Undeveloped extensions
Look what we found just lying around!
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about minigames that we never need to see again in another game, full stop. It was meant to be silly, and I think it accomplished that goal nicely. But, you know, it also does speak to the fact that we have some ideas that have just been mined out straight through to the mantle. There is no more blood coming out of these stones.
No, I’m not about to go on a rant about how companies are only producing the same games these days, since that’s both demonstrably wrong and kind of the nature of the beast. The majority of titles at a given time are always going to be the most popular current thing with a new skin; that’s always been true. But there are a lot of ideas out there that saw exploration in one or two titles, then got shelved forever. In short, there are clever new ideas there just waiting for a dust-off and a revival with newer tech and a modern environment, ideas that are just longing to be developed. So let’s talk about titles that can’t be hard projects because they’re barely even franchises, but they still deserve some more attention.
Demo Driver 8: The Stanley Parable Demonstration
Please do not read the alt text for this image.
It’s hard to talk about The Stanley Parable without sounding like you’re a pretentious twit who uses the word “metatextual” far more often than is healthy. (The FDA recommends using it no more than twice per 1000 words.) And The Stanley Parable Demonstration is even a layer beyond that. It’s not so much a demo as it is a metatextual examination of game demos, layered on top of a game that is itself an examination of choice and the illusion of agency of games. So it’s at once trying to convince you to buy a game based on nothing from the actual game, and it’s also trying to point out the futility of trying to demonstrate a game in that fashion.
While it may come as something of a surprise based on all of that, it’s actually fairly effective at giving you an idea of what you’re going to be getting into. It presents its questions, gets you to ask some questions of your own, and the whole thing plays out with just the right mixture of not actually being a game adjacent with just enough player agency. Even if it’s mostly an illusion.
Electronic Arts: Not the devil you want
If you’re blaming EA for the fact that you disliked the ending of Mass Effect 3, you should probably take that back down a notch.
I’m just going to go ahead and leave this right here: if you’ve spent a good chunk of your time online screaming about how EA is the worst company in the world, you are why companies think gamers are idiots. Yes, you.
EA, as a whole, is a company you basically can’t have a normal conversation about. It’s one of the biggest publishers in gaming – there’s a reason the company gets its own stage time at E3 when that’s eaten up mostly by the companies producing actual consoles. And the company has a huge stable of studios it owns, game it publishes, and things it sells. Oh, how it will sell things. It was one of the first companies to open up microtransactions in-game, and the company’s history is a long one of doing things that make money, first and foremost.
None of that should be surprising. It’s a company, it’s devoted to making money. But when you talk to gamers online, there’s this image that EA is the literal actual villain of the game industry. Which at best makes gamers look like a batch of petulant, entitled twits, and at worst makes us look like we don’t collectively know what we’re talking about. Usually both at the same time, really.
Hard Project: The Dark Tower
It’s a good game, but you need to play through it 19 times to really get the full experience.
At the heart of everything lies the Tower. The Beams lead to the great Tower, the heart of all worlds, the spoke upon which the wheels of existence turn. The tower is the heart of the battle between the White, the Red, and the Black, a conflict between forces that would preserve life and those that would see it serve more sinister powers or even cast off into nothingness. It would make, I think, a pretty great video game.
I don’t need to point out that we’ve never actually gotten a proper game based on The Dark Tower, do I?
Stephen King’s sprawling story about Roland Deschain has seeped its way into a lot of his other books. Several comics have been made chronicling the time between Roland first becoming a Gunslinger (essentially a paladin with revolvers) and the quest outlined in the books, tromping across the world to seek out the source. It’s been in development hell for an adaptation for years. And it’d make a pretty satisfying game… but I don’t think we’re ever going to get to play one. For some very good reasons.
Telling Stories: Roleplaying is stressful
Here’s the thing about roleplaying – a lot of people who have never done it have very strong ideas about what it entails, which are usually some mixture of well-meaning and wrong. Mostly wrong.
This is not out of malice but out of simple reality. It’s very easy to understand what’s required to get good at PvP in a game; there’s plenty of supplemental material available. Ditto raiding, small-group content, or whatever else your game offers. But one of the reasons that I felt (and still feel) that having a regular roleplaying column is valuable is because no one talks about what that requires. No one mentions how much effort goes into making these things happen.
Mike Mearl, a designer working on Dungeons & Dragons, said at one point that tabletop roleplaying is twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours. Roleplaying online offers a slightly better ratio, but if you’ve never taken part, you don’t realize that there’s a lot of work that goes into it. A lot of the advice I’ve given, both here and in Storyboard, is about trying to minimize that work, or at least make the work as pleasant as possible. But it’s still work just the same.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 