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DAW2016: Square Enix

April 29, 2016 by Belghast

Developer Appreciation Week is here! For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster. The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios. As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better. That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole. So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there. If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

I knew sooner or later I would end up needing to do Square Enix because at various times during my life they played a huge role in shaping how I looked at games. Lets go back to a time and a place where the only gaming news I got was through Nintendo Power magazine. In one of those issues I was first introduced to a game called Final Fantasy. For ages I had been looking for the personification of Dungeons and Dragons in game form, and while the gold box games did a decent job of doing just that… there was always something missing. Final Fantasy bridged the gap and gave me precisely that, along with a story line that made me care about all of the dungeon crawling. I remember being so insanely excited when I went to a nearby Walmart and they had this game in stock. The only negative was that within a short few days I would be heading to Boy Scout camp for an entire week. While I normally loved camp, this was quite possibly the most miserable week of camp I have ever experienced. All that I really wanted to be doing was playing Final Fantasy from the comfort of my bedroom… and instead I was making campfires, and hiking up sharp flint rock strewn paths. When I finally got home, firing up that Nintendo and playing Final Fantasy was quite literally the best feeling ever. Regardless of how exhausted I was from a week of camp, I still ended up pulling an all nighter and getting through that damned Marsh cave.

When Final Fantasy 2 was released… aka Final Fantasy IV for the rest of the world… it once again dominated my life for a period of time. I was completely blown away by the graphics at the time, and also amazed at how much more complex the story line of that game was. This was also the point at which I learned the hard lesson of save at every single save point, because of a bad mishap with the Magus Sisters. The game also introduced the term “Spoony Bard” into my vocabulary and for that I will always be grateful. This was also the first game that gave me characters I had no interest in playing… I am looking at you Edward and your inability to do any real damage. The game also gave my quite possibly my favorite goofy archetype of character… the Dragoon, with its amazing but also sometimes frustrating jump attack. I was completely hooked on the notion of having this huge cast of characters that I could switch between at will… but then ultimately only ever seemed to play with the same party ever. For the most part that party was Cecil, Rydia, Kain, Rosa, and Edge… with that last spot being highly variable as I went through the play session. This is really something I do even today when I play for example a Bioware game. In Dragon Age Inquisition, my party is pretty much permanently Cassandra, Dorian, Sera and my character.

It wasn’t until High School that Final Fantasy 3 was released… or Final Fantasy VI for the rest of the world. I remember it coming out around Christmas break and at first I rented it… which was a truly dumb idea given that the Super Nintendo didn’t have memory cards. The main reason for this was because the game itself was something stupid like $85 when it released, which was an awful lot of my limited resources at the time. However after a few days of playing the game I was making a trek to the big city to try and find a copy. After searching a dozen different stores I finally found a copy at Target, and much to my shock it was on sale for only $65. I am not sure exactly sure what it is about Final Fantasy VI, but for whatever reason I think this game will always be my favorite. I tend to love games that pull a bait and switch on me, when you think you are nearing the end of the game… only to realize that the world just got much larger and instead of being nearly done… I was just barely starting. I also have a soft spot for a lot of the characters in this game, because it managed to make me feel things that video games had not really succeeded in doing up to this point. Ashgar and I have had a conversation about this… and for me the game that did all of these things was Final Fantasy V. However for me… that game was not available and didn’t even receive a fan translation until I was well into college. The two games do a lot of the same things, I just happened to experience six first.

Over the years there has been a string of Final Fantasy titles always in my life, and several non-FF series games that I loved as well. For example I love beyond love Vagrant Story, and I remember playing the hell out of it when it came out on the PSX. I also spent more than my fair share of time playing Chrono Trigger, and the subsequent follow up games. Then there are games that I wish would get a reboot like Parasite Eve that were so amazing for the time in which they came out. Essentially there has always been some Square Enix game somewhere in my life, be it Bravely Default that I am slowly working my way through on my 3DS downstairs on my bedside table, or the Kingdom Hearts collection I have sitting beside my PS3 ready to start in earnest. All of these are in fact great experiences, but the one I feel like I really need to talk about is the miraculous rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV. This game was released in 2010 and was essentially universally despised. I remember getting into the beta for it and finding it just largely uninteresting more than anything. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t really feel anything about it. So I was more than happy to return to World of Warcraft, and forget that the game existed.

However in August of 2013 the game relaunched as A Realm Reborn, and I have to say I was shocked at just how much I liked the title. We played for a handful of months until our group ran out of content that we could realistically complete. Then July of 2014 I decided to fire the game up again, because I wanted to see how it had progressed in our absence. Final Fantasy XIV was one of those games that our group left on good terms. What I found waiting on me was this rich cache of content that laid untapped. Over the next several months we had what could only be termed as a renaissance of MMO gaming all centered around this game. I was happy to raid once again, and happy to be doing pretty much all of the tropes of a MMORPG. What made all the difference was the loving way in which this game was being crafted. I have to give huge shouts to the localization team and namely Koji Fox. Final Fantasy XIV is so amazingly well written and is packed full of more feels than most games ever manage to muster. There is content that will make you painfully belly laugh, and other times infuriate you for all of the right reasons. Then there are moments that will make you cry… and there are certain cut scenes in this game that even the mere thought of will summon up the waterworks.

While I am currently on a break from the game after burning myself out again with the launch of Heavensward, I know sooner or later I will return and be happy to do so. Heavensward was quite possibly the expansion I have looked forward to the most from any MMORPG that I have played, since maybe the launch of Trials of Atlantis in Dark Age of Camelot. Unfortunately much like ToA… I got my expectations up way too high, and the content drought that followed the launch ultimately ended up with me stopping playing. However as a couple of patches have built up for me, I plan on returning soon… probably after I get the upcoming Diablo 3 season out of my system. I am happy to know that there is still a very thriving guild presence in this game waiting on me. I have a feeling that sooner or later we will all return for yet another renaissance of MMO gaming and when it happens… it will be in huge part to just how great Final Fantasy XIV turned out.

DAW2016: Bioware

April 27, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a difficult one to tackle, especially since I didn’t get a ton of sleep thanks to the tornado warnings. However I am going to give it to good college try, and hope that the end result turns out at least not too shabby. I first became aware as Bioware as a company with the release of Baldur’s Gate, or more so the existence of what I later came to know as the “Infinity Engine”. I have been a fan of Dungeons and Dragons since I first found a players manual abandoned in a locker on the last day of school in second grade. Finding that book spawned a lot of things, not the least of which was trying to hungrily gobble up anything TSR related. I played the “gold box” series of games, namely because I had read the novels behind a lot of the stories. There was just something missing with the game, and while I enjoyed them at the time they never really felt that good. The story that was being told felt limited by the meager technology, and while I was happy enough with the end product… that only lasted until I had played my first Final Fantasy game. Baldur’s Gate was the title that brought me back from my console days into once again believing that the PC was a great platform for role-playing games.

Subsequent games were released… Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate II and even one of my all time favorites… Planescape Torment… all using this “Infinity Engine” I have to admit I got a bit of the wrong idea behind what exactly the company Bioware really was. In my mind it seemed like Bioware was the tools company, and Interplay, Black Isle, or later the reboot Obsidian were the game creator. It wasn’t until Neverwinter Nights was released that I really started to understand that Bioware was both the tools division and a lot of great storytelling wrapped into one package. Neverwinter Nights was one of those revolutionary games for me personally. While the original campaign was awesome… it was the inclusion of the aurora toolset that set my mind on fire. At this time I was playing a lot of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot so I tried to replicate some of my favorite features of those games using the Neverwinter engine. I learned the C Script language and figured out how to code things like randomly generated loot from tables when you opened chests or killed mobs. I also eventually figured out how to create a token based system along the lines of the one that allowed you to purchase armor in the Darkness Falls dungeon. The end result was this amalgam of the EQ Plane of Hate and DAoC Darkness Falls that I called the “Plane of Spite”. While I never did anything really interesting with it, I loved every single moment of working on it and figuring out the inner machinations of this engine.

It was not really until Knights of the Old Republic that I hopped back on the Bioware fandom, and I remember being crushingly disappointed when I learned that the title was going to be Xbox Exclusive. Thankfully later that year it came out for the PC and I was absolutely thrilled to be dissecting that game world as well. I loved Neverwinter Nights for its technical precision, and the Aurora and Infinity engines for giving me this awesome framework to go out and explore worlds in. However KOTOR was the first time from Bioware that I was completely stunned by the storyline. Last week we went into a discussion on AggroChat about the best Star Wars stories, and by the end of that show all of us pretty much came to the consensus that Knights of the Old Republic was if not the absolute best story, it was at least among them. There are moments in this game that had shocking revelations that I have never quite recovered from. Even though the engine is dated, and the graphics look like crap compared to what I am used to… I can still play this game happily over and over just because it was so damned well crafted. I’ve bought it for others, and even own the mobile port of the game. I feel like this game more than any set the tone for the modern incarnation of Bioware.

I ultimately for one reason or another skilled Mass Effect at launch, and instead picked up the Bioware banner once again with the release of Dragon Age: Origins. During this period of time I was raiding in World of Warcraft rabidly… but there were a few weeks where I completely dropped off the face of the planet, and it was thanks to this game. I was just completely enthralled with the world and the setting, and the concept of the dark spawn and deep roads. I am a Dwarf at heart, so I loved every single moment of Orzammar. My first play through was as a Dwarven Noble, and I have to say after all of the subsequent play sessions that is still the one I cherish the most. Much the same as KOTOR, it was ultimately the characters that set this game apart from the others I had played. They felt so fleshed out and three dimensional, and I actually cared about interacting with them. I am a huge proponent of smashing things with a big weapon, and games that allow me to slaughter by the hundreds… but it is significantly harder to find a game that makes me feel. Dragon Age made me feel so much, and during this time I had a really interesting encounter. One of my guildies invited me to tank for some friends of his, and when I popped onto voice chat we had some of the usual getting to know a new person discussion. I mentioned that I had been playing a ton of Dragon Age… and it was at this point that they started grilling me about this character or that, or what decision I made where. It turns out that I was ultimately raiding that night with a bunch of the writers, and you could almost hear them beaming as they proudly chimed in that they wrote this or that as I gushed about various details.

With the release of Mass Effect 2, I later went back and became an addict of that series as well. I still wish that someone would make that into a Walking Dead style serialized television show, because the story that is being told is among the best science fiction tales ever. It just seems a crime that the only folks that will ever see the story, are the ones who have played through the game. Then you of course have the release of Star Wars the Old Republic, that my friends and I tore through rabidly when it launched. I burnt myself out on that game but recently a bunch of us ended up going back and remembering just how damned well written all of the story arcs really are. At some point soon I want to go back and finish where I left off which is the start of the Revan content, and try out the new experience fallen empire content that I have heard so much about. For sake of time though I am going to wrap things up, because otherwise I could probably carry on for a dozen more paragraphs talking about all of the things from Bioware games that I love. It is a great studio, and while I was scared that EA would destroy its spirit… I have been pleasantly surprised that the core values of the company and the creative might seem to keep trucking along happily. I look forward to more adventures be it with Andromedia or the next great IP that we have yet to experience.

DAW2016: Blizzard Entertainment

April 26, 2016 by Belghast

This morning marks the conclusion of three years of daily blog posts, and the beginning of year four. As a result I thought it was fitting to do Blizzard Entertainment today since it is one of the companies that I have the most longevity with. I have a complicated relationship with this company, and if you scroll through the back log of this blog you will find times when I am bashing them and times when I am praising them. While I knew of the existence of Orcs vs Humans, I didn’t really come into the fold until Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of RTS gameplay, but the thing that sold me on this game and the company as a whole was the level editor. Prior to WC2, my life pretty much revolved around Doom II and making custom maps for it using MapEdit for windows. Trying to get things to work as I hoped they would was always a struggle, and MapEdit had this nasty habit of completely destroying maps in the process of making them. That said I didn’t want to mess with constantly having to shell out into DOS to get the “good” Doom map editors to work. So when I encountered a “good” windows map editor for Warcraft 2 I was enthralled and hooked, and began churning out “PUD” files left and right. To be honest I spent far more time in the level editor than I actually did playing the game.

However when I truly became sold on Blizzard as a company was with the release of Diablo. They essentially took everything I ever wanted in a hack and slash dungeon crawler and made it work in vibrant isometric rendered 3D glory. I can remember many an hour in the Art Department lab that I was supposed to be monitoring playing Diablo, or fiddling with the meager modding tools available for it. I even own a copy of the barely mentioned Hellfire expansion that allowed players to crawl through the dungeon as a Monk. What made this game so revolutionary however was the introduction of Battle.net. Prior to Diablo networking in games was pretty much limited to IPX/SPX which meant that you had to more than likely be sitting on a corporate or college Novell network to play them properly. There were clients that you could use like Kali that you could run to emulate IPX/SPX networking over TCP/IP, but in doing so you also added a bunch of lag to the process. The introduction of Battle.net meant that over a TCP/IP connection you could dial into a server and play in a hosted environment… and it just worked with minimal fiddling. So much of that time sitting in the lab was because I was connected to the college T1 line and able to play lag free on the Battle.net servers.

Later on with the release of Starcraft I ended up building my own windows network back at the trailer my wife and I lived in during the last years of college. The middle bedroom was my computer room and in it were two desks with two computers connected together over a super cheap coax peer to peer network. With this setup my cousin and I played so many co-op and versus games, but the majority of these were afternoon long matches of Starcraft. We were both base builders, and in the process kept trying to build impregnable fortresses to keep the other out. There was a sweet joy in sneaking that ghost over and listening to him scream obscenities as the game told him “Nuclear Launch Detected”. The next big game that I devoted large chunks of my life to was Diablo 2 which launched shortly after I entered the work world, and what was ultimately my second job out of college. I had by then been pulled heavily back into console gaming, devoting most of my time to playing the Sony Playstation and imports on the Sega Saturn. When Diablo 2 launched however all of that halted and I was back to being chained to the PC, devoting every moment to figuring out the inner workings of this new game. When the expansion launched and the Druid class was released, that became my jam. I am really hoping that at some point down the line they give us another druid to play with because that class was insanely fun. I loved having the various animal companions fighting with me, which in part is why the World of Warcraft Hunter class appealed to me so much at first.

In large part by the time Warcraft 3 was released, I was largely tired of the RTS genre and instead addicted beyond reason to a series of MMO games…. starting with Everquest, continuing into Dark Age of Camelot, Horizons, and ultimately City of Heroes. We were happily playing CoH when everyone started talking about the next Blizzard game… The World of Warcraft. At first I was super snarky about it, joking that I didn’t see how Blizzard could do an MMO given that most of their games only had just enough story to keep them from falling flat on their faces. Then I got to see the game when a friend of mine got into the closed beta and he brought the client up to work. I was completely and totally hooked and wanted more. Most of us managed to get into a stress test weekend, and I remember that it was the weekend of my ten year high school reunion. All I could think about was getting home and playing more with my friends. During the beta weekend I played a paladin and a friend of mine played a holy priest, and those two classes had this amazing synergy together. I would crusader strike things, debuffing them against holy damage… and he would burn them down with smite. Sadly this ultimately died by the time the game was launched, but it hooked me on the concept of the game… so much so that when I returned to playing City of Heroes after that weekend it had just lost its luster.

I was a devoted acolyte of World of Warcraft from the day it launched, forming House Stalwart that morning by creating a couple of throw away characters to generate the money needed to buy that guild charter. From there I stayed happy and engaged through two expansions, and it was ultimately not until the sweeping changes of Cataclysm and several years worth of pent up frustrations and drama that ultimately caused me to leave the game. Now World of Warcraft is much like a friend from High School that you get along with extremely well… in small doses. This is the part of my relationship with Blizzard where things get complicated, because it is hard sometimes for me to remember that they are not the “World of Warcraft Company” but instead this company I have had this storied history with since 1995. They are this friend that has given me countless hours of enjoyment and wonder as I wander around the the worlds they have created. So while the shine on Warcraft has dimmed for me… it is still polished to a sheen on Diablo 3 and Overwatch and I hungrily gobble up every last morsel of information on them both. I also greatly appreciate games like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, even though I am not really regularly playing them.

The truth of Blizzard is they have this innate ability to take an idea, and render it down to only the bones… and then build back upon that notion this fun and polished experience. The RTS genre was cludgy and unwieldy before Warcraft. As much as I adore Baldur’s Gate… it is not the clean and easy to pick up experience that Diablo was. Similarly Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot were these arcane and difficult to begin experiences, and World of Warcraft finally brought MMORPG gaming to the masses. This invokes so many different feelings in people, but you have to respect their ability to distill the pure essence of a thing and then amplify those “best characteristics” into a finished product. For me this is exactly what they have done with Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and ultimately Overwatch. Even though I sometimes am critical of Blizzard, I will always be among their biggest fans.

DAW2016 – Undead Labs

April 25, 2016 by Belghast

I was first aware of the existence of Undead Labs back in November of 2009 when articles started filtering onto the various MMO news sites that this company had spun off of ArenaNet to create a zombie themed MMO. Firstly I am a huge fan of all things Undead, and I started watching any news about this upstart company to try and glean bits of information about the upcoming game. Few things make me happier than slashing my way through hordes of the walking dead, and I’m enough of a fan of the George Romero movies that I have a vial of dirt from the graveyard that the original Night of the Living Dead was filmed in. With time it was announced that they had set their sights on creating a really solid single player experience instead of an MMO, which honestly was probably a really solid move given that by the time the game would have released… the MMO market was looking a little shaky. On June 5th of 2013 the resulting game, State of Decay was released exclusively on the Xbox Live Arcade, and I bought it the moment it was available for purchase. If you were to craft a perfect Zombie game… you’d have State of Decay. I loved everything about it… minus one little detail. The game felt like it was originally designed to have co-op support if not a fully fleshed out MMO experience. However as excited as I was about the game I took to my blog and made a post talking about my day one impressions.

Shortly after making the post I had Annie Strain the wife of Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain interacting with me on twitter. This really told me that this game studio was a little different than the big polished institutions I was used to interacting with. Everything about Undead Labs seemed like a big family, rather than a business. I had the fortune to interact with a handful of them at Pax South 2015, as they were ramping up to launch both their pokemon-esc mobile MMO Moonrise and the State of Decay: Year One Survivor Edition. Just talking with them really brings home this feeling of them all being in this together. The best part however is that they really do make amazing games, and over the years since State of Decay has launched I have purchased it for so many of my friends. I even purchased the disc copy of YOSE for my boss, when I found out he had just purchased a Xbox One. While he is not a big gamer, he was a huge fan of The Walking Dead… and as a result is now also a huge fan of State of Decay. Once again… the only problem with the game is that it begs to be a multiplayer experience. We’ve talked about this before on our podcast, but if we could explore that game world with friends it would truly be one of the best games released on any platform.

Another huge boon about Undead Labs is the insanely hard working Sanya Weathers. If you have been around the MMO industry since the early days, there is a large chance you know that name. I became aware of her during my time playing Dark Age of Camelot, and always appreciated the job she did trying to wrangle the crazies and help out the folks who really needed assistance. Within the community management circles she is a bit “infamous” for her blogging days. Regardless of how you might remember her, she is one of those forces that it wouldn’t matter what company she was working with… I would pay attention to them from that point on. I am hugely thankful of my own interactions with her during the lead up to, and after Pax South 2015. I would not have actually had the interview with Undead Labs were it not for her reaching out to me on twitter, and that sort of proactive nature is just awesome. It was heartbreaking when the Studio announced that they would be cancelling Moonrise because I was right there with them pulling for it to be the next big breakout hit.

One of the folks that I met with during Pax South was Geoffrey Card the Lead Designer for State of Decay. Since the convention I’ve followed his movement a little more closely and found that he does this amazing series of live streams. What is awesome about these streams is that he tends to grab various folks from Undead Labs and streams over the pacific timezone lunchtime. The thing that I find valuable about them is the way that the various folks end up breaking down the games as they are playing them, and deconstruct what elements are really well done and what elements could use improvement. A lot of the games that I have seen him play are other zombie genre titles, and it feels like he is trying to grok everything that is going on in the title so that he can absorb it like a sponge and burn it down to the purist element to use for inspiration on State of Decay. As someone who has always been a bit of an armchair designer myself, I find the process valuable and it also serves to give the watchers a bit of a glimpse into the inner workings of the game studio itself at times. If you are into that sort of thing, I highly suggest you check the stream out sometime.

The best thing about the Developer Appreciation Week construct, is it gives me open season to write love letters to the various companies that I really respect and appreciate. Undead Labs is one that I knew without a doubt that I would be touching on during this week, and I am really excited to see whatever the next thing is that they are working on. Part of me is crossing my fingers hoping that we finally get either a co-op experience or a full fledged MMOized State of Decay. Regardless I will be watching any news about this great studio with interest.