CaffeinatedWires

How long should a video game be?  How much should we pay for it?  A few years ago MTV Games Afficionado and Blogger Extraordinaire Stephen Totilo wrote a piece about games pricing in the next generation, regarding the $60 price point and the negative effects that can have on the industry at large - with a number of sound bites from execs all proclaiming that it shouldn’t be a problem.

Cliff Bleszinski, of Epic Games, dissented.  Both Totilo’s article and Bleszinski’s argument are relevant today:

“I would kill to have a [top-quality] game that’s jam-packed with an amazing story and amazing moments and four hours long and costs 20 bucks.” He said it’s possible, if only the industry cut costs by making games shorter and sweeter, but that too many gamers and publishers demand 20-hour games that are filled with the padding of having gamers repeat the same tasks again and again.

Is he right?  Do we need more games coming in at a lower price point but providing just as much bang for the buck?  Certainly amidst a financial crisis such as the one we’re experiencing right now, consumers aren’t rushing out to spend money willy-nilly.  With only a few bucks to go around, gamers facing a $60 price point often must make careful choices about which games to invest in and which to pass by.

Many times this means that only the titles we purchase are the ones with incredible production value, far-reaching advertisement, and a hype-machine set to overdrive.  With financial resources tight, consumers take fewer risks regarding their entertainment.  Speaking personally, if I spend $50-$60 on a game only to find out it sucks, I will be very upset.

So maybe we need cheaper, well-made games: buying three games for $20 is the same as diversifying one’s gaming portfolio.  If one of them is a dud, the other two might well save the whole $60 investment.  And, hopefully, the ultimate dream is having all three games be amazing experiences.  As a result, consumers are more likely to reward developer risk in ways that currently don’t happen very often (I certainly wouldn’t have paid $60 for a “full-length” version of a musical-light show, but $10 means you can count me in).  As a result, everyone benefits.

Of course, some developers might suggest, it’s hard to create a “powerful” game with such limited scope that will have an impact on players.  Four hours?  What on earth kind of story can you tell in only four hours of gameplay?  Poppycock, right?

*cough*

Releasing content in smaller bundles doesn’t mean story has to be cut, either: it just has to become episodic.  Longer tales, such as the ones often found in RPGs, can be told by releasing them over time.  Again, the consumer benefits: if I buy the first episode of Final Fantasy 20 (say), only to realize I hate it, I have saved myself $40 on two episodes that I shouldn’t bother with.  Development studios can focus resources on creating concentrated fits of awesome instead of bogging down time and resources on bloated projects that don’t turn out the way they were originally intended, leaving everyone unhappy.

Is this a model that will work for every game?  Likely not; even so, I can think of ways to translate it to other genres.  RTS games, for example, could ship races as separate packs for purchase - so long as the cost of the core game is reduced in order to provide the best value to the consumer.  Releasing “expansions” at a slightly-reduced price point (only to add one race and a mediocre campaign) is not the best way to do business, no matter how popular the IP you’re working with is.

So maybe the Cliffster is on to something after all: developers, give us cheaper, shorter games that are worth our time, and we might be more likely to give you our money.

Arcane Tinmen, of Denmark, are still attempting to work out the details to revive the too-soon extinguished fires of The Spoils - at least, according to an email I recently received from them.  From what I’ve been able to gather, the fight is still strong … and still completely up in the air.

I’m pulling for a win, but I know how rapidly deals can fall through.  It’s disappointing not to have seen success yet, but at the same time, I’m relieved that any hope yet remains for a card game that died before its time.

I suppose going a month without blogging isn’t really a good way to keep the dream alive, is it?  A true testament to its predecessor, I blame the fantastic Peggle Nights as my primary source of procrastination (and I’m still going to do that review I promised).  I’ve finally finished the challenges and I’m working my way on to the aces before tackling the clears.

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

I also managed to take the time to finish Final Fantasy XII, which is very likely the greatest Final Fantasy experience SquareEnix has produced to this day.  FF7 and FF9 fans, meet me out back.  We’ll rumble old school style.  Bring your posse.  FF10-2 fans, the three of you can be the cheerleaders.  (Really, I have no idea what VGPub was thinking with a 62 rating, other than an attempt to undercut this magnificent game in order to attract attention.)

But I digress.

The thing that actually snapped my streak of failing to blog was an article on Joystiq that appeared to be faux-disgusted as to how “nobody noticed” Talisman got cancelled, as if Capcom did the smart thing by letting the project drop in favor of continuing to work on reviving a ton of old franchises.

Again, I digress.

Didn’t I write about this back in August? I suppose I’m a victim of my own failure to “pimp my blog” as it were, but at least I can feel a sense of accomplishment that even the boys at Joystiq are two months behind me.  Maybe I’ll try to tip somebody next time I unearth exciting news instead of keeping it here for all of six people to read.

I wasn’t expecting it until this Thursday, but a hopeful load of PopCap.com rewarded me with what will likely be the downfall of my productivity for the rest of the day: Peggle Nights!

http://www.popcap.com/games/peggle-nights

I’ll be picking it up and posting thoughts and impressions later.  Less talk, more Peggle.

Gordon Freeman, in the house:

http://www.shacknews.com/screenshots.x?gallery=10698&game_id=

http://blog.reddit.com/2008/09/crowbar-headcrab-and-half-life-strategy.html

Godspeed, Mister Freeman.  The fate of the free world rests squarely on your shoulders.

I’m not sure how it is with other carriers, but I have recently discovered that even an accidental, no-idea-how-it-happened breakage will not move Verizon to replace your phone without insurance… unless you can prove it’s a manufacturer’s defect.  That’s another story.  If not, tough noogies.

I had the inner LCD screen on my phone break randomly, while I was carrying it in my pocket.  The story goes that they will replace broken LCD screen phones for $50 … instead of forcing you to buy it new entirely.  While terribly generous, it still leaves a sting in the mouth.  Yeah, yeah, gripe, gripe, buy the insurance.

By the time you pay the insurance, you’ve paid a considerable portion toward what could have been a new phone.  My last phone survived two years no problem - with lots of wear and tear and riding around in my pocket, which seems to have done in the Chocolate.  I’ve only done a very minor amount of research on the problem, but it also seems as though I’m not the only one.

And yet, I recently met someone who’s had her LG Chocolate for coming up on 9 months now.  So perhaps there’s hope for this phone yet.  I’ll be attempting to replace it soon for the $50 fee at a Verizon store (since the lady I talked to on the phone was absolultely clueless).

I’ve never been a huge fan of CCGs, for one reason or another.  I mean, I could never see the appeal of a game like Magic: the Gathering, for instance.   I’ve never fully understood the rules, I’m not that crazy about the fluff, and it costs more money than I’m willing to spend in order to stay competitive.  I could never really find a game that met all my requirements, so that was that.

And then came “The Spoils”.  This card game revolutionized the way I thought about CCGs, and it brought along an entirely different mindset regarding play styles.  The basic rules, while different from M:tG, were easy enough to follow, and the designers claimed to be constructing the game in such a fashion that would “fix” the things they thought were wrong with other similar CCGs.  Finally, the background and setting was rich; the cards were carefully crafted and steeped in humor - especially geekdom humor.  Just reading a set was about as entertaining as playing a game.  Not only that, but the tournament scene was hot.  This had been heralded to me by my friends as the Next Big Thing in terms of card games.

One demo and I was hooked.  And then, months later, Tenacious Games - the company that produced The Spoils - announced on their forums that they’d run into problems with their investors and the company would no longer be putting out any new sets or holding any more tournaments.  Well, what a bummer.  I played in a small tournament put on by my alma mater’s gaming club, and that was that.  I haven’t thought about The Spoils in months.

And then today, on a lark, I decided to check out the website.  Interestingly, the front page would have the uninformed web surfer believe that the game was still “healthful and dandy” (to hear Mr. Saturn tell it).  Not the case - all the juicy news is broken in the forums.

To cut to the chase: a company from Denmark called “Arcane Tinmen” has been in talks with TG and other involved parties to take over - and revive - The Spoils.  No small undertaking, to be sure, but the word got out sometime in June.  According to forum posts, talks are still in progress, but no one is certain how they will progress.

It’s my ardent hope that Arcane Tinmen will find a way to salvage the game and breathe some life into this otherwise lugubrious tale of a great game that died before its time.

I’ve been an EA Supporter for a while now, but even I can’t find a good excuse for this complete customer service failure.  It seems a young man moved after preordering the Warhammer Collector’s Edition, and now Electronic Arts won’t find a way to ship it to his new location.  Instead, they took the liberty of cancelling his order (which he never even asked them to do).

And since they’re cancelling the “sold-out” imited run Collector’s Edition, he is pretty much screwed unless EA can find a way to salvage this.

Really classy, guys.  EA’s John Riccitiello has been talking a lot about turning EA from a machine that eats dev houses for breakfast into a kinder, gentler, hands-off place you want your developers to live.  Be that as it may, it seems like they’ve got a lot of ground to cover in the customer service department.

XFire recently hosted a chat with Regina Buenaobra, the Guild Wars Community Manager for the English-Speaking world.  It was about as informational as I expected it to be, with as many repeated questions as were asked during the in-game chats Gaile used to hold frequently.  If you’re terribly interested, the link will be made available at the end of the post, but the short version is:

“We have no plans we can tell you about for anything involving the future of Guild Wars 1 or the development of Guild Wars 2.  Oh, and Jeremy Soule is still doing the music.”

Minus the part about Jeremy Soule, that’s what ArenaNet’s mantra has been since early this year.  The only real tidbit of news we’ve recieved was the fact that the GW2 beta was being pushed out of 2008 altogether, contrary to previous announcements.

After watching and listening to the Mythic crew detail the intricacies of their development for over two years now, it’s really hard to keep my mind on a development shop that insists on holding every last one of its cards against its chest.  The only reason, I suspect, we even know about Guild Wars 2 at all is that every ArenaNet fan would have been up in arms when the chapters stopped coming with no explanation as to why.

I’ve also been reading through ArenaNet Developer Josh Petrie’s blog lately; most of his posts are very technical in nature and not very interesting to the layperson (though being a software dev I find them riveting, but that’s beside the point).  He does, however, delve in to a discussion about the developer-player relationship that I think is insightful and right on the money.  He makes the argument that it’s the developer’s job to educate the player, both about a game in question and the industry at large:

Features get cut for lots of reasons, but almost all of those reasons boil down to a cost/benefit ratio that is not in the developer’s favor, or because they sounded cool on paper but when implemented turned out bland or tedious. This is generally a good thing for the overall health of the product — but it isn’t always seen that way by the players. Doing more to educate and inform players about the state of the game as it develops would help alleviate the misconceptions that they commonly have about whether a feature was cut for compelling technical or fun-factor reasons.

Petrie shoots for three, and he scores.  I used to defend the notion that “of course they won’t tell us anything, it’s all about managing expectations.”  But in light of this, I’m not sure I agree with my old stance anymore.  Much in the same way Mythic approached their own content-cutting fiesta, I would rather know why content was cut and what is being done to improve the rest of the game - instead of hearing nothing at all.  No news, in the case of game development, is often not good news at all.  At least, in the eyes of the player.

I don’t expect ArenaNet to change anytime soon, but I’m glad there is at least one advocate on board in the form of the Scientific Ninja.  I’m also excited to hear that Soule is working on the music for Guild Wars 2.  I just wish I knew how much of it he has done by now.  Not that it would mean anything in the slightest.

Link to XFire Chat: http://www.xfire.com/blog/paxchats/313900/

The ever-intriguing Leigh Alexander has a piece up at Kotaku that provides some corollary insight on the notion of games as art, especially where the “Invaders!” piece is concerned.  The essay sheds some light on the earlier post I had made about extremely difficult - or even unwinnable - games.  She writes:

It can be argued that a game that’s impossible to win - that has no achievable objective whatsoever - is not a game at all. Remove the “art” aspect and pretend we’re talking about an image-neutral Space Invaders mod that was designed so that defeat is an inevitability. It defies the logic innate to game design, doesn’t it?

Games need rules and they need an achievable objective. It helps if there are rewards and penalties, and information that helps players learn how to interpret and interact with the game environment. Even if the “rule” is something simple as “player needs to go from point A to point B,” there is a task, a start point, an end point and a result, even if there’s not an end game.

If we extrapolate from this argument, then we can more easily arrive at our conclusion: the more likely it is that a game’s final objective cannot be achieved, the more likely that it isn’t even really a game.  Therefore, developers who attempt to not only include such challenges but also require them are deluding themselves and risk alienating their target audience.  It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it provides a lens with which to view the situation.

At any rate, I find the “games as art” debate to be fascinating; Alexander and Maggie Greene, one of Kotaku’s weekend editors, typically make a point to highlight academic and artistic perspectives on the games we play, and they usually come up with excellent pieces.  The whole article is worth a read if you’re as interested as I am on the topic:

http://kotaku.com/5041184/games-as-art-but-at-what-cost

A question was recently posed to me by a friend: “Is there ever a situation where a game designer should include material in a game that isn’t fun, but still necessary to complete?”  It’s a provocative question: we play games to have fun, right?  So what if the game stops being fun?  Whose fault is it?

A quick reprisal points the finger to the developer; after all, it’s their fault for making something that could have been amazing, but instead has turned out to be no better than running one’s own hand through a meat grinder.  Why couldn’t they have done a better job of designing the game?

Of course, on consideration, this argument is fundamentally flawed: somebody had to have liked that game.  I seriously doubt a developer ever releases something that has been tested and re-tested to prove it puts people to sleep faster than an episode of Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers Paint the Neighborhood.  People put their time into games they find interesting - and, typically, games they would play.  They beta test them and get (hopefully) honest responses. Somebody had to find these games enjoyable at some point.  Therefore, then, the problem truly lies with the gamer, doesn’t it?

After all, if you’re not an FPS fan, playing Halo or Crysis will only serve to incite nerd rage instead of providing an otherwise-enjoyable fragging experience.  Neither of those games were bad; just not for everybody.

So let’s break it down a little: let’s say, for the sake of argument, that games are only played by the people they were designed for.  Only RTS fanatics play Age of Empires, Supreme Commander, and what have you.  In that case, is there ever a case for the developer to include material that isn’t enjoyable - and yet, required?

Maybe a frustratingly long quest that or simply a challenge that seems utterly impossible?  Is there ever justification to do this?  My gut tells me that the right answer is “No.”

Some people love beating the overwhelming odds.  Others feel the sense of accomplishment after killing a thousand of a certain monster in order to unlock whatever secret reward that’s been laid out.  I think it’s great that “extreme challenges” are included in games of every difficulty.

But no matter how ‘hardcore’ the player base is, an “extreme challenge” shouldn’t be required for completion.  If every Final Fantasy had required the destruction of an Ulitima Weapon in order to progress through the story, I’m sure many players would have sworn off the series long ago.  Games are meant to be enjoyable.  That’s why we play them.

We don’t play them to win, necessarily.  That’s not the point.  I’m not saying every game should be *winnable*.  But every game should afford its players the opportunity to be fully enjoyed.  When something comes along that precludes the fullness of what is left to enjoy, it leaves a sour taste, as though we have been tempted and then rebuked.  Nobody wants to continue a game when the reward is no longer considered to be worth the effort.  Sometimes putting 100 hours into a game is worth the effort.

But if a game requires that kind of investment simply to advance further, it probably isn’t.