Click Nothing

Respe:CT

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge in the eight and a half years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped back in 2005. We’ve seen the sunset of an entire console generation, and we are about to sunset another. Three major titles have shipped in the series, the most recent of which effectively giving rise to an entirely new development studio. Still, every now and then I get an email or a mention on twitter from an old fan or a new player thanking me for the game. Normally I just pass the thanks along to the team, who ultimately deserve the credit, but this time I felt I’d say a little more.

A few days ago, the team over at Cane And Rinse ran a podcast that served as a kind of retrospective on the first three Splinter Cell games, with a particular focus on the role of Chaos Theory in the ‘trilogy’. I gave it a listen and it brought back a lot of good memories. For the most part, James, Darren and Karl all have a deep and nuanced appreciation for the game, so the podcast itself is somewhat biased – though they do level their fair share of valid criticism toward the many areas where we stumbled (or outright failed… remember the UAVs in Seoul?).

To even them out further there is a short (pre-recorded) segment toward the end where James Batchelor of GameBurst levels some fair criticism at the game from the (probably more common) perspective of a player who came to the series (mostly) for the first time with Conviction.

Anyway, if you’re a Splinter Cell fan, or a Chaos Theory fan, or if you’re curious about why this game in particular is so often called out as the benchmark for the franchise, I think this podcast does a pretty good job of illuminating where that perspective comes from. My interpretation of the main point they make in this regard is that the game is respectful of the player.

They seem to be saying that they felt the game gave them the freedom and the capability to decide how they wanted to play without forcing them to jump through arbitrary hoops, and without hand-holding them through every little challenge. To this end, they extensively praise the level design – talking at length about what makes missions such as the Lighthouse and the Bank so strong, and exploring also, to some extent, the mixed success we had with some other levels – such parts of Seoul or the Bathhouse. They specifically praise the high density of meaningful interaction and the richness and broad applicability of the player tools – which in my mind (and with the benefit of hindsight) – are the main factors that made the game both highly appealing to a very specific set of players, and somewhat intimidating and inaccessible for a much broader audience. In this sense, I feel that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was very much a game of its era.

The main thing I would disagree with in the podcast is a comment James makes at about the 35 minute mark where he says “Clint Hocking is the man you point to if you like or dislike Chaos Theory.” Once again, please point your accusatory fingers at me for the UAVs, for that last almost unbeatable room in the Bath House, for those inexplicably-missed point-blank headshots, for the lack of the SWAT turn, (and on and on and on) – but you’ll need to grow about a hundred and fifty more fingers if you want to point at all the people who deserve the credit.

Congratulations again to the entire Chaos Theory team for delivering a game still worthy of consideration almost a decade later, and thanks to James, Darren and Karl for bringing back the memories.

Citizen Naruto

So back at Christmas 2007, I snagged a copy of my studio's Naruto game - Naruto: Rise of a Ninja (not our more recent sequel Naruto: The Broken Bond, which by all accounts is even better). I finally got around to playing it a bit, and honestly, I'm really enjoying it.

Consider first that, as I have said many times in the past, I am actually really bad at videogames. Due to this, fighters are my bane. I honestly do not believe that I have ever in my entire life won a single match in Street Fighter (sorry Sirlin). Fighters are just too demanding of twitch reflexes and an understanding of how to enter combos, and read an opponent's moves. I am literally unable to decypher the language of a fighter.

Consider also that I know nothing at all about Japanese Anime. I don't know Naruto from (some other famous anime character that I can't even name to complete the phrase).

So with those major strikes against the game right out of the gate, I'm happy to report that it's a really tight, well realized experience. I strongly suspect that if you are interested in Naruto, you'll really like this game a lot. As for whether or not you'll like it more or less than I do if you like fighting games, I can't answer that at all because I have no idea if it is a good fighting game or a bad one.

The most impressive thing about it is the design of the city itself. Anyone designing an open world should take a good look at this game to see how it is structured. It is possibly the most smartly designed open world city I have ever seen in a game.

Here's the Cole's Notes of why it's great:

First - it's not too big just for the sake of being big. Full stop.

Second, it has a credible population of ordinary townsfolk who go about their business believably. All of the townsfolk dislike you at the start, but one of your rewards as you progress is the admiration of the people. As you do missions and side quests and help people, you get them to switch from disliking you to liking you one villager at a time. Unfriendly villagers say mean things as you pass by, but if you interact with a friendly villager, he will give you directions to your current objective in the form of a little arrow on screen for a short while. What this means is that as you unlock more and more friendly villagers, you have this low-level assistance available to you more and more frequently. It's a really subtle and clever way to make it feel like you're winning the hearts and minds of the villagers.

Third - from a level design point of view, the village is really well thought out and put together. The village has four vertical layers to it. As you progress through the game and unlock new powers and abilities, you are afforded access to higher and higher levels of the city - each higher level connected more 'broadly' then the previous.

At the beginning of the game, you cannot even double jump, and you can only access the lowest level - the streets and the rooftops of a few single story buildings. But you quickly learn the major routes and the major landmarks and get a pretty solid understanding of the basic layout.

Soon you are able to double jump and to run vertically up walls a short distance. This gives you access to the rooftops of most of the buildings in the village and is a very liberating step up. You also gain access to the first set of roof-connecting cables that allow you to 'slide' between interconnected rooftops.

Eventually, you upgrade your wall-running ability and can access the third and fourth vertical layers. The lowest level of cabling is the densest, connecting the most buildings with the shortest cables. The second level of cabling is sparser, connecting fewer buildings, but with longer cables. The highest level of cabling is the most sparse, connecting only a very few of the villages tallest structures.

Effectively these layered fast-travel networks allow you to 'climb up levels of movement heirarchy' giving you fewer degrees of freedom in your movement as you ascend, but giving you the ability to move much further and much faster the higher you go. It's really a fascinating topology.

The game has a really well thought-out economy and progression system as well. There are four currencies in the game: cash, coins, antique coins, and stars. Cash is the only unlimited resource and it is the resource you use to buy consumables (throwing knives, noodles, etc). Coins are (mostly) used to upgrade what you can carry - more knives, more noodles, etc). Antique coins upgrade the effects of your consumables (making all future knives purchased with cash into hardened knives or explosive knives or both). The stars are 'experience points' used to unlock and upgrade your personal abilities - combos and jutsus. Stars are doled out by missions. Both kinds of coins are collectibles (with the antique coins about 1/10th as common) and cash is given for just about everything.

The benefits of this system are obvious - it gives the designers the ability to maintain both limited economies (there are only so many abilties to unlock, hence a finite number of stars), and an open economy (once you have unlocked everything, you can still keep earning cash to buy more noodles to keep your health high - something which I desperately need). And further, by breaking the coins down into two separate limited economies, they alleviate decision stress on the player... not sure whether to save up 23 more coins to pay for that upgrade? You don't have to worry about it - the coin-based economy prices items in the 10's of coins and the antique coin economy prices things in the single units of antique coins (instead of in the 100s of standard coins). Very smart (unless of course, you are going for a more hardcore, more player-choice driven, and more consequential economy).

Anyway - I think the Naruto economy is fascinating and it taught me a lot about different concepts for game economies and I think it's worth a look.

There are also a few things I don't like.

First - I really don't understand the side-mission structure, as simple as it is. In the very beginning of the game, I am told that 'noddle delivery side missions' are unlocked. So I go do some. They are fun, easy, and help you learn the city. Then shortly thereafter, they tell you that races are unlocked, and also that hide-and-seek games are unlocked.

However - when you go to try and do a race or a hide-and-seek game, you cannot. The mission-givers tell you you need to train more - but I spent at least 4 hours (!) playing the game, doing missions, training and buying and unlocked new things before I was actually able to DO one of these supposedly 'unlocked' side-missions. Then - arbitrarily - the missions lock again after a few and you are told 'you need to train first'... but of course, I had no idea what I needed to train in or how, and went another couple of hours before being able to do these missions again.

I understand the notion of wanting to tease the player forward -but you need to tease the player forward with an IMMINENT reward, not one that they may unlock sometime this week. Additionally, by unlocking and relocking the side-missions, you end up playing two different games in parallel - you play a game where there are bunches of side missions and collecting to do - then you finish it all, and play a game of doing main missions until the side-missions are arbitrarily re-unlocked, then you switch back. It's weird. I would much prefer to just do side missions as they suit my whim.

Also - and this is probably the shelf moment for me - I am about halfway through the main story missions and a strange icon appeared on my health/chakra HUD following a major battle with a boss. This icon capped my health and chakra at 500 each, when formerly they were both around 1000. There is no explanation anywhere of what happened to cause it, or how I get rid of it (or even if I can)... I don't even know what it is or what it means - but it has stripped away fully 1/3rd of my power... and I am certainly not a good enough player to make due.

In both cases - the inexplicable locking and unlocking of side-quests and the bizarre 'capping' of my two main combat stats - are simply not explained, leaving me frustrated. Not only is it not explained to me what I need to do to continue forward and/or solve the problem, or when or if I might expect plot progression to solve the problem automatically, it is not even explained to me what the problem is - these impediments are just arbitrary.

Anyway - I still enjoyed the first half of the game quite a bit, and for the city structure alone, I once again recommend it to anyone interested in a rock-solid level design for an open world.

If the two problems mentioned above have been ironed out in the sequel, I'll definitely be picking it up.

GDC09 - Part 3 - Wines and Rants

The last set of slides I have to put up are those for my five minute talk about game rating systems that I gave as part of Richard Lemarchand's Microtalks session on Thursday morning.

Overall I really enjoyed the session - though the prep was a nightmare. I guess it's pretty easy to enjoy a session where you only have to do 10% of the work and then you get to listen to smart people explain to you what exactly it is that you do for a living.

Anyway, the five minute format is colossally difficult. Especially if you are trying to make a point and support it with arguments instead of being all hand-wavy and theoretical. I wish I could have brought to bear all the arguments I have as for why we should switch from 10, 20, 100 or even 1000 point rating systems to a simple five point rating system, but I just didn't have time.

I guess that's what blogs are for.

Here are the arguments I made in the talk:

100 point rating systems are so analog that the human brain cannot make sense of the granularity (what is the difference between an 86 and an 87 in real perceptible, measurable terms?). These systems nobly attempt to make a threshold-less system - but when the brain is overloaded we add thresholds back in... we say '61-70 is above average' and '71-80 is good' or whatever. This is effectively adding back in the thresholds that a 100 point system endeavors to remove... but it is adding them back in in a less rigorous way leading to a mysticism created around certain improbable thresholds at the far reaches of the curve. I called this mysticism the Cult of 90+ and talked about it specifically in the context of wine rating.

I talked also about the relationship between the review scores, the reviewer, the publishers of the review and the developers and publishers making the games. There are pressures in these relationships that push reviewers to give higher scores. This is very easy to do in a 100 point system (because of the bracketed question in the previous paragraph), meaning a reviewer under pressure can relieve that pressure incrementally by inflating a score ever so slightly to make everyone involved a little bit happier. This systemic, distributed pressure release into the system of review scores is inflationary and increases game review scores over time.

In terms of inflation, I present the evidence of it by looking at the aggregated game ratings taken from gamerankings.com and I discuss why it is bad: principally because it prevents cross-generational comparison of games (in fact, this need for cross generational comparison means we should impose and maintain a bell curve in ratings even if games are getting empirically better over time).

As an aside: Adam Sessler ranted against a different set of problems inherent with the way aggregators work at this years Rant session. Adam is also right, in my opinion, and a global switch to a five star system would also work alleviate his complaint to some extent.

In any case, if you want the discussion on the above points, you can download the slides and the text of the talk here.

Also of note is that I used Kent Hudson's 'How To Pick a Lock' talk from GDC 2008 as a point in the discussion and I have had a couple people ask me about it. For those interested in that discussion, Kent's slides and video support can be found here. Thanks Kent.

Now - over and above the points raised in the talk there are a couple other arguments for why we ought to undertake a global switch to a five star rating system for games that I did not have time to cover in the talk itself.

Firstly, 100 point rating systems leverage the 'fallacy of precision' to lend authority to the accuracy of the rating (difference between accuracy and precision is here). Essentially the argument here is that if I claim a game is an 82, then most readers are likely to think 'well, it must be somewhere between an 80 and an 85'. In fact, this is a fundamentally invalid assumption. If I were to use a 10 point system and give the game an 8, readers would assume it to be 'probably between a 7 and a 9'. If I were to use a five star system and give a 4, they would assume it 'probably between a 3 and a 5'.

The problem is that the precision afforded by an 82 does not make the accuracy of the rating higher. It is as likely to be a 60 or a 100, just as a 4 star rating is probably somewhere between a 3 and a 5. Accuracy and Precision are orthogonal concepts, but the fallacy of precision leverages the fact that our brains tend to correlate them. In a the highly subjective field of rating games, it is much more important that we be accurate than that we be precise and someone who plays a lot of games can be accurate in a five star system.

To go one step further with this argument, I would point out that in a world full of aggregators, we still have 100 and 1000 point systems and having these systems aggregating five star ratings into percentages is useful and good (provided everyone uses a five star system and their aggregation policies are standardized, fair and well understood - cf Sessler). Having them aggregating ratings that are already claiming 100 points of precision makes the aggregators susceptible to the effects of the aforementioned inflation (in fact it is in the aggregators that we are able to measure the inflation).

For the record - this point was misquoted in IGN's article on the talk wherein they wrote:

According to Hocking ... 35 of the 100 current top-rated games (as tracked by an aggregate site) were released after 2001. That presents a skewed view of the industry's history and points toward a recent inflation of sorts in game reviews.

Note that an astute commenter then went on to reply this:

To say 35 of the top 100 rated games of all time came out since 2001 means that scores have been inflated since them is not consistent. Since 2001, there have been 8 years of games released. We can assume that almost all games with ratings have come out since around 1985, or 24 years ago. The past 8 years represents 1/3 of this time, and 35/100 is about 1/3 of the total game volume. It is consistent that ratings have NOT been inflated as 1/3 of the top rated games have come out in 1/3 of the time period of game releases.

The commenter is exactly right if 35 of the Top 100 rated games of all time were released since 2001. But the real quote was that 35 of the Top 41 highest rated games of all time were released since 2001. That`s not the 35% we would predict, that is 85%. Get it right IGN, you kind of invalidated the entire talk by erroneously reporting the most critical and central piece of data. Maybe it was the precision that threw you off?

I won't go into the other horribly broken arguments in the comments thread... I should know better... but here's my personal favorite:

Clint is a joke. Far Cry was overrated trash. The 100 point system is fine. It allows a more accurate score. Period.

That's like a straw-man multiplied by the denial of the fallacy of precision. Awesome stuff.

As a follow-on from the fallacy of precision point is the argument that the kinds of precision implied in 100 point systems feel elitist to 'ordinary' people. At a time when the industry is experiencing explosive growth - when new players of all demographics are starting to take up gaming - it serves our interest to give them reviews and rating scores they can understand. An 89.3 implies a level of refinement in perception among gamers and reviewers that not only does not exist, but is also intimidating for the mass market. It is the equivalent of terms like 'mature oak finish' and 'fruity nose' in wine discussion. These concepts are alienating for the market and make people feel excluded when - in the end - the entire purpose of game reviews and particularly of giving numerical scores at all is to help inform people about the product and invite them to play.

The final point I wanted to make was that - as members of a press with increasingly important social responsibilities - the reviewers, writers and editors giving the review scores should be the ones championing the push to a five star system. For all the reasons mentioned above, finer granularity systems are broken and compromise the integrity fo their work (and the utility of their work to developers). Chris Hecker also gave a mini rant this year and he called for the gaming press to do their job well. I believe the first step in doing that lies in radically reducing the importance and weight given to numerical scores and emphasizing the importance placed on quality reviews, well written.

I am pretty sure no matter what I say, this call is going to go unheeded... but I am also pretty sure that those who don't make the transition are going to find themselves very rapdily serving a smaller and smaller niche of an explosively growing market. I look very much forward to continuing to work with those who survive the transition.

Connect the dots

Daniel Golding, over at Subject Navigator, brilliantly torpedoes my last post below the waterline by linking the 29 Blogs switched-on gamers should read. (and as a bonus, there aren't 29, but 39) In most cases he links not only the blog, but one or more of the most important posts of the past year from the blog.

If you're new to this, and want to catch up on the state of game criticism - or if you just had your head in the sand for the last twelve -to- eighteen months like I did, then get over there and get reading.

Critical Condition

So for those who don't know, I've been on vacation. In fact, I have just gotten home from being on vacation from my vacation. Even better, that nested vacation followed hard upon a vacation nested in my honeymoon nested in my vacation. So it has been a long time chilling out for me.

Prior to that - which I assume you do know - I was shipping my game (hence the necessity for multiple nested vacations) and prior to that, I was merely working on my game. At some point during the 'working on my game' era, I more or less faded out of the blogging community.

Boy have things changed in the last eighteen months.

The prequel to this post came about after I found Tom Francis' cool blog and chatted a bit over there as he was finishing out FC2 and all his regulars were (politely) damning me for my misestimation of the frequency with which one would encounter armed guard posts in a failed Africa state.

Anyway - two years or so ago, I was lamenting the relative lack of game criticism (as opposed to reviews), and apparently at some stage during the long quiet that emanated from Click Nothing, my lament was answered. Not only do we have Tom Francis, but my sporadic last days and weeks of looking around at the game blogging community have kicked up a good number of really awesome blogs.

A surprising number of these bloggers are wicked smart and have been buzzing around like busy little bees making me look like some sort of Salinger-esque recluse at best, or washed-up slacker at worst. I'm hgappy to say that (despite what you will find on the forums - which are exploding with haterz) a good number of them seem pleased with - or at least very intrigued by Far Cry 2... many having written actual criticism of the game.

Tom Chick, Ben Abraham, Chris Remo, Stephen Totilo and Mitch Krpata (among others) have given the game some high praise - in some cases listing it as or among their games of the year, with Ben citing the immersive qualities of the game as critical to his enjoyment, while roBurky challenges the game's application of immersion. Meanwhile - on the 'less related to me, but more important from a critical thought perspective' front, Steve's thoughts on Immersion are more engaging and more general, riffing off of Jon Blow's fantastic keynote at the MIGS 08 conference and picking up where my own thoughts on Immersion - as examined by The Brainy Gamer - were left weakly dangling. Thanks for picking up the slack guys. Hmm... that sounds condescending. How about 'thanks for bringing the rope, the sand pit, and two tug-of-war teams to a limp little noodle of nothing-but-slack I might have dropped in the playground somewhere'.

And speaking of slack... Iroquois Pliskin gives me none for my obtuse phrasing of 'ludonarrative dissonance'. He's right. But judging by the number of hits that crazy post still draws, the term itself seemed to somehow become a rallying cry - popping up wherever smart people were talking about game criticism, or the lack thereof (again, nothing to do with me - on August 18th game-story duality was the furthest thing from my mind... I was on a plane to Leipzig I think).

I said in my lament just over two years ago:

"We are this close to having an explosion in the field of game critical analysis. When Bogost doesn't have to spend half his time lamenting, and I don't have to spend five times as many words reiterating - when there does exist a small but noticable and steady stream of this kind of media analysis, all these wasted words will disappear and be replaced with more criticism and analysis. Bogost and myself and dozens of others will shift from complaining about not having the analysis to actually providing it. It's a tipping point. Once we reach it the slow linear growth of this kind of material that we see now will shift into a period of exponential growth, and we'll have arrived."

So I think we have arrived... even as Gamasutra lists 'not arriving' as their #2 biggest disappointment of the year. Maybe that's my contribution to this year in the game blogging world that I feel like I missed. Maybe - for what it's worth - stumbling back out into the wild with last year's map still in my hands is the perspective that I get to bring back in exchange for the perspective that you've all provided.

Let me say it again - things changed a lot in the last eighteen months. And it's great.

(Oh, and that part about being willing to pay a thousand dollars to overhear critical discussion of my game because I'd make it back tenfold... well, on double-checking my math, I take that back...)

In Sid We Trust

"You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world."

Change the world? As far as I'm concerned, for the first time since Alpha Centauri, Civilization:Revolution [2] has allowed me to do it. More than that, it has, itself, changed the world.

I never played Civ or Civ 2. The first time I had a PC that could really do the job SM:AC was the flavor of the day and I got my first taste of Meierian awesomeness as the Spartans. Locked into an abusive relationship with the Hive, I was unable to do anything except what they demanded for over a thousand years. Until I got the bomb and began stockpiling. I was eventually forced to win that game by carpet-nuking the entire planet, wreacking untold devastation on every enemy city - and even some of my own - spartan concrete and iron cities shattered under the overpressures of proximal planet buster detonations. If the only honorable death is in service of Sparta... I unleashed a lot of fucking honor that day. Only a handful of domed Spartan cities remained - awash in a radioactive sea.

Civ 3... I must have played it ten times and never finished a game. Somewhere around the Renaissance - either at the tail end of the Middle Ages or the dawn of the Industrial Era at best, I would become swamped. With hundreds of units in play and often well over fifty cities, I would not be able to maintain any forward momentum. The sheer weight of Civ 3's background systems would drag the pace of the game down to a standstill. Maintenance, Inefficiency, Unit Support and proper basing, Pollution... all of these factors would fall like a hammer on my growth and mire the game down into turns that would sometimes take me over an hour to execute. My PC would then need to churn away on the turns of the other factions - sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes or more.

I never even considered playing another Civ game after that... until they announced it was coming to console. It was then that I realized there was no way they could even release a game whose turns would take two hours to complete. They would be forced to deliver a game that could be played from beginning to end in that time. The only question was whether or not the game would be fun with all the complexity stripped out? How much simpler and lighter could you make Civ without it becoming too easily solvable or too degenerate.

I've now bought the game twice. Once on DS and once on X360, and I have played the game upwards of 20 times. In almost every case I have finished the game (after having played it 5 to 8 times, I would tend to abandon a fresh game if starting terrain seemed particularly lop-sided either for or against).

So what's so great about Civilization: Revolution?

You will finish every game you start
And you will do it in between 2-6 hours, depending on how you play, which path to victory you choose, and how singular your commitment to your strategy. Playing on DS will be faster as you can skip the animated depiction of combat... cutting quite a lot of dead time from the game.

It is 'Civ:Lite'... but in a good way
A lot of the heavy underlying systems of previous Civ titles have just been removed. Not consolidated. Not automated. They are just gone. Unit Support? Talk about hidden numbers that have very far reaching effects... this concept is gone entirely. Efficiency? Again - a hidden 'tax' on what a city could produce that diminished the further the city stood from the capitol - it's gone... simply removed from the game. Does this unbalance the game? Now you can support 10,000 units if you want. Now growth is unchecked by efficiency. Isn't that a problem? Well, we could talk about it for hours, these sorts of questions are rooted in fundamental questions about game themselves. In the end, I am pretty certain that the answer we will arrive at is 'no' ... boy I could write 100 pages on that...

It's the same game on X360 and DS (and presumably other platforms)
This is what is world changing for me. In a game development climate where we seem to be trying to release a version of a game on every imaginable platform and we seem to have to do a lot of work and make a lot of compromises and a lot of changes for each platform (often staffing an entirely new team to deliver the game on each platform), Civ:Rev proves that you can release the exact same game on a handheld as you can on a Next-Gen 'living-room' console. Why - oh why - have our DS games tended to be shoddy reskins of other DS games painted up to look like whatever AAA console title we're launching. Why - oh why - do the big console versions of handheld titles seem almost like a joke of an 'up port'? For me - this is the most important statement made by the game. It is the thing that proves Sid Meier still fucking ownz all our asses. It is the thing that calls into question all of the assumptions we've made about game development for this entire generation - even making Will Wright's statements about player creativity and proceduralism, and the 'second processor' and sharing, ranking, rating - seem a bit off the mark. How do we deal with the current generation's 'divide' between the big machines from Sony and Microsoft and the generation-winning machines from nintendo? Sid just showed us.

The Air War
My friend Greg loves kicking people's asses with air-power. From the TIE Defender to SMAC's shard helicopters, nothing can stop him gloating over his air power as he pounds the fuck out of everything with endless waves of aircraft that seem to materialize around him when his singular Goring-esque commitment to air-war pays off at the start of the end-game. Civ:Rev's air-war is different. Civ: Rev wins the air-war thus; there is no better game to play while on an airplane than Civ:Rev on a DS. Period. Trust me. I flew to Africa, Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai, and then Africa again with Civ:Rev DS. If you don't have a DS and you have a flight coming up, it is worth buying one right now, just so you can play Civ:Rev on it while you fly.

What's wrong with Civilization: Revolution?

It is degenerate
The game is degenerate. Keep in mind, I still had to play the game ~10 times to lock down degenerate strategies, but lack of some of the above mentioned overly-complex balancing features leads to two major problems. The first is that aggressive growth strategies always win. I typically win the game with 20+ cities compared to my next leading opponent having 8 or so, and behind him a cluster of opponents with 4-6. The AI simply does not seem able to keep up with even moderately aggressive player growth strategies.

Another unfortunate degeneration is that the Aztecs simply seem unbeatable. The ability to have units always heal to full, plus the later bonuses that this Faction receives (Temples producing science, reduced cost roads, increased gold production) all stack up to make a faction that is just too powerful.

Geographical Determinism
As I mention above, I tend to restart a game within 50 or so turns if the starting terrain seems too lop-sided. If a kind of bias to a theory of geographical determinism is leveled against Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, then nowhere could this bias be more clearly expressed than in Civ:Rev (note - this is a failing of all the Civ games I ever played, not just this one). The reality is, there are myriad ways in which the starting geography of the game can determine the entire outcome of the game, and after you have played half-a-dozen times, you will probably want to abandon about one game in three after the first 45 minutes or so should the geographical advantages be too extreme.

No customization
A sadly missing feature is the ability to customize - even to a slight degree - the nature of the planet you will play on. The planet tends to always be a fairly similar Pangaea, causing games to often play out in similar ways. In Civ 3 and SMAC you could tell the world generator how much to age the planet, how wet or how dry to make it, how eroded, how old, etc. I miss this feature. For example, I would like to try a very naval focused game playing as the Spanish, English or the Japanese - but the probability of an archipelago-style world being generated by the game is low. Also, you cannot choose which factions you will play against. Having the ability to customize the planet generation parameters and the opponents allows you to play some interesting edges of the game... setting the world up as an archipelago and playing as the Spanish - but offsetting your naval advantages by filling the world with powerful military factions like the Mongols, Germans, and Aztecs forces you to play a game of aquatic commerce and culture, which is very different from the 'typical' game which is imposed by the  degenerate elements. I miss that.

Anyway, that's my review of Civilization:Revolution for the XBox360 and Nintendo DS. I highly recommend you try one or the other (or both).

Tough Love

So Far Cry 2 is on shelves now world-wide. I can see from the XBox dashboard that lots of my friends are playing the 360 version. Achievements are not only great for players, but for developers too as I can track where each of my friends is (more or less) in the gameflow by seeing which Achievements they've unlocked.

Looks like we're tracking to pull down an 86 to 88 aggregate rating depending on how you count it and where you look. I'm not at all happy with that, but I'll save the speculation as to the 'why'. Numbers aside, I've gotten a mountain of emails and read a good number of comment threads and posts that are talking about the game. For the most part people seem pretty blown away by the things we did well and a little frustrated at a couple of things we did badly.

One blog in particular had some cool discussion about the joys of fire, the pain of enemy repawning and the absurdity of buddies (as a result of lack of realization and iteration/polish time). Aside from the sassy-but-smart commentary on my game, I had some time to thumb through it and there is quite a lot of good stuff there on other titles and on the industry. I've linked Pentadact over on the right. Check him out.

Portal - The Cliff's Notes Version

Finally got Guitar Hero 2 a couple months ago, and now Guitar Hero 3 is out. Then came Bioshock. I grabbed Battlestations: Midway and DiRT (someone has to play games that aren't getting 10/10), and also grabbed Halo 3. Assassins is next week. Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect and Crysis are less than a month out. Waiting anxiously for Blacksite. GTA IV, Mercs 2, and my game are coming in spring. R6:Vegas and Viva Pinata are still in the plastic on my shelf... how the fuck am I going to find time to play HL2: Episode 2. Or Episode 1 for that matter?? Nevermind Team Fortress 2.

And shit... Portal. Now here is a game that is coming totally out of the blue (from the yellow?). I expected it would be a clever little puzzle game not worth spending my time on (with apologies to the crew at Valve - I should have known better). Turns out there is this odd industry wide shockwave of people saying "holy fuck I can't believe it, but this is the game of the year...". You're kidding me?! Leave me alone. I don't have time for this. Will just ONE of the twenty games due to ship between September 2007 and March 2008 please, please, please just suck so I can have a rest?

For those looking to get the feel for what Portal is about, but who just don't have time to play it, here's the Cliff's Notes version in Flash... I'm having a blast with this. And sadly, unless someone, somewhere, drops the ball and one of these games turns out to be crap, this is all the Portal I might have time for.

NY Times Disses Halo 3?

Okay, not really.

Jurie, over at Intelligent Artifice linked off this op-ed piece from the NY Times last week that I only got around to reading yesterday. I was honestly surprised at how insightful the article is. Normally games coverage in the mass media is dull and lifeless at best, or part of a blind witchhunt at worst, but this article really cuts to the core of important standing challenges in game development that people in the game industry are working hard to solve (even the guys at Bungie, whether Daniel Radosh knows it or not).

Radosh lines 'em up and knockes 'em down: Halo 3 is the Pong of of 2007. Cinematics undermine feelings of agency. Games are 'backward looking', and we game designers have still failed to fully formalize the language of our medium. "Transformers" is not art, Bioshock's reach exceeds it's grasp....

While any one of these statements is worthy of thousands of hours of debate, what's important here is that these ideas are starting to creep out of the pages of game design blogs, out of the post-lecture corridors of GDC, and into the popular press. There's not much in Radosh's article that I haven't said myself (and I'm not typically being original when I say this stuff) - but my 100 hits a day is insignificant compared to the Times. More people probably read that article on the day it ran than will ever read this one in the entire time it sits here.

You should read it to. 

Harvey Smith Interview

Last month there was a short interview with Harvey Smith in Game Developer that I really enjoyed, though I thought it was pretty short. Fortunately - it was short - as in a condensed version of a much longer (and much more interesting) interview on Gamasutra.

Kudos to Harvey for making a game that says some things that he's feeling, and kudos to Midway for giving him the leeway to say things like that. I think it is critically important - if we want the industry to reach broader audiences - that we let our top creators (and Harvey is one) not only make games about challenging things, but also let them talk about it.

Frankly I'm getting really fucking bored of reading about how many weapons and vehicles there are in next month's AAA FPS mega-hit.

Also - I hope if I ever end up in a position overseeing creative at an entire studio as Harvey does, that I would still have the humility to get my hands dirty if it was needed. That boy's got character.