Finished Fallout 3 last night and used a few cheeky saves to check out a number of the endings (though I went for the generally godlike / pure / paladin route).

I won’t spoil it, I quite enjoyed the ending but I get the feeling that if you don’t spend lots of time exploring (I clocked about 54 hours of game time) you could probably run through the story in about 8 hours.

That said, as soon as I finished the story, I re-loaded a save game (keep some around handy just after you visit Eden) and continued the freeform gameplay (and picked up the DLC).

I Think I prefer the story arc to Fallout 3 than Fable 2, however they were both a little unfulfilling in the end, somewhat disappointing after my “last year” RPG having such an excellent story arc (Mass Effect).  My reaction was probably because both Fallout 3 and Fable 2 allow you to inhabit a character and encourage exploration over narrative.  Fallout seemed the more successful of the two games, though Fable made up for it by being very charming. In comparison, the Mass story was a strong one with the exploration, past the trivial no-planet planets, designed to drive the plot producing a feeling of much more cohesion.

I Still can’t quite get in to Far Cry 2 though, I’m not sure why, the mechanics are solid, the story pretty random but it’s just not really drawing me in (I guess that’s what Zero Punctuations review said in a slightly more amusing manner).  Just too serviceable to love.

So, it looks like Free Radical, a Nottingham based games studio, closed its doors today. 

The surrounding scenario isn’t a pretty read (or at least the picture the gaming press paints isn’t) and it’s the latest in a trend of SME sized games developers folding despite the games industry growing month on month with disregard to the current economic climate.  Month after month websites like Gamasutra seem to report record sales of both console hardware and games (and that’s ignoring the Wii shaped monolithic elephant in the corner).

To directly quote a Kotaku commenter (Pyrefly)

“All that will emerge will be EA, Ubisoft and Activision with each consoles respective first party devs. It would be awful for all us gamers to keep losing more and more studios.”

This seems to be the pervading feeling amongst gamers but I can’t help feel that it might be slightly off target.  Nobody likes to see the little guys fail.  In any community people love rooting for the people they can identify with, with the human faces to development.  However, I just can’t help feeling that the studios currently suffering aren’t just suffering as a result of the economic climate, but more because of the evolving nature of games development. 

Gamers seem to be pointing fingers blindly at the mega-publishers as the cause of the collapse of these small studios but I can’t help feel that this isn’t really the case.  It appears as if they’re really just the victims of technological progression in a time of restricted finances.

Nobody likes seeing the little guys fail, but just to single out today’s example.  From memory (and a little wikipedia verification), Free Radical were formed as an offshoot of Rare, started by some of the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark team.  They had pedigree and went on to produce (what wikipedia claims) is the “highest-ranked first person shooter on the Playstation 2″, Timesplitters.  Since then, they’ve released a few Timesplitters sequels, Second Sight on the xbox, Haze on the Playstation 3 and they were apparently working on an unknown Lucasarts game (speculatively, Star Wars: Battlefront 3).

I’m going to go out on a limb here, I never played second sight (though I hear it was decent), I disliked all of the Timesplitters games (they had no soul, and I found them utterly trite) and Haze (which I also haven’t played) was critically panned and a commercial failure.  In my own personal opinion, their games sucked (straw-man here, they’re not terrible, but I’d not choose to play them).

Don’t kick a man while he’s down, I know.  I’m sure the developers that worked at Free Radical are exceptionally talented.  Technologically, their products all seemed very sound and polished, but from the rundown, they’re not exactly iD software or Epic.  They probably fall into the “averagely reviewed, decent sales” bracket of games companies.

I don’t think what happened to Free Radical today was necessarily their fault.  Whilst people point the finger at the big publishers for not supporting enough SME innovation, I think actually this is indicative of the diverging nature of game development at the moment.

This year has seen the resurgence of the tiny independent game studios using the new content delivery channels, operating outside of the bounds of the current mega-publishers and there seems to be an increasing little and large divide to games development.

The middle tier seems to be being either gobbled up by majors (perhaps saved from bankruptcy) or collapsing and if I were to suggest a reason, I’d say that it’s probably indicative of the increased pressure of producing “AAA quality” games for the current generation of consoles.

You can’t produce a Halo 3 or Mass Effect on a shoestring budget anymore.  You either have to think really big and get help from a large publisher (EA have done some great work this year with games like Mirrors Edge and Dead Space, Ubisoft I’d argue have been doing great work for a number of years), or you need to actually scale down to smaller productions to be competitive with a smaller team.

Huge titles are plagued by content creation, gamers want more re-playability and value for money.  Your games have to look fantastic.  You have to be able to afford expensive middleware engines and components. 

Middle tier, under resourced attempts at AAA grade titles end up like Haze and Too Human it seems, whilst gems like Braid and World of Goo thrive in their microcosm and appear to be sustainable and competitive in their corner of the market (I have no idea what the financial rewards of small productions look like, to be clear and open).

I guess there’s always the option of pushing out a bunch of Wii shovelware if you’re an SME that’s running out of ideas, I hear people buy anything with added waggle.

At the end of the day while we’re losing more studios I’m curious if we’re actually loosing talent.  I’m not sure what the job markets like for a game developer, but I’d have thought that actual talent tends to get re-employed.  Your average coder producing average games might suffer, but anyone with a stellar portfolio (or even a half decent one) in an industry so starved of skills must be re-employable?  I guess the bigger risk is losing game development talent to other areas of computer science where jobs are seemingly more secure and the work is less based around a sustained 8 month crunch.  You really have to be in it for the love of games or be working for a good company (as seemingly the scenario this morning at free radical proved, the staff appear to have been quite badly treated in the last few hours).

I just suspect that the industry is going through a period of restructuring at the moment.  Maybe it’s time for the major labels to stand up for more than just profit margins and defend the culture that helps them thrive.  But at the end of the day, the SME with world class talent will probably be just fine.  Look at iD, I’m sure John Carmack isn’t too worried that somehow his skill set will become irrelevant and he won’t be able to compete.

It genuinely is always sad to see the little guys go, you often need the space in a small company to come up with some of the most brilliant ideas, and as a fellow developer, I know how intellectually nourishing small team environments are, I just hope that the majors that hold the financial security (or what’s left of it) choose to nourish and re-house these individuals so everyone can thrive (and more importantly, keep making great games for me to play).

I don’t work on games, and I’m just a casual observer of the games industry, albeit an enthusiastic one, so take everything above with a pinch of salt.  This has been one of the best years for games I can remember, I just hope this year end doesn’t wipe out lots of talented developers.

I’m not sure if the XBox live team have an official bug reporting mechanism, so I’ll put this post here in the interim and hopefully a search engine or two will pick up on it.

This has no bearing on the NXE that launched today, I’ve just coincidentally solved the problem.

Symptoms

XBox 360 fails to automatically connect to xbox live after power on.  If you then go and perform a network test, it’ll succeed.  Following this, live will connect fine until you power off the xbox for a time greater than a minute or two.

Cause

There appears to be a bug in the code that deals with manual network configuration of the xbox 360.  If you manually assign the console an IP address and then manually assign a DNS server but leave the DNS server discovery setting to automatic, the xbox fails to do a DNS lookup, either automatically or manually, on system startup.

Solution

If you manually assign an IP address and DNS server, ensure that the DNS lookup mode is also set to manual.

I have no idea why the console lets you configure a DNS server and then gives you the choice to use it or not, I’d have thought it’d be one or the other, and it’s a very easy mistake to make and quite tricky to diagnose.

This (well last) weeks chosen game purchase was Fable II (apologies to Dead Space and Far Cry 2, I’ll probably skip on the former for the time being and get to the latter over Christmas).  I’ve been quietly hopeful about how good Fable was going to be since the first pieces of concept art of the castle in Barrowstone made their way on to the internet (how shallow of me), and unlike the unfaltering critics of the world, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the game.

I didn’t really take to the first Fable.  It felt far too empty, framed in the context of having recently played through Planescape: Torment (late at the time) Fable managed to get far too much arcade in my RPG.  I didn’t take to it and I gave up pretty early on.  The world wasn’t big enough, it felt too linear, it felt very simple and really it wasn’t much of a roll playing game.  You didn’t play a role, you played an archetype and there really wasn’t too much of you in the character.

I then played World of Warcraft for almost three years.

Funny how that taints the way you look at games before and after, because this time when I came to play Fable II, I adored the lengths they went to to put the arcade back in to my tedious RPGs.  Mass Effect did it last year by putting a story that I was interested in back in there and Fable II apparently did it with mini-games.  I think that this time I’m enjoying Fable for what its meant to be.  It’s brought out the Warcraft inspired power gamer in me, but alarmingly, the grinds in the game somehow remain fun (I’m looking at you, tedious manual labour jobs), the world, while lighthearted enough, feels like it has some depth and the whole package looks beautiful.

My only problem with Fable II is that the morality system feels broken.  See, when I do action/adventure/RPG-with–choice type games, I always like to play the equivalent of a paladin first time around.  Not the literal paladin class, but the “for the greater good” brooding hero type.  You know the one, most games force you to play the roll, and it always feels like the ones that don’t hope you’re going to anyway.  I guess I feel like it’s my way of pandering to the game designers.  I have no desire to be a software tester, and if the game is geared towards that character type, I tend to feel quite fulfilled playing it.  The story (where applicable) tends to feel like it works well, and you get to travel through the hero’s journey and a good time is had by all.

So I started playing Fable II with the motivation of “being as good as naturally possible”.  I was nice to everyone, spent about 3 hours emoting around town pleasing the comedicly fickle folk and spent about an hour working for the blacksmith.  I started my (currently expanding) property empire and was having a great time.  Everybody loved me.  And I really mean everybody, the villagers started following me like zombies who seemingly had nothing better to do than follow me around begging for marriage / sex / my babies / a roll in the hey and my suspension of believe was totally broken.

It appears I’d been too good.  I couldn’t really do any wrong at all.  I took a (lesbian) wife, I bought us a modest house, yet the villagers still came.  I had extramarital sex with a village in my marital house with my wife in the room.  Still adores me?  Yep.  I went into the middle of town and was very nasty to lots and lots of people.  Everyone still wanted to make out?  Sure.

I backtracked to the starting village, married a man and had a kid.  Everyone was still very happy.  Bought the entire town up and they loved me even more.  I’ve stopped short of driving the town into financial ruin for the amusement value but I feel like I’ve almost ruined the game for myself by being too good.  It seems that while the game design actively encourages you to go one way or another (despite offering a sliding scale of corruption you’re allowed whilst still being good or evil) it really doesn’t know what to do with you when you get there, and really it made me realise that Fable II failed with me in exactly the same way Fable did.  I felt disconnected from the game and the character I was supposed to inhabit and no stupid (if well programmed) virtual dog (I’m a cat person) was going to keep me there.

I love Mass Effect for the sense of morality actually having impact, and I hope Biowares recent mumbling’s about trying to maintain that sense of moral responsibility in the upcoming Old Republic game comes to fruition.  I think Lionhead need to realise that good and evil isn’t just a smile/dance or fart/angry emote before they’ll get the solid emotional connection they seem to have been aiming for since Black and White.

That said, I’m really enjoying Fable II, I’ve hardly touched on the plot and spent four full evenings engrossed in its world, being a good and righteous happy capitalist.  My property empire will be the envy of all the land and I really think they’ve got the action / RPG balance spot on this time.

Now Playing: Ulver – Lyckantropen Themes – NOFVJ0224090

I’m a pretty big fan of sandbox games.  Always have been.

I was the kid that enjoyed flying around in Magic Carpet but couldn’t stand the combat (1994 me just wasn’t that interested in the quirks of early FPS aiming I guess), the kid that loved pretending that the over-world of Zelda games was infinite and I just hadn’t quite got round to checking out its extremities and I still remember my infatuation with the demo of Grand Theft Auto in 1997 (it was time limited and felt vastly different to the finished game, the change of pace changed the gameplay mechanic).  I love the sandbox, I adore Morrowind (and to a lesser degree, Oblivion), I loved killing time running about the levels of Mario 64, I loved the original Tomb Raider, Nights, anything that gives me impression that the world is infinite and worth exploring, it’s what draws me to MMOs.

With all that said, I’m not really sure about the upcoming PlayStation3 game Little Big Planet.  It’s an interesting predicament, because if anything it appear that the game is the epitome of sandbox gameplay.  A physics based platformer that…. Now here’s the thing.  I’m not really sure what Little Big Planet is really about.  I’ve read the hype (and oh god has there been hype), I’ve watched tons of videos from the (almost public) beta, but I really don’t understand what they’re trying to do with the game.  I understand that there’s a single player “story mode” that’s about 50 levels long (so we’re talking Super Mario World-esq), and I understand that the rest of the game is based around level creation and sharing, but honestly?  I just don’t get it.  I don’t think it’ll work.

As a long time PC gamer, the replayability of many of my favourite games (notably early online FPS games like Quake and Tribes, and RTS titles like the original Total Annihilation) was made by the community of hardcore devotees spending seemingly all of their free time developing mod’s and add-on’s, but I get the feeling that that kind of attitude to interactive game design has slipped by the wayside as the barrier to entry has risen.  We’ve moved from a point where the tools and the inclination for homebrew modding was there, to a world where the tools vanished, and as a result, the inclination to produce a polished add-on for a game seems to have died with them.  The PC homebrew crowd had and still has a little bit of that us-against-the-world mentality that made homebrew development so fun.

So what’re they doing with Little Big Planet?  They’re placing the tools and the caring sharing attitude right into the hands of the players.  Excellent!  I love that.  But do people really care anymore?  The 2008 console market is a vastly different place from the homebrew lands of mid-90s bedroom coding, so I’d imagine it’ll be more difficult to get gamers enthusiastic, however, creation is addictive so they’ll capture an audience that way.  Once we’re at this point however, I’m just not really sure that people will really want to play a bunch of largely mediocre 2d platform traversing levels.  I’m sure someone will do something amazing, I’ve seen some really interesting proof of concept stuff (the shadow of the colossus level that was doing the rounds a week or two ago springs to mind) however I’ve not really seen anything I’d describe as breathtaking.  Sure it’s a bit quirky and cool, but is it actually a great, compelling game?  Recent experiences with games that are based largely around user created content haven’t exactly been positive (I’m looking at you Second Life, barely a game…).

Maybe I’m missing the point.  I love 2d platform games for what they are, I’m just not sure that a game focused around disjointed downloadable experiences without any kind of special mechanic or cohesive body is really as compelling as it used to be.  I can’t see how LBP can stand up to games like Braid (as an obvious example), which actually offered something compelling and new to the genre.  Braid succeeded not because it was a platformer, but because it was clever and featured compelling narrative.  The big success stories of the last few generations of gaming (in my mind at least) have been the ones that introduce interesting narrative, the Mass Effects, the Fahrenheits / Indigo Prophecies (the first half of at least), The Longest Journeys.

I can see the joy in LBP revolving around its simplicity.  It’s a great looking game for sure, and maybe the distilled Micro Machines style fun of a console level creator are something that’s been missing from the casual market for long enough for it to be massive, but I just don’t really see the justification for the hype at the end of the day.

I hope people care enough to create something brilliant inside the sandbox Little Big Planet gives them, but I think I’ll sit on the fence until I see something really great happen before being drawn in by the hype of this one.

————–

As a side note, I’m working on a full sample implementation of Peer to peer networking in C# .NET 3.0+ that should be done in the next few days.

Information on how to correctly use the WCF PeerChannel in an Enterprise environment seems really lacklustre and we’ve been fighting our way to a really practical implementation at work.  I should have some sample code ready in a week or so with any luck.  We’re currently using similar code as the core of a distributed, push-based system in production, and whilst it’s had it’s quirks, they’re being ironed out in the sample.

Suffering so you don’t have to!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUN7mHUtzno

Well, it did actually happen, I’ll give them that.
Looks… like a teaser trailer.

Kotaku just posted an epic looking trailer for the forthcoming Zelda DS game. Looks like an epic mixture of old and new school Zelda, honestly can’t wait.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/clips/clip-phantom-hourgl…

I was one of the 0.0000% of the world that actually loved the Windwakers art directing so to be honest, extra points for keeping it around.

Oh and I noticed yesterday that apparently Burnout 5 is out on the first of next month, another game I’m really looking forward to despite knowing nothing about. Burnout 3 was fantastic, Burnout 4 was Burnout 3.5, apparently they’re opening up the world in the new one, removing menus and making it a little more persistent. Dangerous to mess with something that works so brilliantly, but I’m tempted to throw a preorder in there anyway. I can’t seem to find any preview information on the game though, which makes me somewhat wary.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/07/sonys-playstati…

Sony announces “Playstation Home”.

Oh sony oh sony oh sony. No more than a week after you try and threaten the largest gaming blog on the internet (http://kotaku.com/gaming/top/sony-blackballs-kotak…), followed up by a swift backpeddle following public outrage (http://kotaku.com/gaming/sony/sony-and-kotaku-make…), do you go and announce the very service you were trying to keep under wraps by via threat.

Not only did they confirm the rumour last week with some classic corporate mismanagement, but to take such a swift stance on something so imminent really does escape me.

So let me get this straight. An expensive, late, crippled games console, an unlimited number of pr and technical bundles, and yet you still desperately hope that previous market dominance will let you coast through to victory in a technology battle?

Begs belief.

Sega of America appear to be running a poll on their website (http://www.sega.com/home.php) relating to a revival of a classic Sega franchise.

Perhaps by coincidence this poll appears to be on the Wii virtual console page, however if Sega do this especially for me, I’ll send them a cookie. Nights really was a revolutionary game in its time and with any luck the virtual console could more than do it justice.

I’d go as far as preferring a virtual console release of nights over an actual sequel, just the ability to play nights without hauling out a Saturn.

There also happen to be a bunch of other options, Streets of Rage, Samba Di Amigo, Virtua Cop, but really, Nights is the answer. Just don’t do a Sonic The Hedgehog on us.

For the uninformed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiGHTS_into_Dreams…. might help persuade you.