I will not lie, harpooning a whale is pretty bad ass.

November is here at last, and besides the next generation of consoles, it also brings the typical holiday releases. With gems like Grand Theft Auto V, Pokémon X/Y, and Puppeteer already in the hands of gamers by mid-October, the rest of the year will be plagued by an onslaught of FPS titles and the yearly installment of other series. While I will be side-stepping yet another Call of Duty release, not to mention Battlefield 4 and the quick-time-event laden Ryse: Son of Rome, I did take a bit of a chance and spent some time playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Batman: Arkham Origins.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Batman: Arkham Origins are two third-person adventure games that are coming at different points in their respective series. Arkham Origins comes two years after the highly regarded Arkham City, while Black Flag is the follow-up to the disappointing Assassin’s Creed III. Both of these titles demonstrate something that the industry is notorious for these days, rehashing the previous entry. This rehashing is a trademark for the Assassin’s Creed series, where much of the gameplay is lifted from the previous entry, and a new setting and cast of characters are slapped on. Sometimes the result is something that still works, but many times it leaves an air stagnation to a game.

With Assassin’s Creed 2 being the last game in the series I played, I initially had no desire to play Black Flag, but after reading a few reviews, my interest in the game rose enough that I decided to rent the game. At ten hours in, I have been pleasantly surprised by the game, but also shocked that much of the main gameplay is nearly identical to Assassin’s Creed 2. I thought that after four years there would be some evolution, but Ubisoft has decided that the best way forward is to avoid straying too far from the path that they created. Apart from the main gameplay, the rest of the game breathes a bit of life back into the series, but most of this has to do with aspects from the pirate setting and the naval exploration and combat that the era brings. I have enjoyed Black Flag much more than I thought I would, so much that I intend to finish and review the game next week.

Arkham Origins is a game that my initial anticipation faded away a bit as I learned more about it. I thoroughly enjoyed the previous two entries in the series, but prequel stories are usually terrible, and Arkham Origins is no exception. Arkham Origins attempts to use the Assassin’s Creed technique and recycle the gameplay from Arkham City, all the way down to the gadgets that Batman obtains. The entire game screams that killing the Joker at the end of Arkham City was a mistake, and rather than utilizing a new villain, the developers went the prequel route so that they were able to use the Joker for a third time. The overall feeling from the game is that it was churned out in the easiest way possible. Even the city is reused from Arkham City but it is bereft of civilians, which is strange considering that Arkham Origins takes place before the city was locked down. Arkham Origins has disappointed me enough that I am not even sure if I will finish it.

Many were hoping that Arkham Origins would build further upon the foundation that Arkham City laid.

Most game companies today seem to believe the best way to utilize their existing series is to inundate gamers with releases until they drive the series into a grave. By reusing the previous game’s assets, costs are kept low, allowing for larger profits. I would be lying if I said that every sequel is terrible, but the desire to take risks with a sequel or series is fading away. One thing that discourages developers from messing with a tested formula is the fear of change that the public has. Developers know that consumers will have an expectation for the content of a game merely by it being a part of an established series. Changing too many things may turn away fans, so instead developers leave things the way they were, and the masses lap it up. This strategy has paid off unfortunately, Call of Duty: Ghosts hit one billion dollars on its first day of release, even though the Call of Duty series has churned out carbon-copy games since 2007.

Sequels and series make up a large part of the games that are released today, and yearly releases are hardly a new thing, Donkey Kong Country, for example, had a release in 1994, 1995, and 1996. Perhaps it is just nostalgia goggles, but each installment of Donkey Kong Country felt like it had more substantial changes than any FPS installment. The sad truth is that Brogamers outnumber the hardcore crowd, and companies will happily exploit that. If Activision can make a billion dollars by re-releasing a six-year-old game, where is the incentive for other companies to not follow suit? Rockstar spent over four years developing Grand Theft Auto V, a title that surpasses its predecessor in nearly every way, yet its sales numbers will likely be mirrored by Call of Duty: Ghosts. In the end, the quality of a game depends on the developer’s commitment to excellence, but greed reigns supreme, and most companies will cut as many corners as possible to maximize profits. The video game industry of our youth is nearly dead, but at least we have Pokémon X/Y to console us.

Choices, Choices…

Download: Produced 2013.03.31

The Legendary Zoltan braves goblins innumerable as he premieres his latest remix from The Secret of Mana, whilst SiliconNooB and KillswitchTool drive Lusipurr to distraction with an overabundance of language not wholly fit for a genteel audience.

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This month, Lusipurr.com is pleased to present the second commission from our Music Director: Jahan ‘The Legendary Zoltan’ Honma!

Followers of Lusipurr, welcome back to another episode of The Starlight Megaphone. I am The Legendary Zoltan presenting my sophomore musical piece for your listening enjoyment and the appeasement of the keeper of my soul. That said, I doubt he will be very appeased this time around. Last time, I brought you an unlikely call to action from the Kingdom (Queendom?) of Zeal. This time I have brought you a suspense story from the Kingdom of Wherever-the-hell-Secret of Mana-takes-place.

Source Music: Secret of Mana – The Oracle
Original Composer: Hiroki Kikuta
Remix: Don’t Open That Door! There’s a Dark Lich Hiding in There!

Unlike my previous goal of trying to simultaneously satisfy Lusipurr’s set criteria and make it sound good. I decided to go with something far less noble and throw “sounding good” out the window. This is a remix of the music that plays when you fight the Dark Lich boss. The original song is practically without genre. If I had to call it something, I would say that it is drum and bass music. Aside from the crazy percussive breakdowns, there is really only a single melody that is repeated often. So my goal was to turn a genre-less, repetitive, and scary piece and turn it into a different genre-less, repetitive, and scary piece. How creative I am!

I just threw away all the drums and build-up sequences in the original and just repeated the main melody over and over again. Are you worried yet? Each time the melody is repeated it is done so with different instrumentation, feeling, and sometimes even different tempos. The resulting piece is actually extremely varied and while not terribly catchy, is not uninteresting by any means.

When you are listening to the song, imagine that you are in a horror movie, opening doors in a giant mansion, one after another, looking for the exit. Behind one of those doors lurks a Dark Lich. During your flee of terror you eventually manage to find the exit. You feel the safety of sunlight and nature around you…until you learn the hard way that Dark Liches are in no way inhibited by sunlight!

This is what it looks like when a company cares more about cost cutting than it does about reputation.

SimCity Launch An Unmitigated Disaster

This past week has seen EA’s launch of their new SimCity reboot, a game which Lusipurr.com readers will probably be familiar with on account of it featuring some abysmally punitive DRM, which requires players to stay logged in to an EA Origin server despite the fact that it is a single-player game. Well, it would seem that just like every other launch of a single-player game with always-on DRM in the history of gaming, the game has launched with nowhere near enough servers, and players have been facing mammoth waiting queues to even gain access to their full priced game, and once they are finally into the game Origin’s straining servers frequently refuse to save a player’s cities on account of their not being allowed to store and access their save files locally. In an attempt to mitigate the crippling disaster of Origin, EA has begun stripping the game of all non-essential gameplay features, such as leaderboards, achievements, and region filters – and thus basically removing every single element which served as EA’s original exceedingly weak rationale for the burning need to have the game require an always active internet connection in the first place!

Due to a flurry of complaints Amazon has pulled the game from their storefront, as well they should. The SimCity product page on Amazon goes on to explain:

“Many customers are having issues connecting to the ‘SimCity’ servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity for more information.”

To make matters worse, while many much more reputable establishments have been refunding the purchases of disgruntled consumers, EA’s own Origin storefront has been refusing to do so. EA’s official line on the matter is that Origin does not refund consumers unless there are “special mitigating circumstances” – and apparently rendering the game inoperable beneath a thick veneer of obnoxious DRM does not count as “special mitigating circumstances”.

As one final amusing aside, Good Old Games’ Twitter account was this week advertising the purchase of SimCity 2000 with the cheecky description:

“Server problems? DRM-free SimCity 2000 needs no internet to play AND it’s only $5.99.”

Why is the contest between PS3 and the 360 even close?

Because Xbox Live Was Not Expensive Enough

Xbox Live Gold accounts currently go for an absolutely disgustingly unjustifiable asking price of $60, but what of large families who all like to play online? What if father, mother, sister, brother all want to game online and have their own unique accounts and profiles? Well, until this week one could simply purchase an Xbox Live Family Pack subscription, but now that is no longer the case.

Xbox Live Family Packs allowed Xbox 360 owners to purchase four Xbox Live Gold accounts for the still extortionate price of $99.99, for use by power gaming families. Apparently Microsoft fancies that their offer of family savings was too generous by far, and have unceremoniously yanked the package without even a warning or announcement. If there is one consolation, it is that the average Xbox 360 owner’s console will probably have died by the time their subscription is due.

Game Development Practices For the Current Gen and Beyond

The video game industry is currently gearing up to make the transition to the eighth console generation, and such shifts tend to lend themselves to developers briefly opening up and waxing philosophical about their intended approach going forward. This week has seen personnel from CD Projekt RED [The Witcher franchise], Take-Two [working on Grand Theft Auto V], and Ubisoft [working on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag] open up to grant insights into their particular video game development processes.

CD Projekt RED’s studio head, Adam Badowski, explained why, for their continued success, “creative vision has to inform business policy and not the other way around”. Badowski considers it to be very detrimental to the studio when business interests win out and are allowed to determine the direction of game production. Badowski went on to state that despite microtransactions and freemium game-models being where all the money is being made at present, such things do not sit well with the creative ambitions of the studio, and are thus being ignored by them at present.

“Financial and business concerns shouldn’t decide which path we take or the creative aims of the company. For example right now we are not dealing in the free-to-play market and this is why – the market is far from perfect yet, I think there’s something strange and awkward about this business model. So we’re not getting involved in it, even if everyone is excited by how much money can be made using this model. Maybe we’ll change our minds in that regard, but not yet.”

Sure to be a massive commercial success, and yet iterative installments are not being churned out year after year.

Meanwhile Take-Two’s chief operating officer, Karl Slatoff, opened up about the reasons for the publisher [and Rockstar] eschewing a bi-annual release schedule for Grand Theft Auto games. Take-Two are of the view that such a quick turn around in game production would degrade the quality of the game’s content, and thereby fatigue the traditional Grand Theft Auto audience who look to each game’s release as an event.

“Often times people ask us, ‘Why don’t you come out with Grand Theft Auto every two years? To us, that doesn’t make sense, because Grand Theft Auto, every single time it comes out, is a brand new experience. You can’t possibly do that in two years. And if we did that, our product would fatigue and the franchise would degrade from a value perspective.”

Finally, Ubisoft lead game content manager, Carsten Myhill, discussed the publisher’s approach to working on such an atypically developed title as Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The game has been in development since 2011, is launching on both current and next-gen consoles, and is being developed by a massive eight different studios! Their method seems to be to have two different teams do the preliminary work on the game, and then to bring other studios on board once production ramps up.

“We’ve been in development since summer 2011. We’ve had two teams working in parallel – there’s been some overlapping and when it gets to the end of a game it’s all hands on deck to get it finished.”

When questioned about the Playstation 4 version of the game, Myhill responded: “Visuals enhancements are the most obvious difference. We’ll also be supporting the new Playstation 4 controller. We’re going to be revealing all the details of that [in the future]. The feature is built for the Playstation 4 controller, but we’re also looking at other controllers too.”

It is always illuminating to see the extent to which studios are willing to allow the concerns of business to guide their endeavours; here we see an ascending WRPG studio brush off the bandwagon fads like microtransactions [they also have a legacy of opposing DRM in their games], and we see the undisputed king of open-world action games taking steps to avoid overexposing their top money-earning brand. In contrast to this we can see the custodians of the fast fatiguing Assassin’s Creed property [thirteen games released since 2007] moving heaven and earth to ensure that Ubisoft will have yet another samey Assassin’s Creed game to sell this holiday season.

As a side note, it appears that the PS4 version of Assassin’s Creed IV will be the worst of the bunch.