Farcry 5 Is In Stores Now

Another game in the hopper. Farcry 5 released today.  I hope you all enjoy it.  It was very interesting working on a Farcry game based in the US, created by a French company in Canada. I was a Senior Level Designer on this title at the Toronto studio, which focused on the Northern region of the game.  I’m very proud of the work we all did on Farcry 5.  

I had to do most of my development with the sound off.  The words of the cult leader, the Father in my ears all day was getting to me.  I think it has an unsettling familiarity that Americans such as myself can feel.I could write a whole thing about that but I'm not sure what I'm allowed to talk about so just play it and see if it speaks to you as well.

I grabbed a PS4 copy in hopes that I will buy a PS4 someday.  lol

Farcry 5 Has Been Announced

Ubisoft has announced Farcry 5 and released a trailer along with numerous character introduction videos.  Link to the YouTube playlist can be found by clicking here.

Farcry 5 is in fact the title I am currently working as a Senior Level Designer on in the Ubisoft Toronto studio.  I hope to share future Farcry announcements as they are made available.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein Is On Sale

Yes the first game I worked on as a designer is now on sale on Steam.  Maybe it's always on sale I don't know but this was the first time I noticed it at least.  If you're into retro gaming it's a really great old school shooter.  It's still one of the highlights of my career.

I learned a lot working with Gray Matter on it.  I was the last designer Activision had on the payroll when they stopped internal development to focus on publishing.  Gray Matter needed help so I was sent over to help them stay on schedule.  The schedule was an absolute death march, I started overtime in January and didn't see the light of day until November.  I literally missed the entire summer.  I slept on the floor of my office so often that Gray Matter bought me a pillow and sheets.  No joke.

The development process was much different then.  You didn't have tasks really, you were given levels and it was your job to see them to completion.  Your task was to "make it fun." Every day the company owner and design lead would play the level and give you feedback which you iterated on.  Often you were totally free to try anything you could think of if you thought it would make the game fun.  One day I hand scripted every movement of a head bouncing down the stairs (there was no physics) because I thought it would be a nice touch to a spooky area.  In modern game development you'd never really be allowed to take time to do such a thing.  You are given tasks to complete like an assembly line.  Game development today has lost most of that creative freedom.

So it was a terrible death march of endless work but it was also creatively free and fun.  In the end Activision bought Gray Matter and it became Treyarch.  Everyone that worked there got fat bonuses with the buyout except me.  Since I wasn't technically a Gray Matter employee.  So that sucked big time.  After it completed Gray Matter offer to hire me but instead I went to Raven Software with dreams of Hexen in my head.  Considering the insane success of Call of Duty I made another financially bad decision.

Anyway if you haven't played it go grab it. http://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/

Lotta Quake

Looking through my wardrobe I recall how many Quake games I've been a part of.  Certainly strange to thing that when I was playing Quake 1 I wasn't even part of the game industry.  Things certainly changed.

Sad News

Booted up the old PS2 tonight just for the hell of it.  Loaded War of Monsters and found one of the controllers no longer works.  Bummer :(

My No Man's Sky Experience So Far

UPDATE: Apparently there isn't anymore to this game that what I experienced.  Pity.  Perhaps someone will finish the game in a mod.

I read a one sentence review that said, "No Man's Sky is miles wide and an inch deep." I think that is the main issue with the game. You are given and endless expanse of nothing to do in it.

I enjoy the freedom of doing whatever I want but that isn't what the game is. You are actually very limited. You're not building structures or creating a base, or building a ship, you are wandering lost everywhere gathering resources. You sort of create and trade things in your inventory but it doesn't make you feel grounded with a goal and an understanding of what you're doing.  Some say it's a survival game, but does that mean if you can maintain all your shields and systems then you've won?  No, of course not.  You are supposed to feel a drive to explore and find more of what is out there.  But the game doesn't tease you that there is more out there.  For me after visiting three planets I see pretty much the same things and I'm doing the same tasks.  In a game where they say you'll never be able to see it all, seeing it all really isn't a goal you try to achieve.  So is exploration the goal??

You start the game with a crashed ship and use raw materials to "fix" it.  An amazing feat.  But for a character with the ability to do vast space exploration it feels strange to not know anything about where you are and where you're going. You feel like a super smart infant with no clue of the world they inhabit. To make me care about what I'm doing I'd like to know who I am. You are a lone what? Human? Nothing really tells you that. Every intelligent life form you encounter is described as an alien. But you have a fancy ship and fancy tools so where did you come from? Are you a part of something bigger? Have you just lost your memories? Did that question matter to the game's creators? What the hell is the premise of what you are and what you're doing? 

I also theorize that the game might be too open for people to easily grasp and in some cases myself included. Many people need at least a little guidance . Looking at the Elder Scroll series from Morrowind to Skyrim you can see Bethesda tightening the reins on the amount of hand holding and still some people found Skyrim too open and don't know what to do with themselves. I loved Morrowind and hated the more guided direction of Oblivion and Skyrim but No Man's Sky give you nothing at all.

I'm going to continue with No Man's Sky for now. Maybe the game is exactly what I've seen and nothing deeper but I can't shake the feeling that I just haven't figured it out yet.

Where My Interest in Games Came From

I often credit my intro to the video games to a Wolfenstein 3D demo but in reality if I think back I was interested in games way before that.  I lived out in the Iowa countryside so I rarely had access to video game arcades.  So I was super lucky in 1982 when my grandmother gave me a mini Donkey Kong console for Christmas.  I played this thing to death and was grounded on several occasions for playing it under the blankets when I should have been sleeping.  It was super simple but it was all I had.  This game had to

get me through a number of years because it wasn’t until I was in high school that I was able to hit the arcade with any kind of regularity and Wolfenstein 3D was 10 years away.  When I did get to the arcade I would go for Duck Hunt, Tempest, and Rampage but my favorite was always Joust.  I don’t know what it was about those flapping ostrich riders but I couldn’t get enough.

After graduation I had a roommate and he had a Sega Master System and I was hooked.  Space Harrier, Ghost House, Psycho Fox, Fantasy Zone.  My game play became pretty regular and annoying to the people around me including my roommate who wanted his console time back.  But like everyone fresh out of school I had no money and when my girlfriend and I moved out and got married we didn’t have money for games and again my inner gamer went into hibernation waiting for the right conditions to emerge.

These conditions happened years later when my wife mistakenly agreed that we should get a Sega

Genesis system.  BAM!! Again emerged the gamer sleepily playing until dawn, beating each expensive and carefully selected title to completion.  Golden Axe, Ghouls & Ghosts, Altered Beast, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, the list goes on and on.  I never crossed that line into Nintendo gaming.  I think from being a car enthusiast I was stupidly brand loyal and Sega was my brand, the underdog.  I kept my Genesis until I moved to California to attempt a career in animation.  Which is where we bought a Windows 486 PC and my wife came home with a Wolfenstein 3D demo disk that some guy at her job said, “Chad might like this.”  That guy later got a job at Activision and helped me get hired as a game tester in their QA department.

One day my wife came home and found me yet again playing Wolfenstein 3D rather than working on my animation portfolio which lead her to say, “Chad we moved to California so you could become an animator, but instead of working on animation all you do is play games.  Maybe you should work in games instead.”  I whole hardily agreed and the gaming industry is where I have been ever since.