KillZone 3

Before you go any further, I enjoyed KillZone 2 quite a bit. The single player campaign, while featuring some less than interesting characters, at least had a good pace and felt like a decent war game. I loved the War Zone multiplayer, it was right along the same lines as the multiplayer system we had in the Black Powder | Red Earth FPS at the time, and I clocked man-months of time climbing the ladder within the game.

Enter KillZone 3. The intro movie is way too long. The menus feel cluttered. The single player...

I suppose I should pause to mention there will be minor spoilers here, but no more than the first hour of the game because I was so unengaged I just put the SP down and went straight for multiplayer.

The single player starts with a Call of Duty style shoot house level from the perspective of the Helgan only to find, wait you were the protagonist from the last game all along! How shocking. And you meet the leader of the enemy army, say some stupid one liner and then we are whisked back 6 months earlier till the end of KZ2. There's a bunch of terrible dialog, boring cut scenes and then we're dropped into a city that looks nothing at all like the cities I was fighting in during the last game. Everything has this shiny green/red tint...is that supposed to be radioactivity? When I came across my third giant hopping Helghan robot I knew I was playing a totally different game in a totally different world.

It was at this moment that I just dropped out. Why even call it KillZone?

Multiplayer while good, seems less exciting to me. I've played 4 of the War Zone maps and 2 of the Operations maps. They are good but I'm just not hooked in the way I was with KZ2. Maybe because I liked the campaign I had more attachment to the franchise but...I keep finding myself wanting to play Medal of Honor's campaign again.

I'll keep at it. If someone wants to try the campaign in co-op I'd be willing to give it another go, but 2011 is already setting me up for disappointment. I've got my fingers crossed for Crysis 2.

HaleyStrategic.com

For those who are interested, Echelon has partnered with former Magpul Dynamics founder and Magpul Industries CEO Travis Haley in his new endeavor Haley Strategic Partners. Echelon will be doing the creative heavy lifting for the Companies training and marketing packages. We have worked with Travis since 2007, during his days with Simply Dynamic Tactical. It's good to be working with such an energetic and positive individual again.

We are looking to explore photography and film on a level that is more gritty and in the moment than some of the other "war" films/games on the market. More to come :)

On a totally unrelated note, the novel is coming together. Act 1 (should I think of novel's as acts?) is just about complete. I am debating if I want to add a B and C story line to the book or should I just focus on my protagonists. I like books written both ways and I'm not sure which way to go. My graphic novel has a B storyline - which was necessary to tell the story. With the novel, I can fill in the blanks without bringing a bunch of other characters into the spotlight...but that might change.

In the novel, I am writing something a bit more personal. Then again, what started as a first person account has switched gears to a third person narrative, so you never know where things will take you.

Non-fantasy RPGs

I was bummed when I heard Deus Ex Human Revolution was getting bumped to later 2011. So much so that I went to Steam and grabbed a copy of the original. My original copy was for OS9 and there was never an OSX port so this was pretty much my only option :\

I had very different memories of this game. I seemed to recall there being far more branches than there are. The game comes down to very basic choices.

Good/evil

Diplomat/warlord

This is reflected in the level design as well where making diplomatic choices can open backdoors and being violent can close them, though at the end of the day, it's the same missions. Mass Effect has this to some extent as well, though it is more neatly divided into social areas and combat areas, whereas Deus Ex does not separate them at all. You can basically start shooting and blowing up stuff whenever you want.

I'm not sure what I like better.

As I begin planning for a new Black Powder Red Earth campaign, probably to be called Black Powder Grey Skies, I am trying to figure out a smart way to build/track a "branching" narrative from a purely story perspective. I picked up a few of the Bioware GDC lectures on the subject and have gotten some good ideas. We'll see how it progresses.

As much as I enjoy making the Facebook game, I still have my eyes on a high speed FPS multiplayer game and a longer story experience set in the world of BPRE :)

Who is writing these press releases?

Short post, but this has been on my mind...Who is writing these press releases for military themed games that have such great lines as "Report for duty gamers", "New orders received", "Blow up online gaming!", "Incoming!", "Hollywood joins forces with (fill in developer/publisher name)". I mean, really...does anyone think this is cool? Am I missing something? I know these things are hard to write, we slaved over our first one and still I wasn't satisfied...and yet...

In other news, I've played a crap ton of games lately ranging from Demon's Souls to Vanquish to Medal of Honor to the Undead Nightmare expansion pack for Red Dead Redemption. It's been a while since I played so many different games so intensely (currently I'm plowing through Vanquish on Hard and trying to get the max time challenge awards for each level). Demon's Souls had a lot of interesting ideas connecting players/friends/enemies, but ultimately, I was not into the combat, which is a problem when the game is a hack and slash ^_^;

Did anyone else check out MoH or Vanquish? Thoughts?

OK, gotta run. We're trying to get version 1.1 out the door of the Black Powder | Red Earth facebook game ^_^

When I got into this business...

I wanted to make run and gun tactical FPS games for PCs and Macs. I had been playing these games for over 15 years, dating back to late night networked Doom and Marathon death matches all the way to today's team based military shooters like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and Killzone.

As of 2010, I've spent the better part of 10 years working, in some form or another, on Black Powder | Red Earth. Making contacts, doing interviews, studying battles, reading hundreds of books and even attending weapons manipulation and tactical courses (until 2004, I had never even shot a rifle). All this research, prep and brainstorming had the effect of breaking down my suspension of disbelief in so much else of what I was playing and watching in theaters. I liked what was there, but I wanted to go further.

In late 2006, myself, Altay and Phil came up with the idea of social gaming in my apartment in Hoboken during one of our monthly meetings on the subject. Taking FPS games and hooking them into a social network where you could build teams out of a known pool of friends and then manage a variety of customized weapon systems and kits for different roles/play styles.

From the gameplay side, we wanted to incorporate some of the key things we felt were lacking in games at the time - namely, shooting through soft cover and getting rid of bunny hoppers!

Inspired by Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the game would be a multiplayer/free-to-play experience and it would allow us to really create something different from the rest of the pack.

Over the next 2 years we made multiple demos using Epic's incredible Unreal 3 tool set and went to GDC to pitch our wares. While the ideas were well received, the concept of a computer only based free-to-play FPS, was not. Honestly, it was heartbreaking.

By this time, Facebook had become a viable platform for alternative free-to-play gaming experiences. We went back to the labs and started cooking.

About one year later, our product launched. We cut it loose and watched to see what people did. I had a lot of ideas and expectations, some of which were right and others which proved to be way off the mark. We tuned and then put some advertising dollars behind it. When we hit our next user benchmark, we turned off the ads and watched what people were doing. What did they enjoy? Where were they spending the most time? How could we streamline the flow to the elements they used the most?

As November rolls in, we are prepping to launch version 2 of the game. Highly optimized to meet player desires and hopefully exceed it, we're learning a whole lot about how to make money in the free-to-play space. The graphic novel, like all things, is taking longer than expected to hit our quality marks, but what we have is solid and still engaging, even 6 months after I closed the book on issue 1 (and 2 for that matter).

We are so far from where we started it's hard to even remember the days when we first landed in Astoria, with our crew. Looking forward to 2011, there's a lot of options. I'm not sure which way we will go, but I'm sure it will be an interesting ride :)

Hell of a year...

Satoshi Kon. Blue skies...

More Reading Lists

Since people have asked, I figured I would take a few minutes to reference the material I used to design the world of BPRE.

The inception for what would become BPRE happened in a hotel bar in Philadelphia, PA in 2002. It was there that I met a man who would become a good friend until his death in May 2010. It was at this meeting that I first heard about DynCorp, a company that, among other things, provided special operations contractors to the US Government to assist in operations throughout Afghanistan.

We discussed what the environment was like that he worked in and some of the challenges they faced. This conversation would eventually inspire everything that BPRE would become over the next 8 years.

For me, whenever I am creating any fiction, I always start with a world. If people are a product of their environment, it stands to reason you need to design an environment before you can understand the people that would live there. The first titles that had a huge impact on the world the player would be walked through were:

Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner

Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism

Blade Runner stands as “the” dystopian future city upon which all others are judged (though I like Otomo’s rendering of Neo-Tokyo in Akira a bit more). Looking at the thoughtfulness and care layered by Ridley Scott and his production team and applying that to trends in current urban sprawl gave birth to our concept of the city of New Basra. Part Basra, part Dubai - New Basra is a city being torn apart by oppositional and sometimes overlapping interests, where people are swept along by events of rather than driving them.

A place rife with conflicts is perfect for the kind of game we wanted to meet, now to figure out who was who and what were their motivations.

Being as the setting of the world was the Middle East, with an overwhelmingly Moslem population, I needed to expand my narrow understanding of Islam and it's history. A book I found very lucid and helpful was:

The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

The book gave me a great overview and taught me a whole lot I never really understood about Islam and it’s branches. From here, I started a deep dive into the entities I had identified as the main players in the story, specifically the Saudis, the various branches within the Shia Iraqi populace and the Iranians.

The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency

Iran's Military Forces and Warfighting Capabilities: The Threat in the Northern Gulf (Praeger Security International)

The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection

Inside The Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia

The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower

Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition

After reading all of these books and conducting dozens of interviews, it became clear to me, I did not have a deep enough understanding of how the Middle East and Central Asia, as we know them, even came to be. I found, what seems to be considered, the two authoratative works on the subject and read them.

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Kodansha Globe)

These books are exhaustive. I normally read fiction/non-fiction at about 800 pages a week. These books took me almost a month to read each, and I was taking notes the entire time! If you want an understanding of how we got to where we are today, these books are a must, but YMMV :)

Throughout the process I had also been reading any books I could get my hands on about special mission units fighting insurgents, terrorists, nacro-cartels, revolutionaries, etc. The stand outs that I found to be the most helpful when designing our specific game were:

Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team

Warfare by Other Means: South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s

Task Force Black

WAR DOG: Fighting Other People's Wars -The Modern Mercenary in Combat

There were tons of others detailing brutal and painful struggles, such as Sean Naylor’s “Not a Good Day to Die” but the material in that, and other great books, did not ultimately have much of an impact on this specific project.

OK, that’s a long list of stuff to check out if you are interested. Hope you find this informative.