Obligatory Year-End Post '09

I was considering repeating last year's roundup of five things awesome, five things lame and five things for the next year. But I also wanted to look back on the '09 predictions, and the culmination of all this would be too much overlap and too many words. Instead, I'm just going to look back at '09 and forward to '10, perhaps with some tangential thoughts drizzled in.

2009 Astern

Free-to-play didn't gain much prominence. Current F2P games remained so, and few new ones made much of a splash. Dungeons & Dragons Online went free-to-play, which may save the game from withering in WoW's shadow. Battlefield: Heroes is unimpressive at best. Runic is saying they're going to create a Torchlight-inspired F2P MMO, so there might still be a chance of F2P catching on in the west.

Wow, embracing the Wii definitely didn't happen. While there were some true gems (Little King's Story, House of the Dead: Overkill, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories), 3rd parties haven't seen much success on the Wii. There isn't a single simple reason: the confluence of a blizzard of shovelware, a poor understanding of the audience, WiiWare never really hitting stride, general marketing misfires. All have contributed to a lack of 3rd party success on the Wii. Can this be turned around in 2010? Your guess is as good as mine but there's still a real monetary opportunity here for the publisher that nails it.

While Brütal Legend didn't receive accolades from all sides, I found it fantastic. The world, the characters, the love and deep appreciation for the material more than outstrips the somewhat noisy and unfocused gameplay for me (much as Psychonauts did, really). It's one of my favourite games from last year, no question. I couldn't have predicted it, but I'm working on DeathSpank now. Still a little surreal, but god damn, I've learned a lot. That's almost a post by itself.

Mobile games haven't really integrated into the real world. Not surprising, but still a shame. I think there's a lot of potential here. Still shocked someone hasn't done this with an iPhone game yet.

Did '09 surpass the mark set by '08? I ... don't know. There weren't any moments of blazing glory, but there were some very, very competent games. Sequels doing what sequels should (Left 4 Dead 2, Assassin's Creed 2), bullseye executions on a licensed IP (Arkham Asylum), excellent ideas that didn't quite deliver (Scribblenauts). It was definitely an interesting year. Maybe having more weird but awesome moments is as good as a handful of brilliant games that everyone acknowledges.

2010 Off the Bow

Single A and the PC

The momentum had been building for a while, but 2009 is really when the "single A game" proved viable and distinct. And those successes have largely been on the PC. From Zeno Clash to Machinarium to Torchlight, there's clearly a space for highly polished but smaller scope games to deliver extremely compelling experiences. XBLA and PSN contribute as well, but the freedom the PC allows provides even more potential for single A games in 2010. And while some AAA games still soar on PC (e.g. Dragon Age) and others are PC games by necessity (MMOs, RTS), I think we'll see a growing divide between large AAA games that are primarily console-focused and single A games launched on PC.

Spring 2010 is the new Xmas 08

Ye gods, there's a mess of (hopefully) excellent games coming out in the spring of 2010. I fear we'll have flashbacks to when Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Fable 2, Little Big Planet, Mirror's Edge and so many more all came out in a 6 week span. It will murder our free time. But hopefully sales will still be strong and we'll get one step closer to laying the "must ship for the holidays" thing to rest forever.

Motion controls? Middling.

Microsoft will release Natal, Sony will release their ... wand-thingie and they will be okay. They won't revolutionize gameplay from here on out and unless Sony or MS really hits on a killer app, they'll remain somewhat niche. There will be a few interesting and clever games, a lot of clumsy, optional motion controls added to core games and that's about all. But if it means the current console generation stays on the field a few more years, that's a wholly commendable accomplishment even if nothing else comes of it.

DeathSpank - Game of the Century

Or at the very least, you'll be able to play it and laugh. It'll be the first game I've shipped (the previous title I was working on was canceled) and for me, that's tremendously exciting. Hopefully we'll hit our mark and you'll be able to appreciate our labours.

And that's it for 2010. It's going to be another exciting year and one I'm greatly looking forward to. But it's also quite murky, so it will be interesting seeing how things shake out. I'll see you all on the other side.

Obligatory Year-End Post part Drei: Five Things 2009 Could Hold

Five Hopes for 2009

To finish off the year, here are five things I'm looking forward to in 2009. These are less predictions and more things I'd like to see happen. As always, I'm curious about your thoughts about these and what you think 2009 may hold.



Free-to-Play Games Coming Onto the Stage

Gamasutra identified this as one of the 2008 trends, but then referenced mainly unreleased games. Those games should be released in 2009 though and I think some very interesting things are going to start happening with free-to-play games (full disclosure: I'm working on a free-to-play game, Sugar Rush, that's launching in 2009). Despite some truly abhorrent marketing that has almost entirely soured me to the game, I'm very curious as to how people take to EA's Battlefield Heroes. I've got a vested interest here for sure, but part of the reason why I accepted the position at Klei was because I feel there's a lot of potential in the free-to-play model. With even The Old Republic talking about microtransactions being a serious part of the game's monetization (I'd be shocked if they went fully free to play, but I would definitely commend them if they did), I'm very much looking forward to seeing how high quality free to play games will affect the industry in 2009.

Developers Embracing the Wii

To reference Gamasutra again, they identified the Wii's lackluster catalog as one of their biggest disappointments in 2008. To be the eternal optimist, I think 2009 will finally see some solid progress in offerings for the Wii. Given that a gajillion Wiis were sold in November and December, publishers big and small would be absolutely mad to think there isn't a lot of money being left on the table here. Those buying the consoles may not be "traditional" gamers, but it's quite possible to create titles that will please them and veterans gamers alike. Imagine something akin to Katamari Damacy; I was hoping de Blob might do this, but it looks like it hasn't received a ton of attention. Regardless, titles like Zack & Wiki and Boom Blox have proven that publishers other than Nintendo can make the Wii purr and I hope they'll do so in 2009.

Tim and Ron's Glorious Return

I didn't think I'd call out specific games, but with both Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert releasing new games in 2009 (Brütal Legend and Deathspank respectively), I couldn't resist. When they hit, I think we'll have cause for much revelry. If you watch this and tell me you're not excited, you're lying.

Mobile Games Integrating with the Real World

This one is also pretty indulgent and a little hopeful, but I did my Computer Science Masters thesis in Ubicomp, so it's a temptation too hard to resist. I'm hoping 2009 will have at least one mobile game title that interacts meaningfully with the real world. This is the core of Ubicomp, the idea that the when, where and why of a computing device's usage will serve as an invisible form of input (in parlance, it's "context awareness"). The potential applications for this are myriad, but one fertile area is creating games that incorporate real world actions meaningfully into their gameplay. There's been a lot of acedemic research about this, such as this project from Nokia, but the games themselves are usually not terribly fun and certainly don't have any longevity. Giving these ideas and tools to a proper game developer, however, could result in something really compelling. With the DSi including a camera and the iPhone starting to look like a proper gaming platform, it's possible a game that interacts with the real world via media creation and the device's data connection could manifest itself in 2009. Here's hoping.

Seeing '09 Surpass the Mark Set By '08

2008 raised the bar in a lot of ways. Little Big Planet and Spore made signifcant advances for user-generated content in games. FarCry 2 showed us new depths in immersion, while Fallout 3 showed the possibility of a massive explorable, nonlinear world. Mirror's Edge showed us the "S" in FPS isn't necessary. Braid demonstrated new possibilities in integrating meaning, emotion and gameplay. World of Goo demonstrated two dedicated guys (with a little help) can produce a game that's more aesthetically pleasing and clever than the fruits of a multi-million dollar budget. Left 4 Dead has completely recalibrated what's expected from a cooperative game. There are countless other examples as well. Success or not, 2008 was extremely ambitious in a lot of ways. I'm very excited to see if developers rise to meet, and hopefully exceed, what the titles of 2008 have shown is possible.

And that's it for 2008 folks! I'm very new to this blogging thing, having started barely a month ago. I appreciate everyone making me feel welcome and I'm looking forward to carrying on ceaslessly with you all in 2009. Have a good (non-liver-destroying) New Year's Eve everyone!

Obligatory Year-End Post part Deux: Five Awesome Things about 2008

Five Things About 2008 That Pleased Me Greatly

Games as a Service

Steam has been around seriously since Half-Life 2 launched on it in 2004, but it seems that this year Steam really came into its own. It took until 2008, but finally most publishers, even EA, have some of their games available on Steam. The only shocking thing about that is that it took so long. Sure, I realize they don't like giving a cut to Valve, but it can't be worse than a retailer's pound of flesh. And aside from Valve's cut, which I assume covers bandwidth, et al., it doesn't cost the publisher anything. And it actually gives a lot of control back to the developers/publishers, instead of leaving it at the mercy of big box stores and pawnshops disguised as game retailers.

It can also help solve one of our industry’s largest problems- out of print titles. By making a publisher's back-catalog available at any time, important "vintage" games are still accessible to those that may have missed them the first time, even if there isn't enough demand to warrant another run of the title for retail. It seems like most people have found one gem on Steam they meant to play when it was released but never got around to it. For me, that was Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. I picked it up for something like $10 during a Halloween sale in 2007. Made by post-Interplay Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky & Jason Anderson as Troika, it's wonderfully dark RPG that knows exactly what it wants to be.

Some people worry about putting all of the eggs in one service's basket, but Valve (or rather, the folks currently at its helm) are one of the few organizations that appear honest and decent enough to assuage these concerns for me. Steam isn't the only digital distribution service for games; Hothead's Greenhouse focuses on hand-picked indie titles and I've heard Stardock's service is pretty good as well. Regardless of which service it is, 2008 was the best year games-as-a-service has seen so far and I hope it's a harbinger of even better things to come.

Interface Improvements Abound

This one is especially indulgent, but I'm a big interface nerd, so I couldn't avoid it. If 2007 was a year of horrid interfaces (see Mass Effect), 2008 was the year of what I consider to be some significant advances. Aside from a few missteps, I loved a lot of this year's interfaces. Alone in the Dark and Dead Space integrated inventory completely in the game world, FarCry 2 keep you perpetually rooted in the tactile nature of the game and Mirror's Edge was without any kind of HUD at all. Hell, even Mass Effect's PC version had its awful interface fixed.

One of my gaming pet peeves are the interfaces that accomplish game tasks (e.g. inventory, not saving/loading or changing settings) but do so completely removed from the game world. Resident Evil may be the worst offender here, where you could be mere inches away from getting a chainsaw in the face, but if you push Z, you can take as long as you want to rearrange the herb garden in your pockets. Seeing this disappear more and more is fantastic.

The Summer of Downloadable Indie Awesomeness

In retrospect, it's somewhat amazing that World of Goo, Braid and Castle Crashers were all released in the same two month window. Braid and World of Goo were two of my favourite games this entire year, and Castle Crashers’ co-op glee has been exceeded only by Left 4 Dead. Summer may have seen the best of the downloadable indie games, but it certainly didn't have a monopoly. Hothead Games released two episodes of On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (made by Ron Gilbert and some other great folks here in Vancouver, and if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend doing so, even if you're not normally into Penny Arcade), Sam & Max: Season Two hit last November through April and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People may be the best game based on existing IP since Goldeneye or Lord of the Rings Online (which I embarassingly forgot to mention when talking about MMOs yesterday). This is just scratching the surface; there are lots of gems to be found in the downloadable indie space. More than anything else, working for an indie developer myself, it was incredibly enlivening to see other folks achieve this kind of success.

Three Peaks of the Fall Glut

While I maligned the Fall Glut yesterday, it was problem because there were simply so many excellent games released seemingly at once. From the downpour, there were three titles that I absolutely loved. Sequentially, that would be FarCry 2, Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge. Other folks have written more eloquently about them (especially this one) than I could hope to, so I won't wax too poetic. But to me, they represent three of 2008’s great bastions of success. One an ambitious and extremely dark treatise on the nature of conflict whose depths many seemed to have missed. Another, the brilliant, polished and almost unbelievably expansive modernization of a beloved franchise. The last, a much maligned attempt at taking a well known genre in a completely new direction. I'm not sure if I could pick a favourite, since these plus some of the indie games mentioned above all affected me in different ways. That being said, I haven't finished Michael's holiday podcast roundup of favourite games bonanza yet, but if nobody on there picked Mirror's Edge, it might well have been what I would have picked. If you all don't hear from me again, it's likely because the angry spectral hand of Mitch Krpata reached through the internet and strangled me.

(Aside: Left 4 Dead would have muscled its way in here too, except it seems almost everyone I'd like to play with opted for the 360 version, and I'm a PC guy at heart. If I could play it with non-strangers more, I would have found a space for it here somehow)

Excellence in Thoughtful Conversations about Games

Yup, I co-opted Michael's tagline and it's entirely deliberate. While thoughtful writing about games certainly precedes 2008, I think things really gained momentum this year. And often the best work wasn't coming from paid writers with professional editors, but from bloggers, both inside and outside the industry. Bloggers who care deeply and think critically about what games are, and more importantly, what games could be. The blogs I have linked over there on the right are just a sample of the excellent writing being done about games. I've wanted to work in games for a while, but I'd be lying if I said my move into the industry had nothing to do with the fantastic articles and post I've read over the last year. Thoughtful gamer writers, you all inspired me and helped me believe I do have some interesting and meaningful contributions to make. I thank you all genuinely and if there's one thing in the last year that's made me happiest about the medium we all love, it's talking about it with you all.

Obligatory Year-End Post: Five 2008 Disappointments

I was hoping to do some writing while I was visiting the family for Xmas, but as evidenced, that didn't happen. Sorry folks. In an attempt to make up for this, I'm doing my requisite End of the Year series of posts for the next three days. I'm not going to post a Top 10 lists or anything like that. Honestly, our industry has enough quantitification of things that needn't be quantified (no offense intended to those that did the top 10 thing, it's just not to my taste). Instead, today I'm going to discuss five things in 2008 that left me disappointed, since I'm a "bad news first" kind of guy. Tomorrow, five things in 2008 that pleased me greatly and on Tuesday I'll finish up with five things I'm looking forward to in 2009. As always, I'm interested in what other folks think, so feel free to put those thoughts down in the comments. Note: none of these will be in any kind of order, beyond the sequence I thought them up in. Without further ado ...

Five Things About 2008 That Were Lame and Disappointing

Nothing Even Came Close to Unseating WoW as the God-King (Lich King?) of MMOs

As a prelude, I have nothing against WoW or Blizzard. I had the WoW needle deep in my arm from launch day until just before The Burning Crusade came out. I slayed Nefarion countless times and led raids in Ahn'Qiraj. But WoW has been dominating the MMO space for a long time, and that worries me. Anytime someone's on top for that long, things get stagnant. Worse, other organizations try to replicate that success by creating largely the same thing, sometimes with a few enhancements (Age of Conan, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning), sometimes with just a new skin (Tabula Rasa). Of course, they tried to do this without the experience and playerbase of WoW and, not too surprisingly, didn't succeed. Though rare, even seemingly interesting MMOs (e.g. Pirates of the Burning Sea) can't seem to compete against the WoW juggernaut.

I feel there's a great deal of potential in the MMO space, but I worry that's not going to happen when the options are 1) WoW or 2) new project seeking to be WoW. A few niche MMOs like Eve and City of Heroes are doing well, and I think that's absolutely fantastic, but I'm not even sure there's much more room in the niche MMO area. So what will come next? Bioware's officially announced The Old Republic, which may be able to shake up the MMO space. It's hard to predict what may happen, but if TRO is a big success, it may allow a few other new MMOs to grow up in the space between it and WoW as well. Only time will tell.

DRM vs. Piracy Resulting in Countless Civilian Casualties

Gamasutra identified piracy as one of their biggest disappointments of 2008, but I think draconian DRM is as much of a problem as piracy is. Don't get me wrong, I think piracy is absolutely vile and people who "protest" DRM by stealing (see: Spore) are only giving more fuel to executive's arguments that even more DRM is needed. 2D Boy's statement that some ~90% of World of Goo installs are pirated might have disappointed me more than anything else this year (if you haven't played World of Goo yet, do so). Ultimately, the only people that really get hurt by the salvos between pirates and DRM advocates are the paying gamers that just want to play their games. Why draconian on-disc DRM schemes are even still being considered when services like Steam are available is beyond me. But if the whole Spore debacle spurred EA to put some of their games on Steam, I suppose some small amount of good might have come from that mess.

The Fall Glut

Lots of other people have complained about this as well, but I too was quite dismayed by that October-November stretch where something like 2/3 of the year's major games were released. Lots of excellent games were lost in the shuffle and, while I certainly didn't feel this way, some more experimental games that would have otherwise been received with some degree of interest were found lacking in the face of some supremely polished, more familiar offerings. Indie games released during the torrent were also hit pretty hard, and some folks I know personally lost jobs because of this. I really hope the industry can grow up and stop thinking holiday sales are the only target that matters.

Obsession with First Week Sales Numbers

I wish we'd stop evaluating a game's commercial success entirely on its first week sales. This is nothing new to 2008 of course, but the fall glut may have exacerbated things, making this even worse than in years past. I think this is something we inherited from the film industry using opening weekend sales as a bellwether. I've got pretty hardcore film geek friends and yet even they get caught up in guessing how much a movie is going to make on opening weekend. Honestly, does it matter? Given a bloated release period, opening weekend/first week might not be an accurate reflection of how well a title will ultimately do commercially. Crysis dealt with this when it was released, but it was able to maintain consistent sales and ended up doing pretty well. Mirror's Edge (a supposed commercial "failure") seems it might be doing the same. With analysts, executives and stockholders clamouring for numbers, I understand why. I just wish we could all take a slightly longer view before rendering a verdict.

A Seeming Fear of Innovation

A lot of this year's AAA titles seemed pretty binary- they were either new IP with some pretty radical design decisions or iterations on existing proven formulas that offered "bigger, better, faster." Now, I'm totally bias, vastly preferring lofty goals not quite realized to safe bets. That being said, I'm surprised at how hostile the general reactions were to the titles that tried to do something different. It seems like there was a lot of depth that was missed, in FarCry 2 and Mirror's Edge especially. Honestly, FarCry 2 might have made a more interesting statement about games, violence and conflict than any other game I've ever played. Some other bloggers noticed this, but the general reaction seemed to be "a good shooter, bad guys respawn too much." Are we even playing the same game? I'd make the worst reviewer in the world, but I find there's much more to praise in something that shoots for the stars and misses than turning the crank on smash hits from a year or two ago, ala Gears of War.

And that's the five things I least liked about 2008 (probably). Tomorrow we'll be more positive and I'll talk about five things about 2008 that were awesome, and they totally outweigh these.