Was I expecting too much?

I just watched a game demo of Deus Ex Human Revolution on Gamespot and apparently they've spent the past 3 years remaking the gameplay from the first Metal Gear Solid game at higher resolution. Yes, it's first person versus third, but MGS Integral and MGS4 played almost the exact same way from what I could see.

I'm sure there will be "trans-human" perks and buffs that are not in MGS but, honestly, those are just more weapons/items. Will they effect how I can interact with that world? Sure, but it's just another gun at the end of the day. Maybe the story will carry it. A good cyberpunk thriller isn't exactly common so they may hit that on the head.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was more than this. It might be a totally amazing game but after all the hype, teasers and interviews, I really was thinking this would be more than MGS 1.5. OK, back to the pixel mines.

Keeping busy

Quick update.

Graphic novel is up to page 30 with pencils and looking good. Seeing how my written pages convert to finished pages, I need to go back and revise issues 2-4 though or this thing would be well over 300 pages.

The novel. Act 1 is together as a rough. Taking my second pass through to add more depth and do rewrites as needed. It's 6 chapters. About 30k words, give or take. I'm debating posting pieces to the blog. Anyone interested in my work in progress?

Board game/RTS. Well I have one map cranked out and I am working on another. The funny thing is this started as the baseline for an FPS game, but considering our current resources, an FPS is probably a few years away still :(

Legos are by far my favorite way to prototype general flow of a map though. So fast to work with and it keeps you on a grid :-D

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 :)