The First Worthwhile Move Game

When the PS3 released, one of the biggest problems were that there were so few games to take advantage of all that power.  It’s a stigma that followed the PS3 all the way into 2009, even in press reporting, even when the PS3 had more games and better exclusives than the Xbox.  You’d think that Sony learned a lesson from that: having hardware without games leads to frustration, and needs to stop.  With that lesson, we might have expected to see Sony release the Move controller with some truly good games.  Unfortunately, Sony continues to drop the ball with its customers.  In the many months since the Move controller has been out, we have seen NO interesting games!  Sports Champions, which seemed to get good reviews, is nothing more than a longish tech demo.

Well, the first good game for the Move is out — and it’s a Wii game!  I got Dead Space: Extraction for free with the PS3 edition of Dead Space 2.  And boy, it’s fun.  It’s always exciting to have a story-driven game that does something different.  And the Move controls here work really well.

With Killzone 3 coming with Move controls, it seems some exciting times are ahead.  But apart from shooters, everybody is asking for a Move Star Wars game.  What’s truly astounding is why Sony didn’t talk to LucasArts about this in time to get a good game around the time the Move was released.  Does Sony simply not want its platform to do well?  There simply seems to be a lack of due diligence at Sony this generation.

The Characteristics of BioWare RPGs

In December ’09, I uploaded this post detailing what I wanted from an RPG.  At that point, I hadn’t played or read much about Dragon Age: Origins.  Indeed, it had just released.  I bought DA:O sometime in 2010, and have started to play.  As I played, I realized that BioWare gets what I want from an RPG.  No grind, great story, and various other things I demanded in that post all made into DA:O.  It would’ve been like my dream game come true.

But.

There’s a but.  DA:O is not my dream game come true — calling it a nightmare would be going too far, but it’s far from pleasant.  Although DA:O solved many of the major problems I had with RPGs, it introduced so many problems that I consider it nearly unplayable.  In no particular order, these issues are:

1. Muddy graphics.  You can actually make your character look good in DA:O, unlike in say ME2.  But the graphics are so fugly one wonders what this game is doing on current generation consoles.  Everything about the graphics screams low production values — almost as if the devs didn’t even care what the game looked like.
2. Framerate hitches.  During fights, the framerate hitches kill you much more often than your enemies.  This is especially problematic since you often have 10 enemies or so, and can take 5 or more attacks in a second during fights.  The game freezing for half of that time often means you’re already dead by the time it unfreezes.
3. Roll-of-dice fights.  The same fight is sometimes impossible and sometimes trivial based on what your enemies chose to do.  I think this is because the actions of your enemies are randomized; if they happen to act in concert, or if they happen to score a massive critical hit when you’ve got half your health (and wouldn’t normally die), you’re just out of luck.  In long fights this can play a major role.  It makes for good realism, but needs to be balanced better.
4. Poor checkpointing.  I’m not sure what they can do to make things better, but I’d rather not have to repeat the tedious treasure collecting I did.  You’re supposed to save often, but humans are fallible.  They should include a time-based criterion — checkpoint every 5 min, for example — in addition to event or location based checkpointing.
5. Fantastically long load-times.  I’m pretty sure more than 30% of play time is spent staring at load screens.  At particularly tough fights (where you die quickly), the load time can be up to 10 times as long as the fight time.  Maybe more.  Even traveling from one short section to another seems to subject you to these load times.  I accept it is much more difficult to do pre-loading in RPGs than in linear shooters, but no load time should be this long.  Even saving freezes the game for quite a while.
6. Poor interface design.  The menus in this game seem designed to make you struggle to do common tasks instead of make it easier.  A common menu design principle is to minimize the number of button presses for common tasks — DA:O does not care about this.
7. Waste time walking.  You often have to spend huge amounts of time walking through area after area, sometimes enduring load screens along the way, just to get from place A to place B, both of which you’ve visited before.  This is true even if these areas are on the map.  Once you’ve visited a place, the tedium of walking to it should be eliminated.  Long walks in ugly graphically deficient environs are no fun.  Make movement fast and efficient!!
8. Minor annoyances.  There are too many to be listed in separate categories — for example, completely pointless rooms are a personal peeve of mine.

I had all of these pegged as BioWare hallmarks.  But I’ve just started playing Mass Effect 2 (on the PS3, of course), and it seems many of these problems simply don’t exist in ME2.  The people are not ugly, but I can’t get female Shepard to actually look good.  But they’ve fixed almost every one of the problems.  The menu and interface design is especially worth mentioning — this game gives you the feeling that the button you want to press is immediately available whenever you need it!  The game still has roll-of-dice fights to some extent, but these seem to be better balanced with no simultaneous massive damage hits from multiple enemies.  The only time you waste time walking is within the ship.  Load times are not horrendous, and more importantly there are fewer of them.  Saving is quick, done entirely in the background, and doesn’t interfere with gameplay at all.

Checkpointing can occasionally be iffy. And I’ve read online that there are a great many framerate issues, though I’m yet to come across one in over 10 hours of gameplay.

And most amazingly, BioWare managed to make an Unreal Engine game look good.  Every other UE game I’ve played so far, without exception, has an unpleasant wet plastic visual aspect to it.  Bioshock and Batman: Arkham Asylum were, in my opinion, ugly games — though you could say their visuals were technically very proficient.  ME2 changes that for the first time.  (But make no mistake:  ME2 is good looking and has great visual design, but it isn’t even in the same ballpark as Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, or even the first Uncharted in terms of sheer graphical prowess.)

Here’s hoping the DA:O2 team learnt something from the ME2 team before working on their new game!

Darksiders Tiamat Rant

I’m trying to beat the Tiamat boss in Darksiders, and I just have to rant.

This boss is ridiculously hard to beat, but for all the wrong reasons.

1. The biggest cause of your death is the poor camera!  The camera will automatically center itself so that War is visible, but Tiamat is not.  Thus, you cannot see whether and when Tiamat is getting ready to attack you!  Often, you can’t see where Tiamat is!  You can adjust the camera of course, but throughout this fight you’re fighting both Tiamat and the badly programmed camera.
2. The second biggest cause of your death is the fact that the sticky bombs are nearly invisible.  They do not have a colour or glow that distinguishes them from the rest of Tiamat’s body.  It’s often impossible to tell whether the bomb even stuck to Tiamat!   Besides this, Tiamat’s other body parts can obscure bombs that are stuck to Tiamat.  Thus, even if you have several bombs on Tiamat, the lock-on control will not see them and will not lock onto them!  In any case, Darksiders’s enemy selection mechanism doesn’t work very well — sometimes it selects a nearby bomb rather than a flame even if the reticule is directly on the flame.  I’m guessing this is because it draws a line from War to infinity, and the nearby bomb is closer on this line, even though the reticule is centered on the flame.  Whatever the reason, the very few shots at Tiamat you get are even harder to take because of the sheer clumsiness of the controls.
3. The fireballs that Tiamat throws at you are programmed in an entirely unfair way.  I’m not sure what it is, but I seem to take damage even when all I’m doing is watching for them and dashing to avoid them!  Either the game is detecting collision in some non-physical way, or the blast radius of the fireballs is much larger than the fireballs themselves, thus visually tricking you.  As if that weren’t enough, the audio cue is off too.  If you respond to the audio cue, you’ll dash too early and get hit!
4. Finally, that video game programmer insanity — making you sit through a cutscene before you can start a fight — is present, though to a smaller extent.  It seems you can skip most of the cutscene, but the last bit will invariably play before you’re handed control, increasing the aggravation.

As you can tell, I’m really hating this game right now.

Woe is God of War III

This is a rant that I wrote many months ago, after playing God of War III.  I don’t usually buy games at release, but did so with GoW3.  I knew I was taking a big risk, since the body language of the devs in interviews etc. was very under-confident.  Unfortunately, GoW3 failed to deliver.

God of War lost its soul.  The makers of the latest in the series seem to have forgotten what Kratos stood for. The nuances have disappeared, leaving a hollow version.  The story-telling, variety, puzzles and sheer atmosphere have all suffered.

The first problem is that the designers just decided to pack the game as chock-full of brutality and rage as they could.  Previous games had reason to the madness, which made it interesting.  Not this one.

The story is also affected.  Previously, there some reason, however vague, to how you fell into Hades.  Here you blunder into one place, there’s maybe 5 seconds of something going on, then you’re blasted into Hades and before you even realize it you’re looking in wonder (supposedly) at things in Hades.  It’s just way too abrupt and it’s no way to tell a story.  And this pervades the whole game.  There’s no rhyme or reason for anything.  The designers wanted to insert a fight.  How do they do it?  They just inserted a disembodied voice that pronounces, “to proceed you must now fight” and then the fight begins.  It’s literally that bad.  The wonderful storytelling of the first two parts is gone.

The dialogue is much worse this time around.  It’s surprising because the dialogue in the first two games was fantastic.  This is especially true of the biblical-style dialogue delivered by disembodied voices, gods or titans.  Both the words and the delivery are real wannabe stuff, meant to be imposing but just sounding silly.

The graphics are eye-popping, but also uneven.  Even if textures are high res, it seems what the eye really notices is differences in texture quality, not  normatively defined levels of texture quality.  GoW3 makes a cardinal mistake here:  they sometimes put low-res and super hi-res textures right next to each other!  So, although in some areas you can see some incredibly detailed texture+dynamic lighting combination, there are others where you’re taken aback at the lo-res texture sitting right next to the beautifully hi-res one.  One example of such a low-res texture is the initial fight on Gaia, where the grass texture below Kratos’ feet is almost PS2 quality.

The animation.  Most modern games include simple but effective touches, like when a character runs up against a wall, their legs stop moving and they wait until they can move again.  Not so with Kratos: he’ll stand and keep running in place.  Not that this matters much by itself, but it’s one of a series of touches that you expect from a next-gen title.  It just gives a feeling of a general lack of next-gen polish.  There are other such things.  The insistence on finish an animation before allowing the player to control Kratos might be a combat design choice, but it feels outdated.  This isn’t how we usually play this generation.  Similarly, when you press R1 to read a message of some sort, the game pauses for about 3-5 seconds before you get a X prompt that lets you move on.  This might not seem very long, but sometimes it happens right before a tough fight.  It can get pretty aggravating to wait that long every single time you restart the fight.

One of the things that gave the game its characteristic atmosphere in the first two installments was a mediterranean feel.  Hades in the first two installments was unique, sui generis.  Here it’s got Gothic elements.  To me, this makes it worse and detracts from what it should be.  Darksiders is Gothic.  Devil May Cry is Gothic.  God of War is not Gothic.

In the previous GoW games, you were part of something bigger a huge proportion of the time spent in the game.  You were running around inside a gigantic environmental puzzle.  In GoW2, for example, it was the Colossus in the beginning.  In GoW1, it was Pandora’s Temple.  Fighting, climbing, running down corridors and scaffolding and marbled halls, you always knew that you were part of something really big.  You were trying to solve something.  This element is also gone from GoW3.  Just now, I swam underwater for no reason.  I jumped into the water.  Dived, swam, climbed out, then dived into the next segment and swam some more, opened an underwater gate, swam some more.  I did all of this without any reason for doing so.  There was no immediate puzzle, but it was also not part of a bigger puzzle.  I was required to jump through a few trivially easy, pointless hoops just for the sake of it.  Nothing in previous games was pointless.  It degrades the game.

What about intricacy of design?  Think of the circles of Pandora’s Temple.  Think of the Strings of Fate level.  The spinning crankshafts in Hades.  Each of these was finished with a certain level of innovation and creativity that is simply lacking in GoW3.

And where are the puzzles?  1 & 2 had wonderful level-sized puzzles, and puzzles within puzzles, like a fractal in a game.  GoW 3 has nothing.

Finally, let’s get to the fighting itself.  I played GoW1 & 2 years ago, but I can still vividly remember many of the set-piece fights in those games.  Each fight had something unique to it, not just in gameplay but also in the ambience, backstory and the characters in the fight.  The fights in GoW3 were bigger, more graphically stunning.  But they were simply not as memorable.  The fight against Poseidon, for example, was actually quite boring.  It can’t hold a candle to any of the bosses in 1 & 2.

I think Sony Santa Monica struggled so much to make this game a graphical masterpiece that every other aspect suffered.

Why the PS3 Move is exciting

There’s a small bit of excitement about the PS3 Move motion controller.  People say it’s not as interesting as Microsoft’s Natal, but game devs and users seem excited about its precision.  It will be interesting to see all the ways in which Move gets used in games.  The hack and slash genre should see some benefits, for sure.

But I think it’s also exciting for a reason that one of the Sony execs (I forget which) mentioned: consoles have thus far lacked pointer functionality.  There are games that are made for the PC, like a variety of strategy games, that are never made for consoles mainly because PCs have an accurate mouse pointer, and consoles lack such a pointer.  I hope the Move means some great pointer based strategy games can be released for the PS3.

I for one would love to play Age of Empires on the PS3 — a pipe dream, I know, because Age of Empires is a Microsoft product.  However, in spite of my dislike for Microsoft these days, I think Age of Empires is one of the greatest games ever made.   So hopefully, we will see a lot of strategy games that were not previously possible being made for the PS3!

Poor Bioshock 2 sales

Here’s an interesting article from PC World magazine:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191385/bioshock_2_cleans_up_xbox_360_overtakes_wii_in_february_game_sales.html

There’s the usual misleading headline (the PS3 actually outsold the 360 worldwide in Feb and has been for several months running; the article only focused on the US but neglected to mention that in the headline).  But the interesting thing about this article is that Bioshock 2 X360 sales are MUCH higher than Bioshock 2 PS3 sales. Almost 4 times the sales on the X360, compared to the PS3.  What could the reason be?

It’s my feeling that people are buying Bioshock 2 based on how much they loved the original Bioshock.  If there are a lot of Bioshock fans on a console, Bioshock 2 will sell well too.  This is a common pattern in videogames; franchise fans tend to be more numerous on one console or another: RE5, FFXIII are other examples.

When it was first released on the X360, there was a general paucity of quality games for this generation of consoles.  Also, the PS3 had not yet hit its stride with even the first Uncharted yet to be released.  So in comparison to everything else that was available at that time, Bioshock was a fantastic game.  The fact that it was exclusive made it all the more attractive to X360 owners.  (This is a standard feature of games on any console this generation.)  Thus began a love story between X360 fans and the Bioshock series.

Fast forward to late 2008, more than a year later, when Bioshock was released for the PS3.  By then, several real high-quality games had been released into the market, and PS3 exclusives like Uncharted had set the bar for both storytelling and production values really, really high.  When Bioshock was released for the PS3, it was a middling-good game.  Fun, but not exceptional.  The graphics were quite poor relatively.  Many better games were available.  So the PS3 crowd didn’t fawn over it or get starry-eyed about it.  So, by releasing it much later on the PS3, studio 2K shot themselves in the foot.  They could have had a second fanbase by releasing it simultaneously on the PS3, but they missed the train and there are few PS3 fans.

There are other reasons too.  Coming off a year-long game famine in 2009, where X360 fans had far fewer good games to play than PS3 fans, the pent-up hunger might be feeding sales to some extent.  2010 has had a good start for X360 owners, with ME2.  OTOH, PS3 owners had a glut of great games in 2009, and are already experiencing another similar flood in 2010.  In March, for example, PS3 owners have 3 huge games: Heavy Rain, FFXIII and GoW 3.  With limited amounts of money in each gamer’s hand, this means we should expect sales for each game to be lower on the PS3 due to all the within-console competition.

Having said all that, it is unfortunate that Bioshock 2 had lower sales.  This may turn out to be a problem: hopefully 2K don’t get the feeling it’s not worthwhile developing on the PS3!

The Real Apocalyps3

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Brutus to Cassius, Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224

A.k.a, strike with the iron is hot, when the moment is right etc. Why is there a dearth of PS3s in this, the biggest month in Sony gaming history? Maybe the biggest month in gaming history — with Heavy Rain, FFXIII and GoW III? Sony are trying their best to lose this race!

Unreal is Visually Unsatisfactory

I’ve played two games so far that use the Unreal engine: Bioshock and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

When Bioshock was released, it received rave reviews for its graphics — usually, this really meant art style.  I think the graphics were unique that early in the current 7th console generation, but compared to the graphics and art style of current games, Bioshock is not good at all.  Batman has been popular this year; I’ve only played it for about an hour, so I don’t have strong impressions about the game itself.  Its art style is quite different from that of Bioshock and seems ok, but very undistinguished.

However, there’s something about the two games that makes them look extremely similar.  It could be a characteristic look that wet surfaces have.  To me, both these games have a slightly unpleasant visual aspect.  I look at the graphics and grimace.  The surfaces, the rendering doesn’t impress me; it is extremely mediocre.  Objects somehow don’t seem to stand out from the general background.  The rendering seems heavy-handed somehow, like they used shadows too heavily or tried too hard to bump-map everything.

It’s hard to tell without playing more Unreal games, but I think it is the engine and not the games that put me off.

The PS3-X360 Graphical Power Debate?

PS3 and X360 fans and publicity spin doctors have been at each other’s throats about which is more “powerful” graphically.  It’s one of the biggest debates in gaming today, up there with “PSN vs. XBL”, “does the Wii compete with the PS3 and X360″ and such.

The Question

Part of the problem in blog comment and online forum shouting matches is they don’t usually specify what they are arguing about.  A whole variety of questions are addressed.  Two people will argue against each other, but their posts will be about slightly different issues.  Here are some examples of different questions:

1. Is it cheaper to develop a game with the graphical quality of a Halo game on the PS3 or the X360, assuming that it is developed for only one console?
2. Is it cheaper to develop a game with the graphical quality of a Halo game on the PS3 or the X360, assuming that it will be a multiplatform game?
3. Is it possible to develop a game of Uncharted 2 graphics quality on the X360?  Which development would be cheaper?

These questions may all have different answers, some favouring the PS3 and others favouring the X360.

It’s important to clarify that I’m only considering graphical horsepower, not art direction.  A game might “look good” to someone.  This depends on two things: graphical power and art direction.  Art direction is the subjective component.  Graphical power corresponds to things like anti-aliasing and the number of polygons rendered, light sources and polygon detail.  Appreciation of graphical power is also partly subjective.  Different people prefer different types of anti-aliasing, for instance.  However, it is a lot more objective than art direction.  So I’ll focus on graphical horsepower — that is what I mean when I use the word quality.

The mulitplatform question is particularly muddy.  It’s unclear even what the question means.  Suppose you developed a multiplat game with development primarily on the X360, then ported to the PS3 (but made absolutely sure the quality was the same).  How to specify how much money was spent on each console?  You can’t count the original development cost towards the X360 and the porting cost towards the PS3, since that would be unfair to the X360. On the other hand, it is well known that it is hard to make a port with the same quality as the original so the cost of the PS3 is unfairly inflated as well.  (The same problems crop up if you flip the roles of the PS3 and the X360.)

Suppose for now we focus on non-cross-platform games.  This may be unfair to the X360, looking only at questions which are favourable to the PS3, but the question is hard to define.  Hopefully I’ll have a way to reasonably ask the multiplat question after some thought.

Focusing only on single-platform development, any question comparing the two consoles boils down to the following:

Is it more expensive to develop a certain quality of game for the PS3 or the X360?

It is important to note that the above question is not a single question.  It is a series of questions depending on the quality of game you are interested in.  For example, you might ask the question for a game of the quality of Uncharted 2, or a game of the quality of Halo 3.  The answers might be different.  It might be impossible or prohibitively expensive to create a game like Uncharted 2 on the X360.  On the other hand, it might be cheaper to create a game of the quality of Halo 3 on the X360.

Evidence

So far all I’ve done is define the question.  This is a very important step; you have to be clear about what you are asking first.  Now let’s talk about evidence.  For a fixed game quality (e.g. U2, Killzone 2, Gears 2 or Halo 3 quality) how do we assess the evidence that X360 or PS3 is cheaper to develop for?  Here is one rule.  If

1. the quality of game A on the PS3 is better than the quality of game B on the X360 and
2. there are games on the PS3 as high quality or better than game A
3. there are no games on the X360 higher quality than game B

then this constitutes evidence that at quality level A, the PS3 is cheaper to develop for.   It isn’t proof.  It’s just one piece of evidence.  If you have tens of games better than A on the PS3 and no games better than B on the X360, then the body of evidence is inching towards proof.  Otherwise it’s just one piece of evidence.

We do have such a situation.  Game A is Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Game B is Gears of War 2.  No game on the X360 has better quality than Gears 2.  Uncharted has better quality than Gears 2.  And there are two games, Killzone 2 and Uncharted 2, that are better than Uncharted on the PS3.  This is evidence that the PS3 has higher graphical capabilities than the X360 at the Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune level.

If, tomorrow, someone makes a game on the X360 that’s higher quality than Uncharted 2.  Then the above piece of evidence would no longer hold (condition 3 would be violated), and we’d be in the reverse situation: there would be evidence of the X360′s superiority at the Uncharted level.  But as it stands today, the PS3 has the advantage there.

When we are talking about games at the Halo 3 quality the question is a lot harder to answer.  We could look at the development cost of a game of similar quality on the PS3 and compare, but it would be hard to agree on one of “similar quality” and development costs depend on many things other than graphical quality.  Evidence of sorts is provided by developers such as those from Valve who feel the PS3 is much more expensive to develop for.  However, there are credibility issues with developers who are firmly in one camp.  Just as we wouldn’t take Naughty Dog’s word for the theory that the PS3 is more powerful, we shouldn’t take Valve’s word for the opposite theory.  So far, I can’t think of a clear way to establish evidence at the Halo 3 quality level.

God of War III

The first two God of War games were so good, so fantastic, that it’s hard for GoW III to live up to that level of hype and expectation.  I haven’t played the GoW III demo, but I’m hopeful that it will look good.  That said, I have some specific worries.  The worries came up after I played the demo for Dante’s Inferno on the PS3 recently.

Dante’s Inferno is a God of War clone.  I don’t mean it is similar or borrows ideas or moves, or that they are similar because they are both hack-n-slash, as some people seem to imply on various discussion boards.  No, Dante’s inferno feels like a re-skinned God of War.  EVERY thing is the SAME, from the moves to the jumps to the types of attacks to the camera behaviour.  I had an eerie feeling I was playing a PS2-era God of War game.  And that’s where my worries began to set in.

Take the camera, for instance.  For a PS2 game it might have been ok to have a fixed uncontrollable camera, but this somehow feels very dated and restrictive on the PS3.  It is too old school with the kind of graphics and scenery I’m expecting to enjoy on the PS3.  It may be that some of the other games, such as Killzone 2 and Uncharted 2, have spoiled me.  But I really want to be able to admire the scenery if I want to, and be able to look in any direction I wish.  Heavenly Sword was a game in the God of War genre (indeed it got a bit of criticism for being a GoW derivative when it was first released) that had beautiful visuals AND a user-controllable camera.  I agree that the camera was used to great cinematic effect in the first two GoW titles.  But it just doesn’t feel right on the PS3.  And Uncharted 2 showed us how you can do both things: the user’s control of the camera can be taken away briefly during specific set-pieces or cinematic moments in the game, while still allowing the user to control the camera.  I REALLY want to be able to look at whatever I want.  Another argument in favour of the camera being game-controlled is that the player is free to spend more time fighting, increasing the amount of time spent involved in the game.  This may be valid, but it’s always possible to implement a “camera spring” that takes over if the user isn’t actively controlling the camera, so the player can do his fighting and once that’s done, enjoy the scenery if he wants to.  This is something I really hope they don’t mess up on.

The gameplay itself is supposed to resemble the older version a lot.  I hope that they change it a little, because keeping it too similar to the originals would feel a little old.  There should be a sense of a refresh, of something vastly better and superior and more comfortable, since we’re now on a next-gen console.  That is not to say they should change it completely — I’d want it to remain a God of War game.  I’d like the changes to be subtle but new and different enough to feel like it’s an update rather than a continuation.

Another gameplay concern I have: I thought God of War mixed it up pretty well.  Uncharted 2 showed us how important it is and how rewarding it can feel if the pace is broken up with a feeling of some well-earned respites breaking up the intensity of the combat.  I hope the GoW folks learned from this and put in a few well-made cooldown points in the game.