CGW Editor in Chief Jeff Green finally updated his corporate blog and, like many people, is raving about Company of Heroes. And, like many people, he comments on the difficulty level.

The *only* thing I have an issue with at all, and it’s not really an “issue”, is that it’s actually pretty freakin’ hard at time. I’m playing the campaign on normal, and I am *not* winning every scenario the first time out. I’m definitely having to work for it.

He’s not alone. A lot of people seem to be dropping down to “easy”. I haven’t played it yet – my professional backlog takes priority – but by the sound of it, there will be much gnashing of teeth in my office. I hope I don’t have to throw things.

Let’s get something straight. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be really good at games in order to write about them. I’m not very good at most games. I don’t have the time to put into them to become really good and I’m too much into experimentation to quickly suss out a brilliant game plan.

I know when a game is too easy. The Paradox games are infamously easy at the normal levels. I’m playing a new RTS for review in which I jumped into a skirmish map, lost all the objective points and all but four units and then rebounded to a completely crushing win once I figured out what the hell I was doing.

Knowing when a game is too difficult is the hard part. How much of my failure is my fault and how much is the game getting in the way of my victory? Green’s complaint about Company of Heroes is echoed in so many other places that I have no doubt that his defeats are the fault of his daily diminishing reflexes or distractions.

One problem is that difficulty levels really don’t mean much from one game to another. The easy/normal/hard trifecta is pretty useless. It generally means that the AI is given an advantage in resources or abilities, but the value of these advantages can be quite different depending on the title. Two different RTS may make a game harder by giving the AI fifty percent more cash, but one of those games might have alternate player tactics to neutralize or minimize that disadvantage.

I’m not really interested in the historical question of whether games are getting easier or harder – I’ve read both in the last two months. (The correct answer is both. Games are harder because they demand more of you, but easier in that they’ve never been as transparent to gamers.) But it would be nice for me know how much of my losing I can lay at the feet of developers.

Because Company of Heroes and Jeff Green won’t always be around to give me an easy answer.

This screenshot in the latest gallery from Ancient Wars: Sparta has a sheep gushing a lot of blood while the peasant chops its head off. That wool will never come clean.

Having never killed a sheep, I can’t say that sheep don’t spurt blood like that. However, I am fairly certain that you are supposed to slash their throats or brain them with a heavy mallet and not decapitate them like you’re Old McDonald’s executioner.

Unless the farmer in this shot is enacting some sort of death penalty.

I’m no vegetarian. And I’ve happily killed my share of sheep and cows in Age of Empires, either to feed my people or to make sure my enemy couldn’t feed his. But there’s really no need to make animal slaughter a messy enterprise. RTS games, despite their inherent violence, have mostly been free of the blood for blood’s sake stuff that started in shooters and can now be found in many RPGs. From the other Sparta screens, the man-to-man battles look as sanitized as those you’d find anywhere else in the industry, so I’m not clear why we need to see sheep’s blood at all.

I am going through another RTS phase after overdosing on Civilization. So, between working on games I am reviewing, I load up Rise of Legends or Battle for Middle Earth II and rediscover that I am much better at the former than the latter.

Then it hit me. The coolest looking things are always the most powerful. So, if you push your development towards getting the best looking army, you will have the best results – providing you can afford it.

Look at Rise of Legends. Your typical Vinci infantry guys [Read more →]

Joystiq’s Alexander Sliwinski has once again raised the question of who in the hell American McGee thinks he is slapping his name on things. He has some nerve presenting stuff. McGee sees his name as a branding action (like Mark Ecko’s graffiti game) and hopes that his name will come to represent a certain something.

The question over whether Mr. Mcgee has “earned” the right to have his name on a game box is a little silly. It only really works if players ascribe meaning to the name, and sticking it on titles as wildly different as Alice, Scrapland and Bad Day in LA might not work as branding in any manner.

Designers don’t get their names on boxes very often. Sid Meier’s name was first attached to Pirates! because there was a hope that people who recognized the name from his flight sims could be drawn to the new product. It’s not like he had made a name for himself in cartoony action games before. So the name which has become so ubiquitous as branding began as little more than an effort to move an already established Microprose name to another field.

Games are more likely to have “from the maker of” or “from the people behind” than they are to have an actual name attached. Wargames will still use a specific name to push some products. Norm Koger’s name on Distant Guns will draw afficianadoes immediately, and John Tiller’s moniker has become so associated with HPS Simulations that the name is almost superfluous. But as game development teams explode in size and production becomes as important as design and programming, the day of the brand name rock star designer may already be past recovery.

It is odd that EA’s early efforts to make stars of its developers never achieved wide success. Movies and television have become auteur entertainment, though they are certainly as collective as game development is. When Meier’s name started being stuck in front of games he worked on, Will Wright and Dani Bunten were superstars in their own right – Wright still is. Rise of Legends is a Brian Reynold’s joint, and he has his name in small print on the game box. But the ownership of franchises, development contracts and ideas has made the marketing of names like Al Lowe, Tim Schaefer, Phil Steinmeyer, etc. something that only real nerds like me are interested in.

And why should I be interested? Mostly because, to my shame I suppose, I find game developers genuinely interesting people. Even people who have done games that I have panned are full of interesting ideas and are energetic in their desire to make quality entertainment for fifty bucks or less. That so few people would recognize the names behind Rome: Total War or Neverwinter Nights or other games that have consumed my household for the past three years is a tiny insult to their work, an even larger insult than not bothering to read the byline above that 3/5 review you scan in your favorite gaming magazine. But I digress.

And it doesn’t have to be a single name. As I’ve said before, game development require bigger teams than it ever has before. And no one is expected to recognize a name before anything has ever been done. But a track record should follow a designer with more than “from the guy who brought you Barbie Goes to Mars“. Recognize teams. Recognize developers by name.

Even if publishers are reluctant to do it, we in the blogodrome can do our best to acknowledge a body of work.

When first announced, Ancient Wars: Sparta was being plugged as the real historical alternative to all those games that say they are based on history. In an interview last year, the developers said

The name Ancient Wars has been chosen to establish a brand for potential future RTS games like Sparta, but with different historical content. It is new for the genre of RTS games that actual events and historical facts will be the base for such a game. In the past, many games were set in such scenarios, but were freer in terms of storyline, characters and units. With Sparta, we have put much effort into research about the time, and living and dying in those days. Also, we did not implement any fantasy or scientific elements in the game, like magic or gods. So, everything you will encounter is a real part of that time!

No fantasy elements! No magic or gods! Though I noted earlier that some of the units betrayed more interest in coolness than real history, there was not a lot of indication that Playlogic would depart from this mission statement.

Now we have more info on the game courtesy of a hands-on from Guy Cocker at Gamespot UK. And what do we find? [Read more →]