Demo Driver 8: Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013
Will this be a game of stalking the stalkers, hunting the hunters, being at once the victim and the predator?
I generally like animals more than people, because even the most unpleasant animals I’ve known have never been pointlessly insulting or cruel. Thus, I’ve always held on to a great deal of disdain for this particular game franchise – the idea that you would have a game solely devoted to killing animals in a hunting-but-not-really environment just seemed like behavior not worth encouraging. If there was a game franchise devoted to injecting yourself with a whole lot of heroin, I wouldn’t exactly be on board with that, either.
But when I rolled this one up, I decided to keep an open mind. I kill lots of animals in video games, after all, and maybe – just maybe – these games are actually awesome. Maybe they manage to have a complex and realistic simulation of hunting without ever killing an actual animal. Perhaps these are games for people who love the thrill of the hunt but would never want to harm a living creature. It’s a long shot, sure, but it is possible that I would start playing and realize this franchise was better than I had given it credit for all along, with complex simulations of bullet physics and the effects you could have on your prey.
Telling Stories: Letting the mechanics speak
The down side of roleplaying in any sort of game with solid mechanics is that the mechanics creep in around the edges. You don’t get complete control over your character concept – once your abilities start tying into mechanics, you have to start parsing what the larger mechanical implications of your choices are. Even if you have a perfect concept, it might either be overpowered or underpowered, it might not be easily possible, and so forth.
This is also the bright side.
Roleplaying forces you to fling your character concept not just against the stories you want to tell but also the realities of the mechanical environment you play within. In fiction, all you need to do is write a story wherein your characters are presented with choices and challenges that they can overcome as appropriate. In roleplaying, all of the ideas about what your character will be run up routinely against the reality of what the game finds acceptable and what the mechanical implications of those choices will be. And that usually serves as a great way to refine your character concepts.
Killing the six-fingered man
They are not what you’re afraid of. But they’ll do.
My favorite story about The Princess Bride is Mandy Patinkin talking about Inigo’s moment of triumph. Because I’ve totally been there.
Patinkin’s story, in brief, is that his father had recently died after a long struggle with cancer. There isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do in a situation like that, obviously; you love your family member and try to give them strength until the end. But when he was filming Inigo’s confrontation with Rugen, suddenly he didn’t have an abstract concept to wrestle with. Here he was, in character, taking out the man responsible for killing his father. He’s said that it was a little bit like being able to avenge his father.
I know how that feels. Sure, I lost my father to alcoholism, not cancer, and I wasn’t in a movie that allowed me to externalize all of that. But I had my video games, and in places, that was enough. Hell, that’s half of the point of video games, to deal with problems that never get a truly satisfying conclusion any other way.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
So far, a lot of stuff has been happening in The After Years, albeit mostly to disconnected individuals. The first four tales were all pretty well self-contained and didn’t really cross over with one another at all. Moving into the fifth tale, though, it’s high time that some of this stuff started pulling together. Not coincidentally, the entire point of this particular tale is to create a larger framework for all of the various cliffhangers that we’re up to.
Unfortunately, it winds up treading over some… uncomfortable territory getting there. As in veering close to a certain (terrible) show about a whole lot of elemental ninja. Please don’t make me type the name.
But let’s leave that to one side. It’s a new year, it’s a new tale, it’s a new adventure. So let’s get started with a bunch of ninja acting like, well, ninja, doing like a ninja do. No, they are not shredding on their electric guitars while riding their totally sweet motorcycles, we’re talking closer to the traditional concept of ninja.
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.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 