City 16

Bioware recently released a character creation tool for their upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins. I’ve spent some time messing around with the various settings, knowing full well that crafting the character I want to use can often take me days before I start the game proper, and it’s set me thinking about Dragon Age and about character creation in general.

This is Dragon Age's Maximum Face character, achieved by moving all the sliders to max. Thanks to the PC Gamer UK guys for divulging that fun little distraction.

As promotional tools go releasing a character creator early is a stroke of genius. I’m amazed that all RPGs don’t do it. Not only does it give the player a glimpse into the technical, mechanical and narrative aspects of the game but manages to do so without ever showing a piece of gameplay footage. It’s also useful for the player, giving them time to weigh up the different options and aspects that they can pursue without having to deal with the moment of “fuck it this’ll do, I actually want to start the bloody game” (while at the same time, I’m sure the developers are hoping, forming an attachment to their character that will increase the chances of them actually buying it.) It feels weird to actually take some time to praise what is, in essence, a marketing move but, frankly, Bioware’s previous attempts to sell the game have been so cringe-worthy that I was almost put off the whole damn thing.

I get into trouble when I start messing with sliders. I was only able to rescue this character from an expression of permanent surprise after much fine tuning.

Above is the character that I was seriously considering using until my cycling of the menus in order to collect some pictures led to all her characteristics being reset. I’m somewhat on the fence about whether to go for a male or female character this time around. I generally play males in RPGs and never really considered the alternative until Mass Effect came along. Mass Effect’s male lead was such a typical Space Marine douchebag that I couldn’t bring myself to spend even a second with him (that Jennifer Hale did the voicework for the female Shepherd didn’t hurt any.) I probably had a lot greater attachment to my Shepherd than I do to many of my RPG characters partially because the fact that she was female made her a more compelling character without the story having to make any changes for that fact.

That said, my favourite character creation is my Baldur’s Gate half-elf Ranger, Lujan (+50 respect points if you can identify where the name comes from.) Or I should say my favourite character creation ‘was’. As I typed that sentence I realised that Lujan died when my old computer’s hard-drive corrupted. This makes me genuinely quite said, an odd response considering the least important, and least flexible, thing about Baldur’s Gate was what your character looked like. This is, of course, the main aspect of creating your character: the attachment you feel toward them is less about what they look like as it is about the actions you have them perform in game.

I’ve never played as a dwarf before and I must say that I’m seriously considering it. Of course I was instantly disappointed by Dragon Age’s lack of beard configuration options. In Keith, the dwarf above (specialisation: twatting things), I chose the optimum beard length to dispersment ratio and I’m still a little disappointed I can’t go further. What’s the point of taking on the role of a dwarf if your beard doesn’t make NPCs fall to their knees?

Beards aren’t the only thing about the character creator that get the short shrift. Elsewhere, and I’m going to keep comparing against the D&D based Baldur’s Gate because the developers have kept crowing about how DA is a spiritual successor to the series, there are much less options defining both race and class. From the sounds of it this is actually a good move, as the choice you make will have dramatic effects on the whole narrative, right from the story that kicks off your adventure. This is nothing but good news, especially as Bioware’s previous attempt to cultivate a meaningful backstory choice for your character, in Mass Effect, was used in only the most superficial way (to paraphrase, it basically manifested as follows: “so it was you that [survived the siege.]“) Another thing that’s missing is the choice of an alignment which I was all set to spend A Lot Of Words talking about until I realised I should probably save it for my next Let’s Improve Gaming thing.

The most interesting removal, from my perspective, you might spot in the second screenshot. Where’s the Charisma stat? I generally move through my RPGs entrancing the NPCs in the glare of my charasmatic avatar. I then rob them blind. The closest stat Dragon Age has to charisma is Cunning, which nevertheless implies something different. This could turn out to be an interesting move, one I’m quietly excited to discover. It would be a special kind of madness to deny the wordy resolution path from players but it could mean that the warmth people will show you is tied more to your in-game deeds. By the same token it could just transpire that Cunning is a cache-all re-skin of charisma designed to distance the game from its ‘spiritual predecessor’. Either way, I’m looking forward to finding out.

If you’ve spent any time with Dragon Age’s character creation tool then link to your chosen character in the comments and tell us a bit about why that character in particular appeals. It should be interesting to find out why we choose the lives we do…

Digital distribution for PC games has been around for a long time. From major publishers offering downloads of their games through portals like Steam and Direct2Drive through to small-time indies self-publishing from their own site, almost every modern release can now be purchased and played without leaving the house. In fact digital distribution has been around long enough for people to start experimenting with the format and the money-making opportunities it offers. This has ranged from the emergence of companies that exploit the legally questionable area of licence key distribution through to developers themselves offering new purchasing models and payment schemes.

The latest of these experimental models, more of a promotion in actuality, comes from World of Goo devs 2D Boy to celebrate the first birthday of WoG. For the last week, and up until the 25th October, they have allowed customers to pick their own price point for the game. They’ve also released sales figures and survey info from the sale.

Hooray for charts!

The results are fascinating. Perhaps unsurprisingly the largest percentage of people paid the lowest amount ($0.01). 2D Boy have stated that PayPal fees meant that they did not see anything for money given below 30 cents, meaning that between 29 and 40% of downloads would not have benefited the developer. Except that, in a sense, they did. To celebrate the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur developer Wadjet Eye Games made their game The Shivah free to download. Despite having seen the press coverage this generated I had completely forgotten about it by the time I’d got home from work. That was until Idle Thumbs started praising the game on their podcast the week after, at which point I bought a copy. Free publicity from a free release led to sales of a three year old game in at least one case, and undoubtedly more besides. On top of that it raises awareness of the publisher, encouraging people to check out what other games they have and will release.

The promotion saw a 40% increase in Steam sales despite their not being a Steam sale. This just in: People love Steam

World of Goo wasn’t being given away for free and, from the sounds of it, 2D Boy made a lot of money from the promotion. An in depth analysis of the figures can be found here. What I want to look at is the data given from the survey which asked why purchasers chose the price point they did. It’s worth mentioning that the survey figures are, inevitably, obfuscated because not everybody has answered. In fact only 3.4% of people who paid the lowest price point filled in the survey data. There are, however, a couple of trends that are worth looking at.

Firstly, not everyone who paid the lowest price point will have been a lost sale. It’s probably fair to say that the majority of people willing to pay full price for the game already have due to the fact it had been out for a year. Many of the surveys respondents claimed they paid 1 cent because they were getting a second copy for a different OS, or had lost their original download link. Others mentioned that they wanted to get an ‘extended demo’ of the game and promised they would donate money at a later date if they liked it.

The largest amount of respondents have said that they paid the amount they did because they liked the pricing model. This is where we start to be unable to draw accurate conclusions with the data available. If more developers used this model then, presumably, the number of people paying to support the model would drop as it would cease to be a novelty. A lot of people also wrote that while they didn’t have any interest in the game, or had never heard of it, they essentially donated some money because you’ve “gotta support the indies”. There is an incredible amount of good will out there for indie devs, perhaps suggesting that such a promotion would be less successful if it had come from a major publishing house. Then there’s the fact that this was a limited time promotion instead of a release date pricing model. As one respondent claimed:

It IS worth USD20, but since this is a “sale” I think I deserve a discount on the price.

Would a game that had always been sold in this way have received more money because people wouldn’t be applying their own discount to the amount they were prepared to pay or would the difference be marginal as the majority stuck with their impulse buy price? Would the developer be able to recoup the money the games creation cost without a year of sales at a fixed price? Unfortunately until more companies are prepared to experiment with their pricing models and then openly share the results we won’t know.

We are, however, left with a couple of discussion points:

• How much would you pay for a newly released game that let you name your price?
• Would that price change dependant on whether it was a small indie game or a multi-million AAA release?
• Would you always default to an ‘impulse buy’ price point or vary depending on how critically acclaimed / anticipated the game was?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

[What better way to celebrate a site launch than with a guest post? Well, with a beer, obviously. Since that's the way I have chosen to celebrate I'm clearly in no position to write anything coherent. Luckily Kayamana was on hand to provide me with that guest post after all... -Phil]

If there’s one thing that really annoys me it’s the mindless side of journalism, specifically journalists in the entertainment world who do not respect, or maybe even understand, the essential gap between journalism and advertising. I’ll cut to the chase: I’m referring to game journalists bent on turning every review into a competition to produce the most unnecessarily wild and irrationally extreme statement that can be contained in one phrase. Note: this does not mean the phrases say anything about the actual games in question. They rarely do.

Is it just me, or is anyone else out there sick to death of quotes like:

“So hardcore it’ll tear your face off.”

“The second level of the demo is when my entire face was blown off by maximum awesome.”

“This game will get you drunk and get you laid. Trust us.”

Er… seriously? Wii Game Party is going to get me drunk and laid? Whats with the assumption I wouldn’t get drunk and laid anyway? And “trust us”… Is that a genuine promise or just another sign we should never take anything you say about games even slightly seriously? And in that latter case, does that not undermine your whole purpose?

OK, let me just try to work this thing out. Your job is to review games: so that we, the consumers have a vague idea about what’s out there, how much of it is good, what’s worth our money, and the state of the market generally. Yet the reviewer seems more interested in trying to boost his ego by showing off how amazingly funny he failed to be. That’s not to say reviewers should not try to be funny, just that the fact you review games does NOT make you immune to effort, you know?

No doubt part of this frustration comes from being a consumer who has to scan for some intelligent genuine comment, but it’s also partly because I took a degree in it. I was just looking for some kind of 3D Animation degree, saw a game design course, went for it, and enjoyed every minute of it. Some of our work was genuinely challenging and utilised a lot of skills and yet when people asked what i did at uni, I’m almost embarrassed and usually resort to just saying, ‘Oh… 3D animation.’

Not because I’m embarrassed about the course. As I said, it was awesome, I met amazing people and, if I had to go back to uni, without a doubt I’d do it again. It’s because I know people instantly think of socially defective 15 year olds spewing brainless humour on the Internet from their stuffy bedrooms. That’s OK, because it does happen. But the childish journalism surrounding the industry, where ‘BEST EVER’ and ‘IT’S AWESOME!’ are slapped onto every other game cover, is really not helping the stigma the industry’s been laden with. I don’t think film or music students had that problem. Also, when you’ve spent a year or two on level design you start to appreciate just how much effort goes into these games and just how insulting it can be that some reviewers clearly haven’t bothered to take 5 minutes to actually check it out.

I’ve probably got this all wrong but from what I’ve said to people, it doesn’t seem like it is just me. Game reviews do not have to have this approach. There are plenty of interesting and intelligent things to say about games. In the case of my last paragraph, i was concerned that maybe games shouldn’t be taken seriously, but as a friend pointed out: ‘if my job is reviewing toasters, it doesn’t matter if toasters are important, i should actually review them instead of turning it into a showcase of comedy talents.’ I pretty much agree with this, only, in the case of some, i’d have put ‘talents’ in inverted commas.

[Kayamana can be found posting on her own electronic word house here]

It turns out that when you’ve not been able to play the games you wanted to write blog posts about because you’ve spent the week playing a different game, you should write a blog post about that instead. Logic! With that startling revelation comes a new featurette, Mega Bites: shorter posts about games that, while good, don’t need huge walls of text devoted to them.

Reviews of Katamari Forever*, the next game in the series that sets you in the role of the son of the King of All Cosmos and tasks you with using a magical ball to roll up items in order to create ‘stars’, seem to have focused on a couple of issues:

You see, for all the silliness, Katamari Damacy was at heart a didactic condemnation of the developed world’s rampant consumerism. Takahashi never wanted to make another Katamari game. Not only had his point been made elegantly by the first game, but also the core idea had been fully explored.

-Simon Parkin, Eurogamer

Rolling a katamari is as charming as ever, but you may have rolled most of these katamaris before.

-Gamespot

The first point is easy enough to address: Takahashi made a sequel thus fully opening the doors to the series expansion into a franchise. The second is a little more complex, but in my opinion, still somewhat unfair. Named Katamari Tribute in Japan, Forever is essentially an HD re-make of levels from the previous games. I may be starting to sound like the traditional ‘fanboy railing against the mean journalists’ here, but it seems unfair to criticise KF for re-hashing old levels when it’s entire purpose is a greatest hits of the series to date. You don’t criticise a band’s Best Of compilation for using previously recorded material.

As with previous games the final few levels reach a ridiculous scale.

That gripe aside, Katamari Forever breaks down like this: For newcomers to the series it is, pretty much, an essential purchase. Katamari remains a brilliant concept and, unsurprisingly, it’s as fun as ever here. Series veterans, however, will have to weigh up whether the game adds enough new twists to justify the asking price**.

There’s certainly a lot of content on offer. Each level can have up to four different modes in which it can be played. The Endless mode, which allows Katamari’s to be rolled independent of time constraints, is a feature so obvious it’s staggering this is its first inclusion. The soundtrack has also had some attention, consisting of some excellent remixes of previous songs in the series (and some that make you pine for the originals to be included). While not the most visually stunning game you’ll ever see, the graphics are charming and, as with everything on offer here, in keeping with previous games. Of special note is the filter applied the first time you play through a level in the King’s memory: at first everything is black and white, with colour returning to any object in the level that matches something you have already rolled. Not only is this a nice visual representation of the story but also a helpful gameplay mechanic highlighting potential routes that would be beneficial to your growing size.

On successive level playthroughs different graphical filters can be selected.

Some will argue that there still isn’t enough new content to make the game worthwhile, and that’s fair enough. For me, especially after the deluge of ultra-violent, ultra-murky (I’m looking at you Prototype) games I’ve played recently, the passive, peaceful atmosphere of Katamari Forever has been exactly the game I’ve wanted to indulge in over the last week.

*On browsing some of the review summaries from Metacritic I noticed one that read, “Katamari Forever is the penultimate game in the series thus far”. Hey, Metacritic: How about you don’t count the opinion of people who don’t know what penultimate means?

**Actually, don’t pay the asking price which is a staggering £45 RRP. It’s available, with a little digging online, for about 20 notes, a much more reasonable price.