An Open Letter to Electronic Arts

Maybe the ad campaign could employ a variant of the Citadel discount speech from the second game. "I'm Commander Shepard, and I purchase all of the games starring myself via the official Electronic Arts distribution service."

Hey, guys!  So I hear tell you want to kill Steam.

Well, okay, that’s overly harsh; you just want a sweet piece of that digital distribution pie.  And who can blame you?  There’s a lot of money going through Steam, and if I were a big company I’d be looking for a way to pick up a few extra bucks down that road.  You’ve made a good opening move by cutting ties with Steam and putting both Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3 exclusively on Origin.  It’s really a good start toward getting a foot in the digital distribution market, and considering how much I like having some healthy competition here, I’m all in favor of it.

Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion you think that’s going to do it, and let me tell you something – it’s not.  If you prevent people from getting the collector’s edition through any other digital service, people will just go down to the nearest brick-and-mortar retailer and pick up the game there.  Two games, no matter how awesome, are not going to shake the current market up significantly.  Remember, when it was first announced, Steam was thought of as the hoop you have to jump through to play Half-Life 2.

You don’t want Origin to be the hoop for EA games; otherwise it’ll be discontinued in a couple years.  So I advise you to think about this a little bit and make some steps to keep Origin relevant.  Simple stuff, even.

1. Reach outside the core gamer demographic

Right now, the core group of gamers who give a crap about things like digital distribution likes Steam.  Steam is good.  Steam has pretty much every game a player could want.  Trying to tell these people to stop using Steam just for your games is an uphill battle, the sort of thing that mostly just convinces people they don’t want to bother with digital distribution for your games until you decide to get with the program.  And until you have the critical mass that prevents you from being ignored, you are not going to gain many adherents in the existing customer base.

Fortunately, you already have an in with a nontraditional customer base.  It’s called The Sims.  It’s not the sort of thing that is traditionally favored by gamers, and it already has an add-on setup that players are used to dealing with.  So instead of trying to compete with the giant on the giant’s terms, start looking smaller.  Use Origin for Sims purchases.  Push games like the various PopCap offerings, possibly even at discounted prices.  Target gamers who generally don’t think about digital distribution so that you will have an installed base that matters.

2. Give us something we can’t get on Steam

If you’re going to compete with Steam via selection, you have already failed.  You are marketing your store based on the fact that your company is very large and offers a very wide selection.  So instead of trying to compete with Steam by that angle, offer some ubiquity.  Start giving people who purchase a doodad in game 1 a corresponding bonus in games 2 through 5.

Yeah, it’s going to be kind of nuts if I buy a floral dress in The Sims 3 and get the same item in Mass Effect 3, but there are people who will appreciate that.  Heck, offer cross-game benefits just by owning those two games together.  Steam is largely a collection of games made by totally separate companies, so the games rarely work together in any meaningful sense.  You can change that.  You can even offer bonuses based on the cross-section of games purchase by any given player, reasoning that if a player has bought five sports games and the Mass Effect series, he’ll probably like sports-themed items in the latter and some bonus Salarian teams in the former.

This probably seems like a lot of work for little upside, but there’s something else to be noted here.  Namely, that there’s something else Origin can do that Steam currently does not.

3. Be unobtrusive

Steam’s greatest failing is that it’s always there, nagging at you.  It’s a chat client, it’s a server framework, it’s a copy protection utility, it’s many things.  Origin does not have to be all of that.  In fact, if you really want to tout the virtues of buying directly from EA, probabl one of the first things you can offer is a simple promise of just buy the game, download it, and forget about Origin.

It’s fully conceivable that this might lead to a larger number of game thefts, because the copy protection won’t be as tight if you don’t require a constant login.  But honestly, guys, you could use the good press as far as copy protection goes.  SecuROM certainly hasn’t done you any favors.  It also appeals to the crowd who still seems to think that digital downloads aren’t the same as owning a copy of the game insofar as they’ll know once they’ve downloaded it, it’s theirs, and they don’t have to keep checking in to play it.

I’m not saying that without these steps Origin will crash and burn… I’m saying that Origin is already standing on some very shaky ground.  You’re expecting to change the digital landscape from “I’ll buy it from Gamestop or Steam” to “I’ll buy it from EA electronically,” and that’s not a change that happens overnight.  And if you want to make it work, it’s going to take some doing.

Or you could just deal with players walking down to the local Gamestop to buy your games until you stop trying to marry your own distribution service.  It’s all up to you.

Tolerance Levels

I would really have liked to include a screenshot of the upcoming DAII DLC, but we don't know what that looks like yet, so have a mage in a Guy Fawkes mask.

In the beginning, the designers didn’t know what they had.  Well, okay, they knew what they had: a game that you played with a computer.  They just weren’t sure what to do with it.

Pong wasn’t really the first video game, nor was it the first one to answer the question of “how do we make money off of this?”  It was just the first one to do so in a successful fashion.  You fed the game a coin, you got to play.  When one of the two sides reached a predetermined score, the match was over, and if you wanted to play again you had to feed the machine another quarter.

As time went on, arcade game manufacturers realized a simple law – the more coins people had to feed into the machine to keep playing, the more money the game made.  This resulted in the early era of video game brutality.  Consoles were still expensive and not terribly popular, but everyone enjoyed an arcade cabinet.  And if you made those cabinets difficult, players would keep feeding the machine money in the hopes that a few more quarters would open the elusive road to victory.  Home games, as a result, were as brutal as the cabinets.  They people designing one were designing the other, and the home consoles didn’t have the following that the cabinets had.  Games were generally short, but brutally difficult, requiring a lot of play in order for players to advance past a certain point.

But there was a break-even point.  There was a certain degree of difficulty past which people would just start marching away from the game rather than keep hammering at it to try and beat the damn thing.  So there was the balance up until the Nintendo’s twilight years and the launch of the Super Nintendo.  Games had to be hard enough that players had to keep paying at regular intervals, but not so hard that they stopped thinking victory was just another quarter away.

By the time of the SNES, things had changed.  The arcades were no longer the dominant force in gaming, with consoles (and to a lesser extent home computers) having a very different audience.  Here, a trend in the other direction started.  Once a player had purchased the game, after all, there was no further investment to be had – it didn’t matter if the game was played to death or if it just sat unused in a shoebox.  But a happy player of Game A would buy Game B if he remembered the company responsible for Game A.  There was no incentive to make games harder, but there was a distinct incentive to make games more accessible and faster to complete.

Speed was still a virtue, but for the opposite reason.  Before, you could get away with having a game that had only seven levels, because it would take a whole lot of money to take the second.  Now, it was best if you could get someone to drop full retail price for a new game that could be beaten in a week, because that meant the player was coming back for a new game in the near future.

That trend started to see a hiccup only as the Playstation became more popular, where a five-disc epic cost the same amount at retail as a one-disc game that was over in half an hour.  People trended toward larger games, the sort of thing that looked like it would give more bang for a buck.  Hours of play were valued over challenge.  Unfortunately, this design trend came with a negative side effect – players wanted larger games that would be played for more time, which meant fewer purchases.  So the games tended to get another layer of ease layered on and tricks slipped in to ensure that players wouldn’t keep replaying the same game time after time.  After you’ve beaten Xenogears once, there’s not much point to playing again beyond a love of the game.

This is where DLC comes from.  It’s the only logical response to a world in which players want longer games that they’ll get lost in for several days or weeks at a stretch.  If the designers can’t sell you more games in close succession, they can sell you more of the game to keep a steady stream of cash coming out.  And after the game has made its money, they can always release a special edition that compiles all the DLC and gets another little sales spike from players who passed on the initial launch.

At the same time, it’s always a balancing act.  If you make players pay too much for too little, they’ll stop coming.  If you make players pay too little for too much, you don’t make enough money and you can’t make games any more.  So you have to cut a careful balance, and above it all it’s based upon what players will tolerate and agree to.

A point?  If there is one, it would come down to this.  DLC, free-to-play games, cash shops in pay-to-play games, all of that?  You created this, because this is what you said you wanted.  If you need to look to a villain for the ways in which games are monetized now, you can start and stop in the bathroom mirror.

Get Over It

There are no doubt many images that I could use to memorialize Star Wars Galaxies with more dignity. That's kind of why I picked this one instead.

First of all, I want to state for the record that I am unexpectedly sad about the fact that Star Wars Galaxies is closing down.  In every respect, I can understand why the players of the game would be sad and unhappy with this turn of events.  I have nothing but sympathy for the feelings of those affected by this shutdown, because really, there’s no way to frame this as anything less than sucking.

That having been said?  It’s done.

Sony has told you guys that you are not going to win this.  There’s no question, there’s no last-ditch rally to save the beach from Evil Mr. Shutdownington or whatever.  Sony stepped up and said “guys, the petition thing, it’s sweet, but it is also totally pointless.”  And yet the desperate requests to spread the word continue, as if somehow if you just got enough signatures it would somehow alter the space-time continuum and the companies would change their minds.

Seriously, this response should not have been necessary.  I feel for you, guys, really I do – I understand that this is a sad event, and I’m sad to see the game go even though I never played it.  It’s not your passion I’m questioning, it’s your methods.

Smedley made it clear that there was no problem with player population, with the Sony hacking issues, with anything beyond the simple fact that these two companies had an agreement that wound up being terminated.  The companies both knew that a bunch of people played and enjoyed the game.  This was all well-known.  What, exactly, is petitioning SOE supposed to do about that?  How exactly is this going to result in a last-minute stay of execution?  This was the reason why there was a desire to avoid shutting down the game if at all possible.  As it turned out, it wasn’t possible, and the game is going to die this year.

It’s sad, yeah.  Heartbreaking, even.  But your volume is not helping your case.  It’s not hurting your case either, but that’s largely due to your complete lack of a case.  You’re essentially trying to shout down a corporate decision.  It’s a noble effort, to be sure, but it’s a Sisyphean ordeal at best.

Sometimes, you don’t get a chance to change things.  Sometimes, your one chance is gone before you realize you’ve got it.

Look, I’ve been falling in love with things for nearly thirty years now, and I’ve watched a lot of good ongoing things end.  Lost.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  Transmetropolitan.  The first two seasons of Sliders.  Generation X by the original creators.  Persons Unknown.  Transformers Animated.  Firefly.  Some of these things ran their allotted course, some of them were followed by superior works, some were followed by inferior ones, and some just ended.  I was sad when every single one ended… but I moved on and I looked toward the next thing.  I could still love what had come before without trying to anchor myself in the past.

The ardent save-our-game fans are complaining that Sony won’t explain why the game can’t go free-to-play, and they don’t realize that the question has already been answered – it’s not shutting down for lack of players, it’s shutting down because the license was being pulled and there was no agreement that the two companies could come to regarding the game’s continued operation. Starting petitions and whining online doesn’t make you a crusader for the last chance of the game, it makes you unwilling to accept facts.

It’s done.  Get over it, and enjoy what you’ve got left.  It seems like a better option than pissing the remaining time away via Facebook protests.

LA Nawwwww

Is Detective Cole Phelps tracking down a case that required an awful lot of explosions behind him, or is he suffering from severe gas? It's kind of ambiguous.

I’m really late for a hard-hitting review of LA Noire, a fact I freely admit.  Worse yet, at least from my perspective, Chris over at Game By Night hit one of the really big failings of the game right off, which is one of the two major things that’s been going through my head recently as I’ve been playing the darn game.  But, hey, it’s still set to come out later this year for the PC, so I can at least get in some reasonable lead time to advise most players that it might not be all that and a bag of chips.

The problems with the game, however, don’t stop where the aforementioned post stops discussing them.  It’s kind of ironic that one of the first DLC cases for the game makes reference to electroplating, since the entire game feels like it’s been coated with a thin layer of awesome.  But a solid scratch makes it clear that there’s nothing underneath.

For example, the game’s action sequences are, essentially, just setpieces.  The game acknowledges this, and even gives you the option to skip one if you repeatedly fail it – without any penalty to your overall progression in the case.  The gunplay allows you to take cover and duck around and shoot blind, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.  Heck, it takes a concentrated effort to actually get Phelps to drop from gunfire, meaning that the only element that keeps you playing through the moments of action are, well, the illusion that any of it matters.  Scratch that illusion, and you lose all investment.

But the important part is the investigation, right?  Well… yes, but even there you start to notice seams.  See, the investigations are split into two segments – finding clues and grilling people.  The clues, unfortunately, are all pre-determined widgets scattered throughout a given location, with a clear signal marking off when you have all of the clues for a given crime scene.  Several clues require you to re-check a minor object or area more than once, simply because the game won’t let Cole advance past a certain point based on a hunch or a suspicion.  That’s a little more acceptable, but where things start breaking down is when you get into the actual investigations, which offer you the same sort of gameplay experience you’d get out of an old InfoCom text adventure game.

Do you remember those games?  Do you remember how awesome it was to spend four hours with the right object in the right place, struggling to find the exact syntax that the game would recognize?  Did Rygar give you this kind of crap?

There was a suspect who took me quite a while to grill, because I first had to find the right option among the three, and then had to find the right piece of evidence that more or less randomly triggered important information.  The evidence didn’t seem to be linked to the accusation in any way.  There are several times when I would select one piece of evidence, and it would be flagged as correct, but Phelps talked about something else entirely.  It really drove home the fact that I wasn’t trying to piece together clues so much as figure out the arbitrary sequence programmed into the game.

Problematic?  When it’s the only thing the game has going for it, yeah, it’s a problem all right.  The game’s other sequences are just there as alternate filler and distraction, and so all it has left to sell itself on is the whole “putting together a mystery” element.  And you aren’t really doing that, just guessing at how the developers want you to dance.

Oh, and the game auto-saves while preventing you from saving when you want.  So that‘s awesome.

In short… look, the game isn’t bad, but it’s weak in a lot of areas, and the stuff that it has going for it – beautiful scenery and excellent acting – do not make up for the aggressive problems it’s sporting.  If you haven’t bought it yet and you’re still making eyes in its direction, my suggestion is to just turn around and start walking.  It delivers what it promises only in the barest of senses, and even that turns out to be a kind of lackluster experience after a while.

A Touch of RIFT

My trial character, flush with a few rifts shut and the general sense of some tin swords well crafted.

I had honestly expected that my gig on Choose My Adventure at work would be in RIFT.  It was a reasonable assumption, but it turned out to be entirely incorrect.  But I figured, hey, I’ve got at least a week before I’m supposed to start playing Warhammer Online anyway, why not enjoy the spare time a little?  So I fired up the free trial, downloaded the client, and took a little bit of time to familiarize myself with the game.  And I do mean “a little” – a week is hardly enough time to form a deep and nuanced opinion of any title, much less one that serves as the golden darling of the MMO community for quite some time.  But I can understand the appeal.

Put simply, RIFT is World of Warcraft II.

I know, it might sound like I’m damning the game with faint praise, but I mean that as a compliment.  The game takes most of the elements of WoW that make it work and stripped out the several years of baggage the game has accumulated, along with not including system designers who have more ego than good sense.  And there’s a lot of stuff to like in the mix, whether you’ve played WoW far more than you’d like to admit or you’ve barely even touched the game.

To take a random example, look at the soul system.  People have tried to vigorously argue that the system is totally separate from the talent trees, and that’s sort of related to being true.  The fact of the matter is that the souls are talent trees with an extra layer of flexibility, because the deeper you go in a given tree the larger number of abilities for that specialty you get.  It winds up coming off as an improved version of the trees, with each character developing a plethora of abilities related to his or her central focus rather than the current state of WoW (where every class has a smattering of abilities, most of which only have the vaguest utility to a given spec).  It’s a depth of play that I could expound upon, but it hardly seems necessary.

Of course, the centerpiece of RIFT being its own game is the whole system of rifts, in which you get rifts to various planes and so forth and so on.  I already ranted about how this system will not be our salvation, and having seen it in action I’m still of the mind that no, it’s not quite there.

Don’t get me wrong – the first time I saw a death rift opening up, I was pumped.  I sprang into action and worked overtime to close that bastard, because that’s what you do when a rift opens up.  By the fifth time the rift opened, however, I was less rushing off because it was cool and more because I was vaguely aware it would be relevant in a reward sense further on down the line.  There was nothing dynamic going on, just some phased spawns popping up in a random location.

In theory, yeah, the rifts could play off one another in strange ways… but that’s both relying upon the idea that players will just ignore the rifts for a while, and it’s not so much “dynamic” as it is a massive collision of incompatible spawned code.  And it’s the former that really kind of kills the idea, because much like WoW, there’s a very distinct flow to every given zone, which from what I saw meant large swells of people in just the right places to rush out and start fighting at a given rift.  Maybe later zones are more spread out and fix this issue, I can’t say.  The fact that the rewards from closing rift rely upon players closing a lot of them does not fill me with hope.

More than anything, the part that really impressed me was the simple fact that for all its rough edges, RIFT has an awful lot of polish.  The animations are stiff in places, some of the UI elements are kind of awkward, but the thing stands toe-to-toe with the game it is serving as a sequel to for all intents and purposes.  I find that really impressive.

So will I buy it?  I’m not sure.  Certainly I won’t until after my month-long sojourn is finished, but even then I’m not sure if I’ll have the time and the inclination to devote to the game.  For that matter, it looks like it has inherited some of the bugbears of its spiritual predecessor, and I’ve already watched what happened after a great deal of development on WoW.  So it’s hard to always have a lot of faith in the game.  Plus I’ve got the City of Heroes hybrid coming out soon, a lot of other work to do, the big 1.18 patch for Final Fantasy XIV…

But I was impressed.  It was pretty neat.  And depending on what happens over the next couple of months, it might have earned all the good press buzzing around it.

Here’s A Hint, It’s Not Voice Acting

I think the same people are in charge of all previews, because they manage to consistently pick the stuff that's momentarily surprising but ultimately bland.

If there’s one thing that I’ve been seeing crop up time and again in discussions about Star Wars: The Old Republic, it’s that people don’t get what all the fuss is about.  “It’s just got voice acting in it, what’s the big deal?”  And it’s kind of BioWare’s fault, because for some reason most of their recent presentations have essentially just been hammering home that the game will have voice acting and all of the usual MMO staples.  You would hope that they’d have something in there about the solo endgame that may or may not exist, but that’s a different discussion.

So let’s just establish this for a point of future reference – the voice acting, while neat, is not why people are excited.  The battle mechanics, while polished and responsive, are not why people are excited.  It’s the possibility of choice that gets us interested.

I’m not sure why the focus of late has been on all the mechanics of the game and the stuff that keeps it running under the hood, because it seems like Toyota selling the Prius on the fact that it has a motor that generates power to turn wheels.  Yes, a lot of the mechanical features hadn’t been discussed prior to E3 and other assorted events, but to call back to the earlier analogy, we just sort of assume for the most part that you’ll sell us a car that works something like a car.  There’s no need to reiterate that it will, in fact, be a car.  But the whole promise of choice in a game, that’s something interesting.

See, the whole sandbox pseudo-archetype has always gotten away with player choice through a complete absence of any force driving the player.  SWTOR promises to take the freedom to do what you want and place it squarely in the middle of the narrative, something that’s typical for most of the company’s entries.  You get a quest to kill ten rats, but you might find out that there’s another predator in the area far more dangerous than the rats and have to kill those instead.  Or you might kill the rats and let someone else take the credit out of the decency of your heart.  Maybe you decline to kill the rats altogether, maybe the rats turn out to be far worse than you were told, maybe it turns out that the person who gave you the quest expected the rats to kill you instead.  The goal, as stated repeatedly by the designers, is that two characters of the same race, faction, and class can go through the same areas and do the same quests and yet still have totally different experiences.

That is different.  That’s something totally to one side of the whole experience of MMOs as they exist now.  It’s the sort of thing that’s long been the domain of dedicated roleplayers, and it’s being brought into the core assumptions of the game.  And for some reason all of the previews of the game have lately glossed over that fact in favor of elements that we all knew would be present just by the very nature of the game’s structure.

Will it work?  It remains to be seen.  But to claim that it’s just adding voice acting is like claiming that all RIFT added to the genre are a multiclassing system.  Yes, it’s there, but it’s skipping over far more interesting elements.

ME2 Post-DLC

I remember finding the Derelict Reaper a lot of fun on my first playthrough, but this time I had the added bonus of being locked out of most of my class abilities because sniping at Husks is an exercise in dumb.

So after a couple of solid weeks of playtime, I’ve successfully worked my way through the entirety of both installments of the Mass Effect franchise.  And I’ve only got nine more months to kill until the conclusion, so that was smart.  But it gave me an excuse to catch up on the game’s DLC, which I found more interesting as a whole than the offerings for Dragon Age: Origins.

DLC is one of those new buzzwords that’s kind of become a loaded element of any real discussion.  As gamers, we got really used to the idea that anything outside of the game box is either a big expansion pack or just plain free.  The threat of DLC that fixes a broken part of the game hasn’t become a reality just yet, but I think every single gamer is just waiting for the day that the game is launched half-finished and you have to pay again to get the rest of it.  Of course, there’s also the caveat that DLC gives designers a motivation to keep producing new content for the game after launch has come and gone.  DAO had a bit of a scattered approach to DLC, with several installments that essentially had nothing to do with the story followed by one last piece that was meant to “conclude” the storyline prior to the sequel.  (It didn’t.)  Mass Effect – the first one – had two DLC offerings, both of them essentially completely separate from the game’s storyline.

But we’re here to talk about ME2.  What worked here and what didn’t?

Aside from the DLC adding one final squad member (Kasumi), all of the additional DLC is going to fit in just fine if you picked it up after the end of the game.  There’s no strange continuity breaches a la running Return to Ostagar after you’ve cleared the game — all three “story” additions make no explicit references to the timeline, with two of them strongly tilted toward the assumption that they happen after the end of ME2.  Moreover, one of them essentially sets up the start of the next game for players, even if the choice that it offers is essentially a non-issue due to the structure of the narrative.

Furthermore, each of the additional missions actually feels like a deviation from what happened before.  Overlord’s times with the Hammerhead don’t exactly mirror any of the (lackluster) default Hammerhead missions, Lair of the Shadow Broker gives you some interesting fights and a special squad member, and Arrival feels far more different than you would think by virtue of Shepard going it alone.  Okay, there are a few gunfights that feel more or less bog-standard, but the overall level of the content is a fair addition for the price tag.  And it feels like Mass Effect content to boot – Jennifer Hale turns in her usual outstanding work, and Ali Hillis seems to have imported just a bit of Lightning into Liara’s persona.  It’s also nice to finally see Admiral Hackett in the flesh, and he gets a little more characterization beyond the gravel-voiced commander on the intercom.

On the other hand… why is everyone else totally silent?  Why are there geth roaming the halls of Project Overlord without Tali saying so much as “oh, hey, that’s different”?  Was Liz Sroka on vacation that weekend or something?  It’s not a searing issue, but it does sort of throw immersion for a loop when characters are inexplicably silent through events that should logically provoke a response or two.  And if they could afford to get Lance Henrikson in for Hackett, I find it hard to believe that Keythe Farley was too busy to return their calls.

Fixing things that were broken… well, there’s a bit of that.  Certainly LotSB seems aimed directly at the complete non-event surrounding Liara and Shepard, especially if the two of them were in a relationship.  To be fair, a lot of the dialogue that winds up occurring between the two makes perfect sense given the circumstances, but still… there’s some awkwardness lingering from the non-reunion on Illium, stuff that really should have been addressed in the core game.  On the flip side, Overlord actually winds up sort of breaking the Hammerhead, since it shows off just how bad the vehicle combat really is.  There’s a good reason that Firewalker is free, and that is because no one would rightly pay money for it.

The funny part is that LotSB is actually a little treasure trove of character moments when one looks at the private files on each given character.  Little tidbits of backstory, some of them completely new (like the Vakarian family) and some of them well-broadcast elsewhere (like Tali’s affection toward Shepard) are just littered throughout the whole thing.  It’s not ground-breaking, but it’s a nice little addition for fans of the series and the characters involved.

So is it any good?  For the most part, yeah.  BioWare seems to have hit their stride in making DLC that’s not detrimental to the game and still connected to the overall storyline.  But unfortunately, it’s not really a question of “if” for this stuff, since there are some pretty vital storyline gaps being filled in by the additional content.  That part I’m not so keen on.  I almost wish that some of this had been expanded out into a full expansion pack, because you’re going to wind up paying roughly expansion-pack prices to pick all of it up.  Still, I can’t say that I didn’t get my money’s worth.