Square is going Soft

Seeing as how this is Square Enix week on Steam, I’ve been tempted by several great deals on Square games I never got around to playing.  Before buying I decided to go against my “trust Square’s every decision” instinct and downloaded the demos for Supreme Commander 2 and Front Mission Evolved.  I’m sure glad I did, because both of these games were awful.  Supreme Commander 2 is a hollow shell of what its predecessor was, with major changes that encourage turtling and hyper-specialized research.  Front Mission Evolved is not only a major departure from the franchises most successful gameplay (which I knew beforehand), it’s a crappy watered down version of its third person shooter predecessors as well.  The controls were clunky, aiming was hypersensitive, and the voiceovers were irritating.

Seeing two titles from my favorite game company fail this hard was not only disheartening, it was eye opening.  I took a moment to look back over Square’s history with my favorite franchise (Final Fantasy) and came to the realization that they’ve been putting out crap for almost a decade now. Starting with Final Fantasy XI, the company has continuously released games in the series that scrap the winning Final Fantasy formula in favor of relentless experimentation, striving to make games a showcase for their new ideas rather than fun experiences.  Final Fantasy XII and XIII were good games in their own regard, but it was clear that the focus was on the “revolutionary mechanics” of combat and advancement, pushing aside franchise staples like… fun and story.  Final Fantasy XIV doesn’t even need explanation, especially since the company has personally apologized for how bad it sucks.

Between 1997 and 2002 Square was an RPG powerhouse, raising the bar for the genre with every release.  Now it seems as if their hunt for innovation has made them forget their winning formula:

Add 1 part beautiful story,1 part gorgeous vistas, 1 part innovation, 2 parts familiarity, a great ATB combat system, Nobuo Uematsu and lots of chocobos. Not that hard, Square.  If you want some help getting back on track, feel free to hire me.  In fact, here are two big tips for free:
-More Strategy RPG's
-Whatever happened to the FFVII remake?  Scrapped? Well unscrap it!

Pixelated Memories

Two games came out this month that are sequels (one direct and one “in spirit”) to two of my favorite games of all time.  Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Tactics Ogre (spiritual sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics) have both been getting great reviews, and making me languish the fact that I own neither a PSP nor a PS3.  But this entry isn’t actually about these new games, its about my original favorites, MvC2 and FFT.

Aside from the incredible gameplay, ridiculous replayability and visceral combat effects, these two games shared one thing in common: They were both crap graphics for their time.  FFT was a 2D isometric game that usually looked like it belonged on a SNES instead of a Playstation.  MvC2 was a Playstation 2 game that was composed almost entirely of 2D sprites.

As a result of these amazing games having crappy graphics, and other favorite games of the times having distinctly different graphics styles compared to now, I (along with many of you I’m sure) have a natural fondness for pixelated games and classic games with bad graphics. It takes me back to a time when games had to showcase good mechanics to make up for the lacking visuals, when limited audio capabilities tried their best to do justice to the beautiful scores of video game composers (ie: Nobuo Uematsu), and when game genres were still discovering their boundaries and potential.  Most of all it takes me back to simply being a kid and falling in love with video games.

What makes me sad is that the new generation of gamers doesn’t have that nostalgia and never will.  They didn’t watch game graphics improve from 8 bit to 16 to 32, they’ve seen life like 3D graphics fall into the uncanny valley and slowly climb out.  We watched graphics evolve styles, while they’ve simply seen improvement.  Thus they won’t connect graphics of the past to fond memories, and will simply continue to clamor for improved visuals.

I’m sounding like an old codger “when I was your age”-ing, so I’ll just say one more thing.  I think it was a smart move for Kongregate to start carrying Unity games, because the new generation isn’t going to have the tolerance for visually underwhelming indie games.

What were your favorite “outdated visuals” games?

Player Created Content: 1 Masterpiece > 99 Wieners

I tried the free version of Minecraft recently, and in the brief time I explored the world and mechanics I saw what everyone was talking about.  It really is an amazing sandbox game, which you don’t hear very often.  Merits of the game aside, what hit me more than the potential for creation was what players had already created.  It just reinforced for me a point I’d been thinking about lately.

Our gamer culture has produced a very wonderful situation, if you haven’t noticed.  We have created a huge pool of intelligent people who are in love with games and will do and learn and try almost anything to make a living off of video games.  That’s why sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds exist, why game development blogs are so popular, why colleges now offer game development programs, and why positions in established game studios are so competitive.  But the end result is a pool of talent much larger than the demand for that talent.  This means that there is a lot of eager talent being wasted.

Games like Minecraft allow this underappreciated talent to shine, showing the level of dedication that they have to quality content creation.  Its free content/publicity for the game and a great showcase for the player.

Now obviously the caveat here is that for every Wonder there are about 99 player created wiener jokes of content, and its unfortunate that that’s what we focus on in discussions of player created content.  But to be perfectly blunt, 99 out of 100 people in the real world create very little incredible content for the world (children aside), but that 100^th person can end up as a Leonardo Da Vinci or an Andrew Carnegie or a Mark Zuckerberg.  The point is that the world benefits more from the incredible 1% than it is hurt by the less-than-epic 99%.  

Net gain, but only if you give people the chance to try.

Established Mythos: Sales Boost or Blood in the Blogwater?

I plan to write an article later on the modern information cycle and its relevance (and detriment) to the video game industry. For now, suffice it to say that between the intensity of the blogosphere and our almost constant connection to the web, there is an unprecedented amount of analysis, scrutiny and mudslinging that takes place when even a tiny bit of information about a game is released.  This is particularly destructive to MMO’s, who naturally have a longer development time and thus more time for each bit and beta to be blown out of context and proportion.

The effect is worst for MMO’s based on established franchises.  If you hear that a game called Rift is coming out, and hear nothing for three years, how much would you have been able to criticize or speculate on (actually maybe a little bit, if you’re anything like me)?  On the other hand, if you hear that a Star Wars MMO or a Warhammer MMO or a Star Trek MMO is coming out, every moment of those three informationless years will be filled with speculation, naysaying and high expectations.

My point is, the MMO market seems unusual in that an established mythos gives little benefit to sustained sales, since it raises expectations and allows for a much longer window of naysaying.  A game with an unestablished mythos may have weaker initial box sales, but it won’t have to fight the negative tidal wave to hold subscribers.

Let’s hope this is true in another market!

Edit:  Just to preemptively clarify the links, Ravious is scrutinizing and analyzing, not mudslinging.  And I agree with Syp.

Ad Nauseum: Rift

While most people are discussing Rift’s gameplay and lore, I wanted to touch on another aspect of the game that doesn’t bode well for its long term success.  We who read blogs know about a game’s release long before the average gamer that relies on traditional media, so it’s easy for us to forget that traditional print and television ads are an enormous contributor to the success of a game’s launch sales.  Trion has launched a multimedia campaign spanning television, internet ads and even comic book pages, all with the central tagline of “We’re not in Azeroth anymore”.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that these ads look pretty cool, with the tentacles of an enormous monster clawing its way into the world as the hero looks on.  And on the surface the tagline seems like a good idea, because it could suggest that Azeroth was a boring and soft place compared to Telara, playing off of the phrase’s origin in the Wizard of Oz (Azeroth being Kansas, Telara being Oz). But I think this campaign could end up working against Rift’s success.

First of all, naming the world of the World of Warcraft is tacky and fanboyish, as they’re acknowledging WoW’s current dominance by relying on it's brand recognition for a clever tagline.  Combine that with a famous phrase that has been copied ad nauseum, and they end up with a rather low class cornerstone for a marketing campaign.

This ad is also misguided because they’re stressing the point that this game is VERY different from the most wildly popular MMO ever.  That might attract the minority of WoW players who are disgruntled with their current game, but fresh off the release of Cataclysm that minority has shrank significantly.  The context of the tagline and imagery of the ad suggests that Rift will be scarier, more dangerous and more difficult than WoW, only further alienating a playerbase who has slowly dragged WoW down into becoming more casual and less difficult.

Finally, even the metaphor they’re using doesn’t bode well for them, since they’re comparing WoW to Kansas and Rift to Oz.  I haven’t seen The Wizard of Oz in a long time, but I’m pretty sure Dorothy tours Oz (for less than thirty free days) then ends up back in Kansas.  So it almost seems like Trion is inviting WoW tourists.  Nice work, ad department.  At least the art is cool…