I’d love to get off Starcraft’s ass for a day, but the World Cyber Games kinda disowned her.

Official Games ｜WCG 2010

PC

* Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne (Blizzard, RTS)
* Counter-Strike (Valve, FPS)
* TrackMania Nations Forever (Ubisoft, Racing)
* Carom 3D (NeoAct, Sports)

Xbox 360

* Guitar Hero 5 (Activision, Music)
* Tekken 6 (Namco Bandai Games, Fighting)
* Forza Motorsport 3 (Microsoft Game Studios, Racing)

WCG 2010 Promotional Game Title:

PC

* Lost Saga (IO Entertainment, Action)

One of two possible scenarios, maybe a combination:

- Screamed it for years: Warcraft III is international and Starcraft is not.  When I call it the “Korean Gaming Machine”, I don’t kid. South Korean dominance of Starcraft is best compared to American dominance of basketball leading into the early nineties.  And where the World Cyber games hosts the most important Warcraft III tournament of the year, the biggest intrigue on the Starcraft side was seeing how the Korean representatives would tank games in order to sweep the medal round.

- Starcraft II is also absent.  The powers that be could be waiting to see if the sequel is competition-ready.  Of course, Blizzard could also have thrown money at the Games to keep KeSPA’s meal ticket off the most visible gaming tournament in the Western Hemisphere.  Would that surprise anyone?  The tournament is paid and bought by Samsung.  Have you looked at their lineup?  Carom3D is a billards game that makes two straight hours of Pac-Man look like Daigo’s parry fetish.  The tournament also touts “Why is this here?” titles as “Promotional Games”.  Also known as “Samsung wants you to buy their crap.”

Either way, this is far from the end of this battle.

Credit goes to Starshaped for the link.

Despite warnings to Blizzard employees such an act would be punishable by death (or a Bobby Kotick conference call), I got access to the Starcraft II beta.  And since I was “hired” to address the game’s issues, allow me to continue my burial of New Super Battle.net Steam.  I’ve already explained that the matchmaking system needs to prove me wrong before I embrace it.  Time to focus on chat.

In the quest to protect children from the pedophiles and liberals that inhabit the internet, Blizzard gridlocked their communication system.  It’s pretty clear why: World of Warcraft is a pay-to-play MMO and the audience expects pay-to-play support, a game where you can report people for swearing.  Thus, this audience expects Blizzard to deal with Starcraft’s most dangerous criminals.  And rather than slash budget to enforce conduct on a free-to-play online service, they’ll just make it impossible to get your opinion around.

Why can’t I chat with all the people I don’t want to!?

The problem?  Blizzard’s official, possibly-stretching-the-truth story is that Starcraft II was beta-ready last year; an extra year to push the “Battle.net 2.0 is so awesome you wouldn’t want to pirate it!” spiel.  And you’ve reinvented the way chat does business.  Good luck selling this to long-time Battle.net users, the demographic most likely to jailbreak the game.

The two-name system is the culprit, which I thought was there to prevent name-squatting.  You select a visible first name a private last name, which players will have to know in order to add you to their friends list.  Hated friend codes for the Wii?  Here’s an upgrade: You can select the one you want!  You now have a system where you can’t see the full name of the dude who beat your brains out (sans the awkward process of adding them to your friends list), and a nightmare for competitive gaming where replays only identify players by their first name.  (Yeah IdrA, that wasn’t you.  We believe you.)  All of which makes no sense, since players can be identified through league rankings anyway.

And open chat channels?  Confirmed absent, presumably because they’re a conduit for spam and butthurt.  Yes, invite-only clan channels will be there later.  The problem is that as Starcraft and Warcraft III matured, open clan channels became the open chat channels, the GGLs and X17s became the get-togethers.  And Arranged Team and Custom Game invites fed off those channels.  All far less awkward than a feigned “What’s up?  Wanna 2s?” directed towards a random member of your league.

Not that any of this will matter to cross-ocean buddies if region-locking remains.  Currently a “feature” in World of Warcraft, there’s no word on whether Americans can stomp Europeans or Koreans if they want.  Think there’s no reason for concern?  Blizzard was pretty mum on LAN as well, and we saw how that turned out.

If it means disabling a safety net in the options menu, I’m fine with compromise.  But omitting these features to protect your consumer base isn’t going to solve software piracy.  Someone will find a way to implement them, even if it means doing it without your support.

This is going to be a legendary game.  I’d just like to be able to tell everyone that.  Through Battle.net 2.0.

Why do I love history?  People change.  Human nature does not.

Activision was founded in 1979 when Atari programmers split from Atari, a company whose then-monopoly on Atari 2600 development was used to marginalize employees and promote the brand.  In 2002, twenty-two employees broke from 2015 Inc. (rumored the end-result of disagreements with publisher Electronic Arts) to form Infinity Ward.  Five years later, now-mega-corporate publisher Activision rejected Harmonix’s request to follow Guitar Hero with a band-oriented rhythm game. It culminated in a takeover that placed development under Neversoft.  And under Activision’s orders, the company behind the sequel-scarred Tony Hawk series proceeded to saturate and destroy the rhythm game market.

And after the public receives two contractually-obligated map packs for Modern Warfare 2, you can lay the roses on Infinity Ward’s relationship with Activision.  Kaputt.  Done.

We may not have all the information behind the tense situation between Activision and Infinity Ward, but we do have a conclusion: Activision has announced that the series will now be in the hands of Sledgehammer Games, a studio founded last year by veterans from Electronic Arts. Specifically, Sledgehammer is the brainchild of Glen A. Schofield and Michael Condrey, the head honchos on Dead Space.

It’s as fascinating as it is surreal: A developer founded by those who severed ties with Electronic Arts’ corporate culture has been detached from their child by a corporate culture founded by people attempting to escape a corporate culture.

This course of clusterfucks is currently sketchy, featuring the understatement of the year in “creative differences“, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that’s probably foreshadowing a trip to Lawsuitville, and a physical response typically reserved for coming down on enemies of the state.  What we do know is that Call of Duty now falls on Treyarch and newly-founded Sledgehammer games, the latter slated to go action-adventure on the franchise in 2011 (presumably to fill Modern Warfare 3’s void).

In November, I said IWNet could be a turning point in game development history, a step in consolidating control over the product.  That assumed Infinity Ward’s talents would be leveraged against consumers looking to fight the power.  After Modern Warfare 2’s release, I stated Activision was prime to burn, a company totally behest to billion-dollar name power.  And even that assumed Infinity Ward would continue as the class of American game development, a company talented enough to stave off outside influence.

Almost fittingly, Activision-Blizzard released their annual fiscal report yesterday.  Three games accounted for sixty-eight percent of their 2009 revenues: The now-irrelevant Guitar Hero, the World of Warcraft whose user base has peaked, and the Call of Duty now separated from the developer responsible for the success.

So now, there’s only question left to ask: Does Blizzard have an opt-out on the ticking time bomb they’ve partnered with?  Bobby Kotick and Activision officially fail to recognize how video games work.  Guitar Hero III was the best selling game in the series because Neversoft was living on the moxy of Harmonix’s accomplishments.  Medal of Honor: Frontline blew up the sales charts because 2015 Inc. convinced people Medal of Honor was worth their time.  Chinese workshops molding established franchises do not win championships.  Talented development teams do.

UPDATE: As rumored, it’s about unpaid royalties.  Infinity Ward’s looking for their cash and the rights to the Modern Warfare property.  In other words, Kobe Bryant just got cut from the Lakers and is now dedicating the rest of his career to making sure that Los Angeles doesn’t win another title on his watch.

Blizzard Entertainment has an unusual issue: They are scared of their own success.

In 2002, the company crafted the most important netplay upgrade since Battle.net itself, a Warcraft III matchmaking system hailed for consistency and legitimacy.   It’s been downhill in the eight years since.  Today, Starcraft II is now in beta testing.  And so far, the only nice thing to say about this matchmaking system is that I can play Starcraft II with it.

Blizzard doesn’t get it.  Matchmaking isn’t about getting your cat into games against players of equal skill.  It’s about consumer confidence.  No one cares whether the Warcraft III matchmaking system works.  Nobody thinks it does.  And if people don’t believe in Starcraft II’s smorgasbord of algorithms and placement, they won’t convert their time and effort into shaping an accurate leaderboard.

The Reign of Chaos approach worked because its transparent methodology was easy to explain: Start at level one.  Play anyone within six levels of you.  Five wins against equal competition earned you a level.  And if you win fifty percent of your games, the system will nudge you towards level ten.  Simple enough to make win-loss records mean something, simple enough to let players create personal goals.

Yup.  Casual players complained about that system.  A system similar to the one now used by TetrisFriends, a stronghold for casual gaming.  So Blizzard pressed the reset button.  In 2004, the new Warcraft III matchmaking system was built on Expected Ladder Level, where the game would guess your eventual level.  The formula for ELL was never disclosed, so nobody knew the game-to-game reward for beating other players.  What players did know is that one Azeroth player (Jubae) cracked the top five with a near-below-.500 record, that players were tanking games to launch ladder rampages, and top players couldn’t find games at all.  So rather than take the time to play the as-many-as-300 games required to reveal their actual ladder level, people quit.  Lots of them.

We now have Starcraft II.  It combines a modified Elo system with a league format.  Weaker players pad out Novice, Copper, and Silver Leagues, while better players hog Gold, Platinum, and (supposedly-invite only) Pro Leagues.

The first problem? Players in each league don’t directly compete against each other.  It’s a pseudo-league that’s just a simple size.  Instead of explaining you’re in the 97th percentile of all players in one gametype, you’ll be ranked third in a one-hundred-man league.

The bigger problem?  Let me put it this way: Know how people claim a good college basketball team would beat a bad NBA team? Rating in each level of play are independent of the other leagues.  As of this writing, the top-ranked North American player is Canadian Warcraft III semi-pro KiWiKaKi, who holds a rating close to 1900.  Meanwhile, Oakhill of the Battle.net forums (thanks to placement that was no fault of his own) has dominated his Bronze League to a 2100 rating  Great! I totally look forward to Copper League players telling me to get on their level.

Solve for x.

If you are going to create a matchmaking system that doesn’t disclose its methodology, it needs to be effective out of the box.  Even X-Box Live’s Trueskill (link credit to Veryrandom), the work of calculus hell, matches you on a fifty-level ranking system that appears to work consistently.  And right now, I’m looking at a Starcraft II ladder where nobody can explain how record correlates to rating, a team ladder where the best players can’t advance the rankings because they’re “heavily favored” to win.  You know, the same things that happened to Warcraft III.

So yeah.  Blizzard originally trashed their best ladder system to create fair matchups for weaker players.  They’re now tweaking it to give casuals false satisfaction.

What’s that saying about fixing things that aren’t broken?

I’m only following Battlefield: Bad Company 2 because of the “Fuck Activision” subplot, where a shining knight is off to slay Kotick the Dragon.  I have a problem with this perception.

Ars Technica recently sat down with Anders Gyllenberg, the producer of Bad Company 2 for the personal computer.  He explained the netplay model behind their Call of Duty-killer:

The server issue is key here, as Modern Warfare 2’s closed match-making system rubbed many PC gamers the wrong way. Gyllenberg laid out the details. “All servers are dedicated, hosted by some of our partners. If you have a clan or if you are a bunch of friends who want a safe haven where you can meet up, our server partners offer the possibility of controlling your own server,” he told Ars. “Reserved slots is one of the features. As an admin you will also have the option of enabling several features such as friendly fire ratio, Minimap on/off, 3D spotting on/off, etc. You can also password-protect your server if you want to do some serious practice prior to an important game.” Almost all the options you have after renting a server will allow it to continue to be a ranked server, but password-protected servers will be unranked to cut down on cheating and padding stats.

So please, allow me to get this straight: Infinity Ward usurped the consumer’s control of online play in the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, the console-oriented approach to a series that has been annualized by Activision.  To retaliate, PC shooter fans are going to purchase Bad Company 2.  It is the sequel to a console-exclusive shooter.  It is the eighth core game in the eight-year history of the Battlefield series.  And most importantly, you must rent servers directly through the developer and their “partners”.

And people think I’m insane.

The first episode of The Tester was a Cerebus of crazy, a reality television show pining against its self-interests. This twisted attempt to merge Serious Business™ with multi-dozen-dollar production values is proof my math class lied.  One plus one actually equals fucking boring.

Don’t pin it on (picture credit to Joystiq) the contestants.  Minus Ciji (going by the name Star, playing the “I’m the best, believe it!” card), the contestants don’t get a modicum to express themselves beyond a one-layer gimmick.  Amped is a cheerleading coach.  Luge has a Brooklyn accent.  Doc is the lovable fatty.  Where World Cyber Games: Ultimate Gamer established the insanity to come, we know two things about The Tester’s crew: Affirmative action won the day, and two contestants will be eliminated in the next thirty minutes.

But one particular incident stuck out.

The basis for the first challenge pulls from the newspaper: “What’s the difference between these two pictures?”  In a “What skills do you need to be a game tester?” way, it actually makes a bit of sense.  The problem?  Every contestant tears apart the same police lineup.  The Tester tears out your heart by forcing you to watch all of it.  With the segment on life support, Doc brings a change of pace by cracking a joke, stating the picture of a dinner table is making him hungry.  Minutes later, the panelists eviscerate him for not taking the challenge seriously.  What an example to set on a reality show: Personality will not be tolerated here.

The only television I regularly watch is The Daily Show and The Soup.  Both of these shows mock what television is and what passes for it.  I can barely watch television judged to be the class of its genre.  What chance do you have of getting me to watch The Tester on its own merit?  So uh…yeah.  For all I care, this show can launch itself to the heights of reality television.  When it gets there, it can jump off and kill itself.  I have no interest in watching an infomercial that combines Double Dare with military bootcamp.

For whatever reason, I’ve had little luck finding people to agree with me on this.  It’s really unfathomable I need to explain the benefits of surprise attacks in a real-time strategy game.  But I’m going to lobby for this until my fingers are stubs or IdrA wins an important showmatch: Starcraft II needs a Hold Fire command for every unit on the battlefield.  The only reason to go without a Hold Fire command is that “The game is not balanced for Hold Fire”.  And if that’s the case, I have to wonder how Blizzard Entertainment used the last two decades to become game development rockstars.

Scary enough, Blizzard strategy games have earned a perception that they reward mouse speed and nothing else.  The entire post-announcement development cycle of Starcraft II has been a stab at changing this, transforming mechanical game abilities (fighting the twelve-unit selection cap and single-building selection) into various decision-making skills.  Hand-eye coordination will maintain its value, but it’s clear this game is supposed to be a cerebral cage fight.  So why deny gamers access to a significant micromanagement and strategy option that has been validated by Command and Conquer, Supreme Commander, and nearly every military conflict in the history of this damn planet?

Starcraft lacked a true Hold Fire command, and even proved dangerous there; clever use of the Hold Position command could turn a minefield of Lurkers into a crime scene.  Hell, Blizzard has already granted a dedicated Hold Fire button to any unit in Starcraft II that can cloak.  Presumably to, you know, allow players to set traps and conceal their position.

Mindrape.

The benefits for Siege Tanks are obvious enough, but it would extend to any ranged unit with a high damage rate or high mobility.  And when you’ve built your competitive map pool on “valley leading towards a ramp that leads into a base on higher terrain”, there’s no need to explain the benefits of making things a little too quiet.

And hasn’t Blizzard made every implication they want this game built for a television audience?  An American audience infatuated with sports that can hinge on a single play?  When Youtube’s most popular competitive gaming videos are limited to that lucky knife kill in Modern Warfare 2, dare to say how much publicity you can reap from “the ten seconds that turned the world’s largest Starcraft tournament”?  The part where some shmuck gets his pro gaming career defined by the day he got mindfucked?

There is absolutely no reason to go without a Hold Fire command when Starcraft II’s development and Blizzard’s ambitions indicate the game would benefit from it.  Hold Fire embraces the perception of mind-over-micromanagement, and the gameplay mechanic would be a benefit to both of those skills.

Jim Sterling of Destructoid is awesome.  He’s mainstream gaming journalism’s harbringer of British cynicism, a loose cannon who openly rejects “news that isn’t news” while finding room for strong opinion.  And I want to thank him for the indie game shitstorm that has spilled over for a larger audience to read about.  The first salvo?  Artgame developers need less art and more game.

What most of you are doing right now is easy. It’s easy as fuck to make some vague shapes and rambling poetry dialog and claim that it has meaning. Actually try making an artistic, important, introspective game, but try making it fun at the same time. Try and do more with your message than throwing some obscure ideas together and telling us to figure it out. You’re not being clever, you’re not being deep, and you sure as fuck aren’t being unique. You’re being like all the other indie games that act like indie games.

The second? Big-budget doesn’t mean “stale”, and indie doesn’t mean “creative”.

The most perfect example of this problem came from G4TV’s Sterling McGarvey, who I briefly mentioned in a more humorous post. His response to the whole debate was one that, I think, truly sums up my major issue with those who defend art games.

“I’ll take a ‘pretentious artsy-fartsy indie game’ over creatively bankrupt bullshit any day,” is what he said.

Now, McGarvey’s comment was but one of many that shared similar sentiments, but it was a perfect snapshot of the big fallacy among those who stand up for art games — this idea that art games cannot be creatively bankrupt themselves, and that if you are against the indie crowd, you are against originality. This also leads onto a further incorrect but all-too common assumption — the idea that because something is innovative, it is automatically good.

I’ve played video games for twenty-one years and concluded they are a strong candidate for social history.  Technological limitations aside, the black-and-white storytelling in eight-bit Nintendo games can tell you much about the black-and-white Cold War climate they were created in.  It’s difficult to deny gaming can be a form of expression.

But like Mr. Sterling, I recognize artgames have issues.  And I don’t like that any criticism of the movement means we “don’t get it” or that we are “generalizing”.  Pick any criticism out of his articles: He’s either “trolling for views” or “doesn’t understand what art games are supposed to be” (in the same way a gamer doesn’t get World of Warcraft because he only got one character to level eighty).

The “No Russian” scene in Modern Warfare 2 was deliberately designed to make us feel uncomfortable.  BioShock’s approach to libertarian philosophy was a conduit for provoking thought.  And even indie darling Braid used an ambiguous, “the story is whatever you think it was” approach.  These games were capable of making statements because they were fun to play.

And with the artgame movement, I see the nether reaches of the internet responding to large-budget games that use graphics and technical superiority as a guise to cover up poor gameplay.  How are they doing it?  By using art and technical gimmicks…as a guise to cover up poor gameplay.

It’s quite telling in a period of time where Japanese game development has gotten its ass kicked on any front that doesn’t include “Wii” or “Mario”, the Japanese indie scene has thrashed this side of the ocean.  For every Braid, there’s a Cave Story, Melty Blood, or Touhou that dares to be as professional and playable as its commercial counterparts. And while these games may not be artistic expressions, Japanese doujin developers have developed a greater foundation for making “art” when they feel the time is right.

So believe me: People aren’t rejecting games that want to express themselves.  They just don’t want to play bad video games.  And as difficult as it is for one or many amateurs to press the right buttons and make a game fun, you’re going to be judged against the game industry you aspire to change.

Shocked this went under the radar: Last month, the creators of Dance Dance Revolution released a game titled Walk It Out.  South side walkin’ absent, the game is a Frankenstein of children’s fitness and the kind of box art that ruins kid-parent relationships…

…and the gameplay lives up to the billing, complete with the legendary “Why you turn off the announcer first thing in any Konami rhythm game made after 2006″.  If you abhor Guitar Hero for its “go play a real guitar” factor, I can feel your rage for the game where you pretend to walk through neighborhoods.

You now know why fitness games marketed as fitness games aggravate me.  Dance Dance Revolution hit arcades eight years before Wii Fit was a blip on the “Nintendo revolution”, and there is no shortage of physical education programs and diet success stories that have proven DDR as a legitimate part of any exercise routine.  But back in 1998, flailing around on a dance pad looked stupid.  It still does, but Just Dance and Wii Fit have made strides to soften that stigma.  And during that time, Konami has not invested a single dollar in rejuvenating DDR, and hasn’t conceived a significant innovation since 2002’s freeze arrow.  (Yes, in the the rhythm game genre, “press and hold” is creativity defined.)

Think about it: Someone in the Konami board room decided the company could make more money off the Bemani song list by packing it into a pseudo-fitness game instead of its flagship rhythm game franchise.  The result is a game that features ten more songs than the Japanese edition of Dance Dance Revolution Extreme for the Playstation 2, undoubtedly the swan song for DDR’s adventures on gaming consoles.

Currently, the financial success of Walk It Out is in “wait and see” mode.  But in 2010, we shouldn’t have to be waiting to see whether this game can justify its existence.

Don’t give me the “developers and designers will go without food because a millionaire CEO greenlighted a bucket of fail” crap.  Between the pseudo-maturity and ad campaign, Dante’s Inferno needs to fail.

I lived through Mortal Kombat.  The outcry wasn’t just “blood and guts”, it was the context it was presented in.  The game was a candy bag.  All you knew is that your opponent needed to be separated from his limbs.  The nature of the arcade and the tech limitations of the time didn’t let you go deeper than that.  And why bother?  People wanted blood.  When the Super Nintendo version failed to deliver on that, the Genesis port outsold it four-to-one.

Fun.

The culture’s moved past Mortal Kombat, a.k.a. “video game violence without rationale”.  This torch was ceded to God of War, and even the protagonist behind that game’s laughable brutality has a motivation for it.  The reason for Dante’s Inferno: The Video Game?  “We have a poem and we need to make a game.  Hell is about death, so let’s have the character create lots of it.”

And we ended up with God of War down to the mannerisms, animations, graphics, camera angles, and gameplay devices.  And it ain’t good enough to justify it.

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