It’s been a wild 12 months for VG247, so to have fun we’re going to be republishing a few of our favorite work printed in 2018 – opinion items, options, and interviews, that we’ve loved writing and studying, and which we imagine showcase a few of our greatest work. Enjoy!
Why licensed video games was so unhealthy was first printed on April 26, 2018.
Remember when licensed video games have been unhealthy?
Looking again, the Batman: Arkham games felt like a shift. With tight degree design, a bespoke story, and crunchy fight, Rocksteady proved licensed video games don’t must suck. You can really feel Batman’s affect in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Mad Max – two extra competent, Warner Bros-published games primarily based on movies – and you may even see its shadow on the upcoming Spider-Man game from Insomniac.
Of course, good licensed games existed earlier than Rocksteady slipped on the cowl. Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay confirmed 14 years in the past that video games primarily based on films might be nice if they’re keen to inform their very own story. Still, tie-in flops used to line pre-owned cabinets in each game retailer. So, what issues existed earlier than which have seemingly been eradicated now?
Since Warner Bros is having a lot success with tie-ins these days, it feels applicable to first look again on one among its largest video game flops: Catwoman. “Catwoman was a striking example of the things that can go wrong with a tie-in game,” GroundShatter Games boss James Parker tells me of his time engaged on the game. “There was a huge amount resting on it.”
Back then, Halle Berry was one among Hollywood’s most bankable stars, coming recent from the again of an Oscar win. Christopher Nolan was tinkering away at rebooting Batman, so Warner Bros noticed the Catwoman game as a solution to pull extra followers into the DC-verse earlier than the Caped Crusader returned to the massive display screen.
“As a consequence, there was a large number of stakeholders that needed consultation on everything, which would have been fine if the team wasn’t being asked to work to an incredibly tight deadline that – as they were constantly reminded – could not change,” Parker remembers.
“These days, it’s rare to see a direct tie-in with a movie release – especially one that is released day-and-date with the film – but back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, that was the done thing. I was lucky that I was brought onto the team very late in the development from a satellite Argonaut studio to help on some of the platform ports, but the team who had been working on the project from the beginning had been doing crunch since day-zero; six months in they were still working from 11am to 1am, seven days a week. Enough to break even the most committed of people.”
Parker says the undertaking failed because of persistent mismanagement, however that mismanagement was unavoidable due to the context. “All the things that can wrong with game development are compounded within a movie tie-in,” he explains. “The goalposts are moved as the story or contents of the film change, and having several layers of approval – often from people who neither understand nor care about the game adaptation – means that schedules can be thrown off by no fault of of the developers, and all the time they’re facing down an unchanging release day. There’s ultimately there’s only one place that a game created in that kind of maelstrom is going to end up.”
That inflexible launch date is the primary motive Catwoman failed. Every little edit made to a personality mannequin or a cutscene as reference materials was altered rippled all through improvement, triggered issues that want fixing elsewhere, and slowed down all the undertaking. On high of that, as a result of cinema is such a visible medium, the highest canine cared extra in regards to the look than the game’s programs or degree design, which is why the Catwoman mannequin is probably the most putting factor in regards to the game – particularly when imposed onto the much less spectacular environments. The priorities have been skewed.
“From what I’ve seen, the main reasons that things are better now is that more people understand games in general, there’s more trust on both sides, and film tie-ins are now a lot more focussed on fitting into a franchise overall than being forced out on the same day as a cinema release,” Parker says. “There’s also the fact that big games are big money, whereas in the past they might have been made within the marketing budget of the film. As long as they promoted the film they were tied to, the quality didn’t matter – now they live or die as products in their own right.”
Publishers love tie-ins as a result of they arrive with an embedded viewers. Look at games comparable to Star Wars Battlefront 2, which promise to fill in gaps within the story between films, slotting into universe canon. What Star Wars fan wouldn’t need to expertise that? It isn’t all in regards to the cash males, nonetheless – the builders themselves usually love engaged on tie-in games, they usually need them to be good. For a daily developer, engaged on a tie-in isn’t any completely different to working a game that’s the sole imaginative and prescient of the game director, aside from the actual fact they’re doubtless already aware of the supply materials.
“It’s fun for developers to work with well-loved or exciting new IPs, and it takes a lot of the doubt and uncertainty out of the process,” former Traveller’s Tales developer Chris Payne tells me. “Everyone knows how Buzz Lightyear should feel to control – those predefined abilities and personality traits are better than any game vision statement. I did a talk recently aimed at helping film production studios understand the benefit of a good game adaptation. I don’t really want to re-enact any of the Star Wars films beat for beat, but Knights of the Old Republic created a whole new galaxy to play in and enriched the source material.”
Of course, Payne has additionally seen the opposite facet of film tie-ins. One of the developer’s first jobs at Traveller’s Tales was doing the Xbox port of Finding Nemo. The PS2 model of the game adopted the film’s story, and it did a great job of recreating the sensation of swimming by means of a reef as dappled mild breaks by means of the water’s floor. On PS2, these hazy illuminations have been created through an phantasm: wobbling some dynamic lights above the water’s floor to simulate caustics. The Xbox, which was new on the time, allowed the group to make use of shaders for the primary time, and this new tech allowed the devs to undertaking an animated caustic texture over the water to create a glance nearer to Pixar’s sterling animation work.
“However, the levels were interspersed with film clips which I had to get onto the console, and for budgetary reasons we were stuck with the very early Xbox video codec,” Payne remembers. “I don’t know how well you remember Finding Nemo, but it was gorgeous – full of vibrant colour and a wide range of rich blues. The codec mangled them. I spent days and days twiddling the settings to try to get a decent result, but even the maximum bit rate couldn’t do Pixar’s work justice. The game shipped with horribly compressed video clips and extreme banding.”
As properly as having to work with suboptimal tech, Payne says that different initiatives have been up towards the identical drawback Parker alluded to: time restraints. Until not too long ago, publishers have been obsessive about hitting the identical PR window because the film for video game tie-ins, and this usually led to initiatives being scaled again.
“TT did a couple of other movie tie-ins that I wasn’t very involved with,” Payne explains. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a straightforward action adventure that looked great – I recall a spectacular blizzard level with incredibly good snow, which had to be cut back because it was costing something like 25% of the frame [rate]. Then there was Transformers, which suffered badly from a short dev cycle. I believe we had CG models from the Michael Bay movie which were utterly unusable for creating game assets because you can’t simplify a model made of thousands of tiny moving parts. The robots took forever to build and animate, leaving very little time to build varied movesets.”
Of all of the tie-in initiatives he was concerned in, Payne says probably the most troublesome was The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, because of an bold design and a decent deadline. Traveller’s Tales’ first Narnia game had 4 playable characters, however the designers for Prince Caspian needed to make each character playable, similar to within the studio’s Lego games.
“Unfortunately, where almost all the Lego characters share the same skeleton, in Narnia we had dwarves, humans, minotaurs, centaurs, fauns, mice, giants, and more,” Payne remembers. On high of that, the game was deliberate to have epic battle scenes impressed by the work of WETA, a VFX studio that’s accountable for battle scenes comparable to Helm’s Deep within the Lord of the Rings films.
“Because the movie reference was so slow to reach us, we built a vertical slice as a prequel level based on a castle siege,” Payne says. “This gave us some freedom, but it was incredibly ambitious. You could ride giants, wade through the enemy army and smash catapults, which collapsed into physics debris in slow motion. There were barrels that broke, scattering the floor with apples, until we simplified them for performance reasons. And because every character was playable, we had to have two sets of combat animations – the AI had elaborately telegraphed swings, while the player had punchy responsive moves.”
Unfortunately, throughout the insanity of deadline crunch, a take a look at construct setting discovered its manner into the ultimate game and the enemies ended up with the identical animations because the participant, ruining fight. “Without the nicely telegraphed animations, combat was much tougher and less visually interesting,” Payne explains. “We’d shipped it on time, but the film flopped, and after mediocre reviews, so did the game. It was disappointing after the whole team had worked so hard on it, but we were lucky that TT’s Lego franchise picked up the slack. We never did another movie license that wasn’t Lego.”
Still, these experiences haven’t soured Payne nor Parker on the prospect of constructing licensed games. Payne is at present working his personal studio, and he’s open to engaged on established licenses as soon as extra. “A good IP brings a ready-made audience, which is oxygen for indie developers,” he says. Likewise, Parker is working his personal studio, and he would like to work on an a tie-in: “If the producers of Bad Boys 3 are reading this and want a tie-in game, then call me,” he laughs.
Now each builders are answerable for their very own destinies, deadlines, and workload, licenses aren’t the potential nightmare they as soon as was. It appears that triple-A studios have taken the identical classes from years of flops, too, which is why the amount of licensed games is down and the standard is up. Now, the place’s the nice Game of Thrones RPG we deserve?
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