Tag: Xbox One

January 25, 2017January 26, 2017

Free Games in Focus Part 1: Star Trek Online

As I have previously mentioned, there are many ways to get more for your money by either making your own fun or playing games which give more time for your cash investment. One of the games I mentioned was Star Trek Online and its mission creation system. Now I would like to delve deeper into the game itself.

Initially launching on PC in 2010, going Free to Play in 2012 and launching on Xbox One and PS4 in 2016, Star Trek Online is one of many licensed MMOs which switched from a subscription to a free-to-play model after several years in operation and presumably falling revenue to the point where such a conversion was the only financially sensible decision. The mindset behind reworking a game to make it fit a new business model is generally driven by the impetus to get more people in and therefore looking at and potentially spending money on items, services and benefits offered to recoup development/maintenance costs from players who have paid nothing to get in in the first place.

As clearly indicated by the name, Star Trek Online is an MMO set in the Star Trek universe. Players can be either a Federation, Klingon or Romulan captain with their own ship and crew, flying around the galaxy on episodically-structured missions which form part of a larger overarching plot that draws on Star Trek’s extensive history.

What makes STO stand out is its combination of ground and space combat. The former playing much like conventional character-based MMO combat while the latter plays like naval combat in space. Every ship has forward and rear-facing weapons whose firing arc is inversely proportional to their damage output; for example a single phaser beam has an arc of 270 degrees while dual heavy cannons have an arc of 45 degrees, however they are much more potent. Your ship’s defensive systems work the same way too, your ship’s shields have different facings and a lot of the skill of surviving is managing your shield levels and turning to hide damaged shields from oncoming fire while they regenerate or are repaired.

Character progression is split between upgrading the equipment of your captain, bridge officers (who come with you on ground missions and whose abilities you use in space combat) as well as your ship itself; adding new weapons, armour, shields etc. This gear progression is denoted in increasing ‘mark’ levels; you start with mark 1 equipment and by maximum level (60) this increases to mark 12-14. Regardless of your faction choice the progression is largely the same. You start off with a very small ship with limited weapons and equipment. Every 10 levels up to level 40 you can pick a free ship from a limited selection of the next tier up. For the Federation this includes ships of the same class as many of the Enterprises as well as Voyager, however as you level these ships become mechanically obsolete, which is where the micro-transactions come in, which I will talk about later. Similar ship choices are available for the Romulans and Klingons, however there are many more examples of ship classes made up specifically for the game. So how does this free game make enough money for the developers to stay in business and to justify porting it to current-generation consoles? What can you do for free and what requires real money investment?

To answer any of these question it is necessary to unpack the overlapping currencies and systems at the heart of STO. The game has 3 major currencies which have a surprisingly complex relationship. Energy Credits, or EC, is the basic currency of the game; its what players will use to buy items from the Exchange, the game’s auction system, as well as what they will receive when selling junk item to vendors. Dilithium is an intermediary currency between EC and the real-money currency Zen. Dilithium is used to buy advanced upgrades through STOs reputation and fleet (guild) systems and is a time-gate to progress. Players can accumulate as much unrefined dilithium as they like but can only turn a finite amount per day – 8000 – into its refined and usable form. Zen is the currency which players can buy for real money and is used to purchase ships, account upgrades as well as keys for the game’s lockbox system which will be discussed later. Also Dilithium and Zen can be exchanged for each other however their prices are sensitive to rampant inflation caused by supply and demand.

This mixture of interrelated currencies is a bit of a mess, a symptom of the game’s reworking to a fundamentally new business model. Part of this model has included the introduction of lockboxes; blind-bags which can only be opened by purchasing keys for real money or from the exchange for EC. Many of the items in these boxes are highly desirable ships and equipment from various alien races who are relevant in the ongoing story at the time. If you just want to play a Star Trek game as a Federation, Klingon or Romulan captain with their standard ships then you can ignore these systems completely. However if you want to fly niche Ferengi, Cardassian, Undine or ships from the JJ Abrams series reboot for example, the costs start to rise exponentially due to the rarity of said ships and the constant inflation of the EC auction house economy.

Fortunately this approach is completely viable as you can follow the entire story from the beginning without paying anything. Since going Free-To-Play the levelling process has been smoothed out and the ships and equipment you get on the way are perfectly capable of seeing you through; several episodes and chains of episodes offer gear sets which you get from replaying a particular mission several times or from playing a complete arc.

As much as it is possible to play STO without paying a single penny – you can do all the story content, join a fleet, level up the various reputation factions and complete the basic versions of all the PVE group content, there are a few one-off purchases which are worthwhile. One of the biggest limitations free players have is a ten million EC cap and no way to transfer account-bound items between characters. That number sounds like a lot, however if you want to get into buying or selling more expensive ships/equipment then it becomes a serious hinderance; spending 500 zen on raising it to one billion EC (real money prices vary per country and over time) is a sound one-off purchase as it applies to all characters on your account.

Another good value option is to subscribe to the game for one month; even though it is Free to Play you can still pay a monthly subscription which gets you a stipend of Zen currency as well as exclusive items and ships. However paying for a subscription also unlocks numerous inventory/capacity upgrades for characters, ships, inventory and bank space, including bank slots which can be used to send items between characters; which would cost more than the £/$6-7 subscription for a single month and they stay with your account once you go back to being a free player.

It is only necessary to spend any more than that if you are interested in absolutely min-maxing your characters or taking on group PVE content on the highest difficulty. STO’s PVP scene is very small and requires significant investment beyond the means of the average free player, so is not being considered in this assessment of the game’s model.

If you are a Star Trek fan looking for something to play then STO is currently the only Star Trek game going on PC or Xbox One and PS4. It has a lot of good ideas, is worth at least checking out, providing you accept the caveats and limitations of its F2P model.

January 18, 2017

Extra Lifespan – Getting more from the games you own. Part 1: User-generated content.

Games like Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Dota 2/League of Legends all began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, coming from a melting-pot of third party modding and creativity from open-ended game engines and modding tools like Valve’s Hammer editor and Source engine and the early iterations of the Unreal engine. However in addition to systems like achievements promoting more player engagement but less creativity, these flagship games have become more stringent ‘services’ which are the opposite of the creative spirit.

The addition of paid and consumable spray decals for Counter Strike Global Offensive, a game whose previous iterations let users load their own images as sprays to use as many times as they want, is an example of this shift away from user-generated content as a builder of community cohesion towards a more service-oriented model where content is more controlled and crucially monetised. As much as achievements encourage you to explore a game further through replays on higher difficulties, progress milestones or specific player actions they have had the compound effect of limiting player creativity. Open-world games have a lot of space, content and systems in place to give you plenty to do however most of it involves box-ticking side missions which equate to tidying up the map rather than having any creative input. On the other hand more linear shooters are often scripted to ensure the player sees all the set-pieces or that the multiplayer can be monetised for as long as possible. For example Call of Duty Black Ops III only got Steam Workshop support towards the end of its year of support/interest and not long before Infinite Warfare’s PR kicked into life.

This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to make your own fun. Engaging in the user-generated content systems of games which have them is a great way to extend their lifespan through fostering creativity and a collaborative community well beyond the lifespan of its core content. Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are the most popular and prevalent mainstream games which openly support modding (despite criticisms that this approach lets the community fix the games for the developers free of charge) and even the Doom reboot included a level creation toolset of sorts. Halo’s Forge editor has opened up its multiplayer mode to survive competition and maintain relevance in the face of the more bombastic Call of Duty and Battlefield games. CoD has its own limited USG in the form of player-created profile logos, but outside of these we have to look slightly further outside mainstream games to the relative periphery of the market to find games which openly facilitate user-generated content.

The Forza Motorsport/Horizon series has distinguished itself through its livery creation system which lets players create and share custom car designs and images with each other. The toolset gives you a large selection of shapes, curves, gradients and letters which can be stretched, skewed and resized over the bodywork. Over the last 10 years the community for this has produced absolutely stunning artistic designs and accurate replicas of real-world car liveries to be shared and used by others:

I find recreating real-world designs or liveries from other racing games to be a relaxing creative outlet with practical ingame application; in order to share a design you have to have used your own layer groups and designs. If you download someone else’s sponsor logos or art to make it you can’t share anything you make with the wider community. Every time someone downloads, uses or likes your designs you get a small amount of in-game money as a reward and an incentive to produce better designs in the future.

I’ll discuss the game more in the future, but the PC version of Star Trek Online has a powerful set of tools which enables players to create and write their own story missions which others can play through. You choose the start locations, environments, encounters and write the dialogue for every interaction therein. This system is almost as feature-rich as the tools used by the developers and is an extensive avenue for the creatively-minded to get significantly more life out of an already large game:

The PC version of Neverwinter (also made by Cryptic, the developers of the UGC-heavy and unfortunately deceased City of Heroes) also features a similar system which plays to the storytelling/roleplaying nature of the Dungeons and Dragons IP.

The problem with these systems is that they require an audience to get the most out of them. Far Cry 3 included team multiplayer with a map editor however the population dropped off relatively quickly, so what would be the point of spending time making a map for it? I had some plans for a few Far Cry 3 maps including the ruins of a coastal town which a plane crashed through the middle of as well as a precarious cliff-side temple but then I saw that there was nobody playing the multiplayer so nobody would ever play them. Other games like Trackmania present track creation in an accessible drag-and-drop package so there is a low barrier to entry but like Far Cry 3 its popularity has markedly declined in recent years.

These systems let players channel their creativity and potentially extending the lifespan of a game and its community indefinitely, however the reality of a game’s community can be at odds with the intentions behind the creation of such systems. There are of course other games I’ve missed here; Arma 3 has a deep level editor which underpins its community, Mario Maker and Minecraft are entirely built on user-generated content and have both been incredibly successful. The WWE wrestling games continue to expand on their creative suites letting users create individual wrestlers, shows, arenas, belts and entire story-lines to play and share. There are a surprising number of smaller indie games whose bite-sized structure mean that level editors and infrastructure like the Steam Workshop can be combined to build a community, offer more to prospective buyers and maintain collective interest in games which are often much cheaper than larger but more restrictive AAA/mainstream counterparts.

January 5, 2017January 5, 2017

Watch Dogs 2 and the problem of marketing versus reality

When Ubisoft revealed Watch Dogs 2 at E3 2016 I was not impressed. The first game was bogged down with controversy surrounding its graphical downgrade compared to the promotional materials. It took itself seriously in a way which seemed at odds with its own mechanics, positioning itself as a William Gibson-esque gritty cyberpunk thriller but was a fairly standard third-person open world shooter with a few extra UI overlays and some nifty environmental interaction; not to mention its fundamentally unlikable protagonist. The reveal trailer for Watch Dogs 2 showed a fundamentally different but, to me, an equally off-putting premise. It looked like an example of corporate executives and marketing gurus trying to be “down with the kids”:

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh9x4NqW0Dw[/embedyt]

Fortunately for me (and less fortunately for the first-week sales figures which were down 300,000 from the first game) I was wrong. Beneath the memes and millennial-baiting buzzwords is a game with some real moments of emotion and camaraderie as you work with the crew of DedSec, find out more about them through inter-character dialogue and the documents you find/hack during missions. Watch Dogs 2 discusses the murky legality of mass surveillance, criminal profiling, election fraud and corporate collusion by those who do not necessarily have our best interests at heart, all filtered through a neon analogue to real hacker groups. These issues are more immediately relatable to the everyday life of the game’s target audience than Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s pro-war space jingoism disguised as deep commentary moral browbeating or Battlefield 1’s inconsistent and one-sided narrative on the horrors of the First World War as a framing for what appears to be more of the same old Battlefield experience but with biplanes.

However Watch Dogs 2 does more than that, but in a way that may be too subtle for its bombastic purple and green neon visage. During conversations between the members of DedSec the point that what they’re doing – hacking corporations and government departments all over the San Francisco Bay area – is only reinforcing the position of the tech and big data giants who they are targeting; showing that such security and control is necessary to counter these dangerous hacker groups. This tautological loop is similar to the problems faced by real groups like ‘Anonymous’ who Ubisoft have candidly explained were the inspiration behind DedSec in the first place in a now unfortunately deleted interview. This inspiration is clear throughout Watch Dogs 2, whether it be arranging attacks on the game’s Scientology analogue or the textual/visual language of DedSec’s public releases.

Science fiction presents an opportunity to extrapolate real-world issues to their extreme; certain episodes of the original series of Star Trek are blatant Vietnam allegories and Paul Verhoven’s 1999 adaptation of Starship Troopers is a scathing critique of US foreign policy. Watch Dogs 2 achieves similar ends through taking current real-world issues, which is no mean feat considering how long games take to make, and expanding them for the player to unpick in a detached and experimental environment. Unfortunately in this case Ubisoft have hidden this so successfully its flashy exterior that the marketing is potentially sabotaging the game’s appeal to certain audience demographics, who may only discover its appeal when its price drops or when an inevitable “Complete Edition” or “Game of the Year” bundle comes out next year.

“Walking Simulators” like Dear Esther and Gone Home are often criticised for not having enough game behind their exposition, something that Watch Dogs 2 successfully deals with. Even if you don’t care about the direction of its political and technological commentary there is still a large and robust open world action/stealth game to enjoy underneath that deserves to succeed, almost in spite of itself and the intentions of its publisher.