ugachaka :: Jacob was here

Download the new ViDoc from the Halo 3 crew when you get a chance. It’s worth the viewing.

‘Journey’s End’ is a collection of interviews with Halo insiders going through all the Halo games and the feel/emotion of the games from start to finish. Although it neglects going into a lot of detail about Halo 3–since it is still sort of pushing those final consumers to go pick it up–the ViDoc is a great book end for Halo fans who want a refresher or just want to watch a sort of “commentary reel” from the Halo team.

ViDocs are one of the great things that Halo 3 did throughout their production and marketing. Similar to a viral marketing plan, the ViDocs maintained the hype about the game all the way up until launch time and gave Halo 3 fans insight into how the game was coming along and new features. Rather than seeming like a commercial trying to get you to buy, the ViDocs made fans feel like stakeholders who really wanted Halo 3 to succeed.

Halo 3 Epsilon has been appearing on several profiles around Xbox Live. It appears to be a “fifth” or so build of Halo 3 and very close to the final product I am sure. Epsilon apparently gives the players who were lucky enough to be invited to it the chance to play around with more of the Forge game mode that allows greater control. I think you had to have Bungie or Microsoft paying your benefits to get in on this one, but one can hope they email out a code to it at some point through that lovely Xbox Flash mailing list. Can’t we?

Don’t steal my hope.

In an interview with a Bungie game designer and Bungie’s blog man himself, Frankie, Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett found out more about the Forge mode of play and what secretly might be going on inside the little workshop of Bungie.

Forge is compared to a “mission editor” like the Keys to the City mode in Crackdown but only “monitors” can make changes. It seems like it is going to need some demonstration or video before we all really understand how this mode will play.

The interviewees also mentioned that the game is in tweaking mode–almost ready to be in my sweaty hands–but that they have moved on to other projects. One is Peter Jackson’s Halo project, but the other is mysteriously unnamed by either of the two Bungie employees. Guess we will all have to wait.

Since Bungie tied in a lot of story from other elements in the Halo series [see TheHalography], what if Halo was all just one big promotion for another game which will be the most epic of them all? That would be cruel.

I have never been a huge PC gaming fan. I always tend to stick to my console first-person shooters, platformers and adventure games. One element of the PC gaming world has made its way to the consoles–demos.

Prior to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with their online content delivery, console players best chance of getting a preview of a title was to rent it.

With demos now available for free, I find myself not even spending money for titles that I don’t want to make a permanent part of my collection. Dead Rising, for instance, is not worth buying when you can get the demo for free and basically get your all of beating zombies.

After a few minutes of checking out a game, most of them still don’t compel me to buy them. This tendency of my own makes me wonder whether demos are helping or hurting the console market. While it could hook interest, the demo could also make you feel like you rented the game for a couple of days and feel no need to buy it.

The only demo I played and bought was Crackdown, but that was also due to the added hook of getting the Halo 3 Beta along with the retail version of the game.

With the demo, you get all the same experience, but you don’t get the achievement points. Could that be why Microsoft added gamer points and achievements to your Xbox Live tag? Gamer scores are somewhat of a bragging right, and demo moochers can’t get those points.

I just wonder how effective this business model will remain for gimmicky titles like Dead Rising and especially old school Xbox Live Arcade games where the demo can get it out your system.

If you have ever played Halo 2 on the Xbox Live network or especially the new Halo 3 Beta, you know about all the frustrations that go into playing videogames with a ton of people that you might never want to meet in your real life.

Out of gamer types, there are those people who are super aggressive and get mad at you when you don’t let them pick up their weapon of choice. There are the complaining type who either quit the game or talk about how much they hate the game when it starts. There are the explorer types who spend the whole game looking for glitches or trying new things and get mad at players who are actually playing a strategy to win. There are the expert players who jump around the entire game executing complete first-person shooter tactical flankings and destroying the competition while talking about how great they are at Halo. A small group of people on Xbox Live Halo are actually honest gamers with good sportsmanship who go in to play and have a good time.

This video posted on Joystiq today pretty much sums up all these frustrations and the typical “bad gamer” in the Halo 3 Beta. Warning: The language in this is pretty bad, so don’t watch this at work or if you don’t want to hear lots of bad things said by a plastic figurine.

Microsoft is currently promoting its new Games for Windows Live environment–basically Xbox Live for PC users–lately. The latest Weekly Update from GamesIndustry.biz explored whether the entire movement might just be part of the marketing for the newly released Vista.

The marketing manager for Valve, Doug Lombardi is quoted in the article almost directly calling out Microsoft for the move.

Moreover, he pulled no punches in his comments on the consequences of that; “if it’s going to use it to promote sales of Vista, that’s really not good for the industry, it’s good for Microsoft in the short term.”

I personally don’t care whether it is to promote Windows Vista or not, but it would be great if Halo 2 players could choose between an Xbox or PC platform and still play within the same community. Too bad if Microsoft is just doing it all to push Vista on us.

The concern, of course, is that if Microsoft acts as a fair-weather champion for the PC, only to quietly edge away when the deed is done and the gamers have all upgraded to Vista, that retreat will signal yet more headlines about the death of the PC as a gaming platform – and it’s in some measure this disquiet which makes PC developers and publishers cautious in their welcoming of the Games for Windows push.

Article originally published in the GameIndustry.biz Weekly Update from 3/15/07. Full text below…

—Full Text—

gamesindustry.biz
Daily Update
15/03/2007

The Games for Windows PR juggernaut rolled inexorably forward this week, with the announcement that Games for Windows Live – the rather wordy PC equivalent of Xbox Live – will appear in May, alongside Halo 2’s long-delayed debut on the platform. Microsoft’s loud declarations of its support for the PC as a gaming platform are approaching near-religious fervour, with each subsequent pronouncement more eager to prove the company’s vast confidence in the future of the market.

Of course, there’s a major catch. Microsoft’s belief in the future of the PC gaming market, and even in the future of the Windows gaming market, is narrowly defined. The company believes in the future of the gaming market for consumers who upgrade to Windows Vista, for games companies who support Windows Vista’s videogame-related features, and of course, only for people who have hardware capable of meeting Vista’s demands – not a problem for many hardcore gamers, of course, but enough to deny the company’s seal of approval to more casual players.

It’s a least partially on that basis that Valve’s marketing manager Doug Lombardi doesn’t trust Microsoft’s intentions. He told us last week at GDC, in no uncertain terms, that he thinks Microsoft’s newfound dedication to the PC is all just “part of the marketing push to help Vista.”

Moreover, he pulled no punches in his comments on the consequences of that; “if it’s going to use it to promote sales of Vista, that’s really not good for the industry, it’s good for Microsoft in the short term.”

Strong words, but let’s face it – for all Microsoft’s efforts to convince the world that it really, truly wants Windows to be the platform of choice for gaming, Lombardi is only saying what everyone else is thinking.

Microsoft is a conflicted company when it comes to games, and the threats to the dominance of the PC from the likes of Apple and Linux are minor and far-off compared to the uphill struggle the firm faces in the console market against the firmly entrenched Sony. If it comes down to it, any decision which calls for Microsoft to choose between the Xbox and Windows will always be made in favour of the Xbox – at least for the foreseeable future.

Vista represents the exception to that rule. Long-delayed and much-criticised, the new operating system is another aspect of the company’s business that needs support – and gaming has, as Lombardi accuses, been drafted in to supply that support.

At the core of this lies what many developers have told me is a little white lie; namely, the careful inference that DirectX 10, Microsoft’s new games technology platform, is so tightly integrated with Vista that it couldn’t easily be retrofitted to Windows XP. Why, exactly, a relatively simple speedbump in the shader technology of graphics cards – which is the primary feature added in DirectX 10 – couldn’t be implemented on XP has never been adequately explained.

It’s rather too convenient that a technology which somehow won’t work on the venerable and largely reliable Windows XP should emerge just as Vista pads out of its den, and it’s clear – forgive me for stating what will be patently obvious to almost everyone, I’m sure – that the whole DirectX 10 thing is just a handy way of forcing gamers to upgrade to Vista.

The situation looks even more nonsensical when you consider that one of the first games to be Vista-only will be Halo 2 – a title which, over two years ago, ran perfectly happy on an Xbox console sporting a 700MHz processor and a GeForce 3 equivalent card, hardware built when DirectX 10 wasn’t even a twinkle in Microsoft’s avaricious eye.

So yes, Lombardi is quite right in his suspicions. While it doesn’t take a man as knowledgable as he is about the PC market to point the finger of accusation at Microsoft’s motives, it is nonetheless fascinating to see the developer of some of the most successful games on the platform giving such short shrift to the firm which is, in effect, the platform holder. You can’t really imagine a Sony- or Nintendo-licensed developer making such an accusation about their platform holders’ motives.

However, the PC market is not the same as the console market – and Microsoft may be the closest thing it has to a platform holder, but the fact remains that it is not a platform holder in PC, and never will be.

Those who saw Microsoft’s decision to weigh in behind the platform as crucial – and those who stand to be most disappointed if the support wanes along with the need to shift copies of Vista – are those who still see the PC market as fragile and declining, a view supported by dropping retail sales in most territories.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. The PC market is robust, healthy and diverse – supporting a rich and varied ecosystem of companies on a wide range of revenue streams and value chains. It’s completely true that the boxed game market is in decline, and while that decline may be bumped by Microsoft’s involvement, it is merely a temporary reprieve from the deathbed.

The true PC market – the market which is not measured in figures from NPD, Chart-Track or GfK – is a new economy, a truly 21st century digital marketplace which has been built by companies like Valve and Blizzard, and by a shoal of small, ambitious firms who are realising more and more of the potential of the world’s most connected platform on a daily basis.

Doug Lombardi knows that, of course; Valve’s Steam distribution service is one of the businesses on the vanguard of this market. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft needs no introduction, and its revenues cause green-eyed jealousy in companies across the industry. Linden Labs’ Second Life has uniquely merged the concepts of Web 2.0 and 3D MMOs to create an extraordinary media sensation, and a rather successful business.

Casual game firms like PopCap are turning ten minute coffee breaks in offices around the world into the building blocks of corporate success. Tiny developers like Britain’s celebrated and award-winning Introversion team are building unique, exciting content to fill the demand which is being tapped at last by digital distribution services. The PC market teems with life – but not as we know it.

This is a market which has been built almost entirely without Microsoft’s intervention or assistance – and while the helping hand of the Redmond behemoth won’t be slapped away by any of the companies involved, they are also keenly aware that should that hand be withdrawn, they can continue to grow and prosper without it.

The concern, of course, is that if Microsoft acts as a fair-weather champion for the PC, only to quietly edge away when the deed is done and the gamers have all upgraded to Vista, that retreat will signal yet more headlines about the death of the PC as a gaming platform – and it’s in some measure this disquiet which makes PC developers and publishers cautious in their welcoming of the Games for Windows push.

The irony, of course, is that should those headlines ever appear, the writers who mourn the death of PC gaming will probably do so in between games of Bejeweled; or perhaps while waiting for rest bonus to stack up in World of Warcraft; or emailing a viral game advertising a new movie release to a friend; perhaps while waiting for a new indie game to download from Steam.

PC gaming, as usual, is a few years ahead of the console curve. Those who declare the PC gaming platform to be in ill health on the basis of the disappearance of the games from retail would do better to turn their logic on its head, and worry for the future of retail – because where the PC games disappear today, tomorrow the console titles will follow.

Engadget posts that a vulnerability in Xbox 360’s permissions may lead to homebrew on the console.

The Xbox console was one of the most hacked systems I ever heard about. Almost every single one of my friends hacked their Xbox in the early stages of Xbox Live (pre-Xbox Live Arcade).