Feature

Six Game Design Crimes on Trial

Take a look at how gaming’s worst transgressions would fare in a court of law.

By: Marty Sliva
February 3, 2012

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the world of video games is rife with crime — and I’m not talking about virtual decapitations in Mortal Kombat, or the countless murders of the Grand Theft Auto series. The misdeeds in question are those committed on the design level; crimes where the player ends up being the victim. We’ve gathered an identity parade of recent games guilty of committing various degrees of injustice, and equated them to what we believe are their real-world crime equivalents.

No matter how popular DOTA gets, it can still be hard to find fellow players — even at the 1UP/IGN office, a fair amount of people don’t even know what it is. For the newbies, DOTA is a user-created scenario done in the Warcraft III World Editor. It actually stands for “Defense of the Ancients,” and is free to play for anyone who already owns Warcraft III and its expansion. There has historically been one important barrier to entry into its community though: difficulty. DOTA has always been complex, deep, and robust; and it maintains a steep learning curve.

The map (or mod, or game, or however you want to classify it) was passed along to different unpaid developers, and has been curated by the long-time anonymous developer “IceFrog” for the last seven years. I have been an active player since 2004, and was hooked with my first game. Playing DOTA with my friends regularly is easily the geekiest thing I’ve ever done. If someone walks in and you are playing Battlefield or Call of Duty, he or she can understand right away what’s going on in the game. But when a friend walks in on me playing DOTA, it’s not simple. They hear me shouting at my four friends on Ventrilo things like, “Where’s our courier and why didn’t anyone call missing on Pudge!? He just came bot with QoP and ganked the s— out of me!”

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Downloading the upcoming February 14 Mass Effect 3 demo will upgrade the subscriptions of Xbox Live Silver members to Gold so that all players can sample the game’s multiplayer before its release on March 6.

The temporary upgrade system that the demo takes advantage of indicates that Xbox Live as we know it is so outdated that it can’t cope with offering users a single demo. The current XBL Gold/Silver division needs to change. After five years of Microsoft’s biggest competitor offering multiplayer for free the console maker maintains what amounts to a $60 annual surcharge to play online. Online gaming is not new or novel — it gained popularity nearly 20 years ago. Even consoles began supporting the function in the Dreamcast era. Multiplayer gaming should come standard with any system in 2012.

You know a trend is getting out of hand when even the complaints about it start to grate on the nerves; that said, I’m going to take it easy on the zombie-game genre in this brief look at Sega’s upcoming addition to the Yakuza series, Dead Souls. It’s difficult to ignore the recent plague of zombie games, so there’s no point in stating the obvious with empty complaints. Instead, why don’t we attempt to figure out just what’s inspiring all of them?

Outside of the general public’s fascination with reanimated flesh, filling a game with undead foes serves as a promising prospect for developers; after all, who needs to program complex A.I. when you can give all of your game’s enemies the intelligence of a grunt from Doom? It also helps that zombie tropes are so well-known (and expected) that developers don’t need to exert much creativity. You’ve got some undead humans, maybe a few mutations sprinkled in here and there, and a cast of characters looking to get from point A to point B without getting devoured. Hell, it even gives your protagonists the chance to murder thousands and come out at the end with clean hands, unlike Uncharted’s Nathan Drake.

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While everyone on the internet is busy running Madden simulations to predict the Super Bowl we thought we’d take a different approach. In order to determine the winner between the Patriots and the Giants, we’re taking Skyrim‘s home-grown patriots, the Stormcloaks, and pitting them against the country’s giants.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has a lot of content. This much we know. Releasing next week isn’t the most perfect time as far as I’m concerned with the Vita’s launch on the horizon and both Twisted Metal and Resident Evil: Revelations competing for my time, but it’s also a much more comfortable spot than any point in the last quarter of 2011 would have been. One of its developers recently pondered if the amount of content crammed into the game was overdone, and I can’t help but think it just might be.

“We recently had a content completion play through about two months ago… so, QA guys, they’ve been playing the game for years, they know all there is to know about it, its ins and outs, etc… their goal is to play everything,” lead designer Ian Frazier told Strategy Informer. “Do every quest, every dungeon, everything possible, but as fast as possible. That means easy difficulty, skip all cut scenes and dialogue, sprint everywhere that’s sprintable, fast travel everywhere you can, don’t do any combat you don’t need to do… that all took around 200 hours, and that was a speed run.”

Not unlike the situation Nintendo was faced with in the months after the launch of the 3DS, there has been talk of doom and gloom regarding the Vita. Sales of the new handheld have not been particularly mind-blowing in Japan since launch, and Sony has not attempted to portray its launch as anything it is not. More importantly, it has not yet begun to panic — and nor should it.

After 325,000 units were sold in its opening week, Vita sales in Japan have declined week-over-week more often than not. 3DS, PlayStation 3, and even the PlayStation Portable have routinely outsold it, although this finally changed last week when the Vita sold almost 3,000 units more than the PSP. Still, that’s nothing to write home about, which is perhaps why Sony CFO Masaru Kato didn’t go as far as it seemed he was going to when describing Vita’s sales.

The TF2 team is also working on a secret project that isn’t a hat or a map, Valve reports. This leaves speculation open to new characters, a feature-length film, a live-action feature-length film, or a live-action feature-length film starring Brendan Gleeson, Jude Law and Emma Stone. These are the only options.

The Steam Workshop has a shiny new blog, and Valve says it plans to unveil another secret at the second annual Saxxy Awards. We’re pretty sure this secret will be the announcement of the TF2 movie’s sequel, starring Katherine Heigl as Brendan Gleeson and Brendan Fraser as everyone else.TF2 in 2012: ‘Meet the Pyro’ is coming, more secrets originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Most of that, however, was pushed by Konami’s social networking devision, which operates mobile/casual games in Japanese markets and posted revenues of $348 million, up from $127 million over the same period last year. The company’s “consumer games” segment fell year-over-year, from $698 million in fiscal 2011 to $465 million in fiscal 2012. Konami has also adjusted its predictions for the end fiscal 2012, anticipating overall revenue at $3.38 billion and net income at $298 million.Konami net income up 77 percent year-over-year originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The company’s operating profit rose 11.5 percent to $169.4 million and its net income ended at $65 million, up 175.2 percent from the previous period. Square Enix cited Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its online and social titles as the main factors behind its financial progress.Square Enix thanks games for 2011′s rise in revenue, profit originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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