitor, which is pretty close to the FOV of Ostfront). After testing with 90 we discovered it caused a lot MORE clipping issues (yes there are a few remaining clipping issues at 70 degrees, but they are FAR worse at 90). They were bad enough we felt we couldn't officially support them for shipping, and there wasn't time to fix bugs in an unplanned feature. The ability to set an FOV up to 90 will likely return post release after we fix the clipping issues with it. It will also include an "are you sure you want to do this, you may get bad performance" warning when you set your FOV that high.  

Regarding the weapon zoom settings, those don't have any exploitative benefits, but they also don't work 100%. So we took them out of the settings menu, but left the functionality in game. So those of you that still want to use them, feel free to set them up in your ini, they will still work. But because of the issues with them, we can't officially support them right now. And as this was an unplanned feature, we didn't have time to fix ALL of the bugs with them. Essentially, if your monitor is set to certain resolutions (5:4 for example) it could still cause your aim to get off. Now those of you that are willing to take the risk, feel free to edit the inis. In the future we'll likely fix the remaining bugs with the system, and add the settings back to the menu.  

In summary, these were last minute features that I BUSTED MY REAR to try and get it. They just didn't quite make the cut for tommorow, but will be back in the future.

Enjoy.

The cascade continues

Ed. note: this post is a follow-up to "The Space Barbie Failure Cascade," published on this blog on June 25.

Not three months ago, the looming specter of "pay-to-win" mechanics provoked a player riot in Eve Online. The Council of Stellar Management (CSM) flew to CCP's headquarters in Iceland, ultimately receiving assurances from the developer that so-called "gold ammo" would never find its way into the MMO. The most visible result of the conference was this video, which CCP apparently hoped would bring an end to the Incarna scandal.

Of course, it didn't. Eve's player base continues to shrink, and it seems Incarna has the dubious distinction of being the first Eve expansion to fail to increase the game's "Peak Concurrent Users" even temporarily.

Now begins the anti-CCP public relations blitz over the developer's neglect of its flagship game. It started in earnest with a long diatribe* by Alexander Gianturco (a.k.a. "The Mittani") on Kugutsumen.com, and continues with this Eurogamer interview with the same. Gianturco is the Chairman of the CSM, and a leader of Goonswarm, arguably the most powerful alliance in Eve. Love him or hate him, the man has real influence.

* Readers interested only in the subject matter of this post may want to skip to the section entitled "The CSM, PCUs and FiS Neglect" (FiS = Flying in Space).

A couple of choice quotes from the diatribe:

In other areas, particularly upper management, the company seems hell-bent on running Eve Online into the ground to try to make a reality out of the foolish business decisions they made during the Icelandic banking bubble. In 2006 they acquired White Wolf and promised to develop a World of Darkness MMO; similarly, they committed to developing a FPS that will somehow link to EVE out of Shanghai. Then the bubble popped, and everyone began to ask tough questions about the notorious overconfidence of Icelandic males. One of these projects at a time seems reasonable; developing both of them simultaneously is 'Fearless' and 'Innovative' using Hilmar's favorite buzzwords. Elsewhere we call it groupthink-fueled folly [...] 

What we see here is the impact of the neglect of what CCP now calls "Flying in Space", what you and I call "Eve Online". Usually after an expansion there is a surge of players who join the game; these create peaks and valleys in PCU (Peak Concurrent User) numbers as people kick the tires on the new content and then either stick around or leave. Incarna, which has taken a tremendous amount of development and marketing resources from FiS, essentially had no impact.  

Read that again. No impact. Millions of dollars and months of development, into a toilet. Meanwhile we suffer a backhanded Sanctum nerf and have had no new FiS content besides Incursions since the introduction of Wormholes.

In the Eurogamer interview, Gianturco says his views are "100 per cent representative of the Council members."

Incarna still isn't finished, and the CSM thinks that and the general absence of new content in Eve is due to declining resource allocation in favor of Dust and World of Darkness. That's a tough pill to swallow when you're a player forking over a monthly subscription fee.

Eve Online's idiosyncrasies don't end at its emergent gameplay and unitary economy. It has given birth to an omnipresent and somewhat peculiar politics as well. CCP has never been able to control the latter, and I'm betting that their "media strategy" is going to be humbled before that of the CSM.

It will be fun to watch.

Dead Island: early reviews

Ed. note: PC reviews for Dead Island are hard to come by. All the words that follow are about the console versions. The game is due for release tomorrow (June 6).

Start with Dan Whitehead's review on Eurogamer. Of all the reviews in this post, his is the most informative.  The conclusion:

I didn't encounter anything game-breaking in the 26 and a bit hours it took to complete the story solo, or during my forays into co-op play, but it would still be all too tempting to fill this review with complaints about the flaky game engine, the weird floating objects and distracting animation spasms, and annoying glitches like inactive quest points, inconsistent navigation markers and the general air of a scrappy half-finished game. All that stuff is in here, and can easily dominate the experience. 

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the experience though. Dead Island is a deeply flawed game, but it's also clearly a low-budget game and one that has interesting ideas, often under-served by the bargain-basement code. Finding the diamonds in the rough demands a lot of patience, and enough investment in the base joys of zombie slaughter to tolerate the laundry list of flaws. 

I suspect this will be one of those games that will be justifiably mocked by the majority for its many flaws but embraced by a forgiving minority, and passionately defended for its underdog status. Neither response will be entirely wrong. Much like gnawing on human flesh, Dead Island's clumsy horror-action role-player is the definition of an acquired taste.

IGN has the only video review I could find (GameTrailers has one posted, but it wasn't working at press time). IGN's reviews are generally garbage -- and Greg Miller's is no exception -- but you will get to see some of the texture pop-in everyone's talking about. Note that you have to have a YouTube account to watch it, due the age restriction.

GamesTM has a short review with one worthwhile quote:

Aspects of Fallout 3, Resident Evil, Far Cry 2, Borderlands (and many more) litter its design, in ways that would reduce a whack-by-whack review down to a comparative shopping list of features. But even still, it somehow still manages to moan with its own zombified voice, with a system of exploration, quest accumulation and bespoke weapon upgrading that somehow combines well with the simple act of driving over a procession of the undead in a van so heavily decked out in armour that you can barely see out the front window. Furthermore, Techland ramps its character levelling almost perfectly, as feeble weapons give way to heavier duty, home-tooled monstrosities, and the spreading mutation introduces new types of zombie and even more powerful versions of the blade fodder you’ve already encountered. At its best – say, taking three zombies’ heads off with a single swing of the arm – it’s a hugely empowering experience.

Justin McElroy at Joystiq offers a mostly negative review. A few of his caveats deserve consideration:

* The game encourages you to throw weapons, but doing so risks accidentally tossing your prize into an area you can't retrieve it or under a pile of bodies where it's similarly inaccessible. Plus, when you're on the run from too many zombies to handle, throwing a weapon is basically saying goodbye to it forever. Another whole system that should be fun, but isn't. 

* [Y]ou'll almost always use disintegrating melee weapons and the only way to stay ahead of the curve of weapon loss and degradation is by being thorough with your looting. Entering pretty much any room in the game presents you with 10 to 15 areas to search, usually yielding a bit of wire, deodorant (or some other random trinket) or a couple of bucks. When you do find a weapon -- since your inventory will almost always be full -- you'll have to meticulously compare it to every other weapon in your possession. When entering any room is marked by rifling through seven trash cans and comparing the durability stats between two hammers, pacing is ... a problem. Oh, and did I mention the searchables replenish themselves, so you get to frequently repeat this banal dance? Whee! 

* Your occasional AI partners are beyond stupid, thinking nothing of walking into a Molotov cocktail fire, for example. At least twice I had to restart because an AI guide had lost his pathing and couldn't complete the mission. In another instance, my partner wanted us to run from the zombies, only she wasn't running fast enough to outpace them, so we just kept getting eaten.

Jim Sterling has a helpful analysis at Destructoid, which features this study in contradiction:

Ultimately, this is a Techland game that looks just like a Techland game. The glitches, the low quality graphics, and the bizarre gameplay issues that are hampered by broken animation and temperamental collission detection scream of a game that needed at least a few more months of development. To say Dead Island is rough is to be diplomatic. It is, in many ways, a severely broken mess.  

Yet ... it's a fun broken mess, at its most ultimate conclusion. So much about Dead Island doesn't work, but its ambitious concept is so earnestly presented and its loot-heavy character progression so addictive, that it somehow manages to get away with a laundry list of problems that ought not to be forgiven. I hate Dead Island, yet I adore it at the same time. Its combat irritates the shit out of me, yet I created a knife that has a 75% chance of making heads explode with one stab! Co-op is obnoxiously restrictive, yet I can't help jumping into games because taking out zombies in groups is so cool. Its story is inane and pointless, yet I found a bonus enemy in the jungle with a hockey mask -- called Jason -- who had a secret chainsaw in his cabin. Dead Island is the kind of game that mercilessly punches you in the gut with one hand and gives you a slice of birthday cake with the other. 

And of course, there's a day one patch, with an enormous changelog.