The Sandbox

The fervor behind the emergence of the first-person shooter ("FPS") game genre, began by Wolfenstein 3D and cemented by its successor, Doom, was in part because of the implicit promise: soon, I will be living in a virtual world. Heck, I'm already pretty much there, looking out through the eyes of a person as they have complete freedom of movement in a 3D world. Soon, I'll be in the cyberspace of Snow Crash. W00T.

That was 1993. Yeah, fourteen years ago. What happened? Why has the most significant interaction innovation in the genre been "jumping"? Why are "cyber-cafes" depressingly non-virtual places, where my consciousness manifestly does not exist in a luminiferous ether of an endless datastream? What went wrong?

In my previous post, I was talking about why games aren't "progressing" the way players imagine they would, why games seem to make only modest progress, when there's a clearly obvious "destination" that everyone can see. Why aren't we running full-tilt to that virtual universe, where everyone can do anything?

The first reason is that, well, worlds are expensive: worlds have a lot of stuff, and people need to make that stuff. The next has to do with the technology available to create those worlds. Moore's Law is fine and all, because it means polygons get shinier and bumpier as computers get faster. But why aren't the programmers of these games using this tech to its fullest advantage in the game design? They get most things right, but somehow every coder at every company is somehow too dumb to realize what players have been expecting for years.

Here's one of several articles out about gaming on the Mac. With John Carmack at this year's WWDC keynote, showing off id Software's latest engine, id Tech 5, and Electronic Arts declaring a renewed love for Macs, people are singing hosannas about games coming to the Mac again.

Nope. Not going to happen.

So, I finished Bioshock a little while ago and ended up fairly disappointed. Although the environments continued to amaze and the Alice In Wonderland fullness of the art and model design remained sexy, in its way, the gameplay and narrative faltered badly in the last quarter of the game.

Fallout is 10 years old. In some ways it feels like just yesterday I was returning to Shady Sands, Dogmeat in tow, to slaughter all the people who had helped me get on my feet after my unfortunate expulsion from the Vault. In other ways, it feels like forever.

So much has changed in the world of gaming since Fallout -- not the least of which is that the already small market for turn-based role-playing games has all but disappeared.

Gametap.com has Daikatana available to play for free until December 31st, which I discovered reading this retrospective linked from CNN. (I hope having Daikatana FOR FREE isn't indicative of the quality of Gametap, which I haven't tried. If Daikatana, in 2007, is supposed to be a draw, there's another fiasco in the offing, here.) Released in 2000 with expectations and press that really didn't get equalled until perhaps Halo 3, it did nothing close to the business it was required to do. Which everyone who was part of the industry knew, at the time.

Game companies are filled with people who are good at math, and when a game is delayed for as long as Daikatana was, with as many people employed by Ion Storm, in the most expensive office space in Dallas,... it was an obvious disaster, awaiting realization. That fiasco assessment doesn't even begin to address what was already known about the game prior to release: its design was supposed to be revolutionary and amazing, but "Superfly Johnson"? Really? What possible interest could there be in a design where "Superfly Johnson" is not an ironic character?

A sad, cautionary lesson, Ion Storm.

You are, if you like, able to download a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever. iD has released Quakes 1, 2, 3, and 4, and Doom 3, in the time it has taken for this Duke Nukem sequel to generate something that might be a trailer with some game assets. The first version of Battlefield came along several years into the DNF vigil, and it has several sequels. And of course, no release year is given: just "Stay Tuned". For a game that will be a first-person shooter, which is a well-solved game genre, it's just mystifying what could possibly be at issue preventing release, aside from, "No one has actually been working on it, at all."

I'm sort of at a loss. I mean, picking on DNF as "vaporware" is the gaming industry's equivalent of jokes about airline food: there's absolutely nothing worth saying about it anymore. So why do I post? I'm just weirded out by the release of a trailer that does absolutely nothing to suggest that anything has changed about DNF. Nothing is imminent, that I can tell, nothing is clearer. It's just silly.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.