Hold To Reset
Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up
Alex Hutchinson readies the team at Typhoon Studios for reviews
With Savage Planet’s code now in the hands of manufacturing, and much of the team either noodling about with extra content for the game or preparing for Christmas break, the fun, fraught and vaguely morbid task of predicting our reviews has begun. Some with gallows humour predict positive words but mediocre numbers; others, in a burst of optimism, predict universal praise. The old heads know it’s likely to be a mix of the two.
In many ways this is a welcome relief. The industry has matured to the point where different outlets can have radically different opinions on the same game. Gone are the days of white male 30somethings reviewing games made by 30something white dudes to sell to white blokes in their early 30s. The industry and the audience have broadened considerably and brought along a satisfying widening of tastes.
This means that smash hits such as League Of Legends can have a review average in the 70s and more and more fascinating, challenging and worthwhile games will get a spread of reviews. I’m more likely to buy a game that received a few terrible reviews along with its raves, because it means it’s found some challenging content. Personally I don’t want homogenous, focus-tested entertainment. I want loud, exciting and potentially upsetting entertainment.
It’s a philosophy we tried to bring to Savage Planet, and I think we succeeded more than we failed. Its humour is not going to be for everyone, but I’m hopeful it will find enough of an audience to enable us to keep making games along roughly the same lines. All that said, if we get dragged by too many sites reacting poorly to our strong positions on mechanics or tone, then we’re in deep trouble. So what to do?
It would be marvellous to be able to say that the work must stand for itself and that all games submitted for review will receive the time they deserve, but reviewers are time-compressed, not necessarily interested in your game or perhaps even the genre of your game, and usually paid per review. All that means they’re by no means convinced that the game will be worth their time and they’re incentivised to rush through it.
So I find myself writing a cover letter to accompany the review code that we will be sending. The goal is to highlight all the things you could miss (without spoilers) if you run through the game as swiftly as possible. The hope is that even under the most oppressive circumstances, before bemoaning the lack of a feature or the absence of a narrative explanation, they will run a cursory eye over the letter to see if it was there but hard to find.
Savage Planet is a game about taking your time and wandering off whenever the main quest tells you to go somewhere. We flag the critical path and you can always return to it, but I think the real joy (and a lot of the content) is positioned just out of sight and rewards players who go looking for it. I don’t think secrets are satisfying unless they’re at least a little hidden, and if we assume that most players who buy the game will do it because they want to explore, then making them too obvious or forcing them on players is a mistake.
It’s a decision I’ve made before in the open-world games I’ve worked on: we positioned all the Homestead missions in Assassin’s Creed III, for example, as optional. Playing them humanised Connor and allowed him to build up a home base, and unlocked story threads which deepened the story. Most reviewers missed them. It was small comfort to see a Kotaku article a year later saying how great they were, and how they redeemed the protagonist for them. If only they’d seen them in time for the review. I’m certain that cost us ‘points’ in some corners, but I maintain it was the correct call. You need to make the game for the people who are excited to invest their time in it, even if you know that isn’t going to be many of the people who are paid to review your game.
And so we prepare for the judgment of the Internet. These days I push for the ship party to hit a week or so before the reviews, and I give the same speech: take a moment right now to decide if you think we made something great or not, to highlight in your mind what worked and what didn’t, so we can improve next time, and don’t let any online comment or review move you from that decision without a strong argument. Unless it gets 10s across the board.
The industry’s matured to the point where different outlets can have radically different opinions on the same game