My Recent Experience with Bethesda and Zenimax Online Studios

Today I was going to post an article going through my expectations for Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Online MMORPG due to be released in 2014. I sent them a message asking for any information on some certain aspects of the game that I was interested in discussing and the possibility of a beta key to get a feel for the game. In response I received this email:

Greetings and well met, Wise One Patrick!

 

Thank you for contacting The Elder Scrolls Online Team! We are always excited to talk with our fans about the game.

 

I commend you for your bravery of asking for a Beta Key. My parents taught me you'll never know something if you don't ask. Sadly, I can not guarantee you a beta key. You see the selection process for testers is out of our hands here.

 

You see, in one of his crazy fits, the Mad God Sheogorath launched a siege upon the studio with a fleet of mudcrabs and purple butterflies. Luckily, no one was injured (severely) but in the confusion he got away with all of the beta keys! Now only he is able to choose who receives keys and last I heard he chose by tossing the applications down a set of stairs and seeing which ones fly the farthest...

 

We have convinced him, though, start start giving more keys out though. Our upcoming beta events will be getting larger and larger towards launch, so there's still a chance he might decide to grant you a key! You will be under an NDA agreement though, so you would not be able to blog about your game play or even tell your readers that you are in the closed beta tests. I'm sure you understand, we're trying to save our best secrets for launch so as not to ruin the new game play experience for anyone.

 

I can help you out with your questions though! I think the answer to your gameplay inquiry can best be summed up in this video the studio released of some live gameplay footage from QuakeCon 2013. I always feel watching it first hand is better than someone explaining it second hand. :)

 

http://youtu.be/_oWuw-mo_MQ

 

I hope that helps with your blog article! I highly recommend checking out more of our videos on our YouTube page at http://www.youtube.com/user/ZenimaxOnlineStudios as well the articles on our website, https://www.elderscrollsonline.com, for more insight into the design of the game.

 

Stay thirsty for knowledge, friend!

Taryn

The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Let's be honest, I'm a small time blogger, I get very little recognition and most companies, even the indie ones, ignore my messages all together. This is a large company messaging me back with what appears to be a personal response. Obviously the thing about the beta key could be completely generic but it is a nice touch. IT literally made my day that this is something that the big companies still do and I'd like to commend the man who did it.

Darkout Review

Oh hey there Terraria Clone!

This 2D action/adventure survival game developed by Allgraf has some pretty high ratings on Steam so I thought I'd pick it up. Firstly, the tutorial is okay, it tells you what to do but doesn't show you where some things are and is fairly minimal in most areas. The graphics are dark, even with the torches there will be a lot of squinting and "I can't see what block that is." Players will take the roll of a character whose space ship has crash landed on a strange planet. They aim to survive whilst being able to upgrade sciences,weapons and everything in between. There is hostile mobs and cave systems and everything you'd expect from this kind of game.

(please ignore the stupidity that F10 brings up the world seed)

Graphics are pretty but it is hard to see most of them due to the darkness of the night time of the game. Now I'll go into what I find are huge problems. You start with a basic set of tools which as far as I've seen do not require upgrading at all. While some players will think this is a bonus, I call it babying the player. To a audience who will undoubtedly be familiar with Terraria and Minecraft, upgrades and crafting is a well known and highly beneficial game mechanic. Another problem is using the tools. To clear dirt blocks, the game often chooses to clear 3 blocks in a cluster which makes it semi-impossible to create a flat landscape. Then there is the scientific and system upgrade features which to me seem like this genre is being mixed into a genre which it doesn't belong in. The darkness for cave entries looks exactly the same as the dirt blocks so I found myself falling down into a cave that I couldn't get out of as I couldn't see the place I fell in. This is a massive problem.

 Now comes the biggest problem. It is essentially a more expensive yet worse Terraria. The entire rilliance of that game was its simplicity and blocky art style. This is a slightly more 3D inspired version which want to be more advanced. More advanced does not work for this game type. As a non-paid reviewer, it annoys me most when I pay out for a game that promises so much yet lets me down. As indie titles go, this is one to stay clear of. 3/10

Gaming Industry You're doing it wrong!

Disclaimer- This will be heavily opinionated. If this does not fit your opinion then I appreciate that but don't take it out on me.

So the gaming industry isn't in the best of shape currently. We've all seen it - EA voted worst company in America, The WarZ crisis and the hatred at CoD: Ghosts spawn system. It's my mission to try and see why this is happening. In my opinion, Developers and Publishers are doing a few things wrong.

  Firstly, there is a massive problem with, well I guess you could call it coping but it's not real copying. Companies are seeing an idea become popular and trying to replicate it in an attempt to earn money. So far we've seen it in zombie/apocalypse multiplayer survival games originating from DayZ mod of Arma 2. Honey Badgers (Imaged above) is an example of the type of game influenced by the success of the Angry Birds series. There has been countless MOBAs released from the success of DOTA 2 and League of Legends in recent years. It would be unfair to say all of these were because of the originals but a lot have been. When I review games it's the first thing I look for - Has this got any aspects that resemble that of another popular game and to what extent is it. Unfortunately, it's not just the small companies either. EA's new beta of Dawngate even had what appeared to be the same character movements from League of Legends itself with some design aspects of Infinite Crisis. The idea of the MOBA genre is to make money from the competitive scene, not just the characters in the game being sold. I get that there's a lot of games out there so it's hard to come up with unique ideas but I've done it and I'm not even paid to think up ideas. Get your research and idea generation departments replaced by gamers who know what they're on about.

  My second point is to do with creativity. Again and again we see sequels of popular games that aren't as good as everyone thought they would be but they still sell. A good example of this is Call of Duty: Ghosts. It bought very little new features to the series other than a few game modes, new guns etc. but nothing major. Yet still people paid a large amount of money for it and then complained. It happens every year, people buy the game and get angry at it then buy he next one the year after expecting something different. In business terms it's what is known as a "cash cow", it requires very little work and can be milked for money continuously. What companies should be doing is to reinvent things, make things different so that people gain interest, just something to set it apart from the last game. Assassins Creed must of realised that they needed something new from Ezio because 3 was so much better than the past titles. Bioshock Infinite went from Rapture to Columbus and it is winning a lot of Game of the Years. This is the kind of thing that companies should be doing. As I said before, hire gamers for research, because no corporate high level market analyst knows as much about gaming and games as a gamer.

  Think about that guys, and don't forget you can leave comments and opinions below.

 By Patrick (FromFearRises)

Dawngate Review

Another big publisher making a Free to Play MOBA

I have no idea what's going on with everyone thinking MOBA is a profitable game market. This time it's Electronic Arts (EA). Now I'm not sure who the development team behind it is as the link for "About Us" on the games sight takes you straight to EA's info page even though it is listed as Waystone Games, an indie looking team, on the site. As for the game, it is currently in closed beta stages with servers that aren't actually on all the time. As for the MOBA theme, the aim is to get through the enemy structures, into their base and destroy the main objective. In Dawngate there is however only two lanes, one top one bottom, with jungle camps and bushes in between, some sort of spirit wells and more jungles above, and the super neutral creep in the dead centre that takes a while to kill and grants a decent buff. It's the usual 5v5 teams with no option for bots and no ranked matches. The "Shapers" (characters you play as) are categorised in a way which I'm assuming ha something to do with their different powers/role but there is no tutorial or explanations as to what they do, only a pop-up telling you how to purchase "Shapers". Greedy EA.

The graphics have very limited optimisation and take up about a hair worth of an average CPU/GPU combo's memory. They are also fairly simplistic in nature and very bright and childish. As the MOBA scene is more of a more hardcore gamer habitat, not a place for childish looks. The Shapers themselves play out fairly fluently, with a 10 Shaper free to play cycle and a rather balanced system. It also has a neat feature of 3 "spells" that can be learnt at levels 1,11,20 (max. level). Another difference is that the main objective is a giant creature "see above" that throws out attacks and abilities to attacking minions and Shapers. Now here's where we run into our first problem. There is no mana or energy costs of any variety, so you can keeping on spamming those abilities all day. This removes the option for the game to have any form of eSports scene as it takes no skill to spam abilities and get a kill, which is where the MOBA genre becomes that highly profitable game that all these developers want. More problems, they seemed to have based some of their character movements directly from League of Legends, the abilities from all over the place, and most of the HUD and menus form Infinite Crisis. One of the Shapers floats the same way as Syndra, one like Graves and the item system even has similar icons to IC. 

  Although at first I thought the game looked fairly promising, it turned out to be a disappointing rip-off of good games in a bid to earn some more money from the worst Game Publisher (and voted worst company in America) Electronic Arts. Looks like you just keep failing. 3/10

My Game of the Year

Best Shooter: Payday 2

While Payday 2 was not one of the big 2 FPS that came out this year, it did, in my opinion, bring a lot more to the table. Don't get me wrong I like Call of Duty and Battlefield, they don't bring anything that drastically different each year. However, Payday 2 hands down improved the original which was already an amazing game. The mechanics are good, the design is good and it had me playing for hours at a time. It also cost a fraction of the price that the big titles cost. All in all a great game. 

Best RPG: Bioshock Infinite

This is hardly a surprise to anyone who has played this game. Not only did this swap the underwater lands of Rapture for an interesting new design of a floating Columbia, but it brought in one of the best stories I've seen. It has some of the better combat mechanics, great graphics, hilarious glitches and short bursts of pure brilliance, it hands down beats other RPGs such as AC4. 

Best Action Game GTA V

The game everyone had been waiting for, and it turned out good. GTA V povided players with an impressive story, classic GTA online and actually gave players a benefit for their mistake.The only thing I can really fault on this game would be the lack of PC which from what I heard was not down to Rockstar. I've not played many action games this year, so this probably isn't everyone's idea of the best action game but it is mine.

Best Indie Game Paranautical Activity

The game no-one has heard of. I wrote a review on this game fairly early in my blogging career and I was blown away by what I found. A mix between Minecraft and Binding of Isaac is the perfect combination for a little indie game that can blow your socks off. Hours of pixel exploding fun.

Best Strategy Game Civilisation V

A late bloomer in the video game industry this year was Civilisation V, taking a more grown up approach to historical strategy. Civilisation provides the most fun, skilled and challenging experience of the development of humanity on the market. Well worth the hours it takes to win a game.

Best Acting Beyond Two Souls

Ah, everyone else thinks that The Last of Us has some amazing acting for a PS3 exclusive, but the other story based exclusive of the year is what had me hooked. The emotion portrayed by the actors behind this game made me feel like I was watching a highly interactive movie rather than playing a game. It even had me close to tears at one point. I was considering Last of Us but I guess this just took the biscuit for me. 

Best Story Bioshock Infinite

Anyone who has played this game understands why it needs no explanation. The plot twists, the character development, all of it just leads to the best story experience of 2013. I mean, Last of US story was pretty good but the ending just made me think "What? Why?" whereas Bioshock it was like "Holy mother of Jesus that was fantastic!". an obvious choice. Best Character Elizabeth (Bioshock Infinite)

Maybe it's because of how incredibly useful she was in game (fetching ammo, money and health) or the fact she was one of the best developed characters I've seen. Either way I loved Elizabeth. The fact she comes back in DLC's as different forms of herself just adds to her character. She is also a key aspect to the story and the crazy inception that comes at the end. Great character in a great game.

Game of the Year Bioshock infinite

Whether it's due to the fact it won 3 of my choices or just how insanely awesome the game is, this is my personal Game of the Year of 2013. A great story, good acting, good mechanics, good characters, and good DLC, this game is the package.

Worst Game

Gravity Badgers, a really bad Angry Birds Space clone that costs a lot more. Blew my money on it as it looked promising but regret everything. My latest review pretty much explains this decision.

Gravity Badgers Review

Do you enjoy playing Angry Birds Space and want to pay more for a worse close?

Well here's your chance to get ripped off! Gravity badgers was recently added to the steam market place for a cheap £2.99 so I thought "Hm this has a good theme song, looks pretty nice, guess I'll pick it up."

Do not be fooled. This is a game about a badger in space who is on a quest to rescue his crew mates and will face dangers along the way. However the game is really you launching a badger through space around gravity fields as seen in Angry Birds Space, you get to a worm hole and you're on to the next level. There is 3 golden blobs of God knows what which you can easily collect on your way to the wormhole to get a 3 star rating for that level. To free his comrades, this badger faces the worlds easiest boss battles that require less effort than downloading the game. After playing 25 levels in about 10 minutes, I soon realised that this game has the campaign time of 1 Skyrim main mission. Admittedly the levels do get harder later on but nothing that will use more braincells than first grade maths. 

The graphics are the only redeeming feature of this game. They accompany the same 2D art style as Angry Birds however the colour schemes are a lot nicer. As you can see from above it's clean and pretty, everything a 2D game should be. The cutscenes are either a comic style artwork show like that of Angry Birds or a small piece of dialogue similar to Metal Gear Solid but a little more high definition. The mechanics of the game are poor however. The gravity seems to work on a very basic system of push and pull. There is pipes that send you in a given direction and cubes that can send you in any direction of your choosing. There is no abilities as in ABS and no blocks to destroy etc. only a laser to pass through to unlock the wormhole. It is an indie game so I wasn't expecting the equivalent of a AAA title, but I played the original angry birds and it was better than this. It is a simplified clone that costs more money that's all I can really say about it. 2/10