Coming Out of the Basement

A few days ago, Steam Client Beta released a major change.

In the future, the default Steam client will shift the color scheme.  Right now it’s a gray color, but it’s going to become a blue gradient in the future.  This is so this matches the Big Picture Mode more closely.

Also, eventually you’ll be able to hide games in your library that you don’t want to see anymore.  I’ve seen numerous complaints on the forums about people wanting to removing or hiding game titles that they’ll never play.  Believe it or not, there’s a number of users that write to Steam support asking to have games permanently deleted from their account–even if they won’t be refunded any money.

Right now, I have a game category named “Garbage” and I send all my games that I truly hate and will never play into there.

This is kind of news, but it’s more like my personal observation.  When Counter-Strike: Global Offensive first arrived, it was accepted rather slowly.  After the initial rush, many people went back to CS: Source and sometimes CS 1.6.  It was a weird time, and I thought that Valve’s gambit into CS:GO was going to be a huge bust, especially since Valve didn’t develop it but let Hidden Path Entertainment do it.

Perhaps it was because professional gamers were starting to adapt to CS:GO and people started to pay more attention since it was featured in tournaments.  But I think the big change was when they implemented weapon skins and rare item drops.  In effect, they took the best part of Team Fortress 2 (item customization) and removed the worst part out of it (items drastically alter gameplay).

CS:GO became a money train once they allowed Steam Workshop items to be implemented into the game.  Originally, Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment thought that military style skins would be best, like camouflage patterns.  But it turned out that vivid colors and wild designs became the most desired weapon skins.  I can relate to this.  Real world guns aren’t very flashy at all, but it does look cool to have a blazing red firearm in a video game.  Today there’s all kinds of styles and they even implemented decals (stickers) that you can apply to your guns.

Currently, CS:GO is undoubtedly the most popular version of Counter-Strike.  It’s getting so huge that CS:GO will be the next game that Valve wants to show off after Dota 2.  There’s going to be tournaments that will be shown on Twitch and maybe even ESPN.

Crytek is a German company but it does have one development branch in the United States located here in Austin.  In recent times, things have looked very bleak.  There were reports that many staff members weren’t paid for weeks and morale became severely low.  Many Austin employees were asked to relocate to Germany, and that’s effectively laying them off.

Recently, Crytek sold off the Homefront IP to Koch Media, meaning that it’s now effectively owned by Deep Silver.  Deep Silver is the publisher for the Dead Island, Saints Row, and Metro franchises.  Many people saw this as a sign that Crytek was in big trouble, because companies never sell off IPs to anyone unless they have something huge to gain from it.  Recently the CEO of Crytek denied this and said that due to recent money inflow, they didn’t have to sell the IP at all but it happened anyway.

Crytek is going to shift in priorities in a major way.  First, they are going to focus on free-to-play games.  This means that games like Timesplitters and Crysis may never get another sequel.  Far Cry may also be affected, but the interview that I read didn’t specify.  Crytek’s next PC game will be a port of Ryse: Son of Rome, and this is likely the last title that they’ll sell before switching to the free-to-play model.  It’s a strange title to be pushing to the PC since the game did not do well on the Xbox One.  Ryse was financed by Microsoft, but they aren’t financing Ryse 2 so the game franchise is currently a dead end.  Crytek says that Ryse is still a viable product, but somebody else will need to finance it to keep it going.

One indie game that is probably unnoticed is Richard & Alice.  It’s finally coming to Steam after almost a year.  This game has really simple graphics, but most people that have played it have stated that it’s actually a very touching and sad story about two people trying to survive the end of the world.  You can try the demo on the developer’s website if you’d like.  I am somewhat curious where the story will go, and I’ll buy it eventually.

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Steam is now Greenlighting games so fast that I wonder if they are now approving games faster than people can submit them.  Then again, most of the current indie games (the really bad ones imported from the saturated mobile market) are bypassing Greenlight completely by using a backdoor method.

The most recent list includes several games that have been waiting for almost two years, such as The Oil Blue.  Believe it or not, David Galindo–the developer that made The Oil Blue–later created Cook, Serve, Delicious!, a major indie hit.  Even more ironic, the developer had formally announced that he was going to remove The Oil Blue from Greenlight at the end of April because he figured it would never be approved and the game used outdated technology anyway.  Now that it’s been approved, it’s hard to say if this is a cynical or delightful turn of events.  David needs to port it to a new game engine and do a large number of improvements, effectively meaning that he must reprogram the game all over again.  But he’s going to do it!

I think the takeaway here is that indie developers need to keep faith and keep trying.  It’s got to be brutal to be an indie game maker, and I feel bad for the ones that are struggling.  However, I think that developers would benefit from showing their game to other indie developers for feedback and constructive criticism.  The Oil Blue may not be a bad game, but it’s very hard to tell what’s going on unless somebody is narrating the action.  One cardinal rule about video games is:  “Gamers won’t buy (or vote for) games if they can’t understand them.”

Two ancient MMOs have been resurrected on Greenlight: Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot.  They were almost immediately Greenlit, so I don’t know why they weren’t just approved flat-out in the first place.  More importantly, I’m still confused who really wants to play these games anymore other than nostalgia.  Both games are also going to have monthly subscription fees, and I suspect this is going to change several months down the road.

Finally, I saved the best for last.  The Old City is on Kickstarter and it may not get funded, but it got Greenlit and that makes me happy.  The Old City is a so-called “walking simulator” game.  I’m going to say this very clearly and without any sarcasm:  I can’t get enough of those games.  I want more Dear Esthers and Gone Homes.  I like them so much that I think that the tag “walking simulator” needs to change.  They need a sexy new name, like “explore porn.”  No, wait…  I’m going to call them “anti-platformers” because none of them have a jump button.

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I’m not exactly sure why, but there’s already some fear and negativity about Wolfenstein: The New Order despite that it hasn’t shipped yet and all reviewers are likely under an embargo.  With all that I’ve seen, my guess is that this game is not going to be all that bad.

Bethesda has been very careful with this game.  First of all, playable demos have been made available for some time to game critics and many have given favorable first looks, other than Total Biscuit.  Keep in mind that absolutely no game is ever so great that nobody will complain about it, and Half-Life 2 is a perfect example of that.  Also, they are now livestreaming play videos of the game, and by the time the game launches, the game will have a total of 90 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay available.

There’s also a list of features that I find positive about the new Wolfenstein:  I never saw any QTE prompts in any of the trailers or streamed video.  I.e., there’s no “Press X To Not Die.”  Second, your health doesn’t regenerate except to make your health an easy to read number.  You need to find health kits and armor for the rest.  Third, the game lets you decide if you want to go a stealth assassination or guns blazing play, and you can mix it up.  And finally, I like how you can pick up a mounted machine gun and carry it around, but in Wolfenstein you can put it back on the mount again later.  I think it may even reload all the ammo and turn it back into an infinite ammunition weapon again.

One last thing.  Some folks on the Internet are furious that the game isn’t going to have multiplayer.  I need to point out that many games have put out a terrible or flat-out idiotic multiplayer mode, because the game wasn’t really designed for it but the publisher insisted on it.  The best example of this is Spec Ops: The Line.  The game had a brilliant single player campaign, but the publisher wanted a PvP mode anyway.  It’s so odd because the campaign made war look really terrible and Captain Walker ended up a broken man.  But PvP is all about making war and killing very fun and exciting, and it completely contradicted the game’s message.

I almost broke my hand today trying to beat the train in the Dunwall City Trials DLC in Dishonored.  I’ve never pushed so hard on some buttons trying to run a mission in only 31 seconds, and my hands really are hurting from trying so hard.  Keep in mind that I’m actually 43 years old and it’s really hard to play modern games at this age.

Which leads me into my next point.  I really don’t understand why any video game would feature achievements/game modes where they feature Speed Runs or Challenge Missions.  Both are never popular and are really hated by the general gamer audience.  For developers that don’t understand why they are so hated, let me give a quick explanation.

First of all, Speed Runs are the absolute irony of video gaming:  Games get shorter all the time, but then somebody decided to make an entire game mode where you skip as much content as possible.  Let’s pretend that all that work into your game is really unimportant and finish the game as fast as possible.  It’s like paying money to go to a theme park and you time how fast you can run to the nearest exit.

Second, Challenge Missions are nothing but asking the player to Beat the Robot.  “I programmed a gaming robot to play this game at 99% efficiency.  But if you can play at 99.1% efficiency, then I’ll give you a five star rating and a ranking on this leaderboard.”  You know what other game type makes you play like a robot?  Racing games.  If you’re wondering why the racing genre has become nothing but a niche market, then there’s your answer.

You could say that I could ignore this content if I don’t like it, but that’s not my point.  It’s junk content that many people had to take time creating.  Somebody had to come up with the level design, play test it, debug it, etc.  All that time and effort could have gone into something else.  If anything, Challenge Mission DLC (which is in many triple-A games, not just Dishonored) only seems to back the argument that some DLC are nothing but borderline junk just to increase profit margins.

As an aside, Dishonored is a game made by Arkane Studios, a company located here in Austin.  I think Dishonored is a fantastic game, just not that DLC.  If the Steam statistics are even remotely accurate, then I’m not alone in this opinion.

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Indie games that I’m seriously keeping my eye on, and they should have a release sometime this year:

* Below:  This is made by Capy (a.k.a. Capybara Games) and it’s the same team that made Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery.  The latter was a really weird art game that begged to be called pretentious, and it was either loved or hated by fans/critics.  This game doesn’t appear to be as odd.  The most recent trailer clearly states a future Steam release.

* Miegakure:  After four years of being totally silent (and being denied from the Indie Game Fund), there’s a new demo video showing the game.  This game is impossible to describe because it’s about moving along the fourth dimension.  It’s so hard to understand that many people are going to buy this game just to get their mind blown.  I am making the brazen prediction that Marc ten Bosch wants to deliver it this game this year.  It’s got a guaranteed slot on Steam since it’s an IGF winner.

* Secrets of Raetikon:  This is in Steam Early Access already but I never realized that the game was so interesting.  It’s actually a physics puzzle game but it’s barely known by the public at all.  You are a bird and you spend most of the game flying.  It’s very pretty.  The only fear that I have is how hard is it to control your character.  It doesn’t look easy since you have to do moves in mid-air.

I do know about Hack & Slash, Citizens of Earth, Last Life, Dead Synchronicity, etc.  I’m withholding judgment on those games until I can get more details.