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Dualshockers' Joel Taveras has put up a preview of Obsidian's delayed Alpha Protocol, detailing various things he saw at the Sega NYC Media Day. A lot of it is the same sort of thing that was being said by Obsidian and the reviewers before, but two paragraphs in particular stick out as something of a sea-change:
quote:
Right away, one of the things you immediately notice is how good this game looks.... For Alpha Protocol however everything is bright, lush, and rich in detail.
The game moves just as good as it looks. Like other many popular 3rd person shooters, AP incorporates a cover system as well as stealth mechanics.
Interesting, given that before the delay the few reviewers who looked at the game were unimpressed by the game's lacklustre graphics and fairly ordinary combat. It would be nice if that wasn't all Obsidian have been sharpening up of late.
Also included in the review is confirmation of more than the three released locations of Saudi Arabia, Rome, and Moscow, as well as a few other bits and pieces of new information that make it worth wading through the first few paragraphs of recap.
More news, hopefully, to come; so far, it sounds like Obsidian may finally have managed to iron out and polish a game thoroughly. Perhaps this time Sega will try advertising it, too...
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Yet another week and I am here again. Have begun corresponding with a girl in Russia, and it it something to do that enjoy, like this. So without further ado…
From kotorfanmedia we have some fun stuff and skewed stuff to see. We start with Eisu’ hilarious comic book Fortune told , Nadia’s look at love on the dark side with
Just Another Test, and Midnight Hawk delving into Sion’s mind with Becoming Broken.
But Best of the week went to an author that shows not only despair but outrageous humor in two works, Mara Nedolo’
Nightmares of Gizka and
Après Moi, Le Deluge
Well I’m strapped for cash, having spent just over a thousand dollars in the last two months that I had not planned on. Going to be doing nothing but laundry and grocery shopping. Signing off…
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Few details are available on Obsidian Entertainment's other announced project, but a new teaser-trailer for Fallout: New Vegas has been released, showing... well, not a lot, actually. What is (behind the pre-rendered eye-candy) in the trailer is the announcement of a release date in "Fall 2010".
The accompanying press-release also lists that the game will be available on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, before enthusing thus:
quote:
Fallout: New Vegas takes all the action, humor, and post-apocalyptic grime and grit of this legendary series, and raises the stakes.
Hopefully the stakes raised are in more than collar-grabbing animations.
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Landlords can be funny sometimes. This week they put in fire sirens in all of the apartments. That was on Monday, and they leave a not that they have to enter your apartment when they do. Not bothered because I work during the week. Then on Thursday there’s another note; they now have to check all the newly installed sirens, and they are going to do this between 1 and 3 PM. Again not a bother, but while I was standing waiting for a bus, I got a chance to hear what I would miss as a 30 unit complex they are refurbishing gets it’s test. Was I ever glad to be out of the house yesterday!
Everything this week came from Coruscant Entertainment Center, and let me tell you there was some really good work this time. I am waiting for a week where every one of the works gets picked as a pick of the week, but not yet people, not yet.
We start off with Prisoner24601 and Dinah Lance back again with the end of their saga, Balm Sonn4Jam3s starts a slash romance with A Jedi's Love: Chapter 1 Mayla begins with a eulogy in Fragments of Memories: Prologue JoySweeper contemplates life at the top in the Sith with Betrayed, and Lady of Arrakis starts off TSL with Wanderer's Redemption: Esoteric Pilgrim, Chapter 1.
But Best of the best goes to Obaona with this rendition of an Exile without the force still trying in Special.
Well it’s payday and I’m just hoping everyone I know will keep the pins in financially. Signing off…
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Chris Avellone continues his attempt to answer those questions that people frequently fire at him about game development. This second update looks at the amount of background material written for the average companion in party-based RPGs, using the document written for Kreia from KotOR II as an illustration.
Also, one thing I've found often can bog people down is they want to keep exploring the abstracts about a character, when I think sometimes the best thing to do is charge in, start swinging, and find a voice and attitude for the character. There's even times when I write a sample short story for how the player specifically encounters that character and see if that helps me to get rolling on themes and the spine of the character (I'm doing this on our current project, and it's a new approach).
Good stuff, I only wish there were more.
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Discussions and Debates here
The first of the reviews for BioWare's Mass Effect 2 are filtering through now that the review embargo is up. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they're positive about the thing; whether that actually means anything will undoubtedly be revealed when the white safety curtain goes up.
IGN says of both the Xbox 360 and PC editions:
Games like Mass Effect 2 don't come around often enough. Look at any aspect and you can be sure it's great. It's incredibly personal while still retaining a sense of epic sweeping scale. The combat and mission design are outstanding. The visuals, voice acting, soundtrack, and direction are miles ahead of the competition. Perhaps most impressively, Mass Effect 2 manages to fulfill [sic] its incredible ambition while only suffering from very few technical hiccups. The only real caveat I should mention is that some of the revelations and plot twists won't be quite as powerful if you haven't played Mass Effect 1, but that isn't any reason to skip this fantastic videogame.
It may be instructive to bear in mind that the fantastically named Mr. Brudvig also says of the first game's dialogue that:
Mass Effect allows the player to quickly choose an emotional response, which generally include an honorable paragon reaction and a snappy renegade remark. The result is that every little dialogue snippet is about as engaging as they come.
I must take issue with the rt. Hon. Mr. Brudvig for, for me, having essentially the same choices in every situation makes playing Mass Effect like being in a never-ending production of some awful play, where the scene doesn't change but only repeats itself with the actors in slightly different costumes. Being confronted fifteen times with the choice between shooting or saving a man doesn't become any less monotonous because the character in question happens to be wearing a hat in one scene and affecting an English accent in another.
NowGamer reviews the Xbox 360 version of the game:
Mass Effect 2 displays some inconsequential flaws during its third act, granted, but in all other ways what we have here is a piece of entertainment that penetrates the line between gaming and cinema like no other, while simultaneously representing the finest blend of shooting and role-playing we’ve seen this generation. A gorgeous experience and a staggering achievement.
By "penetrat[ing] the line between gaming and cinema" most reviewers seem to mean that it interrupts my playing of the game with a cutscene which changes the medium from gameplay to film, damaging the tentative unity between gameplay and story, cracking the fourth wall and increasing the extent to which story is viewed by the player as inconsequential to game. Why are games which are "cinematic" in this way deemed to be shining exemplars of what the medium can do? Cinematic sequences may well demonstrate how brilliant at making films a group of developers would be but it has no bearing on how good they are at making a game.
Can you even penetrate a line?
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Welcome back. A slow week trying to do some editing and writing. One scene will not come together in my head, and it’s bugging me. My daughter wants to go to Lulu.com and buy all of my works, and that makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
Over at kotorfanmedia this week we had an eclectic assortment. Everything from the fanciful The Lonely God from Bisted, the different look of a cowardly Revan from Old Wolf in
Of The Lies That I Have Lived Chapter 1 and the humorous crossover of Serenity and TSL from Secondrate Anything but Serene wins the race this week.
Well now how do I get 200 troops into an armed and prepared city without being noticed…
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| The nominations for the SWK.com "Mod of the Year" competition are now open. To learn more and nominate your favourite mods click here.
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Though Obsidian Entertainment's Aliens RPG was cancelled some time ago, a short clip of an alpha build has recently been leaked. The video, lasting for just under two minutes, doesn't demonstrate much in the way of the game's RPG mechanics but on display is the sort of combat gameplay we might have expected to play.
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Had an interesting week. Having just recovered from the flu, I return to work. A woman there had read and bought one of my books (Gryphonrider), and had borrowed book 2 to read right before I went on vacation. Came back and she gave me the borrowed copy back, but only so I could sign the copy she had bought while I was gone. Felt really good, people.
From kotorfanmedia we have the last battle aboard the Star Forge from Prisoner24601 and Dinah Lance with Firestorm WinterOnasi
Fills in the blanks with Backstory Faelyn has Revan teaching her apprentice in Understanding Weakness
Jedi Valius gives us new adventure in The Order of the True Sith, Chapter 1: Meetings and Revelations
And Delasaer Chval wins best of the week with a devastated Exile in
When You're Taught Through Feelings
Well, time to spend time on me! Signing off…
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Chris Avellone, lead developer of KotOR II and Planescape: Torment, will be updating his blog "when possible" with answers to questions about "narrative design and getting into the industry". This first post is on the subject of "Do you feel that video game writing, and video game story creation differ from other forms of creative writing? If so, how?" Which sounds rather like an exam question.
Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, once said that when it comes to video games, everything but the writing has got progressively better and until such time as video game developers pick up a book, this is unlikely to change. The scripts of most games remain somewhere in 1985 only without the whimsy of pixelated graphics and floppy disks. Then again, why write System Shock 2 when you can make the sensitive and thought-provoking 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand a game so mind-numbingly daft that I think it may be an exercise in post-modernism: where does the game start and the idiocy stop? (Those with sensitive ears may wish to decline the option to click on that link).
The via, vita, veritas himself doesn't have much to say on the matter of the state of video game storytelling but he does note that "In short, the game 'story' can end up being less important than the player's experience in the game, whether they are actual story events are not." I think, perhaps, it highlights a flaw in many people's attitudes towards games that MCA identifies story as being in competition with gameplay. The two should surely operate in tandem, story delivered through what I see on my screen whilst playing the game, not via a long stream of text in the "Galactic Codex" or an extended cut-scene. The visual symbolism of the real world flooding in torrents of water through the lofty ceilings of Rapture speaks with more gravitas than ever an experience point-providing scroll in Jade Empire did, though both have that shared purpose of "immersion" about which the critics seem to wax lyrical.
"I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room." How true Kenneth Clark's words seem in an industry of large budgets but limp and lifeless thoughts.
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