Rather than muddling my last post with jabber...

For the first time in a long time, I've been playing lots and lots of video games. Mass Effect 2(enjoyed), Battlefield : Bad Company 2(love the multiplayer - when it works), God of War 3(fun but not the magnum opus the gaming press led me to believe).

ME2 was my first Bioware game. Well the first that I actually played through. I'm not big into the fantasy stuff and I was not a fan of the first ME at all. But ME2 struck a chord with me. I didn't love it in the way that I loved FFVII or Chrono Trigger, but there was definitely a Deus Ex flavor to the game that I really enjoyed. I like the little branches that make my character me, but then again, I never really cared for the characters in the way that I did in FFVII or Chrono Trigger. That might be the nature of the beast though...

There was a really cool video piece on GameTrailers.com where Dave Jaffe, a game journalist(no idea what his name is) and one of the BioWare founders discuss the two ways of selling of story in game. It comes down to: are you playing someone else(Snake, Kratos, Master Chief) or are you playing you(Mass Effect, The Sims, etc.)? Is it a roller coaster or is it a whole theme park? A lot to think about in their comments.

As usual also hitting the theaters a lot.

Shutter Island is probably the darkest thing I have seen in years. It's "twist" ending manages to not undermine the rest of the film, something few twist endings ever seem to pull off for me. The soundtrack is brooding, dark and catastrophic...a perfect match for the film. I purchased it within minutes of leaving the theater. The imagery and performances in this movie are unmatched by anything else I have seen in 2010. I will be buying this day 1 on Blu-Ray.

Green Zone was a movie I was looking forward to and while I enjoyed the texture and artistry of the film, the story veers into opposing traffic and collides head on with nonsense. If you haven't seen the movie, it essentially takes a real event(the US invasion of Iraq), overlays a totally fictional conspiracy on top of it and then presents this conspiracy as though it were a real historical narrative.

This one bothered me.

I'll explain...

The idea of merging reality and fiction is at the heart of many great stories dating back to before Shakespeare. However, when entertainment is presented as truth...is this a responsible act??? Is it a film makers responsibility to tell stories that are truthful or are they just producing entertainment? I'm on the fence on this one, especially with this movie. I'll let you know if I come down one way or another...

Busy month

The BPRE beta is entering month 2. It's amazing how much we've learned and adjusted our initial product to suit life in the great outdoors. Among the various optimizations, UI adjustments, feature tweaks and art changes, there has been one sweeping change that we're still working through. When we did the mission outline and shoot back in July of 2009, it was based on a treatment of a BPRE graphic novel that was near finished draft. We did paper prototypes, designed and produced templates, hooked them up to the app and then let people play with them...

Fast forward to November and MW2. MW2 was an interesting turning point for me as a creator on several levels.

First, it was an amazing roller coaster ride that delivered a level of fidelity and polish, previously unseen in "war" game.

Second, despite great voice acting and graphics, it was one of the most disappointing narratives I've ever experienced. Not to mention, it seemed like every time you turn around in the game someone else was picking up the slack(getting punched out, having ceiling fall on me, someone else catching the bad guy I couldn't seem to catch, grabbing my hand as I missed a jump onto a rope ladder, etc.) or I was outright getting killed. That is, of course, when the developers weren't busy bringing characters back from the dead and undermining all the dramatic sacrifice from the CoDMW single player experience.

After playing MW2(and last year's MGS4), the last thing I wanted was yet another twist ending where the player is betrayed by command or some other war is bad preachy thing.

So I sat down and started over and produced a totally different story, same world and still based on real world operations, but with a whole new spin.

One month later, when the team read the draft, everyone got very excited. From the narrative side, we were suddenly in much darker territory with protagonists who were driving the story rather than being driven by it - aka a "Snow Crash" vs "Neuromancer" approach. The new narrative has more potential for diversity in terms of gameplay in a social network environment(ie it's not jsut shooting people - not that there's anythign wrong with that).

We started thinking and talking about BPRE in terms of a modern warfare RPG rather than as a modern warfare FPS/action game...

Fast forward two months and Echelon is knee deep in beta .9999999

Our target is far different than when we started, but we're going with it. The creative process is mercurial and it needs to be controlled but it should not be walled in either. Sometimes, you need to re-write and re-shoot. Sometimes you have to work with what you have. Sometimes, it's a little of both.

Armed with a better understanding of what we have in our hands, we're prepping to do a shoot for the next mass of content in about 4 weeks with the latest iteration of the comic series, driving the mission but not the details. It's an exciting time.

Black Powder | Red Earth beta

Released

Once you install send me an email or PM on facebook so I can activate your account. We're still improving functionality and optimizing load times, etc. If you do play, do me a favor and send us some feedback or post in the discussion boards.