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A Matter of Literacy?

May 6th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Gamers, Industry, Me

This will probably be my only post about Grand Theft Auto IV, a game which has been dubbed not only “great”, but “important” by a number of very savvy critics. Seth Schiesel’s review in the New York Times epitomizes the form, being (as usual) well written enough to persuade my wife that GTA4 is something we should try and wide ranging enough to put the game in a convincing societal and design context.

But, like I said, we haven’t tried it. Like many people, I suppose, I’ve never been attracted to the gang warfare/criminal themes of the GTA series but there is a growing sense that I have missed what could be one of the most important game franchises in the history of the industry, both in terms of design creativity and cultural importance.

I guess it comes down to gamer literacy. As a critic I play as many things as I can, but I’m a genre specialist so I’m more concerned with trying marginal Euro-RTSes than I am with, say, marginal Euro-FPSes. Games are expensive, but I try to use my media credentials for good instead of evil; I suppose I could get a lot more stuff for free, but I feel weird about getting games that I *know* I’m not going to review or preview or write about. Now that I write columns, though, I guess that attitude can change. Of course, to catch up and be literate I’d have an even larger backlog to get through than I already do.

I’m a bit of a hypocrite here, too. I’ve often said that no one can meaningfully comment on film comedy unless they have seen Dr. Strangelove, The Producers and Some Like it Hot. I have similar lists for other pastimes.

If GTA4 is important because it does new things with narrative complexity then anyone who thinks about storytelling in gaming is required to play it. If GTA4 is important because of how it uses emergent gameplay, then anyone who thinks about games as more than rulesets is required to play it.

This isn’t an issue of GTA4 being “canon“; it’s too soon for that in any case. But as a professional, I am obligated to play it, right?

So how do I get around my personal ethical issues with the game? I like ethical complexity and gray areas in games, and I’m not one of those blue stockings who thinks that the games are dangerous, but I will confess to being uneasy about car jacking, especially considering where I live – not exactly a low crime area. (I will nuke the French though, without much thought. Strange how our calculus works…). I also hate driving games, because driving is no fun in the real world either.

Of course, it’s easy to say “suck it up” and play, but this is a fifty or seventy hour enterprise we’re talking about. Every hour spent getting up to speed on the latest Important Game is an hour taken away from work that I know I can sell or from that book that I still have to finish.

So I ask you, gentle readers. What are the limits of gaming literacy? Is this an entertainment division that is impossible to stay on top of?

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Interview with Johan Andersson

May 3rd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Crispy Gamer, Interview, Paradox

My interview with Paradox boss Johan Andersson is now up at CG.

I tend to like interviews where you give the subject enough room to just ramble, and Johan was happy to do that on this occasion. He took time to call Hearts of Iron a “buggy piece of shit” and to deem the development of Crusader Kings “cursed”.

Though the interview was conducted just before the release of EU:Rome, I knew that it would take a while for the interview to hit anywhere I might get paid for it, so I thought it best to talk a little bit about Rome, but mostly about how Andersson sees development and the Paradox model.

I wish that EU:R had turned out better than it did, since that would give this interview a little more importance, I think. The finished product is probably the weakest Paradox game since Victoria, mostly because Diplomacy doesn’t count.

(By the way, there are a lot of great interviews at Crispy Gamer. I tend to focus on the strategy related ones, but Paul Semel seemed to have a new one published every day last month.)

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There’s luck and then there’s luck

May 2nd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Me, Stardock

“Luck” is a very useful attribute in Galactic Civilizations II. You never know when you’ll stumble upon something useful in those anomalies or on a planet. I always take Luck for my race, because it’s cheap.

I’m in the middle of a campaign in the new GalCiv 2 expansion, Twilight of the Arnor. I’m in the middle of a war and then the luck kicks in. I uncover a Ranger class ship. For those of you not familiar with the game, these are random discoveries and Ranger outclass pretty much any default small or medium vessel. One can take on and destroy a fleet of six or seven enemy frigates.

Within ten turns, I discover two more. I now have three Ranger ships anchoring my invasion of Altarian space. Nothing can stand against me.

Though my soldiers suck, so those planetary drops will have to wait.

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Nobody Likes You When You’re Strange

May 2nd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Big Huge Games, Crispy Gamer, Design, RTS

RTS evangelist Tom Chick devoted his most recent column to a celebration of Rise of Legend‘s second anniversary. He talked to Big Huge Games head honcho Brian Reynolds about the game – why it worked and why it wasn’t the huge success it deserved to be.

This exchange capsulizes the prevailing thinking on why the game never really took off:

Chick: One of the criticisms of Rise of Legends — one with which I actually don’t agree — is that even though you guys were doing the fantasy genre, you disregarded a lot of the standard tropes, the elves and dwarves and whatnot, so there was no hook for the average player.

Reynolds: I guess I agree with both you and the people making those criticisms. We intentionally avoided the standard tropes, thinking that would make our material fresher. There were a lot of games out there — some of them highly successful — that deliver that fantasy universe, so we thought, “What’s going to differentiate us? We’ll go for something people have heard of, but that won’t be exactly the same things.”

That’s why we went with the Leonardo da Vinci devices with steampunk. That’ll give people a little bit of a hook, but it won’t be just orcs and elves. Clearly, we would have been more accessible to more people if we had just given them the basics. If our goal was just to get fantasy, we could have done that with lots of magic spells and huge dragons and things like that without having gone to the more esoteric steampunk, etc. thing. In that sense, the people who [criticized us] both before and after were somewhat right. So maybe that was a mistake.

Unlike Chick, I think that the setting was central to why the game wasn’t a sales success, but not because it abandoned standard fantasy tropes. I doubt that an elves and sorcerers RTS would have done much better; it didn’t seem to help Kohan. It’s not that RoL had an original bunch of races; it’s that it had 3 original races that had never been seen in the same place before.

As Reynolds says, they led with the most familiar race, the Vinci. A Renaissance steampunk world with muskets and airplanes and robots is a nice bridge between science fiction and history. Players like having entry points to games, and of the three the Vinci were the widest door. Not that the other two weren’t interesting or accessible on their own. Elemental magic armies like the Alin or the Chariot of the Gods inspired Cuotl can find inspiration and analogs in a lot of other games and pop culture artifacts, I suspect.

But then you plop all three races down in the same world and things that already make little sense start to look downright bizarre. The games media spent a lot of time repeating BHG talking points about battles between science and magic, but the game really wasn’t about that. The campaign certainly didn’t embody any large philosophical struggle over the nature of power, and I suspect a lot of players who tried the demo came away from the experience with the feeling that BHG was being strange for the sake of being strange.

As Bruce Shelley noted in my interview with him regarding Age of Empires, people know what an archer is for and that swords are better than clubs. You might not know anything about the Shang Dynasty, but even people who hate history have an idea how things are supposed to work.

And, individually, people would probably get into the Alin or Vinci. Together? That’s a huge risk.

The risk carries over into the multiplayer world. Rise of Legends is great because even though the faction play styles are remarkably distinct, the strategies available to you can be very subtle. You almost always have an option. But since you need to play a while to figure all this stuff out, the people who are really big on climbing online ladders can’t just walk in and know everything that they can do. The unfamiliarity of the setting is compounded by the variety of strategies open to you. Note that Supreme Commander, a game with largely interchangeable sides, is a multiplayer success story; everybody who plays knows what to expect so the battles come down to epic thrashes between giant robots. There is some subtlety at the highest levels of play in SupCom, but most people don’t get there.

None of this should be read as a complaint that RoL should have had conventional units. Rise of Legends is brilliant precisely because it is so original in so many ways. Because it looks so different, you know it’s going to play different. Few RTSes in recent years have so well epitomized the idea that visual cues can be part of the interface as much as tooltips and menus. It’s a visual wonder that requires more than a build order in order for you to succeed.

Message board dwellers, bloggers and editors like to bemoan the lack of originality in games today, hearkening back to some golden age when everything was original (which is mostly because everything was new, but that’s beside the point.) Rise of Legends, I think, demonstrates the perils of originality. Though I wouldn’t have had them make it any other way (I like the Cuotl even if they were rushed as Reynolds says) I’m sure that Microsoft would have rather had Rise of Nations II – it would have been a sure thing – the first sequel to a hit game is usually bigger than the original. The strategy environment is littered with the detritus of original titles that never moved beyond cult hits (Majesty and Kohan are my two favorites on this list.) True originality has always been a tough sell, and with AAA budgets exploding you can forgive publishers for being unwilling to support creativity at the expense of the bottom line.

Sometimes I wonder if gamers really want strange, though. They will accept original game play elements more quickly than they will accept original settings. Every now and then you get something like Katmari Damacy but the best selling games of all time borrow familiar worlds or accepted tropes and make them better. The Sims, World of Warcraft, Halo, Grand Theft Auto…none break the bank on “You’ll never believe this!”.

I’m more than a little guilty of this, of course. I like my historical strategy games. Replaying Gettysburg or the rise of Russia or the conquest of India gets me more excited than leading space grunts against alien invaders. But the gaming world would be a much poorer place if people like Brian Reynolds didn’t dare to show me things I’d never even imagined.

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Developers On Notice

May 1st, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Industry

There are 26 letters in the alphabet and ten numerals. So can you please stop using Os and zeroes in your registration codes? Or at least make it clear to me which is which? Use a font that puts a strike mark through the zero or makes the letter O really fat.

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No King But Caesar – An Epilogue

April 30th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Ancients, Design, Feature:Anc

I wish I had time to dwell on all the dud Roman themed games that have passed in front of me. The half finished Pax Romana and Great Invasions, the laughable Legions, the boring Hannibal: Master of the Beast, Haemimont’s Roman city builders, Haemimont’s RTSes. Most of these games aren’t very interesting as reflections on or of the Roman world and their failings are the failings of every bad game. Buggy, poorly paced, duller than dirt…. I’ve written about some of them elsewhere. Of those duds, only Pax Romana comes close to having a good idea (its political system) and not even EU:Rome bothered to copy it.

Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I worked through the “significant” titles.

1. BC beats AD: My friend and colleague Brett Todd is an “empire guy”. He’s really into the history of the mid and late empire, the story of keeping a major enterprise going and the constant wars over who should run it. I’m a “republic guy”. For me it’s all about the expansion and the politics and the crises of winning the world while maintaining a regime based on power sharing. Game designers agree with me. Caesar is more popular than Vespasian, Hannibal more popular than Zenobia, Spartacus more compelling than Attila. This is largely because building is more fun than holding your own. So setting a game in a time frame where things keep growing gives you a better narrative to work with. Annals of Rome gives you both the rise and fall. Rome: Total War had an Imperial expansion pack. But for the most part, we want to see the city on the Tiber be the Little Village That Could.

2. Spectacle Trumps History: This shouldn’t be a surprise. Gladiators and rampaging elephants and exploding catapult shells look great on screen, so you might as well use them to sell. These are video games, so visuals matter. But I think the problem with this is that even though spectacle can be fun, it is not inherently fun. I would have traded fireballing onagers in Rome: Total War for a better way to control squalor than mass crucifixion. I would have traded chariot races in Centurion for a better diplomatic model. I would have given up the funny voices in Caesar III for less emphasis on puzzle maps. But remember that…

3. History is not gameplay: You can’t just add history and stir to make a good game, and sometimes the best games fly boldly in the face of history. Rome: Total War, Age of Empires, and Praetorians are all very good and all raise the hackles of those pedants that insist that realism is always more fun. Yes, Annals of Rome and the Great Battles series embraced history completely. The former’s legacy is more conceptual, however and the latter was the first and last we’d see of GMT in electronic gaming.

4. Rome beats Greece: I couldn’t do a Ten Significant Greek Games, at least not without repeating two or three of the games already on this list. Rome holds our imagination in large part because of the spectacle. Red robed legions marching. Gladiators killing each other. Marble temples and fights for the purple. And it’s not simply because Rome “won”, it’s because our popular culture, from Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur to the present, has used Rome as a proxy for our own interests and worries. The decadent Rome of mid-century sword and sandal movies, redeemed by Christianity or slave rebellion. The imperial overstretch of Rome as a warning to contemporary America. The stoic Roman as the model of masculinity and duty. Greece may have laid the foundation of Western Civilization, but for game designers it is the imagined Rome that they rely on for instant recognition. Plus, in most of these games, your average Roman general could sleep through a battle with a Macedonian army. Nerf Metellus.

5. Swords Beats Plowshares: None of the strategy games has a good diplomatic model. The ancient Roman world is seen as one of continual war or planning for war. You could call it the William Harris model if you were confident that anyone who made these games had read the book. This is, to be fair, a problem with many strategy games; peace is what you do while you decide whom to kill next. But the focus on legions and triremes obscures many of the reasons for war in the ancient world and how important (if individualized) negotiations were.

So where does the recently released Europa Universalis: Rome fit on this list? It’s not a top ten list (though I did one of those recently) and even if it were, I’m not sure EU:R would make it. Rome is clearly the star of Paradox’s efforts (it’s big, rich and unstoppable unless the AI is in command), but the Roman world is not. For a developer so keen on approximating history there are no pirates, minimal class conflict, minor differences between how you manage a Republic and an Oriental Despotism. Barbarians are constantly on the move and never settle on their own. Diplomacy is always conducted at sword point and you need total victory to get a minor peace. There are friends and rivals but no easy way to track how they stack up against each other. Historically, religion should not be the big deal that it is made out to be.

The game issues are different from the historical ones. The AI is too weak at war and too hardass in peace negotiations. The hundreds of characters means hundreds of character events, too many to follow, and there are no shortcuts from the event to the character profile. Only a couple of the omens are even worthwhile using, and are too chancy for anyone but the Greeks early on.

But otherwise it fits well in this list, primarily because it has drawn on many of them. Why does Paradox insist on including a “city view” that no one uses? Because people are used to being able to see their cities grow. Why does it stop in 27 BC? Because that’s when Octavian assumed the title Augustus, marking the traditional beginning of the Roman Empire. Diplomacy is so ill thought of that you can just execute ambassadors – historically a very bad action, even in the ancient world.

So what do I want to see in the Rome games of the future?

1. Remake Encyclopedia of War: Ancient Battles, with lots of different armies and a better editor.
2. An AI good enough to make Republic of Rome viable, or at least make a good MP client.
3. A good game that tells the story of Roman expansion from the point of view of the conquered. Maybe a SimCity type thing where you need to keep the proconsul or prefect happy by pacifying your people. You can call it Herod.

Feel free to fill the comments box.

I hope you enjoyed this series. If you missed it, here’s a link to beginning.

I may do another one along a different line in the future. With the summer release schedule starting up, I should have more regular opinions on games to report, so hopefully this sort of repetitive stuff won’t be necessary.

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