If you're following the current flip-flop in Microsoft's policies today for the Xbox One, you'll notice that the tone of tech sites are opposite of that of the gaming enthusiast press(those two being the extremes of the spectrum). As someone who has taken advantage of the used game stores like Gamestop aggressively, I fully understand their value to consumers. That said, I think unless you've used a platform like Steam you don't fully recognize how much of a greater value that is than the potential of used market. As my friend @rolyatkcinmai said it on twitter:

You guys do realise NBA 2k is $13 on PC and $55 on consoles a month after it comes out precisely because there are no used sales right?

Publishers & Developers are not going to in good faith be aggressive like they are on Steam unless they have the closed system. It doesn't make sense for a business to be aggressive when your system is open, frankly. Since 2003, Steam has created an completely closed system, which lead to the creation of a marketplace where I would never think of selling in my games. Steam currently controls 70% of the PC gaming market, and they did so by creating a market with reliable metrics for publishers & developers which lead to the benefit from it in aggressive sales. Microsoft was going to have exactly that and then expand upon it with their family sharing & trading hub for digital licenses(where publishers got a portion of the sale). They were expanding the idea of digital rights in a really forward thinking way, but it seems gamers got hung up on the no physical trade ins & online check.

I can't help but be bummed out, even if a lot of the benefits were potential & not yet concrete. Potentially the Xbox One was doing what Steam did great, and expanding upon it. Now it won't be and that makes me sad. I'll be looking forward to see what our old friend and compatriot Will Smith has to say about it on the Tested Podcast. Namaste, duders.

@granderojo

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Be warned I will talk about The Last of Us in this post, if you wish not to be spoiled please move on. There are a lot of problems I've had with the Uncharted series. The games had dumb enemies, and despite the sheer amount of effort/money poured into them but the first game felt like the game equivalent of Matthew McConaughey's Sahara, second & third Nicolas Cage's National Treasure when they were clearly going for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hardly generation defining as many people put them, but let me not keep kicking the horse. Don't get me wrong, I thought the games were good, just not great. Despite how much money is poured into those, it doesn't make up for how boring it is to press up to climb a cliff-face or how B-movie esque their stories were. Firstly, The Last of Us on the other hand is without a doubt better as a game to play than both the Uncharted games. Naughty Dog has riddled The Last of Us with a plethora of systems by expanding greatly on what Uncharted did well & creating altogether new ones for this game. From the awkward aiming mechanic, to the crafting to the stealth, all are vast improvements over its predecessors. While it still suffers from dumb enemies that seem to plague Naughty Dog games this generation, at least this time it had more actual game too it. That said the game did suffer from problems, namely leap in logic the game had you jump through. Your implicit goal was protecting this little girl with all my being, but she always seemed to be running into me awkwardly. She was invisible to enemies & immune to all harm it seems. This happened early on due to the cramp city dwellings, where bad pathfinding would have her constantly run in front of you and cling to the same bit of cover as yourself. But, as the game opened up with larger environments & often times had you playing as Ellie or Joel solo altogether there was less opportunities for bad AI partner pathfinding.

Secondly, and most importantly, Naughty Dog crafted a superior story than anything else they've put out. The Last of Us is telling the story of the villain from beginning to end but it's more than just that. I quoted Macbeth at the beginning of this post because throughout the game, Joel reminded me of a various characters the Compson family in William Faulkner's great novel The Sound and the Fury. There's something beautifully arrogant and domineering to their specific brands of southern chivalry both Joel & the Compson family express toward the equally selfish and blindness of the innocents that are important to them. It was Ellie's unrealistic expectation that Joel would deliver her to the fireflies to save humanity from the blight which drove Joel to eventually commit villainy. In that end we see that we've been playing as the villain the entire time and you get to see how truly barbaric and unyielding chivalry actually is. If only Ellie knew the truth, she would be devastated to know what Joel had done. But that's her critical error, she expects Joel to operate on the same level of innocence as her.

Joel's life is his survival, it is a motion that is concerned with what drives all men:

What time Joel has to devote to morality he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He must eventually choose between good or evil, but only because his moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can continue enduring and surviving. His moral conscience is his curse he had to accept in order to gain the right to dream.

Naughty Dog has constructed a tragedy unlike any other I've played in recent memory. While so many games try to create a power fantasy, The Last of Us is swimming upstream in the opposite direction trying to deliver a game where the protagonist is trying to regain his innocence.

What did you think of The Last of Us? I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

In my last entry, I blogged about my multiple quests to save the North as Roose Bolton in the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings II at the start of a Clash of Kings. Those games while being failures have manifested in my current ongoing game. Upon the start of A Clash of Kings, I (currently Roose Bolton) married Alys Karstark & plotted to kill her imprisoned brother Harrion Karstark. Upon the assignation of her brother during the war, Alys becomes heir to Karhold, and our only child Halys heir to Karhold. Knowing the invasion of the Iron Islands was impending the North during it's war with the Iron Throne, marriage was arranged between my bastard Ramsay & Asha Greyjoy. After the marriage, this caused Balon to pull back his forces & allowed Robb Stark the time to finally broker a deal with The Vale & House Baratheon to ally against the Iron Throne.

While the Clash of Kings was won by the North,Robb dies in the last battle in poetic fashion despite victory. The war having lasted for a long time he fostered five children, all girls. My new liege, Maege Stark 'The Howling' is young & The North become unstable after the war. During this period of post war reconstruction Roose Bolton lives a long life but eventually he dies, & I take control of Ramsay who is now Highlord of The Dreadfort. Ramsay like in the show & the books is a villainous character, & even while I'm controlling his person I can't stop him from bedding with other women & causing my beautifully strong wife Asha Greyjoy to hate me with all her heart. Having never fostered a child, I divorced Asha while she was still of childbearing age & waited until one of my vassals or my brother poisoned me from how unpopular I was. The night after making my half brother my cup-bearer Ramsay is poisoned & Halys assumes control of the Dreadfort & Karhold. In that same month my liege asks me to crush Hornwood for treachery against her liege. Now an adult & wonderful steward, Halys Bolton with the combined forces of Dreadfort & Karhold easily crush Hornwood absorbing it as a vassal. Little does Lady Maege know that their treachery was a fabrication planted by Ramsay during his reign of villainy.

Skilled in the art of war & intrigue, Halys combines these skill traits to shift the balance of power in the north while staying popular unlike his older half brother before him. Marrying Cassana Flint gives Halys wife weak claim to The Neck. During this expansion, my prestige skyrockets only increasing my general popularity among the Seven Kingdoms.

Right as my expansion ends, The Lannisters and Martell decide to ally in an attempt to take back the Iron Throne. With a Stag currently on The Throne, this war does not last long. During this war I notice the Master of Coin for the Iron Throne is unmarried & a wealthy lord of a lot of land. My mother still of child bearing age, asks to marry & I successfully tie our houses with the Iron Throne.

With my mother having been remarried lord of The Crossing, and my consistent expansions. Our family brings the North a much more consistent balance of power in the region easily crushing any bickering among kingdoms for our liege. This stability that I bring the North allows me to build my relationships with my Lords & neighbors as I constantly spend coin to shower them with gift while taking time to upgrade my cities & castles along the way. My bastard half brother the only one in my kingdom who hates me gives up at some point & asks to take The Black. With him out of my way I spend the rest of the time allotted in life on ensuring my legacy. Betrothing my children to powerful houses & ensuring stability for the region by arranging marriages between important houses. Maege first husband having died in battle, I brokered a marriage between my liege & Lord Byron 'The Laughing Falcon' of The Vale ensuring a lasting strong alliance.

As the years roll on, the Baratheons who won the Throne find themselves seceded by a weaker house by the laws of succession from the unpopular House Mallister through laws of Cognatic Succession. This marriage to a weak house sends the Seven Kingdoms back into a state of violence & leads to Queen Pia of The Iron Throne receiving a swift death by rabble. The Mallister's much like The Frey, have a deep pull of relatives to put on the Throne. Her younger brother, eventually dies after being poisoned. The North, The Vale & Lannisters tired of a weak house on the Throne declare a war of independence, which fails but ends with two more Mallister's dying while in combat. Eventually the deep pool of relatives is exhausted & the last of the Mallisters sit upon the Iron Throne. King Damon & Princess Leana, his only heir, are sacrificed to the Old Gods ending House Mallister. With nobody on the Iron Throne, the Baratheons use a strong claim to take back the Throne with King Durran 'the Bewitched' who ends up being a great warrior.

King Durran's rule would outlast the entirety of the prior usurper house but it would not be without challenge. My Liege among others namely the Lannisters would challenge the crown in small flare up wars, eventually forcing the King to institute limited crown authority which ended the hostilities for a short period. During this time Hayls had me in a state of panic, having expanded greatly during my reign, all I had now to do was ensure my legacy. My first three children having died stillborns, this sent me & my loving wife into a state of depression where a decade passes with no more children. In my 40's though, my friends sense that I'm stressed & they throw lavish parties for me sending me into a state of hedonism. This period of satyrism in the life of Hayls proved exactly what I needed to ensure my legacy, because in the span of less than four years I birth four children to ensure my legacy.

All during this time Alys Karstark, my mother, is living now in the Riverlands schemes to kill the last of the Karstarks to ensure our legacy. Despite being loved by Arthor Karstark with a maximum opinion allotted, Halys agrees to the plot & helps to assassinate Arthor along with his wife & child by smothering them all with pillows. Shortly after these plots, Hayls having lived a long life hair begins to grey & his intense period of hedonism takes it's toll on the lord, sending him into a period of sickness where he would eventually die. My eldest son, still a boy now inherits the high lordship of Karhold & continues on the work of his father. Domeric Bolton, having been schooled in court, had an incredibly high diplomatic rating & even at only the age of 8 his stewardship rating was more impressive than his father. This combinations of skills was unlike anything the Dreadfort or Karhold prior to had prior to his coronation & would allow Domeric to betroth himself to Maege Starks eldest daughter Arya, also eldest sister to the heir to the Vale. His wife also schooled at court would have a very high intrigue, later in life becoming his Master of Wispers. These combinations of traits would prove a highly productive combination in their marriage. Despite the marriage being highly calculated in ensuring the peace & prosperity of the realm, the two fell in love as soon as Arya became of child bearing age.

During this period of transition, other houses noticing the balance of power in the North shifting toward Karhold, began plotting against me. My cousin, a Flint having lordship over the Neck found himself poisoned & his four year old son inheriting lordship over The Neck. His son a weak sickly boy was far too weak to inherit such an important title. Being the kind lord that I was I offered to transfer Lonely Hills to the boys holdings in exchange for Greywater's Watch, the lordship of The Neck, but the boy had other ideas. More Flint than Bolton at this point, the boy declared independence with the Flints at his side sending my realm into a state of rebellion. This being the exact opportunity I needed, as my brother recently betrothed to an important Lannister/Tyrell was unlanded which gave me the chance to give him Greywater's Watch upon victory. Due to the ways the walls were split at The Neck, this rebellion took longer to put down than it should due having to split my forces as to trap the rebels from retreating.

Despite my efforts to ensure my brother's legacy, Martyn Bolton was preoccupied with his other matters having fallen in love with one of my courtiers. Fearing retribution from Lannisters & Tyrells, Domeric plotted to assassinate Martyn's lover along with the child they had together. In a stroke of good luck, it seemed no one else all the Seven Kingdoms wanted this relationship to go on further as the plot success of staying undisclosed peaked at around 4800%. Although Martyn shamed his wife, she continued her duty to her husband & continued producing children, ensuring our line together. After a few proxy wars House Baratheon & Lannister put aside their difference opting for peace as Baratheon joined houses on the Throne with House Dalt of Lemonwood, proud & strong vassals to the Dorne(now long intermixed family & allies to the Lannisters). This period brings peace to the Seven Kingdoms, and during this period Domeric is able to build many improvements to his region while showering his friends with gifts to ensure their loyalty. As his prestige grew this allowed Domeric to betroth his eldest son Donnel with King Humfrey of the Iron Throne's eldest daughter Mary.

Lord Domeric lived a long and happy life during the middle period of his life, but during a rebellion The Vale was in danger of having it's lord lose his high lordship. Fearing a hit to both their houses prestige, Lord Domeric assisted his cousin in bringing down the rebellion handily but during the battle Lord Domeric now an old man suffered a fatal wound. Young Donnel now a young man, inherited the high-lordship of Karhold & seeking to ensure The Vale from further rebellions, Donnel was betrothed to his cousin Randa eldest daughter of The Vale. Schooling his son in the art of warfare, Lord Domeric foresaw the peace between the Baratheons & Lannisters not lasting & realized that the best chances of ensuring his line was to have a great commander secede him. This is exactly what happened. King Humfrey is killed on the Throne & Lemonwood inherits the Throne through his son. Seeing this as their opportunity, Lord Joanna of House Lannister a strong commander in her own right seeks to lay claim to the Throne & the Seven Kingdoms is sent back into a state of War. Many options are presented to Lord Donnel, with three daughters but no sons but still young, it will be to know what he should do. One enticing option presented to him, the Lannisters need troops & Donnel has them. Does he betroth Joanna's eldest son to his eldest daughter with a matrilineal marriage? This would allow the Lannisters just enough troops to take the Iron Throne & Donnel's heir would inherit Castery Rock through right of succession. What side will the Baratheons fall on? High Garden?

STAY TUNED...

When I bought Crusader Kings 2 a few days ago, I made the decision to disavow the vanilla game and set my sights on playing the Game of Thrones mod. You’ve been warned that henceforth I will talk about spoilers for the show/book when referencing the mod. The mod at this point is quite robust, allowing to pick multiple points in Game of Thrones history from the beginning of the 7 kingdoms to Robert’s rebellion leading to A Clash of Kings & A Feast of Crows. As someone who’s dropped over 500 hours of my life into Victoria II, Paradox to me is at it’s best when their strategy games focus on political economy & war is just a tool in your arsenal to get what you want to enact political change. After 27 hours in three days of Crusader Kings 2 I can assure you that for me, Crusader Kings 2 meets those prerequisites. If anything CK2 is an approachable Victoria II, by it’s very nature monastic politics are far simpler to manipulate than the multitude of those featured in Victoria.

In my three days of play, I strictly played the Game of Thrones mod,theorizing a plan to save the North for my strong but naïve leader Robb Stark as Roose Bolton. In the books and the show, the Bolton’s are the festering cancer of the North and their very existence the definition of a broken society. My plan was to start in A Clash of Kings and help win the war for the North while merging the Bolton’s House with Karstark. To my South, Lady Donnel of Hornwood is widowed and to my Northeast the previously betrothed potential heir to Karhold, Alys Karstark is without a suitor. Harrion Karstark her oldest living brother is imprisoned by Tywein Lannister, easily eliminated as he is not popular among anyone in Westeros. The options are to marry myself to Lady Donnel or Alys, and then to arrange a marriage between my bastard Ramsay with the remainder. Hornwood is a powerful house with ties to White Harbor, most powerful economic hub in all of the North and Karhold arguably the third or fourth most powerful house in the North.

Donnel while near past child bearing age at 38 consistently gives me at least one child whenever I marry her off to either myself or my heir. Alys is quite fertile usually, producing multiple children, and I’ve found that ensuring Karhold for my son through Alys is the safest most fruitful option for the Boltons as Alys will consistently produce three to four children minimum with Ramsay & tie our two powerful houses. The next option which I found required me to fabricate a claim on Widow’s Watch. There’s literally no penalty for doing so, the only friends they have are the Flints, and they are easily crushed. At this point you might ask, I thought you were trying to save the North? I am indeed, in order to help my Liege I must first ensure my own house by making it powerful.

From this point further the game gets much harder and far more unpredictable. If Robb gets no help he loses the war 3 out of every 4 times I played, and those are just odds I’m not comfortable with. I’ve found that The Wall will never be conquered, other weaker houses in the North will send troops so you don’t have to worry about the Free-folk of the North getting past The Wall. With them out of the way, I can focus on the two eventualities. If I leave my troops North I can be crushed by the Iron Islands and risk potential death. If I have bedded with Donnel & produced offspring then this is a viable option. In everyone of my tries, if I hold off the Iron Islands long enough that gives Robb enough time & troops to send back South to tip the scales against Tywein, winning the Iron Throne. Another option presents itself but is far more risky: I can also send my entire army South which in two tries presented immediate victory for Robb but ultimately led to my Vassal Lonely Hills revolting.

If I leave my troops in the North, it’s as if the game knows I’m turtling my troops which leads to in every instance the Karstarks find out I ordered the execution of their heir. This never happens in every other instance I played. When they found out I killed Alys brother they denounce Alys as a traitor which leads her losing her title to Karhold which makes my marriage useless with offspring with less use to me than my bastard. I could save the North by just marrying Donnel but Karhold is far too appetizing a house to join with. So right now I’m at an impasse, I can seem to save the North but always at expense of my House. As I look through my notes on how to save the North while making my house more prestigious, I come across peculiar actions I may take. Such as marrying Asha of Pyke islands, & plotting to kill Theon. Difficult sure but hilarious all things considered. While I’ve failed to accomplish the entirety of my goal, Crusader Kings 2 has proven itself worthy of all it’s praise. The game is a dating sim which masks itself as a grand strategy. Play it. If anyone has any tips for how I might make my House more powerful while saving the North, feel free to give me some advice.

I wrote this post on my private blog but it was about games and Giant Bomb came up so I thought I'd just repost it here.

After reading @botherer on twitter mock a blog post from Sean Malstrom which attempted to critique his post on Rock Paper Shotgun I decided that I too shall write about this topic. There has been a steady rise among the enthusiasts press in games to write and talk about the plight of women depicted in games and women working in the industry itself. Good for @botherer, the blog in question sounds as though it was written by a lunatic, but the recent rise of dedication to this one topic for the past year or so has worn thin. I don't know if it exactly started during the #1reasonwhy campaign or when Anita Sarkeesian got her kickstarter funding, but since about a year ago gaming enthusiasts have been writing and talking up a storm about this great injustice. I mean that without an ounce of insincerity, but it's exhausting.

I never knew Machinima was hosting a video on their site of scantly clad women slapping each other on stage until @botherer wrote about it. As an aside, I would love to find out how many people are actually consuming, or even have knowledge of such media before it's added to such a piece. The vast majority of the time I've never heard about something in gaming which is considered sexist until it's plastered on every front page of a gaming enthusiast website. From the number of people in the comments section who write of their support of such articles I assume that I am not the only one who doesn't enjoy consuming such media. The continued coverage on this one topic is really exhausting, and making me wish more outlets would cover other worthwhile topics. Such as accessibility in games. Something @botherer covered earlier this year but very few have. Probably my favorite website to consume gaming content is Giant Bomb, which has two gaming enthusiasts which are color blind but have run no stories on accessibility in games.

As a member of the Giant Bomb community since it's conception, and as such I've had to now endure the comments section Patrick Klepek's #1reasonwhy pieces and let me tell you, it's exhausting. It's exhausting to have something which you love be torn apart by certifiable idiots who deny the existence of sexism and misogyny in every instance. Oddly enough, it's actually more exhausting having to read the torrent of comments telling the idiots why they're wrong and why such things are important. As someone who loves Giant Bomb and just loves reading/playing video games, the most exhausting is having to see the chat section explode whenever Carolyn Petit talks about a game on the Giant Bomb/Gamespot livestream. It's what I described in Patrick's post but worse, and it's a travesty. As worthwhile as it is to read @botherer's enthusiasm in tearing apart the problems of gender present in games, I actually enjoyed much more his writings on Experimental Game Workshop earlier last year and was disappointed there was no such in depth equivalent for GDC. Same goes for Carolyn, the only thing I can think of when I see the chat section explode when Carolyn appears on the livestream "Can all you idiots just shut up and listen to her talk about Luigi's Mansion, she's quite meticulous?!". As wonderful as it would be to engage in the chat with the legion of defenders of Carolyn, I can't help but think that's more destructive than the trolls because it detours the conversation away from the games and it feeds the trolls. At the end of the day I just want to talk about video games the internet, and watch intelligent people who can be funny do the same. The rest is secondary.

@granderojo

I've been listening to EconTalk since it first aired, it's a wonderful podcast about economics. This weeks episode had Yanis Varoufakis guest on it, where they talked about all things Valve and Steam. Some new incites include the fact that Valve hired Yanis because Gabe was reading about the European Debt Crisis and thought his liquidity crisis on steam with hats was similar to the liquidity crisis going on in the current recession. Yanis is a really famous economist and he thought Gabe's email at first was spam. Anyways it's a really interesting podcast because it's two dudes who know a whole lot about economics talking about games which neither of them play, it's amusing really. The end gets away entirely from Valve, they start talking about Greece but you can probably tune out by then. Anyways yeah, give this a listen, it's great!

If this interested you, he's also now writes a blog for Valve.

On the most recent bombcast there was a discussion about open world games, and it as usual the crew summated the problem with some of the games of this genre quite well. I thought I would expand their conversation here about a specific subsection of open world games that I've been playing recently that I have a problem with. So I've been playing Darksiders II, about 5 hours in and I can confirm that yes it indeed does adhere unflinchingly from the structure first popularized by the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This approach to open world game design reminds me of a scene from one of my favourite films, Ninotchka. In this approach to open world, the world is split into what I like to call them archipelagos. In that the core content and are infact just linear experience split between a barren of the world which does nothing but waste the players time, which resembles archipelagos.

Game designers and even some critics will argue that these areas of uninspired content exist to provide adequate pacing but I want to offer a counter thesis. The archipelago effect in some open worlds exists to offer the player a negative experience on purpose. Game designers think the absence itself in these barren areas between the involved content offers a clear counterexample and will uplift the content they actually put more work into as a result. This genius is on display in many games, there's no other way to describe it other than irritating and we all have Nintendo to thank for this trend.

The most egregious modern example of this stupidity would have to be Rage, which took this concept to it's illogical extreme and produced the endlessly disappointing and fleeting experience which all fans of ID Software lament to this day. I would argue not only does it exist to split the compelling content from the drear but to trick the player into thinking he's exploring in a meaningful way when infact he isn't. The exploration of the open world is not meaningful exploration but in fact just a stringed network linear experiences where the game obstructs the player from the worthwhile content to extend the length of the play experience.

The "open world" or barren wastes as I like to call them in these games are full of enemies which pose no threat, and usually result in the player moving through them as efficiently as possible to get to the more interesting content. There's no sauntering in this world like there is in an exploration game like Proteus to absorb the the world, but instead a brutal efficiency where the player tries moving through the area as quickly as possible. This hiking as I will call it instead of sauntering manifests itself in the 'open world' in the form of the cooldown of carrots on the horse for the 3d Zeldas or Darksiders 2 or in the boosts in Rage. When presented the archipelagos of content the player will rush from one island of compelling content to the next, and the designer gave no reason for why it should exist in an open world context.

This structure has existed so long at this point and that there are even varying stages of evolution of it's stupidity. A sterling example of this would be the Fable series. The network of linear experiences broken up by uninspired content is most egregious when you realize that the ingame maps never quite line up with the in game world itself. They are in fact useless because there is infact little to no incentive for the player to actually explore. Fable approach to open world is the equivalent of the player saying to the Molyneux "Can you make a game with a compelling world that is without the parts that bore me to death?" and the Molyneux respond, "I'm sorry player I can't make boring games, can the game be without direction?" This is not only Molyneaux's fault, even acclaimed games like Journey were developed on the premise that players need the absence itself of compelling content manifested in the game to convey a targeted experience to the player.

This approach to game design says more about players themselves than the designers, and more to the point that inane design has proliferated as long as it has due to these games being commercially successful but there is hope. A game that I enjoyed quite a bit but felt was horribly held back by the archipelago approach was The Witcher 2 and on the cusp of Skyrim selling around fifteen million copies, it seems some developers have finally a commercial reason to give players a reason to explore their worlds. The Witcher 2 will feature an actual open world, and no longer will it follow similar conventions of Fable of a lack of direction within the world. After playing through Dead Space 2, I'm convinced that the archipelago could have existed in that game and it would have been worse for it. Going forward, developers need to make up their mind. If they're going to have an open world make it like Skyrim or Proteus where there are actual reasons to absorb the world or offer a directed experience like in Dead Space 2 or Half Life.

What do you think? @Granderojo

I made a small thread about this before the relaunch, but that's gone now and I figured I would, now that I've actually finished the game, flesh out my feelings about Dead Space 2. I have owned the game since it came out but was never able to get past the opening sequence because it freaked me the fuck out. Now that 3 is out I manned up, and finished this game on hard my first playthrough. Many in the previous thread said this game wasn't survival horror, and of you that said that every single user had a different personal definition for what that term actually meant and feeling about the game. For me I played it on hard the first playthrough and I was constantly scraping by. Nothing about it struck as horrific or scary except for that opening sequence but throughout the entire game it had an ambiance that I really haven't had since a game like Half Life 2.

In many respects Dead Space 2 for me felt incredibly similar to Half Life 2. This game as opposed to the original has much more variety in it's environments and the new enemies types felt heavily inspired by some that I remember for Half Life 2. On the note of enemy types, it felt much like Half Life in that some were meant to speed up the action or slow it down as is the case with the Barnacle(Half Life)/Cyst(Dead Space) or Lurker in zero gravity/scanner(Half Life). The enemies I mentioned were used as a change of pace in the same ways in both games to the rest of the enemies which were primarily action, and it works quite well to evenly pace the game. That accompanied by the fact that Ellie has a very Alyx Vance quality to her. She's constantly used as a reward mechanism for the player, much like in Half Life 2, her segments are used to break up the action and she's presented in a respectable manner. Lastly, I felt like I went somewhere. I can't think of many games that have accomplished this, fewer than I can count fingers on one hand probably. To think I started this game trapped in a straight jacket, went through a Unitologist church, did a bunch of stuff in betweensomehow got back onto the USG Ishimura, and then finally the government sector? The last game to deliver this feeling of adventure was Half Life 2 for me and it's a testament to it's pacing that it was able to deliver this.

The expectation that this game was going to be that which replaced Resident Evil for the ever narrowing and changing definition of Survival Horror genre seems ridiculous to me. This game was never going to be that and of that same note, for me I was fighting to survive this entire game. I barely got through each encounter, low health low ammo the entire game and it was incredible. To me I was surviving but I was never horrified. It's a grody experience but rarely scary. In many respects it accomplished what Alien series for me was trying to accomplish in that it doesn't scare but it does something just as impressive. It sets a mood that is just teeth clinching the entire time. On the last note if you're still reading I would highly recommend if you liked this game, Richard Russo's Ship of Fools. While not captivating, the attempt at character development in Dead Space 2 was a vast improvement over the rest of the series that I've played so far(I've read all the books, seen the film and played all the games except 3 so far) and reminded me a lot of Russo's novel in that respect. The catholic church in that book reminded me a lot of Dead Space's Unitologists and the ambiance of Dead Space 2 felt directly inspired by it. At this point I'm really looking forward to getting Dead Space 3 during the next sale. Until now, despite being heavily invested in this universe I was quite ambivalent to the entire thing, but Dead Space 2 really makes an argument for this series existence. While Brad did not particularly enjoy most of his time with Dead Space 3, from reading his review it sounds like EA are going for more of what I talked about here with the sequel so I'm all on board. Looks like I'll be shooting Necromorphs with Carver next sale, who's with me?

Twitter!

DICE is over. Everybody brought up the David Cage keynote and Valve/Abrams team up for obvious reasons, those were important to talk about but I would like to change the pace a bit here. The keynote out of DICE I thought was the most prescient to games as a business and ultimately the direction games are going in was Victor Kislyi’s keynote. As CEO of Wargamming.net, Victor has become one of the pioneers in the Free to Play space in the west, and in his keynote he shows why. Not only does it seem they’re doing all the right things but they are saying the right things. The keynote differentiates itself from many of the other keynotes just due to the raw data dump that Victor presents. Wargamming.net had a million dollar study done to show revenues of boxed copies of games (he calls it the Pay to Play category) and Free to Play. The data shows clearly that Free to Plays revenues are growing tremendously and the games that aren’t Free to Play aren’t doing so well.

This raw data dumped accompanied by later a more important point which is why I really made this topic, that was community. The example Victor gives, albeit awkward just due to his language barrier but precinct due to it’s implications, was the way Harley Davidson created a brand and furious following. He basically presents this as the model that Wargamming.net is going for with their successful game and I would like to reiterate his point in a way that he did not in his talk. Other pioneers in the Free to Play space are repeating these points. Gabe Newell during his LBJ School lecture, talks about creating a way to monetize ingame items for Na`Vi and specifically evangelizes Dendi. Instead of thinking of these things as brands, which they are but that leads to negative connotations due to biases that people hold for brands, what Gabe and Victor has hit on as the backbone of these free to play experiences is community. Community is important because it creates a group of followers which will evangelize your game and as for the case with Valve, create content for your game faster and better than they can themselves.

A community as I will define it, is a group that shares both an individual and collective investment in something. I define community so that in the rest of this blog post I can talk about the problems that I see arising for Free to Play games successfully creating and nurturing community. Community is different from associations in that, associations do not share the collective outcome of the group. Associations are groups that have formed to serve the individuals interests, and often do not inspire the sort of following that a community would. An example being many might fall on your sword if it meant saving a friends life or that or a family member but would question doing such for say a fellow PTA member. Many games try to create community but end up with mere associations and they fall apart due to this. It’s a shame because often times they are better games than the once successful at creating community. It is playing with your comrades that drive gamers to get out their checkbooks for hats and trinkets, developers should be cognisant of this.

Now I think there are two main obstacles to creating community with regards to Free to Play games just due to their structure. They are at the end of the day markets and when you talk about markets and two corrosive effects on community always come up. Those would include as economist call them, specialization and mobility. The most judicious example of specialization and mobility being corrosive to a community is Adam Smith’s example of a pin factory in The Wealth of Nations. To summarize in the language that I have brought up previously, the pin factory allowed associations to replace communities due to the fact they were more economically productive. To bring this back to games, as these new Free to Play games become popular they started embracing progression as a hook to keep players. This progression system has reared it's ugly head in the form of specialization and creates a segmented player base in how the players play the game. This progression system has the ability of generating a lot of rent for a short time but eventually it has the potential of corroding the sense of community. Victor’s game is a game that is an example of a game that has gotten away with this due to free being a differentiator for it but is subject in the future of having it's community suffer due to this. When you play World of Tanks there is a specialization that happens among those playing the game, a “division of gaming” that happens. There are those that have payed for content and those who have not. This divide often times leads to a fragmentation in the user base, and is corrosive to instilling community due to the fact that it’s so individualistically based. This creates associations where there could have been communities and the games that do this lose steam much quicker than those that do allow for so broad specialization. The crisis of specialization is a direct result of the innovation this generation's big blockbuster Call of Duty 4 brought and it’s a problem we are going to need to solve if we care about community.

Now a Free to Play game that had it’s community eaten alive by this was a game that I quite enjoyed. My second favourite game of 2012 happened to be Super Monday Night Combat, the Moba FPS from Uber Entertainment. It’s a game that at this point I have sunk 413 hours into, over 80 dollars and it would have been my favourite game of 2012 if it had effectively created a community. The place is effectively a ghost town today. Sadly though, I now know structure of the content encouraged individual progression in a game that required teamwork and this was it's downfall. It failed to create a sense of community and this is in my opinion due to it's pay for advantages structure of content(not pay to win necessarily) in the form of coin doublers. To fill out your “endorsement” page you needed to spend coins that were gained through ingame play, but this progression could be sped up with a doubler. Now I spent a lot of money and time in this system, but not enough because I just completed my endorsement page. After all this time I hadn't filled it out to have exactly what I wanted for my character. To finally get my endorsements to where I wanted them to be it took me this long and that much money. That's a failure on part of the developer. This is a case of creating a barrier where there needed not be one. The game today has a fraction of the user base it did when it launched, and it’s sad because it’s a great game. They structured it incorrectly and this misstep out of the gate cost them.

This is a failure that I think other games are in the process of making, namely League of Legends. When DOTA2 is finally released, all it will cost for the entire game will be 30 dollars. That means all the heros in the future, no nickel and dime, which is a stark contrast to the huge amount LoL expects you to spend for all their heros. This is going to create a problem of specialization, and it’s going to eat away at their community eventually until like Super Monday Night Combat it’s a ghost land that few people play. The corrosive nature of mobility in the Free to Play space is that resentment that that arises between the median players, one that spends little to no money on the game, and those that buy all the ingame items and have all the best stuff. Closing this divide while never putting barriers between the consumer and the developer to spend money is what will allow for thriving communities in these new marketplaces to continue to grow. A step in closing this divide is abolishing the pay to win aspect or even the perception that it exists in their game. It also involves acknowledgement on the part of developers that things that are considered part of the base game should not be gated through a pay wall. If this perception proliferates in Free to Play games, then community will suffer and ultimately revenue.

Why is community important to these games? My argument is that community when it comes to games is the difference between having a set of fans for your game that produce more quantity and quality content for your game then you can yourself and failure. It is community at the core that makes the whale factor exist in free to play games(see #2). It is not only the content alone that justifies the extra cost but the emotional attachment you get from playing with your friends with the better content after knowing what the base content is like. This is also why I question the success of the Free to Play model on mobile, because it’s much harder to create communities around those games just due to their nature. The ones that have, such as Spaceteam are outliers, and are the direction I see Free to Play games going on the mobile platform. Make a good game and they will come, make the conditions for a good community and they will stay.

What do you guys think of Free to Play? What do you think of the ideas I presented here? Any thoughts, criticism? (If there are some grammatical errors I apologize, I'll look over it later when I'm less tired).

So yesterday I complained in this Path of Exile thread that I didn't enjoy the art style of the game. Art style isn't the end of the world and I decided to sink more time into my Hardcore character. Around the 25-30 hour mark I ran into a desync when I entered a room, and died to mobs that I didn't see. Not the end of the world, it was in fact Hardcore and desyncing is just a fact of life with this sort of game. Instead of starting a race again, I thought I would sit down here and talk about where I'd like to see this genre go in. Totems seem to be all the rage in Path of Exile. Enough that they had to nerf it. Which I see no problem with, these sorts of balance changes are inevitable but I think it illustrates of underlying problem that hasn't been addressed in the genre to this point. The builds in these games that are overwhelmingly popular to most people who play them, which I'm only talking about hardcore because let's be honest if you're not playing hardcore what's the fucking point, right? Anyways the builds that are overwhelmingly popular to those that play them are the safe builds. Builds with a lot of AoE, stun, freeze, health regen, vitality, speed, etc. Now this is a product of people playing with the fear of death but I think it is also in part due to the fog of war or lack of visibility of what's around the other corner. I believe that these games would be better if they incorporated RTS mechanics with a wider field of view.

Now Krater was a game that tried to incorporate RTS mechanics, but it's not exactly what I'm talking about. The camera was no more panned out and the mobs were no where near as large as it should have been. The game had issues but it tried to do interesting things but overall was rather underwhelming in content. I still enjoyed myself but the way it got panned by critics was justified. There were a lot of other games that came before Krater that tried to do this, Homeworld, Demigod and Spellforce but these aren't exactly what I'm talking about either. Path of Exile tries to do a lot of interesting things in it's own way, none of which I will go into here but I'm sure if you read that thread in the beginning I linked to you'll get the point. How long until we get a game where you can control your summons? Or better yet how about the ability to have a party instead of just one main controllable character? Now I understand why this may not have come about yet. Diablo-isometric style action RPGs require a sense of community/economy and taking away the need for roles when playing co-op. It also adds a layer of complexity to the game which segments the potential playerbase. These negatives are probably why this model hasn't come about yet in a real way but I think it could work and there are games potentially on the horizon.

The Wildman project on Kickstarter is probably the most intriguing to me, which bums me out considering that is barely raised over 400k on kickstarter and Project Eternity of the same ilk raised and far less interesting raised 4 million. If there was a way for me to have a 4 or 5 sized party in one of these games accompanied with the skill tree of a game like Path of Exile, having skill compliment each other and just allowing for more variety in play style. Another problem that would come about by incorporating RTS mechanics into ARPGs would be the inevitable simplification of the dungeon layouts. Most maps would be a straight shot and/or geometrically equal from end to end, which doesn't seem like a big problem to me due to the fact that let's be honest with ourselves for a second. The maps that players farm the most tend to be end to end maps that already exist. The maps in Diablo III that have you backtracking are just a waste of the players time and nobody played them. I'd like to make this an open topic, there are a lot more ideas floating around in my head, but I'd like to see what you guys think about what I already think. What do you think about the RTS/ARPG hybrid?

Twitter.