So, Activision have announced that they are releasing an optional subscription for Modern Warfare 3 that will give additional benefits. Though there are no solid details yet of what the package contains, it has been stated that playing multiplayer will remain free, and this is just a perks package.

Online internet reaction, at least in the bits I read, has been suitably backlashy.

Thing is, I can easily see how this is a great idea. Offering optional stuff so your hardcore fans can pay even more if they want to? Sounds good. Call of Duty is one of those games where customers get wildly varying amounts of entertainment time for their money. Some (like me) just play the single player. Others play the multiplayer solidly for the whole year until the next one.

I’m not surprised at developers knee-jerking that this is a terrible idea, I am a little disappointed in the lack of imagination that is being shown about what this service could potentially include.

The trick as I see it will be in not fracturing the player base and unbalancing the game, while still making the up-sell tempting to the have-nots. Map packs (the only paid-for extra that CoD current offers) fracture the player base, as their system makes it impossible to play on maps you don’t own.

There are a lot of other things you could offer that would still allow people to play together (which is what you want, to keep the temptation of signing up wafting in the face of those who haven’t yet).

Stuff like: unique weapons, perks, and classes are all fairly straight-forward; being able to get an extra ten ranks before you hit the cap and have to prestige to continue progressing; allowing a player to select one weapon or perk to take with them when they prestige, rather than starting again entirely from scratch; putting a little “Elite” symbol next to people’s names in-game and on leaderboards; unique player skins.

If they started offering a video & screenshot capture and upload service then give the Elite subscribers more slots to upload to, so they can keep more of their best kills (like Bungie do with Halo).

As well as the usual “bonus XP” weekends for all players, have special weekends where all Elite players earn 50% extra XP.

Or how about adding bonus objectives for people who’ve signed up? The Elite get a random extra target to reach every game that rewards them with more XP and moving up a special leaderboard that tracks this stat. Then you put a prompt on screen to the “have nots” saying “ah, I’d you’d been signed up, you would have just completed your bonus objective for this match, and earned all this extra XP. If you sign up now you can still claim it – do ya wanna?”

It wouldn’t be hard to put together a package that, in addition to having map-packs for free for the duration of your subscription, would seem like a fair deal to CoD’s frequent players, while not ruining the game for everyone else.

Again, I have no insider knowledge of what Activision are planning. These are just some ideas that came to mind as to how I would go about providing worth to subscribers.

You may continue your “which is definitely best, Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3″ rants now…

UPDATE:
Well, some firmer details have come out now, though I’m not entirely sure they are meant to have. From what I’ve read the service sounds a lot like Bungie.net, with advanced stat-tracking, video uploading, and that sort of thing. It also apparently includes the ability to matchmake with other players through social networks, which sounds very interesting.

Certainly nothing that will fracture the player base, and definitely things I could see frequent Call of Duty players wanting. The only question now is the price point.

I would imagine this coming in at somewhere around £4 a month. It sounds like a tiny amount of money (because it is – the cost of a London pint, or even broken down to just a pound a week – who would miss that?) so it will be an easy sell.

And yet it adds up over the year to £48, or slightly over the high-street cost of buying a new game. So Activision would essentially be selling you two copies of Call of Duty a year. (Assuming a 1:1 take-up, which they obviously won’t get. Though even a couple of million signing up would reap high rewards, considering there would be no retail or manufacturing to share the pie with.)

I must admit, I never expected anyone to draw pictures based on my lo-fi two-tone characters, but it has happened. Artist Andrew Wilson has made a couple of pictures, heavily inspired by the game (and I really love his interpretation of my crappy graphics).

Go and have a look at his Tealy & Orangey pictures here, and then have a scan around the rest of his site.

I’ve written about Enslaved before, when I played the demo (I didn’t really like it). Still, it stuck in my head that it had got some decent reviews, so on to my Lovefilm list it went (yes, I am killing the video game industry, if you like to take that particular wrong viewpoint) along with all of the other “I want to check this out at some point” games.

Eventually its turn came around, and I’ve just finished playing through it in the last few days.

On the plus side – hey, I finished it, so it can’t be as bad as Kane & Lynch 2, for example (which I evidently couldn’t even be bothered to put some words down about how bad it was and how much it failed to get the core shooter experience right). But overall my feelings for it are roughly the same as before.

One thing I was wrong on was the environments. The opening level is definitely a low point, and there are some very pretty and grand locations to travel through.

I was disappointed with the platforming right through until the end. There is simply no exploration available there – levels have set handholds that are picked out with a shiny effect so you can’t miss them. Leap from one to the other and you’ll get to where you need to be. There are no dead ends, no multiple routes, no feeling that this is an actual place.

I think the feeling the game left me with on the whole is that they either didn’t have any play testing done by fresh eyes, or if they did then the resulting comments were ignored. (Or possibly they picked their play testers poorly, and just got a bunch of “yes, this is awesome” kids who were just happy to be playing a new game before their mates.)

Three examples of this really jumped out at me in just a small section of the second level (one of the first bits where mines are introduced, if you can bring it to mind).

Presented with a relatively open space, I took a left turn to jump to a platform the designers had decided I shouldn’t go to yet. I was immediately killed by the game’s “don’t go that way” system. (There is an in-game explanation for this, but it’s entirely stupid – the girl who has “enslaved” you will kill you if you leave her. Despite, by her own admission, her not being able to progress without your help. She is willing to kill me, even though it dooms her as well. And she’s meant to be a sympathetic character!)

Aside from the arbitrary insta-death being horrible in itself, I wasn’t given enough warning time to be able to turn around and stop going in the wrong direction, given my character’s momentum and controls.

A few minutes later I jumped across to where the spiteful kill-switch lady was stood. An onscreen prompt told me button controls to pick her up and throw her across a gap that was too large for her to jump. Except stood where I was, pressing the A button as instructed did nothing. I had to place myself on exactly the right spot to perform the throw, whereas the tutorial text had a wider activation range.

The final thing I noticed within this very short play section was after I had thrown the girl. Evidently the gap was too long, or my throw too weak, and she only just managed to reach the other side (this is scripted, by the way – she will always fail this). Scrambling to keep her hold and not fall into the mines below, she calls for my help.

I’m now in a timed tutorial section, having to learn new moves against the clock or I will be forced to reload at the last checkpint, back when we entered this area. First I have to jump back across the gap. No problem there. Next, the on-screen prompt tells me a button to mash to help the girl up. Except – oh dear, I appear to have to be properly positioned for this to work as well.

Why? The game camera frequently cuts to closeups for this stuff? It could very easily have a large area for the action’s trigger, and perform a very slight warp of my character’s position on the same frame as the camera cut.

Errors like these are present all the way through the game (another glaring one that stood out because of how frustrating it was to me was on the final level – my character happily ran straight off a ledge to his death, despite having enough self-preservation to never allow me to do this before).

When people talk about a polished game experience, they aren’t just on about how nice your animation is, how shiny the textures are, or if you have remembered to trigger particle effects every time a heavy foot falls on to a loose ground surface.

Consistency and flow of gameplay are very important. The player should never be left doing what is ostensibly the correct action, but failing because they are very slightly out of place. It will be confusing, and frustrating. If they are doing the wrong thing, that should be obvious. If they are in the wrong place, likewise. You shouldn’t be saying “now press this button” if they aren’t in a position where pressing that button will perform the action you’re saying it will.

It is incredibly rare for your game’s staff to be able to spot these things – most people can’t help but be lead by the knowledge gained on previous plays. Often you’ll see designers playing their own levels are pre-empting the game by getting in to place for triggers or events that haven’t happened yet. This is bad, you will never get good play test feedback from these people.

If you can find someone who is able to approach each new play through as a fresh experience, and provide you feedback based on what they have been taught on this test, then you have found an invaluable play tester. You should treasure them, and you should pay attention to their comments.

“Two posts in one day? Why ambassador, you are spoiling us!”

This was too satisfying not to share, frankly. If I knew who the 200,000th player was I’d shake them by the hand. Hell, I’d shake all 200,000 of you by the hand. Vigorously. But that might take a while. And my arm would start hurting pretty quickly.

Unless you all have very limp handshakes. (Though I suspect my players are made of sterner stuff, and have the type of handshake that could lead men in to battle, forge a mighty business empire, or command a striken ship back to port while all around it sobbed in panic.)

Anyway, if the unspeakable has somehow happened and as of yet you haven’t played Tealy & Orangey, you could always go and have a look now.

Or maybe you only played it when it was first released, or played it on one of those horrible websites that likes to take people’s Flash games and rehost them. If you did you will have missed out on the update that added Practice and Advanced modes, and ten new levels.

What’s that? You didn’t know about the update with the Practice and Advanced modes and the ten new levels!? Bloody hell, don’t let anybody hear you say that, you’ll look like an idiot. Just go and play them now and we’ll speak no more of it.

Thanks again, everyone!

(Oh, I did remember to add a link for you to go and play Tealy & Orangey, didn’t I?)

A friend yesterday wrote his thoughts on THQ’s Homefront, which reminded me that about a month ago I also played a very passable but not terribly spectacular first person shooter. I wonder if you can guess which one.

Sorry, I kind of spoiled it with the post title, eh? I’m still trying to get the hang of this.

And I’ve also kind of spoiled my views on the game as well. Overall Medal of Honor* gets pretty much all of the first person shooter essentials spot on. The controls are tight, and even the weakest guns feel powerful (partly due to the low number of hits needed for a kill, but also because of the excellent audio).

Not that it often lumbers you with poor weapons – except for a few story-related incidents you very much feel like you have the technological superiority and that no expense has been spared in your kit. Which is another point in its favour, and again sets it aside from the common shooter melee > pistol > sub-machine gun > rifle progression.

So the core is good, unfortunately the game constructed around that lets it down.

The NPCs you’re fighting alongside (and indeed your own characters, since it does the Call of Duty person-swappery trick) are pretty anonymous. Even the big hairy fellow in the Oakleys at the top of this article (and who was heavily featured during the game’s marketing push) rarely makes his presence felt. Sure he’s there fighting alongside you, but I would be surprised if you could tell me which of the gruff voices barking into your ear (or earpiece, or both, depending on your proximity – which is another lovely audio touch) is his.

The main issue Medal of Honor* suffers from is setting. A double-edged sword – the “realism” and topicality of fighting a war in a mountainous middle-eastern region was again used as a unique selling point, and no doubt helped the game stand out from more fantastical competitors in the minds of a certain section of the buying public. It is quite limiting in terms of level design variation though. Every mission is a collection of mountainsides and caves, with the occasional tiny shanty town thrown in for good measure.

That said, there is the occasional stand-out moment. One set-piece, at around the 2/3rds mark in the game, stands out in particular. Once again I thought it was going to copy what has become quite a tired Call of Duty trope, but instead it switched to a different direction. At the resolution of the section I was very tempted to shout “oorah!”, which would have been most embarrassing at work.

One particular user interface mistake that really stood out to me was the way that ammo resupplying is handled. Rather than scattering the remote locations with ammo pickups, or allowing the player to run out completely, your teammates are always able to restock you. Proximity to any of them brings up a “request ammo” prompt for the X button.

There are two bits of badness here. Firstly, they won’t give you ammo unless you are running very low, instead offering up the advice to “use what you’ve got”. This gives the impression of you, being one of the elite Tier One tough guys, being chastised for not actually knowing how to use your gun and count your ammo properly. The second issue is that reload is also on the X button, but requesting ammo takes priority. The result is that when you’re close to a team mate (if you’re both cowering behind the same crumbling bit of cover, for example) you cannot reload.

Why the “request ammo” prompt isn’t more context sensitive, I don’t know. I can only imagine that if a decision was deliberately made about this, it was for consistency (possibly players weren’t realising they could restock from their buddies if the prompt wasn’t always there). If that was the case it would be better solved by having team mates offer up ammo for the first time, and prompting that you can return to them in the future (“Hey man, you need more ammo? Here, take these. Let me know if you need more.”) You could even repeat audio cues to come and get resupplied whenever they run out completely.

(*Honour.)

But there is something bloody spectacular going on behind the scenes at Mainly About Games towers.

(That’s not the actual name of where I live, it’s just something that magazines and websites often call their offices. I don’t know why. Maybe to try and kid themselves into believing that their place of work is somehow exciting or romantic. And not somewhere that smells of stale men and desperation.)

Anyway, more news of this big shiny and exciting thing in a couple of weeks. Until then I will try and get around to putting my crushing disappointment at Enslaved: Odyssey to the West in to words. Or maybe finish up the drafted article I have titled “The Numerous and Grievous Game Design Crimes of de Blob 2″.

But I’m terribly busy, you see.

(Incidentally, have you ever done a Google image search for “something bloody spectacular”? There is an amazing psychedelic picture of a cat. Consider that my gift to you.)

I hear that PSN is being switched on again today. Exciting! To see if the rollout has hit the UK yet I go to the UK PlayStation website.

The top story seems to be exactly the information I was after. Great! I click to find out more.

Oh bums. I guess if you were being very generous you might say that at least it appears to answer my question.

Question: It’s been years since the last successful game based on Fox’s Alien IP. Is that because of a flaw inherent to the IP, or have the games just been low quality or badly marketed?

Answer: It’s an inherent flaw of the IP – or at least, the IP when applied as a first person shooter. There is one constant that players will expect from your game – the Giger alien. But these aliens in almost all* of their movie appearances are defined by characteristics that make them terrible first person shooter enemies.

They: are fast moving; are very difficult to pick out against their environment; keep a low profile by hugging tightly to ceilings, walls, or floors; spawn in large groups; have no distinguishing features to give any individual character; attack either by hiding and ambushing from above or behind, or rush straight towards their enemy; are able to kill a human target instantly in melee combat, which is their only attack.

None of this adds up to fun. Difficult-to-target melee rushers are bad FPS enemies (see Half-Life’s headcrabs, the teleporty blue things in Singularity, or … actually I don’t think Halo even has this archetype). No variation in enemy type or weaponry limits your options for implementing a variety of interesting combat situations, leading your game scenarios to feel stale more quickly.

There was one good “shooty” Alien film, and in that the people who were shooting mostly died (mostly). The hero sees very little combat at all.

Counter-question: Why the fuck do people think Alien would be a good FPS game IP?

* Only the first movie is different, by giving us an apparently slower creature, that relies upon the ambush attack rather than speed.

IndustryGamers has a fairly interesting interview with Silicon Knights chief Denis Dyack, where he foretells doom and gloom for the social gaming space. Of course, it’s not uncommon for industry bigwigs to badmouth anything and everything they’re not involved in, though in this particular case I think he has a point.

Though I don’t believe social is a balloon that’s going to pop, I do think there is a lot of hot air in it, and pretty soon it’s due to deflate at some point. A case of “Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor” – though it’s a much larger potential market than the “hardcore” game space, there is a lot of money being thrown at it and I see a lot of those investments not delivering anywhere near what’s expected.

All that aside, it is funny to read the developer of ten-years-in-development, poor selling, Too Human saying things like:

when games actually have to start showing pure revenue and real ‘here’s how much we made and here’s how much it cost’ …I think that industry is going to not last very long.

You probably already know why – essentially that there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there masquerading as social media experts because they have a huge number of followers on Twitter (I’m sure they definitely clean out all the ‘bots). But I thought this was a nice little encapsulation of how somewhere that can seem quality on the surface can possibly have troubles lurking for the unwary client.

During my evening web browsing I followed a link from some blog or other and ended up at the website of Contently Managed. It’s a nice site. Well laid out, quick to load, nice use of colour and images. But that’s what you’d expect from a company offering to school you in all aspects of social media and web PR. They certainly talk the talk.

Out of interest I clicked the “follow us on Twitter” link to see what they had been saying.

And … erm …

Well I’m sure there’s a reason for it. I just don’t know what it would be. And I don’t know why a company that sells itself as being able to help you learn effective Twitter use wouldn’t have fixed it yet.

They do suggest that you should never Tweet longer than 120 characters. Maybe they’ve taken that philosophy to its Zen conclusion.

I have no idea how much business they could be losing through this slip up.