Sure, you’re an adventurer, but are you fireproof?

There’s the sense that you can throw a party together of any classes, made up of random players who just have to be able to play the game and grunt occasionally at each other, and you can have fun most of the time. That’s very City of Heroes / Villains.

There’s the action combat, where you have to watch enemy tells to know where not to be. That’s very Champions Online.

Companions and player created content (i.e the Foundry) as key parts of the gameplay experience. That’s Star Trek Online.

But although those things might have their origin in the above titles for Cryptic, they’ve been refined for Neverwinter.

Cryptic have been developing casual-friendly MMOs for over 10 years and has always used instanced environments to maintain the player experience that the game is about your character (and the team they are with right now, if applicable). Neverwinter isn’t the exception here, with the result being a polished example of this approach to MMO design.

The combat is simple, straightforward and it works. Gone is the ridiculous complexity of Champions Online at the trade off of limited character power customisation.

Neverwinter isn’t perfect – the multiple currencies issue exists as it does in all Cryptic games, there are a number of obvious issues (e.g. the automated chat banning of an account for 24 hours if a few people report them, thus making it an ideal griefing tool) and arguably it might be too simple as a title to last – but it’s fun right now.

And it’s free. That gives the game a lot of leeway because you don’t need to pay a dime to experience the vast majority of the content.

Neverwinter won’t be a game for everyone, but it’s a title that shows off a lot of things Cryptic have learned about making casual MMOs and action RPGs. By launching as pure F2P there is recognition about the payment models that will at least get players in to install the game on their hard drive and give it a shot.

Things seem to be shaping up for Neverwinter to be a very successful title for Cryptic and a rare success among recent MMOG releases. Maybe there’s a lesson there for other MMO studios to learn from.

WHEN DID THIS BECOME AVAILABLE AND WHY WASN’T I TOLD???

Sometimes one thing dresses up like another thing to hide its true intent.

Kickstarter isn’t a store, or so the site tells you. But that doesn’t stop it being used as one, as this odd example shows.

Akaneiro: Demon Hunters was successfully kickstarted to the tune of a bit over US$204k on February 3 of this year, just beating its target of US$200k. Another data point – Akaneiro: Demon Hunters launched as a free-to-play title for the PC on January 31.

Yes, this was a game that launched before its Kickstarter completed. How did Spicy Horse Games, headed up by the distinctively named American McGee, achieve this incredible feat?

He used Kickstarter like a store. ‘Kicklaunching‘ was the term American McGee used, saying that having a Kickstarter on a 99% finished game gave the title “a real boost to awareness and engagement”. The Kickstarter rewards offered a lot of in-game items, but they also merchandise and titles that the studio already had available. Look through the reward levels – a rough count comes up with 39 different backer reward options – and look at what was on offer. Here’s a brief screenshot that shows off some of this:

Buy a video game from Spicy Horse at full price and get bonus items in their newest game for free!

McGee has already announced that Akaneiro was 100% complete and shipping in January regardless of Kickstarter success. In many ways this Kickstarter was all about the promotion of a new title and getting access to the equivalent of pre-order funds through selling existing merchandise / items that only a studio like Spicy Horse could offer. Yes, the money would go into further development of the title, but it was post-launch development – Spicy Horse didn’t need a kickstart here because they would launch Akanerio before the funds would even become available. Surely post-launch development could (should?) have been funded by revenue earned when the game had gone live?

What adds to the issue here is that this game is a F2P title – if a player was interested in Akaneiro, they didn’t have to put any money down to play it. But things certainly got more attractive if they could get a full title for $60 and any extra Akanerio items thrown in as an added bonus.

Not a store? Sure looks like one to me.

I’m a fan of the Bioshock series – I spent a long time pulling apart the game narrative of the original game, believe that Bioshock 2 doesn’t get the respect it deserves and Bioshock 2′s Minerva’s Den DLC is fantastic. I’d planned to do some detailed analysis on Bioshock: Infinite.

But now… apart from thinking about finishing that Bioshock plot guide, I’m not sure I have the motivation. I still think that an overall Bioshock-focused analysis of consistent themes and symbols is on the cards, but Bioshock: Infinite has killed my interest in analysing these things as a stand-alones.

Here’s why. (Oh yeah: ***SPOILERS*** FOR THE NARRATIVE OF BIOSHOCK INFINITE. AND BIOSHOCK. AND BIOSHOCK 2.)

The Bird or The Cage? Doesn’t Matter – They Both Lead to the Pet Store

It used to be that I’d cite STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl for the worst last level exposition vomit, where the game “throws up” all key narrative points at the player at the same time. Not anymore – Bioshock: Infinite is the new champion. After spending the vast majority of the game working with Elizabeth to free her from Comstock’s grasp, the post big battle ending reveals that:

• DeWitt is Comstock, depending on whether or not he accepted the baptism following the events at Wounded Knee
• Constants and variables rule the million million dimensions
• Comstock may or may not accept the baptism, which suggests that this is a variable
• Anna was the baby daughter that DeWitt sold to Robert Lutece in order to have his debts cleared
• DeWitt wanted his daughter back, so he chased Robert Lutece only to see Anna passed to Comstock (with Rosalind Lutece looking on) in another dimension
• The rapid closing of the dimensional portal ends up cutting off Anna’s little finger on her right hand
• The ‘AD’ that DeWitt has carved into his hand stands for Anna DeWitt
• There’s always a man, a city and a lighthouse
• DeWitt and Elizabeth arrive in Rapture, Elizabeth drowns Songbird and both leave in a bathysphere that takes them to a lighthouse
• The lighthouses link the infinite worlds together
• Twenty years after selling Anna, DeWitt is dragged through into Columbia’s reality by the Lutece’s in order for him to reclaim Elizabeth and stop Comstock’s long-term plan of destroying the United States
• But DeWitt forgets all this because of the effects of transdimensional travel
• And the only way for DeWitt to save every dimensions’ version of Elizabeth is to let her drown him before his baptism, therefor ensuring there is no Comstock
• So the multiple Elizabeths drown DeWitt and wink out of existence (or do they all… ?) which makes two drowned protectors for Elizabeth in the same 15 minutes

I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, but the final sequence is a machine gun of PLOT POINT! PLOT POINT! PLOT POINT! that feels incredibly unfocused and rushed.

The various elements of Bioshock link together to form a strong narrative chain.

There’s just not enough linkage between the ending and the rest of the game narrative that it feels connected. Bioshock’s twist – that you were Jack, the cloned offspring of Andrew Ryan who had been created by his enemy Frank Fontaine / Atlas as a controllable assassin to murder Ryan – was completely connected to the narrative. You could go back and find the puzzle pieces that meant this reveal made sense. “Would you kindly… ?” went from an antiquated turn of phrase to key game statement (and meta-narrative comment on the nature of FPS game objectives – the words make it sound like you have a choice, but the player really doesn’t.)

There are some minor signs in-game that DeWitt and Comstock share some kind of bond – the first time DeWitt sees Comstock he gets a blood nose, while zipping around the Hand of the Prophet airship DeWitt finds himself finishing Comstock’s sentences – but most of the above is completely out of left field. DeWitt also mentions the name “Anna” a few times when in a flashback or coming out of unconsciousness, but there’s no evidence of who she is up to it’s revealed that she was DeWitt’s daughter AND he sold her AND she was taken to another dimension at the cost of her little finger AND she’s Elizabeth AND AND AND. It’s a poor ending that feels tacked on because that’s where the author wanted to end up rather than where the narrative naturally flows to.

There’s also no player agency at all. Once you get to the ending sequence, the only choice the player has is around how long they wait before moving onto the next section, or which path they take (that leads to the same point anyway). It’s deeply ironic that a game with the pedigree of Bioshock: Infinite seems to relish making player action feel so restricted.

Ken Levine has some parent-child issues to work through, methinks.

This restriction is immensely frustrating, particularly when it comes to the drowning of DeWitt. The drowning of DeWitt prior to his baptism is forced on the player – it is predestined. Is there no alternative, such as DeWitt being so profoundly changed by his experience with Elizabeth / Anna in Colombia that across all multiverses all versions of him refuse to be Comstock? It makes just as much sense as suggesting that drowning DeWitt in one dimension kills all Comstocks across all of time and space. And it creates the paradox of DeWitt being drowned by Elizabeth / Anna who can’t exist because DeWitt now dies before having ever having conceived a daughter.

Even if you put aside the paradox issue, the drowning of DeWitt actually violates the rules of time / space travel as indicated by the game. Bioshock: Infinite shows that 1) if you enter a dimension where you are dead, you are bombarded by the memories of your ‘other’ self and 2) if you enter a dimension where you are alive, the brain creates memories to deal with the dimension jump, but both ‘selves’ now in that dimension remain separate (although their personal traits may be eroded according to one voxophone recording). So at the end of Bioshock: Infinite where the older DeWitt-who-saved-Elizabeth first rejects the baptism and is later drowned by Elizabeth / Anne, it should make no difference to the younger DeWitt-on-his-way-back-from-Wounded-Knee.

I’m secretly hoping that the DLC reveals that the narrative of Bioshock: Infinite was just the Lutece’s having some transdimensional revenge on Comstock for having them murdered.

Rosalind and Robert Lutece can exist in the same dimension. Comstock and DeWitt can exist in the same dimension. But this rule apparently doesn’t hold true for the climax – instead DeWitt is meant to have been slid back down his own timeline to the point before his own baptism and thus be the One and True DeWitt, which doesn’t happen anywhere else in-game. It really feels that Bioshock: Infinite threw away its own rule set for cheap narrative convenience. You could make the argument that now that Elizabeth / Anna is super-charged she can do this kind of thing, but if she can break the rules then it throws everything up for grabs.

For some games, these kind of large narrative flops don’t matter. The Bioshock series has always stood out for offering a strong narrative, so when Bioshock: Infinite’s plot collapses in on itself during the last fifteen or so minutes, it really shows.

Colombia: The World’s A Stage

Setting as character has also been a big part of the Bioshock series. Rapture, with its leaking glass, claustrophobic dampness and general signs of this-place-has-gone-horribly-wrong was critical to setting the atmosphere for the first two games. Pretty much everyone inside Rapture had gone insane thanks to ADAM and the societal war being fought out – the player was a day late and several dollars short to that party, but part of the narrative was a journey of discovery about why things went wrong and then how badly.

Colombia lacks that atmosphere. DeWitt arrives in a fantastic setting in the clouds that looks pretty, but fails to ever feel like a city. There’s not enough attention given to the details of Colombia compared to life in Rapture. For instance, Rapture contained a lot of audio diary commentary about how individuals felt about Little Sisters and Big Daddies; Colombia makes do with two voxophone entries about the Handyman from the wife of one. How do the ordinary folk of Colombia feel about the Handymen? About Songbird? About Comstock?

And after Nina dies, the children cared enough for her to arrange her body and decorate the space. Heartbreaking.

Rapture’s world was fleshed out by letting ordinary characters talk about their lives and provide exposition to the player. For instance, in Bioshock 2 three audio diaries are provided by school teacher Nina Carnegie that show the popularity of Ryan Amusements as an attraction, what happens when Rapture starts to riot on New Year’s Even 1959 and her final concerns about what happens to the children in her care after she starves to death. It’s a sad, human story in a place of misery and it builds the world.

This isn’t the case with Colombia – outside of the few exceptions like Hattie Gerst’s Handyman statements above and Constance Field’s search for a female role model, the focus is almost entirely on the main characters. This may help to drive the main narrative forward, but it doesn’t tell us what it is like to live in a fantastic floating city. Without that explanation, Colombia ends up a moving stage for the mobile murder cloud that is Booker DeWitt.

A History of Violence

A lot has been written about the amount of violence and blood in Bioshock: Infinite. Unlike a lot of other people, I don’t see much of an issue with it given that the Bioshock series has always contained similar things – the burning corpses thanks to your plasmids, the flying blood from the Big Daddy’s drills, the atrocities that you uncover as you journey through the setting. Perhaps it stands out more because Colombia seems so clean compared to the rotting damp of Rapture, and maybe the close range executions brought it home to players more, but the Bioshock world is a violent, nasty place.

Violent game or not, that’s just gross.

In fact, body horror is a core feature of the Bioshock franchise. Plasmids / vigors corrupt the body, giving it immense new powers in exchange for grotesque deformity and eventual loss of humanity. As such, it’s never going to be a group of titles that you can show to the squeamish, even if it contains some philosophical issues they might find interesting.

BUT… the combat of Bioshock: Infinite is incredibly ordinary. It gets dull very quickly, with it becoming difficult to track where damage is coming from within some of the open spaces where fights occur. Combat within Rapture was much more self-contained due to the smaller environments, making fights more intense and over more quickly because the Splicer was almost always nearby. Colombia sees you repeatedly placed in longer range combat that’s just soulless. The fact that dead enemies turn into lockboxes containing loot on death means the end of battle isn’t viewing your slaughter but more like raiding a bunch of lunchboxes some left lying around.

Flying around on a skyhook is fun. Pity it’s so abuseable – either as a get out of range free-card, or as an easy way to rack up kills through on-rail attacks (see an enemy coming towards you on the rail, just keep mashing the melee button) or through drop-down attacks.

Also gone from Bioshock: Infinite is the longer-term strategic battle planning seen in Bioshock and Bioshock 2. Within these older games it was a strategic decision to hack turrets and cameras so that you could turn the environment to your side. Placing traps in Bioshock 2 was a way of stacking a fight in your favour – the small environments in Rapture meant you could guide attacking enemies down a certain path, or at least deal some damage to the bigger enemies who are rushing you.

In Bioshock 2, there was a point to trapping a room. Although Bioshock: Infinite gives you a lot of trap options, they are rarely as useful to use as just throwing vigor effects directly at targets.

Bioshock: Infinite’s larger areas means that there are often too many areas to try to trap, while any enemy with a ranged weapon tends to stand back and shoot from cover. The Possession vigor and opening allied machine Tears replaces hacking as a way of gaining environmental aid, but Possession wears off very quickly while the Tears are completely spammable (since they recharge after destruction) and / or useless (such as the mechanical George Washingtons that were placed too far from the combat and faded out before doing anything).

On top of this, Handyman fights are exercises in panic. They appear generally without warning and are on you quickly, so the strategic planning and preparation that went into attacking previous Big Daddies is out the door. It’s pretty much hit-and-run the entire time, which doesn’t work out that great given the Handyman’s speed and melee attack range combined with how slowly DeWitt moves.

For a much more detailed look at why Bioshock: Infinite’s combat is often a step backwards from its predecessors, Critical Missive has an excellent evaluation.

Race To The Finish Line

Prior to launch, a lot was made about how Colombia was a racist, filled with ugly stereotypes of African-Americans, Chinese, Native American, the Irish and the like and that players would have to confront that racism. Those attitudes are certainly there, mixed in with a big healthy dose of economic classism as well. But as pointed out by others, the impact of these abhorrent images is quickly muted whem the underclass driven Vox Populi becoming a murderous mob that is indistinguishable from the Colombia forces thrown against DeWitt previously.

Daisy Fitzroy, the only significant character of colour in Bioshock: Infinite. The first time DeWitt meets her she steals his airship; the second she’s got her eye on killing a defenceless white child. Because RACISM.

Daisy Fitzroy is someone that the narrative of Bioshock: Infinite wants to make as sympathetic – or to at least have a justifiable viewpoint – but fails miserably. She is an African-American brought to Colombia to work as a servant, but is framed for the murder of Lady Comstock and is forced to run. Recognising that there are seeds of discord in Colombia that could be cultivated, she becomes the leader of the Vox Populi and works to overthrow Comstock and the Founders.

Which is all understandable, right up to the point that Fitzroy kills greedy captain of industry Jeremiah Fink (justified within Bioshock: Infinite’s world, given his treatment of his workers) and then smears Fink’s blood on her face and makes moves to shoot a white child for being white (… what?). In one fell swoop Bioshock: Infinite plays the “everyone’s a racist” card and sweeps aside whatever genuine grievances the Vox Populi might have had aside. There’s a big step between “riot at a factory due to poor working conditions” and “leave no Caucasians alive in Colombia”.

I’ve read the arguments that such things only reflect what US society was like back in the 1910s. Sure, there’s an element of that, but the ‘nuanced’ message ends up being, “US white society might be racist, but the poor will murder you all if just given a chance!”. By having an African-American separatist – and that’s exactly what Fitzroy is by the time DeWitt deals with her – as the voice of the Vox Populi, there’s little reason to try to find justification in either side’s ideology. Both are just ugly ideas that lead to ugly behaviour. (Andrew Ryan’s Objectivist leanings may have led to ugly behaviour, but Objectivism isn’t of itself an ugly idea, just incompatible with actual human nature.)

Fortunately DeWitt is an egalitarian – he puts bullets into people at the same rate regardless of their age, skin colour or gender.

Devils in the White City

In Rapture, you arrive in a city that’s torn itself apart due to its own internal stresses and discover the narrative that is behind that breakdown. When it comes to Colombia, the stresses might be there but the player is the one who leverages them open. The fall of Colombia is entirely DeWitt’s fault. Rather than finding a new flying ship when the Vox Populi co-opt his first one, he sets out to get a gun manufacturer to supply the Vox Populi with weapons and ends up triggering the revolution, ending in a lot of dead Colombia folk. Not bad for less than 24 hours in a city.

Dr H.H. Holmes. Had a hotel especially built that made it easy to murder people at his leisure and dispose of their bodies. May have killed up to 200 people (which is still a lower figure than DeWitt achieves in game). Was finally arrested by Pinkertons’ detectives.

One often-cited source for Bioshock: Infinite is Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City about Daniel H. Burnham, architect and driving forces behind the 1893 World Far in Chicago and serial killer-come-hotelier Dr H. H. Holmes. If you draw the parallel between that book and the game, Comstock is the genius architect of a fantastic city which leaves DeWitt as murderer who kills people for their money and possessions.

Come to think about it, that’s scarily accurate. But there’s another link here as well.

When the Vox Populi become the new opponent group, it means your targets swap police uniforms for… devil outfits. Bioshock: Infinite literally ends up with devils in the whites’ city. SUBTLE.

Whenever any side puts on devil outfits – masks and everything – they’ve pretty much ceded all ability to keep popular support within a Christian society. Although Comstock may be the religious leader of one side, the underclass of Rapture is shown to still have its own Christian tenets, given the African-American preacher you see in Shantytown (plus it is extremely likely that the Irish in Colombia would be devoutly Catholic or Protestant given the era).

There’s obviously symbolism in having the Vox Populi red devils taking on Comstock’s white-and-blue religious forces. But it seems like an anachronistic aesthetic picked because it looks cool rather than because it actually fits the Vox Populi. Unless one of the points of Bioshock: Infinite is that rebelling poor people are actually the minions of Lucifer, that is. (There may be some actual historical precedent for such outfits, but I’ve been unable to find it.)

What exactly did Ken Levine learn from his Occupy experience anyway, if this is how the Vox Populi ended up?

Going back to Bioshock 1 and 2, the Splicers wore masks and were overdressed in a shabby-chic-post-apocalyse way because 1) they were hiding their deformities caused by ADAM and 2) they were psychotic. In Bioshock: Infinite, a devil mask is one of the approved outfits of the revolution and worn voluntarily.

Elizabeth is the Best Damn Vending Machine a Boy Could Ever Have

A woman holding a quantum physics book? NEVAH! You can’t fool me, you obvious fake geek girl.

A lot was made pre-release about how great the relationship would be between Elizabeth and DeWitt (and by extension, the player) and how Bioshock: Infinite would avoid the usual pitfalls of escort gameplay: bad AI and pathfinding, escort characters getting in the way of combat, players failing missions because the escort did something dumb / got killed, etc. To this end, Bioshock: Infinite is successful in avoiding escort problems, but unfortunately Elizabeth failed to connect with me.

This is partly my fault and partly game play driven – there’s so many containers to search through in Colombia that I spent my time rummaging even when Elizabeth spoke. Given the quick realisation that she’s always nearby and indestructible, there’s no need to worry about her at any point.

Elizabeth’s key role (outside of driving the game narrative objectives) is during combat, where she throws you ammunition, salts and health packs as well as opening up Tears for you to use. I’ve got a strong belief that for a lot of players this is the basis for any attachment they may have to the character – she’s a beneficial vending machine. If Elizabeth just stayed out of the way during combat but didn’t offer any in-combat help, there would be lengthy portions of the Bioshock: Infinite where she’d virtually disappear.

Also, who helped her in to that corset? Did she have a beautician back there?

Elizabeth goes through a curious ‘growing up’ experience across the game narrative. When you meet her she’s dressed as a schoolgirl despite being 20 years old and is a bit naive after spending that time mostly cut off from people (but not socially awkward or an introvert or anything – years spent alone with only books and a Songbird don’t harm your communication skills at all, it seems). After seeing a lot of violence she is finally put in a situation where she kills someone (Daizy Fitzroy, as covered above) and runs off in reaction to what she’s done. Shortly after catching up to her, she hides and changes clothes, while also giving herself a perfectly trimmed haircut. The dress she chooses takes her from girl to woman – something any male players would undoubtedly notice given the amount of cleavage she’s now got on display.

It’s a dress that’s completely out of fit for the rest of the conservatively religious Rapture – looking around in-game, there are no other female characters or images that show off that amount of flesh. The game gives the excuse that it was there weren’t any other clothes to wear, but that’s more of a justification for Elizabeth to sexy up than anything else. There’s a hint that she’s dressed in Lady Comstock’s clothes (or similar), but Lady Comstock is never shown wearing anything so low cut.

Tweetybird

Songbird has such a great appearance yet is nowhere near as interesting as the Big Daddies where.

Songbird really is irritating, isn’t he? And not in an impressive way. After seeming so important during the pre-promotions, it turns out Songbird is just a narrative convenience to stop you succeeding in rescuing Elizabeth until a certain point.

Songbird is the most literal Big Daddy analogue in Bioshock: Infinite, so it’s sad to see him treated so poorly. A large part of the Bioshock mythos has arisen from the Big Daddies – visually distinct and incredibly iconic in both sight and sound. Songbird doesn’t have anywhere near the same kind of impact in this title, and while Big Daddies get a lot of audio diary attention to flesh them out, Songbird gets a measily one or two.

Vim and Vigour

Vigors are – as revealed through the game – Colombia’s version of Plasmids, stolen through the Tears into Rapture by Fink. There’s just one problem here: a massive part of Bioshock’s back story is the discovery of ADAM from underwater sea slugs that gave Rapture’s scientists the ability to create Plasmids in the first place. Instead of EVE and Plasmids, Fink creates Salts and Vigors, but the question remains: where is the ADAM coming from?

Rapture society ripped itself apart to get more ADAM and eventually started planting sea slugs in little girls in order to keep up with demand (and then needed to create Big Daddies in order to protect the Little Sisters from being ‘harvested’). Vigors and salts might be newer in Colombia, but they are everywhere. That requires a lot of ADAM. It’s unlikely that Fink is stealing it from Rapture – it appears he can only observe through the Tears, because he never mentions going through one – which means it requires another source. Given that Colombia is a city in the sky, it’s a long, long way from the sea slugs it needs to fund the ADAM economy.

Perhaps the DLC will reveal where all this ADAM is coming from, but it’s another example of where Bioshock 1 and 2 tried to build a quasi-working world that explained itself, Bioshock: Infinite is happy to throw things at a player and say, “Why? Just because, that’s why!”.

The Reviews Are In

Despite the above, I don’t think that Bioshock: Infinite is a terrible game, just a remarkably ordinary one that was over-hyped and is the weakest title in the series thus far.

Consider the above to be a minority report.

But I’m one of the few. Looking at the Metacritic scores for this game, 62 out of 62 reviews (PC), 29 out of 30 (X360) and 24 out of 24 (PS3) professional reviewers rate this game 80+ out of 100. They see the game as “a genre-defining game”, “as near perfect as a game can get”, a title that will be “left in the back of your mind for years to come”. Instead I see a title that is a step backwards in almost every way to the rest of the series.

Sometimes I think that games writers are so desperate for video games to be considered True Art that they latch onto anything that might fit that definition. The Bioshock franchise has a pedigree of being a thinking FPS and this was the return of Ken Levine as Bioshock lead, automatically giving the title extra bonuses to its “Art” credentials. Throw in a strong start, aspirations of nuance and an ending that can be argued over – even if it doesn’t really fit or make sense – and suddenly these reviewers appear wowed by the flash and afraid to look too much deeper in case going, “Hmm, still a lot of flaws here” would provide ammunition for those looking to deride all video games.

“We were bad, but it was on purpose, so you can’t criticise this at all!”

Even those who pick up on the numerous flaws of the title downplay them, still wanting to make Bioshock: Infinite something of a historic monument. I’ve read the arguments that Bioshock: Infinite is meta-narrative on player agency in video games, a meta-commentary on the illusion that DeWitt has free will in a fixed narrative structure which seems to put the title in a can’t-lose situation – if you didn’t like the lack of control you had in game, or that none of your decisions mattered, then it’s your own fault because that was the author’s intent! Of course Bioshock: Infinite is meant to be on rails – you travel via sky-rail in-game, don’t you? It seems that if only Aliens: Colonial Marines had pitched itself as a satire of licensed games that fail to deliver  then that title would have been received a lot more positively.

On top of which the original Bioshock was a much better examination of player agency in games. “Would you kindly…” had a lot of impact for a reason and it was actually partly refuted by the multiple endings – players did have moral agency over how they behaved, even if the game itself set fixed objectives. Bioshock: Infinite replaces that with a pure Calvinistic Predestination model that suggests nothing changes regardless of what the player does.

Be good, be evil, be an angel, be a devil – doesn’t matter. Died, died, will die.

As I said before, it’s amazing that a game with “Infinite” in the title ends up being so damn fixed in place.

This isn’t the universe where I write that blog entry.

This trailer attracted negative attention because is showed women in fetish outfits being violently killed by Hitman’s protagonist, Agent 47. The eight women – known as the Saints – appear as nuns, strip off, shoot up a building (completing missing the target) then die in a variety of ways at Agent 47′s hands. As a trailer it was an odd mix of sexual imagery and bloody violence that turned off a number of people.

Nuns have their own language? Who knew? Also, looking at how these women carry themselves I think they failed their nun deportment lessons.

Developers IO Interactive said they were surprised by the reaction to the trailer but it was based on a level in the game that they were now going to beef up to provide the Saints with more character. In fact, the quote is:

“The Saints trailer is based on a level within the game. One way to go about that level is to in all guns blazing but of course, it’s not the smartest way. We learned from the trailer that we really needed to give these characters some context and some back story,” said Blystad, “We’re working within the game—within that level—to build these characters up before you meet them. That way you know what you’re getting and you aren’t put off by them.”

(Sidenote 1: This controversy didn’t hurt Hitman: Absolution’s sales at all, with this game shifting 3.6m units worldwide… although publisher Square Enix wanted closer to 5m units shifted.)

(Sidenote 2: The trailer wasn’t even Hitman: Absolution’s most offensive promotional activity – that went to the Facebook app where you could put a ‘hit’ out on people for their “small tits” or “tiny penis”, among other things. Square Enix pulled the app and apologised for it pretty quickly after that launched.)

So, having played and finished Hitman: Absolution, was the controversy worth the attention given what the game really released with? Did the Saints get more character in-game?

I have to say that the reaction to the controversy changed nothing, because the Saints remain eye candy for Agent 47 to murder. They appear in a short cutscene when called in to deal with Agent 47 where they murder a tied-up man, then are the targets in the Attack of the Saints level (although seven Saints rather than eight), and that’s it. They aren’t any more difficult to take out than other opponents and their ‘special outfits’ serve no real purpose other than to make them look ridiculous next to the numerous fully dressed men in protective jackets who are supporting the field operation.

Here’s a playthrough of the Attack of the Saints level:

Do you see any character being given to the Saints? Would you be able to tell any of the Saints apart (outside of the single African-American Saint) in-game if they weren’t named targets?

There’s a few lines given to the Saints being effectively damaged women of all stereotypes that have been bought together and trained so as to “focus their rage” into special forces unit, but that’s about it. The end result remains Agent 47 killing sexy nuns who are (futilely) armed with big guns.

One extra trailer does exist about the Saints, but it is out of game and not something that would have been widely seen. It’s a recap on the Saint’s background and amusingly includes (if you stop to read the text of a letter) a query about why the Saints are dressed up in latex if they are meant to disguised as nuns. The unsaid response seems to be, “I dunno – we let all our murder squads pick their own outfits”.

However, the trailer still is very clear that despite the Saints’ alleged exceptional murder skills, Agent 47 still takes them out. So there are two trailers, released before the game, indicating that the Saints don’t pose an iota of real threat to Agent 47.

This is a good question, especially if the Saints were meant to use their appearance as nuns to blend in to the population.

The big issue here isn’t that Agent 47 was killing women, it that he was killing women dressed up to be sexually appealing when they certainly didn’t need to be. Yes, they’ve got big guns, but the battle stilettos and tightest of tight clothes more than offset that.

The Saints are meant to be a special forces team, so at the very least combat boots and body armour – rather than high heels, stockings and talcum powder – should be a standard outfit. Plus there is nothing that the Saints do to show that they are any different from the garden variety minions you fight on any other level – compare that with Sanchez, who knocks out Agent 47 once and can be (depending on your approach in his level) a mini-boss one-on-one melee fight. In comparison, the Saints fire an RPG into a building and then wait around for Agent 47 to kill them.

On top of which their nun disguises would draw more attention than hide them – nuns in full habits are uncommon enough in most places, but sexy nuns? In latex? Unless you go to a particularly permissive Catholic congregation that’s held at an S&M club, those clothes won’t pass unnoticed. Given Hitman: Absolution’s focus on being in the ‘right’ disguise, it ends up being a violation of the game’s own logic.

My conclusion at the end of this is that the Saints trailer presented the Saints almost exactly as they appear in-game. Agent 47 can’t kill them all in-game the same way that he does in that trailer because 1) the Saints are never presented to the player all in one area, 2) Hitman: Absolution requires the player to be a lot more stealthy if they want to be successful in-game and 3) the trailer is a much more of a loving ode to rapid-fire wetwork than the game allows, but the role of the Saints remains exactly the same:

Look sexy in the cut scene, appear falsely competent and rapidly die at Agent 47′s hands.

If the Saints had their characters “beefed up” before Hitman: Absolution’s launch, I can only imagine how uni-dimensional they must have been before. Although IO Interactive said they were working on improving the Saints, the end product doesn’t bear much difference to the promotion that irritated a lot of people to start with.

“Cancelled? Damn it. Okay boys, time to polish up your resumes for the next WoW expansion.”

Hey, remember that Warhammer 40K MMO that was going to be published by THQ and was being developed by Vigil Games? No? That’s okay, few people do.

The Warhammer 40K MMO was barely mentioned during the discussion around Vigil Games failing to find a new home after THQ collapsed. Vigil’s published titles of Darksiders and even Dante’s Inferno were referenced, but this was a project that first appeared back in 2007 that everyone seemed to have forgotten about.

It had been announced in mid-2012 that maybe it had been cancelled or maybe it had been morphed into a single player title (or maybe both – no-one seemed to know) but that’s still a lot of time invested in a title. W40K:DM was in development so long people started making up fake launch dates that seemed believable.

It’s a title to remember as it was one of the factors that helped bring down THQ. W40K:DM had an indicative budget of US$50m and it’s very possible most of that money (or perhaps even more) was spent for no good outcome – former THQ President Jason Rubin named the “massive wasted capital in the unpublished MMO that was cancelled” as a contributing factor to the destruction of THQ’s financial viability.

Not much was known about the actual mechanics of gameplay, but the trailers certainly make it look very third person shooter-y, which is a type of MMO that’s got a very chequered past.

With Vigil unsold and SEGA buying out all of THQ’s Warhammer rights, it’s most likely that this MMO is completely dead. A few years ago there may have been some interested parties that would have swooped in and picked up a heavily-developed MMO at fire sale prices, but new MMOs just don’t have the financial legs they once did. THQ couldn’t find organisations interested in buying into W40K:DM back when it was still part of an operational company; now that it is unfinished code and assets on a server somewhere there’s even less likelihood of a resurrection, even at this time of year.

Hmm, now that I think about it, Warhammer MMOs don’t have a particularly good history anyway. Perhaps Warhammer and its variants are an IP that should be kept apart from the massively multiplayer arena.

I was eyeballing SimCity review scores on Metacritic as a point of interest to see how different sites scored SimCity.  A glance over these scores turned up something interesting: it seemed like all the sites that got early previews and most likely played on EA’s private servers (as Polygon did) gave the title much higher scores. To see if this was true, I charted SimCity’s professional Metracritic review scores over time and this is the result:

SimCity (2013) review scores from March 4 to March 17, as indicated on Metacritic. (Click to enlarge)

It’s pretty clear that the day 1 and day 2 reviews from gaming press sites were much, much more positive than any site that reviewed it later on. They cluster up in the 80% to 100% range, but even a few days later the review scores are much more spread. Polygon has three review scores up there to reflect the changing review scores it gave SimCity – a gushing March 4 review gave the title 9.5, a day later that was revised to 8.0 and then on March 7 it was downgraded again to 4.0.

So, to things that come to mind:

1. Those gaming journalists writers that got early access to SimCity and most likely played on EA’s private servers did not get an accurate view of what SimCity would be like to play at launch. The result of this is that the Day 1 reviews would have encouraged people to purchase a title that they may have been locked out of due to server issues.
2. Reviews posted later have had the benefit of seeing the situation blow up and possibly experienced the frustration of not being able to log in themselves. However, but this time the controversy was in full flight, so it’s very possible that the reviewers tempered their scores knowing how the masses were reacting to those issues i.e. not well.

One thing that might blur the line here with some of these scores: we don’t know when the actual reviews were written. Just because they were published on a certain day doesn’t mean that they weren’t written and finalised well before that date. It would be interesting to know if those who returned the higher review scores had played it pre-launch on EA’s servers or had actually had a good SimCity experience after the title had started its retail sales.

Regardless, it’s a concerning issue when reviewers are experiencing a completely different game than players will and then recommending the title based on something that may not be replicated after launch.

The Verifiable Claims

Going through the list (and changing the order to build a clearer picture):

Claim: Paragon Studios grossed 12 million in revenue annually.

Going through NCsoft’s Earnings Reports, the statement that Paragon Studios “grossed 12 million in revenue annually” is a bit open to questioning, at least over which period you are looking at. If you do a quick sum of the revenue-by-year for CoH/V you end up with something like this using a Jan – Dec reporting period as NCsoft does (results converted to US$, with some assumptions used in the conversion):

This is based on NCsoft’s Earnings report information that everyone seemed happy enough to rely on until CoH/V was shut down. (Click to enlarge)

Arguably there’s a bit of a gap in the idea that CoH/V – the only revenue source that Paragon Studios had that I’m aware of – grossed US$12m annually. At best it could be seen as a rough average over the last two years.

If you tweak it to a Jul – Jun accounting cycle, the figures look a bit different. CoH/V’s launch quarter is ignored and we end up with the following annual revenues:

The same figures as above, but on a different reporting schedule (click to enlarge).

So perhaps if you allow for some errors in conversion and maybe some rounding from the source, the concept of CoH/V earning US$12m a year in revenue is viable for 2010-ish onwards. Looking at those same figures you can really see that the revenue numbers take a dive around 2009/10. (Champions Online launched September 2009 – I’m not saying that the decline was entirely due to that, but it’s an interesting coincidence at least.)

Sidenote: those two images above are some very strong support for why CoH/V was shut down. That kind of revenue decline is a pretty brutal trend.

Claim: CoH had a high retention rate. Subscribers had a stick rate of 95-98%.

Obviously I can’t verify this by producing Paragon Studios’ internal data, but it is consistent with previous comments from former CoH lead Jack Emmert that this title had “a 90% retention rate from month to month“. But the key word for this claim is “subscriber”.

Subscribers stuck to CoH/V something like the above. The problem appears to be the lack of new players who came along to also get stuck.

CoH/V was a F2P title. Subscribers – paying an automatic $15 or so a month – the most dedicated of players to any F2P title, because they could elect to pay less money and still keep playing. It would also be nice to know the time period for this indicated stick rate – per month? per week? (I believe such figures are usually reported on a monthly basis, but that doesn’t mean the claimed figure was). Regardless, it’s a strong result for CoH/V.

But even with such strong retention figures, you can’t forget the other side: new player attraction / acquisition. Let’s say that CoH/V started the year with a monthly stick rate among subscribers of 98% and 100k subscribers. If no new players came on board over that year but 2% churned monthly, at the end of that 12 months they would now have 78.4k players, or have lost roughly 22% of that ‘sticky’ subscriber base. You need new players to replace exiting subscribers to ultimately see a title grow.

Looking at those above revenue figures and accepting the potential for CoH/V subscribers to be incredibly loyal, it’s pretty clear that CoH/V’s problem was in attracting new players. This was despite a sizable marketing push around Going Rogue and then when CoH/V went F2P. It seems that CoH/V was a title where the subscriber base was rusted on but new players weren’t coming on board in large numbers.

Claim: NCSoft has no plans for a CoH 2.  Paragon wanted to do it but NCSoft was growing ever more uncomfortable with a Superhero IP, worried that it wouldn’t work in today’s market.

NCsoft canning plans for CoH 2.0 is consistent with information I’ve seen from other sources. The perception that both Champions Online and DC Universe Online bombed wouldn’t have helped change their minds either.

Claim: They (Paragon) had a second project in the works. It was a compromise to not being able to make CoH 2.  It was the show “Lost” meets Minecraft.  You crash-landed on an island and you were able to build your own fortress and weapons. You teamed up with other players to tackle the mysteries of the island.

I’ve heard this claim before and it is mentioned in a previous link.

The Unbelievable Claims

Claim: The studio’s total annual operating cost was $4 million USD. 

Paragon Studios had a total annual operating cost of US$4m? That’s… low. Incredibly low. Even the article points out that with Paragon Studio’s 80-odd people, they’d be paying an average of US$50k per year to each employee (a very low figure with the average salary in the gaming industry reported at around US$80k per year) for an overall payroll of US$4m, and that’s before rent, taxes and other business expenses.

I had a look at rent. Here’s where I believe Paragon Studios was located (2189 Leghorn St., Mountain View, California) and I believe it took up the whole building, so that’s 13650 square feet (SF) to pay for. Rental rates in the area look very low – ranging from around US$15 / SF per year to US$65 / SF per year at a glance – and if we take an intermediate figure like US$30 / SF per year for Paragon Studios, that still means around US$400k was going out in rent annually and the rest of the studio only cost US$3.6m to run.

Do you know who else is in Mountain View? If you are living in this area, you are generally pulling in quite a bit more income than the national average.

Also, just taking into account studio operation costs may not reflect the full story of CoH/V’s costs. NCsoft provided services such as customer service, payment systems and server hosting to CoH/V, with it being highly likely that Paragon Studios was required to pay some kind of contribution towards those areas. Any cash going towards those overheads would also increase the studio’s operating costs, but they may not have been included in any kind of “studio operating cost” figure.

I could certainly accept that the operation cost of CoH/V was US$4m, particularly with rent costs being low, but saying that Paragon Studios’ total operating costs were US$4m seems to be leaving some numbers out somewhere.

Claim: CoH was profitable even before they converted to Free to Play but were even more so after the conversion.

Here’s the problem with taking the word ‘profitable’ at face value: you can’t always be sure what kind of profit is being talked about. Gross profit? Net profit? A profitability ratio? Profitability per player? And over what time period?

I have a lot of problem accepting that CoH/V was more profitable after going F2P considering its revenue continued to shrink following the conversion. Unless Paragon Studios and / or NCsoft was slashing costs internally, there is no way that you could have gross profit going up while revenue went down. Increased profit on other measures would be possible – perhaps on some kind of average profit per paying player basis, or something – but not at the net profit level that really counts.

As I’ve said previously, it’s possible that CoH/V was profitable but Paragon Studios wasn’t. Perhaps CoH/V’s profitability went up because a lot of costs were being deferred to the other project. This claim really requires a lot more challenge and clarification before is should be accepted.

The Unverifiable Claims

Claim: Brian Clayton tried to orchestrate a management buyout of Paragon starting over a year ago because it became progressively more difficult to deal with NCSoft. They had created a Kickstarter page and a campaign video, but it never went to press.

The claim that Paragon Studios was attempting a management buy-out isn’t currently verifiable using existing sources. However, if it is true, it’s a claim that could provide a reason for why Paragon Studios was shut down with such surprising speed.

The Kickstarter information is curious, given that Paragon Studios was 100%-owned by NCsoft and would need NCsoft’s permission to launch it. How would that conversation go? “Hi, we want your permission to help us leave you, and we’re going to be very public about it. That okay with you?” Plus how much could Paragon Studios realistically look to raise from that channel? Even in the absolutely best case scenario, it would less than US$4m.

“We’re going to break up, but I’m going to spend the next month telling everyone and seeing how much money they’ll give to help me move out. If it’s not enough cash, I’ll stay with you. Sound fair?”

There had to be other investors behind the scenes and probably the kind of people / organisations for whom an extra few million on a deal wouldn’t be a problem. It’s likely that any Kickstarter would have been more to show that CoH/V was popular enough to hit a financial target via crowdsourcing than vitally needing the money to fund the buy-out. Especially if prior to starting the process Paragon Studios were aware of how much they’d have to raise to buy out NCsoft’s share – the full amount would have had to be in the tens of millions.

I’ve had a look on Kickstarter to see if I could find a Paragon Studios-related account name, but was unable to locate any – the Kickstarter site is great for searching about projects but lousy for searching about user accounts.

When Cryptic sold the CoH/V IP to NCsoft and a number of Cryptic developers left to start NCsoft NorCal (which later became Paragon Studios), they did so under a structure that was fully owned by NCsoft. That Paragon Studios was allegedly looking to break away from this structure is unlikely to have been viewed positively by NCsoft management regardless of CoH/V’s financial performance.

Subsidiary break-aways are exercises that test the trust each party has in the relationship. Information that used to be openly shared is now cut back and each side looks to guard their territory, especially where current revenue generators would become competition for future revenue. Even in situations where the break-up is mutual, at least one side ends up looking bad to the public (and usually it’s the side with the most money / power in the previous deal) – if the relationship was working, then no-one would want to change it, right?

Loyalty is a difficult leash to get out of gracefully.

If NCsoft management were aware of the plan, it would be very easy for the internal view on any Paragon Studios management buy-out to be one focused on perceived disloyalty. Hadn’t NCsoft invested a lot in CoH/V, including a boxed expansion and F2P conversion, only to fail to see a return to growth? Hadn’t they kept expanding the Paragon Studios team despite CoH/V failing to meet its annual revenue targets?

But Paragon Studios management still wants to take all of that and walk away, taking the benefits of that relationship with them? It would be possibly insulting to NCsoft. And it would serve as a problematic example for other NCsoft-owned studios. Maybe ArenaNet or Carbine Studios would start to look at independence with a longing gleam in their collective eye. That’s not a situation NCsoft would want to encourage.

If NCsoft was thinking like this, it would have made Paragon Studios a very ripe target for cutbacks at a time of financial hardship – why spread the pain when a single studio that already wants out is underperforming? Some may view that as spiteful, but if you have to cut your costs, you start with the easiest targets. And you do it quickly, because that way no-one has time to take valuable materials with them.

Claim: NCSoft paid $8 million USD to buy CoH. They wanted $80 million USD to sell it. They only value it at $3 million for tax purposes.

NCsoft made the deal to buy CoH/V from Cryptic at the end of 2007. I don’t believe it has ever been publicly indicated the amount paid for Cryptic’s share of the IP. Although US$8m (if true) might seem a bit low for a title that earned about three times that amount in the same year, it’s important to remember that Cryptic were only in charge of management and development of the game, plus owned part of the IP, with NCsoft funding other aspects of the game and owning the other part of the IP. Internet rumours were that Cryptic and NCsoft owned the CoH/V IP 50/50 until the buy out. So in buying CoH/V NCsoft was spending money on something they already part owned.

However, without other sources, the US$8 million claim is unverifiable.

In the absence of other information, there is PLENTY of room for rumours.

NCsoft wanting to sell CoH/V for US$80m is another curious claim, because it matches up with a claim that Trion was willing to spend US$80m to acquire CoH/V. But that’s a not entirely reliable rumour based on a single post in a video game forum from someone who may have been making a general claim (“Trion had US$80m available to spend on project acquisition”) that’s been taken as a specific one (“Trion had US$80 that they were willing to 100% use to buy CoH/V”). Other rumours about parties interested in buying CoH/V included Sony Online Entertainment (which was then refuted by SOE’s MMO head) and Valve (who allegedly was only offering US$3m plus profit share to NCsoft to buy the IP).

So maybe Trion’s story is true and NCsoft was just looking for a price they’d been offered by a recent potential buyer, but the biggest issue is that a lot of the comments on CoH/V’s price come from discussions on message boards. These comments then took on a life of their own as people looked for any information about what was going on with CoH/V and rumour started to be treated as fact.

Was the MMORPG.com source in the room when NCsoft indicated they wanted US$80m, or did they also hear about that figure from another source? And importantly: when did they hear that figure? A few years ago, US$80m for CoH/V as it earned US$20m+ a year would have been believable; in 2012 when the title was earning half that revenue that same price may not have applied.

Finally, regarding NCsoft only valuing CoH/V for tax purposes at US$3m, there are a number of questions: what part of CoH/V was valued at that figure? All of it, including its operations? Or just the IP? That aside, it remains an unverifiable claim – I can’t see any information that breaks things down to the per title level. If you can find those things in the Earnings Reports or Audit Reports, let me know and I’ll revisit this.

Claim: NCSoft tried to work with Paragon, they really did.  But the profits were not what they needed to be, and CoH/Paragon were the weak link in NCsoft’s lineup moving forward.

Other people within Paragon Studios may feel differently about how well NCsoft worked with Paragon Studios, so it’s a bit too subjective to be verifiable.

NCsoft has a history of completely supporting a title right up to the point it doesn’t. I’ve seen this used (and have used it myself) as a criticism of NCsoft, but there is also virtue to it: NCsoft generally doesn’t cut a game off and let it slowly die. If a game is NCsoft’s they work to try to make it successful, exhausting a number of options before possibly pulling the plug. It’s actually saying something nice about NCsoft in that they were trying to turn things around, but sometimes it doesn’t work and you just have to make a hard decision for the benefit of the rest of the business.

Profitability and revenue have already been discussed.

And Now, A Word From Our Publisher

The fact that this is how most gamers view publishers doesn’t help NCsoft’s case to be viewed in their favour.

No-one really trusts PR statements put out by big businesses. In this case NCsoft’s Communications Head Lincoln Davis put out a statement that a lot of people seemed to read their own pre-conceptions into.

At its heart, NCsoft’s statement was that the financial figures the anonymous source presented were incorrect, Paragon Studios and CoH/V weren’t meeting long-term profitability goals, and that it was a difficult decision to shut the studio and this title. It seems that a number of people wanted NCsoft to counter by releasing the ‘real’ figures, and that since they didn’t they must be lying, but all of the things can NCsoft said can be true. As I’ve pointed out above, a number of the financial claims around CoH/V from the anonymous source require a lot more information before they could be considered as true and correct.

Both sides here may be telling the truth as they know it.

Lies, Damned Lies and Misinterpreted Statements

Under these kind of he said / she said situations, external observers on games forums will tend to try to find out who ‘lied’. In real life it’s rarely as simple as having one (or both) sides telling the absolute truth or a pack of lies. There are plenty of ways that someone can tell what they believe to be the truth but it turns out to be not fully correct – perhaps they are correct within their own sphere of work but wrong about the organisation overall, or perhaps they misheard or misinterpreted a statement. It’s also very possible that a company’s employees are told one thing while management is aware of a much fuller, more detailed picture.

This is why anonymous sources can be troublesome – they can tell a journalist / video game writer something they (in the best case) believe to be the honest truth, but how much weight their comments have depends on their position within the organisation. MMORPG.com felt that the source was reliable enough to publish the comments, but as I’ve argued above there are a number of claims made that deserve further questioning to better tease out their accuracy.

The Red Herring of a Smoking Gun

Some people won’t forgive NCsoft for the closure of CoH/V, and that’s fine. But my point is that there are some possibly very sensible business reasons for the closure and not NCsoft being evil for the joy of it.

A lot of people seem to be looking for a smoking gun around the cancellation of CoH/V: that CoH/V in itself was profitable. As I’ve said before, I think that’s true – under certain conditions / assumptions, CoH/V probably was a profitable title. But at the same time, I don’t think Paragon Studios was a profitable studio with only CoH/V’s revenue coming in. There was at least one other title under development as well as two previously abandoned titles, meaning a lot of expenditure but no expectation of new revenue for at least a few years.

The challenge that some people seem to have is around why you’d shut down something if it was profitable, but it’s not that uncommon. If a title (or product or service, for that matter):

• wasn’t profitable enough to meet its targets;
• was profitable now but had a future expectation of going into a net loss situation;
• was a less profitable investment than its alternatives; and / or
• risked defecting to become the competition

then there is a solid business case for reallocating its operational dollars elsewhere.

Even if solid evidence emerged tomorrow that CoH/V was undeniably profitable, it doesn’t prove that NCsoft’s decision was objectively wrong or a poorly thought out. Subjectively a number of people disagree and think that CoH/V should have been left operating, but CoH/V’s revenue had been on the decline for quite a while with no signs of recovery. Something was going to give at some point; it just happened more suddenly than expected.