Creating the environment
You threw me into the arena, don’t be surprised that I plan to fight now.
During a conversation the other night with a fellow Final Fantasy XIV player, a statement was made: “It’s not the developers’ fault how players behave.” Which intrigued me, because it’s a sentiment that I see a lot, and one that makes logical sense. It’s also one that’s almost entirely wrong.
Obviously, developers are not coming into your house at night to tell you how the game should be played, or including notes in the instruction manual. Although that would be kind of funny from a perverse standpoint: “press A to jump, but don’t do it in level 3 because that’s not the right way to play.” But the developers are totally telling you how to play, and if you’re breaking the game or playing in a way that’s not fun for you or anyone, that’s entirely the fault of the development team.
It all comes down to the environment you create and what you encourage. Because that’s what tells you how to play the game anyway.
Demo Driver 8: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (#98)
And you find yourself thinking “I could be playing a game that’s just as dude-centric but with Joe Mad designs,” so that’s not a ringing endorsement.
The Castlevania franchise has been in an odd place as years have gone by. It has produced a lot of classic games over the years, lots of stuff well worth playing, and it’s one of the few franchises to pull of a wholesale genre switch successfully. It’s been good, by and large. Sure, not every game has been a thunderous success, but there’s a sense of continuity just the same. And there’s a conscious effort by the people in charge not to just turn Castlevania into a franchise of the same thing every few years – see also the mention of a wholesale genre switch above.
At the same time, one wonders how many stories you’ve really got about shaggy dudes going off to fight Dracula in a big old castle over and over.
I commend Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for what it’s trying to do, totally. I commend it for being a reboot, I commend it for once again trying to reinvent the series in terms of gameplay, and I can’t say that it’s doing a bad job, exactly. But I can say that it’s a game which would have been better served had it come out three years earlier or so, and I can’t say it sports a particularly good demo. Even if it does feature Sir Patrick Stewart.
Game companies feel like people
If game companies were more like cats, I think I’d like them more.
It all started when I was thinking about BioWare.
I like BioWare, if you didn’t know. I like them quite a bit. Sure, the studio has made missteps here and there, they’ve goofed up, they haven’t been as good as I know they can be. But the studio is trying. I realized that more than anything, they feel like someone worth knowing. Sure, they’re going to blow it occasionally, but not because they’re bad, just because everyone makes mistakes, and they seem to take their mistakes in stride and move on.
That, of course, led to me thinking about how many other companies feel like people instead of just machines made to take money. Yes, that’s what they are, but if the Supreme Court keeps insisting that corporations are entitled to all of the same benefits as individual people, we might as well start talking about these studios as people, right? It seems only fair.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Everything seemed to be going so well for a while there. We had an airship again after we’d wrecked the first one. We had not only just finished one leg of our supposed quest, we had done so immediately after finishing the prior leg of the quest, very efficient-like. (It’s good to have these things on your resume for future world-saving gigs according to Destined Heroes Quarterly.) We failed to save one shrine maiden! And now here we are, stuck inside of a town with a big lock on our airship.
I supposed we’d better walk back into the town and find out what’s going on, huh?
Well, yes, but we should also take the opportunity to examine the new jobs we got from the Water Crystal, because this is when we start getting into the fun stuff. The first crystal gave us the basic lineup, the second one gave us a few nice outliers, but we’ve got some new jobs to play around with! So let’s take a look at the lot of them.
Hard Project: Pacific Rim
You see that chassis and your brain immediately starts playing the theme song. Mine does anyway.
The main reason that I can’t say Pacific Rim was my absolute favorite movie of 2013 is simply because Frozen also came out last year. It was an absolute treat just the same, a summer action film that understood that it didn’t have to be dumb and didn’t have to assume you were stupid. There were giant robots, there were giant monsters, there were references to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the midst of it. Great stuff. I have seen it at least half a dozen times now.
Of course, the fact that we’re supposedly getting an animated series gives rise to the hope that we’ll get more toys and licensed products, but even from the film alone it seems incomprehensible that we didn’t get a great game. And we didn’t, of course – it was a weak game saved only by its connection to a film in which you punch the hell out of kaiju in a giant robot. But why is that? What makes the game so hard to develop in the first place? Is it possible that even with a sequel and a cartoon it’s still not going to lend itself nicely to a game?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 