In a new Gamasutra interview, Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Gears of War studio Epic Games, explained what he thinks Japanese game developers can do to improve their standing in the global video game marketplace.
"My advice to Japan is that in a disc-based market right now, you cannot [ignore multiplayer]," he says, adding, "I'm not saying tack multiplayer onto every game."
Grasshopper Manufacture's Shadows of the Damned, which had a lot of critical praise but flew under the radar of the mainstream, was "a wonderfully crazy adventure," says Bleszinski.
"...The dialogue had me laughing out loud, just even the key-door systems in there; it was a beautifully crazy game with really fun gameplay, but no multiplayer co-op experience in there. I'm not saying tack on versus; there's a billion different ways you can do some sort of 'players interacting with other players.'"
"And if you're going to make a third-person shooter... the fact that Vanquish didn't have a multiplayer suite was a crime," he says. The shooter, developed by Platinum Games under director Shinji Mikami, also failed to find a significant audience.
"That IP, it was pretty good as far as being Western, but the gameplay was great, the vibe... and I've often said on record that if Gears is the kind of Wild, Wild West coal train chugging along, that Vanquish is the Japanese bullet train, with style and everything. And there is absolutely no reason I shouldn't have been zipping around, doing the mega slides, diving up in the air in an arena with other players."
He does, however, recognize one Japanese franchise for getting multiplayer right -- even being influential.
Calling the Demons/Dark Souls series "one of the most innovative games" for its passive multiplayer, he says "that game is going to continue to inspire a lot of Western developers to figure ways that you can have connected elements in campaign games, and have more of a blended experience."
The full interview, in which Bleszinski looks under the hood of Uncharted, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil, among others, is live now on Gamasutra.
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I do still believe Singelplayer is a valid option, the original Bioshock proved this a while back in a time when almost everyone seemed to believe mutliplayer was the key.
but yes Vanquish not having multiplayer was a shame, I would have loved to play that game in multiplayer especially seeing how fast paced and actionpacked it was I think I would have really liked it, and in that game it did really feel like a loss.
After reading everything he said in context I don't have that impression. If you take that bit you quoted and tweak it to read "I'm not saying tack DEATHMATCH onto every game" I think it gets a lot closer to what he's trying to convey. And if that is indeed what he meant then I agree with him completely.
all this second group of games doesn't focus at all on cutscenes or try to be CG-movies, sure, some of them have intricate narratives, but they are known for having really interesting gameplay mechanics, probably more interesting than most games by established western developers. The old and repeated CG-movie criticism seems to be stuck on some, but it is probably more valid for Quantic dream than any current gen japanese game.
They are also extremely polished and thoughtfully designed, which is often more than I can say of western games.
Seems to me that Cliff would have them do Gears of war, and as fun as that is, it doesn't work everywhere. I dont think it would have worked well with any of the games he mentions without some significant modification. I personally feel that shadows of the damned and Vanquish are really great games, but they have more important issues to address before than the lack of multiplayer...
For example, the inclusion of co-op in RE5, was fun when played with a friend, but overall it was not a step in the right direction for the series. In games like Mass effect or deadspace) it seems completely unnecesary and it doesn't add at all to my enjoyment of the games. I have not once felt the urge to play dead space 2 multiplayer.
There are cases like Portal 2, where multiplayer brings out something new and cool to the table, but it always seems to me that many developers are asking wrong questions: instead of asking, how can I make this game the best game it can be.. they are focusing on: how can I make you need to play it more!
Better games is the goal.
I agree on Shadows of the Damned, it was short on modes in general, i was really looking forward to a survival mode akin to RE Mercenaries, or DMC Bloody Palace... but alas nothing... a multi-player should work though...
- Kid Icarus
- Demon's Souls and Dark Souls
- Dragon's Dogma
- Dragon Quest IX (albeit local only) and X
- Monster Hunter (local only, but I'd be astounded if 4 wasn't over the Internet).
- Every single fighting game.
What Japan doesn't have is another "me too" multiplayer mode in every FPS/3PS they make.
"Lasted longer" is basically tautologous if you add any game modes, and not intrinsically good. "Sold more" isn't a good metric to judge success even if you're only looking at the money.
Cliff specifically called it out for lacking story mode co-op, which would've destroyed the game. Sure, if you planned early enough in development you could make it work, but you'd get a game totally unlike SotD actually was.
1). it creates a group of core players or loyal fans.
2). It creates an internal market place in where you can sell more back end content to those players.
Other than that I doesn't really expand the base all that much. It could be argued that games have more online options than ever, yet only a few of them have large loyal user bases. A small development team tacking on MP to their odd story game is still a small developer with a odd story game that will sell to a small base of gamer.
Take a look at the difference of GW2 to Swtor. Gameplay(not their crappy story), movement, autonomy, difficulty, divergent thinking. and realize this ~ this change in "brands" has was EXPECTED 2 years after WoW came out. It never came out, they made the same mistakes.
Don't copy GW2, don't copy WoW.
Don't copy failed recipes for games at all, look at the change however. Understand why it happened and understand why it failed to come on time.
Don't focus on 'brand", focus on leading the industry in gameplay change.
Nintendo didn't succeed because it was simple-mindedly conservative and for children. Nintendo suceeded because it made great gameplay and kept it's nose clean of addressing western culture as a "brand" purchasers to be exploited. It may have been accidental, but their ability to show interest in their customer base by being relatively good conscioused.
You need collaboration, from people with diverent opinions also, just because one person is western culture bent and another is eastern culture bent isn't divergent.
If at the end of the day your primary focus was making a buck, you failed to do your job right. But also if at the end of the day you failed to make dollars for good art you failed to do your job right.
Multiplayer or not, that's not the real issue.
The fact that the Asian market (and especially the Japanese) absorbs their own rehashes and sub-par games is the main culprit. And you cannot really fix this thing, because it's a culture thing. If a western game is better than a Japanese one, or is published by somebody other than a Japanese publisher, the western game will sell less. In turn, the japanese devs will get the idea that they're doing the right thing and will continue producing the same game over and over again. How many identical final fantasy-type games can we play over the course of a lifetime?
And there's tremendously more innovation coming from Japanese indies than from Japanese studios, and more from Japanese indies than western studios, and more from western indies than western studios. So this observation tells us basically nothing except the game industry everywhere pretty much sucks lately!
On the console side, and I won't go into the PC market (because japan is virtually non-existant there) there are very few titles that pushed genres forward, especially lower when compared to what happened in the 90s.
In the western market we did have innoation in big franchises such as the multiplayer environment in the halo series, the pseudo-rpg shift in CoD4, the modern MMO formula of WoW, the cover system refinement of GoW, as well as smaller indie titles like Braid, Ecochrome, Fez. But the biggest thing of the last decade are the improvements to the UI and control schemes (on the software side) all across the board.
I'm not saying the Asian developers are inferior, Just saying that they got complacent compared to what they were in the 90s, and it shows. Sure there are a myriad perfectly good reasons for that, but it doesn't make the fact less true.
Echochrome's prototype was from a Japanese indie developer and developed into a full game by SCE Japan Studio. (The same studio also made Loco Roco and Patapon.)
Maybe if you didn't get the origin of the games you think have new ideas totally incorrect, you'd see more evidence of new ideas from Japan.