Catching up: Catherine - the nerdy guide to relationships?

It is very rare for me to find a game that I will have such mixed feelings towards. In case of Catherine, these feelings are also incredibly polarized. What you are about to witness is as much of a love song as it is a hate rant. The text contains some spoilers - you've been warned.

Let's start with the good sides. The gameplay is simply delicious! I only play puzzle games on my phone and if I were to choose a game type for one of my main gaming platforms, puzzler would be one of the last choices. Still, the way Catherine handles its puzzles is exceptional. Fast-paced, highly competitive, diverse climbing mechanics with variety of block types provides a very entertaining challenge. And when I write challenge, I mean I have platinum trophies in both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls and I still wouldn't dare to play Catherine on hard difficulty. There's 28 stages in the main game, 64 stages in Rapunzel retro mini-game with same mechanics, just a bit different rules + Babel + Colosseum, a local competitive multiplayer. That's a lot for a simple small game Catherine seems to be. 

Level design itself is impressive. If someone told me to design a level for platformer or a shooter, I would at least have a faint idea where to start. With Catherine, I would pass right away. Respect to all these guys who fried their brains with maths of this block-building. Even bigger respect to designers that came up with all these cool techniques that NPC's in the game teach you (I would have never invented half of them on my own).

The narrative of the gameplay shines as well. Whenever gameplay tells us the story, it just can't get get better. Climbing a tower, pushing blocks like a slave in Ancient Egypt, avoiding traps and falls, dealing with various environment elements and being constantly aware of your surroundings - and all of that as a metaphor of being in a relationship! Cherries on top are these small moments where designers use clever tricks to let you feel the social aspects of the games theme. For example you can only check out a dirty picture on your phone when on a toilet, which makes you feel like a sneaky bastard :) A nice touch is also the online feature showing statistics, how other players answered the questions.

Then comes the story itself. The main theme of the game is relationships, fidelity and growing up. Pretty unusual for a video game, huh? Unfortunately, as much as I was excited to find out how they approached it, I got solely disappointed. There's just so many sins Catherine's storytelling commits, it's almost unbelievable.

First of all, the setup. We have a classic shōnen manga situation - a guy who seems average in every possible way, yet somehow two girls want to be with him so badly that he can't decide which one to choose. It reminds me of an old Jim Carrey stand-up:

Start at 2:38 :)

This might work for teenagers that feel like most average of the average and dream of girls being interested in them. When used as an assembly for a mature analysis of cheating in a relationship, it falls flat very quickly. To top that off, none of these girls is really to die for. From the very start Katherine is depicted as an annoying control freak that most of the guys would dump after a few months, a year tops if sex was good. Bimboey Catherine on the other side very quickly shows she's nuts and I myself would be running from a girl like her faster than from a rhino. After first few nights, I just wanted to have an option to get as far away from both of them as possible. But no - no matter what you do, Vincent (the main character) behaves like an indecisive teenager, but without the charm of Keichii Morisato or Tenchi Masaki. But wait, it gets worse.

In the center of the story there's this meter that shows where your actions and choices take you on a good - bad scale. Seriously, every single dilemma in the game is judged as simply right or wrong. All the subtleties and complexities of human relationships got downgraded to just "good" or "bad". If I wanted a bite of such oversimplification I'd just go to church instead of playing a game. 

After most of the stages you get to answer questions that are supposed to judge your attitude towards relationships. Of course, they are also judged in this ridiculous right and wrong scale which leads to all sorts of even more absurd revelations. To give you a taste:

Q: Do you prefer an older or younger partner? - selecting "younger" automatically drives you towards the "bad cheater" scenario. WTF?

Q: Have you been told your romantic standards were too high? - according to the game designers, affirmative answer doesn't mean you will die alone looking for "the one". It means you are a good, faithful partner.

Q: Are you more of a Sadist or a Masochist? - apparently, cutting yourself means you are a reliable, stable lover. Sharpen your razor blades, guys!

Seriously, if someone ever got the crazy idea of getting dating advice from this game, he would end up as a repressed weirdo who, if lucky enough to get a woman by sheer luck, would be unable to communicate with her, building up his and her sexual frustration. There's just one conclusion I am able to draw here. When I was teaching teenagers creative writing, one of the first advices was "don't touch topics you have no idea about - it will show in what you write". Dear Atlus writers - it really shows you have no clue about men-women relationships. Actually, there is barely a moment in the game that could show you know how an average 32 year old man behaves. 

But yeah - you guessed it. It gets even worse! The narrator in the game, together with sms-based tutorials tell you at least three times how the choices you make in the game matter. How the answers to the questions change your good vs. evil meter and how it affects the story. Well - bullshit! No matter what you do and what messages you write, the plot stays the same for the whole game up until the ending that has a number of different versions. Due to the first 95% of the story remaining untouched, half of these endings doesn't even make sense. You can be leeching dirty pictures from the bimbo Catherine and send the worst possible messages to the bitchy Katherine. Either way, Vincent will suddenly (really, he does that out of the blue) realize Katherine is the love of his life and he wants to save his relationship. I played the game twice because I thought the choices I make will really make some difference in the story but my advice to you guys - unless you want to check out other difficulties, just watch the other endings on YouTube.

Does it still get any worse? YES! The game is rated M and obviously trying to market itself to the young adult audiences. It also clearly tries to touch the topic in a more dramatic, mature way. One could think that they believe in the cognitive abilities of the players who finish the game. Unfortunately, right at the end, a busty red-afro-head appears, like she did in the start, and trying to imitate Elvira, she... explains everything! She tells the player what climbing the towers was a metaphor for! Treating the player like a complete idiot, she explains something that was obvious by the third night at latest.

The developers delivered an immaturely told story of 30+ people acting like characters from High School Musical. Simplified relationships to a flat right-wrong scale. Showed how they didn't care about your choices and just force-fed you the same story no matter what you do. And after that, they still dared to lecture you on one of the most obvious metaphors of the decade. That... was weak.

No, it doesn't get worse than that anymore, luckily. The story is a complete waste of a good theme and instead of letting the player explore the various aspects of relationships and fidelity, it takes you back to the third grade and simplifies the whole message to:

7 reasons why linearity beats the crap out of free roaming.

The latest Greatest Game Series of the Decade poll on GameSpot got dominated by open world series crushing such franchises as Super Mario, Street Fighter or God of War. Combine it with yesterday's premiere of GTA V and people orgasming as soon as they touch their own copy. Add to that yet another article where I read that a game's flaw is its linearity, I feel obliged to stand in defense of linearity, that not only raised me as a player, but is also a foundation of roughly every game there is.

I don't want to get into the whole "is this game open-world?" or "is this game non-linear?" debate. There's Skyrim (or whatever it aspires to be) on one side, Contra on the other and everything inbetween is a subject to discussion. Some would argue that Dark Souls is a non-linear open-world game. Others would say Dark Souls is beaten in 6 linear steps with some wiggling area inbetween, like which bell to ring first. Why is that nobody calls the second and third trilogy of Final Fantasy open world games even though they all have world maps, free roaming and a decent number of NPC's, quests and substories? Most people don't even see a difference between a sandbox and open world (The Sims are a sandbox without open world). Let's just... not get into that, as it's a topic for a book. A thick one. 

Here's 7 reasons why linearity in games is in my opinion superior to free-roaming.

1) Every bit of your experience can be predesigned. It of course sucks ass if the designers have little imagination and you are forced to go through a cliche story using a clunky gameplay. If, however, the designers know what they are doing (and have cash to deliver it), you will watch the ending credits with a feeling that you just lived through something beautiful. Imagine ICO with 10 sidequests and 5 villages added. Instead of a story of a boy escaping a castle with a girl it would become a story of a boy dragging a girl around to find some chest to get a key to open a door to kill a spider to buy a bigger wallet to carry more cash... You get the idea :)

2) Story and pacing in linear games is much easier to nail as limiting possibilities pushes the story and gameplay further and doesn't distract. I always care deeply about the story elements. In Oblivion or Baldur's Gate I barely had motivation to reveal the quarter of the main storyline before I got bored with endless sidequests. I have no hard data to back that up, but I can bet that the open world games completion rate is way lower than with linear games. Way to tell an unfinished story. No wonder stories in free roaming games are mostly close to irrelevant - would be a waste of a good story anyway.

3) Open worlds must offer something to do, which means hundreds of filler quests. It's pretty much impossible to make hundreds of cool, innovative small stories or tasks. What we get is dozens of trash-quests like "help me find my cat" or "I seem to have misplaced my Broken Sword of Forgetfulness +4 in the dumpster". I'm a hero and savior of the universe, goddammit, not a catcatcher. If I wanted tasks like this, I would go outside and help old ladies carry their groceries. In a game, I don't want to be running errands. I much more prefer to have a decent main storyline with two or three fun and/or interesting subquests and a cool minigame.

4) Just as quests, the NPC's in open-worlds are mostly generic and without any personality. They sometimes have some shallow backstory, but mostly they are just bartenders who heard some gossips or shopkeepers who just returned with some goods. Boooring! In a linear game, NPC's count. Even the Crestfallen Warrior from Demon's Souls (a guy who basically just sits and whines) is way more interesting than majority of open-world NPC's.

5) In a linear game, I don't have to run for 20 minutes through mountains, wastelands, plains and villages just to get to the interesting part. And in an open world game, this interesting part will most likely be some trash-quest or generic NPC. No, thank you.

6) Sorry, but general gameplay quality of open-world games sucks most of the time. Shooting or driving in GTA sure is fun, but nowhere as fun as shooting in most of decent shooters and driving in any decent racing game. Fighting in Skyrim is not nearly as fun as in any given fight-oriented RPG or Adventure game. Heck - the first Legend of Zelda (1986) has fighting mechanics equally compelling as Skyrim (2011) - you just have to mash the "attack" button while standing in the right spot, facing the right way. Even a simple jumping mechanic: in linear games it's used to solve jumping puzzles or as an element of fighting, in open worlds it's there because it'd be just frustrating for the players to not have the jumping ability in a game that's supposed to offer freedom. 

7) The illusion of freedom paradox. The closer you get to giving the player complete freedom, the worse he will feel about the restrictions. While a linear game can be designed around a limited range of features, sandbox can't. In a linear game you will accept that you can't enter every single house, can't get to the top of a faraway mountain, can't jump or can't have a hour-long dialogue with every guard, barmaid or peasant. In an open world, every limitation is taking away from the main promise of the game - free exploration. And sooner or later, every player will encounter a limitation that feels unfair for him/her. What's worse, even if the game did give you the possibility to do literally everything, it would still feel weird, limited or just plain counter-intuitive with the currently available controllers.

Don't get me wrong, guys. I really appreciate the amount of work put into the open worlds. In general, there is no such thing as a perfect game. Every title focuses on one, maybe two aspects and more or less accepts that the other elements will be just good enough. And that's ok - Mario Kart doesn't have to use newest graphic technologies to achieve the goal of being a great family game. BioShock wanted to tell the story and show an interesting world, but the shooting wasn't really the coolest experience in the genre. Lollipop Chainsaw aims at the joy of slashing zombies in little pieces without much focus on mature or even consistent storytelling. It all happens for a reason. Developing a "perfect game" would be just plainly too expensive and time-consuming in today's reality. Even titles with hundred million dollar budgets can't  afford to have it all.

Open world games often have no choice, but to choose the balanced model because of the budget limitations.
Images stolen from the best MMO ever - Ragnarok Online :)

Open worlds are no different when it comes to the budget limitations, but at the same time they are promising to give the player almost unlimited freedom. That's where the problems come from. They need to have all these features that other games can live without. Players want to get into every house they see, swim in every river, run, jump, shoot, brawl, cut, fly, drive, craft, trade, interact with as many objects and talk with as many NPC's as possible while having a vast world to explore. That's a lot of features and graphical assets to deliver and it's not surprising they won't be top quality.

And I understand why the games offering open worlds are so highly praised. After all, they are usually titles offering many, many hours of gameplay. It's no wonder that players prefer to spend $60 on a game that offers 80 hours of diverse, even if just "correct" gameplay rather than pay the same cash for a game offering 8 hours of brilliant gameplay. Another obvious reason for open world or sandbox games popularity is the actual promise of being able to do so many various things - telling your own story (even if crappy, still your own) rather that playing the main role in someone else's movie. 

I get all that and I am definetely looking forward to seeing how these games develop and how (terrifyingly) close they can come to real world simulation. At the same time though... Don't be dumbasses, guys. Even Elder Scrolls series have lots of linearity in them (every chain quest, includint the main one is linear). All these reviewers who use "linearity" as a synonym of a bad game, teaching the young players to associate linearity with low value should be forced to try to jump up the side of the Skyrim mountain for eternity.

Happy bday to me! ;)

Hey folks! This is just a short post to brag about two cool presents I got today, as they are quite related to the blog's theme.

First - a T-shirt - came from my boss and looks like this:

This is a double-cool gift! Mostly because it raises the probability of me having something clean to wear, but also because it might mean that he probably won't knowingly kill or rob me until the end of current project. Unless, of course, he's just putting my caution to sleep before firing me, in which case I will just add "I worked in gamedev for over a year and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" on the back. 

No, seriously. The design is just ultra-cool. I love it.

Another gift was from my girl, who after listening to Demon's Souls sounds for almost two months decided she can't stand it anymore. In all fairness, Souls series aren't famous for their soundtrack variety, especially with the redundance of the dying sound. Yup, you guessed right, she bought me headphones :)

Gotta say, the whole headset is really sweet. I am nowhere near a specialist when it comes to sound, so I won't be writing a review here, but I remember playing BioShock and being unable to hear all the words in the audio notes, because my audio setup had pretty much all the sounds on the same channel. With these babies I can hear all the words while shooting splicers, listening to the pouring water and hearing every single sound my Big Daddy armor makes. A while ago I encouraged everyone to get a surround set for their homes to fully enjoy games. Now I can add that surround headsets really work and are a far better choice if you don't wanna piss off your parents / spouse / neighbors.

Yeah - I know this post isn't exactly what the few of my followers (I think I might actually be reaching a 2-digit number of regulars^^) might have wanted to read, so yeah, apologies, and stay tuned - I'm already working on an article on game linearity.

GMN at GamesCom

I started writing this article on the plane back from Cologne and with head full of stuff I have seen and thought during GamesCom. Yes, I am writing this to justify the possibly chaotic nature of what you're about to read. Oh, and if you want some GC 2013 summary or photo gallery, you'll probably have to look somewhere else. Here's GamesCom in the eyes of a noob developer. 

Before GamesCom

If you are going to a fair with your product, you need to have something to present. A trailer, beta gameplay or at least some artwork. All this needs to be prepared. That means that a big chunk of the studio's work will not be going into developing the game further, but into preparing the trailer or gameplay demo or both. The bigger the fair, the sooner the studio starts preparing for it. In case of the biggest events, the preparations start months before. Close to deadline the team is very likely to go into crunch mode. The producer goes to a convention like GamesCom tired after the last minute preparations and full of guilt. Guilt, that he spent way too much time on promotional tasks and that he has so much to catch on with productionwise.

Business area

There are two types of a place a company can have in the business area. Some decide to have a stand-alone booth that - as a rule of thumb - gives better visibility. Others might get a booth in larger areas prepared by third parties. Such areas have the convenience of external maintenance, a dedicated bar and lots of tables for networking. To be honest, the business area of GamesCom looked pretty boring. Sure, the walls have nice logos and arts on the walls, but if you don't know where the cool stuff happens, it looks pretty close to any job or trade fair. It's what happens behind closed doors matters in the business area. Since only press and people from the industry can enter, studios tend to show much more of their currently developed games than they would show in public. My studio, for example, was showing only a CGI trailer in the entertainment area, while people in the business area had a chance to see the gameplay. Another perk is shorter lines or no lines at all if some exhibitors decide to show off their products in both areas. People in the entertainment area waited in a line for hours to check out the Oculus Rift. I waited five minutes. People in the entertainment area could crowd around a booth with the racing seats while people in the business area could casually try the seats out without any crowd and enjoy a race.

Sounds like a dream comming true? Not really. If you are there as a developer, you are most likely booked from early morning till late evening to deliver the same presentation over and over with just small breaks to pee. The shorter the presentation, the worse. A guy from CCP Games briefing people for EVE Valkyrie was explaining the same controls over and over every five minutes for three days. After that, he'll probably be repeating these controls briefing in his sleep for a week. The only people who can actually fully enjoy all the perks of the business area are high level executives and press.

Entertainment Area

This is where I spent most of my time on GamesCom as I was responsible for showing off the trailer of our game. It is also what most of the folks came to see. The amount of people in there is truly ridiculous. To play some of the more popular games for a few minutes you need to spend at least an hour in a line. To get from one hall to another you need to slowly move with the crowd - getting from the closest hall to the one most far away can easily take 20 minutes of travel. In the halls themselves, if there are two big studios having an exposition next to each other, the space between them will probably be so crowded that it'll be impossible to go through.

What you see here is maybe a 1/3 of a corridor between halls.
This year, GamesCom was invaded by over 340 000 people.

If you want to visit a big games convention (which I highly encourage you to do if you have the means to do so - it's an amazing experience!) then I would advise you not to assume that you will get to play a lot of games that are still in development. Still, you will get to see lots of cool presentations, professional battles in the most popular online games, like LoL or SC2. You will have a lot of chances to win some nice gadgets - be it t-shirts, baseball caps, sometimes gaming hardware or peripherals. Also, don't worry if you don't get to play a game - it is almost as fun to see others play it. You will at least learn what the game is about this way.

By the way, it is completely amazing, what people are willing to do for a freebie. Guys from Roccat have told me about a show they did where in the end they only had one mouse left. Two guys - strangers to each other - went on the stage to battle for it. To win the mouse they had to... kiss. And they did. As a reward, they got this last mouse. One. How they shared it remains a mystery. And I've seen with my own eyes people having dance-offs for keyboards and bare-chested air guitar battles for headphones... It was incredible to watch how people don't want to take fliers from hostesses, but would kill each other for them if you throw the same fliers off a stage.

Just look at the cute chibi chocobo!

A common misconception about the entertainment area is that you can meet developers there. People in Blizzard, Nintendo or Square-Enix T-shirts are mostly hired hosts and hostesses that know extremely little about the game they are letting you play. They are mostly there to check ID's for mature games, direct the line of people waiting to play and to hint the controls to the currently playing if needed. If you want information, you will sooner find them on fliers, posters or screens than by asking the hosts. Even if the guy at the stand is actually an employee of the studio, he's most probably from marketing or PR. Let me just put it this way - lots of people asked me what my role in the studio is - sales, PR or marketing. When they heard that I'm a producer that's actually working on the game, they were very surprised.

Merchandise

In the back of Hall 9 of Kölnmesse was where you could actually buy some goodies. Surprise number one - I haven't seen a single game being sold. T-shirts, posters, action figures, plush toys, trading cards, wallets, keychains, soundtracks, mousepads, more T-shirts... but not games. A lot of the stuff was obviously low quality and overpriced. Others were incredible quality and even more overpriced. Some were just a plain robbery, like selling a hoodie heat-prints for 25€ (you of course have to provide the hoodie). Browsing through all this stuff makes you regret you are not a millionaire who doesn't care that small silver replicas of pendants from Final Fantasy series aren't worth 230€ no matter how you slice it. Still, it is nice to at least look at some extremely nice stuff like Portal's companion cube pillow, vinyl Final Fantasy album or massively detailed, hand-painted figures from Starcraft 2.

Yup, look at the prices.

Boobs. I mean... girls, ah, who am I kidding :)

By now, hostesses are an integral part of every convention. How to better reach a bunch of nerds like us than with a pair of D-cups? The funny part is, one of my responsibilities on this GamesCom was to take care of two cosplayers for promotion of our game: Ari Campari and cosplaying celebrity, Ophelia Overdose. Since I now have a full two days experience on the matter (+ some previous experience from RPC), I can now tell you - don't go cheap on the girls. It might not sound like a hard work, but apparently not every pretty chick is cut for the job. I had the pleasure of observing a wide moat between zombie-hostesses creeping around, handing out fliers and my girls who were actively comming up with new ideas, attracting attention. There was a very visible difference in general attitude, body language and awareness of the role between Miss Overdose and other girls. I never expected I would be able to learn professionalism from a cosplayer.

The awesome team promoting Lords of the Fallen over the weekend.

So once again - don't just get any pair of boobs for promotion. There's more to a hostess or cosplayer than a cup size. And even though - to quote Ophelia - "they're not there to be intelligent", I can assure you that you won't regret having girls that can actually say a few things about your game or hardware, not just giggle. 

Saturday Parties

This was something I didn't expect. At 8 PM Kölnmesse closed for visitors that left literally tons of trash on the floors behind them. After that, parties of exhibitors began. The biggest one, hosted by Sony, started at 10 PM. At that time, the venue turned into one of the most incredible clubs I have ever seen. Free beer, gaming-related environment and on top of that... hundreds of hostesses who somehow managed to look even sexier during the night than during the day (no, it wasn't only the lack of light and amount of beer). Which got me to conclusion: in your faces, jocks - guess who are your cheerleaders partying with now!

Sorry pervs ;) no photo of the party and sexy girls. 

Being not exactly a dancing type, I left the party really early to check out the geekiest party in the Messe - a party of casemodders. Modified PC-cases stood among full beer-cases. Groups of four were playing a custom-made automated drinking game machine that automatically filled the glass of the looser with a scarily glowing alcoholic liquid. Some guy from Netherlands was showing me the case they prepared for the contest in 24 hours that was made out of trash, was both spinning around and lighting up. I saw a laptop with water cooling, PC's shaped as Terran miniguns, Ferrari engines, boxes with bloodbags... almost as crazy as a club full of nerds and hot chicks.

Games that noob is waiting for

I decided not to stand in line to the biggest titles - I didn't have the patience for it, and besides, everyone knows everything about these already. So, apart from Lords of the Fallen (impudent self-advertising), I am now really looking forward to two games:

- Rain by SCE Japan Studio: a nice example where a simple idea makes a game. From gameplay mechanics to art direction, everything comes together.

- Contrast by Compulsion Games: a mix of 2D and 3D platformer with an excellent idea of shadow mechanics.

After GamesCom

Getting back from GamesCom feels like getting back from a summer camp. You head home with your bag full of dirty clothes, wanting to finally sleep in your own bed. You ponder on new sexual experiences (I still don't know how I feel about female Link cosplayers). You say "see you" to the people you have met there even though the chance of seeing them again in the next few years is extremely low. You carry dozens of new phone numbers with you knowing that it's unlikely you will call even 10% of them. On the train/bus/plane home you are completely exhausted, but full of positive feelings and memories that probably won't last longer than a day when you get back to your everyday reality.

Please don't localize my games

Even though a queque of topics I wanted to cover is growing longer, this issue has cut the line as I bought my copy of XCOM: Enemy Unknown a few days back. Five minutes into the game I was in the WTF mode, an hour into the game I was in full rage, wanting to write a purely dismissive article how localization of games is a modern day tragedy comparable to Holocaust. Luckily, it was nothing several days of calming down wouldn't manage to channel into a more useful article.

Okay, okay, so what happened?

The game I bought was in Polish. No, it's not an exotic language for me. Still, the disc I got has no option to change the language. I bought an original game that I can't play in the original language it was created for. The biggest problem though is the quality of the localization. The big world clock in the game keeps showing a spelling error. The models move their lips completely out of sync with the voiceovers. They even keep moving their lips long after the voice is gone. The actors stagger with an intonation of people who read the text for the first time. And I checked - those were real actors, not just some random guys dragged away from their desks in the studio. Don't get me started on the times when they are struggling to say a sentence in German... To top that off, the player can actually hear the audio tracks switching, a second-long silences, where even the background music stops.

Summing up: not only was I unable to play my game in the original language it was designed for, the game I bought was made barely playable by the quality of localized audio. 

How did they manage to break my game so badly?

The company responsible for that rape on XCOM is actually a publisher with a long tradition of localization. The work they did with the first Dungeon Keeper was amazing and it truely outclassed the original. It can't be that in the last 15 years they suddenly became a bunch of newbs - while I still prefer the original version, they did a decent job on localizing Starcraft II, which means the skill is still there. If you don't know what's the reason behind something, it's probably cash. In this case, that statement couldn't be more true.

The sad truth is that the localization is rarely treated like a proper part of a production. In many cases the local publishers are in charge of it, as a part of the publishing deal. This means that the developer delivers the game and then it is someone else's responsibility to finish the job in some other language. This has a lot of implications.

On the developer's side, it leads to all kinds of limited support. Many localization teams don't get a chance to play a game or even see the cutscenes they are working on. Many only get some basic kit or even plain excel sheets with all dialogue lines listed, translating it out of context and presenting it to the actors, out of context as well.

On the publisher's side it often leads to using advanced cost-cutting techniques to deal with the localization duty as quickly and cheaply as possible. Of course, it's not always the publisher's fault that their language version is more of a quick fix than an actual translation. Often, they get all the stuff that is needed way too late before the publishing deadline.

If the localization process gets planned decently, we get an acceptable local version that doesn't make the player cry. If all these problems I mentioned pile up, we get a version that got translated overnight, recorded in the first takes and directed by some deaf marketing assistant.

Why localize in the first place?
Even though I personally have the luck of not needing any translations, I know there are people who - for various reasons - don't have the necessary language skills. And even if they do, there are various cultural and pop-cultural aspects that are just not understandable for people of different cultures. Also, I've seen some really great localizations that not only didn't make me cry over the skill of the translators, but actually made the game or movie much tastier.

Math time
The BluRay discs are quite roomy. They can fit at least two language versions in vast majority of the cases. And don't tell me that adding an option to choose your language is an additional work - depending on the way the game is built it is somewhere between 15 minutes and 3 hours work of a guy that is able to change one or a few filepaths in the code - you don't even need a real programmer for that. If there's only one language pack file or folder, testing isn't even required. In the worst case scenario, where all the files need to be pointed to, testing still doesn't have to be thorough, as the original version was already tested and approved. It's just about rushing through the game in godmode once (or maximum twice) and checking if all the text and audio is in one language. With the current average length of a game it is one day of work of a Junior Tester. To sum up - in most cases leaving the original language on the disc requires an additional one day of work and is a cost of at most $100 - that's hardly a reason for neglecting it.

Dear local publisher! Think of all these players that still like boxed games, but would rather buy your game from PSN, XBLA, Steam or Origin rather than getting a one-language box. They are the cost of your bad business decision. Think of all the commission money you have lost, because you decided to save $100. So if you really have to strip the kids of one of few opportunities to learn a foreign language and you really think that this is what the market is expecting from you. If you really have to localize the game I want to buy in a box without shipping it from UK or US, please leave the original language on the disc. You will make the game world a so-much-better place.

Jobs in gamedev: Tester / QA

When I told my boss I wanted to write about testers, he just said "oh, boy...". When Extra Credits did an episode on game schools, James Portnow wrote "Ask the school what their hire ratio is in the industry (not including jobs in QA)". When an executive of our befriended studio visited our new office, he asked me "How many people are working here? And how many of them are QA?". As you can see, there seems to be something weird going on here. Why is QA (Quality Assurance, a more "official" name for testers) often treated like a spare wheel? Why is it such a complicated topic? 

Let's start with some undeniable facts. Compared to the other jobs in gamedev, it is relatively easy to become a tester. A vast majority of testers are in their 20's, most of them start their jobs in the first few years after finishing high schools, no university degree is needed. Creativity, art / sound / programming proficiency or even a high level gaming skills are not required on the entry levels. It's really no wonder that the job in QA is statistically the lowest paying job in gamedev. Another reason, why testers are low paid is that QA is often outsourced to low-cost countries. These outsourcing companies often give feedback of relatively low quality and importance for the developers. Apart from the average cash the developers are willing to pay, it also affects the general reputation of testers. There is also an ongoing debate in many studios, whether QA is even a part of development. There is one quite solid argument against - testers don't produce anything. On the other hand, QA is usually engaged in the development process from the early stages, it takes a significant part in it.

All these factors explain pretty well, why the QA is often treated as a completely separate department. It seems to justify why getting a job in QA isn't a measure of the game school quality. It explains a question how many QA people are working in the office, as it is easier and cheaper to hire more testers, so the number of testers can quite easily boost the number of employees, creating an illusion of a bigger studio.

Now as much as all these statements are true, they are also highly unfair for all the testers out there. Getting hired as a tester might be a bit easier than being hired as a programmer or an artist, but it doesn't mean that you can just walk in to the studio and get this job.

What are the requirements for a tester?

- you need to love games and to play a wide variety of them;
- knowing foreign languages is a real asset - the more exotic the better. You will often work with different language versions of the game - being able to find spelling errors increases your value as a tester;
- you need some proof of logical, analytical thinking - to understand how the game mechanics work in order to break it down. You have to be able to find a way to reproduce it so the developers can fix it;
- you should be really resistant to stress and routine - you will be given repetitive assignments, be ready to play the same game over and over and over again;
- you should be quite flexible - overtime is very common;
- the better you know your gaming platform, the better - only being able to run the game isn't enough. You should know about the hardware and software your platform is running. The more platforms you know (PC, PS, Xbox, Android, MacOS, iOS...) the better;
- having an eye for the detail is a must - you are supposed to catch all kinds of bugs: gameplay, visual (including lighting, physics, etc.) and sound.
- interests like art, music, game design, history, science fiction, fantasy, game theory, math, coding, creative writing, travelling, literature - all these can really come in handy.
- showing that you took part in some open (or even better - closed) beta tests can certainly be a big plus.

As you can see, it's way more demanding than it seems at the first glance. Yes, all these requirements are for the lowest paying job in gamedev. Yes, this is the job that gets so underestimated and looked over. Sadly, QA very rarely gets used the way it should. Imagine having a room full of dedicated, demanding players that aren't heavily invested in the project, since they weren't directly developing it. Sure, they might have less experience that than the game designers or artists, but still they are one of the best focus groups you could possibly dream of. Incredibly often feedback from this group is looked over or belittled. Incredibly often QA is pushed down to be just mechanical bug seekers. And that's a shame, really. In most gamedev studios QA is dependant on all other departments, never the other way round.

A great thing about guys in QA is that they are always ready to help. It's usually the youngest team in the studio and a lot of testers treat their current position as their first step towards their dream job in game development. That's why they love being included in all kinds of activities outside testing. For example, when we were preparing a trailer for our game, we weren't sure about one of the elements, we made a focus group out of our testers. Not only they were really happy to help and share their opinions, but also they gave us some very valuable points and insights we would never gather all by ourselves.

How does work as a tester look?

There is actualy a movie (heavily sponsored by Konami, Microsoft and Mattel), where the protagonist is a video game tester. The movie's name is "Grandma's Boy". It is quite fun and worth watching at least to see how hot Linda Cardellini looks in a business suit or how hillarious Jonah Hill is when he sucks on a pair of plastic tits for a few hours straight. However, if you want to base your opinion of gamedev industry on it... Well, don't. It's like learning woodcutting from Monty Python's lumberjack song.

The biggest mistake you can make when it comes to being a tester is thinking it's about playing games. It is about testing one game. Over and over. For a long period of time. And you don't even get to enjoy a game that's finished. You get a half-product, that is more or less playable, often with placeholder textures, basic lighting, generic music and dialogues written by whoever took a pen and paper to their bathroom break. If you are a player that gets easily annoyed when a game just randomly crashes and you need to go through the same gameplay elements again without being able to turn off the long cutscene... It's not a job for you.

What's more, while playing the game, you are obliged to find all the issues you are able to and describe them in some bug-tracking system, for the other departments to review. It requires not only patience and resistance to routine tasks, but also lots of precision. You also never know when a new task will arrive and you may rest assured that most of them will be "for yesterday". This means that no matter which part of the studio is crunching, the QA is always crunching with it.

There is of course the plus side. You get an access to the new technologies long before they hit the market. You get to work in an amazing, young team, as testers are usually the best integrated parts of a gamedev studio, who work hard, but play even harder. Being a tester also means you have access to a lot of knowledge that would be otherwise very hard to get anywhere else. Since QA works with all departments, it also learns from all of them.

Ok, let's start with QA... What next?

For many young developers, being a tester is a starting point in their career. It certainly is one of the easiest ways to get your foot in the door. QA is probably always the team with the biggest rotation. Many people quit because of the stress, amount of work and because the reality of being a tester isn't how they imagined it to be. On the other hand, people do manage to get into other teams if they want to, and there is no real rule where they might end up. If a person shows some talent and manages to catch the eye of the lead game designer, art director, head writer or whoever is in charge of the target team, there is a much bigger chance they could become a junior quest designer (or a junior writer, junior concept artist, junior level designer, etc.), than if they applied from the outside.

But let's not treat testing like an unpleasant mid-point for thei aspiring designers. There are also people who live and breathe QA and whose personal development takes place entirely in the testing area. These people specialize. What are the higher positions in there?
- Senior Tester - he is the more experienced tester who is often responsible for teaching the basics to Junior Testers. Think of a Senior Tester like a special task commando who becomes a sergeant if less experienced people need some advice or training.
- Localization Tester - a tester who is fluent in foreign language(s) and is responsible for verification of localizations
- Compliance Specialist - something you won't learn elsewhere. Tester responsible for preparing the game to meet all the certification requirements for a release for a specific console.
- QA Team Leader - responsible for planning the tests, distributing the tasks among testers, management of the bug-tracking database, solving problems, communication between departments and preparing reports of the current project status.

The QA department is like a goalkeeper - they are rarely praised, often blamed for any fuckup. And not only by the development. When "more aware" players find a bug in a game, they think "oh, someone in QA didn't do their job". In reality, testers find much more bugs than the other departments are able to fix to deliver the game on time. Some problems just take too much time to solve compared to how critical they are.

If reading all this didn't scare you off, then you just might have it in you to become a tester. After all, it's one of the easiest ways to get into a gamedev, and I can assure you, it is an exciting industry. Being in QA is probably one of the biggest learning opportunities and one of the toughest gamedev life tests. If you dream of making big AAA titles and are in the beginning of your professional career, take a game you really, seriously hate and spend 2-3 hours with it every day for a few months. If that didn't kill you, you should apply for a job of a tester!

Quality of this article is assured by Raczyn, my awesome QA Team Leader - great thanks!

What Microsoft's ideas tell us about the state of game industry

Hello folks! The recent flood of hate towards Xbox One got me thinking (again). For a week or two the whole world has been fed latest ideas of Redmond's giant to be negatively shocked by pretty much every single one of them. Then, the whole buzz around it was mostly kicking Microsoft when it's down rather than adding something new to the topic. It escalated to the point where Microsoft was forced to back off. I'm gonna keep my critique to the minimum and try to focus on another aspect - why those ideas came to life in the first place. Just to clarify, I have never owned any Xbox and I am not planning to, so whatever I'm writing here is just an opinion of a bystander.

Companies as big as Microsoft don't base their decisions on the direction of the wind or eye color of the CEO's dog. They do market research. Lots of it. And when it comes to releasing products such as Xbox, they use every trick in their arsenal to make an informed decision. They clearly identify the problems and the needs of their current and potential consumers. While the choices they make based on this data can be outrageously wrong (and everything suggests that's exactly the case right here), the identified problems are often still there. Obviously, we don't have all the data Microsoft has, but let's try to get to reverse the process and deduce what were the reasons for them to try to beat EA in being the most unpopular company.

 

TV, TV, TV, Television, TV...

Fanboys and fangirls can argue to the end of the world, whether PS3 or Xbox 360 is a better console, but there's one element that Microsoft's console objectively lacked compared to it's competitor: a BluRay disc drive. Being able to watch HD movies without buying additional equipment is pretty sweet, and everyone knows that. MS guys didn't want to make the same mistake again. They didn't want to be behind the competition when it comes to the multimedia again, so they went all out. Controlling games, movies, television and what not with one piece of hardware, being able to throw away you remote and manage all that just with a gamepad that you love feeling in your hands. That's actually a really great idea. Just maybe as a bonus option rather than a key point of a whole game console presentation.

Another thing that could have driven Microsoft to this idea is the gamers behavior. I personally don't understand this, but a lot of my friends play their games while watching a movie or some TV series. I like to focus my eyes on one thing at a time, but apparently there are throngs of people who don't. Do they really want to do it on a single screen? Well, since 46" have become a standard size, gamers probably don't have much place for another screen anyway, so again - it kinda makes sense to give the players an option to watch TV or movies while playing on the same screen. 

Finally, let's look at the direction the games are going. Photorealistic graphics, strong story focus, gameplay elements looking closer and closer to a movie - if we draw a trend line here, soon we will be just watching movies with a gamepad in our hands, being prompted to press X once in a while. Since life expectancy of consoles grows, a company that thinks ahead might want to be ready to give us that - watching movies with a gamepad in our hands.

Sharing games

Or rather a lack of it. This is directly a result of the way the industry works right now. Players expect the games to be more and more visually stunning. To keep a production budget on the sane side, games are just made shorter. You could spend months playing Super Mario 64. You beat The Last of Us in a weekend. Players are less likely to pay full price for a weekend game, not caring that the title did cost a lot of money and that developers are now very often having a hard time to break even, not to mention finance another game. Combined with piracy, it grows to be a really major revenue problem for developers, resulting in closing many good, innovative projects in favor of easy to sell shooters or continuing franchises that should have died a decade ago. Is double-charging for the same game copy an answer? Not really, but the problem is still there.

You might hate the idea of not being able to share a game with your friend, but frankly - it's happening at the moment anyway. PC players love Steam - there's no game sharing there. On PSN, you can buy digital versions of the games for full price and you don't get to share them in any way either. Right now, over 50% of the games are sold digitally. Which means that over 50% of games on the market cannot be shared anyway, and the number still grows.

Yes - announcing that on your new console free game sharing will be impossible is like shooting yourself in the head but frankly - it's not that big of a deal since in the next few years box editions will most likely become just a small fraction of sold games.

Big Brother

The idea to have the console connected 24/7 results in a straight line from the approach they had to sharing games. It is clearly designed to primarily monitor what's been installed on the console and react accordingly. Microsoft tries to hide it, by focusing on how fun it will be if the console will greet you when you enter the room, but frankly - if I want the console to do that, I don't mind pressing the power button first. Being unable to play games while offline might be shocking to console players, but it's old news for PC gamers. If PC gamers can live with DRM, there's a big chance console players can adjust as well. Of course, this way of thinking is far from user-friendly. Let alone the fact that I personally find forcing someone to stay online morally unethical.

The chosen 21

In general opinion, Microsoft's current generation network services are rated higher than competition's. Sure, you have to pay for it, but it is more reliable and better supported - you know what you pay for. If they want to deliver a console that stays online 24/7 and keep the lead in network service, they need to make sure it works flawlessly. With great expectations comes great responsibility. They are perfectly aware that hacking communities are already flexing their muscles to have a bite on Xbox One network. Limiting the number of countries is most probably a tradeoff for the security. Obviously, the 21 countries were chosen by the revenue they can produce and that's just how business works.

Will gamers outside the chosen 21 love them for it? No. But what is the real damage for Microsoft? Countries that won't get Xbox One right away are ones with lower purchasing power. This means most consumers wouldn't buy the new console at the premiere anyway, sticking for one more year to the current gen, waiting for next gen to get cheaper and then, just as with Xbox 360, they would tinker with their consoles to be able to run pirate games on it. The small percent that would buy it right away would buy a PS4, yeah. In the end it is just about numbers - apparently someone in Microsoft did the math and concluded that the loss of market outside the chosen 21 is less dangerous than an unstable service.

Wrap-up
A new day greets us. Microsoft backed off, but the situation on the gaming market didn't change. The problems still exist and they will have to be dealt with sooner or later. Most probably, the solutions will be just as radical as the ones proposed by MS, just communicated better. Again, there will be pointing fingers, but in the end, it's not only the greed of the companies that is to blame. Our choices and behaviors as gamers are even more relevant. We all expect lots of great games with stunning graphics, meaningful stories and hours of deep gameplay. Believe it or not, Microsoft's ideas - however outrageous they sounded - were aimed primarily at making sure there will be money to support these kind of projects.