The Tribes series is a line of first-person, multiplayer-centric action games, originally developed by Dynamix, which focus on team and class based combat in open landscapes. The first game, Starsiege: Tribes (1998), offered a unique experience in an era of tightly enclosed, corridor-based shooters, and capitalised on the early, explosive growth of online action games to become very successful. The follow up, Tribes 2 (2001), suffered a difficult birth, with a flurry of bugs, patches and patch-retractions. This lead to strongly negative word of mouth and publicity, which crippled the game’s fortunes, and those of Dynamix, which closed months after the game’s release.
The series was widely assumed to be finished at this point. However, in 2004, Irrational Games released Tribes: Vengeance, updating the multiplayer game, introducing a singleplayer campaign, and announcing that “Tribes [was] back with a vengeance.” Unfortunately, the return was short-lived. Despite good reviews, sales were disappointing and fewer than 6 months after release, the game’s publisher announced it was ceasing support for the title. As such, assessing the game’s multiplayer component is somewhat difficult (at any given time, there are barely a few dozen players spread thinly across a similar number of servers), and so these notes focus mainly on the singleplayer component. These notes assess Tribes: Vengeance’s game design, followed by its narrative. They then strive to determine which factors caused the game’s commercial demise.
Many a Half-Life fan has tried to discern the true nature of the G-Man’s mysterious role in the game’s universe. It has often struck me that perhaps that universe is the wrong place to be looking. On the train journeys that bracket the games and that serve as a metaphorical transition between the Half-Life world and the real world, Gordon has one major companion - the G-Man.
Who else would want to make the journey from real world into the Half-Life world, other than the players? Valve’s game designers have a penchant for watching their players, as expressed in their extensive use of playtesting (documented in Half-Life 2: Episode One’s commentary) and statistics gathering. I’d wager that they would love to come along for the ride.
The G-Man’s role to date, then, is this: He is the personification of Valve within the Half-Life world.
He’s the nod and the wink that says “we both know this isn’t real, but let’s pretend it is anyway”. He’s the guy checking up on players, ensuring they don’t get stuck and smoothing the road ahead. He’s making sure they see everything he wants them to see and nothing he doesn’t. He’s the cartoon character on the front of the train, laying the track out just in time for the train to speed onto it. The G-Man and Valve’s designers are both in the business of giving an illusion of choice where there is none. Both are in the shadows, manipulating their puppet into willingly doing their bidding,
But Valve have announced their intent to give the G-Man a real role in the story over the course of their coming trio of episodes. The G-Man is physically forced off the stage at the start of Episode One, even. Much like Dr. Breen in the closing minutes of Half-Life 2, Valve’s designers find themselves in need of a new host body.
Step forward please, Alyx Vance.
One of the more curious aspects of the city-based game, which has blossomed in this console generation, is the dichotomy between those games which strive to emulate a real city and those which do not.
The genre heavyweights, the Grand Theft Auto games, boldly embrace cities which, whilst clearly inspired by real cities, are very much their own creation. By contrast, many of its competitors, such as the True Crime series, Driv3r and The Getaway, choose to set themselves in ‘real’ cities, pursuing accuracy in both name and geographical layout.
This realness is a powerful marketing draw. It is an effective differentiator. Handled correctly, it can easily be made to imply a superiority in quality, derived both from the impressive numbers it generates (”25 square miles! Recreated from thousands of photos! Hundreds of developer man-hours!” etc), and the notion that accuracy is quality.
Assessed strictly from a design perspective, does the suggestion that real is better stand up? What benefits do these ‘virtual real cities’ and their real layouts bring? Are there disadvantages? There are two ways of looking at these questions, because there are two ways of looking at environments: as spaces and as places.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is out, and garnering critical acclaim and great sales.
At the beginning of the week, Bethesda (the game’s developer) announced a series of paid downloadable add-ons to the game, the first of which is some armour for the game’s virtual horses. This turned out to be quite the controversy - one place I saw the announcement clocked up over 400 comments.
Though I’m not normally one to comment on the business side of games, the uncharted territory that Bethesda has waded into seems particularly fertile and worth trying to map out. Will their discoveries usher in a utopia of more game content for all and more money for developers? Or a dystopia of unfinished games and paid patches?
In my previous post, I mentioned that I have been toying with some ideas for new directions in which to take my writing. This is the first product of those thoughts: I have decided to create a diary of the project I am building (which I’m currently calling just ‘Resistance’), as a series of posts here on The Ant Nest. I’m already a fair way into things, but I think I have enough archeological evidence to piece things together from the beginning, so that’s where I’ll start. This post and any future posts in this diary can be found collectively via this link.
Where to begin then? The initial starting point was easy for me to pin down. “Choose a medium you enjoy working with” and all that: I’m a big fan of the first-person perspective because of the immediacy and sense of direct engagement it gives a player. Knowing that I wanted to build a first-person experience, from a practical perspective, the Source engine was then the most natural choice for me. Valve have built a great set of tools that I was already pretty familiar with from building maps on the HL1 engine and a solid community has been nurtured around Valve’s products, which is sure to help out if I get stuck. Additionally, I don’t have the resources to start wildly creating huge quantities of new game assets, so whatever I make has to fall fairly close to what I can achieve with the existing Half-Life 2 assets and code.
So far, so simple, so boring: I’m making an FPS ‘mission’. But Quake 4 isn’t the same as Half-Life 1, which isn’t the same as Metroid Prime: there’s more decisions to be made before I have my basics laid down.
In Brief
» If it hadn’t gone that way already, I think this is the point at which a piece of good design (simplify the whole “my electronics device is acting funny” dance) becomes a mistake immortalised in textbooks and design courses everywhere. Microsoft sure do have a thing for iconic failure messages.
» “[The blood spray] orientates itself perpendicular to the character you’re hitting, and deliberately moves outside the silhouette. So it sprays away from the character even if you shoot from the front. This is distance based. It doesn’t care too much when you’re up close to a character and it’s big on screen, but when you shoot from a distance it sprays to the side.”
‘This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details’, Wil Shipley recently said. When it comes to Team Fortress 2, the details are so damn fascinating and instructive. Oh, what I’d give for the source code to the Critical Hit system.
» One problem with machines reading natural language is that they don’t cope very well with metaphor. Case in point: I get a steady stream of search engine traffic from people looking for information about ant nests. Seeing these visitors on my referrers list causes me a degree of guilt at clicks wasted and searches frustrated. But as fortune would have it, one of my favourite sites recently put up a couple of articles about ants and ant nests, allowing me to redirect these folk there and assuage my conscience.
Do check out Tracking Ants and Nest-casting on BLDGBLOG - they’re both great reads. If you’re here for both ants and games/simulations, I recommend to you the fabulous but flawed SimAnt, which I’ll maybe write about in more detail one day.
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