August, 2008

The Fallout 3 saga in many ways embodies very classic arguments and lines of conflict in gaming culture. We've got the old vs. new, the fan vs. the anti-fan, the optimist's "they'll come through" vs. the pessimist's "no, they will eat a crate of epic fail"... usually not actually representative of the positions held by many of them, but they're floating in the air, nonetheless. One such familiar point is the discourses about the actual act of purchase. On one hand, you have many critics lamenting that despite the game's numerous flaws or its perversion of the original vision, the public will lap it up and cough up the cash anyway. On the other, you've got many 'apologists' of Bethesda asserting that for all the whining and crying, the detractors will go and buy the game anyway - which, it's implied, will cancel out all of their arguments against the game. How exactly that leap over the shackles of logic is made, I wouldn't know. So, either way, is purchase the ultimate equaliser against the neverending squabbles of fandom? How often do the clamours of fans eventually reach the corporate world and deliver accurate, representative kicks to the backside, and how often are they contradicted by their own purchasing patterns?

Let's deal with this one by one. First, we have the point that despite flaws or controversies that are so very big in the context of the industry and the culture, it's dwarfed by that ever-looming mastodon - the, gasp, silent majority - who will step on your puny arguments like the strong hulk he is, and buy Fallout 3. Or something.

S. Majority, artist's depiction

Alright. After spending a week blubbering like a fish, the flu has subsided and I have regained basic human faculties. As good a time as any to resume the proper update schedule. This one is going to be the first of several blogposts talking about Fallout 3 and the controversies surrounding it. I'm not really interested in declaring who's right and what's really Fallout: that's been done to death, and I'm frankly not qualified.

For those who spend their time hunting wild game and smoking out of long pipes instead of being constructive on the internet, Fallout 3 is the sequel to two highly acclaimed RPGs from the late 1990's. Rather like a concubine who's grown old and saggy, the father of the originals, Interplay, lost most of the folks who actually developed the Fallouts, made bad decisions resulting in various financial hemmorrhages, and ended up selling its best assets. The Fallout license ended up with Bethesda, famous for their The Elder Scrolls series. The long-awaited sequel is now nearly here, and the press hype machine has been winding into a frenzied click-clack of steam and soot.

Didn't anyone tell him he put his belt on backwards?

I've been struck down with some sort of bizarro cold keeping me in bed 18 hours a day, so let's keep this short: Vince D. Weller, at the helm of Iron Tower's Age of Decadence project, has kindly answered a few questions for the Alley. Find the link on the left... or, ah, here.

7. How much awareness is there of indie games outside more dedicated gamers? What do your relatives or the people you meet at the bar think when you tell them you make indie games?

I'm not sure that awareness is the right word. It's about the visuals these days. Some people take one look at our screenshots and lose their interest immediately. Hell, I've seen people complaining about Alpha Protocol's graphics calling it a "budget title".

No indie studio can match the visuals of mainstream games and since the visuals are the main feature these days, indie games would remain unnoticed by the majority no matter how aware people are about these games. So, indies are a domain of dedicated gamers and I don't think anything can change that. Considering that it takes 0.1% of mainstream development budget to make an indie game, we are more than happy with 0.1% of the audience.

8. The promotion for Age of Decadence has involved not only your ‘standard’ stuff like screenshots, but also ‘Let’s Play!’ threads where fans can indirectly ‘play through’ a portion of the game, picking dialogue options or what to do next. What’s the payoff? Why is it worth doing?

3 reasons: feedback, credibility, entertainment.

Feedback - well, that's kind of obvious. If not, see my answer to the next question.

Credibility - we are all accustomed to PR folks lying, exaggerating, and promising features that aint there. We promise quite a lot too, and I think it's important to show people that everything we promised is in the game. The "let's play" format - forumites make all decisions, developer just drives - is made for this purpose. Actually I wanted to show our assassins questline, but the forumites decided to do and try different things, which is great.

Entertainment - waiting for a game could be boring and uneventful. I believe that we owe something to people who supported us by joining our forums and taking their time to offer advice, so it was also a nice present. Thanks again, guys.

9. Checking in on the AoD forums, I found the ‘Teron’s Mine’ discussion very interesting (http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php?topic=337.0) – Oscar, one of your devs, posted screenshots of an area he had developed, then tweaked it about a dozen times to satisfy fan feedback. It was almost as if he was presenting a draft for everyone to polish together. Does this happen often with Age of Decadence? Does it ever get difficult or cumbersome to put so much emphasis on fan input during the creation process?

It's an acquired taste. Basically, we don't treat people who are interested in AoD as idiots. First, their opinions are important because we are making this game for them. So, what I think sometimes matters less than what they think. Second, you know that saying "one head is better than two"? Well, how about one head vs a thousand heads then? Listening to our fans allowed us improve the game greatly. Some suggestions were absolutely brilliant. Kind of like "Damn! Why didn't I think of that?", which is exactly the point. You can't think of everything. The only way to do that is to pay attention to what people are criticizing and suggesting.

It's not about designing by committee. It's not about being unsure and asking people to do your job for you. It's about presenting your vision to people and letting them help you polish it and make it better. We started showing everything and getting feedback from day one, and once we realized the benefits, it became our way of doing things. Pretty much every aspect of the game was presented to our fans who did their best to tear it apart (fucking savages) and help us "think of everything".

10a. Are we seeing a trend towards simpler, less challenging RPGs that ‘hold the player’s hand’?

One of them rhetorical questions?

10b. Is Age of Decadence a rejection of this recent trend, or something else entirely?

Rejection is too strong a word to describe our design philosophy. The mainstream is going one way, we are going the other way. That's all there is to it.

11. You’re known for being quite outspoken – not afraid to call things as you see them. Some might say that this is needlessly confrontational towards people who might appreciate the type of game you make – is that an issue?

I don't think so. I don't see "being outspoken and calling things as I see them" as a bad thing. The gaming industry suffers, in my opinion, from too many politically correct people. A GameSpot editor who gave more than 10 years to the site was thrown out because he dared to have an opinion about Eidos' Kane & Lynch instead of writing a paid fucking commercial (aka, a review). How fucked up is that? GameSpot had basically acknowledged that their site is a publishers' outlet and unless you are really interested in what publishers happened to think about their own games, there is no real reason to visit the site. Everyone seems to be ok with that though.

Anyway, I'm well aware that what I say may offend someone. That's the downside of having an opinion, I suppose. However, I'm making a game not writing a complete collection of my opinions on various topics. If someone is unable to understand the difference, well, I don't think he or she would enjoy AoD.

12. If the option was ever presented to you – would you take up mainstream game development as a career, or stick with indie?

The option was presented to me, but I had to decline politely. I'm afraid that games I would like to make won't appeal to publishers who decide what mainstream developers should and shouldn't be working on. I'm not trying to say that all mainstream games are bad. Far from it. I greatly enjoyed Mask of the Betrayer. I'm looking forward to Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol, Diablo 3, and Divine Divinity 2. However, I also like a different type of games and since nobody else wants to make them, it's my duty to mankind. Ok, it's my duty to a few hundred geeks who happened to share my thoughts on RPGs. We can't abandon them, can we?

13. I’d ask about the release date, but we know “it will be done when it’s done” – anything planned for the waiting fans in the foreseeable future, though?

That's what the foreseeable future is for, isn't it?

Many thanks to Mr. Weller for the interview - and, possibly, providing the first RPG worth playing to death since 2004.

The Alley has chased down Vince D. Weller of Age of Decadence for another delicious interview.

You can find out more about Age of Decadence at http://www.irontowerstudio.com/.

1. Let’s get the groundwork done – who are you? What is Age of Decadence? How did you get into indie game development?

Vince D. Weller, the lead designer of The Age of Decadence, an indie RPG.

The Age of Decadence is an isometric, turn-based, single-player role-playing game set in a low magic, post-apocalyptic fantasy world, inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire. The game features a detailed skill-based character system, non-linear gameplay, multiple skill-based ways to handle quests, choices & consequences, and extensive dialogue trees.

As for the last question, I'm a passionate gamer and I've always wanted to make games. Same goes for the rest of my team. Tools that are currently available to indie developers make it relatively easy to "get into indie game development". All you need is commitment.

2. Age of Decadence’s setting is a ‘fall of an empire’ scenario: what does this setting bring to the game?

Fall of empires is an interesting period. The old ways - laws, beliefs, ways of living, classes, even power - are falling apart to give room to something new or mutating into something new if they want to survive. Society is slowly reverting to the more natural, primal state. Power is starting to change hands, aided by assassinations, backstabbing, and plotting. As Glen Cook said: "Conspiracies and assassinations and naked power-grabs. All the fun of decadence.". All that forms a nice and colorful playground for your character. If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere.

3. You have previously described your team as “picking up Troika’s ball because somebody had to”. What is it about games like Troika’s that today’s RPGs aren’t providing, and why is it important to keep that flame alive?

I don't think that in the last 10-15 years anyone did as much to truly push the RPG genre forward as Troika did. Fallout and Arcanum are two of the best RPGs ever created. ToEE had the best and most faithful DnD turn-based combat and one of the best turn-based combat implementations in general. Bloodlines was probably one of the first successful attempts to fuse action with role-playing. Robust dialogue trees with skillchecks, focus on characters and dialogues, non-linearity, multiple options and paths, choices & consequences - that's Troika. We are influenced by Troika's games, by Troika's design philosophy, by Troika's ideas.

Troika's games were different. Troika's RPGs were actually ROLE-PLAYING games, not games with adjustable stats. Sure, they were buggy and often unpolished, but I'd rather play a brilliant, but unpolished game, than a well-polished, generic and uninspiring game.

Needless to say, we'll do our best to deliver well-tested and polished games for our audience.

4. What made you go for turn-based combat in Age of Decadence, and what do you have to say to those who believe that it is a relic of the past?

Real time and first-person view are as old as turn-based and isometric. Probably even older. See Diablo 3 "OMG! Why is it isometric?!" drama for more info:

“Camera is not technology,” says Wilson [Diablo 3 lead designer], clearly somewhat frustrated. “People associate the camera with isometric and say: ‘Oh, why didn’t you update the tech?’ Well, we did update the tech. The camera has nothing to do with tech, the camera is all about gameplay. Isometric gameplay is very different from FPS or over-the-shoulder third person – which is pretty much what the entire industry is moving towards. But then some of the biggest hits of the last year were Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and those were not high-tech games. Gameplay is what matters; it’s what’s always mattered to us.”

Similarly, turn-based isn't about tech, it's about gameplay. It can't be a relic because games like Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic still exist and aint going nowhere. To understand what TB offers, let's imagine RT Civ. Imagined? Well, there you go.

Turn-based gameplay is about thinking, considering your options, and using tactical advantages. Real-time gameplay is about clicking really, really fast (hence the twitch gameplay name). The fact that when developers want to offer you a bit more depth in your RT cereal they pause it, should tell you everything you need to know.

Why AoD is turn-based? Because we like TB games and we spit on your RT crap. What? The mike is still on. Oh, shit! Now we'd have to issue a press-release stating that RT games are as good as TB games and that we are all huge RT fans. Thanks a lot!

5. What is Age of Decadence’s target market? Will it be able to attract new, or younger, generations to this kind of RPGs? Is that your goal?

I have no goal in this regard and I don't target anyone. I'm simply making a game I would want to play myself. If it turns out that there is enough people who are interested in such games, the existence of market will be officially announced and we'll continue making games we like. Otherwise...

On our forums you can find many young players and many seasoned veterans who've seen many gaming winters. I don't think it's a question of age. It's a matter of personal preference.

6. What kind of impact can an indie game such as Age of Decadence make on the RPG market in general, and mainstream RPG designs?

Well, call me overly ambitious, but I'm confident that the impact would be zero. We're working hard to turn this dream into reality!

Click below for the rest!

First, a little bit of housekeeping. The alley is now 21 days old, which is nowhere as iconic as a month or a year or a hundred years, but why let abstract divisions of time stop us? I celebrated by doing nothing particularly productive today and drinking water with a piece of lemon inside.

.......

Anyway, on to the topic at hand. Nothing big today - just wanted to mention a feature on The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. The Witcher was released last year by Polish developer CDProjekt, with a lot of hype and marketing. It was, in fact, a pretty awesome game. The problem was that, being a Polish game, it was localised to English - and the localisation was crap:

Sometimes it's like Yoda wrote the dialogue in shorthand.

One of the newspieces doing the rounds this week is on Cliff 'cliffski' Harris's dialogue with people who pirate his games. Basically, he asked people to email him to explain why they did/were tempted to pirate his games. Reportedly, answers mainly revolved around price, low game quality, DRM and convenience.

The thing is, every one of those factors are something all of us can identify with. They're about as in-your-face as North Korean propaganda. Like the music industry, you can't help but think that the reason piracy such an epidemic is because the legal market is broken in several areas.

Come on, take a look. You want EA? We got EA. Sega? We got Sega too.

So I left people hanging after Part One. Thousands of people. Nubile teenage girls that couldn't bear the torment threw themselves off various high cliffs, into the serene waves. I am completely remorseless, but thought I should finish it off, anyway.

Let's begin from what we might see as the 'apex' of the casual gaming phenomenon:

Old people go Wii (Image from Chicago Tribune)

Last year, we realised that even the +70 demographic could now be considered, in industry parlance, a 'casual gamer'. Now, what's the most striking thing about that photo? One, the impeccable fashion-sense of our jean-clad bowler: two, that he doesn't look like a gamer, at all. The 'casual gamer' of the industry's imagination, in essence, isn't a 'gamer' at all.

Well I wasn't kidding when I said I'll interview people. Despite my limited skills at hounding important people, Matthew Rorie, the Marketing & PR Producer at California-based role playing game developer Obsidian Entertainment, has kindly answered some questions about his job for the Alley.

I'm actually very, very embarrassed to put this up, because the questions are pretty horrible. Apparently, when I work on my thesis all day long then write the questions, I sound like a sociologist that's overdosed on tranquilisers. Kudos to Matthew for some interesting insights, nonetheless. You can read the interview by clicking here, or just looking at the Interviews section on the left column. Click 'read more' for my comments.

Matthew Rorie waxes rhetoric at E3.

7. Sometimes, we hear Obsidian described as ‘Bioware’s Little Brother’, having debuted with two sequels of Bioware games. Is this still a prevalent feeling amongst other devs, the press or amongst fans? What kind of image do you think Obsidian has right now and where do you want that to go?

Any company has to think seriously about its image. Hopefully we're earning a reputation for developing world-class RPGs that are exciting to play and which have interesting stories. I feel pretty confident that that will continue into the future, at least based on my experiences with the stuff we're working on.

8. Promotion of a game occurs not only through official news media, but also fansites and fan communities. What are some of the differences, if any, between promoting your games and revealing information through professional and amateur channels? Are there different kind of benefits to be had?

Well, when you deal with large media or websites, your information has to be somewhat general so that the large audience that's reading it doesn't get overwhelmed in minutia and miss the forest for the trees. You can speak about specifics, but you have to make sure that the big picture is being communicated effectively, because you don't know how many people reading that article will know about your game and what it's about. When dealing with the fansites or community, you can be much more specific and dig down more precisely, because you know that your audience is going to know what you're talking about. Dealing with the community is a great way to reward people for being involved and interact with the core fans, as well.

9. Some people are beginning to use such unofficial channels as their primary source of information on games. Do you see this becoming a general trend? What impact are they having on the role or effectiveness of corporate PR and ‘professional’ game journalism?

I don't know about it becoming a general trend; I think people who are interested in specific games have always been more likely to visit game-specific boards and websites. I know I always used to visit Diablo-specific websites back when I was in my throes of addiction, just because they covered minutiae that larger sites didn't. That's much the same nowadays as it was ten years ago, as far as I can tell, so I don't think there's been a trend away from the larger sites as being important aggregators of game information. I think there'll always be a kind of symbiosis between the larger game sites that cover everything in a general manner and the smaller sites that cover a specific game in-depth. In my role as a marketing and PR person, I just have to realize that some information is more suitable to one kind of site or the other, or as a comment on a forum, etc.

10. All developers must control, to a degree, when and how they reveal information about their games. Recently, Diablo 3 used a sudden burst of information to capture the attention of the gaming world, while others are less conspicuous, and still others insist on remaining tight-lipped. What are your thoughts on these various methods and the kind of effect they have?

Well, it varies from game to game, and depends on a huge number of factors, including things like launch window, game genre, developer/publisher reputation (and Blizzard's is hard to match), and the financial aspects of your marketing campaign, so it's tough to generalize. There's a fine line between releasing enough information to get people excited and giving them too much information and causing them to become bored about your game.

11. Screenshots and trailers are popular, staple methods of promoting games. Some argue that because it is easier to show good graphics or exciting combat on such media than complex dialogue or choice and consequences, game promotion naturally focuses on the former. Would you agree?

Well, ease of creation of promotional assets is definitely a factor in terms of what gets made, as is the ease of understanding on the part of the people who see it. We definitely try to show off the deeper aspects of our games, as well, but those will more often come out through interviews and other in-depth discussions.

12. Finally, I recognise that it is still early days for you in this job. Do you have any ambitions or visions for the future in the way Obsidian (and you) does PR and Marketing?

Maybe. :) It's probably a bit too early to be nailing my theses to the church door, though.

A big thank you to Matthew for answering our questions!