Click Nothing

Out of the shadows...

For those wondering what I've been up to for the past while, here's the news; a year or so ago I moved back to Montreal, and have been working on an upcoming Assassin's Creed game.

Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe was revealed with a teaser in the AC Showcase that aired as par to Ubisoft Forward over the weekend. While it is only a teaser / logo reveal, it's always exciting to share the news: so here it is in all it's ~20ish seconds of glory.

 

Let's Play... Screw the Banks!

Maybe you've been vacationing on Pitcairn Island since the beginning of April and you haven't gotten news yet, but a month or so ago millions of documents were leaked to the press from the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama. These papers reveal how hundreds, or potentially thousands of wealthy individuals have been using offshore companies, banks and law firms to avoid paying taxes in their home countries.

Leaving aside questions of whether or not this kind of shit should be legal at all, the probability is that some of it is not. I personally think tax avoidance (the legal optimization of your finances to minimize your tax payable) kind of sucks to begin with - for the simple fact that it disproportionately benefits people who already have lots of money and can hire lawyers and accountants to help them pay less tax. Tax evasion (the illegal concealment of income to avoid paying tax) is an actual crime - the crime that got Al Capone sent to prison. Money laundering is the transformation of money made through criminal enterprise (such as dealing in arms, slavery, drugs, conflict minerals, etc) into 'not-illegal' money. Law firms like Mossack Fonseca, and the offshore banks they work with, and the shell companies they create, explicitly, openly and legally help wealthy people avoid taxation. Unfortunately the same systems and structures they use to do so can (and are) used for tax evasion and money laundering. I think that sucks.

Anyway, the Prime Minister of Iceland was already forced to resign because of his involvement in this mess, but his is only the highest profile head to roll so far. Acting and former Heads of State and their immediate family members from over 40 countries appear to be named in the leaked documents along with many other wealthy individuals and public figures. Apparently on Monday, May 9th, a giant list will be published of all the people connected to the couple of hundred thousand offshore companies that have been created through Mossack Fonseca for the purposes of doing international business, avoiding taxes, evading taxes, cleaning the bloodstains off their cash, or hiding the fact that they simply stole it outright from the budgets of very countries they are supposed to be running.

While all of this has been going down, I got to reminiscing with Mathieu Berube, who I work with here at Ubi in Toronto. Mathieu was a level designer who worked with me back on the first Splinter Cell, and was the LD who built the Panama Bank level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which I personally think is the best Splinter Cell level ever made. In the story of the game, MCAS Banco de Panama was the financial middle-man able to conceal the people involved in the arms-for-information transaction between Displace International, Zherkezhi, and Peruvian revolutionary-wannabe Hugo Lacerda. Mathieu and I joked about how, when you work on these kinds of near-future political thriller kinds of games, you often end up predicting the future: the Bank level in Chaos Theory was ultimately about the power of offshore banks to make these kinds of illegal transactions anonymous.

After talking about it, we realized that it would be cool to see if we could get the game up and running and play through the level again while talking about how we designed and built it. It would also give us a chance to rant incoherently about our frustrations with all the shitheels who are screwing the rest of us by not paying their fair share. So that's what we did - we dug up a 360 (SCCT was on the original XBox, but was made backwards compatible) and did a run through and talked about some of the decisions we made.

So we made a Let's Play...



PS Making this video is not in any way intended to imply we are working on any particular game. What we're working on is unannounced. The fact that we're talking about Chaos Theory is a coincidence related to current events and nothing more.

Ten Years Down

I realized earlier today that it's been ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped.

Obviously, a lot has changed in that time, but I'm not going to wax nostalgic about that. I thought instead I would regale you a never before made public tale of what that game meant to me.

Chaos Theory was a hell of a project. I began as the Lead Level Designer and the Scriptwriter, which meant from the start I was doing two serious, full time jobs. I had to get the level design team queued up to deliver 12 maps that were of much higher and much more uniform quality than those in the original game, and I had to make sure we had a story and script that worked all the way through. I also had to get a commitment from that entire team that - come hell or high water - we would not cut a single level. This was doubling down on both the team, and on quality - it meant everyone on the level design side was bought in, but it also meant I could work with confidence on a script that would not later be hobbled by having to move or cut levels.

At the same time, there was a lot of stuff to fix in terms of the global vision of the game. The original Splinter Cell had been a big hit, but it was not without its serious faults. Punishing 'Game Over' gating and brutal trial-and-error gameplay that we should have fixed in the original needed some challenging and innovative solutions if Splinter Cell was to be moved forward.

Development was hard. Sometime around Alpha, mandate came down from Ubi that all internal projects needed to have a Creative Director. Mathieu Ferland - the Producer - asked me to do the job. I said no. I was not convinced that it was not just a bullshit management position and I was worried that I already had two jobs. But after a few discussions with friends and family and the team, a week or so later I changed my mind and became Creative Director, Lead Level Designer and Writer for the game. If you watch the credits, you'll see that three of the first five names in the credits are me. The other two were Mathieu Ferland, and the Art Director, The Chinh Ngo. Anyway, these responsibilities came with a heavy price, though. I spent most of the 24 months of Chaos Theory's development working 80 hours a week.

About six months after I became Creative Director, when the game was around Beta, my good friend Dave (who had been an AI programmer on the original Splinter Cell, and who is currently one of the founders of Tiger Style) came to Montreal to visit. He stayed with us, and he slept in our spare room for a week or ten days. That week I took 'time off' - by which I mean I left work at 6pm or so every night so we could have dinner and hang out. It was fun - I've been told. I don't really remember.

I went to GDC in March of 2005, while the game was in the distribution process, and I gave a talk about the narrative structure of the game. Of course, I also got to hang out with Dave under far less stressful circumstances. Over dinner one night, we got to talking about the time he'd last been in Montreal. During that discussion, I kept correcting him about what we'd done the last time he was in Montreal, but we kept disagreeing about the details and the timing. Over the course of the meal, we realized that I actually had no memory of his trip to Montreal six months previously, and that I was recalling a previous visit he'd made about a year or so before that. Dave had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear - I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.

Once we realized that the incongruities in our conversation were the result of a legitimate failing of my memory, Dave helped me trying to find a handle. We talked about it over dinner, and then on and off over time. I spoke with my wife about it (she, of course, had full recollection), and eventually, I was able to pin a few minor pieces of my memories to the cork board of my brain and piece together a kind of past.

Over time, I was able to slowly reconstruct some significant part of that lost week. I remember a few meals and a few conversations in a few bars. I remember my friend being in my house. I remember us drinking coffee together and smoking cigarettes.

Writing it all down, now, I have to confess I have mixed feelings about it. I am really, truly proud of what we accomplished with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It stands the test of time as one of the best games ever made. At the same time, the personal cost for making it was real and serious. It's not about forgotten beers in some bar on St Laurent. It's about brain damage and the loss of life. To this day, I am still not sure what the right equation is there. I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I'm still not sure if I would do it again if I had the chance.

Anyway, here's something you've never seen before:

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.

Convergence Culture

Part Eight: Future Past

Seven months ago when I started writing this column, I suspected the things I would be talking about were mostly wishful thinking. The idea that an increasingly entrenched game industry would see value in connecting casual, social or mobile gamers to their blockbuster AAA titles through meaningful gameplay seemed likely to fall by the wayside in favour of more aggressive exploitation of insidiously monetized shovel ware. How could developers – constantly understaffed and struggling to make every deadline – ever find the time to build a Facebook or iPhone game that would meaningfully link casual players to their fifty million dollar Christmas release if they couldn't find the time to make their Beta?

The World of Warcraft Armoury has been around for quite a while, but let’s face it: Blizzard can afford to put a man on the moon if they want, so they’re not much of a model for the rest. Various Spore browser apps allow you to look at the Sporepedia on a mobile device, but these offer no gameplay, and aren’t even built by EA. The best that the year’s biggest releases could muster – like Modern Warfare 2 – were fan made game guides and various utilities for mobile devices that allowed you to find Intel Drops, know what Perks and Kill Streak Rewards were coming and read some map strategies. None of these things were meaningfully linking different groups of players to a single unified experience.

I wasn't my only non-believer, either. I received plenty of emails skeptical of the idea that some 40 year old executive might want to manage a crime family from his Android phone, and in doing, drive a component of the open world urban crime game his son was playing. More openly hostile emails condemned me for selling out to the marketing vampires I identified in the intro for suggesting we could do everything I was suggesting profitably, while others accused me of undermining the ultimate goal of building the perfect immersive simulation of everything.

But while my pipe-dreams and prognostications may remain heretical for some, they might also end up coming true. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – developed by my esteemed former co-workers – has done a fantastic job of opening the door for a huge audience of casual and social gamers to peer into the amazing world of Renaissance Italy and the life of Ezio. I had no idea AC: Legacy was being developed, but it achieves many of the things I suggested months ago (and in many ways better than I imagined – which is no surprise knowing who was involved). This is an important first step toward the future that I’m talking about because it challenges the notion that the kinds of fantasies gamers are interested in are inaccessible to a broad audience. We may have always suspected that the fantasy of Assassin’s Creed had a broad appeal beyond the existing audience of a few million hardcore gamers – but we couldn’t prove it. Now we can. Now we will be able to measure the appeal of that fantasy to a real audience.

Dust 514 – though still in development – openly attempts to link two of the most hardcore audiences of gamers out there: competitive online FPS players and dedicated PvP MMO players. While the potential scope of this intramedia link is smaller than that which would connect Assassin’s Creed on console to Facebook gamers, the data will be just as interesting and important. Will an audience of ‘me first’ shooter players accept the cascade of consequences that emerge from the proposed design? Will they – for example – willingly engage in a battle they can’t win to achieve the strategic goal of a group of players in EVE? Will EVE players be willing to leave their best laid invasion plans in the hands of a bunch of bickering fourteen year-olds with hyper-conductive nervous systems? Is the patience and ruthless plotting of the EVE community compatible with the twitchy thirst for chaos of an FPS community?

And perhaps the most important question raised by these games is whether or not the connection between different audiences will act as a gateway between the games. Will people who have never played a console game give Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood a chance if they are invested in Legacy? Will ageing shooter fans invested in Dust 514 decide to give EVE a try as their reflexes fail them and they fall under the curve?

Before this article ever sees print we'll have answers to these and other questions, and developers will already be hard at work on a second wave of games that strive to do even more than I imagined. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet."

Far Cry 2 Map Editing Guide

Wow - two posts in a row about books that I contributed to - albiet this one is only indirectly as I didn't actually write anything for it.

A few months ago, Ubisoft announced that they would be facilitating the creation of a map editing guide to be written entirely by the Far Cry 2 map editing community.

It's done (age gated). I finally got my hands on a copy of the finished product yesterday, and I think it's pretty cool. Published by Charles River Media, the guide is hefty and acts mostly as a super-robust handbook for the (already awesome) editor. It discusses all the different classes and game modes and weapons, and breaks out all the different biomes that the game supports, as well as providing a lot of interesting discussion on the design implications of different topolgies, terrains and environments. It touches on the classic pillars of multiplayer map design and even provides detailed indexes of the object libraries (which is very helpful - particularly for the console mapper).

Since most of my readers here are developers, I'll be honest and say I don't think the book would be of much help to a pro (though it's not just for designers, a lot of programmers on our team played with it and were very happy with the results - I would recommend any programmer, animator, or producer who has never been hands on with a level editor give it a try just to see what they can do). Mostly though, for an amateur or hobbyist, or - perhaps more importantly - someone looking for a way to hone level design skills for a resume, I think the book is a really valuable contribution.

I'll also say I'm really impressed by a fan community who can organize themselves around the considerable and daunting task of seeing a collaborative book project all the way through from conception to completion in such a short time.

To see this kind of commitment coming from fans of the game makes me even more proud of it.

Available from Amazon here.

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.

41 Days Down

So, after a doctor's appointment this morning, I have been cleared for a part-time return to work, starting tomorrow.

For the time being, I'll only be working four hour stretches, three days a week. That will leave me all the time I need for my physiotherapy, osteopathy, and acupuncture, along with swimming, cycling and whatever else I can squeeze in there that might speed my recovery - without overdoing it and injuring myself.

For those not already in-the-know, it's a herniated disk between L5 and S1, and the base of my lower back. The herniation was compressing the nerve down my left leg in classic fashion and limiting movement considerably. It was also extremely painful except when lying down, and much to my own disappointment, the prescription calls for stationary bed-rest... and they mean it for real (and they're right). I tried to resist it for the first couple weeks, but that proved itself pointless - so instead I basically got to sleep 12+ hours a day and play videogames the rest of the time. That actually turned out to be a big plus, because I missed so many of last years games, I thought I was never going to catch up. I got to play Fallout 3, Dead Space, EndWar, Bully, Left 4 Dead (with Tom and PY mostly),  Naruto, Chinatown Wars, and a lot of Drop7, and now my intimidating list of games-to-play is a lot shorter.

The other good news is that I was smart enough to take the 'opportunity' to change my eating habits so that I wouldn't gain 20 pounds while I was rendered immobile. Even without any exercise (aside from very light stretching in the last 3 weeks) I managed to lose almost 15 pounds simply by tracking my caloric intake versus my (non-existant) burn. For for any of you out there wishing you could lose 10 pounds - if I can do it with a hernitated disk, lying on the couch like a lard-ass all day every day for over a month - you can do it to. Even better - the positive messaging of today's post is not sponsored by Oprah or Wheaties or Weightwatchers or Tracey Anderson or anyone else other than good old fashion arithmetic. Calculate how much you need. Calculate how much you burn, add the two numbers, and count what you eat until you reach the sum and stop. So you know - it means that you have to either stop eating Doritos, Sour Cherry Blasters and One-Bite Brownies or you have a lot of fucking running to do - I chose the former option.

Alas, now the sick-leave that followed my vacation-within-a-vacation that came after my honeymoon that was embedded in my vacation that followed my world tour has come to an end.

Looking forward to getting back to work on that new game I can't talk about.

The Fast and the Curious

/corporate hat on

Fast Company just named Ubisoft as one of the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies (with a shout out to the Anvil engine and to the PoP team on the click-thru). I'm fucking proud of it, so despite that fact that some of you will call me a corporate shill, I'm going to blog about it anyway.

Yves Guillemot has always said that innovation and creativity were important pillars for us, and I must admit I have had the good fortune to be able to benefit from this stance in my creative life. Trying to innovate is something I've always pushed hard for in everything I've done. I know a lot of other people have too. We've invested a lot in innovation over the years and consequently have had to learn to embrace the risks that come with that (and we've also taken our share of the bumps that accompany them) so it feels good to finally get a shout-out for it.

It's especially encouraging given the current economic situation to have a nod like this even as Yves reasserts the importance of creativity and innovation instead of backpedalling to a 'safer' stance as (in my opinion) other more 'reactionary' CEO's might do. It means the light flickering through the smoke over the trenches is actually the sunlight of victory and not more incoming tracer-fire.

Even though such a list is a little arbitrary, it's also cool to see who they've ranked us ahead of and who they've ranked us behind.

So bye-bye Lego and watch out Microsoft and Wal-Mart.

/corporate hat off

Goin' Down to the Crossroads

UPDATED -

Frank: ask and ye shall receive

So - even though I am way too busy back at work to be spending my time doing it, I didn't want to leave it unfinished. I just completed my first X360 user map for Far Cry 2.

It is called FC2dev Crossroads and it is now published and available for download for anyone who might be playing FC2 online. It is a large map, supporting 12-16 players and all game types - DM, TDM Capture the Diamond and Uprising. I was only able to playtest it with groups of a few friends at a time. But thanks goes out to Magnum PY, gregvw, XL Burrito, and Final1Option for finding some last minute bugs for me to fix before publishing.

On the whole, I found make an 'urban environment' very tiring. It take much, MUCH longer to populate buildings and structures with furniture and destructible obejcts etc, than it does to make huge fields of terrain that look beautiful. I think if Imake another map with will be a small one. Either that or it will be a much more terrain and landscape focused level with more vehicles. Crossroads is all close quarters street fighting with no vehicles.

Anyway, if you get a chance to play it online, feel free to comment and let me know what you think.