Obviously the simplicity has benefits as well as negative points: it’s simpler to use, so therefore more of the community can try their hand at map-making for an extremely popular title. This is demonstrated by the fact that since the Puzzle Maker has been available, the number of Steam Workshop files for Portal 2 has shot up to nearly 100,000 (by comparison, Team Fortress 2 has close to 5k and Skyrim just over 7k)1 despite being the newest edition to the Workshop repertoire.
My first test chamber for Portal 2
The negatives, I feel, come with the restrictions you face with what is available to you in the Puzzle Maker: e.g. you can’t add extra doors for staged testing. Plus, try as I might to create things exactly as I imagine them in my head, it never seems to be quite right as not all the tools are available to you. The solution here would be to learn how to use Hammer properly… but for a lot of fans that’s a bit too confusing to contemplate.
So, you may be wondering why my production of test chamber blueprints stopped mind-May… the answer is Diablo 3. This hit internationally on May 15th and domestically (in the UK) May 18th. After some very irritating cock-ups from various pre-order suppliers, I eventually got my hands on it for the UK release date.
I must say I’m sort of glad I didn’t get a copy until May 18th as Blizzard had some serious issues on the international release. Let me explore these. D3 is both single and multiplayer but you have to be online all the time, on Battle.net’s servers even to play on your own. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either. Couple that with the fact that their servers clearly weren’t ready – nor capable – of handling the volume of people trying to connect. Again, just to play single player.
Error 37 screengrabs were plastered all over the internet as eager fans were raging at Blizzard. That’s not to say I didn’t escape: I’ve had three instances since I got the game where I’ve been unable to play because the damned servers were having a tea break (or eating themselves, I dunno) with Error 35 taking out the game on May 20th for over 9 hours and Error 37 rearing its ugly head again nearer the end of the month (Error 35 = servers down for maintenance; Error 37 = servers are busy).
That’s the one major drawback of the game. The interwebs have been awash with rumours of an “offline mode”, but whether Blizz decide to actually do it or not only time will tell.
Enough of that. The game itself is great fun with brilliantly detailed graphics and fun attacks for all classes. This is the first RPG of this type (the hack’n’slash) that I’ve actually finished – albeit only on normal difficulty – and am now going through it again to try and find better loot (so far unsuccessfully). The fact that I haven’t got bored yet is praise in itself as I do have a tendency to just wander off despite all my intentions to play through as every class and on every difficulty. Again, time will tell if I do end up admitting defeat.
Blizz have done OK with the female characters; yes, they start off fairly under-dressed but so do the male counterparts. My one criticism is the fem-Demon Hunter’s boots… why would you wear heels (at all!) to fight the prime evil? Seriously. Oh, and the occasional armour vs. cleavage fail is a given.
In between my battling of evil I made a brief foray into the world of the mod. The mod in question is Centralia: Part 1, which is the opening sequence of a game developed as a mod for Half Life 2: Episode 2. I’ve written a more general review over here but I felt it worth a mention as a) it doesn’t involve shooting guns or killing things and b) yeah, OK, my brother is one of the devs.
The idea behind it is (I paraphrase) “to make creepy places fun”, so they’ve taken an extraordinary story from real life (Centralia, PA) and added some more spooky to the mix. Even though it’s pretty short for now, it still managed to make me jump a couple of times.
A still from the beginning of Centralia
It is a genuinely interesting concept for a game and I’d quite like to see where it goes, but to do that I first have to persuade my bro to set up a KickStarter fund, then he has to get funded through it. Blah, blah austerity etc.
Tropes Vs Women in Games: a cool thing for you to throw money at
As I’ve mentioned KickStarter, we here at BR had this drawn to our attention. Tropes vs. Women in Video Games is the brainchild of Anita of Feminist Frequency who is hoping to make a series of films based on, well, tropes of women in video games.
“The series will highlight the larger reoccurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders.”
This looks promising, and who here wouldn’t want to get paid to play games and make films about it? Exactly.
Next Month:
There will be Max Payne 3 – as the PC edition got delayed so it didn’t have to do battle with Diablo 3 – and probably (finally) some AC: Revelations as I now have a copy waiting for me. I suspect there will be more but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet!
But! Before I go, an Assassin’s Creed note…
Just quickly, this has just popped up on the internet: promise of a female protagonist in an Assassin’s Creed title! It will be a “companion game” to AC3, subtitled Liberation, but will only be on the PS Vita. Borderhouse (follow the link) say:
What’s interesting and exciting is that the protagonist of the game will be a woman of color named Aveline.
Admittedly, yes, that is pretty interesting – and awesome – but being me I have to push the cynic buttons and raise two points. First, we’ve talked about this before, and I will keep banging on about it until it surfaces for definite: is this the “her” Juno mentioned at the end of Brotherhood? This mysterious lady-assassin that Desmond has to find before he can defeat the Templars? My guess is: no. If it’s running concurrent to AC3 he can’t have found her yet as, surely, her story comes after his ends (after another three games).
Secondly, PS Vita? Really? An over-expensive handheld with few titles and not nearly as many users as Xbox 360/Ps3/PC? That’s where you decide to premiere your first femprotag of the franchise? You don’t think that’s a little bit sidelining? I suspect the peeps over at Ubisoft are expecting only the die hards to buy it, which means they aren’t too bothered about offering up a viable femprotag for the mainstream just yet.
Or, maybe they’re testing the waters for the Elusive Female Assassin that will save the world. Or, maybe Aveline is “her”. Prove me wrong, Ubisoft, please!
- as of 9am, 31.05.12
March saw the eagerly anticipated release of Dragon Age II; the follow-up to Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening (along with all the extra DLC that became available during the interim period). Dragon Age, for those of you unfamiliar with the games, is a fantasy RPG in which you guide your character through quests and the main plotline, battling all manner of nasty creatures and unscrupulous types along the way. You gather a team made up of mages, warriors and rogues who may be human, elf or dwarf, and they help you defeat the forces of evil.
One of the key features of games like this is that you can build your own character: you pick the gender, the hair style, the facial features, the class (e.g. a mage), and in some instances you can even pick the voice. I, for example, have a male warrior elf with ginger hair in Origins and in Dragon Age II my character Zakarianna Hawke is a female, white-haired rogue with a facial tattoo (you can see a visual of her below left). The possibilities aren’t quite endless, but they’re still fairly comprehensive.
Other popular games that boast this feature include the Mass Effect series and the Fable series, both of which I thoroughly enjoy. I was, however, quite late to the Mass Effect party for one very key reason: I thought you had to be male. That is to say, the advertising and marketing for Mass Effect gave me no inkling that there was any other option than to be the character that features in the trailers and the stills.
Normally this doesn’t bother me (pretty much all the games I have ever played have a male protagonist) but I read an unfortunate article that suggested Commander Shepard – Mass Effect’s protagonist – was a bit of a womaniser. So I wrote it off.
I then, much later, got a little overexcited by all the sales after Christmas in which I saw Mass Effect 1 and 2 for a little over a tenner. I asked my brother what he thought of them and ended up buying the games – turns out, you can play as a female character! Plus all the womanising depends entirely on the decisions made in-game by the person directing the character (again, my take on Commander Shepard, Drakhoa Shepard, is just below left further down).
This little surprise, combined with Dragon Age II’s recent advertising prior to its release, made me wonder why games that allow you to play as male or female are only ever marketed using the preset male appearance. For illustration purposes I have collected a few trailers courtesy of YouTube:
- Dragon Age II “Destiny – Extended” Trailer
- Dragon Age II “Rise to Power” Trailer
- Mass Effect 3 “Debut” Trailer
- Mass Effect 2 “Full Cinematic” Trailer
- Mass Effect 2 “Launch” Trailer
- Fable II
- Fable III
From those trailers alone, would you have any idea that you can actually play through as a female protagonist? If you knew nothing else about these games, I doubt there’s any chance you’d be able to guess the female protagonist option from the advertising. This could be quite off-putting to gamers (not just female gamers either) as the advertising doesn’t highlight the option of choice that you get in the game; to be a character that you want to be. It certainly put me off: when confronted with the limited information and the possibility that the male protagonist was a character I wouldn’t be able to stand, I chose to look elsewhere. Even though, for me, that elsewhere was probably going back to a First Person Shooter with a male protagonist: at least most of them don’t talk, and you forget the character when you’re facing down hundreds of Replica soldiers or when a Necromorph just came bursting out of an air vent to tear you to pieces.
I’m not trying to fault these RPG games here, though they do all have some downsides – I’m just wondering why the distributors and the marketing bods decide to exclude one whole section of their demographic in one swoop. I’m sure there is some (weak) reasoning to do with demographic statistics and some blanket statements about who buys these games, but surely that’s wearing a little thin by now? I certainly got sick of seeing the preset male character’s smug face in all the Dragon Age II trailers.
Well, if we look over at Blizzard and some of their teasers for Diablo III (coming out later this year) then there are some positive developments on the horizon. They’ve begun releasing trailers relating to each ‘class’ of character for the upcoming game – all of which can be played as a male or female version – and, most importantly, they’re telling us all about it in their advertising!
Demon Hunter and Wizard are two of the classes you will be able to play as in Diablo III; the others are Monk, Barbarian, and Witch Doctor. The latter three are automatically presented as male, but Demon Hunter and Wizard are automatically presented to us as female on Blizzard’s website for Diablo III, despite the fact all five classes can be played as either. It is interesting as well that at BlizzCon2010 the 19 minutes of gameplay footage included in the press kit featured both the female Demon Hunter and Wizard as the protagonist.
Clearly, then, not all RPG gaming advertising is male-centric, and hopefully more companies will start to follow down the path that Blizzard is taking – showing the audience the variety that is available in-game, instead of just marketing it at male gamers and assuming female gamers (should such a fabled beast exist – haha!) aren’t going to get offended at being ignored or forgotten about.
They are, as I mentioned earlier, all good games (Fable, Dragon Age, Mass Effect) so don’t let the advertising put you off playing them, but equally let’s not resign ourselves to the notion that male-centric advertising will never change. It is changing; it just happens to be very slowly.
- Rai, at the tender age of 23, has been gaming for 15 years and writing for 10 – perfect combination! Watch this space for more Gamer Diary.
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