Climbing - Just Another Hallway

There's a specific complaint people around the gaming side of the internet like to make regarding a somewhat specific mechanic - climbing.  More specifically, how climbing works in most linear, but sometimes open world, games.  This complaint is usually about how climbing functions, and the entire argument, in my opinion, can be boiled down to be that "climbing in (game) is basically the same as going down a hallway."  In the most mechanical and basic levels, yeah, I can see why they'd say that.  Take a game like Uncharted, which is no stranger to this argument.  There are very specific climbable areas, and they're all marked/ colored to indicate to the player 'Hey!  You can climb up this yellow fence!  No, not that unlit grey one, this one!'  Then the player reaches the indicated place, usually holds a direction and maybe has to press a button here or there, and the character goes up a linear path of hand and footholds.  Sounds a lot like just pushing forward on the stick and going down a hallway, doesn't it?  Yes, but also no.  Even in the situations where climbing is as linear as possible, and requires nothing more from the player than walking down a hallway would, I still believe it adds more value than another hallway would.

Let's start by looking at those Uncharted and Tomb Raider type games where the climbing, often, is as linear as it gets.  The biggest difference in what climbing adds to these games, which is going to sound obvious, is just the act of climbing itself.  To me, walking down an empty hallway has a pretty low ceiling on how cool or interesting it can be.  Depending on the perspective and animation of the character, at best it is usually forgettable, and at worst drags down the pacing and becomes boring.  Climbing has a higher cap for coolness and engagement if for no other reason than variety.  There's really just a single repeated animation when the player holds forward to walk down a hallway, but climbing can have dozens.  The character can lunge, scramble, dangle, slip, reach, leap, swing, and do all sorts of different movements to traverse what amounts to a linear path.  Even if there's not any more input needed from the player, or any real danger to the character, its just more pleasing to watch.  It's a thin illusion that the world is actually bigger than it really is, but it at least is trying to keep the player engrossed in the world with some verticality and opportunities to view the world from a different vantage point, show a far off goal, or even previous location that is now way off in the distance.  These are not things easily accomplished in a hallway.

Open world games treat climbing very differently for the most part.  In essence, they're the opposite of the linear climbing games where either everything is climbable, or everything with a few exceptions are.  I won't spend much time on this type of game because the scope is so different from the linear type of game that it doesn't really make much sense to compare them.  It is interesting to see how the compare to one another, though.  Breath of the Wild felt like a true world because you could climb any surface provided you had enough stamina to reach the top.  There were no set points to start or stop climbing on.  You were free to crawl around and make your own path as you saw fit.  The Assassin's Creed games are all about climbing, but are more of an expanded version of the linear style climbing.  You can climb a lot of things, but every building has set anchor points where your character can hold on and climb up.  Some buildings can't be scaled from certain angles, and once you're on a path up, you're pretty much locked in until you get to the top without much room for variation without killing your momentum completely.  To their credit, the games do use this to their advantage in some cases, where climbing specific structures is meant to be something of a puzzle.  Again, that is much more interesting, and requires different thinking, than something like a standard flat maze.

A year (or more now?) late, and I'm playing Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is what inspired me to think on this subject a little more.  For those who don't know, Horizon is an open world game, but with linear climbing mechanics.  You can only climb certain rocks that have white edges, specific parts of machine architecture, or yellow wooden handholds in the rock.  From there you have one, maybe two, ways to direct your character to the same location.  At first, this felt very unnatural to me.  I obviously can't play all open world games, but I do think I have at least a working knowledge of a good amount of them and they either have free, or mostly free, climbing, or no climbing at all.  Not very often does an open world game only have set climbing points like a linear game.  For a while it frustrated me as I jumped against rock walls trying to make my own path up cliffs I knew there was something at the top of, but ultimately failed because it wasn't the one right spot I was supposed to begin climbing from.  After thinking through linear climbing as I did above, I wondered if I was thinking of the climbing in Horizon the wrong way too.  It turns out, I was, or could at least think of it in a more positive way.  Instead of the climbing point being an arbitrary barrier, I starting thinking of them more like secret passages.  Plenty of games have little nooks and crannies that are purposefully obfuscated or obscured from player's view to hide secrets in, which is exactly how these climbing paths work.  You can see something, a treasure, but don't know how to reach it.  Searching for and finding that path is rewarding, often more than the actual reward itself.

What do you think about the different types of climbing in games?  Do you like linear climbing sections even though they don't actually require more of you than walking down a hallway?  What's about open world climbing?  How else do you think climbing could be used in games that haven't been before, or aren't as much?

There's Potential Here: Point Man

First Encounter Assault Recon.  Perhaps the most forced acronym a game title has ever been subjected to, but at the same time almost feels fitting for the type of game F.E.A.R was.  On one hand, it was a hard-core FPS with satisfying weapons, impressive AI, and graphics and effects that were incredible for the time.  Even to this day people reference the shotgun from F.E.A.R. as one of, if not the most, satisfying shotguns to use in gaming.  Then, on the other hand, there's the horror element to the game.  The story, score, locations, and characters are all inspired by popular horror media.  These two seemingly disparate genres, a military style FPS with a focus on visceral action and empowerment, plus a mix of cerebral and in-your-face horror, are the two main ingredients that make F.E.A.R.

The franchise is comprised of the first title, simply called F.E.A.R, a sequel F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin, and F.3.A.R.  Yes, I know, but that's the actual title the new developers went with.  The first game also had two expansions, F.E.A.R Extraction Point, and F.E.A.R Persues Mandate, that did continue the story, however both were made by a different developer and rendered non-cannon once F.E.A.R 2 came out.  So, as always, let's go in chronological order and figure out what we're working with.

F.E.A.R

The main character of F.E.A.R was created when the game was still primarily intended to be an action focused title.  As a result, the team at Monolith went with the traditional silent protagonist, even going so far as to not give him a real name and referring to him only by his call-sign Point Man.  Point Man is the newest member of the F.E.A.R team, a special US military group that specializes in paranormal threats, consisting of the commissioner Rowdy Betters and teammates Spencer Jankowski and Jin Sun-Kwon, who are sent after a man named Paxton Fettel who has taken control of a battalion of psychically controlled super soldiers.  Of to a great start, right?  He used these soldiers to take over Armacham, the company who created the soldiers, as well as cannibalizing a number of their staff.  Fettel is tracked by satellite, but can conveniently evade detection whenever the plot needs him to. 

Starting with the first location Point Man is sent to after Fettel, he begins to see strange visions of things like Fettel as a ghost that dissolves into flakes and a hospital hallway where he hears a man guiding a woman in pain through childbirth along with cryptic narration about Point Man's origins.  Later the real star of the horror shows up when Sadak- I mean, Alma begins appearing.  Bits of story are fed as the Point Man shoots his way through the clone super soldiers, using his super human reflexes that give him bullet-time, through optional and hidden laptops the player can find that ultimately culminate in a couple revelations.  The first is that Fettel is Alma's son whom Armicham had trained to be the psychic commander of the clone soldiers.  Alma, an even more powerful psychic and part of Project Origin, was put into a coma after her father Harlan Wade, who was in charge of Project Origin, and the President of Armicham Aristide realized how dangerous she was becoming due to being experimented on.  When he turned 10, Alma formed a psychic link with Fettel to try and use him to free her.  To stop him, and from anything like that happening again, Harlan and Aristide decided to cut off Alma's life support and just let her die instead of keeping her in a coma.  Great group of people, huh?  It turns out that Alma's spirit, anger, psychic energy, or whatever you want to call it didn't die and makes another link with Fettel to kick off the events of the game.  We also learn that Alma had another son before Fettel with weaker psychic abilities.  I wonder who that could be?  Anyway, a lot of shooting and spooking later, Point Man ends up going down to where Alma is being held, has a hallucination where he finds out...no...that HE is Alma's first son!  What a twist.  At the same time he also kills Fettel, his brother.  Harlan is also down there, and goes ahead and frees Alma because he suddenly feels bad about basically torturing and experimenting on his daughter for her entire life.  Too little too late, though, because the second he lets her go she liquefies him.  Can't really blame her.  At that point Point Man's mission is to just blow up the entire facility because why not, right?  Things can't get much worse, can they?  So, he does it and escapes into a helicopter with Jin.  It looks like everything's going to turn out...wait, the helicopter shakes.  What was that?  One last scare/tease as Alma starts pulling herself into the helicopter's open door.  Why would a ghost need to climb in a helicopter?  Oh, and Spencer was killed by Alma at some point early on in the game.  He shows up as a ghost like once and is never really mentioned again by anyone.  Anyway, that covers the basics of the first game, or at least the important parts.  Point Man, Jin, Betters, Aristide, and Alma (sort of) survive, while pretty much everyone else is dead.  Cool.

F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin

Fun fact about F.E.A.R 2.  It wasn't originally a F.E.A.R game, and was just going to be called Project Origin after Monolith held a vote for fans to decide the new game's title since they lost the rights to the name F.E.A.R.  During development they ended up buying back the F.E.A.R name and the game became F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin.  Kind of interesting, isn't it?  Well...I think it is.

But on to the game's story.  Perhaps it was because Monolith didn't have access to the F.E.A.R IP in the early stages of development, or maybe it was always the plan, but the sequel does not put the player in control of Point Man but rather a member of Delta Force named Michael Becket.  The game begins roughly half an hour before the end of the first game where Delta is sent in to arrest Aristide, but even before that we experience Becket having hallucinations of a young Alma on a tree swing.  She also gives us a jump scare right off the bat just so we know this is a scary game and nothing says horror like a little girl and a loud noise, right?  So, right off the bat we're given a reason to think there is, or will be, some connection with this new guy and Alma.  As Delta Force makes their way to Aristide, they have to fight a bunch of soldiers sent by Armacham's board of directors who want to cover everything up by basically killing everyone involved with all the evil psychic experiment stuff.  They're lead by Colonel Vanek who will be our human antagonist for the game.  On the way to Aristide's penthouse, you find clues about a "Project Harbinger" that includes Becket and some other people in Delta Force.  Yep, Armacham has a lot of these "projects whatever".  You later find out Harbinger was an attempt at basically replacing Fettel as psychic commanders.  Of course you manage to get to Aristide, but just as she's starting to explain how Delta Force are the only ones who can stop Alma, the ending of the first game happens and a huge explosion knocks Becket out.  He's taken by Aristide and half hallucinates as he's undergoing surgery on Aristide's orders.  I would ask how anything is functioning anywhere in the city after a psychic nuke went off, but it turns out the hospital is actually way underground so I can kind of let it slide.  Becket wakes up alone for whatever reason, totally fine except for more visions of Alma, and figures he better get back with his squad.  Becket, now armed with the same bullet-time power as Point Man, fights more Armacham soldiers who are now after him and his team because of whatever Aristide did to them.  I will mention on the way out that you find Redd Jankowski, Spencer's younger brother, right before he dies on an operating table.  Why even bring back that family just to keep killing them off without having them do anything?  Regardless, Becket is also contacted and helped out by a guy calling himself Snake Fist, which I find amazing.  He tells Becket, despite him being as mute as Point Man, that Alma is trying to absorb him because of the psychic energy he is now producing after the mysterious surgery.  Oh, and the replica super soldiers are back too.  I guess they're being controlled by Alma at this point, which doesn't really make sense since Fettel was specifically trained to control them to be awesome soldier guys and Alma wasn't, but whatever.  To cut out a lot of fluff, while escaping the hospital and trying to regroup, everyone but Becket, Morales, Keegan, and their Lieutenant Keira Stokes are killed, mostly by Alma. Naturally, they split up and are separated so you end up on your own basically the entire time you're going through the school to find Snake Fist in the...secret underground base where Project Paragon was being held.  Oh good, I was worried we wouldn't come across another secret underground base or shady Armacham project.  Oh, what's that?  Paragon was all about testing psychic kids so they could be used my Armacam?  Sounds about right.  So, more shooting, some creepy new enemies, and you kill Vanek in a QTE with about as much narrative impact as this sentence implies.  You finally meet Snake Fist and are given a plot dump/ absolutely absurd solution to Alma.  He says you need to go to the, wait for it, secret underground base on a nearby island to find and use a super secret psychic amplifier to boost your power so you can beat Alma's ghost in a psychic duel.  What game am I playing again?  With his life's purpose of telling you about this plot device fulfilled, Snake Fist immediately, and I mean immediately, gets his head ripped off.  Seriously, the way this game treats supposedly important characters is ridiculous.  But, pressing on, Keegan goes nuts and wanders off so naturally Becket goes off after him alone too.  More fighting, same old stuff, and you get to the secret island base without finding Keegan.  Becket gets in the...psychic amplifier, but before Stokes can turn it on for you, Aristide shows back up and explains her evil plan to everyone.  See, she operated on Becket with the intention of using him to lure Alma into the amplifier so that she could trap them both inside, thus giving her some leverage to stop Armacham from trying to kill her.  The sheer absurdity, incredible stupidity, of this plan is just delicious.  I mean, how did she know Becket would even go to the amplifier?  He only learned about it from Snake Fist, so did she set it up so they would meet?  What if either one of them died?  Snake Fist literally only lived seconds long enough to give Becket that information.  If he died anytime before that, her plan wouldn't work.  Also, since when does a psychic amplifier double as a psychic/ ghost prison?  Just wait, though, because the ending takes the ridiculous levels up to maximum.  So Aristide shoots Stokes, Alma shows up and knocks Arisdie away from the controls, but still manages to start the process of sealing the chamber thing.  Alma throws you into a...disturbing hallucination where most of the time you're fighting Keegan and also trying to pull three switches to activate the amplifier....while stuck inside of it?  The rest of the time, mostly through flashes, shows Alma...to use the word accurately, raping Becket.  When you break the hallucination Becket realizes he's still inside the chamber, which Alma opens and comes in to put his hand on her pregnant stomach.  Yeah.  F.E.A.R. 2 ends with the player character being raped by a ghost and getting her pregnant.  If anyone guessed that, congratulations, you're clinically insane.

F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn

This expansion is super short, and has only one important element to it, so I'll make this quick.  A replica, who is a clone of Fettel, is drawn by Fettel's ghost, because of course he has one, to find him.  He does, Fettel possess him and is "reborn."  Done.

F.3.A.R

The third game in the series has some notable differences behind the scenes.  It was made by a new studio, Day 1, had John Carpenter contributing in some form to the cinematics, and was written by Steve Niles.  With those names attached, F.3.A.R definitely raised a lot of people's expectations.  Did it deliver?  Get it?  Because Alma's...pregnant...okay, never mind.  Also, this game is the first to have a co-op mode where two players control Point Man and Fettel, one with the traditional shooting and bullet time powers, and the other ghost powers like stun and temporarily possessing enemies.  Learning about co-op in a horror game...well that caused a lot of people to worry.

Set a convenient 9 months after the second game, Point Man reappears after being...somewhere and starts of captured and being tortured by Armacham.  Little do they know he's the most committed silent protagonist ever and never says a word.  Ghost Fettel shows up to rescue his brother, apparently being 'bound by blood', and helps him escape in a forced alliance.  They take a helicopter and head out to meet Jin while Fettel dumps exposition about how terrible a person Harlan, their grandfather, was to them between chapters.  Oh, do you remember Jin from the first game?  The member of F.E.A.R we saw maybe twice?  Yeah, she's back too.  Along the way there's plenty of new enemies to shoot, new creatures to spook, and visions of Harlan monologuing.  Once you reach Jin she shows Point Man a video of Becket, now feeling like talking, who explains his...unfortunate situation with Alma at the end of the last game.  Jin decides that, based on the 'psychic anomalies' that are 'like contractions', there isn't much time to stop Alma from giving birth.  So, yes, F.E.A.R. was supposed to specialize in paranormal threats, but how did she come to the conclusion that this psychic stuff, and none of the other 'abnormalities', if that's what we're going to call them, are in any way related to how soon a ghost is going to give birth?  And their plan to stop the birth is to first...rescue Becket from Armacham?  Okay, I mean, that's probably a good idea, but wouldn't exactly solve the problem, but sure.  Let's rescue Becket.  On the way, which is a long way with even more monsters and soldiers, by the way, Fettel and Point Man, well mostly Fettel, starts to disagree with the plan to stop the birth/ kill the child if they can't.  He wants to 'think about things as a family.'  Because the Wade family is just the pinnacle of a healthy family.  By the time Point Man and Fettel reach Becket, the world is basically ruined.  The entire city is crumbling, water is blood, and the sky is red.  Point Man opens his pod thing he's being held in, and then Fettel, right after saying, "This will kill him," just goes ahead and possess Becket.  They learn about everything that happened to him in the second game, he freaks out a little, pukes, and tells Point Man to kill his unborn ghost child right before Fettel explodes him.  Man, and we made it so far into this game before an important character was killed off with little to no reason.  Shame.  So, basically, they gained nothing from finding Becket.  More backstory about Harlan and a big dumb boss fight with his memory, or something later, and they finally reach Alma as she's about to give birth.  At this point the game can have one of two endings based on which brother got a higher score during the game and was, therefore, the favorite son.  Yeah, it sounds as bad as it was.  If Point Man wins, he shoots Fettel in the head, killing him...again and then Alma also dies...again, just after giving birth.  Jin comes over the radio and says things are going back to normal as Point Man walks out of the room with the baby in his arms.  If Fettel wins he's able to possess Point Man, delivers the baby to raise, and then...eats Alma for her power.  Supposedly that will make him like a God or something?

Wow, that took longer than I expected for just three games where the main character never even speaks.  Still, now that we're all caught up, we can get on with how the series could fix itself should it ever be brought back.  First, though, we have the issue of multiple endings to decide on.  Really, there's only one primary difference between the two.  In both endings we can confirm that: Alma is dead and the world is starting to go back to normal, the baby was born, and one of the brothers intends on raising it.  So, how will we decide which one to move forward with?  Trick question!  As much as I'd like to just pick the one I think leads to a more interesting sequel, we're going to let the players decide.  By looking at how many people got the achievements and trophies for...wait.  This game doesn't have separate trophies for getting specific endings...oh.  Well, that kind of ruins my entire plan, to be honest.  I guess I really will just pick whichever ending I like and go from there. So...

Fettel possesses his brother, eats his mother, and adopts his new younger brother.  What can I say?  "Bad" endings are way more interesting most of the time.  So, where does a F.E.A.R 4, or 4.E.A.R if we're going to keep on with the stupid naming conventions, pick up?

10 years later, Fettel is still possessing Point Man's body.  Due to his higher than average psychic abilities, and their blood ties, Fettel is able to hold this possession without killing him for this long, but not much longer.  He needs a new body, which is what he's been training his new brother/ son for his entire life.  He's almost ready to do this when the new F.E.A.R team made up of all the characters the franchise mercifully forgot about rather than outright killed: Jin, Stokes, Morales, and Betters at command, interrupts him.  His ghost can only partially take over the third child, who we will just call Wade for convenience, causing Wade's immense powers to go out of control.  Point Man, now free again, goes after Wade to finally wipe out Fettel for good. 

I imagine this game to put Point Man in various scenarios that challenge his goals, as well as make him reflect on his history as a silent and blindly obedient tool for killing.  Point Man has been used by everyone for his entire life, including his mother, brother, grandfather, superiors, and even his enemies like Armacham.  After being a prisoner for 10 years inside his own body, he refuses to let himself be used anymore.  Through the game he will work with and against three main factions: the new F.E.A.R team who want to kill Wade, Aristide and Armacham who supposedly has changed and want's to teach him to control his power, and Wade himself who, like Point Man, want's to be free of everyone else's influence.  He'll spend equal time with each faction through the game, with Fettel getting more control of Wade and his powers over time, thus upping the distortion of reality and introduction of new horrors to deal with, until he must make a decision.  Kill Wade with F.E.A.R, trust Aristide and Amracham to contain Fettel and train Wade, or team up with Wade to fight an incredibly strong ghost Fettel and set him free. 

Through the entire game, just like the previous ones, Point Man, and by extension the player, will have no choices in what they do/where they go.  The Point Man will still be silent, but we will hear his voice in the form of an inner monologue growing more fed up and sick of being a means for other people to achieve their goals.  When this final choice occurs, prompts will appear on screen for the player to select, however no matter which one the player selects, the Point Man will reject it and make his own decision.  His decision would then have to be one not presented to the player, which could just be him throwing his guns away and speaking for the first time just to say, "I'm done." 

Naturally I expect an ending like that to be very divisive.  In what other game does the protagonist, completely out of the player's control, just decide to abandon the game and leave before its conclusion?  The thing is, while we may want to see how it all plays out, Point Man doesn't.  He doesn't care any more, and just wants to make the most out of what's left of his life rather than continue risking it for other people.   After looking at what Point Man has been, or more importantly not been, in the series, I believe that the best way to close out his story would be this build up to a complete rejection of participation.  First he was a silent killer who should've been far more vital to the plot of the first game than he really was, then abandoned for a game, and when he was brought back we got some context on his and Fettel's childhoods and relationship with Harlan.  This final game would be about him realizing he's essentially been possessed his entire life, including by the player, and breaking free. 

Those are just my ideas, though.  As always, I welcome hearing criticisms and better possibilities in the comments. 

Leaks, rumors, and general spoiling of hype.

I love being surprised.  At least, in terms of hearing about things I'm interested in, whether it be a continuation or something brand new.  That moment, crafted by teams of people, when it is first revealed is meant to evoke as much excitement and hype in people as possible.  Usually it comes in the form of a trailer, but in rare occasions even something more substantial, with the absolute rarest being the 'and it's available now!'  Sure, in the case of things like video games these reveals can often be so focused on creating excitement that they end up being misleading, but with relatively low exception, they all still do come out.  It may not end up being good in the end, not exclusive to games, but it is a thing that exists.  My question may seem like it answers itself, but at the same time I feel it doesn't.  Why do we want to spoil the initial surprise, cut our own excitement short, by exposing things before they're ready to be presented?

I remember, back before I really dove deep on the internet, first discovering E3 on TV.  It must've been 2006 because it was the first time Halo 3 was revealed to the public.  Sure, we all knew there would be a Halo 3, if not from a business perspective than from the way Halo 2 ended, so the surprise, for me, was actually seeing it show up out of nowhere.  All of a sudden Halo 3 went from being a thing that would happen eventually, something I would occasionally wonder or speculate with friends about, to something actually real.  If you have a spare 3 minutes, I would recommend giving the reveal trailer a re-watch before I give a quick breakdown.  Starting with that iconic chime and a slow fade from white on an abandoned dusty plain, the camera slowly pulls back and we're hit with another chime.  It's familiar, but at this point we're not even meant to know what we're looking at yet.  Then we hear and see a distorted figure flickering in and out of view as smoke builds up and we wonder if that was...we're given just enough time to wonder before another chime, more words, and a first clear look at the person speaking.  But it's not a person really.  Just as we can confirm for certain the person we're seeing and hearing is Cortana, Master Chief steps out of the smoke, assault rife over his shoulder, which he brings down into his hands.  We get the end of Cortana's monologue and finally the chimes we've been hearing come together into the main Halo theme as the camera makes its first cut to show what the Chief is facing.  Dozens of enemy ships converge on a mysterious structure in the ground, sending off a shock wave as it opens, and finally emits a light that cuts the screen to black in time with the music.  The last words of dialogue are given in complete silence.  "This is the way the world ends."  The music kicks back in and the Halo logo with a three focuses itself on screen, finally confirming what we all knew for absolute certainty, and then giving us the tagline "Finish the fight" which would've been enough, but they even give us the year we can actually accomplish that task of 2007.

This probably isn't the best constructed reveal trailer ever made, but it was the first one that came to mind and was very effective for me at least.  Just imagine how excited so many people were to see that for the first time, the range of emotions that  trailer pulled them through.  The mystery, teases, buildup, and payoffs.  Now imagine how much less of an impact it would have if the person watching had read online that there would be a Halo 3 trailer at E3?  Every trailer that started that wasn't immediately recognizable would make them wonder 'is this Halo 3?'  Then, rather than the music cues building mystery, their mindset would connect the pieces before they were intended to and know it was.  The trailer would still be worth watching, still evoke some level of excitement, but far less than how it was intended to function. 

In theory, it makes sense.  We want to know about the things we like, so we seek out information about it.  Until it is official, there are leaks, rumors, and all kinds of speculation that can be found.  However, going that deep almost always leads to a far less satisfying experience than waiting for the official reveal.  I mean, we've gotten to the point where people are speculating what games are being made based on the descriptions for jobs studios are putting out, or what trademarks are being filed.  Is that really a satisfying way to find out what is being worked on?  I can't speak for the developers, but I really doubt that's how they want their work to be revealed.  Yes, news outlets and reporters need things to report on, but can we pull back at least a little bit?  Perhaps I'm too deep into the news cycle myself and the problem isn't actually as bad as it seems, but I know that I find it increasingly rare for a trailer to be the first thing I see or hear about a game anymore.  While that does seem to be the obvious solution to my problem, just don't go looking for leaks and stuff, that only gets harder and harder to do.  Without completely avoiding outlets,social media, forums, websites, and anywhere else related to gaming, you're going to see something at some point.  And why should I, or anyone else, have to avoid these places when we enjoy the community and other aspects of them?  Am I being too soft?  Should I just accept this is how things are now, or have we really gone a few steps too far in trying to dig out news as early as possible?  I'd really like to hear everyone's opinions on this.  

Studios We've Lost: Pandemic

Hundreds of game studios have existed since the beginning of the video game era, most of which have not survived for one reason or another.  I have always been fascinated by the closure of studios, especially the reasons why, and thought this would be a perfect opportunity to satisfy my own interest in the topic while providing you with a (hopefully) entertaining essay detailing exactly why some studios just disappeared.  I'll go through the studios entire history as best I can, pointing out highs and lows as they are relevant, share the reason they were closed, if one was given, and then perhaps share the fate of their IPs and employees.  This will likely be the most dry content I produce, but I'll do my best to make it an entertaining read without sensationalizing or presenting anything misleading.  I'll stick to the facts for the most part, will make personal commentary along the way, but mostly at the end, which I will clearly distinguish as my own opinion and not fact.

As indicated by the title, the first studio I'll be examining is Pandemic.

Formed in 1998 by Josh Resnick, president, and CEO Andrew Goldman, two former Activision employees, Pandemic was formed with partial investment from Activision who also published their first two titles as a studio.  These games were Battlezone II: Combat Commander and Dark Reign 2, released in 1999 and 2000 respectively for windows.  Both were Activision IP and were not equally received upon release.  Battlezone III, a hybrid of the FPS and RTS genres, was much anticipated by the public, however was hit hard by reviewers for its many bugs and high requirements to run for the time.  Along with a multiplayer mode that wasn't functional until a later patch, I suspect Battlezone II failed to reach high sales, though I wasn't able to find any official numbers to support this.  Dark Reign 2, on the other hand, had a slightly better reception with 77 metascore, high of 93 from PC Gameworld, and a low of 60 from various publications such as CNET Gamecenter.  The game was praised for its graphics in comparison to other contemporary RTS games, with criticism coming in the form of its difficulty and not doing enough in terms of game play to distinguish it from others in the genre.  

These first two games would be the only ones Pandemic developed directly for Activision.  They were also able to open a second studio in Australia to work on Army Men: RTS  while the main studio was given the opportunity to work with LucasArts on Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the Gamecube, PS2, and Xbox.  The game features both vehicular based combat as well as third-person action as various Jedi during and after the events of the film of the same name.  Unfortunately, the game wasn't particularly well received, sitting at a highest of a 73 for the Gamecube version on metacritic, with the PS2 version just below at 72.  A common criticism was that, while there were fantastic elements to the game, they were not frequent enough and the product on the whole felt disjointed and simply average.  Thankfully, this would not be the last chance Pandemic got with the Star Wars license.

While working on another title for Midway under the title of SpecWarrior, Midway decided to end their contract with Pandemic.  Having already put time and resources into the project, Pandemic sued Midway for $4 million dollars in damages plus $750,000 in fees.  Midway filed a counterclaim, stating that Pandemic had no merit to sue.  Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find any report detailing the results of this lawsuit.  

Before they could return to a far away galaxy, Pandemic and Sony Imageworks partnered with the Institute for Creative Technologies, a US Army research initiative created to explore new techniques that could be used to improve training methods.  While it seems as though the game, which would be released as Full Spectrum Warrior, perhaps a callback to the game they had been working on for Midway, was initially intended to be only for training purposes, with no commercial release, one was required in order for the team to have access to the Xbox as a platform.  In the end, it was decided that two versions be created, one for original training purposes, and a second with various changes to make it a more viable commercial game.  What set Full Spectrum Warrior apart was how it played.  The game was a real-time tactical game where the player commanded squads, however the player doesn't directly control any squad member, only issuing orders, a unique and novel distinction from traditional tactical shooters of the time.  The game ended up being the most well received title for Pandemic at the time, with the Xbox version getting an 84 on metacritic and the PS2 version a 74.  There were some rumors and allegations surrounding this game and the military's use and the partnership with Sony being unfair, but nothing public to confirm any of this.  

Immediately after, Pandemic released their latest project with LucasArts and the Star Wars IP they had begun working on back in 2002, but this time they weren't beholden to a specific film.  Star Wars: Battlefront aimed to draw from all six films for their large scale battles.  While the game didn't score particularly high in total, with a metacritic of 82 on PS2, which was the highest rated, the individual reviews ranged from as low as 50% all the way up to 94% between all versions.  The game play, visuals, and online play were almost universally adored, while criticisms were primarily aimed at poor AI, and disjointed and confusing campaign that felt like an afterthought.  Sales for the game's console version reached 4 million by 2007, with PC numbers breaking 290,000 copies by 2006, both only counting US sales.  Striking while the iron was still hot, Pandemic released the followup, Star Wars: Battlefront II, the very next year to even greater success.  The sequel scored better than the original, with the PS2 metacritic sitting at a 84 and Xbox just one point below at an 83.  According to the NPD Group the game was also the sixth best selling game of 2005, was the second most popular game on Xbox in 2007,was still number 3 in 2008, and then jumped back to number 2 in 2009.  The game was reported as selling 6 million copies by 2007, 2 million more than the first game in one year less time.

Keeping with their break-neck development pace, Pandemic also released Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction in 2005.  Expanding their scope of large scale battles into the open world, Mercenaries was an ambitious title that earned even better average scores than their Star Wars game, the best version averaging an 86, but couldn't come close to matching sales numbers.  My best source for sales reports the game sold a total of only .68 million worldwide.  The game was banned in South Korea up until 2007 due to the game focusing on the war in North Korea, although I personally don't attribute this ban to the game's overall poor sales.

Meanwhile, the Australian team had been working on their own new IP with publisher THQ.  This game supposedly came about through a joke made by a former member of Pandemic after a failed pitch for a kid friendly game to Microsoft.  True or not, the game that came about, also in 2005, was Destroy All Humans, a game where the player controlled an alien sent to harvest human DNA to keep his species' DNA stable after generations of cloning.  Critics enjoyed the level of open destruction they could achieve and goofy tone, but thought some game play aspects were lacking and missions were too similar, leaving it with an average score of 76 and 74 on the Xbox and PS2 respectively.  They would go on to release a sequel the following year to a similar average score of 74 and selling over 340,000 copies just in North America.

Back in the US, Pandemic released another sequel, this time in the form of Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers.  Unfortunately, this game couldn't muster the same level of reviews as the first and sits at a 71 average on it's best platform, the PS2.  This would be the last game Pandemic released under THQ before Pandemic partnered with Bioware.  With this new partnership, a second development team was created in the Australian office in 2006.  However, no games were released during this partnership before EA acquired both Pandemic and Bioware.

Under EA, the US offices set to work on two titles, another sequel and another licensed title.  The sequel, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, didn't set the world on fire.  Not only was the studio's streak of "average" scores unbroken, coming in at 72 with the exception of the PS2 version which only reached 49, but the game also had to deal with some controversy.  First was EA's misguided marketing stunt to give away £20,000 of petrol for free to anyone who visited their station, a max of £40 worth per visitor, that they had set up to look like a military bunker.  A member of the local parliament described the event as an "ill thought-out media stunt," following the traffic issues caused.  The Venezuelan government also came out against the game as a tool to create support of a real life US invasion due to Pandemic's previous relationship working with the US army on Full Spectrum Warrior.

Perhaps attempting to translate their successful formula found in the Battlefront series, Pandemic's next title was set in one of the only other franchizes that could compete with Star Wars in terms of popularity: The Lord of the Rings.  The Lord of the Rings: Conquest borrowed a lot of the same game play mechanics from Battlefront, also being created by the same core team, and transplanted it into the world of Middle Earth.  While this concept may have seemed like a sure hit on paper, the game ultimately flopped in terms of critical response.  The game got a 55 on metacritic, with reviewers criticizing everything from controls, balance, AI, graphics, and more.  In terms of sales, the best data I could find puts the game at about .63 million units sold, almost certainly far below expectations for a game bearing such a popular IP.

During this time the Australian team had been working on a game adaptation of The Dark Night.  The title was never given a formal announcement, only leaked by Pandemic themselves and later actor Gary Oldman during an interview.  It was supposedly going to be an open world style game, but after missing the release of the movie, the game was cancelled due to EA closing down the entire Australian office during a restructuring by EA.

Working hard on their next project, Pandemic released their first original IP since 2005's Mercenaries.  The Saboteur was another open world game in a similar vein to Mercenaries except set during the conflict of WWII, and would release in 2009 as the studio's final game.  The studio became aware of their impending closure and had to make various cuts and sacrifices to the game in order to release by the end of the year.  Perhaps due to the over saturation of open world titles at the time, or games set in WWII, the game couldn't reach above a high of 76 on metacritic.  Many outlets enjoyed the unique visual style the game presented, but found the game lacking in game play, AI, story, and being generally unpolished.

As the studio was closed down, 288 employees were let go, including high level executives, with only a small team of 35 being brought into one of EA's other studios Danger Close.  Around a dozen or so former members of Pandemic were able to join 343 Industries to work on the Halo franchise, while others have gone on to Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Respawn Entertainment, and more.

While this behavior, of purchasing and closing down studios in a short period, has become somewhat tied to EA's reputation in the last year or so, it was not something the public payed as much attention to despite the trend already existing.  Still, Pandemic wasn't the only studio to suffer in this closure, being just a part of a total of 1,500 jobs lost and joining Maxis and the Command and Conquer team's closures, as well as cancelling a dozen games that were currently in development.

This bring us to the question of this entire piece, and where I will go into full on opinion and speculation mode.  What happened to Pandemic?  Officially, the statement from EA was that the layoffs and closures were to "improve our cost structure, ensure quality, and build schedule integrity for this studio."  To me, that is about the biggest corporate non-answer that could be given.  A more interesting statement was this one about Pandemic's IP from EA's Games Label Senior Vice President Nick Earl.  "I want to make it clear that the Pandemic brand and franchises will live on.  In the months ahead, we will announce plans for new games based on Pandemic franchises."  As we know now, Battlefront has made a return but that wasn't so much Pandemic's IP as LucasArts', and later Disney's.  In fact, the only IP Pandemic worked on that EA has access to are Battlefront and Mercenaries, as far as my searching can show.  Making another Star Wars game was an inevitability, and the Battlefront name had a lot of goodwill and fond memories attached to it so it made sense for EA to utilize it eventually.  There was also the leaked information about a Battlefront III, however this was after Pandemic's time with the series and being developed by Free Radical, who may or may not end up being the subject of a Studios We've Lost in the future.  So that leaves Mercenaries.  As it turns out, one of those dozen games cancelled during EA's "restructuring" was Pandemic's third Mercenaries game, but in the almost 10 years since shutting the studio down and cancelling the project, EA has shown absolutely no interest in continuing that franchise.

Now, I don't believe that Pandemic's closure was only due to EA wanting the Battlefront name, despite it being basically the only thing left of Pandemic.  In truth, I think Pandemic's demise was something of an inevitability.  With the exception of the two Battlefront games, the studio never really had a "hit" to speak of.  Their games were all rated alright to low in the eyes of critics, and from the sales data available, I would guess most were seen as financial failures, especially in their last few years.  To their credit, though, the studio was able to make a good number of games in a relatively short time period.  This was more common in the PS2 generation, and we could even see a decrease in releases per year once they moved to the 360 and PS3 hardware, but I think they still proved to at least be a consistent and efficient development studio.

AA games have been on the decline since the PS2 and original Xbox generation.  We've seen games split to either giant, multi-million dollar budgets with hundreds or people working on it, or shoe-string indie games with a handful (or less) developers.  Many people much more qualified than me have commented on this trend so I won't rehash it more than that, but my point is that Pandemic was one of those AA studios that just doesn't exist anymore.  They made fun, medium sized games with issues, but could make them on a modest budget in a decent time frame and sell enough to fund their next project.  While I, and many others, may not like it, studios like that just aren't what publishers want anymore.  As much as we love to hate EA, I don't think Pandemic's fate would've been much different had they not been acquired, or were acquired by someone else.  They could've finished their latest Mercenaries game, and their Australian team may have been able to release their Wii racing game, but without another commercial hit to offset the longer development times on the newer hardware, I don't see Pandemic surviving to today without managing to pull off more hits.  Pessimistically, or maybe realistically, I would see them put out a couple more games over a few years to okay sales and passable scores, but find themselves bleeding money until they had to close on their own.

This ends my first Studios We've Lost.  If anyone bothered to read this entire thing, first of all I'd like to apologize, and second I'd like to thank you.  If anyone has suggestions on how to make this series better in future installments, I'm open to all forms of critical feedback.  I hope this first attempt was a little entertaining, a little informative, and maybe a little interesting too.  

Review Scales

Just about everything today gets reviews.  We review entertainment, food, products, and basically everything else.  As people we just seem to have a drive to give a score, a grade, to things, and we are equally drawn to seeking out these scores as quick information.  While I generally dislike scores since they incentivize people to skip reading the actual review and just look at the final score, I can see the value in them on the whole.  If something is just terrible, it can save someone a lot of time to see that 503 out of 509 people who reviewed it gave it a very low score and just continue searching elsewhere.  As a starting point, I don't really have a problem with scores too much.  I do have some issues with review culture, though, where non-professional reviewers, although not exclusively, tend to only utilize the highest and lowest scores available to review things.  That mentality, how it effects people and business, and a lot of other things about reviews in general, are not what I want to talk about right now, however.  What I want to focus on is a flaw many people and outlets have tried to solve in many different ways but none of which, at least to me, really accomplish that goal.  That flaw being what system we actually use to score things.

1-10, five stars, letter grades, even medals like in the Olympics, and more are used by critics to rate things.  The 1-10 scale is what I see most common, where a 1 is the worst score possible and 10 the best, but in a lot of cases they want to get even more granular and use decimals.  That essentially turns the 1-10 into a 1-100 system, since a 7.8 is basically a 78.  The same goes for a star rating system, which if it uses half stars is no different than a 1-10 scale system.  I do admire how different a medal system is from basically everything else I've seen used, mostly because it isn't as telling right away.  I couldn't make a quick translation of what a silver medal would be as a number for example.  You can still get a rough idea of the reviewer's opinion, but are still incentivized to actually read the review to really see what that score means.  The downside is that this system of grading is used almost by no one, and perhaps that it invites more comparisons between things being reviewed than others since we are accustomed to seeing medals used to distinguish performances in the same event rather than two pieces of media that may have nothing in common aside from the medium they were presented in.  To a lesser extent the same is true for letter grading, which could also be translated into a 1-5 or 1-10 number scale depending if it uses pluses and minuses.  So, for simplicity's sake, and because it is the most common anyway, I will be using the 1-10 system as a general example when presenting what I think is a more useful and honest rating scale.  I'm also going to be focusing on professional reviewers and not general people who have no reason not to give perfect or the worst possible score for little to no reason whatsoever.

One of the biggest issues that come with a 1-10 rating system that many people have noticed over the past few years is that it is very rare to see things being given a score in the 1-5 range.  Because this has been going on for so long, people now have such a skewed view of the ratings that a 6 becomes equivalent to what a 3 should be, which defeats the entire purpose of having a 1-10 scale.  My solution, I think, would at least help alleviate this kind of issue.  Rather than have the scale go from 1-10, what if we rated things from -5 to +5.  This makes a more clear divide between feeling positive about a thing, where +1 through +5 scores would be given, 0 as neutral or feeling it has equal faults and positive elements, and -1 through -5 describing things that have more faults than positives.  With this system it would be much harder for scores to creep up like they seem to with the normal 1-10 system.  Also, I think it would be more useful for those who just look at scores to understand how the reviewer actually feels about whatever they're reviewing.  I know I would be able to glean more from a 0 rating in this system than a 5 in the current   Granted, I'm sure the extreme ends of the scale would be underutilized in a similar way they are now, but hopefully would at least expand the range more than what we have now.

Naturally, I don't expect this system to sweep the internet and to suddenly see it being used by all the major review outlets, or even any smaller ones for that matter.  The reason I think this, unfortunately, is just because we're stuck in our ways.  People are used to reviewing things in the way they always have been, and likewise people are used to seeing scores presented in that same way.  I know how important aggregate sites can be for reviewers, places like metacritic for example, but even this system could be easily translated to fit their traditional system with the most minimal effort.  The best I could ever hope for would be a very slow change, but even that I don't really see happening unless there's a huge outcry for an overhaul of the current systems.  Still, if I ever do decide to give things a score on here, that's the system I'll be using.  What about you, fine reader?  Do you like the current review scales?  What do you think of the system I've presented here?  Does one seem better or worse, or do you even have an alternative that trumps both of them?  Feel free to comment if you feel so inclined.