Play La Marseillaise!

Credit where credit’s due…  I really have to appreciate the fantastic coverage that This is Vegas has gotten from the press in Europe. While I’m really happy with how the U.S. press has responded to the game, it’s still funny to watch how Americans in general spend so much time pondering how much the game is like GTA.  In my completely broad-but-insulting generalization, people on this side of the world just seem to want to know who it is they get to shoot, while Europeans more easily “get it” and embrace the completely over-the-top nature of this game.

What is the deal with that? For everyone who complains about how games too frequently fall back on the old stereotypes of violence and thuggery, American gamers are still likely to complain when it isn’t present. People seem to think it’s just the result of high-level censorship…  e.g. in Europe sex = okay, in America violence = okay, but these attitudes aren’t just made-up.  The expectations of the audience certainly shapes the taboos in those respective countries.

To either side here are a couple more recent appearances from the other side of the world… Here are a couple of covers from the UK and Germany, using imagery created by our awesome Art Director Wayne Laybourn. With the help of a great team including our design guru David Heutmaker, he has completely nailed the feel of our game… The colors, the motion graphics, even created a home for some of our more “game-y” elements… We’re not trying to create a gritty portrayal of the city of Las Vegas, folks, and anyone who compares it pixel-for-pixel with the real city is completely missing the point.  The style is like nothing I’ve never seen in any game before it.

Incredible stuff… Cheers, mate!

We’re going to Vegas next week to show off the game (as well as check out other Midway titles), so you should see some good coverage very soon.  We don’t want to reveal too much too soon, but I am confident that the upcoming showing should answer many questions for people who don’t know what our game is about.

Short update today, sorry I’ve been slammed.  Meanwhile, enjoy some Don Hertzfeldt.

Links

• GameTap interview during GDC
• Gamespy interview Podcast
• Game Informer preview
• Kotaku climbs on board
• Joystiq catches wind
• “This is Sparta” joke number 861
• Gameindustry.biz
• ActionTrip
• Play.tm
• CVG Online
• TeamXbox Screenshots
• GamePolitics wonders about political pressure
• OMG does our game have anything illicit in it?
• Local Las Vegas news report is shocked that a game might be made about their fair city!?!
• Three years ago Rouse said we’re gonna blow your minds DooD!

Video

• Gametrailers interview with Studio Head Alan Patmore
• IGN Podcast
• Another IGN Podcast
• We couldn’t ask for a more appropriate plug

One last edit:

My list of coverage can’t even approach this person’s…  Read the very first This Is Vegas blog.

But I can’t say that the silence has been easy to endure.  “So Pat, what’re you’re working on?” my industry friends would casually ask as we munched awesome, giant slices of pizza…  The answer used to be so easy…  “Military shooter” or “Star Wars game!”  Those chats were easy, and would elicit a knowing nod…  Little else needed to be discussed.  Maybe talk about a new weapon or multiplayer mode, or gripe about problems with the technology, but not much else.  Lately it’s been a struggle:  “Well, it’s an open-world action game, but it’s got this sort of lifestyle component…” They’d stop, and give me a puzzled stare.  “I can’t really say anything else, but it’s pretty different.  It’ll be announced soon I think.”.  As they turned back to their slice, they mumbled: “Uh, sure, sounds cool.  Can’t wait.”

Well, after an eternity, it’s finally announced.  It’s called This is Vegas. 

 There’s only a thimble-full of information, so until more gameplay is revealed publicly I’ll have to continue to wave my hands at our monthly pizza ritual, but at least I can point you in the direction of some of the early coverage:

On IGN:

• Announcement, including our teaser trailer.
• Full Preview, this is one of the better overviews
• Entertainment, featuring a tourist map written by the ever-awesome Jay Pinkerton.
• Gigs, touching on a number of the side missions you’ll undertake throughout Vegas.
• Suits, providing an overview on the factions and communities that you’ll get to know.

The Teaser Trailer:

I was an incredibly huge fan of Super Mario 64, which I put up as my favorite game of all time. That game was a pioneer in so many ways, and its gameplay still holds up quite well today. It had an extremely workable camera that was tuned for each area you went through, and along with its controls, they went unmatched for many years after its release. (Maybe Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, another favorite of mine, finally matched it?)

Of course I was waiting for this game because I would love another Mario 64. Unfortunately I went through this same anticipation five years ago for Super Mario Sunshine and was gravely disappointed. I ask around a lot about what was wrong with Sunshine and I get very vague answers. It had all the trappings of Mario 64, but why did it fall flat? Thinking back I think it was an uncompelling package, another “island paradise” with arbitrary block puzzles sprinkled in. More offensive was that damn backpack/watergun thing. Mario is about motion, and that “clean up the gunk” spray nozzle thing required me to keep Mario in place. What were they thinking?!? Seeing that nobody that I know liked it (and even reviewers retroactively dis that game), but it still netted a 92% on GameRankings, I certainly have to take all the hype for Galaxy with a grain of salt.

So Sunday I cracked Galaxy open and was drawn in. In a couple of good sessions I went through two full galaxies and probably about 25 stars. I’m a completionist so I went for all the secondary objectives first before moving to the next area.

Here are a pile of impressions:

• The Wii control scheme, for maybe the first time in my experience, isn’t annoying at all. You move Mario with the stick like you always did, but somehow the disconnected nunchuck feels better than a gamepad stick might, because it isn’t a big slab and can be tilted to help orient you to the action.
• Thank fucking god they ditched the “flip the wiimote to jump” thing that they toyed with a couple years ago. You just press the A button as you’d expect, which doesn’t give you the 1/4 second delay you get with gestural motion in most Wii games. That would have killed Mario.
  • This is hopefully a very good sign for Wii. It seems like when it was introduced, everyone out there was trying to use fancy whirls and flips to do mundane things. Tilt the wiimote to steer? Wow, dude, you just invented the joystick. Shake the wiimote to make Link attack? You just invented the button, asshole.
  • Some of the wiimote point-at-this mechanics are a bit weird, such as the float-stars that pull Mario along, but they do feel pretty unique and perhaps not easily replaceable with a button (there are advanced techniques like gravity slinging that start to emerge later).
  • The sticky slingshot-thing (where you pull back with the wiimote to fling Mario at a target) certainly could have been controlled with a joystick, but in the end it felt like a fairly versatile game tool.
  • The secondary use of the wiimote works pretty well. Picking up crystals by pointing the cursor at them is a nice diversion when you’re being launched this way and that, and the idea that a friend can hang out and play crystal control is pretty cool. They do have the “shake to spin” thing that gives a bit of my above gripe, but it feels fairly responsive and doesn’t get too annoying.
• Gravity takes you wherever it wants to. Walking upside-down, leftside-right, frontside-back is disorienting, but somehow he controls and camera manage to bring it home and you quickly adapt. As a result, you get a weird sort of topsy-turvy feeling that somehow you continue to keep control. It’s exhilirating, and addicting.
• The camera can be a bit disorienting, such as when you are in an upside-down overhead view, trying to head stomp something. Only a couple times was I at a loss for control, such as when Mario is walking on some glass spheres and the camera doesn’t move when he’s on the other side, leaving you staring at Mario’s feet through distorted glass, wondering which way was up. The moment was so magical, however, that I hardly minded.
  • The incredible Psychonauts was the only other game that I can think of that did this well (such as the Milkman level, which for me was the moment the game went from curious to sublime).
• The puzzles use their main mechanics in very interesting ways. Gravity will flip you this way and that, and it’s also localized, so you’ll meet challenges where you leap up into a zone that snares you with reverse gravity so you land on the ceiling. They could have stumped players, but the mechanics are so well communicated that you just feel totally in control.
• The “collect crystals” mechanic is pretty weird though. First of all, you can “shoot” them, but so far that mechanic hasn’t been very important… You can use it to stun enemies if you don’t want to risk spin-attacking them or hopping on their heads, but I’m not sure that giving Mario a weak “gun” really added to the game. So far it’s been a redundant mechanic other than a couple times that it was shoehorned in as a required action.
  
  • Oddly, the crystals you collectare the same ones you use as ammunition when you shoot. I’m not generally a fan of combining two very opposing purposes into single resources (imagine a shooter where your health was your ammo) because you become gun-shy (no pun intended) about using it. I really avoid shooting crystals very much, but so far the “currency” I’ve expended to unlock stars/doors has been pretty minimal, so maybe I’ll loosen up. I’m just worried that I’ll get halfway through the game and some mushroom-headed star mutant will ask me for 5000 in order to get some super-awesome thing.
  • Also, the “aim to collect crystals” is a bit weird since no other pickups like coins and so on work that way. I’m glad that I can hoover up dozens of the little things in seconds, or even grab them while in flight, but it can be a bit of a mental switch when you scoop up all those crystals and then have to walk over to grab the one coin. Of course it makes sense, because coins regain health, and I’m getting used to it.
• Moving Mario is easy, as it always is (damn those guys can just nail motion). All the Mario 64 moves exist, but some are easier like the wall-jump (Mario “sticks” to a vertical surface for a quarter second before sliding down, giving you a chance to launch again).
  • The moves, however, are more or less undermined by the spin attack, however, which you can use during a jump to go higher and further. This pretty much negates the need for the old standbys of the triple-jump, crouch-backflip and the crouch-longjump. In a sense it feels like those old moves are just there as a nod to the previous game, although it felt nice and comfortable to know they were there.
• Sending Mario into space is strange but oddly refreshing. After how stale the “island paradise” felt in Sunshine (what, am I suddenly playing Sonic Adventure again?), this suddenly felt like a wild reinvention of classic Mario themes.
  • However, I did lack a sense of place in some cases. I came to “know” these little chunks of rock, but the early part of the game really felt like I was being led by the nose, getting to a launch star and being sent to another planet over and over again. There wasn’t a sense of “planning” to it, nor did I feel in control of my exploration. But, nobody ever accused Mario of being open-world, so the fact that these paths are mostly linear seems appropriate to the series history.
  • The sight range was incredibly long, and it was amazing to be able to see these little chunks of rock far in the distance. I could even wave my wiimote pointer at them and steal distant crystals from the surface. My only regret was that I didn’t feel like an explorer… I wanted to see that piece of rock in the distance and figure out how to get to it. Instead I just went where the game led me next.



• They still have lives. You pick up the mushrooms to get an extra life, and gaining them is easy. Just like in Mario 64, saving and restoring the game will strip you of all but 5, even if you had 60 of them during a play session. People might consider that mechanic a relic, but it seems very Mario to me.
• Mario still has some of the greatest personality of any game character in existence. Sure, he’s disgustingly cute as he yips and cheers while jumping around, but god damn is he charming. It never gets old to me.

The best moment so far was Megaleg, where you get thrown onto a little planet with this giant robot with big legs towering over you. Once a leg comes down, you climb up the side of it and onto the main body where you finsih him off. It felt like a unique Shadow of the Colossus moment, but even cooler because of the ridiculous exaggeration of the huge robot on a tiny planet.

So overall, I’m really digging Galaxy. Not sure if it is in “greatest game of all time” territory yet, but it’s probably the best game I’ve played this year so far. It adds a completely new angle to platformers in the way that Portal turned the shooter formula on its ear. If anything, it makes me glad to know that new ideas do still exist, waiting out there for us to find them…

The booth, which we had to whip together sort of last-minute, was purposed as somewhere between education and recruiting. Unfortunately we didn’t have an announced title to talk about or show, so the theme of our booth was more about Midway overall than specifically about the Surreal studio. Luckily, we had some nice materials from Blacksite and Stranglehold… and since we share technology and even assets with those groups (our kick-ass artists and FX group have contributed some great work on those games as well), we consider them to all be part of the same family, so it was cool to represent our peeps nonetheless.

Anyway, this since this was the World Cyber Games, there were of course matches going on all day, so while I was mainly walking around to check out some of the playable games on the floor, I couldn’t help but get a big dose of the craziness that is competitive gaming.

There was a huge screen at one end of the hall, with good-sized audience sitting and watching these matches over the course of the multi-day event. It wasn’t a sold-out standing-room-only type of event, but it was fairly lively. These contests had the trappings of a full-fledged championship-level event, the competitors sitting in soundproof booths, the announcers introducing contestants and calling out the events onscreen…

Honestly, the idea of watching a bunch of people I don’t know play Starcraft really had no appeal to me, so I focused my attention on the kiosks for Left 4 Dead and Crysis. However, while I was waiting for a chance to play, I couldn’t help but catch a dose of what was going on in the competition… and as the announcer excitedly described one competitor’s gutsy push through the enemy’s defensive line, I got a bit hooked.

I’ve always felt that the attempts to legitimize gaming as a “sport” (no doubt to be spoken in the same breath as baseball and football) was something of a joke, much as I wished otherwise… The “gaming pros” are hard to give the same level of respect for people who play videogames as we do sports athletes who achieve so much physically… (C’mon, who can you name besides maybe Thresh? I’ll give you a hint). That’s too bad, because for an pastime that still evoked images of closeted nerds, hyperactive 14-year-olds and bong-hitting college students, we could still use some heroes with more mainstream appeal (like a certain Dallas developer achieved a bit of 10 years ago).

Back at Raven I worked on a lot of games that supported online multiplayer, and during the development of every one I got calls from people who hoped to turn online matches into a spectator sport… but nothing ever really happened. One problem is that these guys were always starting with a game in development and asking for support (such as special camera controls) so that it would be “broadcast-worthy” (a tall order for a dev team working to hit a deadline). What they thought they could do is create the competition and the people would come regardless of the featured game… but the audience didn’t bite.

People want to watch games that they play themselves, or at least games they appreciate and understand. The problem with most online games is that there never are enough players to build a critical mass of people that are familiar enough to understand the strategy and drama behind it. Even fairly successful games like Battlefield 1942 are not as widely-played as something like Starcraft. It seems like every PC gamer on the planet has tried it… While it’s ten years old, it’s certain to be a standby (although perhaps replaced by Starcraft 2) for many years to come. You’d think that the games would update with the times, but you certainly don’t expect football to (significantly) change its ruleset every year the way gamers chew through new titles.

Maybe breakthrough titles like Halo could carry a similar audience, but there are few games out there that can. One thing that might increase the level of competition and get widely-publicized competitions some momentum is the evolution in shooters that we are seeing lately… With competitive games like Call of Duty 4 and Team Fortress 2 evolving to create meta-game elements like rankings, statistics, achievements and character-building, these games are going to be more competitive than ever. A player’s handle will be more than what he logs in as, it will be something that has an identity, complete with bragging rights. The top players will get more exposure as rankings become more prominently featured in these titles. Reputation and glory will become a major factor…

God knows that Korea is ten steps ahead of the rest of us. When the top Korean players appeared during WCG, those guys were rock stars! Perhaps it’s harder to find a charismatic gamer who measures up to a charming athlete, but somewhere down the line, competitive gaming will become accepted by the mainstream, and the industry will get those heroes that they are looking for.

We should also call out the incredible work of the Surreal FX team that appears in the game. Every column, chair, and statue all have all been translated into a visual symphony. Perhaps the game isn’t just about mass destruction, but in Stranglehold, even fruit can be capable of dazzling moments. Check it out!

Also, if you dig the visuals of Stranglehold, or if you liked the creepy vibe of The Suffering, you should check out the new Art of Midway book now available! This is concept art on overdrive, including some incredible work from our own Garrett Smith and Ben Olson. These guys create entire worlds with the sweep of their pens (or mice). This is only a sampling of what we see everyday… Thanks also to the Midway art directors for putting this together. Fantastic stuff.

General show:

• With its unabashed “nerdcore” attendee list, PAX is better described as a mini-GenCon than a mini-E3. They have an impressive size for being a fairly young show, but it still is very much centered around fandom of the Penny Arcade comic. The sessions with the authors and on the PA game were some of the hottest tickets, as opposed to other sessions talking about more “serious” topics of development.  Not surprising, it’s not supposed to be a GDC or anything, despite heady topics about PR and episodic content.
• On the upside, it actually had a fairly impressive turnout of games in playable form, including many that I hadn’t seen before in any form. I assume that falling at the same time as Leipzig gave the publishers some ready-made material to show.
• Aside from what I mention below, there was a great spread of playable games:  Haze, Eye of Judgment, Metroid Prime 2, Conan (console), Heavenly Sword (a new demo), Warhammer Online, a big America’s Army thing, and several dozen more I’m not thinking of here.
• Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony and EA all made an appearance, which is impressive given recent news that E for All won’t have that sort of backing.
• Overall PAX surprised me with an air of “legitimacy” as a serious show. It would take a couple more years, but if it ultimately balloons into a notable national event, it’ll be cool for Seattle.

Kane and Lynch:

• I was able to sit down and play through an entire level… this is the Japanese street battle against cops that you’ve probably seen videos of. They did a great job of maintaining a feel… all the civilians running around gave it a good feel of chaos, even if they were just there to block shots and fall down dead. As you can probably guess, the game’s pretty grim.
• This game was one of many ones that I played that use the Gears/Killswitch cover scheme. Here, it felt pretty good. AI used cover extremely well, with multiple animations to shoot out of cover at a number of angles and heights. If you flanked them, they did an impressive job of adjusting their stance to keep cover.
• In the demo I was grouped with a bunch of nondescript allies who fought alongside me, so I don’t know if I was Kane or Lynch, and my partner didn’t really strike me as any different as any other ally. That said, the feeling of directing a group was good… These guys looked cool coming up alongside you and firing out of cover… You could direct them and it felt okay, even though I didn’t always see a big impact from the commands: “go there”, “attack this” and “follow me”.
• The control scheme read like a scientific calculator manual, with multiple commands on the D-pad and L3 sprinting… Bleah.
• The demo was a fight along a directed path, with none of the usual “open world” experience you see so much.  I must admit that I went up to a car whose door was open (for cover) and almost expected to be able to drive, but in the end the game was better without it… allowing there to be a lot of detail in smaller spaces. This gave a pretty intense experience… however, I still didn’t get a feeling that the characters they were marketing were distinct in any way, other than having to fight cops a lot.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune:

• In this one I played in a small playground with a bunch of climbing pillars and a courtyard fight against modern pirates.
• The climbing didn’t really stand out to me much, except for the fact that the animation was crazy-smooth. The problem with its smoothness is that sometimes my character felt “lazy” or slow. In general it had all the Prince of Persia-style climbing mechanics you expect…  I didn’t really engage in any climbing puzzles in the demo.
• In contrast, I really enjoyed the shootout I had. There was something a bit more personal in my combat with these enemies… I took cover (once again) like Gears, but there was something about the feel of the shootout that felt intense. The videos really don’t do it justice.
• At the same time, while the renegades I fought were pretty generic, how they moved and the personality of the shootout that really made it seem like they were dangerous people. This is something that Half-Life and a couple other games do, but isn’t always the case… more often you’re afraid of “a bullet” or “an explosion” than you are of an organized, motivated group of people. I think it delivered that feel really well to me. Since I didn’t get that feel from the videos, I’m trying to figure out why I felt so strongly, whether it was control, or responsiveness, or how the enemies were moving, shooting and constantly trying to flank me.
• Melee combat was cool too, a sort of side-on, slow-mo affair that had a good visceral feel. Of course everyone does the up-close takedowns now (again you could credit Gears’ chainsaw for this).

Lair:

• I picked this one up and played it for about five minutes. It was really hard to get into… My dragon steered by tilting the controller, which was not particularly responsive and always led me to want to touch the sticks (which controlled the camera). If there was a way to reverse direction, I didn’t know what it was.
• The game is definitely a child of Rogue Squadron rather than what I was hoping for, a spiritual successor to Drakan. Generally I was flying from checkpoint to checkpoint, destroying distant targets with flybys. I felt like I had already experienced all there was by watching the videos online.
• One thing that using the tilt-sensor allows you to do is to load up BOTH sticks, D-Pad, all four shoulder buttons and all face buttons with commands. This game gave Kane and Lynch a run for its money in terms of control complexity. I guess it comes from those sim roots.

Dark Sector:

• I was shocked to see this playable, six kiosks, with open slots always available.  I’m not sure whether there’s big buzz around the game or not.  I played through a chunk several times, but I’m not sure how far I got (it was pretty hard).
• There was hiding behind pillars and seeing them disintegrate as they are shot up, which I got my fill of in Stranglehold. For some reason the cover didn’t feel as cool as it did in Kane and Lynch or Drake’s though.
• My glaive was probably my deadliest weapon when I threw it (my SMG seemed weak against enemies, they just kept getting back up), but I didn’t feel like I had experienced it the way it was supposed to be used…  I just saw a blurry thing go to the enemy and make them fall over.
• I didn’t get far enough in the demo to try out the “elemental powerups” to it, which is what I’m interested in trying.

 It was interesting posting to that crowd…  It was a group that was pretty academic-heavy, so getting content from a developer was a rather novel thing.  As a result, I kept this first article rather general.

Play Appraisal 1: Observations of a Developer

At the time, with a smug “experienced developer” sense of authority, I felt fairly certain of what GTA IV held for us. When they finally released that first trailer, I was surprised… they made a couple of choices I expected, and some others that I didn’t.

What led me to my assumptions were a few elements that I felt were key to the original success of the franchise:

1) The GTA series is pure Americana. Pop culture oozes from it, from the advertisements and radio stations, to the culture around guns and cars, and their acquisition. Sure, back in the stone age there was a GTA expansion in London, but the series has been locked and loaded on the U.S. since it became a phenomenon with GTA III. With the former DMA located in Scotland, this is no accident… we’re seeing America exaggerated through the lens of an outsider, and Americans and overseas audiences are eating it up.

GTA had to return to the U.S. with number 4. The only question was what city? Liberty City makes total sense… Once the series tackled Miami and California, there really aren’t any remaining cities with the worldwide recognition and cultural punch. (Sorry Chicago and Seattle, you have limited visibility to gamers in, say, Spain.) Plus, New York is still the most iconic American city there is.

2) GTA has always been both stylish and stylized. For all the controversy and violence in the game, it was never graphically realistic… and that worked in its favor. The situations were so over the top that when you caused a 10-car pileup or were pounding on someone with a baseball bat, was counterbalanced with the style to create a more amusing image than ghastly… sort of like Bugs Bunny with a bloody chainsaw. Sure, gamers have clamored for more realistic graphics like they always do, but I was genuinely surprised that they moved closer to photorealism with the new one.

While gamers have become more desensitized violence in games, there still is a line there as you approach realistic victims and more realistic results of your actions. I worked on the Soldier of Fortune series, which depicted accurate wounds, with enemies screaming and the whole close-up-and-personal ordeal. It did fairly well for its time, but it was a decidedly hardcore affair with no pretenses of mass-market sales numbers. I always felt that one thing that allowed GTA to get away with what it did without crossing that line of repulsion was that their characters and physics were so over-the-top. It’ll be interesting to see how their turn towards the photorealistic goes.

3) GTA has always delved into romanticized crime cultures. The Mafiosos and Miami drug smugglers of GTA III and Vice City have long been given a shiny, appealing gloss in movies and television. As nasty as those people could be, there still was a bit of fantasy that made people ask themselves “what would it be like?” With San Andreas, the series took a turn towards the L.A. “Boyz in the Hood” gang culture, which was a bold step since it’s much less romantic than the other two… However, it had a huge well of rapper and hip-hop culture to delve from, so it’s no wonder that it was an equally huge success.

The biggest surprise with GTA IV then is the choice to move away from all that and dig into the Russian mob… The player is a new immigrant pursuing the American dream. It’s compelling because it is by far the most iconic story in New York City. However, keeping the player under the foot of the Russian mob is shockingly removed from previous titles. There’s no fantasy in that at all… the Russian mafia are well-known as a bunch of very dangerous and scary individuals. Very few souls dream idly of that life. Plus, with the player remaining reasonably poor for the duration of the game, there will be less of a carrot of “living the high life” once the story is played through.

Of course who am I to question a company that has created a series that has grossed over a billion dollars in sales? The gameplay will be awesome as usual. The rabid fanbase will follow the well-told tale wherever it leads them. While most new franchises get about 30 seconds to snare a consumer’s attention, where a crime drama centered on the Russian mafia would almost certainly fail, GTA IV will be a success. It would take a quarter or less of the sales of GTA’s previous incarnations to be a success, but it’ll be interesting to see what the impact of these choices will have. Perhaps it’ll open people’s eyes to even more interesting stories for games to tell… let’s hope so.