Mirror’s Edge 2: A Sequel of Hopes

There was a lot of interest surrounding Mirror’s Edge in the build up to its release in 2008. It was an intriguing idea for a game, mixing Parkour with a first person view point to run through a near-futuristic city. For Dice, it was an experiment with gameplay and unfortunately it didn’t quite work. Thankfully it wasn’t a complete flop. The game-world was a stimulating scene of perfect whites and bright primary colours. It stood out as a visual feast in a time of grey-brown shooters.  

Both EA and Dice had been very coy about the prospect of a sequel. It seemed that another original IP had been doomed to a single instalment for not being blockbuster success. So it was a pleasant surprise to see a teaser trailer for Mirror’s Edge 2 at this year’s E3.

Being a teaser trailer, it didn’t really give away much. In particular, the direction Dice will be taking the gameplay in. Mirror’s Edge was a bit of an unfocused mess, as it veered between exciting Parkour chase sequences and clunky combat that would break the flow; usually as a hail of bullets blocked your progress.

And as shown in the trailer, the combat is here for another round. Dice only need to achieve two things to make melee fights a welcome part of the game rather than a frustrating roadblock. Learn from games such as the fantastic recent Batman titles, which demonstrate how to perfectly have big flowing melee brawls; and clearly sign post which enemies you have to fight and which you’re supposed to evade. There were points in Mirror’s Edge where you were never really sure if you had to stop and fight, or keep running. The action often devolved into a horrible trial and error routine, as you frantically scrabbled for the path to follow.

A revamped control system would also add a lot to the sequel. Faith had an extensive move set, but it was difficult to time your actions. The minimalist HUD wouldn’t give you any hints as to how long you could wall-walk for, or when you needed to time your melee moves to disarm opponents. It gave the game an unnecessary high skill requirement, which a couple of interface hints could go a long way to fixing.

My biggest hope, is that the world becomes a lot more fleshed out. The opening cinematic set up the events of the story for Mirror’s Edge, but you never really got to find out more about the city. It looked gorgeous and was fun to run around, except you never got really explore it. There were some opportunities to take different routes, yet the majority of the game was a linear path. It would be interesting to see some real branching paths that give you a choice in how to approach the level. Most of all, it would be great if the story for the sequel is longer than five hours. The length of the story really hamstringed Mirror’s edge as it was hard to justify paying full price for such a short experience. So here’s hoping that Dice use the time they have (as the trailer simply gives a release date of ‘when it’s ready) to perfect the sequel, and deliver a game that matches the hopes we had for Mirror’s Edge.

Dead Space 3: Boom, Bang, Splat, Meh

*Warning, minor plot spoilers below

There are few games I stop playing before I complete them and now, Dead Space 3 has joined that small group in my games library. Not because it’s functionally broken in some way or terrible in quality, but due to a lack of atmosphere and genuine scares.

Dead Space is one of the very few AAA franchises that considers itself to be horror.  And yet with each new title, it moves further away from the shocks and scares of the original and towards being an action orientated title. And there’s no reason or need for the change of direction as the original had a good balance between action and horror that made it unique.

A lack of atmosphere and pacing are the main culprits for the missing terror. Instead of trying to build any tension, it relies almost solely on jump-scares to the point where you can predict the appearance of every enemy. To compound the problem, the Necromorphs have had a significant speed upgrade which gives you about a second to kill fresh enemies before they jump on you and take a chunk out of your health.

That may seem unfair and often I did feel cheated when entering a room; being immediately jumped on with little time to react. But to give you a hand with your quick draw, the audio goes absolutely ballistic with loud, sharp noises to announce the appearance of every enemy. The sound design completely robs the moment of any shock value and instead becomes a cue you rely on to progress. There’s no moment where the audio tries to build tension, it’s just flicked on and off like a child playing with a light switch.

Dead Space 3 also fails to make the best use of space. In fact only about a third of the game is set in space with the rest of the game taking place on the snow planet of Tau Volantis. And the developers missed a great opportunity to use the most terrifying scenario of the series. The moments when Isaac has to step into a decompressed room, or walk out onto the hull of a ship. These were brilliant examples of when the sound design perfectly complemented the atmosphere of the game.

All you can hear in these moments are dull thumps of your footsteps and thuds of your weapon discharging. You have to depend on your other senses as the Necromorphs can sneak up to you unheard. It was these moments that put me on edge, sweeping the room to find enemies before they found me. I didn’t even want to step into these areas.

And there wasn’t a single moment like this in Dead Space 3. There are some interesting points where you can jet around freely in space between the wreckage of an old fleet to scavenge parts. However the fact that you can simply fly through space means that enemies can barely attack you. I often didn’t even notice that Necromorphs were firing at me because they couldn’t hit. Otherwise the homing space mines were the biggest concern, and they fail to be any real threat as they kindly announce their approach with loud warning beeps; like angry trucks trying to reverse into you.

The new upgrade system is the largest change in Dead Space 3. Notoriously done to cram in EA’s micro-transactions so you can upgrade faster. EA did claim that micro-transactions wouldn’t be necessary and in fairness to them, it’s absolutely true! Once again you quickly acquire your trusty Plasma Cutter and it’s still a perfectly viable weapon for the entire game. All the other parts you pick up along the way allow you to craft other weapons to add a little more flavour to your arsenal. The big flaw is that the crafting system is very confusing. It took me a while to work out all the possibilities and how valuable certain resources were. Compounding the problem is the lack of detailed tooltips which led me to creating a few poor weapons and adding useless upgrades.

I might return to Dead Space 3 when there’s a lull in the release schedule just for the sake of completing it. I feel that Visceral Games has taken a wrong turn and need to rethink their approach to horror if they want really scare players. Otherwise the franchise will become just another third person action game; a very competent third person action game, but lacking the elements that used to define it.

SimCity: DLC Before Bug Fixes!

Unsurprisingly EA is already rolling out the first wave of DLC for SimCity, which isn’t a problem in itself. However they seem to have prioritised it over fixing critical bugs. To my dismay, I only discovered them after many hours of play within the same game region, and after writing my own review.

The first bug I encountered was caused by trying to build a regional wonder with the help of a friend. After he paid the hefty price of one million Simolians to begin construction on an Arcology, we both noticed strange occurrences in our cities. Random warning messages from our advisors would pop up, stating buildings weren’t open due to a lack of workers. Incredible traffic jams would form at the freeway junction and buildings were being abandoned at an alarming rate. After some investigation, it turned out that almost my entire population was going to work on the Arcology every day. Something that shouldn’t occur until the required amounts of construction materials had been delivered to the site.

Despite this completely crippling my cities economy and forcing me to abandon my gambling specialisation, I decided to carry on. I was curious to see what would actually be achieved if we finished building the Arcology. At this point you may sensibly be thinking, “why not cancel building it, if it causes so many problems?” Well that was plan A until we realised the game won’t let you.

Several hours of careful city management later, I bumped into a rather typical nuisance of playing SimCity. My game had failed to synch with EA’s servers again. Great, another twenty minutes of play lost I thought as I clicked the ‘roll back’ button again. Then as I tried to re-enter the game, it never got past the loading screen telling me to try again later. After leaving the game for an entire day, I was still running into the same loading error. A quick search turned up a massive thread on EA’s tech support forum, as thousands of players who had encountered the same bug were having to manually ask EA’s tech support to recover their save files. No proof was needed to show that games which only allow cloud saves are a bad idea, but now we have it. Having run into this bug, I know it’s not worth my time playing another minute of SimCity.

As for the DLC itself, players can now build Nissan Leaf Charging Stations as extra mode of transport. This lets your Sims zip around in non-polluting electric cars. Obviously it’s a little piece of advertising for Nissan, and to make up for that the DLC is free.

“Plopping down the Nissan Leaf Charging Station will add happiness to nearby buildings. Adding the Charging Station will not take power, water or workers away from your city. Zoom in to the streets of cities and players will start seeing a percentage of their Sims from all wealth classes driving the electric vehicles. The Charging Station produces no garbage or sewage as well making it pollution free.”

While I’m not entirely opposed to large companies being able to put adverts into games, it would be nice if the added content was actually balanced. Much like the special editions of the game that included the British, French or German theming, it just makes an already easy game even easier. Of course it is optional DLC, but considering the bad PR EA and Maxis have already attracted for the game; you’d expect them to get their priorities sorted.

SimCity: Keep Your Fun Inside the Dotted Line at all Times!

SimCity looked very promising at its initial unveiling. The best known city building simulation getting another instalment, coupled with a brand new game engine which promised an even greater level of detail. Then EA made the horrendous decision to slap useless, always online DRM on it. They didn’t just manage to match Blizzard’s cock-up with Diablo 3, but actually beat it. And just like Diablo 3, you’re left wondering if there’s a game worth playing?

Thankfully for everyone who bought and persevered with the launch day troubles, the answer is yes. The updates in the new instalment bring some interesting re-works to the mechanics of previous SimCitys. Most notable is the changes to roads. They now act as the veins of your city, distributing the heartbeat of the power stations and other utilities. Water and electricity trickle down them to all attached buildings, whilst sewage is pumped back along them to your waste treatment plants.

Because of this, you can no longer place buildings in the middle of nowhere. Instead you have to build a road to every space you want to make use of. It seems odd a first as it redefines how you plan your city. Now roads are the most important element, and building the right roads at the start will save you a lot of painful demolition work later on.

Roads also control the density of your city. Previously your choice of zoning defined an area as low, medium or high density. Now your roads are the key to your city’s development. Upgrading a road to ease a traffic jam can suddenly cause a whole street of skyscrapers to pop up out of a trailer park.

The core gameplay remains unchanged. You take on the role of city mayor with all the powers of a dictator. You mark out areas for residential, commercial and industrial buildings and then entice tax paying Sims to move in by providing all the utilities and services a budding metropolis will need. As always, you have a group of advisors who’ll keep you informed of your Sims needs.

And it’s just as hard as always to keep everyone happy. Your Sims will often speak up with speech bubbles, alerting you to services or objectives they’d like you to achieve. If you accept their challenge, you’re often provided with a monetary reward to help you city grow. The only problem is you’re often asked to ‘plop’ buildings which will be useless for your city’s specialisation. You can be a mining tycoon; then out of the blue be asked to build an airport for tourism. Even worse are the constant requests you receive to build any DLC you have. I get constant requests to build the superhero DLC I received with the limited edition, and there’s only one way to shut your Sims up. You have to turn all Sim speech bubbles off in the options. It’s a minor problem, as speech bubbles really serve the purpose of being an extended tutorial. However I know I’m missing out on any challenges and money rewards I might be interested in which is a little annoying.

The UI is very nicely laid out. Clicking on any icon on the tool bar brings up all the construction items associated with it, as well as the appropriate city overlays. Each overlay provides a living graph, displaying all the information you need to track anything you need to see in real time. As you wait for your taxes to roll in, it’s satisfying to sit back a flick through the overlays; watching your city grow and spotting how its needs change.

And there’s an impressive level of simulation occurring. Although the big problem, as with many simulations is; if you look too closely the cracks show. And this comes from the new ‘agent’ simulation used. Each blob of utilities, vehicle and Sim can act independently, which leads to some odd scenarios. Often, conga lines of rubbish trucks form as they compete to serve the same buildings. And this happens with plenty of other services such as busses and emergency vehicles. Even more bizarrely, the AI is enticed by the freeway like moths to a bright light. I’ve observed my fire trucks drive straight past Sims in desperate need of saving from a horrible fiery death, just to go for a joy-ride on the freeway! Presumably all my emergency crews crave the open road where there’s no red lights to stop them, because for no explicable reason they will stop at red lights!? Until a recent patch, they would happily join traffic queues and junctions and patiently wait their turn instead of using open lanes to jump the queue.

The AI also acts like a fool when it comes to resources. Your city specialists bleat like new born lambs as soon as any coal mine or oil well is full. Completely oblivious of the fact that your fleet of delivery trucks is en-route, just stuck in traffic. Meanwhile your power and water advisors will happily fall asleep on the job and not warn you of any problems until the lights go out.  And if I could shoot the zoning advisor, I would. Many of my cities end up in a bizarre situation where he demands I build more residential housing as there aren’t enough workers for my industry, but also tell me to build more industry; with no explanation for the industry demand.

Multiplayer has the most obvious simulations issues, or really, the lack of simulation. Your city will often receive ‘spare’ workers or vehicles from neighbours to help you, despite having a shortage of the same thing. And it’s not surprising that this element of the game is very loosely based on actual game data. Each city runs asynchronously so that all players can use their preferred game speed. This would make it impossible for real time sharing of resources. It’s a little immersion breaking, but equally it doesn’t really add or take away anything from the experience.

In fact, the majority of the simulation issues are just distractions, only mildly annoying when you notice. The biggest problem by far is the incredibly limited city sizes. You barely have to zoom the camera out to view your entire city. It takes me only a few hours to fill all the usable space. Then all I have left to do is a bit of tinkering. The limited space also means you can only really specialise in one type of industry, and once that’s accomplished your budget takes care of itself. Without being able to build a sprawling mega-city, it’s hard to go wrong. The challenge is prematurely cut off, leaving you with the choice of trying to please all your Sims, or moving on to found your next city.

In the build-up to the game’s launch, EA and Maxis went to some lengths to explain the limited city sizes were due to the complexity of the simulation. Also thrown in was the ‘fact’ that the origin serves handled some of the calculations for you, allowing the game to run on lower end machines. It sounded like a reasonable comprise that even led me to a somewhat optimistic view on the DRM.

It turned out to be a complete lie following some excellent detective work by RockPapaerShotgun, and modders quickly exposing the nature of the DRM. We really shouldn’t have expected anything more than anti-piracy measures from EA, and poor ones at that. The game will only check in with the servers at around a twenty minute interval, do a quick cloud save, update some region stats and then merrily continue on.  You can play offline during that entire time until it reaches the next arbitrary check. And if there’s any synching issue during a cloud save, your progress is lost leaving you the choice of abandoning the city or doing a rollback, undoing the last twenty minutes of play!

Clearly there are no server side calculations going on here. So why were there so many explanations to the contrary from the head of Maxis? Why are we limited to small cities and no local save feature? The likely answer is that EA was expecting to get away with selling some city size DLC before the DRM fiasco blew up so spectacularly. EA showed their corporate side horribly with this pointless DRM, which can be easily removed.

It would be nice to see EA do a U-turn on this stupid decision, and you’d think with their share price failing, they might would to improve their reputation. Instead, it seems dragging it through the mud has been the plan for the past few years. We can only hope than a change of CEO might see a change in direction.

There’s an enjoyable, measurably good game buried under the DRM. Like Diablo 3, it has suffered a similar fate. Until modders remove the DRM (something I’ve never hoped for before now), it’s difficult to recommend because of the message that would be sent to the industry by SimCity being a sales success. Hopefully the wave incredibly bad press coverage will outweigh the ‘success’ of any high sales figure, something I shouldn’t have to wish on any game. 

We Built This City on DRM: SimCity

It’s funny how history can repeat itself. Not quite a year ago Blizzard was weathering a storm of their own making for the launch of Diablo 3. Now EA is scrambling for the umbrella due to the abysmal launch of SimCity.

You’d think EA would have learned from the past. Both Ubisoft and Blizzard have received heavy criticism for their always online DRM, and EA have just joined the club. The launch week has seen long queue times to get onto a server after a faltering start filled with crashes and rollbacks.

Like Diablo 3, SimCity’s always online requirement has been heavily touted as a feature; with multiplayer elements making their first appearance in the series. Players can now choose to be neighbours on large over-world maps, allowing cities to interact with each other in new ways.

The option to play SimCity as a traditional solo experience is still there, however you now have to log into the game through Origin and remain online at all times. The game itself does do some calculations server side, taking some of the burden off your machine. But this can only really be seen as a feature for those running a PC from a decade ago. No doubt there will be a group of players in this bracket due to SimCity’s wide appeal. Realistically it’s an extra level off DRM protection to keep the pirates at bay.

And I would have no problem with that, if the game I bought on release day worked and was guaranteed to be playable after the servers are shut down. However EA clearly missed the former and completely refuse to commit to the latter. It’s worrying to see games moving in a direction where we are not only technically renting them from the publisher, but that the publisher reserves the right to shut down a game when it suits them.

Ubisoft has already backed down from this idea on a number of titles due to the bad publicity. So it will be interesting to see if EA and Blizzard try it again. There is scope for always online requirements to work in certain games (not in anything action heavy). But publishers need to realise that not all gamers have stable connections, and need to put consumers first with reliable servers and DRM removal at the end of the game’s shelf life.