YOU LIED TO ME: E3 Hype and You

E3, or The Electronic Entertainment Expo, is the event where everybody involved in gaming struts their stuff. It’s easily one of the most important annual events in gaming, so it makes sense that it gets a huge amount of press. When you focus enough attention on something, soon people will create things to exploit that attention. And that’s how we ended up where we did; where game publishers and marketing people release misleading “gameplay” demos and scripted sequences to dazzle and amaze every E3. It’s hard to avoid feeing the hype when you see something as impressive as these publishers put out, but before you go pre-ordering everything from A to Z, let’s consider how these companies have misled us in the past.

Publishers preview games, tech companies preview new consoles, and gaming personalities and journalists flit about covering it all.

Chief among the creators of unrealistic Hype is Ubisoft. At E3 2012, Ubisoft showed off a very impressive demo for Watch_Dogs. The big hook of this game was the “hacking” that you could do with your cell phone. In the demo, you see Aiden Pierce (protagonist) as he hunts down some guy for some unknown reason. The trailer was structured to show off all the bits and pieces we should expect in the game. Aiden uses his phone to cause all calls in the vicinity of a club entrance to be dropped, allowing him entrance to said club, where he hopes to lure badguyMcWeDon’tKnowWhoHeIs.

Golly gee, look at those particle effects! And that lighting! Realism is finally here!

Aiden causes a car pileup outside the club by turning off the traffic signal, allowing him to trap his target and execute him. The demo ends with Aiden hacking a bridge to go up just as he jumps a car over it, which was pretty awesome. Future Chicago looked dark, gritty, and full of impressive particle effects. The gameplay seemed like a really refreshing take on the GTA style open world and the game’s style seemed like a cool take on the usual Cyberpunk feel.

Woof. Talk about downgrades. The quality change here coupled with the massive amount of day one issues did not bode well for Ubisoft.

In one of the more embarrassing post E3 releases, Watch_Dogs featured almost none of the amazing graphical fidelity we saw in the original trailer. The lighting was flat, the textures downgraded, and detail was lacking. The amazing “hacking” we say in the trailer was reduced to a long distance “use” button for most of the game. While downgrades have become very accepted post E3, the sheer drop in quality here prompted a large amount of outrage. Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3 featured a very similar bait and switch the year before, but the gameplay looked very similar so there was less fan anger. Once again, promised graphical detail and technology was missing, replaced with lower quality material.

E3 style puffery isn’t restricted to Uibsoft; Irrational games had its time in the harsh light of reality in 2011. In its reveal trailer, we saw some of the horrible beauty that Columbia had to offer as well as impressive graphics and gameplay. The trailer shows our protagonist in Columbia, some of the weapons he might use, as well as some of his powers.

We also got a good look at the skyline mechanics as well. The cannons you see here fired on the protagonist from miles away, implying some very long range combat.

We got introduced to Elizabeth and her amplified versions of the main characters powers and Songbird, her pursuer. The trailer featured enemies in much greater numbers than we had seen in Bioshock as well as some impressive set pieces. It seemed like the slower style of Bioshock 1 and 2 was changed out for something a little faster paced and somehow even stranger. All in all, it seemed like a hell of a follow up to the first two games.

Things might not have been as shiny, but the shooting mechanics looked similar enough. 

When E3 2011 rolled around, we got a new trailer, but things already looked different. The textures and effects had been noticeably downgraded and Elizabeth’s powers seemed a bit less direct. The shooting gameplay looked similar, though a lot of the weirdness of Columbia was replaced class war and societal strife. Irrational avoided a lot of anger by pivoting the game design and downgrading in more subtle ways. While I prefer the version of Infinite that we say in 2010, what came out wasn’t nearly as shocking as Watch_Dogs.

Why all the hype though? Why do companies wait for E3 to release their shiny new toys? There’s a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is the ever-shifting makeup of game’s budget. In the long-long ago, most of a game’s budget went to development and the rest to marketing, but things have shifted dramatically. Destiny, the MMO-like console shooter, cost a total of $500,000,000 to develop and market but only only 140 million was used for development. While companies are clearly spending more on marketing, the effectiveness of word-of-mouth can’t be underestimated and nothing generates word-of-mouth hype like E3.

The shift in budget makeup and attitude towards E3 plays into the changing purchase funnel for games. It used to be that you would buy a game or console after it came out, maybe reserving one before release if you were really worried that you wouldn’t be able to get a copy. Nowadays pre-ordering is the norm, so much so that pre-order copies of games come with extra content, DLC, or more. E3 becomes the time to launch your pre-order page and get as many sales as you can, even though people haven’t seen the (real) game or even played it. These two shifts have led to more and more focus on E3 “demos” and upped the stakes on both the purchaser and creator sides.

So why would game developers, (most of them) producing this content because they love the medium, manipulate people like this? There are two sides to every story and developers deserve their half as well. They’re under a lot of pressure to get people excited for a game, and a lot of that involves the dreaded E3 demo. They have a specified length and (often) a list of things that need to be in the demo. They then have to slap something together with the assets that you have (notice that Big Daddy wail in the first Infinite trailer?) and make it “playable” on a stage.

Often, the demo is a kind of concept exercise for the devs where they are presenting not what the game is, but what they hope the game can be. Being optimistic is not a fault, though you can see how it might rub gamers the wrong way when the changes are so dramatic. While many of the issues are self-explanatory, the struggles that come with making a game for different kinds of machines can be tough. PCs have the benefit of a modular design and incremental progress, so they’re on top of the heap as far as processing power and graphics capabilities go. Consoles are released in discrete generations and though developers find ways to optimize their performance, they do have static hardware. By virtue of the fact that games start development on PCs, the first we see of them is often beyond what a console could do.

At the end of the day, E3 is a great show. People get to show off passion projects, innovative technology, and new awesome games. We, as consumers, need to keep in mind that a lot of what we see is smoke and mirrors, though not always with negative intent. Sometimes developers are trying to show everything a game could be and sometimes marketing people are looking to nab preorders. E3 2016 will be over by tomorrow and we’ll likely see a lot of awesome stuff, but let’s keep out expectations under control to avoid any flame-breathing rage down the road.

Now that you've avoided excess hype, think about spending some of that time and energy sharing this Topic Post! It'll do you more good than pre-ordering, that's for sure.

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Impossible vs. Cakewalk: Difficulty in Games

Difficulty can be a hard subject to talk about in games. Some people play a game religiously, so it all seems easier. Sometimes somebody has trouble with just navigating 3D space in games.

For instance, while some might consider it hard, I can speed-run Grey's Anatomy: The Video Game in 38 seconds.

 Difficulty is still worth discussing, though. Game designers and developers put so much work into how a game looks, feels, and plays that there’s no way they didn’t think about how hard to make it. Developers have betas and alphas to help narrow down how hard is too hard, or if a section is too easy, but sometimes the end result still feels off.

So, what makes a game hard without being frustrating? What can developers do to make an easy game still feel like a worthwhile experience?

Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland was the first Gameboy Advance game to feature the pink puffball we’ve all come to know and love since Kirby Superstar on the SNES. The gameplay follows the usual Kirby formula of “eat enemies and gain their power” and make your way through colorful and linear levels.

Look at him! So adorable. the Kirby series has always been more about the world than extreme gameplay.

From the moment you start playing Nightmare in Dreamland, it’s evident that this game is not going to frustrate you will difficulty. Instead, it’s going to take you an adorable journey filled with cute monsters, interesting bosses, and oddly named levels (Yoghurt Yard anybody?). The levels are filled with food to restore health, enemies are generally easy to beat, and if you do die, you’ll only be sent back a small bit in the level. This game is about making your way through the world and trying out new powers. Watching Kirby change as you go through the dozens of forms you can find is fun and cute. The game never tries to say that it’s going to be a harrowing journey so it never feels “too easy.” It falls into that Goldilocks zone of juuuuusstt right.

On the other hand, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim always feels a bit too easy. The second you start playing the game, you see the total destructive power that the Dragons have, and the thought of taking one of them down might fill you with fear. Then, you actually fight one and it feels like a total letdown.

Look at this thing! It's terrifying! It breathes fire, can cause meteors to rain from the sky, and is crazy evil. Yet you beat it by slapping it in the face with a club.

You just run around until they land, then wail on them. Before you know it, they’re dead and you’re absorbing their soul and everybody else is staring at you in awe, like it was hard. Two hours later, you’ll see a Dragon land in the middle of a little farming village and get torn apart by peasants. Skyrim fails to present you with danger in 99% of fights, though the Dragon Priests can be tough to take down, due to their powerful masks and staves. Skyrim starts you out with a full set of armor, weapons, and potions so there’s never a time when you feel like you’re just starting out in the world, or feel vulnerable. You can pause the game a second away from death to eat 50 raw potatoes and 5 health potions and bam, you’re all better. When a game is inconsistent like this, it removes a lot of the satisfaction you might get from overcoming its “challenges.”

That covers “easy”, but how do you make a game hard without going to fuck-you-that’s-bullshit-are-you-kidding-me territory? The trick is fairness, really. You have to make the player feel like any death they experience is a result of their choices and actions, and not the game suddenly deciding that’s how things are going to be. And while there’s some definite RNG rage, FTL: Faster than Light does a really good job of showing you how proper planning and decisions can beat even the hardest enemies.

Victory here will feel better than beating 10,000 Dragons in Skyrim.

By defeating enemies and acquiring scrap, you upgrade your ship and crew in any way you see fit. FTL makes it clear from the beginning that you are outmatched, outgunned, and that only a clever mind will help you survive. The game is hard because of the overwhelming force against you and because things can change in an instant. One missile aimed wrong and the enemy can repair their weapons engine subsystem and get away, leading the rebel fleet to overtake your position. FTL demands your attention and concentration, and though there are times when your defeat feels undeserved, it generally does a good job of respecting your choices.

If “fairness” makes difficulty feel okay, then “unfairness” must make it feel frustrating. Bioshock Infinite was generally a fairly easy game, but it featured a difficulty option called “1999 Mode” that went too far in the opposite direction.

All complaints aside, this game is absolutely gorgeous. Columbia, the floating city where most of the game takes place, is beautiful and very atmospheric.

For the most part, the rules of 1999 Mode are pretty well thought out. Enemies inflict greater damage on you, the navigation arrow is removed, and there’s no weapon auto aim. However, enemies also gain increased health, there’s less ammunition for your weapons, you have less health, and respawn points are reduced. What ends up happening here is that the enemies can take a huge amount of punishment and stay alive, whereas you take a hit and you’re down. Enemies also know where you are at all times, as soon as you fire on them once, even if you try to hide. Some of the bosses already have a lot of health, and in 1999 Mode most firefights become a war of attrition, rather than a thrilling and bombastic experience. You also have less ammo, and given that you can’t upgrade every weapon, you’ll end up fighting a lot of bosses with whatever you can find ammo for, which will take even longer.

Anybody who's played Bioshock Infinite can tell you how annoying this boss is on normal difficulty. It gets 50 times worse on 1999 Mode.

Increased difficulty modes are good, but they need to be implemented carefully. Increasing the amount of damage everybody does make sense because it makes combat deadlier. Increasing the enemies health while lowering the player’s makes it feel as if you’re hobbled before you even start the fight. It’s a really delicate balance and definitely hard to strike, but as long as things get harder on both sides of the equation, everything can still feel fair. You can give enemies more programming routines so they might try to flank the player,

Difficulty is tough to do well. It’s like trying to balance scales on a rope bridge in a very windy valley. There are a few things developers can do to make things easier on themselves, though. Start your game with a sense of where things are going, make player’s choices feel important to the outcome, and avoid making the enemies way more powerful while making the player weaker. Everybody has a different idea of what makes a game too hard or too easy, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about what makes for a good level of difficulty.