Our struggle to model a female character
We spent months figuring out how to make it look totally realistic when white guys run through dank sewers so that you can seriously feel the sweat and stench and now you want us to add girls to the mix? What are we supposed to do?
I know we’ve all gotten a lot of mileage out of making fun of Ubisoft lately, due to the fact that their reason for a lack of women in the new Assassin’s Creed game comes down to a simple difficulty in modeling ladies. It seems like a mockable standpoint, like a bunch of people trying to defend their complete unwillingness to do something with a poorly conceived cop-out that mostly shows a profound lack of care for the gender that makes up half of the gaming market.
Alas, while I’ve gotten my own jokes in, I suppose now is as good a time as any to reveal that I was on the team which tried to crack the modeling problem. Oh, certainly, it might seem silly to you, but as it turns out, women are a lot harder to put into games than you think. What follows, thus, is a completely accurate picture of the process wherein we tried and failed to add a single woman to the game as a playable character. Perhaps now we can finally put these matters to rest once and for all.
Demo Driver 8: Rochard (#379)
I played Portal and you didn’t, you miserable hacks! Have fun shooting an invulnerable box!
Sometimes this feature can make me feel just a wee bit cynical. By its very nature, I wind up playing a lot of little indie games, and a lot of these little or single-A titles turn out to be obscure for good reason. My overall desire for games remains the same as it has ever been. Which makes me wonder if the problem is just me, or if maybe the whole indie development switch doesn’t have the legs that I want it to have, or any number of other things.
Then I play a game like Rochard and it reminds me of the best part of trying on random demos – finding a gem you never even would have looked at otherwise.
Rochard is very much in the puzzle-platformer vein, a former PSN title that migrated to Steam as well a little while back. It is also very, very charming, marrying a strong visual sense and a simple-but-enjoyable story to solid mechanics. It’s fun, and it’s the first game that I’ve had where I immediately tossed it onto my wishlist once I was done with the demo. Then, of course, I sat down to write this article. It’s what I do, after all.
Telling Stories: Enhance both experiences
Tabletop roleplaying isn’t the same as roleplaying with people online. And not just for the obvious reasons where you can’t all be sharing a pizza around a table and spend a bunch of pre-game time chattering about whether or not you enjoyed the last episode of whatever television shows are airing now. Is Game of Thrones still a thing? I don’t have cable.
But really, even beyond the obvious gaps of personal interaction, there are a lot of differences between a gathering in the real world and just roleplaying in an MMO. The systems are different, the environment is different, even the way that the games play is different. It’s a lot easier to roleplay in the middle of a dungeon when the entire world stops and starts based on what the player characters are doing, after all, compared to your average online game where the game is going to keep moving whether you like it or not.
But that’s the thing – there are some good lessons to be learned from online worlds that you can apply to your tabletop sessions. So don’t discard one out of hand! A bit of time in an online game can make your game that much better.
Thoughts on the E3 2014 presentations
IT LOOKS A LOT LIKE THE PRESENT AND FEATURES LOTS OF STUBBLE-DUSTED WHITE GUYS
Oddly, despite having worked in “the biz” for nearly five years, I’ve never actually been to E3. Part of this is due to my distance, part of this is due to my general distaste of being crushed into a convention hall, and part of it is because there’s a minority of stuff that’s relevant to my particular slice of “the biz.” If you want to talk MMOs, there are other venues that give you better options.
Still, as everyone who is reading this is well aware, I do things other than play MMOs. (Other game-related things, I mean. This is not going to be my recipe for taco burgers.) That means that I’ve still wound up watching and keeping track of most of this year’s conference, and as I trim this up not too long before it goes live, we’ve seen most of the big stuff that companies have on display. Some surprise reveals happened, some reveals took place that were kind of predictable but still nice, and a lot of it is worth analyzing.
We’re also not seeing another Mega Man game on the horizon, but that’s sort of a predictable disappointment by this point.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Easy come, easy go. After a quest to retrieve an airship that took all of ten seconds, you are deprived of your first airship shortly thereafter. Yes, your constrained little world opens up by smashing your airship into a rock, revealing a much bigger world than you had thought you occupied. This is a regular theme in this game, as it happens; you think you know what the world looks like, but soon thereafter you get something bigger. It’s also the first of many airships that you ruin, but let’s not talk about that.
The important thing is that this opens up a path to head south and to Cid’s hometown, where he promises that he can conveniently build you a replacement airship if you can just get him an engine. So we have a long-term goal, and astonishingly it doesn’t really involve the crystal at this point. Sure, we’re supposed to be saving the world from darkness, but it’s not yet clear how we’re going to go about doing that. Is there darkness in the optional little side-dungeon in Kazus (which I’ve been calling “the second town” the whole time because of laziness)? Nope, just some Mythril Swords and a chance to wear out that job sickness.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 