Halloween and today’s Sony announcements bring us more The Last of Us part II tease:
Definitely going for some seriously disturbing Walking Dead style violence. Although the clinician in me must make the observation that if you were hung twice by the neck by your body weight and you did manage to survive, you’d almost certainly have a crushed trachea for your trouble.
Any which way – can’t wait!
Title: Dark Souls III
System: PS4 (also on Xbox / PC)
Genre: (A)RPG
Developer: From Software
Publisher: Bandai / Konami
Director: Hidetaka Miyazaki
Date Played: late April / early May 2016
Rating: Amazing
After the delicious time I had playing Bloodborne, Dark Souls III was a no brainer. Which understates the matter since I preordered it and was playing the day it was released.
Which leads me to both review this latest (and supposedly final) entry in From Software’s legendary Action Role Playing Game genre. But in the process, explore the small but important differences between Dark Souls III (DS3) and Bloodborne (BB) as a detailed exploration of the genre.
If you think of Bloodborne as a modern day Castlevania, then DS3 is a contemporary Ghouls ‘n Ghosts.
Bloodborne = Castlevania
Both From Software games are born from the same DNA, but the biggest difference is:
Thematic (not gameplay) Genre. BB draws its roots from Lovecraftian horror while DS3 purports to derive from more traditional D&D-esque stock. But, not really. Both games are so dominated by Hidetaka Miyazaki’s specific auteur imprint that their differences are of a most subtle degree. And while Dark Souls is the older franchise, I’d actually argue that in BB the idiosyncrasy of his particular style more closer overlaps with the explicit genre. BB is so “perfectly” Japanese Lovecraftian, while all three Dark Souls pull fantasy much closer to horror. I don’t mean to imply any particular criticism in this observation. I adore both games, and both sub-styles. And while DS3 is more vaguely medieval and BB more vaguely gothic, they just share so much stylistically.
Dark Souls = Ghouls & Ghosts
Style. BB is creepier, but DS3 is certainly creepy. The washed out colors and particular/peculiar shapes and forms are very similar, designed to vaguely discomfort. DS3 tends a little more toward matte while BB likes shiny. Certain textural material motifs are common and some are different. BB likes cloth, leather, eyes, and fur more while DS3 likes metal, fire, stone, and dragons. BB has more 19th century architectural and costuming elements. But both are so dark, gothic, and “churchy”. Plenty of enemies or objects could almost be used in either game. Half the sound effects ARE used in both games.
Graphics. Like BB, DS3 is a gorgeous stylized game. The art design is magnificent in its bleakly weird way. Giant vistas abound and strange unique shapes and distorted silhouettes. And although the engine (used by both games) seems perfectly competent, the art direction is more important than the tech. You just have to like dark and weird. Creatures with flowing forms, hidden eyes, and faces, weird mutations, and a generally ruined, graveyard, gothic sort of look. I’d give a slight nod to BB for uniform of graphical style and theme but a slight nod to DS3 for scale and awesome visual scope.
Sound Design. Fabulous music and minimalist but effective fx. The thud of sword on shield, or the grunt of blade on flesh are all fabulously telegraphed.
Gameplay. The broad strokes of the two games are nearly identical. You explore a interlinked world where levels fold back on each other. Monsters and death abounds. You fight through and die. And die. And die again. Eventually you may reach continue points (bonefires/lamps) or open up shortcuts that allow you to circumvent areas already explored. Item collection is persistent across death but experience (souls/blood) is lost on death, with a single chance at reclaiming it by fighting through to wherever you lost it. Souls/blood both serve has currency for leveling and item purchase. Weapons can be upgraded and fit with stones/gems.
Combat, controls, & mechanics. The combat in both games is masterful and varies slightly in important little ways. In DS3 it’s realistic, even typical to carry a shield and block attacks. In BB you can carry a gun, but it does low damage and is useful mostly to interrupt and stun. In both, weapons usually have a 1 and 2 handed mode, but in BB these vary more substantially (at the cost of far less weapons). BB has the “regain system” in which you have a few seconds after taking damage to “take back” some or all of your lost health by attacking again. This encourages a more aggressive style of fighting. In DS3 it is perfectly advantageous to play much slower and more defensively. And since in early levels, BB has 20 healing potions and DS3 only 3-4 until upgraded, the beginning DS3 game requires damage avoidance for survival. BB allows you to charge the big weapon strike and has a dedicated potion button. DS3 allows for much more magic use, opening up very different play styles. But for simplicity I stuck to melee.
I started the original Dark Souls as a caster and paid dearly for it. Only the most advanced players should consider investing in magic during their first playthrough. Melee combat is just so much easier at lower skill point investment. By a New Game+ playthrough, having acquired most of the spells and a lot more skill points, hybrid or caster roles are perfectly reasonable.
Subtle level design decisions also make for combat differences. In BB, you can easily be mobbed by groups of enemies and crowd control is simultaneously more difficult and more important. Same with AOE and sweeping attacks. In DS3 enemies are less clumped, usually only 1-2 at a time — unless you like dying.
Both combat systems are extraordinarily satisfying. The feel is generally excellent, with a slight edge to BB‘s faster, more nimble style. But blocking is highly gratifying as well.
Story. Both games offer minimal and extremely mysterious story. Yet BB actually has boss intro scenes, substantially more cinematics, and even a few vignettes with multiple characters talking. That’s not to say that this fleshes out a single character, or offers even the slightest clarity as to their motivations, just that you see them introduced and they therefore have more “personality.” Definitely I liked this in BB. And the weirdness all fit together more weirdly, lending to a sense of more odd and mysterious goings on. Yet DS3‘s plot is even “grander” and more unknowable. Perhaps mostly because nothing makes any sense at all. Listen to the above intro trailer to get a taste. That’s not to say that lines like “The fire fades. And the Lords go without thrones” or “And so it is that ash seeketh embers” don’t give me goosebumps — no, I love them — but they don’t exactly make a lot of sense. Except perhaps if you have eyes growing inside your skull. Anyway, slight nod to BB for “plot” and “character” — if you can call it that.
That said, DS3 has MORE NPCs and more complicated “questlines” (good luck actually understanding them or following them without online help as they are so much looser and less defined than in other RPGs). There is a veritable rat’s nest of guys you need to nudge weirdly along their stories in order to open up as much vending as possible. So a nod to DS3 for complexity (a good thing in this case). BB‘s equivalents feel undeveloped and there are only 1-2 of any magnitude.
Both games have multiple mysterious endings too. In both cases I used my internet prowess to achieve the “most difficult” ending. Yet I’m still not sure what being the Lord of Hollows really means :-).
Gear. DS3 has a LOT more gear to collect than BB, but the emphasis is quite different. BB‘s armor is mostly leather or cloth and mostly cosmetic. Some have particular resists, but that’s about it. The weapons in that game are relatively few, but highly differentiated. There are two main types: trick weapon and firearm. In DS3 there is an enormous variety of both weapons and armor with four main weapon types: melee, talisman (for spell casting), bow, and shield. Supposedly all of the weapons are viable, but they aren’t necessarily highly differentiated as there are many similar ones. The armor tends to group into light, medium, and heavy. Unlike BB, weight is a meaningful factor in DS3. I personally went with fairly heavy armor, but it was unclear that the poise attribute (which is supposed to all for heavier armor to prevent you being staggered) was fully functional, or at least worth investing in. The weapons system does suffer from a touch of imbalance. Early on I got a Deep Axe which was fairly powerful, but not very upgradable. It took me a good while to find a weapon and upgrade it to a level where it surpassed this early stage find. It’s hard to know which gear to invest in. DS3 also has MUCH better boss gear rewards. Each boss gives you a soul which can be traded for a choice of two high power items, usually weapons. In DS3, there are a plethora of rings (you can wear 4 at once) that add additional powers. In BB these are replaced by runes (you can wear 3). They are fairly similar but the DS3 system is better in all ways. And overall, I’d give DS3 the win for gear, as it has more stuff and particularly more types of stuff with the shields and whatnot.
Gear Upgrading. BB‘s gear upgrade system is a little simpler than DS3‘s. They both have the same four tier currently +3,+3,+3,+1 normal upgrades, but DS3 has 2-3 additional side currencies for upgrading different gear. Boss gear, and other special types fall into at least 2 “non normal” upgrade paths. It also has a more generous supply of gear upgrade items, although split among all these types. BB only has 1-2 of the top upgrade per play-through, DS3 has at least 4-5. The different types are a little confusing. There are also gems that can be socketed on (most) weapons/shields that modify how the items scale. The use of these depends on your build and I only ended up trying 3 of the 15 or so types. In BB, each weapon has a couple sockets for different gems that can either tune the scaling or boost the damage output (a lot!). I liked this additional ability to pump up the power of even a level 10 weapon, so I give BB the edge here.
Other collectables and upgrades. In my opinion, as far as RPGs go, the more you can upgrade the better. DS3 allows you to upgrade both the number of flasks and their potency, which BB doesn’t do at all, so this is a big point in DS3‘s favor. It also has more random items and consumables. However, they generally seemed less useful than those in BB. Maybe this is due to BB’s slightly higher overall difficulty level (or just the fact that I got better at this sort of game between). There are lots of spells and whatnot which I didn’t experiment with. DS3 has the whole “ember” system by which you can spend this limited but reasonably available currency to gain max health until you die. I mostly used it for bosses. You need it for multiplayer. There is also the whole hollowing thing, which even as the Lord of Hollows I didn’t totally understand. Somehow dying hollows you out more, and you have less multiplayer ability when hollowed. This is a change from the much more brutal hollowing of Dark Souls where the game just got harder the more often you died.
Classes and leveling Mechanics. Being an RPG, both of these games have means by which you level up and improve your characters. These are extremely similar but differ in subtle ways. BB has two currencies, blood and insight. Insight is earned mostly from bosses. Often you can buy the same things with both. Insight subtly changes the game’s look and play, which is very weird but cool. DS3 really just has the souls, which are almost exactly like blood. In both cases, you collect them like XP and can spend them for gear or to level up your character. Their persistence is similar in both games in that you lose them on dying, and have a single life afterward to try to retrieve them from the spot (in DS3) or spot/monster (in BB) where you lost them. This means that if you die with a decent number of points you really need to focus on retrieving them conservatively. If you get cocky during one of these missions you will often lose the batch and end up howling at the TV.
Leveling is frequent, but a painfully small boost to your power. You have to chose which point to invest in. DS3 has more types of points, with higher differentiation, and far more defined character builds. In BB mostly you could go for strength or dexterity builds, with a few people investing in arcane for a weak kind of magic. In DS3, besides the basic stats shared by both games like health, endurance, and item discovery, there is a weight carrying stat and three different magic stats driving (in some combo) three different sorts of spell-casting abilities that can be mixed with melee. These “classes” are a bit odd and nebulous compared to something like World of Warcraft or Diablo, but they are definitely more interesting in DS3 and overall I really like the RPG mechanic.
For me, the leveling mechanic adds to the game on so many “levels,” (haha) which is one of the reasons I always like RPG mechanics. First of all, it gives you more things to progress, and therefore have that “sense of achievement.” Second, if an area gets too difficult, you can always grind somewhere and level up to make it easier. Overall nod is to DS3, but the systems are pretty similar.
Level Design. DS3 has more levels, and somewhat larger than BB (particularly if you exclude the DLC). The levels are fabulous in both, but quality goes to DS3.
However, BB has the whole chalice dungeon thing which allows for A LOT of extra levels to help farm blood and with their own powerful gem upgrades. There is a lot of content here, but the problem is that it’s boring in comparison to the normal levels. Somehow the featureless dungeon levels, half randomly constructed, are both extremely difficult and very dull. I never really enjoyed playing them.
Creature design in both games is fabulous and while DS3 probably has more, the variety is very good in both cases. Each creature tends to have considerable differences in attack and defense styles, which interplays delightfully with the generally awesome combat mechanics.
This boss you kill by bursting the sacks hanging between its legs!
Boss Design. Both games focus a lot of energy on bosses. There are many. They look fabulous. They play well, and require significant investment to master. DS3 has more bosses (particularly without DLC), and both games have a lot of excellent dramatic bosses. The BB ones felt more differentiated, mostly had cool intros, and seemed harder. Maybe it’s because I often co-oped the DS3 bosses, maybe I got better between games, maybe not. BB bosses seemed to absolutely require reading strats and watching videos to conquer. Some, like the Orphan of Kos were so insanely hard I still get shivers. Nod to BB for bosses just for sheer evilness.
Hubs. BB has a dedicated “Hunter’s Dream” hub while DS3 has the hub located in the “regular” world. Both have continue points that allow for teleportation, but DS3 allows you to teleport straight from one to the other without returning to the hub. Given the lengthy load times this is a significant plus. In addition, DS3 lets you reset a level at the bonfire without a load.
Co-op Multiplayer. I don’t really do much PVP (if I can avoid it), so I’ll discuss co-op. The system is very odd in both games, and not well “explained.” But it was much easier to summon co-op help in DS3 and I used it extensively to get past bosses. Actually I didn’t even discover it until about 7-8 bosses in, but I used it on most times after that. DS3 bosses are WAY easier with 2 players. More people seems to increase the hit points of the boss more than its worth. Neither of these games bother to explain their odd mechanics. You pretty much have to read about them online. But anyway, DS3 wins here. It also has more bizarre multiplayer factions than BB. In both cases the why you should join them and what they do is vague. You have to read the wiki online for a full explanation. I don’t focus on this kind of thing, but on regular leveling, bosses, gear, etc.
Balance. The sort of vague mysterious quality to both games makes for a somewhat diffuse balance. But that being said, the gameplay itself is intense and spectacular. Even though the bosses are huge and terrifying, or maybe because of it, I tend to prefer the levels. These are just awesome sauce and I also like the high level of challenge and the collecting and “upgrading.” These are just very satisfying games if you invest the time. BB felt a little tighter and more focused, but the increased scope of DS3 is fabulous too.
Mystery. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. These games are oddly mysterious, ambiguous, and “ill documented.” In that, they don’t explicitly teach the player about what’s available through clear tutorials, and they don’t even telegraph the availability and consequences of major branches, mechanics, decisions and whatnot. For example, if you were playing a spell-caster, opening up the vendors that sell most of the spells requires an odd sequences of dialogs and encounters, none of which is clear. You could easily goof or miss out on these. That’s just the way this game is. I happen to like this vague quality and find it highly immersive. But I also love David Lynch films. If you like everything very neat and well telegraphed, or don’t enjoy pouring over the online wiki descriptions, these games might be extra super hardcore frustrating. If, like me, you embrace it, they have a flavor, complexity, and immersive quality much different from a more explicit game.
Overall, these are just some of my favorite games in recent years — true masterpieces. If you don’t mind your games hard (very very hard), and you like fantasy combat and aren’t easily creeped out, you must play them.
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Title: Bloodborne
System: PS4
Genre: ARPG
Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Date Played: January/February 2016
Rating: A Masterpiece
I few weeks ago I wrote a short article on my initial impressions of Bloodborne, and I’d like to come back to it now that I’ve defeated the game. Every boss. Every area. The whole DLC. All the side quests I could manage. The secret special double probation third ending. Now that’s on the “first play-through” (known as NG), I’m only a third through NG+ (a second harder go at it). But still, I think I know the game pretty well.
Let me put it out there, Bloodborne is the best console game I’ve played since The Last of Us, one of the best console games I’ve played in a long time, and one of the best games I’ve played since Diablo 3. It’s a masterpiece.
Perhaps my favorite thing about this game — and there a lot to love — is the setting, mythos, and lore. If you can handle it, this video gives a bit of a taste (SPOILERS ABOUND):
Besides being a great game, Bloodborne is a masterpiece of Lovecraftian horror. Many of you have probably never heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but along with Edgar Allan Poe, he is surely the most influential writer in the entire genre of horror. Enthroned in the genre not unlike J.R. Tolkien is for fantasy. Stephen King, no slouch himself, cites Lovecraft as his own greatest influence.
Bloodborne is like a love-letter to Lovecraft, reveling in a blend of “classic” (vaguely 19th and very early 20th century) influences, including in no small part Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the like. Every element of the game backs up this stylistic choice: The superb art design of world and characters both. The esoteric, cryptic, and complex mythology. The themes of forbidden knowledge explored and perverted. The creepy gorgeous music and terrifying sound effects. The influence of horrific powers from above/below/beyond. The moral ambiguity. Insanity. Dreams. Transformation and metamorphosis.
This is a dark dark game.
It’s just so deliciously creepy and mythological. Really. Dark Souls has a cool world feel and mythology, and there is significant overlap, but Bloodborne really takes it all to the next level, elevating itself above mere video game (and it rocks in that department) to become a genuine work of art. Surely no chipper happy landscape painting, but a dark broody bloody 1911 horror novel of a game.
It’s quite twisted and disturbing too, in a very gothic fantastic way. There are a lot of awful reoccurring themes: nightmare worlds, bad births, transformations into beast-hood, sadness, tragedy. It’s often slightly Japanese in flavor, which blending with Lovecraft’s very Western horror lends it even more of a sentimental exotic twist.
The above video is a good example. The “Orphan of Kos” is a horrifically difficult boss born from the corpse of its parent — a great one, one of the Cthulhu-inspired demon-gods. It fights you with its placenta as a weapon. Yuck! This fight was so hard too. It took me probably 12 hours to master.
Bloodborne is a very boss centric game. There are a lot of them, 18 in the normal game, 5 in the DLC, and at least 15 in the Chalice dungeons. They are all hard. All different.
Nothing about this game is very obvious. There is little hand holding and there are countless secret and optional areas, bosses, weapons, etc. However, taking the time to explore them is both satisfying and makes it easier — as you’ll need their powerups. Coming late to it, the DLC served as an extra optional area to mix in with the main game. It’s extremely well done, and perhaps even harder than the primary plot. It fits in seamlessly from a style point of view.
Which brings us to more fantastic points about Bloodborne, the gameplay. The sneaking around and the combat is really quite excellent. It’s extremely difficult, and very skill oriented, particularly the many many varied bosses. But the mechanics are intensely visceral and satisfying. The combinations of feel, exceptional animation, physics/collision driven hand to hand, and amazing art and sound design all serve to enhance the effect. Every strike is satisfying.
The controls are very deep and nuanced, with a ton of variety in weapons. As a control programmer I can really appreciate the effect and tuning that went into them. At times the game appears to read your mind, allowing you to combine combos and hit multiple opponents in the same strike — but really it reads subtle indications from your joystick movements during the long attacks to guide and influence the results.
It’s difficult, and I’m not that great at the highly precise art of parrying with the guns — catching the enemy at exactly the right moment as to stun them — but subtle mechanic changes have made the combat “easier” or at least less frustrating than that in the Souls games. Probably nothing as much as the “regain system” in which you can recover lost hit points by rapid retaliation.
The meta game is excellent too. At first I though it cryptic and the investments of blood echoes into levels of little apparent goal. However, I found that Bloodborne is actually a satisfyingly easy game to grind. Having trouble with a boss? Well, there are two options: read up on strategy and practice, or level up and practice — actually, you pretty much have to do both. The game doesn’t discourage a bit of grinding, and rarely makes it take that long. Plus the combat is so satisfying that even killing a room full of monsters over and over again is fun. 15 minutes of grinding will often earn you a level or two. Grinding up weapon upgrade “stones” and gems works pretty well too.
You have to choose how to invest in this game. There are only enough materials to upgrade a few weapons, so you need to choose which to use and spend both on them and on the appropriate character stats wisely.
There are always a lot of options to help you get past difficult spots. The first up being to watch some strategy videos, next are to tune your “runes”, weapons, outfit, and consumables for the fight. There is a lot of variety here. With weird powerups to exploit some vulnerability in most bosses. All challenging to learn and use. The “armor” is interesting. They aren’t radically different in power, and you can often wear what looks cool (and they do look cool — and different). For particular bosses and areas you can cobble together a set as best needed, for poison resistance, or fire, or frenzy.
I also love the way the world is so dense, but all twisted about on itself. Nearly every level has a door, gate, elevator, or ladder that cuts from the beginning to the end — after you sneak around and open it. It comes to feel progressively more accessible as you open up various connections. You learn it REALLY well too, because most areas require so many careful traversals in order to master. This is a game about learning the exact way to get through difficult challenges. It’s about mastery and careful progression.
A deliberate experience to be savored.
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Title: Bloodborne
System: PS4
Genre: ARPG
Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Date Played: January 2016
Rating: Awesome (although hard)
Many years back to played a couple days worth of Dark Souls, by this same developer. So when I was recently perusing some “best games of 2015” and came across the PS4 Bloodborne, a more updated take on the “mega-difficult action RPG genre” I decided to give it a try.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBGjx-4_R10
Although it might not be obvious, Bloodborne is really a spiritual descendant not only of those older “Souls” games (also by FromSoftware), but of Castlevania. It’s dark, gothic, and a creature hunting action roll playing game with lots of secrets.
Let’s talk about atmosphere. Bloodborne is Japanese Gothic, with a kind of vaguely european, vaguely 18th or 19th century vibe. Creepy cities, leather, top hats, blunderbusses, werwolves, and all that. It’s a gorgeous gorgeous kind of dark game. Excellent and moody visuals and soundscape.
At the mechanic level, Bloodborne is a sort of brawler. You fight usually two handed, with both a firearm in the left hand (generally a slow shooting blunderbuss or flintlock pistol) and a “trick weapon” in the right hand. The trick weapons switch between a smaller faster version and a bigger slower one. This switch can be done in the middle of combat. In fact, you can have two of each kind of weapon and switch those out too. Combat is careful and calculated, generally up close and personal, very visceral — not unlike a Final Fight style brawler. You dodge slow deadly blows, shoot guys to stun them, and then bash their faces in — combos abound. This refinement of the Souls hand-to-hand combat is faster and more furious. Different kinds of weapons and blows are satisfying. The monsters are varied, their animations clear and effective. A new mechanic where you can steal back lost hit points by attacking immediately after loosing them is very effective to encourage a more furious style of fight.
But all that is this micro-mechanic. The macro mechanics (i.e. the RPG element) are brutal and different (although less evil that the Souls games). Blood echoes are xp earned by killing monsters, but you loose them all when you die. However, some nearby monster picks them up, and if you return to kill him (after killing everything up to him again), you can regain them — unless you die a second time on route. This mechanic, combined with a ridiculous scarcity of continue points means that you spend a LONG time killing the same guys over and over, learning every corner of the world. In fact, you have to kill one of the hideous bosses to get a continue, and it took me over a week to do that. Long before that I pretty much learned the ins and outs of the first area (which has a choice of two bosses).
And you can spend your blood echoes on leveling up, or weapons, or leveling your weapons, which are all great ways to get better at the game. Too bad you can’t actually spend anything until you at least see the first boss — and this is quite brutally challenging without leveling up.
Nor did the game bother to explain this, or much else about its rather oddball but well crafted macro-mechanics. Bloodborne, like the Souls games is virtually free of the burden of documentation, walk-thru, or any of those niceties for coddled modern player. Instead it relies on painful trial and error — and no small amount of walkthrough video viewing.
It took me about a week to kill the first boss. By the time I even faced him seriously, he really wasn’t that hard, but my initial encounters at low level had been so punishing I took my time leveling and exploring. For while the monsters respawn every time you die or return to the leveling hub, rare items and “doors” are persistent. That is you can only collect an item once, and a door, once opened stays open. It is this last, since the level is folded around itself, that makes the long traversal through the level more manageable after awhile. For example, an initially locked gate near the checkpoint, when unlocked from the back allows “quick” (killing “only” 11 monster) access to the first boss.
And while one might think that slinking around killing the same monsters over and over again would be boring, the addictive rhythm to the combat and the slow progress in both leveling and skill makes it all quite rewarding — if dastardly difficult.
All ARPGs involve a grind. Diablo 3, one of my favorites, is nothing but grind. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In Diablo, you just slay slay with abandon in order to earn xp and small changes at gear upgrades. In Bloodborne, you pick your way through carefully, for the consequences of death are much sharper. Still, fundamentally you kill monsters, collect XP, and improve your character for more more monster killing. Such is the name of the game.
More thoughts to come after I progress…
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The original cover
In this case it’s literally a golden oldie, as the cartridge was gold (at least the earliest ones). And I still have that yellowing piece of plastic in my “cart box” but I didn’t actually need it this time (I sold my NES years ago anyway). This time, I booted the classic up on OpenEmu, an awesome new mac 8 and 16 bit emulator with masterly emulations of all the great 80s and early 90s systems (Gameboy, NES, SNES, Genesis, etc). Hey, and it’s fair use, because I did keep that cartridge (along with my other favorites).
For good reason, as The Legend of Zelda is one of the all time greats. A classic console game. A classic RPG. First in a legendary (haha) series and really one of the best games of all time, particularly when you place it into its context in the history of video games. Oh, and this time, I played it with my 5 year-old son. He mostly consulted from the arm of the chair (as the game is pretty hard), but he did love it, begging to play it day-in and day-out.
First a note on the emulation: Pretty much pitch perfect. I plugged a PS3 joypad into the Mac and the game looked, felt, and sounded exactly as it always did. The joypad controls are basically the same as a NES pad (except you don’t get that awful thumb burn the sharp plastic on the original led to). This is essential as emulated games require the right kind of controller. Console and arcade games are programmed for specific controllers — I should know, having shipped 9 of them! — and they just don’t play right unless the hardware/software pairing is nearly exact. The emulator also allows you to save your state, which isn’t necessary with Zelda, as it has a battery backup (also emulated), but certainly helps with other games.
The original gold NES cart
So how was it? Surprisingly, hardly dated at all. Fantasy is my favorite genre, hell, I convinced my dad to buy the computer so I could write a D&D magnum opus. And early games like Wizardry, Alkabeth, and Ultima I, were among my computer favorites. Adventure (the original Atari 2600 cart game) was another old favorite and is the clear progenitor to Zelda. This notion of video game pedigree has long been of interest to me. Like any other human art, games borrow from those who came before. And there’s nothing wrong with this. To claim that Zelda is any less a work of genius because it shares elements with earlier fantasy games is pure hogwash. The good ones integrate and add to the oeuvre. We will call the Adventure/Zelda school, which also includes arcade game Venture and who knows how many others, the action RPG.
The Zelda “stats screen” was extensive for the time
Zelda doesn’t have character stats or experience like Ultima and Wizardry (which borrow more heavily from D&D), but it does have a fantasy setting an an upgradable character. In fact, one of Zelda’s cooler features is its large number of items/powerups. You can up Link’s hit points (hearts), collect three swords, 2-3 shields, and a bevy of rings, bows, magic wands, and other magic items. I would argue that even a modern action dungeon crawler like Diablo III is a clear Zelda descendant.
The monstrous outside world
What Zelda does have is a big outside world, nine (x2 sorta) sprawling dungeons, a host of enemies, lots of secrets, and a tough but addictive joypad-based action gameplay. The map is positively gimongous by the standards of 1986. And this is many ways in which the gap between Adventure and Zelda is huge. Not only are there a lot of screens, but they actually look like something (Adventure‘s graphics are notoriously simplistic). The above map is comprised of 16×8 screens, each a bit different. The dungeons and various secret entrances and caves are tucked all over the place.
A typical outside screen, complete with enemies and cave
Wandering the outside takes up a good amount of time, with Link traversing between various dungeons and hunting for secrets. The outdoor enemies are tough at the start of the game, but easy enough once Link has powered up with the Blue Ring, Magic Shield, and some sort of distance weapon (the magic wand being one of the better ones). This brings me to one of Zelda’s design quirks. As the game progresses you increase the number of hearts (hit points), but when you die you always reset to three filled hearts. This necessitates visiting either a fairy or farming the monsters for hearts to reach full heath (often needed to get through a dungeon). And even odder by today’s standards, is the fact that only at full health can you fire the “beam sword” (launch your sword across the screen). This effectively makes the game “harder” when you’ve been hit, which goes against modern game design, but was typical of the more hardcore spirit of yesteryear. In fact, this whole setup isn’t so different from the typical arcade one in which you power up a life (typical in shooters like R-Type or even pseudo action RPG / platformer Ghouls and Ghosts). Zelda can be fairly unforgiving. The dpad control is a bit squirrelly, and the slightest bump against a foe or his flickery projectiles can cost you a heart (and your precious beam sword). It rewards patience and keeping your distance. Enemies randomly drop various gems (rupees), hearts, fairies, bombs, and the like. As my son put it, they can be “mean and stingy” (meaning that the RNG can really make or break you).
Fairy, how I love thee
This also brings me to one of Zelda’s more peculiar design decisions. The world is littered with difficult to locate “secrets.” These stairs, caves, and the like are hidden behind indistinguishable spots all over the world that need to be bombed or “flamed” open. Inside are various powerups, vendors, quest items, and even dungeons. How the hell any “real” player (unaided) is supposed to find these? I have no idea. Today, in the age of the internet, one just uses a handy guide like this one. But in the 80s? We had to rely on Nintendo Power Magazine! This was one of Ninetendo’s dirty marketing tricks back then. Pretty much, to play these games, you had to have the right issue of Nintendo Power (with its dedicated hint guides). They used to sell millions of issues a month! I also read that producer and all around genius Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to create a game in which players had to “communicate and collaborate.” Well, I guess he did.
A typical dungeon room. Features: top door locked until all monsters are dead, left door locked with key, right wall busted open with bomb, boomerang hurling enemies
The dungeons are where most of the real difficulty is. Dying here brings you back to the start, but you keep anything you have acquired. Bombed out walls stay bombed, but monsters often/sometimes respawn. The problem is, you have to chose between slogging through another try with three hearts or heading out into the world to farm hearts, which will result in full respawns inside the dungeon. Later in the game judicious purchases of healing food and help here. Enemy difficulty is highly variable and while it does progress as you move through the game, it isn’t linear. Certain nasties like the Darknuts (can only be hit from behind/side) and the ghosts are far harder than others. The Like-Likes are positively mean, as they can steal your shield. Different rooms have different combinations and some can be quite frustrating (lots of Darknuts at the same time as fireball spitters!). Each dungeon has 1-2 magic items to acquire plus a compass and a map (which help fill in that screen in the upper left). At the end is a final boss, another heart container, and part of the “Triforce” (which although triangular, contains 8 pieces, so perhaps “Octforce” would have been a better name).
This hydra boss is typical
Each dungeon has a boss at the end. Each is seemingly difficult but usually possesses a “weakness” that while not always obvious, makes them fairly trivial. Some are vulnerable at different times or to different weapons (usually found in their own dungeon). This hydra guy above is more technique based, you have to strike each head 2-4 times (without getting hit by the fireballs). The earlier heads will “spin off” and attack you (just dodge them). Killing the last head will slay it. Basically, it’s all about the dodge and strike. Some bosses return in later dungeons as “sub bosses” with slightly different traits.
This about sums up the plot
The game is light on plot: reassemble the Triforce, rescue the Princess Zelda, and save Hyrule. Better barely no plot than a dumb one that rubs itself in your face! Some of the messages along the way include bonus misspellings courtesy of their translation from the Japanese. Oh so fun!
All in all, Zelda remains intensely playable. While it might be a fairly frustrating at times, it’s never so hard that putting it aside for a couple hours doesn’t lead to immediate progress on returning. This is a pretty big game with a ton of variety, and it’s all packed into 128kb!! Yeah, that’s right, about the size of one highly compressed small internet jpeg ! Code, music, art, everything. And it was a big cart at the time, costing around $90-100 1986 dollars! Now it’s about the size of the average email in my inbox. There is even a “second quest” in which you can replay the game with a slightly different layout and higher difficulty.
Awesome game and a seminal mark in the history of the fantasy RPG. Even WOW owes a debt to Zelda.
My 5 year-old son Alex would like to offer his own review (typed completely verbatim):
When you play Legend of Zelda you go to a first dungeon, a second dungeon, a third dungeon, a fourth dungeon, a fifth dungeon, a sixth dungeon, a seventh dungeon, an eighth dungeon, a ninth dungeon and then you win the game. You might run into big bosses and scary Darknuts and ghosts and bats and blobs and bombs. And sometimes you can bomb a secret a door and collect keys and gems and hearts. Watch out to get no hearts or you start all over again. But after you finish the whole game on the nine dungeons you unlock the queen (Princess Zelda). And you won the game!
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Title: The Last of Us
Genre: Zombie / Survival / 3rd person shooter
Played: June 15-25, 2013
Summary: Masterpiece (even if I weren’t biased)
With The Last of Us, the trajectory Naughty Dog has been pursuing for over a decade reaches for and achieves new heights. This synergy of world building, gameplay integration, emersion, and story telling really began with Jak & Daxter. True, with Crash Bandicoot, we made inroads in all but the last (anyone remember the “Crash, can you find my battery?” plot of Crash 2?). Crash focused on integrating addictive gameplay with a consistent, coherent, and lavishly produced setting (I’ll include character in this setting), but it didn’t have any true story or drama.
The Jak franchise introduced a more elaborate narrative and characters with more complexity, particularly in Jak 2 where we started integrating the cinematic segments in a more interwoven fashion. The Uncharted franchise took this to new levels, essentially becoming Indiana Jones type movies that you played, but TLOU climbs yet another step further, delivering characters you care about , true drama, and intense cinematic language while preserving a completely coherent style and intense gameplay. Everything about the game serves to reinforce the overall tone: the pathos of two people trying to heal in the face of great horror.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpdSVF_k_w]The art design is fabulous. Again, even though the Art Director (Erick Pangilinan) is one of my best friends (obviously biasing me) this is objectively true. It’s certainly one of the best looking games to date. There is a deliberate choice to heavily light — stylistically overlight — the entire game. While there exist some dark underground parts, for the most part, the lighting is luminous. Intense white light (think Minority Report) starkly bathes this ruined vision of America. No gloriously decayed texture is left hidden. Closeups of characters show every stain and frayed thread in clothes worn for months (perhaps years?). This is a world of contrast. Lush greenery has reclaimed much of the urban landscape, yet crumbled concrete, rusted steel, and burned out cars litter the scenery. As do sordid blood stains and desiccated corpses. There is a sense here of great violence, and desperation, much of it in the past. Little details abound. Shrines to dead loved ones. A tiny grave marked with a teddy bear. Family photos. Rarely does it look cloned or stamped (although that door with the weird seal is everywhere) . Nor, despite a strong and coherent visual style, is it repetitive. As we move from the Northeast to the Heartland to the Mountains the scenery — and even the seasons — keep changing. Weather is used to great effect. The rain in early Boston sequences is stunning, as is the chilling lakeside blizzard late in the game’s second act.
The view took my breath away
The minimalist string music compounds the game’s haunting atmosphere. While the game is full of detail, it’s in the broad sense, fairly stark — as the bulk of the scenery is ruined and deserted. This lends the whole world a quality of emptiness reinforced by the matching sonic starkness. The sound effects are harsh and solidly naturalistic, emphasizing both the natural (bird noises) and the discordant tone of decayed materials (like rusted garage doors opening). To this background soundscape is added the grim punctuation of the combat sounds. Every grunt, sneaker squeak, bolt action, and gurgling last breath is vividly apparent.
There is a minimalism to the interface that fits with the overall tone. The title screen is a single frozen camera shot of a window. The menus are barely styled and contain only exactly what they need. The art is simple and iconic. Not only does this work from a stylistic point of view, enhancing the serious tone of the game, but the controls are direct and to the point, easy to use, preventing you from getting distracted by mechanics. With TLOU, it’s the story and characters that matter, not the mechanics of saving a game. Many elements traditional in modern titles are toned down or absent. Achievements? Not part of this world. Secret collectables? The game has them — in the form of Firefly pendants — but they are understated mementos of the dead, not the bombastic collectables typical of the genre.
Minimalist interface
Technically the engine steps out of the limelight and just delivers — and delivers in spades. Bugs are minor and few and far between. I never crashed or got stuck. There are some frame rate problems in the biggest and widest of shots (and they do look gorgeous) or sometimes with the flashlight or “hearing mode,” but this never hurts the gameplay. I noticed a couple extremely minor graphical glitches. Mostly stuff just works, often combining multiple disciplines in classic Naughty Dog brilliance. The animation, particularly in interaction with the backgrounds and other characters, is a triumph of both art and programming. It’s perhaps the slickest, most lifelike, ever used in a game. The AI is first rate. The environments feel wide open and vast, and they have a certain non linearity, yet because of the nature of the game you must be contained, and it’s done very artfully. Rubble fills stairwells, broken down vehicles block alleys, collapsed bridges deter overzealous exploration. So much of what makes this game look so great is the amazing synergy between art and tech. The rain, the water, the snow, the glowing light effects, the realistic shadowing and flashlight. It’s all solidly in both realms.
Hunger games much?
Different elements of the gameplay work well together. The game’s phenomenal pacing is made up of story cuts, intense combat, sneaking, and scavenging. This last, which is surprisingly satisfying, is sometimes done in the heat of battle — or at least when hiding from deadly foes and desperately looking to bolster ones supplies — and sometimes an end all onto itself. These quieter moments, after a brace of nasties are defeated, or in an abandoned section of city, are welcome relief. The game rarely has enemies sneak up on you once a section has been identified as safe, so these provide a nice break in the tension. The crafting itself is simple. There are a 4-5 resources and similar construction costs for pairs of items. Healthpacks and molotov cocktails share resources, as do shivs and weapon enhancements. Everything is in short supply and desperately useful. Pills can be used to upgrade your character, but you must chose in which manner. Spare parts upgrade guns and the like. The weapons are nicely differentiated, each with it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and they get noticeably better when upgraded. The shortage of ammo always prevents any weapon from being overpowering. Even the assault riffle, gained in the last level, isn’t too fearsome against your body armored opponents.
I dare you to put one of these in your bedroom
Let’s discuss the gameplay. Technically TLOU is a 3rd person shooter, but it makes a number of stylistic alterations in service of mood that completely alter the feel. This isn’t your typical shooter where ammunition is plentiful, the character sponges up bullets, and healing is easy. You can only survive a handful of hits. The arrival of more than 2-3 mobs in close proximity is a near certain recipe for death. The healthpacks (potions) take some time to apply and are in short supply. Joel and Ellie do a lot of creeping around in the shadows. The key here is to avoid agroing too many mobs, and when you do, to lose them by getting out of the way. A number of mechanics serve this end.
There are a lot of shadows. Counters and obstacles are conveniently crouching height (this rarely looks forced). You can creep around fairly rapidly. Humans can see and often probe the darkness with flashlights. The infected are generally blind (or crazy) and so are easier to sneak up on — but clickers and bloaters are tough and can kill you in one bite. Joel (and Ellie) have quite the sense of hearing and can “hear” through nearby walls to spot the outlines of enemies. This is a little gamey, and the mobs apparently can’t do it, but in practice works quite well. One of the most effective strategies, particularly with the infected, is to stay in stealth at all costs. There are a couple of ways to kill silently (more or less). Humans and runners can be strangled or knifed (which wears out your blades but is quicker). The bow can be used to silently kill most opponents at a distance and if you’re lucky, you won’t break your arrows. Overall it is deeply fulfilling to wipe out a whole crew without them ever seeing you. This often requires replaying the section several times to learn the layout and careful looting of every possible supply.
Speaking of which, the looting, scavenging, and crafting mechanic is awesome. Everything is so scarce, ammo so valuable, and everything you craft so useful that a few items easily make the difference between life and death. It’s also extremely satisfying to evade some opponents, sneak around, craft an extra shiv or health pack and then kill them. You can augment the melee weapons to make them kill faster (very useful as while melee is satisfying, should a second or third mob show up while you are pummeling someone, it’s bad news). You can build shivs (essential for fast silent kills, surviving clickers, opening secret doors) or healthpacks or a number of bombs. The bombs come in three types. Molotovs, nailbombs, and smokebombs. Each have their use. The fire is great against infected. The nailbombs can be thrown OR left around as mines. I didn’t appreciate the smokebombs until near the end of the game, but they create a kind of dead zone that the human mobs won’t fire into and which can be used to kill them. Used sequentially and in tandem with the flame thrower they make a lethal combination.
Moments like these are genuinely touching
I have a few quibbles. The aiming can be difficult at times, particularly until you upgrade “weapon shake.” It’s few hard to land a head shot (or even sometimes a shot) before someone shoots you. When opponents are behind you or off to the side it can be frustrating to try to turn and strike them. There is some kind of quick turn around move. I didn’t master it (but should have). Some sections with lots of enemies are quite hard. There appears to be at least a bit of DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment) to help you get by if you die a lot in one spot. Actually fighting bloaters and particularly bloaters together with clickers can be VERY hard.
I’m betting TLOU required A LOT of tuning to reach its current fun factor, as it would be easy for gameplay involving so much hiding, creeping, and dying to be boring — but the elements combine to make it really fun. After the first chapter I learned to become methodical and search every corner for loot. Instead of being tedious, this served as a break from the tension and turned out to be incredibly satisfying. The melee is extremely graphic with a good amount of variety. It’s quite creepy hearing a guard gurgle as you strangle him or slamming an infected in the neck with a baseball bat “augmented” with taped on scissors. Everything serves the horrifying mood.
Uh oh!
And mood is one of the game’s greatest strengths. TLOU draws from nearly every post apocalyptic source and builds trope after trope into a satisfying, coherent, and perhaps more realistic whole. It’s prettier and less hopeless than The Road — and considerably more believable. No film could ever offer this scope. The sets (or CGI) would be far too expensive, the cast too enormous. Yet TLOU also strives to compete with film in terms of emotional engagement and character development. I’d argue it succeeds.
The longer form (it took me 18 hours to play through on normal difficulty) helps with the character part. I’m becoming of the increasing opinion that film is actually an unsatisfying format — offering far too little depth, particularly in this day and age when the 2-3 hours are mostly consumed by overlong effects driven fights. Some of TLOU’s vignettes should come off as forced, as they are drawn directly from tropes and fairly straightforward. One that comes to mind is when the hunter humvee murders two innocents while a hiding Joel and Ellie watch. However, in the context of the game and characters it was surprisingly effective. TLOU is a clear case where the whole transcends the sum of the parts. And hell, a lot of the parts are pretty damn good.
Can we say creepy?
Neil Druckmann (who I hired as a promising intern programmer a whole career ago) turns out an emotional script. Again, it draws extremely heavily from tropes. Everything any post apocalyptic survival story has ever had is here: hunters, cannibals, resistance leaders, a cure, friends who turn (into zombies), reversals, quarantine zones, etc. But in moments little and big the relationship between Joel and Ellie builds — so much so that the little downtime conversations are real gems. By the time the Pittsburg chapter concludes, Ellie becomes in your head someone really worth fighting for — and the remainder of the game — wow, it really delivers. I often feel (reading or watching) that the second half lets me down. Good as the first half of TLOU is, the second is several times better.
Really notable for me was the entire “winter” sequence. Coming out of a really emotional turn in Colorado TLOU employs cinematic language and plotting in a highly effective way. So much do we care for the characters, and so pretty is the game, that it manages to make 10 minutes of trudging through the snow exhilarating! And that’s only the beginning. I really liked the way the game cut back and forth between playable Joel and Ellie as it told the story from both perspectives. Although, I have a slight nitpick with the “arc” of the section villain, who starts out with some complexity and sympathy and turns monster without too much explanation. But such is the momentum of this story that it sails right over speed-bumps like this.
So basically, if you care about video games at all, play The Last of Us.
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I was recently asked a couple of questions about the early days of Playstation 2 development…
My first dev unit looked more or less like this
Can you remember your first reaction when you saw the PS2 for the first time?
My first PS2 glimpse was hardly typical. In the spring of 1999, I had to go down to LAX and claim my prototype unit. It was one of the first to leave Japan (a few weeks earlier we had sent an employee to Tokyo to get one and he’d been turned back at the airport because the customs people thought it might be a weapons computer!). It took several hours of walking paperwork around freight offices behind the airport to claim my prize. When I did, I dug through the giant crate of peanuts to uncover a handmade aluminum cube about 18 inches square, filled with wire wrapped circuit boards. It smelled like ozone. The shell was a bit bent in transit and I was terrified it wouldn’t work. But it did.
What most impressed you technically when you started to work with PS2?
At first, the thing was a beast. Well, later it was still a beast. But what was really impressive once you got into it was how much floating point vector math you could do on the vector units if you took the time to program them. This was HARD. Seriously HARD, but the things worked all from on chip memory and were ridiculously powerful for the time.
Did you notice any wider changes to gaming, culturally for example, as a result of the PS2’s impact?
The PS2 had sufficient horsepower to make games look fairly realistic. You could actually put motion captured human models in a game and have them look okay. On the PS1, this was hopeless. Take a look at how blocky Lara Croft was back in the day and you’ll see what I mean. The ability to have human characters drove the whole style of games in a much more realistic and film-like direction. Before that, games were much more cartoon in style.
The more official dev unit that came many months later
What one, stand-out factor do you think helped PS2 become so successful?
It was small. It played DVDs. The price was reasonable, and the games rocked.
What do you think was PS2’s most technically accomplished or innovative game and why?
I’d say that the Jak & Daxter games were certainly among the most technically accomplished. Our engine was really customized for the machine, and it was a machine that really rewarded custom design. The architecture wasn’t like anything else. But we were evolutionary in game design and there were certainly games that innovated more in genre. The PS2’s middle and late periods brought some really innovative and creative games like Katamari Damacy, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Okami.
What do you think will be PS2’s lasting legacy?
I think the Playstation in general, and the PS2 in particular, really brought video games out of the Mario/Zelda kiddie style and into direct parity with the other broad entertainment mediums like film. The stylistic line between an effects laden blockbuster and a big video game is very thin. There’s even been a lot of back-flow as video game sensibilities push into other mediums.
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Naughty Dog and Sony released an awesome “red band” (uncensored) trailer for their upcoming post apocalyptic survival game, The Last of Us:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4pYIsaZqE0]Looking cool! Damn, those people look realistic.
Find the previous batch of teasers here.
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Yes I know, they’re “infected”, but name change or no, it’s still Zombie Time! Here is a recent video with some infected – enjoy!
and, even better, this Story Trailer:
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The collector’s edition box
…continued from my coverage of the WOW Burning Crusade endgame.
The months leading up to the launch of Wrath of the Lich King were very exciting for me. First of all, my son was about to be born — in fact, he was scheduled to arrive just days after LK! And on a WOW front, Blizzard pushed the 3.0.x series of patches 4-6 weeks in advance of the expansion itself.
Patch 3.0.x introduced the most sweeping changes of any infrastructure patch yet — and a lot of it was content of a sort. We got the usual full reworking of the classes and talent trees. This didn’t itself add any content, but yet it did. One consequence was a substantial increase in average dps output. All of a sudden, impossible raid bosses were now difficult… but doable. Our guild, which previously could kill Arche and Illidan on a good night, starting trouncing them and moving through Sunwell.
Just as significant, was the brand new achievement system. Blizzard hardly invented achievements, but in their usual fashion, took what other did and did it better. The WOW achievement system launched with an overwhelming array of achievements and meta-achievements (more than 500). These didn’t give you any in-game advantage, but they sure felt cool and opened up fun vanity awards such as pets, mounts, and titles.
Even before LK itself shipped, I spent countless hours grinding out certainly achievement types. I’m a completist (i.e. type A) and I thought I’d knocked off almost every quest in Azeroth. Well, it still took me about three weeks to complete the Azeroth and Outland sections of Loremaster (an achievement and title awarded for doing every quest in the game).
The patch also moved pets, mounts, and currencies into new interface tabs. This opened up a lot of bag space and made it reasonable to invest heavily in collecting the cute little beasties. I was already a bit of a pet collector, but in the month or so before LK went nuts with grinding out every cool pet I could. Unless the grind was particularly horrific (Hyacinth Macaw), I got it. This included rarities like the Black Tabby Cat and Disgusting Oozeling. I always had the most pets of anyone I knew.
One of the great things about the achievement system was that it opened up countless different avenues of time investiture to choose from. I worked on questing, dungeons, seasonal events, and pets. Others might have worked on PVP, reputation, or whatever. Every aspect of the game was covered and it brought new life into many of them.
WOW Achievements
Patch 3.0.x shipped during the busy WOW holiday season that includes Brew Fest, Hallows Eve, Winter’s Veil etc. In the Vanilla period, I treated holidays as curious decoration. A few minutes doing the Winter’s Veil chains in 2005 showed them to yield… pretty much nothing and that was the last of it.
During Burning Crusade, Blizzard introduced the first holiday boss, the Headless Horseman. Not only was he a fun new boss, but he dropped a bit of epic loot. Serious toons like my Warlock had much better gear anyway, but he was great for grabbing a good ring for your alt. He was so popular that the Dire Brew boss, Ahune, and the Valentine’s boss soon followed.
But achievements took the holidays to a new level. They provided a road map of weird activities during each holiday. And if you did everything for the holiday, you got a title. And, even better, if you did everything for every holiday (which took a year) you could earn a 310% speed special purple dragon mount! At the time, these fast mounts were very hard to come by. Usually only the most hardcore raiders could hope to earn one.
So that Halloween I tried (successfully) to finish the holiday meta, which was in those days pretty f**king stressful. Blizzard has since made them much easier, but that first year there were some achievements that required a lot of luck and a lot of grinding. To maximize your odds, you had to really knock everything out as soon as you could during the holiday in case there was some troublesome random number based task. Also, at the beginning of the holiday, the crowds generally made most things easier. And there were some serious crowds. The holidays were never too popular before, but the rush to earn the achievements brought out a serious frenzy of players.
The Headless Horseman: Holiday boss extroidnaire
Burning Crusade was so cool that I was very excited for Lich King. Plus, the trailer was badass. I even waited outside at midnight to buy my pre-ordered Collector’s Edition. This was the last time I bothered. I still got CEs (for the pets) but I just ordered them from Amazon and waited the extra 12 hours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMRhnC4-QGQ
I bought a new Macbook Pro a couple weeks before just to make sure I could play in the hospital with my tired wife and freshly minted son. This actually worked pretty well, newborns sleep a lot. 🙂
Anyway: the endgame.
Historically, dungeons made up the bulk of early endgame play. I dinged level 80 and some guildies invited me into a Heroic. Yeah, that’s right. No keys. No attunement. No grinding to Revered reputation. Just hop right in… and crush the dungeon in 20-30 minutes!
Huh? Not only were dungeons short, which was obvious even while leveling, but even the Heroics were incredibly easy. I never ran a single level 80 non-heroic instance. There was no need. Your quest gear would easily carry you in Heroics, and the rewards were much better. Better gear, more rep, and more badges (more on that later). Crowd control was completely useless. Pats? Who cares? The tank just grabbed a pile of mobs, you nuked them down, repeat.
A few specific fights were kinda hard at the beginning of the expansion: Skadi in Utgrade Pinnacle, and the final bosses of Oculus and Halls of Lightning. As a consequence, those last two were the least popular instances.
For those that liked a challenge, every dungeon had 2-4 funky achievements that involved weird ways of beating bosses. Some were quite hard and almost all required a group that played together regularly. Getting all these achievements earned you a cool mount and provided quite a time sink for the dedicated few.
LK took the badge system developed in BC to a whole new level. It introduced two (soon to grow to four, then six) badge currencies for PVE alone. Badges of Heroism came from 5 man Heroics and 10 man raids and Badges of Valor from 25 man raids. Both allowed the purchase of good endgame gear. The lower currency epics were the same grade as the heroic epics. The better currency similar to the first tier of 25 man raiding.
In practice, this meant that you wanted lots and lots of badges at first. For several weeks, even Heroism badges were useful. Soon enough, at least for classes with damage only specs, you wouldn’t need those so much (except maybe for the new Heirloom gear). But Valor badges, you could always use those. And even the heroics let you earn two of those a day by running the “daily dungeon.”
All of this meant that it was advantageous to run 5 man dungeons long after you needed anything the dungeons themselves dropped. As they were easy to begin with and most players out-geared them rapidly, they became mindless zergs (see below).
The currency tab: have a few badge types!
LK gave us more reputations than ever. Most zones had one. Some of these had small clusters of repetitive daily quests you could use to grind to exalted. Those with quests mostly yielded cosmetic or profession benefits. The grinds were fairly short, usually around 2 weeks.
While in BC each dungeon yielded a specific rep, LK instituted tabards that allowed you to earn the rep of your choice while running Heroics. This meant that it was only a matter of time before you brought all tabard reps to exalted, but usually, by the time it happened, you didn’t need much they had to offer. Each rep did have an epic or two, and so the first couple were useful, particularly if they had dailies to speed up the process.
Professions, both of the crafting sort and the basic cooking and fishing, usually each got a single daily quest. Instead of having recipes drop all over the world randomly, the were usually sold by the profession vendor in exchange for a new currency given by the profession daily. So, for cooking, you ran your quick little daily, and every couple of days, bought a new recipe. This all made it easier and more predictable to collect your patterns, but it also took most of the excitement out of the process.
Overall, after about a month, you were done with the dailies (other than the daily dungeon).
The “hub” (or home town) of the Oracles faction
At launch, LK was a little shy on raid content. It gave us two single boss raids: Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity and one big one. Naxxramas 2.0 had 15 bosses!
These three raids could be run either in 10 man or 25 man configurations. You could run both each week if you liked. I was never much for 10 man because the loot was considerably worse and they dropped the lower badge type (which I always had in excess). 10 man was a bit easier for most fights. OS was very easy normally (there was a progressive way to make it harder) and The Eye was harder, but not too hard. Both were short.
Even Naxx was tuned way easier than previous raids. But it was long. At this stage, Naxx 25 held a lot of good gear, but it quickly became quite a slog, particularly if you ran BOTH the 10 man and 25 man versions. It only took our guild about a month to have it on farm (where every boss died every week). Long before the next raid tier launched, we were pretty darn sick of Naxx. The revised Vanilla design was still excellent, and few players had seen the instance the first time around, but still, it felt a little lazy. Even the gear looked the same (although it was updated for level 80)!
The clever achievements did add a little fun. Title based ones like “The Undying” (where you cleared Naxx without any deaths) were very popular among the skilled.
Naxxramas 2.0: back for more ghoulish fun
In BC, although tedious, PVP was a good way to progress your PVE game. LK saw the introduction of gear that was so heavily slanted toward PVP as to be nearly useless in PVE (compared to easy to get badge gear). This, combined with crazy battleground fatigue from BC, insured I never ran a battleground during the whole of LK (except for a few holiday achievements).
One exception was Wintergrasp, the new world PVP zone. Now, I couldn’t have cared less about WG itself, and found it pretty boring. But it was useful to run it occasionally so as to be in the right place at the right time to catch a group for the new PVP raid instance. This dungeon, located under WG keep, was available to the faction that most recently won the zone and contained at first one, then with each new tier, more raid bosses. These bosses were very easy, trivial to PUG, and dropped a mix of PVE and PVP gear, including the pants and gloves from each tier!
Getting lucky here was an easy way to save badges or DKP (Dragon Kill Points used to partition guild loot).
Archavon: PVP/PVE loot piñata waiting for the slaughter
The early raids were easy by design. Blizzard wanted a wider range of players to experience the raiding content. But OS had an unusual mechanic for making it harder. You could kill Sartharion’s 3 drakes before the boss, and take him down easy, or you could leave up one, two, or three drakes. For each extra drake you fought at the same time as the boss, the loot was better. This itself didn’t make much of a gearing difference, but if you killed him with all three drakes up (3D) you got an elitist title and a chance at a cool specialty mount.
In the spring of 2009, when the next big raid, Ulduar, shipped, it took hard modes a step further. Ulduar was another giant raid with 14 bosses. It was long, involved, and pretty hard even normally. At least, the last third was. Some people loved it. I thought it was too big and took too long. And I really wasn’t a fan of the first boss’s tedious vehicle mechanic. A few of the bosses also had unusual “hard modes” like OS where you could trigger a different, much much harder fight. We attempted these a number of times but our guild only really managed hard modes on Flame Leviathan and XT-002. The hard modes dropped gear a half tier better.
If you more or less did all of these hard modes you could open up Algalon, and extra boss who was really cool, and really really hard. You only had an hour a week to fight him too, but killing him awarded a highly prestigious title.
Ulduar was home to some crazy-ass fights
During the LK period, Blizzard experimented with the badge system. At first, you had to manually loot your badges off bosses. It was easy to forget, and so they then added an “auto loot” that forced them into your bag. This worked, but was buggy and often caused server instabilities. Later, they moved the badges from your bags into a special currency section and added a system by which they would be automatically credited as soon as the boss was downed. This included a system to issue rewards when the final boss of a dungeon was cleared.
Additionally, as each successive raiding tier was released, it became necessary to make available new currencies. Players would have accumulated surplus badges in the older tiers, and to keep things fair they introduced new pairs of currencies (one for dungeons and 10 man and one for 25 man). Limited means of down converting newer currencies into older ones were experimented with. By the end of the expansion this became an unwieldy collection of 6-8 different badge currencies just for LK, so while the basic scheme was to be retained in Cataclysm, some cleanups were in order.
Overall, the badge system did remove some of the frustration inherent in the random nature of dropped loot. It helped you make steady progress regardless of your raiding situation. In the Vanilla/BC days this had been vastly more susceptible to your spec and how often your guild ran farm content. If you played an “easy to gear” spec like Holy Paladin (who has healing plate all to itself) previous tier or farm instances would literally shower you with loot. In the days when a Holy Pally could heal effectively in any armor type, you could passably gear one in just a run or two of a big instance like Kara or Naxx if other healers didn’t need the loot.
Summer saw another interim patch with a new rep, a new daily quest hub, a new 5 man, a revised level 80 version of Ony, and a new mid-sized raid. Grinding the rep mostly got you cosmetic gains again, but the new 5 man was useful in gearing alts as it dropped entry level epics very easily. Both the 5 man and the raid were lazy designs and took place inside the same basic arena map. You fought a series of bosses with no trash.
Lazy and uninspired as this was, it was efficient gearing wise.
The raid, Trial of the Crusader, had 5 bosses and could be run in 30-40 minutes. Blizzard tried something new with raid difficulty variations. TOC had 4 modes: 10 man, 25 man, 10 man heroic, and 25 man heroic. You could run all four modes every week! Because of the complex array of gear levels in Ulduar (10 man, 25 man, and their respective hard modes ranged from 213 – 239) there was rapid gear inflation going into TOC. 10 man was 232, 10 man heroic and 25 man 245, and 25 man heroic 258.
This all meant that almost anything from TOC was better than Ulduar (and of course Naxx and the like). 25 man regular was pretty easy and its 245 stuff was even better than Algalon loot. The place was fast and pretty easy. 10 man heroic wasn’t even THAT hard once you had 25 man gear. 25 man heroic was pretty hard, but not crazy.
All in all, a total loot fest that invalidated all the previous LK raiding content. It was also mind numbing because there was incentive to run it on 3-4 modes per week. Sometimes I’d run all four in one day, then switch over to an alt and run a few more! Everyone was very rapidly and totally burned out on the place. Good thing there wasn’t any trash.
Trial of the Crusader: all bosses, all the time, four times a week!
The penultimate major patch of LK introduced a lot of content. The giant Ice Crown Citadel raid opened along with three new 5 man dungeons. These followed the model set by the Isle of Quel’Danas in BC and were both more difficult and dropped far better loot. In fact, they dropped 232 in Heroic, which was equivalent to TOC 10 man. This continued to devalue loot from the original dungeons and first two tiers of raiding (Naxx and Uld). You could gear new tunes very quickly and effectively in 232 and 245 by a combination of these new dungeons and TOC farm runs.
Which prepared you well to run ICC for 258 and 264 loot. The first four bosses of ICC were very easy and the instance opened in waves. Average gear levels surged. Still, the middle and ending ICC bosses were not so easy and again separated out the solid and just average guilds. This gigantic instance was to be the main source of endgame raiding for the next year to come. The only exception was a one boss side raid that came in Spring of 2010. After a few months of endlessly repeating ICC many players moved on to alts or other games.
The creative hard modes of Ulduar must have required too much developer effort and constraint, so ICC retained the preselected Heroic mode like TOC, but Blizzard collapsed the normal and Heroic raid lockouts so you could run it at most twice on one character. This manual switch between difficulties is still the case today in Mists of Pandaria.
Icecrown Citadel looms in the background
LK also introduced Dual Specialization. This continued Blizzard’s push toward quicker and easier by allowing your character to have two entirely different talent/action bar/glyph setups. This was most useful for tanks and healers as they could split between a raid and farming spec. Die hard PVP players could also split that way. For PVE only dps classes like my Warlock it was a nicety, but not essential. Still, it supported the varied play-style agenda that Blizzard had and has been pushing.
The ICC patch also brought one of the biggest changes to date: the dungeon finder. Previously, to run a 5 man dungeon, players had to assemble a group manually via global chat channels (idiotically confined to capital cities), all players came from the same server, and had to journey across the world to the instance. Once three arrived, it was possible to summon the other two.
The dungeon finder allowed players to queue for a category or specific instance and then instantly teleport into the dungeon together. It even drew from a pool of servers. In practice, this was nearly instant for tanks and healers and 10-15 minutes for dps. You could continue questing or dailies while waiting and you could replace players fairly quickly if one bailed. Afterward, you could teleport back to the exact spot you left.
Given that assembling a group required 1-2 hours of broadcasting in a capital city, this was enormously convenient. It meant that you could queue while playing, and then when ready, pop in, run a dungeon, and pop back with very little down time. But most players were from different servers and this meant that the incentive to stay with a problematic (or slightly problematic) group was very low. Gone was accountability, the sense that you would be branded lame by other players on the server. Gone was the camaraderie of making in-game friends during successful (and not so successful) runs. Server identity continued to erode.
The dungeon finder
The combination of factors introduced in LK led to the rise of “zerg dungeon farming”:
The net effect of all this was that late period LK dungeons became a sort of silent and hurried race through the instance. In the typical run, the tank charged forward, grabbing mobs willy nilly while dps aoed them down and healers barely had to do anything. Boss mechanics became nearly irrelevant. Subtlety and strategy were abandoned.
Wrath had this dramatic Nordic vibe
By the end of Lich King, nearly all the major mechanics that Blizzard introduced during the course of WOW evolution had come into play: Badges, the dungeon finder, dailies, reputation hubs, tier acceleration, split difficulties (heroic and normal), split raid sizes (10 and 25), profession currencies, separate pvp/pve tracks, achievements, and more. This endgame toolbox allowed for a wide range of player activities and for fairly continuous rewards along many of them. It allowed for much of the player base to experience raid content and tried to avoid sudden progress blockages for different player types.
The general feel and flavor of Lich King was also fantastic, but there were problems. In the name of accessibility, the epic nature of many encounters was sorely eroded. Numerous difficulty and size tracks and long reuse of content led to fairly extreme burnout. Overgearing of instances watered down designs that were already fairly forgiving and removed any strategic play in dungeons (i.e. crowd control and the like). In the name of balance, loot and rewards became monotonous and chore-like. Raid content was too sparse and too easy to cover the two year expansion. More burnout ensued.
I liked the expansion, and I give Blizzard an A for effort. They aren’t afraid to experiment and try to move the game in a better direction, even if those changes sometimes have negative consequences. They are particularly willing to overhaul class mechanics again and again. Overall, the LK endgame gave you more to do than ever before.
| WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria. or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling. Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis! If you liked this post, follow me at: My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
What was the original concept for the game and how/why did you come up with it? Was it a deliberate attempt to create a PS2 mascot to rival Crash?
Of course we wanted the J&D franchise to be as big (or bigger) than Crash. And while this didn’t come to be, it was certainly our goal. The formulation of new game ideas involves two aspects: genre and style.
As to gameplay genre: On the PS1, good looking free roaming 3D seemed impossible. The machine lacked any hardware sorting or clipping, and had a relatively low polygon count. Plus, the AI challenge of creating a camera that didn’t leave players puking was extremely daunting. So we locked down the viewpoint to improve graphics and focus on traditional Donkey Kong Country style gameplay.
But with Mario 64, Miyamoto showed that free roaming was possible, albeit on the N64 and with no small dose of camera frustration. By the time we began Jak & Daxter (January 1999) newer games like Banjo-Kajooie vastly improved the playability. Clearly, on the PS2, full 3D could be great.
Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?
With regard to style: With Crash we enjoyed enormous worldwide success in no small part due to our collaboration with Sony’s worldwide producers. So for J&D we set out to create a character and environment that merged elements from worldwide cultures. You can see the result in Jak, who is a hybrid of western cartoons and eastern manga.
We asked every Naughty Dog artist to spend a couple of days sketching concepts for the look of the game. We threw these on a giant table and picked elements we liked as a group.
It was an ambitious title for its time – what were your biggest challenges in realising your original vision? Was it a rocky development?
Like every first on a system Naughty Dog game, Jak had a rocky development. First of all, the PS2 was ludicrously difficult to program, particularly in those early days when no workable examples or libraries existed. On top of that, I made the audacious choice to write the entire game in a programming language of my own design called GOAL, creating a brand new compiler and debugger from scratch. In addition, to realize the ambitious graphical goals we invented a roster of brand new technologies: several different level of detail systems, perhaps 10 rendering engines, seamless loading from DVD, advanced runtime physics, and joint animation systems to rival the offline tools. It was really really crazy and basically took us about 20 months just on the engineering side before the engine was able to produce the kind of levels we wanted.
Can you tell me more about the mooted 3rd character and why it was axed?
There never were any serious plans for a third character. But we had more ambitious plans for Daxter in the beginning. He was supposed to be able to hop off your shoulder and run around and do stuff. That didn’t happen until the second game. Same with the vehicle stuff. We squeezed the racer in, but barely, and we had much more aggressive plans for it.
How close to your original concept was the finished game?
Very close. We wanted to put you into this beautiful fully rendered fantasy world and yet to allow full interactive exploration. We wanted no loading, elaborate storytelling, a camera you didn’t need to manually control, and both classic platform and vehicle gameplay.
Which element of the game are you most proud of, and which element, if any, do you feel fell short?
I’m both most proud and most torn over GOAL, my custom language and development environment. This ended up being so much harder than I thought, and is certainly the most sophisticated programming I’ve done in my career. In the end it was pretty awesome, although not without its quirks. I’m also supremely proud of our completely load-free seamless-world . We were the first to do this (I even have a patent on it!), and few have attempted since. It was a lot of work! And let’s not forget Jak’s control, which I personally programed. Jak has really good control, as good as any game ever. His animation is incredibly fluid, yet he is supremely responsive to both the player and the environment. Even basic elements of his control system were written and re-written a dozen times.
How would you like the first Jak & Daxter to be remembered? What has it brought to the medium of video games?
The single most important thing that J&D brought to the medium (and there are countless smaller things) is its consistent and complete integration of the game and story elements. This comes to full fruition in Jak 2, and continues peerlessly today in newer Naughty Dog games like Uncharted. Jak has a detailed and involved story, but it’s never a semi-interactive movie, it’s a video game! The storytelling does not come at expense of the gameplay.
Which of Naughty Dog’s big PlayStation characters – Crash, Jak & Daxter, or Nathan Drake – is closest to your heart, and why?
Crash and Neo Cortex are my favorites, and I also have a really big sweet spot for Daxter (who is such a hoot). The Uncharted characters are awesome too, but I can’t take any responsibility for them, so the connection isn’t as personal. And don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, even back to the forgotten ones like Keef the Thief, but really Crash’s wicked orange grin melts my heart, and Cortex is who I secretly wanted to be… If I were a cartoon 🙂
This interview was originally posted here.
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My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
August arrives, and with it another teaser. This continues that cool creepy vibe driven by the bluegrass soundtrack.
We interviewed Andy Gavin, the co-founder of Naughty Dog (with Jason Rubin) and creator of Crash Bandicoot. We asked Andy how he got in to the industry, about the inspirations, motives and ideologies behind Crash Bandicoot – one of the games industries seminal characters, and on on what makes a good videogame character. He also told us about the entirely different culture and ethos he built up at Naughty Dog – which meant putting the player first. We also asked him to reflect on his successes and ‘failures’ at Naughty Dog, about what he thinks of the company now and about his future plans. Today, Andy has turned his attention to writing – and is now an established novelist – so we also asked him about what he’s reading, and what he’s working on right now.
Just some of the highlights from this in-depth interview…
What inspired you to start Naughty Dog – how did you get in to the games industry?
In the 1970s I was hugely into fantasy novels, fantasy role playing games, and early video games. When I first encountered a computer it was only natural that I tried to make games. Back then, unless you knew how to program, computers were pretty much good for a blinking cursor. Then about two years into my programming career I met Jason Rubin. My programs were better than anyone our age, and his art skills (particularly on the computer) were better than anyone else’s. It was a match made in heaven and we started working on games together. In those early days we called the company JAM Software, but we renamed it to Naughty Dog around 1985.
“Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game.”
What were the aims behind Crash Bandicoot – what was the brief? Was it to create a character to compete with Sonic and Mario, and to create a mascot character for Sony – or something more?
Yep. At that time character action was one of the most popular genres, and one of our favorites. Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game. And it was born from the question: what would a 3D platformer be like? Well, we thought, you’d spend a lot of time looking at “Sonic’s Ass.” Aside from the difficulties of identifying with a character only viewed in posterior, it seemed cool. Although we worried about the camera, dizziness, and the player’s ability to judge. When it seemed likely that Sony didn’t have a mascot character of their own we jumped on that too. Essentially we planed for Crash to become exactly what it did – but the fact that we were successful still stuns me.
We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about… …we loved the word bandicoot.”
What was the inspiration behind Crash Bandicoot – where did the concept come from?
We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about. We bought a copy of Tasmanian Mammals – a field guide and flipped through. The Wombat, Potoroo, and Bandicoot fit the bill. We loved the word bandicoot. Personality-wise we felt he should be goofy and fun loving, and never talk.
What was the symbolism and ideology behind the mannerisms, attitude and behaviour you gave Crash Bandicoot?
As the machine didn’t really have the power to pull off giving Crash a voice that wasn’t lame, we needed to use animation to draw in the player emotionally. This jived with one of our main design goals, which was to make the animation better than had ever been seen in a game before. We wanted at least Looney Tunes level quality, if not Disney level. Animation is an emotional language and our top flight cartoon character designers showed us how to convey the whole range of human motion in the exaggerated vocabulary of traditional animation.
What was the reasoning behind the colours you gave Crash Bandicoot?
Simple, Crash needed to pop against the background so you could see him easily. Since he lived in a natural world of greens and grays orange was the hottest and most complementary colour. Real animals want to blend. Cartoons want to pop.
Crash Bandicoot is of a few games which has a real cultural impact and it’s created an extremely loyal group of superfans – a fan community which is still going strong, producing fan art, writing ‘fan fictions’ – some devoting much of their life to a character you created. What are your feelings about being behind a cultural icon?
It’s amazing that this happened and I feel very gratified to be a part of it. I chalk up one of the main reasons the game was successful to the character’s iconic quality. Crash is a sort of every-creature. While he has his goofy side, his natural enthusiasm and willingness to rebound from any upset (literally) make him highly endearing.
Crash Bandicoot Fan Art is very popular – this piece is by ‘ZoDy’ on an online community for artists called DeviantArt
Could you share any interesting facts or ‘secrets’ about Crash Bandicoot that even the biggest superfans may not know?
The original Crash Bandicoot has an entire extra level on the disk that is not accessible without a cheat device. It’s called Slippery Climb and was a monstrously big and difficult “climb on the rainy castle wall” level. It was cut because it was too hard and we didn’t have time to balance it properly.
What makes a good videogame character?
Video game characters aren’t especially subtle, but they are appealing. They need to be visually distinctive, with clear expression of personality traits. Visually, Crash is orange, big head, and gloves. Then on the personality side, playful, resilient, not the brightest bulb, but willing to go the extra mile.
Would you say that seminal ‘mascot’ characters like Crash, Sonic, and Mario are playing a less important or significant role in the games industry? Why do you think it might be the case?
It does seem that as games become more realistic they have less distinctive characters. Many current console games now are essentially military. The badass space marine is iconic, but not really distinctive. What makes one different from another?
“I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.”
Some say that Crash ‘failed to innovate’ over the years ‘rendering the character useless’ – what would you say to that?
It’s not fair of me to comment on the non Naughty Dog games. I feel that our four Crash games innovated relative to the speed of release (1996, ’97, ’98, ’99). We tried to really pack tons of new stuff into every successive game while keeping the best of the old. Fans knew that with our games they would really get their money’s worth. They voted with their wallets in huge numbers, and I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.
How much would you credit the sophistication of Naughty Dog technology to your background in LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory?
I was always a technically ambitious programmer, but MIT and the addition of Dave Baggett to our team really helped us up the ante. Dave and I fed off each other, each convincing the other that the next impossible thing was possible. But Mark Cerny also played no small role in this ambition. While he only coded a guest module or two in each game he’s brilliant and he really pushed Dave and I to rise to the next level.
Why did you decide to leave Naughty Dog 2004?
This is a complicated question and there are several answers. A) My contract was up and to stay (on terms I wanted) I would have had to haggle out a new one (boring). B) I was burnt out after over ten years of 90-110 hour work weeks. C) And most important, we had been training our top guys (Evan Wells, Stephen White, and Christophe Balestra) to run full game teams. They were ready.
Since handing over the reins, are you happy with how Crash Bandicoot has developed over the years?
Crash is a little like the really hot girlfriend that you dumped because of an important at the time argument. Then, years later when you run into her, find she’s a hooker with a crack problem.
What do you think of the company now? Is it how you visualised it would be?
Naughty Dog on the other hand is the kid that grew up, got straight A’s at Harvard, then founded an internet company and made a fortune. Plus they still come home for the holidays and send Mom flowers on Valentine’s day.
Would you ever consider returning to the company?
I still have tons of friends there. I just dropped by the other day and I had a rush of nostalgia for all the excitement and the sense of being part of something huge. But Evan and Christophe have things totally under control. More than that, they keep the ship running better than ever. So they don’t need another officer at the helm.
My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds.
Do you think you’ll ever return to the gaming industry as a whole – or even create another video game?
It’s hard to say. My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds. There are still games I crave making (achem… fantasy games). Really I’d love to build the most incredible MMO ever (I’m a huge WOW and Diablo fan) but then I think about the $150 million budget, the six year development plan, and the 200 person team…
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the gaming industry throughout your career?
Ha. I can’t even begin to answer that. My career started when the Atari 2600 was king and continues to modern console games, iPhone, and Facebook games. But the really big thing that is changing is the move away from the packaged goods model where a complete game is sold for $40-70. Download only games with subscription and micro transaction models will soon be the norm.
What do you make of the games currently being released now, …including Uncharted – Drake’s Deception? What do you make of console gaming as it is today …and the games you find most interesting right now?
UC3 is a blast, I love it. I still love fantasy games. My favorites this year, having finally quite WOW (again, for now), are UC3 and Dark Souls. I really want to play Skyrim too, which I’m sure I’ll love. I got it release day too, but I had one novel to finish editing and a second to publish – I didn’t dare put it in the machine.
Zoë Ainscough couldn’t recommend Uncharted 3 enough in a review which appeared recently on PostDesk Gaming
“I don’t think the future [of games] will be better graphics – it’s not important any more. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilize game balance will be a challenge” …”new ways of paying will have a huge effect on the structure of games”
What do you feel the future of gaming will be – and how is it going to develop over the next few years? Will it rely on enhancements in technology – or are you seeing other trends?
I don’t think it will be better and better graphics. That will happen to some extent, but it’s not important anymore. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilize game balance will be a challenge. Integration of even more elaborate social structure is another trend. I think that in the next few years we will actually start to see less of the incredibly expensive monolithic console games. As disks go away new ways of paying are going to rear their heads and this will have a huge effect on the structure of games.
Is this forming the basis for the future of gaming?
Across your entire career to date, what achievements are you most proud of? What was your biggest success?
#1 is founding Naughty Dog and establishing in it a kind of corporate culture and ethos that puts the player first. Really NDI is all about providing good value to the player. Value in games is wow factor, fun, novelty, and a polished entertainment experience that minimizes frustration. I’m also proud individually of each of my “projects.” This includes all thirteen major games I wrote, Flektor, my compilers, both my novels, and even my website:http://all-things-andy-gavin.com .
One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition… Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projects with a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.
What has been the biggest ‘failure’ that you’ve had to overcome in your career?
I don’t have what I consider any serious failures. More a lot of “lessons” of various degrees of severity. One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition. Hint this had nothing to do with Naughty Dog or Sony which went great. Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projects with a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.
Has being a novelist always been an ambition of yours?
I’ve been an avid reader my whole life (over 10,000 novels and who knows how many non-fiction volumes). Mostly fantasy, horror, historical or science fiction. In high school, I won several national literary awards for my short stories and I was an editor and contributor to our high school literary magazine. In college, despite being a diehard science guy, I took creative writing classes (sometimes I was the only guy) and submitted stories to Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines (not that they ever bought any!). I wrote the stories for some of our games (don’t judge my novels by that, in the old days games couldn’t afford real stories). But the insane work output needed for Playstation games didn’t leave me the time to write and so it was with considerable zeal that I turned to it seriously two and a half years ago.
“My first novel, The Darkening Dream, was just published. You can find out all about it at the-darkening-dream.com and it’s for sale now.”
Tell us about your new books – and what are you working on right now?
I have three books in various stages of production. My first novel, The Darkening Dream, was just published. You can find out all about it athttp://the-darkening-dream.com and it’s for sale now. This is a fast paced historical fantasy about a bunch of teens who try to stop some really creepy supernatural chaps from maiming, killing, and destroying the world. The teens get in over their heads. Really over their heads. All of the magic (and there’s a lot) is based on real historical occult, which makes it much creepier than the made up stuff – because truth is stranger than fiction. My second book, Untimed, is a YA time travel novel about the crazy adventures of a boy no one remembers, who falls through a hole in time and finds himself lost in the past. It’s really slick, funny, and fast paced. I just finished editing it and am now figuring out who I want to publish it. Then I’m supposed to be writing my third novel, but instead I’m answering interview questions and learning how to layout a print ready file. J
What are you reading right now?
Julian, by Gore Vidal. This is a historical bestseller from the 60s about Julian the Apostate who is a really interesting Roman Emperor from late antiquity. It’s part of a particular a branch of investigation for my new novel. All of my books involve history in some way. One of my ambitions is to show that history doesn’t have to be boring, quite the contrary. Untimed bounces through four centuries and it’s lightning paced.
“Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control”
What are your plans and ambitions for the future?
In the short run (2012) I’d like to finish two more novels (gulp) and turn The Darkening Dream and Untimed into bestsellers. The writing part of being a writer is really fun and creative – although way more work than I imagined, and I imagined a lot. Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control. There are limitations of the medium, POV, etc., but there are few technical tradeoffs and no budgets or meetings. Only time and imagination limit what you can do. This is why, despite the profusion of all sorts of fantastic new mediums, novels are still one of the beststorytelling devices. Most games are more about gameplay and fun than story – even if Uncharted has been changing that. Long form television (like high budget cable shows) is also very good now. I love HBO and Showtime dramas. They sport some of the best writing in film or television today. Film is really too short for in depth characterization, although the best of them rise above this limitation.
You can find more on Andy Gavin’s writing at andy-gavin-author.com, on his first novel at the-darkening-dream.com, and the second novel atuntimed-novel.com. The Darkening Dream is available on Amazon Kindle for $4.99 at Amazon.com and for £3.27 at Amazon.co.uk. [Prices correct at time of going to press]
The Darkening Dream is an “ominous vision and the discovery of a gruesome corpse lead Sarah Engelmann into a terrifying encounter with the supernatural in 1913 Salem, Massachusetts. With help from Alex, an attractive Greek immigrant, Sarah sets out to track the evil to its source,never guessing that she will take on a conspiracy involving not only a 900-year vampire, but also a demon-loving Puritan warlock, disgruntled Egyptian gods, and an immortal sorcerer, all on a quest to recover the holy trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel.Relying on the wisdom of an elderly vampire hunter, Sarah’s rabbi father, and her own disturbing visions, Sarah must fight a millennia-old battle between unspeakable forces, where the ultimate prize might be herself”.
A couple of weeks ago I went back to Naughty Dog to do some interviews for the Jak & Daxter Collection, which releases tomorrow (February 7). And of course you should go buy this right away, only one click AFTER you buy my novel, The Darkening Dream. But my thoughts about the visit have been logged on the Naughty Dog blog:
While I’m still good friends with many Naughty Dogs and frequently see them socially, it’s been a couple years since I was in the office itself – and this was my first time in the new gigantic Watergarden 2.0 space.
Wow! My baby is all grown up and popped out a helluva pack of rugrats. When I left, the office was 25,000 sq/feet and we had about 80 people – which at the time, seemed enormous enough – now it’s over twice that big with more than twice the folks. From the walls hang giant murals of Naughty Dog masterpieces. It’s enough to make you feel small…
You can find the full post here!
I also got the chance to catch up with all my friends, virtual and real.
Pack leaders old and new! Left to right Christophe, me, Jason, and Evan.
Storytelling, the old fashioned way
Modern man has a wide variety of “pure” storytelling mediums, like film, long form television, and novels. While these have some very significant differences they all share the same basic focus on plot and character. Typically at least, good stories introduce a character with problems, get you to like them, then chronicle the struggle as they are compelled to change and adapt to overcome these problems. In the end, they either do so, or are defeated to teach us a lesson (a variant we call tragedy).
These elements: character, plot, and transformational arc, are completely central to the normal story (I deliberately ignore weird experimental storytelling). Really, they are the core of what makes a good film or novel.
Roman mosaic showing comedy (right) and tragedy (left)
But with a game, this whole business is secondary. The primary focus of a game is fun. And fun through gameplay. Does Tetris have any character or plot? Did even Doom? No. But they were fun games. Really fun.
Games such as Naughty Dog’s Jak & Daxter or Uncharted strive to bridge these gaps by offering both. This is very difficult because they don’t really serve each other.
The gameplay in Uncharted 2, for example, has three primary modes: survival gunplay, platforming, and puzzle solving. The player must assess the layout of the level, learn it, and navigate it without getting killed. This involves anticipating the enemies and taking them out first. You use the weapons at your disposal, the mechanics, and the terrain provided to do so. With platforming you need to come to understand what the character can do physical, find your way, and successfully traverse the route.
Some games do focus on story
When these are done well, when the design is varied, the levels pretty, the enemies cool, and the challenges measured, challenging and above all, doable – it’s fun. Uncharted 2 is such a game.
It also has a pretty darn good story which is woven in with the design of the levels and the challenges. This adds to the whole thing. Watching the next segment of story becomes part of your reward for finishing a segment. There is a tremendous level of art that goes into getting both of these to work at the same time, but certainly each is constrained at times by the needs of the other.
Content in games is expensive and difficult to make. Therefore it needs to repeat. You really do need to shoot the same enemy hundreds of times. Otherwise the enemy isn’t providing enough mileage to justify the labor involved to create him. The player is also in control and therefore the consequences of his play affect success or failure.
My first novel
But in storytelling, success and failure are the carefully monitored heartbeat of any good story. You bring the protagonist up, dash him down, grind him into the ground, lift him up, slam him sideways. I knew this intuitively when writing my first novel, The Darkening Dream. I’ve read so many books and watched so many films and shows that it seemed “obvious.” But at the same time, it turned out to be far from easy. Writing a good story has less constraints than making a good game, but it’s still extremely difficult. You need to be constantly balancing the issues of character, motivation, the logic of the plot, and the need to seesaw the dramatic tension. In the end stylistic concerns sometimes overwhelm dramatic ones (to the reader’s detriment).
In a game, it’s even more complicated, and there is barely a chance of hitting all the right dramatic notes. The player has a lot to say about this natural up and down pacing, so the story-based game tries to separate how well you are really doing from the actual plot. Usually death or failure in the game causes the player to merely repeat some segment of the game (and hence the story), when they finish the level and get the next segment of storytelling, they’ll get it regardless of whether they died once or 100 times. The better player merely proceeds faster.
This is different, but even more problematic in a less linear game such as World of Warcraft. There, the mechanics of the game heavily distort the conceits of storytelling. The story is even broadly linked to the chronological evolution of the game in real time. For example, in December of 2009 Blizzard released the Icecrown Citadel patch of Wrath of the Lich King, making it possible for players to finally reach and confront the ultimate boss of the expansion (the titular Lich King). But the fact is, in order to properly maintain the reward mechanics of endgame raiding, each character was and often did, progress through this segment of the story once, or even twice a week.
The Lich King
Now, two years later, the Lich King has been defeated, the world of Azeroth has been broken, yet it’s still possible to go back to Icecrown and take on Arthas again. And again. Ditto for any of the several hundred even older bosses. Players accept that they have random access to a long and convoluted story. In fact, the need to generate so much gameplay in WOW has created a body of lore that gives the Silmarillion a run for its money. But the way in which it’s experienced mutes the emotional intensity.
What really provides the excitement in WOW (and many other games), isn’t the question of whether the dragon queen Onyxia lives or dies, but the – shall we dare say – drama of whether she does tonight, for us, the group fighting her. And more importantly, will she drop the Nemesis skullcap (arbitrary cool piece of loot) one has been trying to get for six months.
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My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic coin-op and Atari dominated home market imploded), all major video game machines were from Japan until the arrival of the Xbox. Things were dominated by Nintendo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Nintendo, Sony… you get the picture.
And in the days before the home market eclipsed and destroyed the arcade, Japan completely crushed everyone else. Only the occasional US hit like Mortal Kombat even registered on the radar.
Miyamoto, creator of Mario, playing Crash 1. I’m standing behind him off frame
All of this, not to mention the cool samurai/anime culture and ridiculously yummy food (see my sushi index!), made us American video game creators pretty much all Miyamoto groupies.
But on the flip side, American games, if they even made it to the land of the rising sun at all, almost always flopped.
Japanese taste is different the wisdom went. Special. Foreign games even had a special name over there (which I have no idea how to spell). These “lesser” titles were stocked in a seedy back corner of your typical Japanese game store, near the oddball porn games.
So it was with great enthusiasm and limited expectations that we approached the mutual Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, and Sony decision that we were going to take the Japanese market really seriously with Crash. Sony assigned two brilliant and dedicated producers to us: Shuhei Yoshida and his then assistant Shimizu (aka Tsurumi-0600). They sat in on every major planning meeting and we scheduled the whole fall for me to localize the game in exacting detail (while we were simultaneously beginning work on Crash 2!).
For the most part, Yoshida-san made things happen and Shimizu, who has literally played like every video game ever made and read like every manga, worked the details. I (with a bunch of help from the artists) had to put in the changes.
Yoshida-san front and center, Shimizu on the far left, Rio (joined the team during Crash 2) on the far right
Somehow Yoshida-san was able to maneuver the game into being not one of those funny foreign games, but an official bona fide release of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. the first party Japanese studio. And it was to be sold and marketed pretty much like it had been made in Japan! Wow!
So to pull off this cultural masquerade Jason and I decided that Shu (as Yoshida-san was affectionately known) and Shimizu got pretty much whatever they wanted. They after all, knew the mysterious Japanese market. Which turned out to be pretty darn true. And, besides, both are really really smart and crazy hard workers (Shimizu is famous for sleeping under his desk) and so we all got along famously.
The gameplay itself wasn’t really too much of an issue. Shimizu did help us smooth out some sections and make them easier (often by adding extra continue points − opposite of Europe). But there were a lot of other changes.
The Crash 1 main titles, in Japanese
First of all, we had to translate the text. Some of this wasn’t so bad. But the main logo was a 3D object and Jason had to painstakingly create a version of the paper design the Japanese provided us — which required lots of checking from Shimizu as he doesn’t speak Japanese.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4XzmZyiIXA
Above is the opening in Japanese.
And things got even harder (for me) with the in game text. The Playstation didn’t have a lot of video memory and we were using a medium resolution 512 pixel wide mode anyway. What little there was, we had pretty much consumed. But the Japanese language has four alphabets! One is Latin, two are similar but different looking phonetic alphabets, and the last is the giant Kanji pictographic database. Kanji would’ve been impossible, but we needed to cram the two extra phonetic sets in. Plus the characters are more intricate than the Latin alphabet and need more pixels. I can’t remember what I did to squeeze them in, but I do remember it was painful. One part I do recall was implementing the sets of letters that vary only by an extra dot or ” mark by drawing them with two sprites (hence saving video ram).
Once the font was installed we had to input the crazy looking “shift JIS” text. One of the problems in those days was that the text editors all 8-bit, unlike today were 16-bit typesets dominate. And with a European language you can usually tell if a line of text had gotten swapped or mangled, but in Japanese… and even worse, in shift JIS it just looks like a bunch of garbage characters.
So again, Shimizu had to check everything. A lot.
Our opening and closing cut scene dialog was recorded in Japanese using very high profile Japanese actors (so they told me). We replaced those audio files (using one of my automated systems of course!). There were also a good number of cases throughout the game where we had placed text in textures. The configuration screens, loading screens, load/save screens and all sorts of other ones. These all needed new versions. We collected all of these textures, shipped them out to Japan and got back Shimizu certified versions in exactly the same sizes with the Japanese text. I used and upgraded the system that I had built for the European version so that any file (texture, audio, etc) in the game could be “replaced” by a file of the same name in the same directory with a .J on the end (or a .S, .E, .F, .G, .I for various European permutations). The level packaging tool would automatically suck up the most appropriate version and shove it in the J versions of the levels. I’m not sure we left ANYTHING untranslated. Even Japanese games usually had more Engrish. Achem, English. I so remember a Castlevania with “Dlacura’s grave.”
Then the Japanese came up with this idea of having Aku Aku explain various gameplay mechanics to you when you break his boxes, much like the raspberry boxes in Super Mario World. This was a great idea, except it meant that the game was suddenly filled with about 200 extra paragraphs of text. Undecipherable text. I had to squeeze that into the levels too. More problematic was the seemingly simple fact that when a big block of text comes up on the screen the game effectively needs to pause so the player can read it. You can’t just “hit pause” but need a separate state. This simple feature caused a lot of bugs. A lot. But we stomped them out eventually.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WojXNCbHOmY&feature=related
Above you can see a walk through of the first level. A lot of the PITA localization work was in the save screens (big fun: character entry screen in three Japanese alphabets) and the various statistic screens at the end of the level. I think the Japanese allowed us to do away with the horrible password system and use memory card only.
The Japanese box and CD with its very strange Crash and Eve painting — it was nice and colorful
The Japanese also had some famous actor record a whole collection of really zany sounding grunts and noises that Crash was to make. Shimizu lovingly crafted long lists of extremely specific places in the game where exactly such and such exclamation was to be uttered. He was never one to spare either of us from a great deal of work 🙂 But his willingness to tackle any task himself, no matter how tedious, made him hard to refuse. I also had to squeeze all these extra samples into the extremely tight sound memory, mostly by downgrading the bit-rate on other sounds. This caused Mike Gollom, our awesome sound design contractor to groan and moan. “3.5k is pure butchery” he’d complain. I found this SGI tool that used a really advanced new algorithm to downgrade the sounds, they sounded twice as good at any given bit-rate than the Sony tool.
Anyway the really funny bit about these Crash sounds was the subjective feel they left us Americans with. Strange! They made Crash sound like a constipated old man. But the Japanese insisted they were perfect. I guess they were right because the game sold like crazy over there.
Another weird audio difference was that five of the songs were swapped out for new ones. Josh Mancell the composer put it this way:
An 11th hour decision made by the Sony people in Japan. They felt that the boss rounds needed to sound more ‘video game-like’. The only reference they gave was music from the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. I only had a day or so to write all those themes. My favorite comment was about the original Tawna bonus round music. It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.
You can find the different tracks here.
There were also a host of minor but strange modifications we needed to make. One was that a few characters originally had four fingers, which is typical of most American cartoon characters. Apparently the Japanese have a more than usual dislike of disfigured humanoids. Fingers were added (to make them the normal five). There were a whole bunch of little visual, audio, and gameplay changes Shimizu had us make to the game. Most of these I felt were neutral, different but not really better or worse, so I just trusted him and put them in. Occasionally if they were a really pain I pushed back.
Eventually, right around Thanksgiving, just in time for Jason and I to head to Japan to promote it, the Japanese version was ready!
If you didn’t catch it, I have a similar detailed post in the European localization of Crash.
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My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
Cover of the hint guide in Japan
Title: Sucker Punch
Director/Stars: Abbie Cornish (Actor), Emily Browning (Actor), Zack Snyder (Director)
Genre: Action
Watched: January 5, 2012
Summary: Style over substance
The concept for Sucker Punch, whacked as it is, is actually pretty decent. The movie is also gorgeous and stylized. Yet… it just doesn’t really work at any rational level. Part Kill Bill, part Pan’s Labyrinth, part Inception, part Sin City, part video game cut scene, this film is all CGI glitz and fetishistic style. It’s also worth noting that the writer/director, Zach Snyder, brought us those other style over substance “classics”: Watchmen and 300.
As to the plot. Wait, I can’t really use that word because as I’ve discussed at length before plot is the action created by opposition to the protagonist’s desire. The characterization in this film is about as solid as a whiff of gunpowder and we have only the most basic desire: escape. The film opens with a comic book style summary of the setup: girl has been orphaned, framed by her evil step-father, committed to a mental asylum (in the late 40s), and scheduled for a lobotomy. From this grim — but actually dramatically interesting — setup we devolve into a series of nested fantasies.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love reality bending films. Pan’s Labyrinth is my favorite film of the last decade. They’re just hard to get right and it’s key to overlap and contrast the inner and outer worlds. In Sucker Punch, the outermost (or real) world is seen for about three minutes at the beginning and again for about three minutes at the end. Oddly, a middle layer in which the girl (named only Babydoll) imagines herself a prisoner not in a mental institution but in a stylish brothel serves up what little plot and characterization we have. This itself parallels with the real world and might have been interesting if we spent any time there. Instead we are propelled one after another into a series of really cool looking fantasy set pieces. Oddly, the “plan” to escape the institution (brothel, asylum — both? neither?) is broken down into a quest of five video game like steps, conveniently provided by Scott Glenn in a role known only as “The Wise Man”. Each step, which in the midworld amounts to things like: “steal a lighter from the fat-cat mayor who is visiting to have his way with the fifteen year-old hotties” is instead rendered into an “action packed” fantasy that has very very little bearing on the task. Also, this setup, which is pretty awful but intriguing is whitewashed due to a pansy PG-13 rating.
We have a big fight in a cool asian temple against three giant robo-samurai-knights. Each has his own weapon! Yah video games. This even includes a Doom-style gatling gun.
Immersion in a steampunk super-sized World War I trench battle, which honestly for about one minute took my breath away.
A return to the assault on Helm’s Deep, complete with orcs in danger of lawsuit from WETA and big fire breathing dragons (the dragon is the lighter — yeah, that’s deep connection).
And a sci-fi shootout bomb run on a super high tech train filled with killer robots. Snooze!
The first three of these, particularly the WWI fight, are gorgeous. I mean really cool looking. But they are ten-fifteen minute fight scenes with almost no dialog set to ethereal music like a version of “White Rabbit” sung by Emiliana Torrini. (NOTE: I did order the soundtrack, that part was awesome) For a minute or three each they seem intensely cool. But they’re just shooting, jumping, slicing and more shooting. We don’t know who these characters are. They’re in a dream within a dream. And we don’t care. They are shooting at thousands of horde-like video game style enemies. We don’t care. Somehow each of these fights results in achieving the fairly straightforward midworld objective. The connection is highly non-obvious.
Highly non-obvious = non-existent.
It’s also worth noting the extremely bizarre infusion of manga/game infused stylization. First of all, by including Comic book, 40s faux-gangster, Asian, WWI, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi we have a serious total complete massive buttload overabundance of style. Any one of these would have made for a highly stylized firm. Extreme too too too too muchness. But the girls in their weird “warrior schoolgirl” outfits is whacky — although I am a lover of midriff — and I could have gotten drunk taking a shot every time someone thunked down a gun in slow-mo or gotten rich with a penny for every giant CGI gun casing that flipped toward the camera. This is of the more is more school of filmmaking. Synder should have studied more closely what makes Pan’s Labyrinth a brilliant film: Two styles contrasting, with one being hyper realistic, a strong tie between the fantasy and reality planes. And most importantly: highly developed characters including one of the most terrifying genuine evil types to cross the silver screen in years.
Sucker Punch sort of totally could have been cool if we cared.
Gaming site Kotaku has run a quick little feature on The Darkening Dream today.
What do you do after founding and retiring from one of video games’ most successful development houses? If you’re Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin, you write books.
The first of said books is The Darkening Dream, a shadowy fantasy novel about a young girl caught up in a battle that pits ancient supernatural forces like vampires and Egyptian gods against each other.
You can check out the full post here.
Thank you guys! And I’ve already seen a big sales jump. I hope all the fans of my old stuff love my new stuff too.
Today is a double nerdgasm day. Not only did Naughty Dog announce it’s new game, The Last of Us. But–
the Diablo 3 opening cinematic was released. The game itself should be coming in Q1 2012. Ah, so many games, so little time. I haven’t even had the moment(s) to pop in Skyrim. Been too busy packaging The Darkening Dream and editing Untimed.
Naughty Dog, the company I founded, has just released the trailer for their new game — and new franchise! This is the first new series since Uncharted launched in 2007. I have to say the new one looks totally awesome because it’s well — post apocalyptic zombie (which I love) — and in true Naughty Dog fashion totally gorgeous. Plus I love spunky heroines. This one, seemingly, but not actually voiced by actress Ellen Page of Juno fame* is totally cute, in a kind of jailbait sort of way.
I can totally see how the kind of intimate hand to hand and gunplay mechanics that Naughty Dog has been perfecting with Nathan Drake would adapt perfectly to this sort of The Road meets Juno world.
So I’m even more excited than I was for Uncharted 3, which is saying a lot!
*NOTE: According to this website, the leads are Miss Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, as given by tweet from someone at Naughty Dog. And @Neil_Druckmann, my friend and the lead designer confirmed via twitter too, so it’s accurate.
