Aug 31, 2012

Ron Gilbert's Cave Is Deeper Than I Thought

Kotaku

Ron Gilbert's Cave Is Deeper Than I Thought What? It is.

There's a special type of anxiety that arises when you have to solve one of Ron Gilbert's puzzles in front of him. This is the guy who made Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, for gosh's sake. And here I am, poking and prodding at a new puzzle he made, stuck but not wanting to ask for help.

On Wednesday, I visited Double Fine to play through the PAX build of Gilbert's new adventure game The Cave. As I played, I found myself stuck on the first major puzzle. I switched between my three characters, poking and prodding at objects in the environment, trying to figure out the best way to remove a fire-breathing monster from my path. As minutes passed and I made slow progress towards an eventual solution, I began to suspect that The Cave is going to be a larger, more finely wrought game than I may have thought.

Eventually Gilbert chimed in and helped me solve the puzzle. And thank God, really.

Okay, let's bullet-point this sucker. Some of this stuff is already known, and then I'll get to the new stuff I played.

When it was first unveiled, The Cave looked as much like a puzzle-platformer like Trine or even Shadow Complex than a traditional adventure game like the ones with which Gilbert is commonly associated. I described it as Metroidvania meets Maniac Mansion. Which, yeah, OKAY, THAT SOUNDS COOL.
In the game, players take on a crew of three of a possible seven avatars. There's the monk, the knight; the time-traveler and the adventurer, the hillbilly, the twins, and the scientist.
Each character has come to this mythological cave for a different reason, and must puzzle their way through the entire underground labyrinth.
The map contains one unique zone for each character that only they can explore—and find what it is that they really want.

None of these characters speak—in fact, the only speaking character in the game is the Cave himself.
The cave is, in fact, a man, and will be played by Stephen Stanton, who played Agent Nein in Psychonauts.
There was some question as to whether the Cave would be a man or a woman, but in the PAX demo I saw, Gilbert confirmed that the voice actor I was hearing was the final voice actor.
The Cave will be the narrator of the tale, and regularly interjects with humorous asides and observations about the group's progress. For example, when you "die," the cave will joke about how he's the only one who doesn't seem to want someone to die, before quickly bringing your character back from the dead.
From the very beginning of the game, you'll be in-engine—there are no loading screens, menu screens, or any other type of general user interface. The camera begins looking at the nighttime sky before panning down to a clearing in a forest, in which stand the seven protagonists.
Character selection is nifty—you'll be able to cycle through the characters using the D-pad, and hitting Y will give you a clue as to each character's special power. For example, the Knight sprouts a set of angelic wings, and the Time Traveler shoots out a beam of blue light.
As you select a character, The Cave will tell you about him or her, giving a hint as to what they're looking for down within.
In a humorous touch, the first thing you do in The Cave is head into a room and grab a crowbar. Because of course the first thing you do is grab a crowbar! After that you'll come up against a set of boards described in the game as a "shoddy barricade," which of course easily comes apart with the crowbar.

One of the linchpins of The Cave's design is that you're controlling not one but three characters. My time-traveler broke open the shoddy barricade with the crowbar, but then she climbed down a little ways and came to stand upon a weak but not-quite breaking set of boards. Clearly I'd have to send down some more characters.
I used the D-pad to hop back to the character-selection screen, and quickly I chose two more characters—the monk and the adventurer. Each character was assigned to one of the top three points on the D-pad, making it a snap to navigate between them. Once I had all three standing on the boards, they broke, and my three protagonists went tumbling down, down, down, down into a pool of water far beneath the earth.
Gilbert told me that at this point, the three characters for the playthrough would be set, and players couldn't turn back.
I was expecting to find another puzzle, but I wasn't expecting to find another speaking character—and yet, as I climbed my adventurer out of the water, that's just what I found. I heard a man crying. I came out into a large, gaudy "THE CAVE" gift-shop. Something about it felt, well, entirely appropriate for this kind of game. "I hope you're not here to visit the Cave," a ruddy man behind the counter said through tears, "because.. we're closed!" There had been a horrific accident, and they were forced to close. What was the disaster? Oh, they had "no trinkets to sell."
Guess what? I had to go get some trinkets.
I then had to bypass a gate that forced me to use the three-character setup: First, two characters had to pull a lever at the same time—after I'd pull it, I'd switch to another character, and the character I'd been using would keep pulling the lever. It was a good warm-up for what will doubtless be the game's defining mechanic.
With that, I was off to the left and face to face with the monster-bypass puzzle I'd seen in a demo back when the game was unveiled.

The setup was classic adventure game: There's a monster, and if you try to get around him, he'll kill you instantly. There's a huge crane-claw located above him, and clearly you have to lure him underneath the claw and catch him in it to proceed.
I had: A sparking fusebox that killed me when I touched it, two wells, a pit in front of a monster, a broken-down crane, and a vending machine with no power. Sound adventure-gamey enough for you?
The eventual solution was simple enough, but after I poked and prodded at it for a while, Gilbert walked me through it in the interest of time. (Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself).
"I like when people are stuck and confused, I find that more fascinating than frustrating," Gilbert said.
Here's the solution: Take a bucket from the well, put it over the water to stop the fusebox from shorting out, take the fuse down to the other fusebox next to the vending machines, plug it in, buy a hot dog, carry the fuse back up to next to the crane, plug it in, get the crane set, and then—I'm ready.
Now here's the thing—two things made this all more interesting than standard adventure game fare: One, I had more direct control of the characters—I could run and jump with them, which simply makes the game a bit more involving than pointing and clicking. Second, a lot of the puzzles required hopping between my characters in mid-action.
Once the claw was powered up, I had my adventurer toss the hot dog out into the pit. When the monster came running out to eat it, I hopped up to my monk, who was standing up at the crane's controls, and had him drop the claw. It snagged the monster, and I was free to go on my way.
I was struck by how complex this first puzzle was—I asked if the game would feature a lot of these more involved puzzles, and designer JP LeBreton confirmed that yep, it would. Some of the character-specific regions, he said, would feature several of them at the same time, and players would be able to tackle them in whatever order they want, like the hubs in classic adventure games.
Since each character has a special ability—the adventurer has a grappling hook, the time-traveler can warp through walls, etc—there are multiple solutions to each puzzle. Gilbert told me that he wants the game to be about experimentation and discovery—as you play, you'll figure out things you can do with special abilities that you didn't think were possible.

I was impressed with the depth of the first major puzzle in The Cave, and have a feeling that this game is going to be bigger size-wise than I'd anticipated it would be. Particularly given the fact that there will be seven large, distinct puzzle areas, not all of which will accessible on a first playthrough. Gilbert's Cave appears to run deeper than I thought.

Man, it's really hard to say that with a straight face.

Hey, okay, here are some screenshots!

Aug 31, 2012

Spec Ops' Multiplayer Developer Defends Mode Called 'Cancerous' by the Game's Designer

Kotaku

The studio responsible for the multiplayer component of Spec Ops: The Line, whose lead designer called it a "cancerous growth" foisted upon the game by publisher 2K Games, defended its work in a statement today.

In a feature published earlier this week by Polygon, Cory Davis, formerly of Spec Ops developer Yager, ripped the multiplayer as inessential to the story the studio was trying to tell. "2K was relentless in making sure that it happened—even at the detriment of the overall project and the perception of the game," he said.

Darkside Game Studios, the developer responsible for Spec Ops' multiplayer, said this today:

There are a lot of positive topics covered in the recent Polygon article about Spec Ops: The Line. However, one clarification needs to be made about the multiplayer mode: Darkside Game Studios was brought onto Spec Ops towards the tail end of the project and revamped the entire multiplayer design. The deadline was tight, the demands were high, and Darkside did a great job according to focus tests, reviewers and players. Cory Davis himself followed up on his Twitter account: "Darkside Games did a great job with the time / resources they were given. They finalized and shipped a historically troubled Multiplayer." His concerns originated prior to Darkside's involvement and stemmed from his opinion that the game should contain no multiplayer at all. Fortunately, for the core fans of Spec Ops multiplayer, this was an outlying opinion.

Davis in earlier tweets said his statement about Spec Ops' multiplayer "is not directed at Darkside Game Studios. MP passed to multiple studios, was troubled throughout," and that his comments "are in no way representative of my overall feelings for 2K as a publisher." Davis also noted that he no longer works at Yager.

Davis, to Polygon had said, "The multiplayer game's tone is entirely different, the game mechanics were raped to make it happen, and it was a waste of money. No one is playing it, and I don't even feel like it's part of the overall package - it's another game rammed onto the disk like a cancerous growth."

2K Games, the publisher, has had no comment on Davis' remarks.

Aug 31, 2012

The Secret World "State Of The Game" Update Promises Continued Content, Despite Developer Difficulties

Secret World Legends

It's no secret that The Secret World has been facing some troubled times. Developer Funcom laid off half their staff earlier this month, which would seem to make the promised monthly content updates more challenging to release on time.

However, in his August, 2012 State of the Game announcement, Ragnar Tørnquist, the game's creative director and senior producer, reassured fans that the content is still flowing, and the team is still dedicated to the project. He also took a few digs at other recent big-name MMO announcements and launches, emphasizing that The Secret World remains, in many ways, unique: "We're not going to play it safe. We won't be introducing classes or levels, elves or centaurs, and regardless of the competition, we won't back down from our original vision. We're going to keep doing what we're good at."

So what remains on deck in The Secret World? Tørnquist promised that even though Issue #2 of content updates has been delayed by two weeks, that Issue #3 is still on track to release on time. Details about Issue #3 remain scant, but it is promised to tie-in with Halloween and have cats in. As for the rest of what's on the horizon:

So what's ahead in upcoming issues? There's a ten-person raid in New York scheduled for October, and it's not like any raid you've ever played before. We have a bunch of auxiliary weapons on the way, and more character customisation improvements. We have a huge and exciting new feature pencilled in for Christmas, which ties into the achievement system and gives a lot more meaning to the usual 'Kill 1,000 Vampires' goals. (After all, who hasn't wondered what it would be like to have some vampiric abilities to play around with?) We're creating intermediary decks with brand new clothing rewards; we have a ton of new missions and storylines in development; and we have a huge new adventure zone scheduled for next spring, bringing players back to Tokyo's Ground Zero, to face brand new threats, meet new characters, play new missions and explore an intriguing urban environment unlike anything you've ever seen in an MMO.

State of The Game - August 2012 [Funcom]

Aug 31, 2012

Steam Greenlight Is A Good Idea, But Makes Its Buried Treasures Very Hard To Find

Steam Community Items

After one day of poking around Steam Greenlight, I feel like I have seen this all before. And then I realize: in a way, Steam's suddenly going all Kickstarter. It's a big new platform that the little guys—and not-so-little-guys—can use to get their project in front of millions. And it's a bit of a mess.

Greenlight is at once a brilliant idea and a nightmare of execution, an enormous haystack in which perhaps, if we are lucky, some needles are hiding. At the moment, Steam informs me there are 579 games awaiting my rating. Yesterday there were somewhere in the order of 260. At this rate, even millions of Steam users won't be able to comb through the Greenlight slush pile with any efficiency.

While anything that exposes more unknown, indie games to a wider audience is a great idea, there are already some flaws in Greenlight's implementation that make it difficult to work with.

Language. I don't mean bad language, or abusive language. I mean, I can't read the Cyrillic alphabet and these Russian listings are worthless to me. A language filter would be very helpful.
Fake listings. In half an hour, I reported more listings than I voted for. Battlefield 3, Shootmania Storm, Minecraft and FIFA 13 are not your indie games, submitters. Nice try. Valve is banning fakers as they come up but it's still an imperfect process.
Insufficient information. There's not much to go on, with most games. A handful of potentially pre-alpha screenshots and a short description rarely say much worth knowing. As a result, it's too easy to judge a book by its cover, as it were. The prettiest games are the ones that can most easily grab my attention.
That cursed downvote button. Like any popularity contest, a dedicated fan base can rig it. While a horde of fans arriving to upvote a game is perhaps the desired effect, that thumbs down button may prove prone to abuse. The gamer community is not known for being gentle or subtle with its displeasure.
Playability. Greenlight welcomes games at any stage of the production process, but it would be helpful to be able to filter out finished products from pre-alpha concepts.
Ranking. It would be helpful to be able to sort games by how many favorable ratings they've received. Maybe there's an excellent project at the top I'd like to pile on to, or one languishing unfairly at the bottom that I'd like to boost.

So while flicking randomly through 20 pages of potential PC games, what can the discerning user find?

Well, some games look downright lovely. The art in Fly'n and Incredipede both look beautiful, painted in colors and bold lines.

Then there are the titles. Escape Goat is the name that made me giggle most, though A Hat In Time also caught my attention, and made me look more closely at their listings. (Though, of course, names can also draw negative attention; Voxel Elephant Murder Simulator struck me for all the wrong reasons.)

Steam Greenlight readily highlights the challenges of curation—it's hard to separate the good from the bad, in an overwhelming world. Some games in the mix look like they could be promising PC indie titles, if they're ever finished. Some are clearly finished or almost-finished works by developers who know what they're doing. Others are clones of popular ideas (Minecraft in particular seems to be inspirational), or straight-up trolling.

Steam has just become like the wide-open mobile market in one key way: unless you already know exactly what you're looking for, it can be quite a challenge to find. Hopefully, the system will see some enhancements soon.