MMOs.  I’ve tried many, though it’s fairly safe to say that my realization of the horrible time sink they too often are has changed me over the years to where I don’t play them much if at all.  Unfortunately, the (what I now see as lazy design and a cop-out) design behind most all MMOs is to get you to waste tons of time leveling characters instead of experiencing story or amazing game design moments.  I’d even venture to say most have very little to offer in amazing scripted sequences, it’s usually more about customization or earning items of status that meant jack and shit outside of the game.

My first MMO was Anarchy Online, way back when (what…2001 was it?), which I didn’t last long on.  Star Wars Galaxies came out and I started at launch (of course, being a Star Wars nut), and I still find it amazing I know work with a large chunk of the original art team from that game at Red Fly Studio.  I played Galaxies a lot, for a few years off and on.  That damn game.  In between I tried World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa (I’m still bitter towards that one), Everquest II.  I came back to WoW several times, I grew to appreciate the simplicity of things in the game & it’s art but eventually grew bored with the forced group content—I had a pair of characters maxxed out, and yet never saw an ounce of the endgame content because it was focused on the hardcore raiding types, a mechanic that’s truly broken about MMOs I think and ready to change.  Too many games punish those of us that just play the game to relax and have a good time, they’re about spending hours on raids and grinding for max stat items, etc.

Cryptic’s hit three titles I’ve tried now.  City of Heroes I played quite a bit, eventually growing bored with the game in general though enjoying combat and loving the costume designer.  Champions Online I tried over Christmas and felt sorely let down from, it was quite literally City of Heroes with updated graphics and felt like it addressed very little of the major problems from CoH (like adding additional game mechanics, say civilian life of your hero or vehicles or anything like that).  Third came Star Trek Online.

I was definitely right to wait for a demo, I grew really damn tired of buying these games just to have wasted the money (Tabula Rasa!!!!!).  The trend I’m seeing, looking at things as a game developer now, is—and granted this is an assumption—a careless attitude of “eh, we’ll fix it after launch” for these games.  Broken systems, pathetic immersion factors, boring design and flat out shitty environment art.  It plagues almost every single MMO out there (though WoW has nailed the environment art, and they do innovate quite a bit with expansions for how quests play out).

So we come full circle to Star Trek Online (STO)…amazing game, if it was still 2003.  I played through the demo content tonight, and I couldn’t help but feel like it was a horrible reskinning job of Champions Online with a couple of neat additions to combat and then space.  Champions Online, which was just an upgrade of City of Heroes.  Which is an old freaking MMO. 

Being positive first, though…the character art is top-notch and amazing.  I’ve always liked the detail they put into their characters and options for customizing in their games, but Cryptic just went above and beyond with Star Trek both with their character creation/customization and just the quality of the art in general.  The characters are gorgeous, believable, and while going down a hall with my phaser rifle drawn the way the warning lights shined on my character’s hair really set the mood.  It was awesome and fun.

Combat…much as I’m starting to grow a distaste for what I see as generic low-quality work/design in Cryptic’s games, the combat is almost always fun to play.  In some ways I really hate the combat in STO—enemies rushing me and kicking it in front of me while I blast them adds +10 to the outdated feel the game has for me.  The new “hit C to go into aim mode” bit is an excellent touch though, and really makes things a lot of fun.  I also like having to actually have line of sight for my attacks to work, very nice addition.

Space combat…feels like it has potential.  I had some fun with it, and while maybe it gets better later I’m skeptical.  I also like the addition of having crew members, though the complete lack of any interaction with them on a story level or character development level was disappointing.

That’s about it that I can say that’s nice.

The very first thing I noticed when I started the game was the horrible environment art.  I mean freaking shit-tastically horrible, the scale they used for making their rooms leaves you feeling like a child running around in your parent’s room with dad’s shoes un for fun.  The ceiling is something like 40 feet above your head, and instantly I felt like I was in some old ass MMO rather than on a starship in the middle of a firefight.  The second thing I see?  I look out the window to see the “space fight.”  Fuck that thing, right there I knew the game was going to be a let down…and I’ll explain.

Video games are not movies, we all know this.  But there are certain rules that seem to work well across all media/entertainment items, like the concept of an intro “hook” to get you into the experience.  Films use it, books use it, music in it’s own way uses it on albums, theatre uses it…games need to start using it.  Some already do, but when I’m going into Star Trek Online expecting at least a quality level you’d expect from such a big IP and I get an out of scale room and 1999 quality visuals outside of a ship window?  Come on, Cryptic!!  This is where you shine and convince me to pay a monthly subscription for this terd, not admit that it is one!

The immediate problem is—again—scale.  The ships outside are so minute in size that when you move you can tell they’re super tiny.  On Force Unleashed II—running on the pathetically tiny hardware that is the Wii, mind you—I built a full on space battle happening outside of a hangar bay and windows later on.  I quickly saw how scale could destroy the immersion of it, and so I focused on making the ships big enough & far enough away that they felt large to the player…this wasn’t days of development time kids, this was over a few hours tops by myself.  I don’t claim elite skill here, I call out lazy work at Cryptic.

It just went on from there.  Characters standing around, shitty animations, NPCs wandering and not making contact with the stuff they’re working on, enemies spawning while I’m reading a quest update or warping through walls, no vocal acting save for a painfully bad actor reading for a medical hologram (not even bad actor, just bad writing).  That made it the most painful, I would have at the least expected main quests—especially in the demo—to have voice acting and lip sync animations on the characters so they look like, I dunno…they’re talking?

Cryptic is a studio I plan on steering clear of from now on.  It’s frustrating because it’s obvious there is some real talent there, with the gorgeous characters, amazing customization detail and some design that’s making combat fun despite it’s horrible flaws.  But the work just always feels lazy, not well thought out and done at a bare minimum so it can get out of the door.  Having done two other MMOs now I would expect a lot more from them than…this.

Ugh.  G’night.

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It is about gorram time that one of those pathetic, stupid, poorly thought-out and bigot-fueled gay marriage bans was turned over.  It’s being immediately appealed and that’s fine, faster it gets to the Supreme Court so it becomes standard the better.

I can’t say I am more disgusted, ashamed of and embarrassed by people claiming to be Americans that have supported these bans.  Has our society truly become so ignorant and poorly educated that we don’t realize this is absolutely no different whatsoever from the days when our country was telling a black person they can’t use the same drinking fountain as a white person because of their skin?  Seriously?  It’s almost like some kind of bad joke. 

“Oh, well…it’s different,” they say.  “This is about protecting the sanctity of marriage.  God says…”  Then you take that up with your church or religious organization, and if you want to stay bigots in there that’s on you. 

“We’ll give them civil unions, but not marriage.”  Just like a non-white could still ride a bus, they just had to be in a different area.  Or they could still go to school, just not the one white folks went to. 

I have my own issues with religion certainly, I’ll freely admit that…I respect and even like certain things about many of the different faiths out there.  I don’t agree our country was founded on any one religion and think that if anything it was setup with the idea of people being able to freely choose their religious beliefs. 

Government’s job is to set up and maintain a stable society and protect an individual’s rights that are clearly defined by said government…then keep it’s hands back and freely lets people choose their religion, so long as it doesn’t infringe upon anyone’s guaranteed rights.  You don’t get have  multiple wives or human sacrifices because your religion calls for them…you can’t make up some crazed religion that lets you steal or murder or rape.  Those all infringe on someone else’s rights.  Yet it’s okay to tell a man he can’t marry his life partner that happens to be a guy, because men don’t marry men.  They’ve taken no one’s rights away from them, they just want the same rights a man and woman have to marry in a heterosexual relationship.

Personally I look forward to going to my brother’s wedding someday (if he ever ties the knot) in a country that isn’t going to tell him he’s not allowed to do so.  It’s the ideal I served my country for as a United States Marine, and this overturning of the ban in California is finally a rag to scrub away that nasty shit-stain on California’s history.

Dammit I’m up way too late.  G’night!

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I do have my list though, as any self-respecting gamer should have, of those memorable moments that I’ve come across and certainly hope that maybe…just maybe…I can bring to someone playing a game I work on some day.  Something to make them put down on a list of their own.  And so, in no particular order I bring you…

THE LIST

–Ninja Gaiden – The original from way back in the NES days, the cinemas blew me away and were so damn rewarding for the work you were doing in the game.  Learned the word “intuition” from that too, heh heh.  Had to ask my Mom what it meant, think I was 8?

–Super Metroid – While that whole game was amazing, the bit that stuck out the most to me was when the little metroid fella gets shot trying to save you from Mother Brain’s attack at the end.  I can still remember growing furious and fighting her while gritting my teeth and probably saying some really stupid shit talk to the TV.

–Unreal – It’s antiquated and silly now, but man when that game came out at first the graphic engine was amazing.  Much of that stands out, like moving through that first air duct with the steam and lights and halos from galre, but the memorable moment goes to the first time I had the shit scared out of me in a game…you’re in a hallway and all the sudden the lights start turning off, one-by-one coming towards you.  Next thing you know the level is pitch black, and then a strobe light kicks on and you see some big huge dude coming after you.  Screamed my head off.

–Final Fantasy VII – This has two awards, the ol’ classic.  The first was taking Ariel out on a date…games focus on so much combat and bad-assery that experiencing this relationship growing between two characters was just amazing.  Which feeds into number two…Ariel getting killed by Sephiroth.  Not unlike that metroid saving Samus, I was freaking pissed fighting that fight after she’d been killed.

–RLH (Run Like Hell) – This was a sleeper title on the original XBOX, wasn’t particularly great but the memorable experience comes from the very beginning of the game.  The second the game starts as you familiarize yourself with the hangar of the derelict space station, the floor rips open and a massive beast comes racing after you.  And so—as in the name—you must run like hell to live.  It was such a neat & surprising “GET OUT OF HERE” moment.  Shame the rest of the game wasn’t as good.

–Ninja Gaiden II (on the XBOX 360)…near the end half of the game, there is a part where you must climb a very long, very steep set of stone stairs leading to the entrance of this temple and a FLOOD of enemies are washing down upon you the entire way up.  Literally, you must kill hundreds of them as you cut your way up, and the experience was brilliantly designed to just be plain awesome—I don’t recall it being very difficult, I just remember how bad-ass and epic it felt pulling off such a feat like that.  Truly amazing experience.

–Batman: Arkham Asylum – The combat.  Never have I had more fun and wanted to get better much more than this game, it was cinematic and beautiful and fun—consistently challenging in the best way possible.  I wish to god that I could convince LucasArts to make a lightsaber combat game directly riffinf off of this fighting system because the perfectly choreographed animations would offer players the best looking saber fights they’ve ever seen.  Shame it’ll never happen.

–Starcraft II – The newest addition to my list here, while I’m not happy with the multiplayer aspect (I think they took the easy way out) single player was really enhanced and made so much more fun to play.  Most memorable is playing the mission “Outbreak” on the hard difficulty setting (not nearly as scary on normal)…during the game’s daylight cycle you must run outside of your base and destroy infested buildings harboring zombies, basically.  Then when the sun goes down, and you SEE it going down, you have to race your ass back to base and bunker down to survive through the night as the creatures assault you.  That feeling of dread when I would see the sunlight leaving, and the relief as it rose again will forever stay with me.

I’m sure there are plenty more I’ll add later, but that’s it for now!  G’night.

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There was one particular response someone made that stuck out to me, really striking a chord and it was left resonated inside of my skull for the rest of the evening.  Summed up by the quote he quoted, “to thine own self be true.”  I couldn’t possibly agree more, and it’s something I’ve actually been learning on my own the last couple of months especially.

I’m a very passionate person—especially when it comes to my job and the games I work on.  I tend to get very frustrated by people that are—or that I perceive are, which is even more a shortcoming—apathetic or just plain lazy when it comes to their work.  If I see problems that need to be fixed or polish we can do, I’m all about getting in there and making it as awesome as I can…when those around me don’t share the same enthusiasm, well…to put it bluntly, it pissed me the fuck off.  Almost to the point of wishing violent harm upon them, I get so angry about it.  Of course I’m not going to waltz up to said jackass and punch them in the back of the head, so then I get frustrated with myself and my anger which then leads to stress and so on and so forth.  Misery is the end result.

So not too long ago I was given charge of a strike team, working on some things for Force Unleashed 2.  I was very excited, I knew it was going to be an insane amount of work (which it was) but I was putting that aside for the moment to get it done as 6 months from now when I see that game on the shelves at Wal-Mart or Best Buy I could be proud of it.  I’d forgotten the reality that not everyone was going to share said enthusiasm though and so the first day of the strike team during our game review I had the very essence of my being ripped out, pissed on and some other grody things by the very opposite of people excited to make the game better.  More to the point, not excited at all about more work so late in the game.

My first reaction was as one could expect…I was depressed and upset, frustrated that they didn’t share what I was perceiving as a great passion for the game.  Couple of sleepless nights, but I remembered some previously learned lessons from other strike teams I had run and that helped out immensely (protip #1 on running a strike team…only involve those doing the work with that part of the work, you tell everyone everything and it looks bigger than it is).  Eventually I saw where I would come into conflict with a particular individual, which stressed me out more—the main reason being I didn’t like that I wasn’t going to get along smoothly with someone, I like that I always get along with people at work!

“To thine own self be true.”

I like this quote, because (in my mind) it’s open for interpretation past what it’s actually saying.  Well, maybe more personal application than interpretation.  Either way, what I take from it is that it’s absolutely a fool’s errand to try to change how those around you are going to feel.  I’d like it if they were happy or excited about something enough to do more than the bare minimum, but at the end of the day no pep talks or heart to hearts are going to change how they feel about the situation.  What I can control, though, is how I feel and what I allow to get to me. 

I like to be happy at work.  I think it’s a little odd everyone tells me on a fairly regular basis that I’m always smiling or happy (especially on build days), but I enjoy that and I’ve come to take great pride in that.  Why should I let someone else’s negative attitude drag me down?  So I took this into practice on the strike team, I assigned out tasks and if they weren’t completed to satisfaction I gave them back until they were (rare cases).  Where I normally would get upset that I was having to do that, I just smiled and liked the idea of how much better it’d make the game.

So, my advice to those of you out there that actually read this post…know what it is that you want, and take that responsibility into your own hands instead of trying to pass it off on someone else’s shoulders.  You really won’t change how those around you act or feel, but you can do something about yourself and—as I’m ever the optimist—maybe some of that will rub off on them.

I’m deliriously tired now and a little surprised I made it this far resembling something like cohesive though (or did I?)…g’night!

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Personally, I think it really boils down to two core types of games…simple and complex.  I look at everything in those shades of judgment, and while not every title is necessarily black or white in my eyes I think it’s extraordinarily rare to find an actual “gray” game in there.  Lots of black and white, a few dark gray and light gray sprinkled around.

Most casual games, some FPS titles and action titles, “cool new feature” games, and “cool game design” games fall under the “simple” category to me.  That’s not to say they were easy to make, it’s just that for whatever the Developer’s reason may be they decided not to include story as a core element to the game’s development.  Perhaps they felt there was no need for story, maybe they added it later on as an afterthought, it doesn’t really matter to me.

The “complex” games would be the games that include story development as a key element from day one.  That doesn’t even mean the story is being written from day one (though, personally, the first draft should be finished in pre-production), it just means that the importance of that story to the creation of that game is just as strong as all other elements.  Mass Effect, Bioshock, Knights of the Old Republic, Final Fantasy…these are all complex games to me.  Not only is there a strong story element for these, but the environments and interactions with characters show that there is a much larger world beyond what you as the player can scratch the surface of.

The Designer at the GDC discussion panel summed up perfectly for me what I see as the “old way” of thinking about game development…he explained that when they first start working on their game title, they try to figure out what “cool new things can players do.”  It sounds like when I was 16 years old, sitting in a room with a couple buddies trying to figure out what “cool new thing” we could do to spend our time on.  Maybe in the past, where the limitations of hardware had simple meshes with little or no textures working it was more important to avoid story development in favor of those cool new tricks.

In this time though, and even more importantly in the years to come, that technology field is leveling out and letting game developers truly reach for the stars with their games.  Ten years ago it was silly to think about fighting a massive fire-breathing dragon in realtime 3d graphics and be scared shitless…now?  Not such a distant consideration, and I can only begin to imagine what that fight is going to look like in another ten years.  While I think gimmick-based design (aka “what cool new thing can we do?”, thus filing these games in the “simple” category for me) will always have it’s place and gems, I have a hard time believing people will pass up the chance to actually believe they are fighting that dragon over the simple games.

Further, I think the gimmick-mentality of these developers has held development back in many ways.  There are pioneers truly paving the way for the future (BioWare, Silicon Knights) of game creation and their growing popularity surely has to be some sign of things to come?

Back to the actual point…I can’t believe that someone would agree story writing is important but they want a Designer that can write some over an actual Writer.  ANYONE that has worked in the industry is familiar with the time the Designers put into their work, how can someone seriously think that the story and dialogue can be given proper treatment as a side-feature?  That’s just a lazy way to think to me.  Story is a lot more than something for the players to interact with, it affects every single person working on that game from start to finish…the Coder making the AI for that final boss can add quirks based off of feedback from the character’s story, the Designers know the player’s backstory and can add or remove content and features to take advantage of the impact of these features.  I speak from experience seeing the affect adding a story treatment to a game has on a team and it’s powerful…I only wish it had been there from the beginning, simple as the story was.

On “Elements of Destruction” there was a sort of wish-washing going on with the story, more like a collection of whispers of suggested ideas than anything written down.  An angry weather forecaster, to self-aware AI, to blah-blah-blah.  I remember the team meeting where we discussed story and at first the popular vote seemed to be to just ignore the story or worry about it later, which drove me insane (granted, had I actually spoken up at the time instead of quietly fuming proper discussion could have taken plac…lesson learned).  So I went back to my desk and during my lunch hour wrote up a basic backstory, named the player character, explained how Dr. Edgar Herbert could transform his frail old body into a being of pure energy and call forth the elements to attack.  I named the enemy and gave them backstory as to who they were and why they wanted to stop the player (Dr. Herbert).

It was no moment of divine intervention or the writing of an award-winning story.  I went off of the general guidelines THQ had expressed a desire to see and the already-established game design, and put a story in there.  It’s not a deep story, the only hint of a lot of it for the player is received through reading a lot of text, but it’s there for the players who want a story and it’s creation influenced all of the developers on the team.  Edgar came to life later with dialogue written by the Lead Designer (Justin Kovac) and recorded by an actor, little elements came out of that and the game started showing some semblance of a soul.  All because of adding a story.

I see game design today in a sort of awkward puberty period, where the true potential of the game industry is just starting to be discovered (the supposed immunity from the deteriorating economy that’s just been realized, for example) and developers are starting to have teams so large that they cannot get away with just cluster-fucking a group of people and saying “now…go!”  Competition is starting to become tight, employers are having to become more attractive to lure the veteran talent (getting rid of crunch time, for example), and Writers are actually becoming members of the staff at more and more places while freelancers roam more than ever before.  I foresee development teams becoming more and more similar (though never the same) as major motion picture crews, a Director rising to ensure an overall vision and interacting with all pieces to bring them into that fold.  And, like film, I feel that eventually the complex games will become the true “art” of game design while the simple titles will stay right where they are.

Enough ranting for the night!

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