Hard Project: MMOs
Create a world. Live there forever.
You know, it’s a brand new year. And it can’t go worse than last year did for the genre that I sort of get paid to write about, because 2014 was a wash in terms of new releases. Every single big title that released in 2014 managed to screw things up something awful, and when you factor in Blizzard cancelling a title that realistically was never coming out anyway and didn’t have any impact on the industry unless you’re watching it like a hawk and speculating, you have plenty of people calling the industry dead.
It’s an absurd statement. The one bit of traction it gets, though, is that making an MMO is hard. Very hard. No matter how certain the IP you have to work with, no matter how much money you can throw at the project, no matter how experienced the developers are. MMOs, to a one, are hard projects. When you take things like a significant budget or experienced developers out of the equation, the project just gets harder, but it’s sort of a minor miracle that the dozens actually on the market actually exist, much less that they work so well.
Challenge Accepted: The meat of challenges
When failing with panache becomes harder than succeeding gracelessly.
The most irritating part of playing through Guitar Hero III, for me, were the songs that made it easier to get a Perfect rather than a five-star rating. Since the former relied on you hitting every note while the latter relied on score, there were lower-difficulty songs where the sheer sparsity of notes meant that it was easy to use your star power at the wrong time and wind up without enough points to clear the upper threshold. It made playing a lot more frustrating, because for most of the game the real difficulty was a perfect streak, not getting that star rating.
Back when I discussed difficulty levels, I mentioned that a lot of the stuff used to tweak a game’s difficulty didn’t really alter the fundamental challenge of a game. Sure, you can alter how hard enemies hit and how hard you hit in a lot of games, but that doesn’t necessarily make the game harder. What does make a given game harder or easier than another? That comes down to a series of questions.
The biggest parts of 2014: A review
This kind of sums up my feelings about the year, yeah.
2014 is just about fading in our collective cultural rear-view mirror, and to that I say “fuck along.” This year has been sort of terrible, after all. But as this blog was started/revived/whatever in March, it’s been around long enough that I do not have immunity to the contractual requirement that you have to do some sort of year-in-review piece. On the plus side, at least I don’t have to cast a vote for game of the year.
I probably should, but I didn’t play all of the games this year, so whatever.
So let’s look back at the collection of broken bottles and drunken notes that encapsulate 2014 and talk about them in hindsight, a hindsight heavily filtered by the fact that pretty much no one wants to remember this year and that I have a terrible time remembering when things actually happened. Seriously, I still think Lost premiered recently. I am not well-suited to retrospectives for precisely that reason.
The tiers of remakes
Do the same thing over again, only different and better.
Remake. The term strikes fear into the hearts of all, because you know you’re in for a ride as soon as you hear it, and it might not be a good one. Someone has decided that your favorite movie or game or show needs to be recreated completely, because for whatever reason the original just isn’t good enough any more.
To be utterly fair, if you’re looking at your favorite stuff with a critical eye, this is frequently accurate. Your favorite stuff is not sacrosanct, and there are times when it completely deserves a redo to be more accessible or just plain better. My affection for older games does not render them immune to the ravages of technology, and bringing them up to date both graphically and mechanically could do wonders for several. I’d love to see the original Phantasy Star games brought together into a fully remade form, for example.
Yet for every great remake in any medium, there are some truly atrocious ones. So let’s look at what can be done with remakes, the tiers that can be aspired to, from the worst to the best.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 