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felassan · 4 years

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Insights into DAI’s development from Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

The book is by game industry journalist Jason Schreier (it’s an interesting read and well-written, I recommend it). This is the cliff notes version of the DAI chapter. This info isn’t new as the book is from 2017 (I finally got around to buying it). Some insight into DAO, DA2 and cancelled DA projects is also given. Cut for length.

BW hoped that DA would become the LotR of video games. DAO’s development was “a hellish seven-year slog”

The DAI team are compared to a chaotic “pirate ship”, which is what they called themselves internally. “It’ll get where it needs to go, but it’s going to go all over the place. Sail over here. Drink some rum. Go over here. Do something else. That’s how Mark Darrah likes to run his team.” An alternative take from someone else who worked on the game: “It was compared to a pirate ship because it was chaotic and the loudest voice in the room usually set the direction. I think they smartly adopted the name and morphed it into something better.”

A game about the Inquisition and the large-scale political conflicts it solves across Thedas, where the PC was the Inquisitor, was originally the vision for ‘DA2′. Plans had to change when SW:TOR’s development kept stalling and slipping. Frustrated EA execs wanted a new product from BW to bolster quarterly sales targets, and decided that DA would have to fill the gap. BW agreed to deliver DA2 within 16 months. “Basically, DA2 exists to fill that hole. That was the inception. It was always intended to be a game made to fit in that”

BW wanted to call it DA: Exodus, but EA’s marketing execs insisted on DA2, no matter what that name implied

DAO’s scope (Origin stories, that amount of big areas, variables, reactivity) was just not doable in a year, even if everyone worked overtime. To solve this problem, BW shelved the Inquisition idea and made a risky call: DA2 would be set in one city over time, allowing locations to be recycled and months to be shaved off dev time. They also axed DAO features like customizing party members’ equipment. These were the best calls they were able to make on a tight line

Many at BW are still proud of DA2. Those that worked on it grew closer from all being in it together

In certain dark accounting corners of EA, despite fan response to DA2 and its lower sales compared to DAO, DA2 is considered a wild success

By summer 2011 BW decided to cancel DA2′s expansion Exalted March in favor of a totally new game. They needed to get away from the stigma of DA2, reboot the franchise and show they could make triple-A quality good games.

DAI was going to be the most ambitious game BW had ever made and had a lot to prove (that BW could return to form, that EA wasn’t crippling the studio, that BW could make an ‘open-world’ RPG with big environments). There was a bit of a tone around the industry that there were essentially 2 tiers of BW, the ME team and then everyone else, and the DA team had a scrappy desire to fight back against that

DAI was behind schedule early on due to unfamiliar new technology; the new engine Frostbite was very technically challenging and required more work than anyone had expected. Even before finishing DA2 BW were looking for a new engine for the next game. Eclipse was creaky, obsolete, not fully-featured, graphically lacking. The ME team used Unreal, which made inter-team collab difficult. “Our tech strategy was just a mess. Every time we’d start a new game, people would say, ‘Oh, we should just pick a new engine’.”

After meeting with an EA exec BW decided on Frostbite. Nobody had ever used it to make an RPG, but EA owned FB dev studio DICE, and the engine was powerful and had good graphic capabilities & visual effects. If BW started making all its games on FB, it could share tech with sister studios and borrow tools when they learned cool new tricks.

For a while they worked on a prototype called Blackfoot, to get a feel for FB and to make a free-to-play DA MP game. It fizzled as the team was too small, which doesn’t lend itself well to working with FB, and was cancelled

BW resurfaced the old Inquisition idea. What might a DA3 look like on FB? Their plan by 2012 was to make an open-world RPG heavily inspired by Skyrim that hit all the beats DA2 couldn’t. “My secret mission was to shock and awe the players with the massive amounts of content.” People complained there wasn’t enough in DA2. “At the end of DAI, I actually want people to go, ‘Oh god, not [another] level’.”

It was originally called Dragon Age 3: Inquisition

BW wanted to launch on next-gen consoles only but EA’s profit forecasters were caught up in the rise of iPad and iPhone gaming and were worried the next-gen consoles wouldn’t sell well. As a safeguard EA insist it also ship on current-gen. Most games at that time followed this strategy. Shipping on 5 platforms at once would be a first for BW

Ambitions were piling up. This was to be BW’s first 3D open-world game, and their first game on Frostbite, an engine that had never been used to make RPGs. It needed to be made in roughly two years, it needed to ship on 5 platforms, and, oh yeah, it needed to restore the reputation of a studio that had been beaten up pretty badly. “Basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we’ve ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did. With tools that don’t exist.”

FB didn’t have RPG stats, a visible PC, spells, save systems, a party of 4 people, the same kind of cutscenes etc and couldn’t create any of those things. BW had to create these on top of it. BW initially underestimated how much work this would be. BW were the FB guinea pigs. Early on in DAI’s development, even the most basic tasks were excruciating, and this impacted even fundamental aspects of game design and dev. When FB’s tools did function they were finicky and difficult. DICE’s team supported them but had limited resources and were 8 hours ahead. Since creating new content in FB was so difficult, trying to evaluate its quality became impossible. FB engine updates made things even more challenging. After every one, BW had to manually merge and test it; this was debilitating, and there were times when the build didn’t work for a month or was really unstable.

Meanwhile the art department were having a blast. FB was great for big beautiful environments. For months they made as much as possible, taking educated guesses when they didn’t know yet what the designers needed. “For a long time there was a joke on the project that we’d made a fantastic-looking screenshot generator, because you could walk around these levels with nothing to do. You could take great pictures.”

The concept of DAI as open-world was stymying the story/writers and gameplay/designers teams. What were players going to do in these big landscapes? How could BW ensure exploring remained fun after many hours? Their teams didn’t have time for system designers to envision, iterate and test a good “core gameplay loop” (quests, encounters, activities etc). FB wouldn’t allow it. Designers couldn’t test new ideas or answer questions because basic features were missing or didn’t exist yet.

EA’s CEO told BW they should have the ability to ride dragons and that this would make DAI sell 10 million copies. BW didn’t take this idea very seriously

BW had an abstract idea that the player would roam the world solving problems and building up power or influence they could use. But how would that look/work like in-game? This could have used refinement and testing but instead they decided to build some levels and hope they could figure it out as they went.

One day in late 2012, after a year of strained development on DAI, Mark Darrah asked Mike Laidlaw to go to lunch. “We’re walking out to his car,” Laidlaw said, “and I think he might have had a bit of a script in his head. [Darrah] said, ‘All right, I don’t actually know how to approach this, so I’m just going to say it. On a scale of one to apocalyptic... how upset would you be if I said [the player] could be, I dunno, a Qunari Inquisitor?’”

Laidlaw was baffled. They’d decided that the player could be only a human in DAI. Adding other playable races like Darrah was asking for would mean they’d need to quadruple their budget for animation, voice acting, and scripting.

“I went, ‘I think we could make that work’,” Laidlaw said, asking Darrah if he could have more budget for dialogue.

Darrah answered that if Laidlaw could make playable races happen, he couldn’t just have more dialogue. He could have an entire year of production.

Laidlaw was thrilled. “Fuck yeah, OK,” he recalled saying.

MD had actually already realized at this point it’d be impossible to finish DAI in 2013. They needed at least a year’s delay and adding the other playable races was part of a plan/planned pitch to secure this. He was in the process of putting together a pitch to EA: let BW delay the game, and in exchange it’d be bigger and better that anyone at EA had envisioned. These new marketing points included playable races, mounts and a new tactical camera. If EA wouldn’t let them delay, they would have had to cut things. Going into that BW were confident but nervous, especially in the wake of EA’s recent turmoil where they’d just parted ways with their CEO and had recruited a new board member while they hunted for a new one. They didn’t know how the new board member would react, and the delay would affect EA’s projections for that fiscal year. Maybe it was the convincing pitch, or the exec turmoil, or the specter of DA2, or maybe EA didn’t like being called “The Worst Company in America”. Winning that award 2 years in a row had had a tangible impact on the execs and led to feisty internal meetings on how to repair EA’s image. Whatever the reasons, EA greenlit the delay.

The PAX Crestwood demo was beautiful but almost entirely fake. By fall 2013, BW had implemented many of FB’s ‘parts’, but still didn’t know what kind of ‘car’ they were making. ML and team scripted the PAX demo by hand, entirely based on what BW thought would be in the game. The level & art assets were real but the gameplay wasn’t. “Part of what we had to do is go out early and try to be transparent because of DA2. And just say, ‘Look, here, it’s the game, it’s running live, it’s at PAX.’ Because we wanted to make that statement that we’re here for fans.”

DA2 hung on the team like a shadow. There was insecurity, uncertainty, they had trouble sticking to one vision. Which DA2 things were due to the short dev time and which were bad calls? What stuff should they reinvent? There were debates over combat (DAO-style vs DA2-style) and arguments over how to populate the wilderness.

In the months after that demo, BW cut much of what they’d shown in it. Even small features went through many permutations. DAI had no proper preproduction phase (important for testing and discarding things), so leads were stretched thin and had to make impulsive decisions.

By the end of 2013, DAI had 200+ people working on it, and dozens of additional outsourced artists in Russia and China. Coordinating all the work across various departments was challenging and a full-time job for several people. At this sheer scale of game dev, there are many complexities and inter-dependencies. Work finally became significantly less tedious and more doable when BW and DICE added more features to FB. Time was running out though, and another delay was a no.

The team spent many hours in November and December piecing together a “narrative playable” version of the game to be the holiday period’s game build for BW staff to test that year. Feedback on the demo was bad. There were big complaints on story, that it didn’t make sense and was illogical. Originally the PC became Inquisitor and sealed the breach in the prologue, which removed a sense of urgency. In response the writers embarked on Operation Sledgehammer (breaking a bone to set it right), radically revising the entire first act.

The other big piece of negative feedback was that battles weren’t fun. Daniel Kading, who had recently joined BW and brought with him a rigorous new method for testing combat in games, went to BW leadership with a proposal: give him authority to open his own little lab with the other designers and call up the entire team for mandatory play sessions for test purposes. They agreed and he used this experiment to get test feedback and specifically pinpoint where problems were. Morale took a turn for the better that week, DK’s team made several tweaks, and through these sessions feedback ratings went from 1.2 to 8.8 four weeks later.

Many on the team wished they didn’t have to ship for old consoles (clunky, less powerful). BW leadership decided not to add features to the next-gen versions that wouldn’t be possible on the older ones, so that both versions of the game played the same. This limited things and meant the team had to find creative solutions. “I probably should’ve tried harder to kill [the last-gen] version of the game”, said Aaryn Flynn. In the end the next-gen consoles sold very well and only 10% of DAI sales were on last-gen.

“A lot of what we do is well-intentioned fakery,” said Patrick Weekes, pointing to a late quest called “Here Lies The Abyss”. “When you assault the fortress, you have a big cut scene that has a lot of Inquisition soldiers and a lot of Grey Wardens on the walls. And then anyone paying attention or looking for it as you’re fighting through the fortress will go, ‘Wow, I’m only actually fighting three to four guys at a time.’ Because in order for that to work [on old gen], you couldn’t have too many different character types on screen.”

Parts of DAI were still way behind schedule because it was so big and complex, and because some tools hadn’t started functioning until late on. Some basic features weren’t able to be implemented til the last minute (they were 8 months from ship before they could get all party members in the squad. At one point PW was playtesting to check if Iron Bull’s banter was firing, and realized there was no way to even recruit IB) and some flaws couldn’t be identified til the last few months. Trying to determine flow and pacing was rough.

They couldn’t disappoint fans again. They needed to take the time to revise and polish every aspect of DAI. “I think DAI is a direct response to DA2,” said Cameron Lee. “DAI was bigger than it needed to be. It had everything but the kitchen sink in it, to the point that we went too far... I think that having to deal with DA2 and the negative feedback we got on some parts of that was driving the team to want to put everything in and try to address every little problem or perceived problem.”

At this point they had 2 options: settle for an incomplete game, which would disappoint fans especially post-DA2, or crunch. They opted to crunch. It was the worst period of extended overtime in DAI’s development yet and was really rough: late nights, weekends, lost family time, 12-14 hour days, stress, mental health impacts.

During 2014′s crunch, they finally finished off features they wished they’d nailed down in year 1. They completed the Power (influence) system and added side quests, hidden treasures and puzzles. Things that weren’t working like destructible environments were promptly removed. The writers rewrote the prologue at least 6 times, but didn’t have enough time to pay such attention to the ending. Just a few months before launch pivotal features like jumping were added.

By summer BW had bumped back release by another 6 weeks for polish. DAI had about 99,000 bugs in it (qualitative and quantitative; things like “I was bored here” are a bug). “The number of bugs on an open-world game, I’ve never seen anything like it. But they’re all so easy to fix, so keep filing these bugs and we’ll keep fixing them.” For BW it was harder to discover them, and the QA team had to do creative experimentation and spend endless late nights testing things. PW would take builds home to let their 9 year old son play around. Their son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse and accidentally discovered a bug where if you dismounted in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would vanish. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else ever had or will ever like the horse.”

MD had a knack for prioritizing which bugs should be fixed, like the one where you could get to inaccessible areas by jumping on Varric’s head. “Muscle memory is incredibly influential at this point. Through the hellfire which is game development, we’re forged into a unit, in that we know what everyone’s thinking and we understand everyone’s expectations.”

At launch they still didn’t have all their tools working, they only had their tools working enough.

DAI became the best-selling DA game, beating EA’s sales expectations in just a few weeks. If you look closely you can see the lingering remnants of its chaotic development, like the “garbage quests” in the Hinterlands. Some players didn’t realize they could leave the area and others got caught in a “weird, compulsive gratification loop”. Internet commentators rushed to blame “those damn lazy devs” but really, these were the natural consequences of DAI’s struggles. Maybe things would have been different if they’d miraculously received another year of dev time, or if they’d had years before starting development to build FB’s tools first.

“The challenge of the Hinterlands and what it represented to the opening 10 hours of DAI is exactly the struggle of learning to build open-world gameplay and mechanisms when you are a linear narrative story studio,” said Aaryn Flynn.

“DA2 was the product of a remarkable time-line challenge,” said Mike Laidlaw, “DAI was the product of a remarkable technical challenge. But it had enough time to cook, and as a result it was a much better game.”

Read the chapter for full details of course!

#dragon age #bioware #video games #SW:TOR #mass effect #I've seen plenty of this info discussed in articles/thinkpieces and on online communities over the years #but it's nice to read it first hand #some very insightful stuff here #these behind the scenes looks are very valuble #a lot of DAI's elements make sense given the context and what was going on in the background and the tech challenges they faced etc #be kind and respectful to devs folks they're human beings #also in general this book is really interesting and easy to read #funny in places too #it has lots of other chapters on lots of other games including Stardew Valley #I def recc buying it #anyway hope this post is useful/interesting to someone!#oh and as always support good treatment of game devs #crunch culture in the industry is harmful and exploitative

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vroenis · 4 years

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Lost Legacy Exemplifies Naughty Dog’s Cultural Crisis

There’s a discussion about Ocean’s 8 that positions its existence around whether or not it's necessary as a counterpoint to the Ocean’s reboot - the Ocean’s Cinematic Universe - if you will (what a world we live in) - that it was only made as a gender flip of the reboot that spawned two sequels, three films in total cast almost entirely with men.

My perspective is that as much as I generally enjoyed the Ocean’s reboots for what they were, Ocean’s Eleven should have been a cast entirely with women in the first place.

The heroes we both need and deserve.

Massive spoilers for the original 1960 Lewis Milestone version and the Steven Soderbergh one in 2001 of Ocean’s Eleven - Soderbergh’s flip is of-course that they get to keep the money at the end so that they have to potentially give it back in the sequel he knew he’d be able to make, whereas I doubt Milestone knew he’d ever get a sequel back in the early 60′s so the rub for film-making back then is to burn the money at the end. Nevertheless even for the early 2000′s, the boldest of moves would have been to cast it with women, not to be progressive but also to be progressive, tho that’s still an absurd thought that to cast women is progressive - but to be smart. Ocean’s 8 is a fantastic film, deftly written, paced, acted, shot and edited. Would the world have responded to it in like-kind? I know how *I* would have responded to it, I think you can answer for yourself how societal cultures may have responded at any point from 2001 thru to now. In any case, I have Ocean’s 8 on blu-ray. I love it.

A reader asked me whether I’d played Uncharted: The Lost Legacy after kindly reading through my bludgeoning of Uncharted 4, and seeing as they were patient enough to endure that blood-letting, I felt I owed them and probably Naughty Dog the time of day to give Uncharted-And-A-Half a chance, and I’m really glad I did. Fair warning, there’s a lot I didn’t like about Lost Legacy, and there’s going to be some more pain - a lot of pain. I don’t think any of my tumblr audience is quite on the rest of my socials, but anyone who’s connected to me anywhere else on the Wire was subject to my frustrations as I played thru the game on Saturday, including the blurred image of my Google Keep notes I took while playing the game in preparation for this journal. I keep notes now.

Nevertheless, I can say that on the assumption that the Uncharted series is wrapped, or at least in the narrative arc with these characters as we know them, that Lost Legacy is easily without question my favourite Uncharted game by far.

On that assumption that Uncharted is more or less done, now’s as good a time as any to take a top-down look at the franchise as a whole. I know I already did a fair bit of that in the last piece, but some broader thoughts on what the series does and says have solidified while playing Lost Legacy, and I’ll discuss them as a lead-in to my thoughts on the game.

Again - this is going to be riddled with spoilers for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and most likely the entire Uncharted series, so if you’ve not played them and are interested in doing so, or don’t want to see them heavily critiqued, please stop here.

The first game was released in 2007 and was apparently in development for roughly three years. What was happening up to and around 2004 to 2007? September 11 had happened in 2001, the world was at war in the Middle East in Afghanistan and second invasion of Iraq had begun in 2003, Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005 - the same year the IRA ended armed conflict in Northern Ireland, 2005 saw the outbreak of H5N1 Avian Flu - topical right now. There are so many more, I can’t list them all here - lots of momentous events that in some way or another highlight community awareness in some way - that’s probably a bit of an obtuse statement but hopefully it’ll string together in a sec. What struck me and a bunch of my friends odd about the first, then the second and then somehow every Uncharted game since, is that Naughty Dog seem to choose an ethnicity for their antagonists and scratch the surface of “what if this element of their cultural violence is bad”, but then leave it so shallow that it remains a caricature and comes off as casually and carelessly racist. The first game frames the theme around Nazis, but the actual enemies are anything but. Yes, they’re intended to be mercenaries, but they’re hardly nondescript, they’re absolutely of very specific ethnicity.

From the second game onward, Naughty Dog seem to want to make use of real world settings and do some nuanced research on actual sociopolitical conflict and I always feel uneasy about how its presented. Lost Legacy begins much the same way and I worried about the tone going in. An active war-zone in India as gravitas to your setting that is then almost completely abandoned until the very end? This is my problem with how the writers treat setting in Uncharted. They use very real conflicts that have real-world consequences for people in which actual lives are lost to inject gravity into their narrative and then quickly discard it for the sake of shenanigans once the wise-cracking starts when the tone shifts gear and the characters themselves take centre-stage in the foreground.

Here’s the thing.

The character’s are enough. I *love* these characters. Their story is fantastic. Nadine’s and Chloe’s story was the best and most cohesive of the entire series. Also it only took me roughly six hours to play thru and I only feel like half of that was wasted! That’s still probably being too generous but I’m grasping for positives, here. Still - I don’t know why the senior production team has never had confidence in the core of their product which is the charm of their characters and the play dynamic - Uncharted is primarily about *seeing* and *doing* - for the most part, unfortunately, separately.

The dialogue between Chloe and Nadine is extremely interesting, it is absolutely the best thing in the game, yet it keeps getting interrupted by stupid gameplay beats due to poor timing of rolling up on level locations. Uncharted 4 was supposed to have locations hidden around levels where you could engage in dialogue between characters but I barely found them - why hide such interesting content in your game?? It’s completely absurd. Then the only few I did find were between Elena and Nathan altho I really don’t think those were meant to be hidden, and they were so poorly written and I hated them so much, I didn’t care to discover any more. Again - no disrespect at all to Nolan North and Troy Baker whom I absolutely adore and respect, but I didn’t find anything engaging or interesting *at all* about the brother narrative. I didn’t care one bit what that nonsense was about. What about Sully? Where’s Sully’s story?? I’m just so - so glad we got a story for Chloe, and that at least Nadine got some great screen time too as a part of it and that it all presented so well.

Before I continue to praise what went well, there are a few things I can’t let pass. While the driving has thankfully improved and controls quite well now, the exclusion of a minimap or GPS HUD element is interesting. I’m fairly certain it’s intentional as to not detract from the game’s clean, cinematic look, to not break immersion, but this just generates a horrific breakdown in actual player experience for me. Without any navigational assists, I constantly got lost and stopped every 20 meters to check the map, frequently driving into dead-ends, off cliffs and past where I wanted or needed to go. The game isn’t a 30 hour open-world experience with distinct and varied landmarks the player will familiarise themselves with and learn to navigate by, for the most part the level is fairly homogeneous in object geometry.

Some of the puzzles take far too long to mechanically execute, in particular the smashy-slashy statue block jumpy stupid whatever it’s called one and the sliding shadow motif. It doesn’t matter that neither actually takes too long once you know the solution, it’s that they feel long and then are actually over-long and also not interesting to mechanically execute. This is due mostly to clunky character animation and animation smoothing, and part of Naughty Dog’s overall obsession with being cinematic which is something I’ll return to towards the end of this piece, something which has been a strength but will ultimately be to their detriment. While cinematic visuals might be a benefit for traversal, it’s something that absolutely does not suit puzzle-solving. In the example of the statue-block puzzle, the hard reset each time the player is hit means laboriously jogging all the way back to the beginning and starting again - it’s just poor puzzle design having to begin again from a full reset. There’s no satisfaction in having to remember the whole thing and while I didn’t look up the solution online, I’m willing to bet many people will have just dialled up a clip on YouTube and copied it without figuring it out themselves. This is a failure of connecting what’s satisfying about moving in your game and what’s satisfying about solving puzzles, something Crystal Dynamics understood far better in the Tomb Raider reboots, in particular the second outing (Rise of) with their much more environment-centric puzzling.

The sliding shadow puzzle just simply takes way too long to jog around the space, then clip onto the hot-zone for each lever, wait for the animation to lift it, wait for the animation for the pieces to slide, rinse, repeat. Once you know what you have to do, it’s overly frustrating actually having to do it.

It brings me to a weird quirk of design where the puzzle designers perhaps don’t understand something that the environmental designers do. Maybe they didn’t get the same little notes in the Slack channel, or Trello board or Teams pin or whatever. Uncharted level-design has almost no back-tracking, less in each successive game, and it’s almost entirely absent from Lost Legacy - you’d have to look closely to realise you’re navigating the same area you came in thru and almost always moving over it in a different way that’s been modified - now it’s flooded, now there’s a bridge, now you’re swinging or leaping or climbing where you weren’t etc. I feel like this is the Hidetaka Miyazaki Souls/Borne effect of level design in which environments are designed to be both realistic and practical.

Great! Good for the level designers. Did the puzzle designers not get that note? Maybe they did. I need to stop thinking that every poor optimisation is a symptom of ignorance - that’s bad form on my part. What’s more likely is it’s a symptom of either bad leadership, poor tool implementation, lack of time or too narrow or strict an observation of representative vision - by which I mean - they can’t change the way the characters move or animate just for puzzles, because it has to be consistent with the cinematic representation of the game as a whole - and that sucks lemons. It means the overall play experience suffers for the sake of the overall cinematic experience except executing a puzzle isn’t cinematic unless it’s expansive...

Like the positive example I’ll give of the light reflector room. Shoplifted from Uncharted 2′s giant knife that has Nathan climb all over a giant knife, Lost Legacy’s light reflector room has slightly less climbing but is a much larger space, more impressive and a much better example of good puzzling in Uncharted. It’s not difficult to solve but again (I think again?) I’ll argue that you don’t come to Uncharted for difficult puzzles - you don’t come to Tomb Raider for difficult puzzles, either.

The puzzles in these games should be mostly environmental because they feel good solving them, and solving them should be more about the doing - the playing - and the playing should be moving - running, jumping, climbing etc.

Both the giant knife and the reflector room are a joy to execute because they’re fantastically realised - large cavernous environments that aren’t annoying to navigate, that give you time to appreciate both the scale of the spaces and the details the designers and artists have put into them. Lost Legacy’s is more impressive because you do a lot more puzzling and spend much more time in its vastly larger space, culminating in combat that usually I would be ho-hum about, but I guess exhibits more animation and destruction tech which while scripted, is still impressive nonetheless given how extremely difficult it is to have interactivity still occurring.

I have a few things I want to mention before I begin to wrap up, given it’s going to be a very long wrap - I’d say I’m taking cues from Joseph Anderson but I’ve always been this verbose.

The medallion puzzles were excellent, in part perhaps because they felt like the closest thing to the Tomb Raider reboots’ challenge tombs. Some of them were silly and lazily implemented, the worst offender being you just had to shoot mans and get the medallion from the lock-box that the mans had put it in (pfft), but the best ones were integrated into the environment such that you may well have walked past or thru areas that were puzzles before you knew what they were. This brings up one of the most interesting things I’ve been turning over for quite some time now. Ben Croshaw aka Yahtzee aka Zero Punctuation may have first mentioned “chest high walls” in his first Gears of War video, but it may well have been an Uncharted game. I don’t remember but he will have thrown in mentions of all the generic cover-shooters as a catch-all for how the environments immediately telegraph that Combat™ will happen. It’s a particularly astute remark and speaks volumes of video game design - developers always seem to have very specific design language to separate traversal, combat and puzzling. While I clearly don’t care for combat most days, and yes - I do acknowledge there are some practical concerns for combat that can’t be avoided, I always envisaged design that blurred the lines between puzzle and environment so that you never quite knew what was and wasn’t a puzzle. Everything should be the puzzle. In some senses, Cyan’s old Myst games were a bit like this but in a very rudimentary and crude way - sure, they’re quite old now, but even those had very clear not puzzle areas. It’s a complex and subtle subject, but something of a study of games like Fireproof Games’ The Room would be in order. Understandably smaller scale, but the thinking behind it is definitely adjacent.

Final notes - the young Indian girl in the prologue has amazing animations that you’ll miss entirely unless you swing the camera yourself. A whole team of people or a single animator has spent hours on those animations - that a director or team leader hasn’t forced the player to see and appreciate them is a disservice.

Every section where you have to do something under pressure like run from mans shooting at you or dash through a lengthy section of crumbling cave network etc. is a horrible play experience of not knowing where to go. They’re trying to inject excitement by applying pressure but there’s no clear guidance and no dependence on player skill, so you end in bizarre fail-states due to going in completely the wrong direction that glitches cameras or scene time-outs resulting in check-points and the whole thing just doesn’t scan as a cinematic experience. I hate hate hate them - you’re subject to the same musical swell that’s supposed to be like a movie only to fail again and it comes off as b-grade and pathetic. Every game has had this problem and it is just straight bad design.

Three? Four? Games in a row, Naughty Dog have recycled;

being pursued on foot by an armoured vehicle crashing through level geometry while you have to run and occasionally shoot/fight mans,

driving down a shanty-town on a hill pursued by an armoured vehicle - perhaps the same one as previous scene

a big chase scene of lots of vehicles jumping from vehicle to vehicle shooting and/or punching mans that may or may not include...

a train combat sequence where you start at the back of the train and work your way to the front of it shooting mans as you go

This lacks creativity at this point. I think duplicating these once each - so you do them twice total across the franchise is fine, but they hit the same beats in the same way - exactly - every time they appear. It just strikes me as Naughty Dog just not knowing what else to do. At one point, I think it was in Uncharted 4, when driving down the shanty-town on the hill, I literally had a brain-fart not knowing which game I was playing because I swear we did it in 2 and 3. Did we do it in 3?? Look, I don’t know. But it’s getting old. At least we didn’t do it in Lost Legacy, but we did the train and I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of doing the same things in the same way. It could have been a train but it should have been in a way that just wasn’t just another Uncharted train. It hasn’t worn thin, it’s worn out.

Overall, the games look great... but playing them feels like they’re stuck in PS2 and early PS3 era philosophies, like Naughty Dog haven’t evolved and don’t realise that people’s brains function much quicker and can process more, or that the media we consume, the games we play function at a higher level and we can digest more, we’re capable of processing higher functions. I’ve been playing Ubisoft’s The Division 2 and enjoying it more the more I play, much to my surprise. I understand the intent behind the gameplay is extremely different to the single-player experience of Uncharted, however there are some parallels in what it achieves animation wise;

The Division is also a cover shooter but of-course as a multiplayer, open-world live-service game, its intent is to telegraph to the player that the entire environment is a permanent play-space in which to always be playing. It utilises an information-rich GUI that is an always-on system with button icons telling the player what button to press over what surfaces to snap to, vault over, climb up, run to (and snap to cover), open and loot, interact with etc. I don’t know if these can be turned off but I like them on. It’s a pretty amazing feat that almost every environmental object has been mapped as a snap-to-cover and/or climbable object. For this reason, the character movement in Division is pretty quick and snappy, however it still manages to have a decent degree of natural human kinetics in the character rigging which is amazing. This means if you move-off from standing still, there’s a slight delay as your “weight” shifts, same if you change direction. When I say “snap” to cover, it’s not actually instantaneous, your character makes a movement and takes time to do so, yet it’s still not sluggish. Somehow the developers have worked at fine-tuning a balance between not-instant, but not too slow.

This is something that even in Lost Legacy, I feel Naughty Dog simply can’t do. The animations are decent during play - they’re outstanding during cutscenes (we’re getting there), but character models have a really awkward relationship with the environment. They clip awkwardly with ladders and buttons and wheels - with puzzles and levers - getting the grappling hook to prompt is again better than Uncharted 4 but still not ideal. I had far fewer glitch-outs than 4 too, which was a significant improvement, but I still had to animate back and forth a few times to get into hot-zones appropriately and with character kinetics not quite right, it wasn’t exactly easy.

And again to be fair, this stuff is suuuuuper difficult. I don’t mean to talk about this stuff like it’s cooking instant ramen. It’s so freaking tough. Rigging and mapping interactive character models has to be one of the most stupendously difficult things a developer has to do - making it work with all that scripting, getting it to play nice with all those assets and lines and lines of coding for the full experience. I have so much respect for game developers and what an astronomical task it is. So when I say I prefer one development team’s product over another’s, I don’t mean to say that the other team is absolute garbage - there are so many things that might contribute to that final product and we have no idea what’s been going on at Naughty Dog. If the team leaders and producers say they’re happy or even if they don’t, and the decision is made to ship, there’s nothing more they can say or do.

If there was one thing I absolutely loved about this game, it was the two main characters and the story that was told about them. I can excuse the main text as the catalyst that brought them together - even to the point that it’s a story about Chloe ultimately deciding what’s important to her. My issue with this comes full circle with the setting being in a real world conflict. There’s a bit of white savour complex in there in that Asav might be the narrative’s antagonist, but he at least is local. It’s not clear exactly what Chloe’s ethnicity is and I’m not here to judge what her stakes are in it because clearly her character has a sense of home and place in India, but she certainly also has a complex sense of being an outsider. So the point is not to judge, but the game also is unclear on its positioning other than she’s the heroic vehicle of deliverance. See what I mean about theme? This is what I mean by you could have just as easily written almost an identical story about Nadine and Chloe, with very similar interactions, tension, redemption and resolve - even with an antagonist, conflict and a happy ending, but either treated real sociopolitical issues with better care or not set your game in them at all. I’m all for setting games in the real world, but if you’re going to do it, do it right. I’m not the person to ask.

I need to be careful not to direct that criticism at the base-level developers nor at Claudia Black who is the manifestation of Chloe’s voice because she does an amazing job of bringing her to life. The casting of Laura Bailey voicing a black South African Nadine was much more awkward given Nadine’s ethnicity wasn’t decided when she was cast - again that’s on Naughty Dog’s leadership, but I won’t knock Laura Bailey for it. It’s easy to say she should have resigned, perhaps she should have, that’s an economical question only Laura can answer and I’m sure it’s not an easy one. Suffice to say, VO work isn’t lucrative.

What a side-track.

I don’t think I ever cared about Nathan. I think I always cared about Elena, and not because WAIFU and also not because WHITE KNIGHT or whatever other bullshit reasons stupid alphagamerz will spit from their frontheads. Elena’s just more interesting, probably because Nathan is written like a design document and Elena’s written like a human being. Naughty Dog want to create a game about adventuring with lush expansive environments, shooty mcshooting and light puzzling. They want it to be cinematic and unrivalled in its quality and they have the smarts to build the tech around it, with Sony’s help. Backed by Sony money, they take VO seriously and do a great job at creating that cinematic experience, coupled with some above-par for video games narrative writing. The problem this introduces for me is Nathan’s raison d'être has to justify everything - action, tension, stupidity...

Nathan Drake really is the design document.

I feel like he’s just the unfortunate side-effect of being central to the game, and it’s typical of my character to just not dig the focus of things and get into subtexts a whole lot more. Often I get into things in the periphery, things adjacent - I don’t love or hate Shakespeare or for that matter Baz Luhrmann but Romeo + Juliet ‘96 is an amazing film and not at all because of the eponymous Romeo and Juliet and again, not for Leonardo di Caprio (spit!) or for Claire Danes (she can stay) but the absolutely divine cast of supporting characters (John Leguizamo will live in my heart forever oh baby).

That Nathan makes stupid decisions is already something that turns me off. That he makes poor decisions because... he’s an orphan? Because... he was bullied? Because... his brother left him? This is why he’s not transparent with his wife? Actually, he’s quite realistic. Except the people like him I’ve known in my life aren’t heroes - they’re pathetic or unreliable or abusive or dangerous. Elena is an adult. She’s not perfect either and that’s also great because neither am I. As a side character she has the conceit of being more nuanced, but as the contra to Nathan, she’s also mature versus his childishness. OOOOAAAAH EVERYONE LOVES A LOVEABLE MANBABY OOAAAH COMEON LIVE A LITTLE EVERYONE’S GOT A LITTLE CHILD STILL IN THEM SOMEWHERE yea fine, I get it, like I’ve said before, yes - he embodies the recklessness and playfulness in us, but that’s a confusing position for a game that frequently tries to ground itself in real world conflict to be taking. You’re reducing him to that but injecting complex and nuanced characters like Elena and now eventually both Chloe and Nadine? I’m telling you now - any male that doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to grow-up, when the time to set aside the playfulness and be TRUTHFUL AND TRANSPARENT WITH HIS PARTNER is a dangerous person and FUCK THAT NOISE. Nathan, as much as I do absolutely - make no mistake - adore Nolan North’s voicing - ends up being another Homer Simpson - as long as you laugh at his stupidity, you’ll excuse it, and you’ll excuse the hurt that’s done by it, and that shit doesn’t fly with me. His redemption was not earned. I say again - Elena should throw him into the sea.

Nadine ends up being a fantastic character, even if she’s given less narrative time, she’s a great example of her behaviour telling more story in contrast to Chloe getting to reveal her past and it’s nice to see them play off one another. I feel Nadine and Chloe as characters hit great story beats in ways Nathan didn’t get to with pretty much any of the other characters in four games - not Sully, not Elena, not his brother, not even Chloe - all told, we never actually get any back-story on Nathan and Chloe and I think we’re better off for it because I don’t care.

Having a quick squiz around tumblr reveals the obvious and rampant shipping of Nadine and Chloe and I couldn’t be happier. I think Naughty Dog knew what they were doing. There were so many moments. Those moments were for us. I think they were subtle enough that the fragile manbabies would have missed them but there’s no fooling us. Some of the babyboiz would have been seething thru their mouthbreething hairmouths and I’m sure probably took to the internet but that’s OK, they can remain unfucked incels for the rest of their lives or worse, serviced by whatever unwashed creatures want to dare fondle them in the dark. The elephant ride and that whole conversation was almost enough for me to forgive the absolute disaster that was Uncharted 4. It was given enough time to breathe, it was absolutely beautiful, and just when you thought they were going to terminate it and apologise for making things too awks, it concludes just perfectly and you get a phone picture that doesn’t have Nadine in frame, yet her presence in that picture is definite, pervasive and emotional. Again, some people may have completely missed it and maybe it chalks up to life experience, but as completely contrived as an artefact of complete fiction as that whole sequence might be, it was one of the most wonderfully tender moments ever created in a video game and I wonder if it makes the whole affair worth it.

In the Uncharted 4 piece, I threw in a few barbs about the most meaningful interactions, and in Lost Legacy, what I really loved was Chloe taking photos of things she thinks are beautiful and interesting on her phone, and feeding the elephant - these were the most meaningful interactions in the game. I love that the photos on the phone didn’t serve any gameplay utility at all, they were there because her character wanted to document her travels, because she thought what she was seeing was cool, and any time in the game, you could pull out your phone and look at what you’d seen. It was such a good and important decision to have the very first picture to be the Indian girl in the market, as that rather than the local conflict, does more to ground you and Chloe as a character in the setting. The game never forces you to look at it as a reminder, but you know it’s there.

I did steal these from the internet, sorry - so if they’re yours, let me know and I’ll be happy to take them down - this one in particular, seeing as it’s a photomode capture. I should have taken my own but I don’t do photomode caps on my first play-thru and there’s no-way I’m replaying this ever again.

It took five games for Naughty Dog to finally get some decent character writing, but a part of me still feels they couldn’t have existed without all the dross of the other games. There’s this immense amount of back-story and labour both the developers and the players had to slog thru to get to this point, and I feel as tho we get here and there’s just too little to show for it. I still really enjoyed the story that was told, the sense of character I felt, but a lot of that was contingent on the Uncharted universe in situ. Lost Legacy feels like a combining of all of Naughty Dog’s narrative motifs - the earnest redemption, the moment of tenderness and connection centred around peaceful animals - it’s a greatest hits of Naughty Dog in the best way possible because each narrative beat hits perfectly. I’m glad I played it with two characters who endeared themselves so much to me, that I truly cared about.

I’ve spend a lot of time praising the strengths of writing for at least Lost Legacy, but for each thing I’ve enjoyed about at least these two characters, there have been so many things I’ve been critical of. I feel like in order to get to the tiniest bit of enjoyment, I had to suffer thru so much. Honestly I don’t know if it really was worth it. It’s hard to know given that who I am now and where my tastes are and have developed as a consequence of my experiences, and I definitely would not replay any of those games again - so where does that leave me? I can’t go back and play The Last Of Us and I absolutely won’t play the second game, I just can’t do Naughty Dog games now, I don’t have it in me.

Naughty Dog have spent the better part of two decades developing tech for visual fidelity specifically for the Playstation hardware platforms (PS3 and 4). They’ve also been doing it by overworking their staff, many of which have left out of frustration or necessity. The problem they face is that as industry tools in general improve, there will no gap between games developed by Naughty Dog and any other contemporary studio from a visual perspective. Make no mistake - the Uncharted games are absolutely chock-full of objects, geometry and animation - somehow miraculously so on the Playstation platform in comparison to other games with the exception of other first-party and exclusive games receiving similar support from Sony such as Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn and Sucker Punch’s forthcoming Ghost of Tsushima. There are probably other similar examples for the previous generation on PS3.

Yes, there’s a certain style of game Naughty Dog create as far as narrative goes but because it’s becoming more cinematic, that style is judged more and more by cinematic standards and at best it’s barely semi-professional aside from the outstanding voice work. There are few striking visual motifs that set Naughty Dog games apart from a design perspective, and the gameplay and mechanical constructions that once distinguished them at least a little from others are ever diminishing at increasing rates - more-so as their work practices make the level of quality they set out to achieve ever more unsustainable.

Lost Legacy encapsulates a lot of what I feel about video games as a whole at the moment - as an industry and as a culture. It’s a snapshot of a culture that’s achieving wonderful, beautiful things that are in ways huge - immense, yet somehow can feel so small in comparison to some of the challenges it faces. It’s an industry and culture experiencing a period of great upheaval, where after years upon years of malpractice, terrible things somehow still endure. It’s a space where sometimes it feels like a battle to find the tiniest shred of beauty buried in the dirt and ash, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to the frustration that working thru it brings about while grass-roots labourers continue to be burned.

Like many things in life, both at my age and at the level I guess a person gets to at the exposure rate of a thing, I’ve cut back a great deal on my engagement time with video games, so I’m a lot less patient with the functions and mechanisms of a game. There’s a labour element of video games that I feel developers might think is somehow necessary and there’s a component of that which is true, just not quite in the way they think it is, and it takes a unique frame of thinking to break out of traditional design to understand it. Again I’m not saying there’s anything special about how I understand games - there’s nothing at all original in my thoughts - I’ve shoplifted them wholesale from a hundred other people back from when I used to read Gamasutra and even now when I read designers and the people I follow and talk to on Twitter etc. There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with traditions and the people that enjoy them - just because they’re not my thing any more doesn’t mean they’re bad. It just means I’ve moved to something else and I shouldn’t engage with them.

That, I think, is what I’m waiting for. Kentucky Route Zero, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a whole bunch of others - these are the games I feel are pushing past the boundaries of tradition. Then the moments Uncharted takes itself out of its traditions - Nadine and Chloe’s elephant ride, Chloe’s phone pictures, Elena and Nathan’s house tours especially as Cassie - that’s when I think now you’re running! Run with it! Look, I’m still playing The Division - I’m still moving and shooting and enjoying it.

But we can do so much more. Many developers are doing more. We as an audience need to play more All of us together need to do and play more.

(The epilogue is me figuring I talk a lot of shit about AAA games and nary a word about KRZ, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther and the rest and I get it, but oooooo howdy is it really difficult for me to talk pragmatically about games I actually love)

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gman-003 · 7 years

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Legends - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Analyzed, Part Two

Levias is an even worse fit. He's supposedly a guardian spirit for Skyloft, but he's never mentioned until the part of the game where you have to go get a MacGuffin from him. After that, he never appears in the story again. I think he gets more total screentime in Hyrule Warriors than in Skyward Sword. He feels like a Link's Awakening reference that was tossed in at the last minute, when it was decided that Skyward Sword was to be the origin myth for the Legend of Zelda series. Games have become a very narrative-focused experience. When the Legend of Zelda series began, all you had was "you're the hero, go rescue the princess from the monster by getting all the magic things". You're still the hero, there's still a princess and there's still monsters and magic things, but the series has gotten a lot more story-focused as time has passed.

That's not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Early games skimped on the story because they didn't have the technical capability to tell it well. The NES basically didn't have the memory capacity for books' worth of text or minutes-long animations. And a story done well is always worthwhile.

But it has to be done well. Is the story of Skyward Sword good? Well... kind of. It has great bits, it has okay bits, and it has some bad bits.

Good: Zelda has agency, Groose has arc

Certain tropes have gotten a lot of flak for their prevalence. The "damsel in distress" trope, the helpless female character who you must rescue, gets some deserved criticism, and the Zelda series has used that trope pretty extensively in past games.

Not here.

Skyward Sword gives us a Zelda who takes action. She does things. In the earliest parts of the game, she sticks up to a bully to protect you. When she gets thrown to the surface world by a tornado, you go to rescue her, only to discover a) she's taking care of herself, b) she's on her own quest, and c) she's actually kind of busy right now, let's try to meet up later, k?

Even when she becomes trapped in a crystal thing... she was the one who put herself there. She had to do some weird magic stuff to keep The Imprisoned... imprisoned, and until you kill the thing for good, she's too busy to come have sloppy makeouts so get off your ass and finish the quest already, Link. Get it together, because she's got hers.

The complaint about the trope is often misused. Tropes are tools, and tools exist to be used (although yes, the extent to which that particular one is used is indicative of problems with our culture's gender roles). Using the damsel-in-distress trope to, say, give the broad strokes of a story because you're on the NES and putting a more detailed story in the game would require cutting out half your gameplay, is perfectly valid. Nintendo could have told a good story even while using that trope... but instead, they gave us a Zelda who felt like a real character, who did real-character things and had a real story of her own.

In Skyward Sword, Zelda has an arc. She has character development. She has growth. She feels like a real person, with internal conflict and personal change. She's an actual good character.

She's not the only one. Groose - who I had pegged at first as the annoying comic-relief character - has an arc. He starts off as a bully - childishly cruel to those weaker, but a coward to those who he can not or will not harm. He sobs inconsolably when Zelda goes missing... until, eventually, his grief is overwhelmed by his envy at Link's exploits, and he tries to usurp him as protagonist, trying to be the one to save Zelda and, he hopes, win her favor. But visiting the strange surface world changes him. He learns to respect others. He finds his courage, helping Link fight a demon. He uses his brain, and not just his brawn. And, eventually, he realizes that Zelda is her own person, that he's doing both of them a disservice by trying to win her.

That's a story right there. That's an arc. It's not one that's well-suited to game form, honestly, but it's great character development. The low-level writing, the words and sentences of dialogue, is never particularly great in Skyward Sword, but the mid-level character crafting is on point.

For everyone except Link.

Okay: Proving your worth to be a hero, not being a hero

Link as a character has one big problem in *Skyward Sword*. He doesn't have agency. He never does things without another character, or several characters, pushing and prodding and guiding and dragging him through the story. His supporting cast is so supportive that he loses his protagonist status - because he gets told to do everything that he does, he becomes merely the pawn for other character's successes, rather than a hero in his own right. He's a bullet fired at Demise by Zelda. He's the dumb meat swinging Fi and the Goddess Sword around. He's the errand-boy of Impa, in two ways.

Link's character arc is barely an arc at all. It's all buildup for almost no payoff. Link spends the first three dungeons trying to prove to Impa that he's good enough to keep up, to not be a liability to her and Zelda. Then he spends three dungeons proving himself worthy of the sacred fires needed to forge the Master Sword. Then he has to go prove himself a hero to the three dragons. Link only "becomes a hero" at the very, very end, when he defeats Ghirahim and Demise - specifically, he becomes a hero when Demise gives him a chance to run away, and Link chases after him instead. So, about fifteen minutes before the credits roll, depending on how much trouble the final battle gave you. (It gave me a lot of trouble, by the way). Other games in the Legend of Zelda series did not make you wait nearly so long. In *Ocarina of Time*, Link gets his first hero moment when he first faces Ganondorf, and draws his sword against the king of evil. In *Wind Waker*, Link shows signs of heroism from the beginning, when he ventures into the forest to rescue a fallen stranger. Perhaps the writers of *Skyward Sword*��intended that early moment where Link ventures to the surface in search of Zelda to be that moment where he shows even a sign of heroism... but they sapped it of any meaning by having him be so forcefully prodded into it, by not one but two characters. I was yelling at the screen for them to shut up and let me go on an adventure already, but the cutscene dragged on of Fi and Gaepora telling me how important it is to go on an adventure. (There may be a blog entry entirely about this scene, as well as the role of certain steps of the Monomyth in interactive media, if I feel like it's worthwhile). Link isn't really changed by his adventures. He's learned skills and acquired powers he didn't have before, but he's fundamentally the same character, as far as I can tell. Maybe it's just hard to show a player character developing self-reliance and confidence, because their actions are controlled by the player? But plenty of other games have pulled this off - the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot springs to mind.

That brings up an interesting aside: does the protagonist of the story necessarily have to be the player character of the game? I would argue that Zelda is the protagonist of Skyward Sword's story, even though she's never controlled by the player. Link doesn't take initiative. He starts the game doing things because Zelda told him. When Zelda's gone, he does things because Fi told him, or because a dragon told him, or because someone just asked nicely. Zelda has far more agency than Link, and honestly has a better character arc.

In the end, it was Zelda that defeated Demise, not Link. Link might have been the one swinging the sword, but the victory was arranged by Zelda. She (as Hylia) placed all the tools Link needed in the places he would get them, and kept The Imprisoned from escaping until Link had assembled all the pieces necessary to kill it.

And even though I'm not sure the Legend of Zelda gameplay formula would be the best fit for such a story... I kind of wish I had been playing as Zelda instead. Or maybe playing as Impa, since she had lots of action going on, but was more closely involved with the story's protagonist. Either one seems like it could have been a good game.

Bad: Elements out of place

While Link is a bad fit for the protagonist role, he's at least a good fit for the player character role, and his story isn't jarringly bad. But there are elements that seem much more out of place.

The story of Skyward Sword has an unfortunate tendency to bring new characters in without foreshadowing or justification - characters that, logically, ought to have been known to the player earlier, but were not.

Demise, the game's final boss, sort of comes out of nowhere. You never see him except in the bestial, non-sapient form of The Imprisoned. You never see art depicting him as a humanoid or writings referencing him as such. This isn't completely without foreshadowing, as you do know that The Imprisoned is not in its original form, and it was once a fearsome demon king, but it's still quite abrupt to see him standing before you, wielding a sword. It was clearly intended to be a surprise, but it comes off more as a "we made the final boss fight without telling the writers" than a "clever twist ending".

And the game's very status as an origin seems to contradict its internal story. Skyward Sword has an obsession with the past. You're fighting an ancient evil that was sealed away in an ancient battle by ancient peoples under the guidance of an ancient goddess. Time travel is a theme of one of the dungeons and is a major component of the story - and you always go backward to the past, never forward to the future.

The game does not feel primitive. You have plenty of advanced technology - rotorcraft and electricity are in active use on Skyloft, and the are friggen robots on the surface. That doesn't jive at all with the supposed placement at the head of the timeline. The technology of the series jumps all over the place - Skyward Sword has all this advanced, modern tech, but the next few games per the official timeline, Minish Cap, Four Swords and Ocarina of Time feature very little tech beyond that of medieval Europe. You can't even argue that all the technology we see in Skyward Sword is ancient, pre-apocalyptic tech, which will break down and be lost over the next century or so. Some of it was indigenous! Beedle had electrical generators and human-propelled aircraft, stuff we emphatically do not see in our visits to the past. He didn't salvage that from an ancient ruin, he invented it. So why isn't that seen in every other game, since they all take place after Skyward Sword?

I suspect, contrary to the claims of Aonuma, that Skyward Sword was not intended to be placed at the head of the series from the start of development. It feels like it was created either to be at a vague future point in the timeline, or with no concept of being a sequel or prequel at all. Before the three-branched timeline was made official, it was commonly argued that the series had no strict chronology, that it was literally a legend, in the sense of being the same story told over and over by different storytellers.

Under that paradigm, Skyward Sword fits well. It has the magic sword of power, it has the princess and her protector, it has the mentor, it has the companion, it has the demon king, it has the whale, it has all the stock locations. It has all the recurring nouns of the Zelda franchise, it just puts them together differently, as every game did.

With its focus on the past, I could even buy it being a distant sequel to another game, perhaps on the Wind Waker branch of the timeline. I have not yet played the games billed as direct or indirect sequels to Wind Waker, though, so that may have its own contradictions. It could even fit around the rest of the timeline - have the "past" of Skyward Sword come before every other game, and the "present" come after. There's tons of theories that could be made to fit - and all of them fit better than the actual way they chose to present it.

Overall, I just don't feel like Skyward Sword is a perfect, natural starting place for the Zelda series. I have a theory as to why it was made the Official First Zelda Story, but that will have to wait for another time.

#everyzeldaproject #the legend of zelda #loz #skyward sword #game writing

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ohshimaacademy · 6 years

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Crash Landed (the reboot we never got)

Following the release of Mind Over Mutant, Radical Entertainment started working on their next game. 2009 went by without a mention of Crash's next big adventure, but the near future would have been very promising... had the division behind the next game not been laid off. Kept under wraps during the entirety of its development, Crash Landed was cancelled before it had a chance to be officially revealed. Luckily, quite a few concepts, images, and videos have surfaced since then, giving us a sizable impression of how it was intended to be like.

Radical Entertainment spent a lot of time coming up with new ideas and deciding what would give Crash his old flare again. The team settled on a reboot of Crash's universe and story, featuring stunning cartoony graphics and a new visual style. Crash himself was planned to show a lot more emotions than the frozen grin he gained a few years prior. Some exaggerated features such as the bushy eyebrows and wacky facial expressions were reminiscent of the old days.

Unlike Crash of the Titans and Mind Over Mutant, development began on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and it was going to be ported to the Wii afterwards. This conversion process was being handled with unique attention to ensure that the Wii version suffered the least downgrades possible.

A DS version was also being planned, and pitches were being accepted from studios that wished to develop it. One of these studios was Renegade Kid, which produced a playable demo with 3D gameplay. WayForward was another contender, and fittingly enough, their pitch became the basis for Galactic Taz Ball after the game was cancelled.

The game went by at least 2 names during development: Crash Landed and I Am Crash Bandicoot. It is unknown which name was used last, but the second one parodies I Am Legend, which is not too surprising given Radical's penchant for having fun with movie titles.

The game was cancelled after 2 years in development. During the production of Mind Over Mutant, Activision acquired Sierra and all of its subsidiaries, which included Radical Entertainment. During a massive layoff spree in 2010, Activision shut down the Radical division in charge of Crash Landed. Activision's decision to not pass the project to a different studio suddenly halted its progress forever.

One factor that contributed to this decision was a certain lack of tangible results — despite the numerous concepts, animations, and an impressive graphics engine for its time, Radical reportedly had little to show in terms of gameplay, leading Activision to decide the project was not financially viable.

Crash Landed was an origin story, and it was going to be a fresh, new start that retold how Crash came to be the bumbling hero we all know and love. After being mutated by Cortex, he would have gotten entangled with the task of rescuing his fellow bandicoots. Unlike Crash, these bandicoots weren't evolved by scientific contraptions, so they were still small, defenseless critters. They were internally referred to as "bandicutes", and some of the concept art shows that they would sometimes get trapped in dangerous areas until Crash freed them.

Besides Cortex, Dingodile was going to be a major villain in the game, harassing the local bandicoots by shooting them out of a cannon and using his trusty flamethrower. Notably, some entirely new enemies were going to try and stop Crash on his tracks, such as a vicious Land Shark and the queen of a colossal firefly hive (neither of which was an evolved character, just like the bandicoots).

Gameplay

One of the main innovations in the game was an invention system. By finding items and combining them together, you would be able to craft some rudimentary yet imaginative and effective tools. For example, sticking a frog inside a plastic bottle (dubbed the Frogzooka) would let you use its tongue to eat enemies and reel in objects out of reach, or launch Crash with the use of catapults. If you had a couple of extra bottles, you could fill them with fireflies and tie them together with a rope and some sticks to create a Jetpack. Also planned were a hang glider and the ability to ride a wild warthog, just like in the very first game.

Like in the more recent games in the series, Crash was going to have an upgradable health bar. This was coupled with the humorous detail of Crash losing his pants after taking too much damage (ala Ghosts 'n Goblins). Along with some of Crash's iconic moves, he would have retained the ability to climb up certain walls from Mind Over Mutant.

Levels were going to be semi-open, akin to Twinsanity, with linear paths to follow and optional areas to explore. Despite the presence of Wumpa fruits in the concept art, Crash would collect purple pick-up items (most likely Mojo, as seen in Crash of the Titans and Mind Over Mutant).

There were also going to be random weather effects (such as rain) and day/night cycles. While it's unknown if the weather had any effect on the gameplay, the concept art suggests that Crash would encounter much bigger, tougher enemies at night. Other environmental effects included Crash getting mud all over him or waddling through thick grass.

Locations

There were several islands planned for Crash to visit. The first one was Black Rock Island (referred to as Wumpa Island in an unreleased Press Kit). Though lacking ruins and monuments, it bore some resemblance to the second island from the original Crash Bandicoot, featuring a giant tree and some lava caves. Speaking of caves, there was also going to be a firefly nest, where Crash would be forced to fight the hive queen to rescue his fellow, captive bandicoots. Further ahead, Crash would meet (and presumably fight) Dingodile, and along the way, he would create the Frogzooka and the Firefly Jetpack.

The second island was a desert wasteland with a bunch of canyons and a giant oil refinery built around it. Some level geometry was built for it, but no other details have been found. A third island by the name of Crocodile Island is seen in the concept art, featuring a lush jungle ripe with swamps. The final known area was a laboratory where Cortex experimented with animals (both traditional mutations and hybrids like Dingodile). Since this was the place where Crash was created, it's presumed that he would escape Cortex before the game began and wound up on a different island, much like in the first game. Alternatively, the game could have begun in Cortex's lab for some brief moments.

Music

The music was going to be composed by Gabriel Mann and Rebecca Kneubuhl, best known by Crash fans as members of Spiralmouth, the band behind Crash Twinsanity's musical score. The main theme was different in style from other Crash games by evoking the Golden Age of US Animation:

Promotion

Despite the game's cancellation, the Ansell Creative Group, a creative agency in Canada, was working on a Press Kit. It was meant to include a Special Collector's Edition DVD in a fancy case. It would have featured a demo version of the game and a map of Wumpa Island, showing several details about its features as well as the places you could visit in the demo. Not only that, but there was also an idea for the map to include a McDonald's discount for a hypothetical tie-in McWumpa Burger, showing that a valuable effort was taking place to make Crash a relevant icon again.

Crash Bandicoot

Our dashing protagonist, redesigned for the reboot. The characters in this game had a modern approach to their designs that stayed true to their origins. Crash showed a wide variety of expressions like in his early days, and the exaggerated facial features provided an even more cartoony look than before (in fact, the entire game was cel-shaded).

Boar

A throwback to the very first game, Crash could hop on to an unsuspecting wild boar and ride it at high speed.

Nite Creatures

This concept suggests that the enemies Crash would encounter at night were going to be much larger than himself, meaning that the day/night cycle wasn't just there for show.

Thug Bot

One of Cortex's robots, this guy had a cannon inside his mouth.

Lab Grow Fist

According to the artist, this giant fist would come out of the ground and punch Crash if he came close to the platform, retracting with a thumbs-up if it hit him (a reference to Terminator 2).

Squid

Various squid designs.

Buttons

A device and some buttons with a floating platform to be used in Cortex's lab.

Lab Frogzooka Launcher

The Frogzooka, one of Crash's inventions, would let him catapult himself when latched on to certain things, such as this launcher in Cortex's lab.

Light gate / bridge

The artist explains that these gates would individually extend from a loading bay, thus creating a 'light bridge'. Most likely found in Cortex's lab.

Flak Burst

This seems to be a concept for a particle effect of some one

Islands:

Black Rock Island

The first island in the game. The proposed Press Kit that was in the works specifically labels it as Wumpa Island. It's unclear which name came later.

Most of this island's outside areas (and perhaps more) were built before the game was cancelled. The in-game representation looked extremely faithful to this concept art. The giant tree and the caves are evocative of the first Crash Bandicoot's middle island.

Crash would create his first inventions here, such as the Frogzooka, the Firefly Jetpack, and a hang-glider. Playable locations included the island's coast, the aforementioned giant tree, a subterranean firefly nest, and some lava caves.

There were at least two bosses in the island: a large Land Shark and the firefly hive queen. Dingodile was also going to make his first appearance at the far end of the island harassing the local bandicoots, but it's unknown if Crash would have battled him here, as he was also set to make an appearance in Crocodile Island.

Island #2

This unnamed island was a vast wasteland with a lot of canyons, tunnels, and Road Runner-esque rock formations. A giant oil refinery was built around it, dumping oil into the ocean (much like Cortex's power plant dumped toxic waste in the first game).

Crocodile Island

The third island contained a lush, tropical jungle with dense vegetation and a large swamp. Dingodile would make an appearance here burning the place down with his flamethrower.

Crocodile Island - Waterway

A concept for the third island's swamp.

Main Lab

The place where Cortex experimented with small animals, including Crash.

Bandicoot in a Jar Our friend: Crash, sleeping inside a capsule. Since this game was a reboot, this was likely a scene from the beginning of the game, showing Crash after being evolved in Cortex's lab.

Cortex's Lab (Outside)

A self-explanatory diagram showing Cortex's lab and the activities in each sub-division. The lab is roughly shaped like Cortex's head, suggesting that his design would have been faithful to previous iterations.

Lab 2 (Inside)

Lab 2, where Cortex experimented with small animals. This was the place where Crash was evolved. You can spot a couple of captive, not yet evolved bandicoots, and a collection of gruesome creatures inside pods.

Machinery

Some platforms and devices to be featured in Cortex's lab.

Islands

A montage of various concepts for Wumpa Island and the surrounding islets.

Wumpa Flora

Some of the flora found in Wumpa Island, including sentient (potentially carnivorous) flowers, palm trees, and Wumpa trees.

Sea Urchins

The sea urchins were enemies half-buried in the sand. They looked like rocks and slept peacefully until Crash approached them, at which point they would open their eyes and protrude their spikes in fear.

Firefly Hive

Early in the game, Crash would go down a cave filled with fireflies to rescue his small bandicoot friends, who were being held inside the hive queen's nest. The concept art suggests that the queen was going to be a boss, and fighting her would lead to parts of the cave crumbling down.

Wumpa Island Colors

A color script for some of Wumpa Island's locations, including the firefly hive (bottom-left). The top-right images are actually from Mind Over Mutant (specifically where the Crunch fight occurs), and are in no way related to this game. Some of these images are actually screenshots.

Firefly Jetpack

One of Crash's makeshift inventions, a jetpack made out of two bottles filled with fireflies, a vine, and a couple of bars. The picture on the left is a rough 3D model, while the one on the right is an artist's rendition of the proposed final look.

Caves

Various cave concepts, including one inside a volcano. It is unknown if they're related to the firefly hive.

Badlands

Concepts for the game's desert island, whose name is still unknown.

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