Games of the 7th Generation: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

So this is the "big one".  This is the game that re-refined the first person shooter genre.  To my mind, the history of first person shooters goes something like this:

Id basically invents the genre with Catacomb Abyss and Wolfenstein 3d.  They make the definitive FPS with Doom, and then they pull it into the 3rd dimension with Quake.  Meanwhile, in Chicago, a company called Bungie is following closely building shooters with their own Bungie twist, the Marathon series, it's not quite as recognized as Id's stuff, partly due to being on Macintosh instead of DOS.

Enter Halo.  Halo basically re-defines the genre by introducing huge refinements.  The player can only carry two weapons at a time, mostly due to the fact that she's playing on a controller.  This means you can't easily scroll a mouse wheel or hit a number to change weapons.  They also introduced the idea of a regenerating shield which means you no longer needed to run around finding health packs, if you made a mistake you weren't screwed, you just had to take cover until your shield regenerated.  Halo was an interesting and innovative game in many other ways, but these are the key refinements to FPS games. 

Then Call of Duty 4 came out.  It was highly anticipated.  Call of Duty on PC released in 2003, was a new standard of polish. Call of Duty 2 was, in most people's opinion, the best X Box 360 launch title.  The studio behind these games, Infinity Ward, hadn't worked on Call of Duty 3, and this was the much anticipated follow up to Call of Duty 2.  Previous Call of Duties had covered World War II, but mainly, they'd covered World War II movies.  Nearly every memorable scene from Call of Duty or Call of Duty 2 could be directly traced back to some World War II move.

With Call of Duty 4, Infinity Ward was stepping away from World War 2 and entering the realm of modern combat.  At the time, this was considered a highly risky move.  It was well known that players loved World War II games, and most modern combat games had been comparative flops (Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon).  The general wisdom was that Modern warfare just wasn't that interesting.  Turns out the general wisdom was completely wrong.

Call of Duty 4 possibly pulled one of the best tricks ever in gaming.  They made an action-movie game that everyone thought was a war-movie game.  Call of Duty 4 was the first time in gaming where I felt like I was controlling the protagonist of an interactive action movie.  Incredible moments from my favorite movies were re-created and I was the hero.  The stealth mission, the sniper shot, the one final shot with a pistol.  A bunch of action movie clichés in playable form.  It also brought Iron Sights to the masses.  A feature that drastically changed the way gunplay in a first person shooter felt. The game was about creating huge moments and letting the player experience them, almost the antithesis of previous games that were more about giving the player tools to create his own moments.

I still remember finishing the game, thinking to myself that there was a new top-tier first person shooter studio now, and then hearing the credits song and just having my mind blown.  It was a really professional sounding rap song and it was playing over the credits like a movie, and it was made for the game (by the development team), just like many 80s movies credits songs.  Then when the credits were done rolling, I noticed that in the "message of the day" area there was a snarky comment from Infinity Ward about hiring (EA had just had lay offs), and I could tell they knew they'd built something really special. 

For the impact this game had on first person shooters for the rest of the generation, this is probably the most likely choice for THE game of the generation if I had to choose one.  All this, and it was only about six hours long, which, at the time was considered way too short for a $60 game.  The developers understood something, though.  For 6 hours, nonstop action is an incredibly fun experience, for much more than six hours, it starts to actually get kind of tedious.  A very interesting insight I didn't have until much later.  Overall an incredible experience.

Year of the 7th generation

I decided to take a break from the "Games of the Generation" because I realized as I was compiling the list, that there was a year the 7th generation really came into its own, and that year was 2007.  That was the year that:

Halo 3

Mass Effect

Assassin's Creed

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Crackdown

Bioshock

The Orange Box

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune,

and Rock Band came out.

Not all of these games are in my "games of the generation", but they were all major releases that really served to kick the generation off and give some hint as to what was to come in the generation.  Call of Duty heralded in a generation of realistic military shooters, The Orange Box was valve's move to console gaming, Uncharted wasn't quite there, but was the beginning of cementing Naughty Dog as a force in gaming.  Rock band was the bright flare in an ultimately doomed game genre, Mass Effect was the beginning of a generation defining RPG Trilogy, Assassin's Creed is probably the biggest IP created this generation, sales wise, and Bioshock was a commercial and critical smash that introduced the world to Irrational.  

Some of these games will be on my list, some won't, but there's no doubt that 2007 is when the 7th generation really began to shine.

Games of the Generation: Halo 3

This one might seem like a bit of an obvious choice for someone who worked on Halo 4 and now works at Bungie, but it is a bit of a different, interesting milestone for me in this generation.  I highly respect and like Halo 3, I think it's a great achievement, but what sticks out for me, is that Halo 3 is the first game this generation with truly out of control hype.  The hype machine was turned to 50.  Halo 3 brought a ton of stuff with it, four player co-op over live in a game with complicated physics, an incredible matchmaking system and some of the best multiplayer ever in video games.

But man, it also brought an incredible hype train.  The Believe ad campaign, the Starry Night ad, just and incredible tour de force of advertising, making sure the world was ready for another Halo game.  I remember standing in line for my midnight copy outside of Gamestop in Westwood Village in Los Angeles, and not only were there tons of "norms" lined up, there were frat boy types driving by in trucks cheering us on yelling "HALO", not making fun of the people lined up for a video game.  It was really an incredible event, and a turning point in AAA gaming.

A bunch of us at Pandemic (including what turned out to be 3 future Bungie employees) picked it up at midnight and went home and played until we finished the game the next day.  We actually took the day off to play through Halo 3, that's what an event it was for us.  It was a great campaign, but it was buoyed by the incredible hype machine that came before it. It also sort of marks the "end" of an era of shooters.  More run and gun shooters came after Halo 3 (Notably Halo: Reach and Halo 4), but the next game in my Games of the Generation was about to change everything.

Games of the Generation: Gears of War

So let me get it out of the way.  I didn't love Gears of War, I didn't even particularly like it.  I thought it was a fun cooperative experience, but overall I found it to be one of the more overrated games I've played.  So why game of the generation?

Gears of War heralded in the Seventh Console Generation.  As soon as the first ads came out with in-engine cut scenes that looked like CG films, the generation truly started.  The visual fidelity in the game was quite simply unmatched.  Nothing ever looked like that before.  From the material system to the particle and hit effects, it completely redefined video game visuals.

There have been a few games that just set a visual bar.  Where after the game comes out, the rules are fundamentally changed forever.  Doom, Quake, Unreal, Half Life 2, and Gears of War was one such game.  There was simply video game visual before Gears and after Gears.  And this isn't just some love letter to the Unreal Engine team, the art in the game is just fantastic, and the design fits with the engine and art to really make a showcase for the greatest strength that Epic has, the ability to push incredible visuals.

And for all that it had novel mechanics.  Take Killswitch, mix in a little Full Spectrum Warrior, change the camera so you can see your avatar in mind-melting detail, and boom: Next Gen is here.  I didn't love waiting for dudes to pop their heads out in order to get the rare headshot, but I was a fan of the few times I was able to pull off a really nice flank.  I liked the names of the difficulty selection items:  casual and hardcore, as if a "casual" gamer would play it.  Of course some must have, since it went on to sell over five million copies.  There were clever mechanics tricks like action reloading.  Sure the A Button was ridiculously overloaded, but it must be said that Gears of war laid the blueprint for third person shooters for the rest of the generation.  You like Uncharted? Thank Gears.  Similar to the visuals, there were third person shooters before Gears and After Gears.

I didn't really care much for the story or characters, but there is something to the overall notion of how the game was built that feels lost in modern games.  The weapons, though they may be adolescent male power fantasy weapons, feel unique, and weird.  A chainsaw Bayonet is a quirky idea, the Torque Bow, just.... different.  I feel like Gears was one of the last games to come out before the Great Homogenization of games that happened this generation.  It's a throwback to a more creative age of shooter design. Realism wasn't the be-all end-all. 

I didn't find the game's scripting to be all that polished, I ran into several bugs, and found some of the encounters lackluster, but the visuals were polished to a high sheen.  The level where it's raining, was just one of those mind-blowing moments visually.  From the splashes of raindrops to the water dripping down that stops at your body, creating a particle effect.  The overall attention to detail in the environment was ground breaking.  And all this with a relatively small development team.

So even if I didn't love Gears, I have to give it credit as an absolute milestone game of the seventh generation.

Games of the Generation: Fight Night Round 3

So I plan to bore the internet and myself with a bunch of posts about the games that defined the seventh console generation for me (starting with the Xbox 360, including the Wii and the PS3). These are going to be either the best games of the generation, or milestones in the generation, or just games that meant a lot to me personally.  The first of these is the game that really helped define the beginning of the seventh generation:

Fight Night Round 3

This may not be the best boxing game of all time.  It may not even be the best one in the Fight Night series.  Actually I'm pretty sure it's not.   It is, however, the moment that I knew the next generation had arrived.  Specifically when I first played the demo.  There were only two boxers in the demo: Roy Jones Jr., and Bernard Hopkins. Extremely canny choices by the development team, it showed these guys really knew boxing.

At the time, I didn't really know boxing.  I had only vaguely heard of Roy Jones Jr., and I had never heard of Bernard Hopkins at all.  I certainly didn't know that Jones had beaten Hopkins in a boring unanimous decision with only one usable hand, and I didn't know that fans had been clamoring for a rematch during the intervening years.  I did, however know that the overall visual fidelity of what I was seeing on my screen surpassed anything I'd ever experienced in a video game before.  It really no longer looked like a game.  It looked like a CG movie, and at times, it could almost be mistaken for a real boxing match. 

When the game finally came out, I poured hours into it, I created a boxer and finished the career mode (thousand pointing it as I did so).  I re-played famous fights over and over again.  Ali-Frazer, Robinson-LaMotta, Jones-Hopkins, Leonard-Hagler.  The game turned me into a boxing fan.  I had to know all about the men these avatars represented, I studied up on boxing, learned about Floyd Mayweather, and both Sugar Rays, I learned about Shane Mosley and Oscar De La Hoya (you'll notice not all of these guys were even in this game).  I would watch boxing on TV and between rounds play Fight Night.  I would watch TV and play Fight Night during commercials.  If I ever had any down time, Fight Night went in. 

The mechanics were brilliant, the Sweet Science boiled down to a few button presses.  Set up the heavier blows with the jab, duck, move, counter.  Is your guy fast?  Keep away.  Is your guy strong?  Get inside and fight in a phone booth.  You can never really capture the style of a guy like Roy Jones, but you can feel what it is to be the faster man, and what it is to pack a huge wallop.  Fight Night executed on this beautifully.  Eventually the game felt a little shallow, with the haymakers and the counters possibly being slightly overpowered, but it didn't stop me from playing. 

Visually, it set the bar for what fighting games should look like, a bar few have met.  The fight night and UFC games from EA are in a league by themselves when it comes to fighting game visuals.  At least in my opinion.  Blood and sweat coming off the body, great cloth simulation, and that slow motion punch to the face.  Just amazing visual moments that truly set this game apart.

I bought the next two Fight Night games and thoroughly enjoyed them, but Round 3 will always have a special place in my heart.

Definition of Terms

I work in the game industry and it seems like there are a few terms that go poorly defined or understood by gamers, the games media, and even developers.  Mainly it has to do with categorizing games and trying to talk about types of games with broad generalizations.  I figure I'd throw a few definitions I'd been thinking about into the ring and see what people thought.  I'd like to point out that this is just my take on this stuff and isn't meant to be any kind of authority. It's just a talking point in a larger discussion.

AAA or Triple A: This term is meant to define a game that's in the "big leagues" of gaming.  Generally it is an indication of a game's budget.  In the sixth console generation this budget was somewhere between one and ten million dollars.  It was a rare game that cost ten million dollars to develop.  In the seventh console generation, AAA probably starts somewhere around twenty million and can go up to two hundred million dollars.

So what does all this money buy you?  Generally it ends up creating a higher fidelity experience with some degree of higher production values.  More money can be spent on art for larger and possibly more intricate locales, more iterations can be paid for in level design, more money can be spent on voice talent and sound recording.  Frequently more money is spent on marketing and the game gets more exposure.  This all means the game is expected to sell way more copies in order to turn a profit. This also means that these games tend to be somewhat risk-averse and frequently are meant to be built into multi game franchises to ensure multiple years of high revenue.

Towards the end of the seventh generation, and beyond, Triple A games almost always contain some form of long tail, usually in the form of a multiplayer component.  And nearly always in the form of downloadable content used to generate more revenue to try to eke even more profit out of these expensive behemoths.

Indie:  This refers to a small scale developer or a small production team's game.  Similar to film, it can be somewhat tough to define.  Few would consider Bungie to be an indie developer, though the company isn't owned by a larger company.  Generally this term is used to describe games that live more on their ideas than their production quality.  Some particular part of the game is meant to be taken to a superlative level, or there is some innovation that isn't generally seen in AAA games.  Mainly indie games can tend to take more risks because they have much smaller budgets.  Usually the teams are smaller and self funded.  That's not to say that there aren't a ton of experienced developers in indie games, it's just that there is generally lower or no salary so they don't attract the same kind of talent.   Not to say they have less talented developers, but they definitely have a different style of developer overall, I've found that independent games tent to be more quirky and rely more heavily on mechanics than production value.  I have also found that more is forgiven from indie games due to their lack of a huge budget.

Core Games: This is where I'm going to get really controversial.  For me, a core game is a high fidelity immersive narrative experience.  This immediately discounts games such as Madden and FIFA, and to some degree Call of Duty.  I wouldn't necessarily rule those games out as not being core games, I just think they're sort of exceptions to the rule, and generally fit into some (possibly very large) niche.  Generally core games are trying to present some large narrative experience, some big story.  Usually they try to use immersion to tell said story. 

Core games aren't necessarily AAA, I've found most indie games are honestly trying to target core gamers.  These are the games for people that over the past 20 years or so would identify as "gamers" or more specifically "video game players".  Generally video games are one of the main interests of people who fit into this group, either as a hobby or an overall form of entertainment.  I won't go into made-up demographic information, but developers expect this group to spend significant amounts of time with games in their lives.

Casual Games: These games tend to focus on small repeatable puzzles or mechanics that can be played for short periods of time.  Frequently they have some sort of progression hook to create a sense of investment.  The cost of entry for casual games is generally very low or free.  They rely on progression hooks or low barrier to entry for revenue.  Rarely is there a notion of an immersive story, and a minimum satisfying play session is generally only a few minutes.  Contrast that with a core game where it is difficult to get a satisfying game session that lasts less than an hour.  Casual games generally reside in places with the absolute lowest barrier to entry, so either in an app store on a mobile device, or on a web page or linked through Facebook.  Generally they want to avoid an installer for PC, and rarely do they really take off on consoles because the barrier to even starting to use a console has traditionally been so high (having to go into the living room, turn on the TV, switch it to console mode, etc etc...).  These games rely on absolutely huge numbers of players, but they tend to make very little money from each player.

These definitions are broad guidelines with which to try to sort games, they're not any sort of hard and fast rule.  Don't think of the categories as buckets but more like a spectrum, some games are between AAA and indie, and some games are between core and casual, a good example of that is something like Plants vs. Zombies, which requires a fair time investment to play, but has still managed to reach a huge audience through easy accessibility.  Anyway, I'd love to hear what anyone thinks about this stuff, I think it's a really interesting discussion.