I was planning on ranting about everything wrong with Fable 2 and why it is utter rubbish, when, lo and behold, I discovered that Zero Punctuation has already done it for me. So let’s all go watch it instead, while eating tea and crumpets.
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Ok, I guess I can’t quite get away with being that lazy and I have a few other things I wanted to mention, anyways. My biggest complaint is the abortion of a coop mode that isn’t even worth playing. Normally what you would expect from coop would be two (or more) players with full control as if they were playing single player, except they are playing in the same game and can therefore ridicule each other for every tiny mistake like the socially inept cretins we are. Instead, you get two players who must both be on screen at all times (even over Live) and largely no control over the camera.
The camera is pointed at a fixed position between your two characters and neither player has any control over it with the right stick. Supposedly either player can reorient it with the left bumper, but neither my friend nor I cared to play long enough to figure that out. Both players are also confined to a space about the size of a college dorm room before you run into an invisible wall preventing either of you from making any further forward progress. It feels a good deal like trying to play football while chained at the neck to your partner with 4 feet of razor wire and wearing blinders. I supposed I should have expected something like this when I heard they needed a release day patch to get it to work at all.
So now that the main reason I paid money for this game has been cruelly denied me, let’s investigate the single player and see if there is anything we can salvage from the $60 I just wasted. Let’s start with the dog. The only real use he serves is to find treasure chests full of worthless junk and to find dig spots with, you guessed it, more worthless junk. They tried to work him into a quest or two, where the dog is supposed to track someone or something through a completely linear dungeon and they even still have the magical Golden Brick Road™ to show you where to go (except for the Archeology quests). In another case of pandering to casual gamers (read: drooling, mouthbreathing retards), every time the dog wants you to do something, it barks (which is good, since he can easily be off screen) and displays an accompanying bright, large icon over his head (Completely disrupting any sense of immersion you may have had. This is bad). God forbid you miss a few trinkets at the start while learning that when the dog barks and runs off someplace it wants you to follow it. I’m not trying to say that catering to casual gamers is inherently bad, but maybe you can use a slightly smaller hammer to bludgeon them with next time, Captain Obvious.
I also thought it strange that the main pursuit of Fable 2, combat, was so bland and boring (cast Time Control, charge up a big spell, kill everything), whereas the combat in a game like Assassin’s Creed, where the point was to avoid getting into fights, was so much deeper and more fulfilling. Eventually, they throw a few meager excuses for puzzles at you, but it seems as if they thought better of it after trying it once or twice and gave up. I guess those two elements are really just indicative of the game as a whole. Disappointing, half-assed and unpolished.
So my semi-internship at Big Huge ended a few months ago and they decided not to keep me. Sadness. I hear they are losing people left and right. I wonder if they regret letting me leave now. Somehow I doubt it, judging from the news of doom and gloom for THQ recently.
I’m working on a project with some friends from school which will hopefully become a real job at some point in the future, but in the mean time, I’m looking for work that actually pays cash money. Awesome time for it. Hooray economy. At least Obama won the election, so maybe the economy won’t continue to slide into the toilet.
I’ve also been thinking of ideas for blog posts now that I have excessive amounts of free time, so there is a possibility that I won’t let my blog stagnate for, what, like 8 months? I’m surprised I even remembered my login and password on the first try. It makes me feel kind of bad for anybody who follows a link here looking for something interesting (I’m linked by Japanmanship, how’d that ever happen?). I’ll try to be a little better about updating in the future.
It’s been a while again, but I only have time for a quick update since it’s getting late. I’ve been working on a little render engine off and on in my spare time for a while. It doesn’t do much yet. You can’t even move the camera around, but I wanted to throw it up so I don’t lose it if my hard drive were to die like one of the ones in my desktop did recently. The only noteworthy thing it does do is load and display Collada models. So if anybody needs a reference for how to do that with FCollada and actually manages to find my blog, kudos to you and good luck, fine sir or madam. You may find it on the projects page.
So, the news is out and I can at least mention it now. We got bought by THQ. Kind of cool for the company since it gives them access to a lot more resources and kind of makes the whole developer/publisher relationship a lot simpler. It becomes more in THQ’s interest to spend money on us for different stuff because it becomes an investment in their studio rather than an expense paid for someone else’s studio. They also don’t seem to have a whole lot of interest in changing things in terms of company culture, either, so that’s pretty cool.
But it also has good and bad consequences for me, individually. I had hoped it might make it easier to move from an hourly employee to a full-time position, but if they have more money to throw around, it could also mean they don’t really want the comparably cheap labor I would be providing. I’ve only got a few months left until my contract is up and I don’t know if there’s going to be a position available for me when the time comes, which kind of sucks. It would be kind of interesting trying to apply for a job someplace else when I can’t really say anything about large portions of what I’ve been working on. I’m not exactly sure how that would be handled. Hopefully things will turn out alright and I’ll land steady employment somewhere that I enjoy working. Of course, this could also be the motivation to try to hack it on my own, who knows. Time shall tell.
When you are really really busy. A couple months and a couple milestones have passed. The game at work is looking pretty awesome, but I still can’t say anything specific about it yet. Sadness. I’ve also started becoming one of those people, who codes at work and then goes home and codes some more for fun. Never thought that would happen. So I’ve been working on the rendering engine I started before I got a real job and it has changed quite a bit, mostly in small ways and how things are structured due to the influence of seeing How It’s Done™ in the real world. A lot of it is stupid stuff that should be obvious, like passing around pointers to everything is a lot more dangerous than passing around indices to stuff in managers. Anyways, the main stopping block I ran into when I set it aside was that I was trying to get it set up to load Collada files, which are apparently the future, but I couldn’t get their damn API hooked up and compiling. It turned out that their project settings were a little off, so the dll it was making was fubared, but at least now sort of works. I think I have it loading in verts, normals and texcoords correctly, although it’s hard to tell when I can’t be sure any of these models I’m testing on are exported correctly. One of them has a mesh with only two verts in it. How the heck is that supposed to work? But I’m making progress again, and that’s the most important part. I’ll be starting my own company and getting filthy stinking rich in no time, now.
Oh, and I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned that I picked up three kittens, gave one away and now have two cats. They’re funny and they keep my legs warm when they aren’t falling through the space between my legs when they’re propped up on a table or getting stuck under the refrigerator. Silly buggers. And they don’t like catnip! What’s up with that? The world must be coming to an end when cats no longer have a craving for catnip.
