Posts by Leigh Alexander

You Gotta Have Faith: Does Style Beat Out Realism

3:00AM Leigh Alexander | Earlier this month Kotaku posted a pair of images of the lovely Faith from Mirror’s Edge. One was the official rendering by Swedish dev DICE of the parkour-inspired, Asiatic heroine – and the other was a reinterpretation edited by an Asian fan, imagining what Faith would look like if she had been designed according to what he says are Asian standards of beauty.

Does Survival Horror Really Still Exist?

2:00AM Leigh Alexander | By: Leigh Alexander You’re picking your way through the destitute skeleton of an abandoned building. All around you, decaying, discarded décor reminds you that people lived and worked here once, just as it prompts you to wonder what happened to them. Strange noises and crawling damp seep through the rotted walls. Your backpack is stuffed with cryptic objects you inexplicably picked up in your exploration – unsettling to look at and obscure in their application, they somehow hold the solutions to the puzzles that impede your progress, if only you can figure them out. It’s dark, you’ve got a weak flashlight, a short knife, maybe a length of steel pipe you picked up along your way. And you have a sinking feeling that at the end of the next corridor, death is lurking in the shape of a shambling, deformed monster. But you press on through the dispassionate madness, driven by unravelling mysteries and the unresolved ghosts of your own past. This is survival horror – does it still exist? More »

Games As Art, But At What Cost?

4:00AM Leigh Alexander | We’d like to see games as art. Even those of us who’d personally rather just shoot stuff, thank you very much, realise in general that “games as art” might be a simple way to vault them into the sphere of mainstream relevance, earn them appreciation and understanding from an audience that currently, unjustly, looks down on them. We love, of course, when games have themes and messages, when they offer the player a choice – this equates to more complexity, we feel, this places a game on level with other media that aim to make us feel. There’s an entire segment of the audience that devotes itself to finding the emotional moments in games; we write essays, post blogs and have forum discussions about Little Sisters, about holding hands with Yorda or getting rid of GLaDOS. And many of us have even accepted, to some extent, that games are currently a little bit self-referential and insular. They often tread dangerously in the direction of comic books, which by giving comic book fans only and exactly what they wanted, ended up being of interest only to comic book fans and no one else. We see that games, as an interactive medium, have much greater potential than this. But what happens when a game doesn’t create the message from inside its fictional world, but uses a message that already exists? What if “games as art” in the real world actually looks like something we really, really don’t like? Let’s talk about Invaders!.

Blizzard’s Next Game Could Be More Successful Than WoW

10:20AM Leigh Alexander | Blizzard’s team doesn’t care for the term “killer app”, used to describe a program or product — in this case, a certain MMO — that single-handedly shaped the market around its platform. In fact, when we asked about World of Warcraft’s unshakable hold on the massively multiplayer biz, game director Jeffrey Kaplan was humble. “I don’t believe that WoW is untouchable”, he said. “I completely believe that a game could come out and be more successful than WoW. I’m hoping that we’re working on it right now”. Designing and developing any MMO, Kaplan said, simply distills down to a series of choices. “I think a lot of other companies have had great opportunities to do what WoW has done… usually for whatever reason, they miss the mark”. “I actually feel really bad, a lot of times, when new MMOs come out and don’t do really well, because I’m not thinking of it from a business perspective. I know what it’s like to be a developer on a team that you believe in on a game that you just love, and for some reason, you don’t get enough time, or someone makes a bad decision… everybody’s making a lot of small choices, and when those go wrong, your game ends up not successful”. More »

Art Apocalypse: Blizzard’s Wilson Talks Diablo III Design Decisions

9:20AM Leigh Alexander | When I met Jay Wilson today, Blizzard’s lead designer on Diablo III, I opened our conversation with two loaded little words: Art direction. I didn’t need to say any more, of course, because Wilson already knew about the fan-fit I was referring to. “It’s a complex issue”, he said. “It’s been a big issue online, but for the most part, the response we’ve gotten has been very positive. We’ve got petitions, a few people on forums [who are] very loud, but it’s really more of the ’squeaky wheel’ syndrome”. “Certainly, internally there’s no doubt. I would tell people who don’t like the art style that probably, getting the art style was the hardest thing”. But there’s a careful method to all of it, Wilson explained: Wilson said that what we see now is the third iteration on the Diablo III design. As with many of the decisions the developer makes, much of the art design issue was based in gameplay principles. “Diablo is a game you play for, hopefully, hundreds of hours, and one of the rewards is a variety of different-looking environments”. People looking back on old Diablo, he said, may have a selective memory. “People remember the Act I dungeons… but they kind of conveniently forget the green fields of Act I, and all of Act II… and it’s palaces, its bright deserts”.

Gigantique Sacks and Lovin’ On Squirrels: All About WoW Achievements

8:00AM Leigh Alexander | We now know that World of Warcraft will get achievements added in when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion comes, and when we sat down with Blizzard today we got to discuss them, learning about some of the kinds of actions and behaviours that will earn you those achievements. “We’ve wanted to add them for a long time”, WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan, who is as enthusiastic in person as he appears in this picture, told Kotaku. “I’m a huge fan of achievement systems in other games; I love Xbox’s system, and I also think Steam did a really good job in introducing achievements. We always talked about it for WoW… [since] players are always measuring themselves against other players”. Why the decision to include achievements, then, with such a heavily status-based leveling system at the core of WoWs mechanics? Big difference, said Kaplan: “With levels, you’re gaining tremendous character power… skills, abilities, access to more items and areas… with the achievement system, we really wanted it to be a history of your accomplishments. Not gaining character power through it… we wanted it to be a reflection of your character’s power”. So how does it work? Squirrels ensue: