Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is a chore to play. I’ve read others’ reviews, trying to figure out the game’s appeal, and by and large they’ve focused on aesthetic qualities. Don’t get me wrong, the game aesthetically is quite nice. The graphics are among the best I’ve seen on the 3DS, and the game does a very nice job of varying the locations and thematic elements to stretch the game’s graphical appeal even further. Graphics don’t make a great game, though; they just make a good-looking game, and a good-looking game can still be a boring game. Others comment on the game’s length, and that’s certainly true as well; the game is impressively well-sized compared to Nintendo’s recent releases, chiming in with at least 20 to 25 hours of play time just to beat it once. But if a game isn’t fun to play in the first place, does its length not actually work against it? Some also comment on the large amount of optional content, but again, if a game is not fun to play in the first place, does optional content intended solely to make you play the boring game more actually improve it?

Those strengths are window dressing that seems to obscure the fact that the underlying gameplay in Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is just plain boring. I wanted to make this a weaker claim at first, suggesting that maybe the game just is not quite up my alley and that others might like it, but I cannot convince myself that the gameplay is not simply boring. The game is most accurately characterized as an action puzzle game, with the majority of gameplay consisting of figuring out how to move from room to room to accomplish whatever arbitrary objective the game has thrown at you more recently, like collecting fan blades or finding a particular object in the level. Moving between the rooms is almost always a matter of, essentially, figuring out what piece of the game world needs to be touched with what button. In this room, you need to touch the invisible door with the Y button. In that room, touch the wilted flower with the A button. Occasionally, the game gets crazy and asks you to do ridiculous tasks like touching a ball with the R button and then moving across the room.

That is an atrocious way to design a “puzzle” game. I hesitate to even diminish the word “puzzle” by crediting the game with the term. A puzzle game involves solving novel challenges using the tools at your disposal; Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon boils down to figuring out which of the game’s four buttons needs to be press while standing in which locations. That is not a puzzle, that’s just a test of the player’s ability to recognize set pieces in the game’s environment. “Congratulations!” the game says, “You recognized a black spot on the floor means that something disappeared. Now move on to the next room.” Throughout my time playing the game, the vast majority of the play time can best be characterized as figuring out which button to press where. That is not good puzzle design.

The game does have a few sections that involve a little more gameplay. Of course, the premise of the game is that Luigi is (inexplicably) a ghost hunter, so you would think that hunting ghosts would be a prominent part of the game. That is not the case. During one mission, I timed myself, and less than 10% of the play time was spent in any way engaging with ghosts. The gameplay was entirely revolved around sticking my vacuum cleaner or flashlight into various nooks and crevices until something popped up or a new door opened. Even when a ghost did pop up, the “gameplay” involved in catching it is almost too simple to even mention. The entire ghost-catching gameplay essentially consists of shining the flashlight on the ghost from the right angle, then holding down the R button until the ghost disappears; if the ghost escapes, rinse and repeat. The only variance on this formula is that different ghosts have slightly different properties; some hide behind or in objects, some have more HP, some hurl projectiles in return. In truth, this section of the game is not actually that bad; it’s just lackluster and ironically deemphasized. Even with my somewhat negative perception of this portion of the gameplay, my overall impression of the game would likely be higher if there was more time spent ghost-catching and less time spent sucking bath towels off their hangers.

The game has some somewhat objective flaws as well. The level structure is strange; the game is broken into six “worlds”, each with a handful of “levels” each, but the levels entirely overlap one another. For example, in the first world, every level happens inside the same mansion. Most of the time, you start in the same place for each “level” in a world, and the portions of the level you have access to are determined solely by which level you chose. It feels like you should be able to freely explore the mansion or whatever the locale for the particular world happens to be, yet the level structure applies seemingly arbitrary restrictions on where you can go and when. This is also a frustration because you often find yourself backtracking through portions of a world you covered on a previous level just because money and coins are accessible in old portions that are otherwise unused in the new level. There is also no in-level save option (and levels are easily long enough to warrant at least a quicksave), the dialogue between levels (and during levels) is plodding and slow, and there is not really a strong driving plot.

None of those flaws, however, are game-breaking. All could merely be minor problems with an otherwise strong game if the gameplay itself is enough to buoy the game. The gameplay in Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, though, is just boring. I would not even call it particularly bad: the controls are natural, simple, and intuitive, the puzzles are usually easy to understand and approach, and the learning curve is very shallow. The problem is that the game just never asks the player to do anything fun. The game is a chore to play; in many ways, it is not unlike the actual chore of vacuuming. Almost the entire time is spent running around with a vacuum cleaner figuring out what spot you haven’t touched with it (or with the flashlight) yet, just to unlock the next room so you can repeat the process. There are the occasional encounters with ghosts and even more occasional boss battles, but those are so few and far between that they do not contribute notably to the gameplay experience. Usually I am far more analytical and detailed in my reviews; this is by far the shortest I’ve written in the last couple years, but ultimately I simply do not have much to say about the game. I have nothing specifically good to say, and I have little specifically bad to say. It is simply a game without real gameplay. It’s not good and it’s not bad, it’s just kind of… there.

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon does not feel like a game you play; it feels like a game you complete. There is no challenge, there is no true engagement, and there is no fun involved. It’s just a chore to be finished and crossed off. It is the very definition of a 5/10 game: it is playable, it does not have any glaring flaws, but it also is not in the slightest bit engaging or entertaining.

A few bits of housekeeping before I get started: first of all, game development is an inherently muddled process, and oftentimes it is difficult to draw lines around who developed which game. At times, this may lead to disagreement over who the developer of a particular game truly is; however, with how quickly the industry changes and the speed with which companies are bought, sold, and changed, there is never truly a black and white to what constitutes one developer’s library. Secondly, there will be a lot of differentiation in the sizes of the libraries described in these lists. As such, in certain lists, I will refrain from including more than one game from one franchise and instead use one game as a stand-in for the series as a whole; in other lists, multiple games from the same franchise may be listed. Lastly, while I have a list of companies I plan to look at eventually, I am always looking for suggestions on what company to cover next; if you would like to make a suggestion, you can drop by the Top 10 List discussion board, contact me through my contributor profile, or visit either of my websites that cross-post these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com.

This week, I’ll be talking about Firaxis.

After Sid Meier departed from the company he founded, MicroProse, he co-founded Firaxis games with fellow MicroProse designers Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds. Like MicroProse, Firaxis focused mainly on PC games, most often in the strategy genre that Sid Meier essentially designed. Firaxis reacquired the rights to the Civilization franchise, but in an interesting development, they never needed to reacquire the most recognizable part of their developments at MicroProse: Sid Meier’s name itself. Sid Meier’s name was still emblazoned on many of Firaxis’s developments, given his actual role at the company – it’s difficult to retain a copyright on the name of an employee that no longer works for you. At Firaxis, Meier continued to do what he does best, releasing several incredibly high-quality strategy games that have gone on to be recognized as among the greatest games ever created in any genre. At times, this took the company back through its MicroProse roots, redeveloping old games with new hardware capabilities or revisiting their past games in new expansion packs. At times, the company even found itself in the odd position of effectively competing with its: the company’s third major release, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, was specifically developed to compete with Civilization II, the brainchild of Firaxis executive Brian Reynolds that was still running strong three years after release. All but one of the company’s titles are prefixed with Sid Meier’s name.

#10: Sid Meier’s Railroads! (PC)

Several times, Firaxis has revisited games that were previously developed at MicroProse, with one of the notable examples being the 2006 release Sid Meier’s Railroads!. Railroad Tycoon, you’ll recall, was released in 1990 and marked one of the founding cornerstones of the ‘tycoon’ genre, as well as pushing Sid Meier’s development efforts toward the simulation strategy realm rather than the military simulations on which he had previously focused. The series went on to spawn five games, though Meier was only involved in the earliest ones. Sid Meier’s Railroads! is an updated version of that. Like the original, the game puts the player in charge of a new railroad company, tasking them with constructing entire new industries based around their delivery mechanisms. While the game was never quite as much of a hit as the original, it was still a welcome update on the game concept.

The key different in Sid Meier’s Railroads! was raising the level of abstraction at which the player works. Previous versions focused primarily on laying tracks, constructing stations, and lower-level elements of managing the business. Sid Meier’s Railroads!, by contrast, put the player more in the role of managing technology and playing the role of an executive. Terrain systems were much larger and more sprawling, and tracks were laid more automatically compared to the manual approach used in earlier games. The game also featured a head-to-head mode wherein up to four players competed to construct the most successful company in the same world.

#9: Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution (PS3)

Almost all of Firaxis’s games have been developed for PC (Sid Meier’s Pirates in 2004 was later ported to consoles), but in 2008, the company tried its hand at bringing its most famous franchise to a console audience. 4X genre games, like real-time strategy games, are famously rather difficult to play with a controller-based console, given the flexibility and controls necessary to play them effectively. Past attempts at porting real-time strategy games to consoles have largely been subpar, with the Nintendo 64 StarCraft port providing one of the highest-profile examples. With Civilization Revolution, however, Firaxis opted to attempt to design a game from the ground up with the console release in mind, hopefully being able to dodge the problems that plague the genre on consoles with a good, focused design.

This was accomplished by effectively simplifying and streamlining the gameplay of the game to be playable with a controller. This approach accomplished a dual purpose: not only did it bring the 4X genre to a simpler control scheme, but it also brought the complicated genre to a more casual audience. It was now possible to play Civilization without being the type of micromanager that some past games required. The end result was one of the few well-rated strategy games to be released for a console: it received high scores across the board for every version, although the Nintendo DS and iPhone iterations were not quite as acclaimed as their big-console brethren.

#8: Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! (PC)

After splitting off from MicroProse and forming Firaxis, the first game Meier and his collaborators produced was the 1997 real-time strategy game Sid Meier’s Gettysburg. In a slight departure from the earlier games he had produced, Gettysburg focused less on building up a civilization and more simply on military tactics. In a way, that represented a simplification of the more full-featured earlier games, but it also allowed the design to delve more into the actual military tactics of the simulation. One of the more interesting elements of the game is that unlike many real-time strategy games that effectively require the player to complete the mission as written to proceed, Gettsyburg is built to explore alternative possibilities as well. If the battles do not go the way history dictated they actually occurred, the player continues and explores the ramifications of the alternative history (within the single battle, that is).

The game spawned a direct sequel a year later in Sid Meier’s Antietam. Built on the same engine, the game is very reminiscent of the original, providing the same kind of alternative history exploration of the Battle of Antietam. This is not the only time when the Gettsyburg engine was reused either, as BreakAway games, itself composed of several of MicroProse’s old staff members (as well as Origin’s), developed a series of games based on Napoleon’s conquests for the same engine. BreakAway games would also collaborate with Firaxis on Antietam, and would later collaborate on Civilization III as well.

#7: Sid Meier’s Civilization V (PC)

The latest Civilization game, Civilization V, was released in 2010. On the whole, it matches most of the previous games in its scope and intent; the player is still tasked with guiding a new civilization into the future, achieving victory in a variety of ways. The differences between Civilization V and its predecessors are likely most clear to fans of the game and the genre; changes included a shift from square to hexagonal tiles, the creation of computer-controlled miniature civilizations for trade and conquering, and an overhauled battle system.

Although the game still bears his name on its cover, Sid Meier’s involvement with the development was rather hands-off. Jon Shafer, a long-time mod developer and intern at Firaxis, rose through the ranks and eventually was tasked with the lead developer position for Civilization V. The game was received well, but arguably was a disappointment for the franchise; it might seem strange that a game that received 9+ ratings across the board could be considered a disappointment, but that itself is a testament to the quality of the Civilization series over the years. The past games in the series were arguably among the greatest (and inarguably among the most popular) games ever created, and while Civilization V was a very solid 4X strategy game, it may not have quite lived up to its series’ high expectations. The computer AI is especially a point of weakness for the game, and some of the simplifications did not sit well with long0time fans.

#6: Sid Meier’s Pirates! (PC)

No, it’s not just a weird sense of déjà vu: I’ve talked about Sid Meier’s Pirates! before. Two games have been released under that title: the 1987 hit game that started MicroProse’s move toward tycoon/simulation games, and the 2004 remake. Sid Meier and Firaxis reacquired the rights to the title to put out this update. The game was also one of the only Firaxis games to find a release outside of the PC; after its initial release for Windows in 2004, it was ported to Xbox, PSP, Xbox 360, Wii, iPad, and Windows Phone over the years (with each subsequent port, of course, growing more and more distant from the original).

The game never quite reached the level of acclaim that the original reached, but that standard would never have been fair: the original changed the industry as a whole, paving the way for an entire genre in which the latter Pirates! becomes only a single instantiation. The game was still highly well-received, considered a worthy update on the classic formula. In particular, many reviewers marveled at how the game managed to update the graphics and sound to create an immersive environment while sticking to the game’s classic bread-and-butter gameplay. Pirates! was also successful in maintaining the original game’s allowance for multiple gameplay styles; while many similar games are imbalanced in favor of certain gameplay styles (and you might expect a game titled Pirates! to favor, you know, being a pirate), Pirates! remains balanced and enjoyable in a variety of play styles.

#5: Sid Meier’s SimGolf (PC)

2002 brought arguably one of the dreamiest collaborations in gaming: two of the most recognized game designers in development history, Sid Meier and Will Wright (of Maxis fame), collaborating to bring us Sid Meier’s SimGolf. Not to be confused with the Maxis title from six years earlier that never really took off, Sid Meier’s SimGolf united the two simulation-oriented minds toward a much more full golf creation simulation. Rather than just simulating the creation of an individual golf course, players are instead tasked with running the entire golfing operation, picking up on Meier’s earlier career in developing games like Railroad Tycoon. Will Wright’s experience at Maxis did not differ at all, and he brought experience in making the game a bit more managerial, with the player tasked with hiring groundskeepers, installing refreshment vendors, and other elements of successful business management.

It is thus a bit sad that the collaboration never totally took off. The game received a warm, but not overly excited, reception, and much of its attention was based more on the Wright-Meier collaboration than the content of the game itself. The game may have also suffered from a lack of audience: the tycoon games typically have rather niche appeal, and adding in a content area that is not universally appealing (unlike the similar RollerCoaster Tycoon, which draws on a bigger casual fanbase) may have missed the opportunity to bring more fans in. For this that played, though, the collaboration was a treat to behold.

#4: Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (PC)

The various Civilization games are all very similar – don’t get me wrong, they’re all very, very good, but they’re all also very similar. What that means is that after writing about four of them in the span of two weeks, I’m kind of sort of running out of things to say about them. It goes without saying that Civilization IV was a solid, well-acclaimed game. It received scores in the upper ranges across the board, as well as several Game of the Year awards, both specifically for its genre and its console and for gaming as a whole (from those rare vendors that give PC games a fair shake in such awards). It’s also received consideration for the best game of all time in its genre and console. None of this is much of a surprise.

So, what’s interesting about it? It spawned two expansion sets, Warlords and Beyond the Sword. It also was used to build a remake of the original Sid Meier’s Colonization. Maybe one of the more interesting elements is that the game is significantly more easily modifiable than past versions of the game; the game ships with a world builder, and the source code has been released in the form of a development kit to allow for modification of the game’s AI, as well as many other principles. Although the game itself is, of course, not written in the language, many of the extraneous elements are written in Python, making them relatively easy to modify.

#3: Sid Meier’s Civilization III (PC)

As the first Civilization released by Meier at his new company, Civilization III mercifully gives me a bit more to write about. Civilization II, you’ll recall, was actually released by MicroProse after (or shortly before) Meier’s departure, and he had relatively little to do with the game’s development. Instead, that game was designed primarily by Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds, the former of whom also served as the lead game designer for Civilization III. If you’re starting to wonder what exactly Sid Meier was doing all this time, then don’t worry, so am I. The continued success of games with his name on them, though, has preserved the power of affixing "Sid Meier’s" to the start of a game title, regardless of his actual level of involvement.

Like basically every Civilization game, the game was released to near universal acclaim, won several Game of the Year awards, received multiple expansion packs, and remains popular to this day. If that’s starting to sound like a broken record, then good; that fact alone should serve to demonstrate the dominance and quality of the Civilization franchise. This is a franchise where excellence is expected and normal. The anticipation that surrounds new Civilization releases can be matched only by the most immensely popular franchises in gaming, such as the Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy series (with the former’s significantly more conservative number of releases making it a much stronger parallel). The very fact that the franchise can take that level of success for granted is, ironically, a testament to its success.

#2: XCOM: Enemy Unknown (PC)

Only one game on this list, and indeed only one game in Firaxis’s entire library, was published without Sid Meier’s name affixed to the front: their most recent release, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Rewind in time and recall that X-COM: UFO Defense was developed by MicroProse Games (along with Mythos Games) back in 1994; despite commercial success, the game would go on to be considered something of a cult classic rather than a popular hit. That game would also spawn numerous sequels, although few if any reached anywhere near the same level of acclaim as the original. The series lay dormant for over ten years, after the lukewarm reception received by the 2001 Hasbro release X-COM: Enforcer.

Firaxis, though, acquired the license to create a new game in the franchise, and the result was a doozy. Released only a few months ago, the game has received nearly universal acclaim. Several outlets, including Game Spy, Giant Bomb, and GameTrailers, named it their own Game of the Year, and the game is far and away Firaxis’s most acclaimed hit outside its iconic Civilization series. Perhaps the most notable achievement for XCOM was its ability to span console boundaries. As discussed above, strategy games are famously better-suited for PC than for consoles, but the dominance of consoles in general has limited the genre’s growth potential. XCOM somehow manages to create a successful strategy game for a console – no small achievement for a company that almost exclusively develops for PC.

#1: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (PC)

Perhaps, then, it is ironic that arguably the best game Firaxis ever developed wasn’t a Civilization game at all, but rather a game developed in part to compete with the Civilization game developed by MicroProse around the time of Meier’s departure. The 1999 release Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, retroactively included in the Civilization franchise by some analysts but a standalone game at the time (recalling that the Civilization brand name still lay with MicroProse), is among the greatest games of all time. It represents one of those rare games that is perfect in nearly every way: it showed the hallmark balance characteristic of all of Sid Meier’s designers; its faculties for user-created content were astounding for the time; its complex strategy and technology trees rivaled any Civilization game, previous or since then; and its ability to transition the 4X gameplay to an alien world, without the benefit of actual world history from which to build, is astounding.

But arguably the best part of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri was the plot. That’s an interesting element in and of itself, given that most Civilization games built their plots largely on alternative world history. Alpha Centauri, though, gave an all-new plot that has since been favorably compared to some of the all-time greatest science fiction works; perhaps it is fitting that science fiction was one of the first genres to receive a true literary masterpiece in game form. Since its release, Alpha Centauri has been referenced in most subsequent Civilization games, with launching a spaceship that reaches Alpha Centauri remaining a common victory condition.

Conclusion

Honorable Mentions: Sid Meier’s Antietam!, Sid Meier’s CivWorld.

In an interesting turn, Firaxis became in 2005 the second company founded by Sid Meier to find itself acquired by a larger game publisher. Just as Spectrum HoloByte had purchased MicroProse, Take-Two Interactive, most famous for owning Rockstar Games and 2K Games, purchased Firaxis for over $25 million. The purchase was not out of nowhere: Take-Two subsidiary 2K Games had been the publisher for several of Firaxis’s games, starting with Sid Meier’s Pirates! in 2004. Unlike purchases of similar studios by companies like EA, Take-Two largely preserved Firaxis’s staff and culture. It remained a fairly distinct entity until it was consolidated with PopTop Software in 2006, and even that maneuver was not wholly unreasonably given PopTop’s history of developing games in the style of MicroProse, including Railroad Tycoon II and III as well as the Tropico franchise. Firaxis executives Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs, and Soren Johnson were left in charge of the studio, although today only Meier remains as Briggs departed later that same year while Johnson joined EA to work with Will Wright on Spore (before moving on to Zynga more recently). Even without many of its heavyweights, though, Firaxis remains on extremely firm standing, with its last two games receiving significant Game of the Year attention.

If you’d like to join in on the discussion of this list, I invite you to the Top 10 List discussion board, linked on this page. You’re also welcome to contact me directly via the information in my contributor profile, or to come by either of the web sites that co-host these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com. If you have any suggestions for what company I should review next, please let me know!

A few bits of housekeeping before I get started: first of all, game development is an inherently muddled process, and oftentimes it is difficult to draw lines around who developed which game. At times, this may lead to disagreement over who the developer of a particular game truly is; however, with how quickly the industry changes and the speed with which companies are bought, sold, and changed, there is never truly a black and white to what constitutes one developer’s library. Secondly, there will be a lot of differentiation in the sizes of the libraries described in these lists. As such, in certain lists, I will refrain from including more than one game from one franchise and instead use one game as a stand-in for the series as a whole; in other lists, multiple games from the same franchise may be listed. Lastly, while I have a list of companies I plan to look at eventually, I am always looking for suggestions on what company to cover next; if you would like to make a suggestion, you can drop by the Top 10 List discussion board, contact me through my contributor profile, or visit either of my websites that cross-post these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com.

This week, I’ll be talking about MicroProse.

Many game companies are synonymous with their founders or figureheads: id Software with the Carmacks, Valve with Gabe Newell, Origin with the Garriotts, and so on. Few such figureheads, though, are borderline synonymous with more than one company. That is an achievement that lies arguably only with the original founder of MicroProse, Sid Meier. MicroProse was founded in 1982 by Sid Meier along with his partner, Wild Bill Stealey. In its early days, the game was primarily responsible for military-oriented titles, including flight simulators, military simulators, and the occasional militarily-themed strategy game. Although few of these titles entered the public consciousness, they were solid and popular enough on their own to give the company a strong financial backing. By the late 1980s, the company was on sufficiently solid footing to start branching out, and it was at this time that Sid Meier began to make his now-famous reputation. MicroProse was responsible for several of Meier’s early games, including Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and the original installment of the now-famous Civilization franchise, undeniably one of the greatest games – and franchises – of all time. Financial problems prevented the company from diversifying into console gaming, though, and in 1993 the company was acquired by Spectrum HoloByte. Although the acquisition built some early success, in 1996 the parent company was forced to cut staff to save money; in response, Meier and other significant figures departed the company they had founded. The company continues developing, and more prominently publishing, games to this day, but the majority of their most-recognized hits came before this departure. It is important to note that many games which are most associated with MicroProse are not internal developments; Worms, for example, is published by MicroProse, but developed by Team17.

#10: Grand Prix II (PC)

Prior to its days developing some of Meier’s greatest ideas, MicroProse had a rather long and decorated history of developing high-quality and modestly popular simulation games. For a list of several of these, you can check out the honorable mentions section of this list: many of those games are quite notable, and were included in my early drafts of this list. Aside from the military simulations, though, the company also produced other similar games, and arguably the most significant game they produced in this realm was 1996′s Grand Prix II.

Grand Prix II was the follow-up to 1992′s Formula One Grand Prix, itself one of the most significant racing games released during that time period. It was among the first to feature somewhat realistic 3D graphics, and was also notable for its attention to detail in recreating the real logos and car designs visible in actual Formula One racing. The second game, though perhaps not quite as revolutionary, was considered for a long time the pinnacle of F1 racing games. Its graphics were among the most realistic in any game to date, and its physics engine revolutionized the genre at the time. Like Doom’s revolutionary physics engine, it was among the first to feature actual movement in all three dimensions rather than just graphics in the three dimensions. Like its predecessor, it also featured a remarkable attention to detail, with painstakingly complete recreations of all of the tracks on the F1 circuit from the 1994 series.

#9: Knights of the Sky (PC)

As mentioned above, MicroProse made a name for itself early on for its successful collection of military simulation games. Although the company released several of these in a variety of subtly different genres (M1 Tank Platoon and F-19 Stealth Fighter especially come to mind), arguably the most significant and best one the company released is 1990′s Knights of the Sky. Originally released for DOS, it later received ports to Amiga and Atari ST, marking one of the relatively rare times that MicroProse entered the console market.

Knights of the Sky is a combat flight simulator, a genre which, despite an enormous number of releases and relatively significant popular acclaim, rarely generates games that receive much buzz. Outside the Ace Combat series, the series is typically relegated to niche appeal, and even that franchise is not all that widely known. Despite this, Knights of the Sky was released to critical acclaim, receiving accolades for its intuitive, smooth gameplay, its remarkable graphics, and its cohesive, cogent presentation. The game is also notable (to video game history nerds like me, at least) for demonstrating an early version of modern "patching" systems: by mailing a floppy diskette to MicroProse, players could receive patches that updated the damage system of the game as well as overhauling the allied patrolling system. The game was also one of the earlier games to feature a multiplayer head-to-head mode completed over a modem, an early precursor to… well, every modern multiplayer convention in gaming.

#8: Dragonsphere (PC)

Among the genres that have fallen by the wayside with the march of time, point-and-click adventure games are typically referenced as one of the most significant examples of such bygone ages. Although some recent games have revived the genre, the heyday of the genre clearly fell in the early 1990s, the time when the Monkey Island games, the various quality LucasArts titles, and other series thrived. It was during this time that MicroProse released Dragonsphere, one of its only forays into this popular genre. At the time, it was something of a one-hit wonder: it featured among the most advanced graphics in gaming history at the time, but aside from that, it was not notable for much. Then again, the genre does not lend itself to the notable features present in many other genres, so the graphical quality of the game is sufficient on its own to earn the game recognition and cult classic status.

Dragonsphere was actually the company’s third release in the genre, following Rex Nebular and Return of the Phantom, two games that did receive some attention at the time of release. The close proximity of the three releases comes because MicroProse, in an attempt to develop more often for the genre, had created its own in-house MicroProse Adventure Development engine. The engine was meant to give the company a leg-up in developing more adventure games with a faster turn-around time and more shared code, but in the end it was something of a dud.

#7: RollerCoaster Tycoon (PC)

The tradition of naming business simulation games with the moniker ‘Tycoon’ dates back to Sid Meier’s original Railroad Tycoon, released in 1990. MicroProse never officially copyrighted the ‘Tycoon’ name (leading to games like DinoPark Tycoon and Pizza Tycoon borrowing the name with no connection to the original series), but they re-used it throughout their history, including for games like Transport Tycoon and, of course, 1999′s RollerCoaster Tycoon.

In many ways, RollerCoaster Tycoon is something of a throwback, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, despite being released in 1999, the game is almost completely written in Assembly code. For comparison, Assembly code became an outdated way to write video games likely a full decade earlier. The fact that such a complex game was written in such a basic language is itself still astounding. Secondly, the game retained a singular original designer and programmer; while that was common in the 1980s, by the late 1990s most games were designed by committee. RollerCoaster Tycoon, though, was designed and coded almost singlehandedly by Chris Sawyer. As part of that, Chris received a portion of the game’s profits, another paradigm that was relatively outdated by the time of the game’s release. Of course, the game’s success is well-documented, going on to be one of the best-selling games and franchises in PC gaming history. The game was particular notable for bridging the casual gamer gap, drawing an appeal to customers that did not normally play video games.

#6: Sid Meier’s Colonization (PC)

To the layman, Sid Meier’s Colonization initially looks like a more advanced version of his prior classic, Civilization. Rather than creating a new nation effectively from scratch, it involves navigating and founding a new one in the name of a financing nation, seemingly a more evolved and realistic task. In effect, however, despite the visual similarities and somewhat related gameplay structure, Colonization is a very different game. One of its key features involves the development of the colonies that the player founds through multiple phases, from total dependence on its host nation to eventual total independence. The game is built to much more closely mimic the actual conquest of the New World than Civilization, actually taking into consideration the timetable and historical figures present in the colonization of the Americas. Players would quickly recognize many of the figures (including Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington) and tribes (such as the Sioux, Apaches, and Cherokee).

The game was well-received by its audience, which seemed primed for the game by the prior Civilization game. Like Civilization, the game has also been redeveloped into an open-source clone, FreeCol, available for free play and continued development. Although the game never received a true sequel, its influenced was also seen in the Civilization series: Civilization III’s expansion pack, Conquests, featured a campaign that was markedly reminiscent of Colonization, and Civilization IV’s expansion pack, also titled Colonization, was effectively a total remake of the game on top of the Civilization IV engine.

#5: Railroad Tycoon (PC)

In my mind, MicroProse went through a two-step evolution from its original identity as a developer of military simulations to its more recent and recognizable incarnation as a developer of business simulation and tycoon games. The first was the development of Sid Meier as a major game designer for the company, and the second was the move by the company toward these business simulations. Railroad Tycoon is the second step along this progression. Released in 1990, Railroad Tycoon was a bit of a surprise hit – first and foremost because, well, it’s a bizarre concept for a game. The game puts the player in charge of managing a railroad company, along with all that entails: building the tracks, stations, trains, schedules, and basically everything else. Reading a description of it, it really seems like a boring game.

Yet, Railroad Tycoon was one of the first games to demonstrate the now well-documented fact that boring jobs can suddenly become significantly more entertaining when framed as games (as lesson that, for better or worse, has been adopted by many in the education industry, but that’s a rant for another day). It wasn’t the first tycoon game, but it certainly played the role of popularizing the genre. The game was a commercial success, spawning a remake and three sequels. Interestingly, however, neither the remake nor the first two "sequels" actually were products of Sid Meier, with the second and third game instead developed by PopTop Software after acquiring the rights to the name from MicroProse, following Meier’s departure to form Firaxis. Even more interesting, PopTop Software was later integrated with Firaxis by owner Take-Two Interactive.

#4: Civilization II (PC)

It’s almost difficult to discuss Civilization II without discussing the original first, but I’m going to give it a go. Released in 1996, the game was the follow-up to the ridiculously popular 1991 release Civilization. That game was the brainchild of Sid Meier, and ultimately would go on to be recognized as arguably his greatest achievement. Perhaps it comes as a surprise, then, that Civilization II was released without any of Sid Meier’s involvement. Although the game was partially developed while Meier was still at MicroProse, its primary architect was Brian Reynolds, later involved in Firaxis’s development of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and now one of the most significant figures at Zynga. Brian Reynolds is also credited as a major party in the development of Colonization.

Despite the absence of Sid Meier in the development process, Civilization II still went on to be a rousing success. It swept several awards for the PC game of the year and the strategy game of the year, and is ranked by some among the greatest games ever created in general. Many elevate it above the original, and it has even be used (as has the original, again) in educational research to study the ability for artificial intelligence systems to learn and adapt to a new game. The game earned a remake a couple years later, Civilization II: Test of Time, ironically released specifically to compete Alpha Centauri, putting Brian Reynolds in the odd position of watching one of his games compete against another.

#3: Sid Meier’s Pirates! (PC)

If Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon was the second step in MicroProse’s evolution toward its more recognized incarnation, Sid Meier’s Pirates! was the first. Sid Meier’s Pirates! Was the first game to feature Meier’s name in the title in a move to try to attract fans of Meier’s earlier work (the aforementioned combat simulation games) to the significantly new genre. Like most of Meier’s games, it is a simulation, but unlike most of his later games, it comes more from the perspective of a single individual. The player takes the role of an authorized privateer for one of four countries, and from there is given leeway and flexibility to pursue the course most appealing to him. One can change allegiances, change strategies, change styles, and convert to piracy at any time.

Upon its release, Pirates! was immediately a runaway hit. It inarguably helped revolutionize the industry in a variety of ways; however, in my opinion, the most important contribution of the game to the industry was its open structure. It’s a little inaccurate to say that up until that point, most games were relatively linear: the game was released in 1987, around the same time as the original Super Mario Bros., and thus there was no generic "most games" to which to compare it. Still, its open structure was something to behold, unlike anything the industry had ever attempted before. The freedom to go anywhere or do anything is easily a precursor to the modern open-world genre, one of the most defining genres of the past decade.

#2: X-COM: UFO Defense (PC)

It’s unusual for a game with as high a profile as MicroProse to have a "forgotten game", but in my experience, the fact that X-COM: UFO Defense (released in the United States under the title UFO: Enemy Unknown, but more commonly recognized by its original title) was a MicroProse product is often forgotten. Part of that is because the game was part of a collaboration, with Mythos Games sometimes receiving more credit as a developer while MicroProse is inaccurately considered a publisher. More likely, however, is the fact that X-COM: UFO Defense bears relatively little resemblance to the business simulation and strategy titles for which MicroProse is more commonly recognized. In a library including the Civilization games, RollerCoaster Tycoon games, and various Sid Meier games, X-COM: UFO Defense is a bit of a black sheep.

The game, however, remains one of the company’s all-time best, and is even ranked by some as among the best games ever created, especially for the PC. It remains one of those rare games that seems to get better over time; as other companies try to recapture what made the game so great, it becomes more and more clear that the game was truly something special. It is, perhaps, for that reason that recently, 18 years after its initial release, the game received a remake – interestingly, by Firaxis games, the new company of MicroProse frontman Sid Meier, who – by all accounts – actually had relatively little to do with the original X-COM: UFO Defense.

#1: Sid Meier’s Civilization (PC)

The granddaddy of them all, though, remains the original Civilization. Released in 1991, it remains to this day one of the most popular, influential, and significant games of all time. In direct opposition to my theory about every genre going through at least four phases of development (experimentation, popularization, actualization, and normalization), Civilization basically encompasses the first two phases itself: it is arguably the first game to even test out many of the concepts now associated with the 4X genre, and at the same time, it single-handedly popularized the genre as a whole. It would not be unreasonable to say that the game actualized the genre, too: to this day, it remains one of the best 4X games ever.

That comes in large part because, like its close cousin real-time strategy games, 4X games do not necessarily rely on excellent graphics or advanced simulation power to be engaging. Increases in computing ability do not automatically improve 4X games the way they improve first-person shooters or other genres. The design, balance, and pacing of the game are the most important elements, and in Civilization, Sid Meier somehow managed to hit the nail on the head almost right out of the box. The game is downright transcendent, an undeniable member of the pantheon of gaming’s all-time greatest games, alongside the likes of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Final Fantasy 7. It has spawned numerous sequels, remakes, and impersonators, and, like its successor, even finds its way into academic research from time to time.

Conclusion

Honorable Mentions: M1 Tank Platoon, Red Storm Rising, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Darklands , Transport Tycoon, Airborne Ranger, Falcon 4.0, Gunship 2000, Hyperspeed , Night Hawk: F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0, Return of the Phantom, Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, Silent Service, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Birth of the Federation, Starlord

After Sid Meier’s departure, MicroProse was never quite the same. In 1997, the company was acquired by Hasbro (who, conveniently, put an end to a dispute between MicroProse and Avalon Hill, the maker of the Civilization board game, by purchasing both of them). MicroProse was merged with Hasbro’s own game publishing division, Hasbro Interactive, and closed several branches. A couple years later, in another acquisition, Infogrames (a French video game publisher) took over Hasbro Interactive from Hasbro, and effectively put an end to MicroProse, closing the last studios and discontinuing the usage of the company’s name (opting instead to use the more recognized name Atari for its developments, which it had also acquired). In an interesting twist that could only ever happen in the business world, a few years later the Interactive Game Group acquired the MicroProse brand from Infogrames, along with its intellectual property. This has allowed the group to use the MicroProse name on its developments, leveraging the company’s history (although in actuality, that never seemed to come to fruition). But the company’s legacy is not with its modern incarnation (or lack thereof). Several companies, including Sid Meier’s Firaxis, PopTop Software, QuickSilver Software, Zynga, and GraphSim in some way can trace their origins back to MicroProse or its major figureheads. Eventually as well, Firaxis reacquired Sid Meier’s intellectual property from the remnants of MicroProse, allowing that company to continue to develop Civilization games, as well as a remake of Pirates!.

If you’d like to join in on the discussion of this list, I invite you to the Top 10 List discussion board, linked on this page. You’re also welcome to contact me directly via the information in my contributor profile, or to come by either of the web sites that co-host these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com. If you have any suggestions for what company I should review next, please let me know!

A few bits of housekeeping before I get started: first of all, game development is an inherently muddled process, and oftentimes it is difficult to draw lines around who developed which game. At times, this may lead to disagreement over who the developer of a particular game truly is; however, with how quickly the industry changes and the speed with which companies are bought, sold, and changed, there is never truly a black and white to what constitutes one developer’s library. Secondly, there will be a lot of differentiation in the sizes of the libraries described in these lists. As such, in certain lists, I will refrain from including more than one game from one franchise and instead use one game as a stand-in for the series as a whole; in other lists, multiple games from the same franchise may be listed. Lastly, while I have a list of companies I plan to look at eventually, I am always looking for suggestions on what company to cover next; if you would like to make a suggestion, you can drop by the Top 10 List discussion board, contact me through my contributor profile, or visit either of my websites that cross-post these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com.

This week, I’ll be talking about Blizzard.

Many game companies become synonymous with a genre, and many game genres become synonymous with a given company. Real-time strategy games are interesting in that, to a large extent, they have become synonymous with two different companies: Westwood Studios, as covered last week, and Blizzard, this week’s company. Started in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse, Blizzard started off as many companies do, creating ports of popular games and building up to some standalone releases. A couple of its early games caught some attention, but the company truly hit its stride in 1994 with the release of its first real-time strategy game, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. The success of the game went on to spawn several sequels and expansion packs, and quickly served to associate Blizzard nearly exclusively with real-time strategy games. The company wasn’t content to rest on those laurels, though, and branched out into a new genre with its second highly successful franchise, Diablo. StarCraft, another real-time strategy game, followed before the company branched out one more time into MMORPGs. It’s actually hard to determine which genre the company is more associated with today; while it retains the legacy of great real-time strategy game design, its most successful release resides in the MMORPG genre, and its Diablo games remain among its highest-rated. One thing is certainly undeniable, though: few companies have three distinct video game franchises as powerful as Blizzard’s triumvirate.

#10: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC)

We’ll talk at length about the original StarCraft game, but suffice to say that after its enormous success, and after twelve full years without an additional release, anticipation for StarCraft II was enormous. I, personally, can’t recall any franchise as popular as StarCraft that went through that much time without a sequel. Upon its reception, it met with widespread critical acclaim. Blizzard’s years of real-time strategy game development were channeled into a perfect balance between the various factions, and unlike many games that focus heavily on the multiplayer mode, the single player campaign of the game drew heavy praise as well. The multiplayer service itself, though, still drew praise on its own, and has emerged as the first real challenger to the original games’ role as the most successful e-sport around. This success was even further enhanced by StarCraft II’s role as the first major real-time strategy game to be released since the end of Westwood Studios’ days.

Despite all this success and critical acclaim, though, StarCraft II has not managed to attain the level of cultural penetration of its predecessors. It drew relatively little attention as a Game of the Year candidate, and while fans love it, it remains overlooked in many circles. Reasons for this abound, but in my opinion, the fault for this lies in the release structure: StarCraft II is broken into three major releases, and thus far only one has come out. This fragmented release schedule of what feels like three parts of the same game leads to the impression that the game is not yet finished, yet the long release schedule between stories diminishes the anticipation they would otherwise draw.

#9: Rock ‘N Roll Racing (SNES)

Before Blizzard changed its name from Silicon & Synapse, it had two modest hits that put the company on strong standing moving forward. Released in 1993, the second of these two hits was the battle racing game Rock n’ Roll Racing. Available for the SNES and Sega Genesis (and later ported to the Game Boy Advance ten years later), the game focused on racing four opponents around a track with a heavy emphasis on attacking one’s competitors. In many ways, the game’s structure is similar to Nintendo’s Super Mario Kart, but the isometric viewpoint in the game provides a unique flavor compared to its contemporary.

The game is also an interesting study in the relationship between developers and publishers. Originally developed by Silicon & Synapse as a sequel to their very first game, RPM Racing, it was the publisher Interplay that changed its name and soundtrack. The name of the game actually comes almost entirely from the soundtrack; the background music of the game are instrumental versions of several popular rock n’ roll songs, and that element is more responsible for the game’s name than any element of the actual gameplay. That’s not to suggest that the music and name don’t match the game, but the fact that the publisher exhibited such significant control over the final product’s soundtrack, name, and marketing remains interesting. A sequel was developed completely independently from Blizzard, but never achieved any success.

#8: The Lost Vikings (SNES)

The other, and likely better-known, game developed by Blizzard in its Silicon & Synapse days was The Lost Vikings. Released in 1992, The Lost Vikings was Blizzard’s first major hit. "Hit", of course, is a relative term, but the game was the first one (following from Rock n’ Roll Racing) to give the company a firm financial footing to expand towards. In terms of gameplay, The Lost Vikings had a very unique style; the player controls all three Vikings, but only one at a time, and the ones not being controlled must still be protected while controlling another Viking. In a strange sort of way, the game was reminiscent of the style of Lemmings, where different skills had to be leveraged to the benefit of the group as a whole. Of course, given that some writers reference Lemmings as an early, early predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, I could just be grasping for straws here to connect Blizzard’s early history to its RTS-centric teenage years.

The Lost Vikings did spawn a sequel, The Lost Vikings II, released in 1997 for the SNES and later ported to the Saturn, PlayStation, and PC. Its release date put it near the end of the SNES’s console lifespan, though, and as a result it never achieved a significant following like the original. It is, however, notable for being the last Blizzard release outside the company’s three major franchises, Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo.

#7: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (PC)

Blizzard’s first major hit went on to spawn its most successful franchise and many of its most successful games. Perhaps that legacy is ironic, then, given that the original Warcraft game was not terribly remarkable. Now, don’t get me wrong, the game was very good; I played it for hours upon hours back then, always having to use cheat codes to get through it (hey, I was 7 years old). When compared to the Command & Conquer series, though, which debuted only a few months later, the game was far behind. It is for that reason that even though technically, Blizzard entered the real-time strategy genre between Westwood Studios’ Dune II and Command & Conquer games, Westwood still typically draws credit for incubating the genre in its early years. Blizzard did not take the reins with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and in fact would not take the reins for a few years after.

All that said, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was still a quality release, as well as the company’s first major financial success. One of its most notable features was the ability to compete with other individuals over local networks or internet connections; while other games had employed this in the past, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was among the first to convince its audience that this type of gameplay was more engaging and challenging than typical gameplay against AI. Needless to say, though, the game’s most notable achievement was spawning on of the industry’s all-time greatest franchises.

#6: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (PC)

Although Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was its first foray into the real-time strategy genre, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was the game that truly helped stake Blizzard’s claim as a legitimate rival to Westwood Studios’ popular Command & Conquer series. Released only a few months after its rival, Warcraft II was worlds ahead of its own predecessor in every way, from the graphics to the complexity of the build tree to the flexibility of combat. The game’s most notable contribution to the industry, though, was in raising the profile of Blizzard and allowing it to compete as one of the PC industry’s greatest heavyweights, alongside the companies we’ve already discussed (id, Origin, and Westwood most notably). In fact, it was Warcraft II that fueled a veritable arms race between different real-time strategy developers. It was also one of the first games in the genre to garner significant attention as a Game of the Year candidate, and essentially swept the awards for PC-based games in its release year.

Warcraft II was also significant in its role in helping splinter the real-time strategy genre. Although it was regarded as a direct competitor with the Command & Conquer franchise, it also in many ways differentiated itself in qualitative ways. At the surface level, Warcraft II focused on fantasy elements while Command & Conquer focused on realistic alternate history, but that discrepancy fueled the ongoing differentiation of the genre. It is hard to imagine, for example, the Command & Conquer series inspiring a game like Warcraft II’s eventual MMORPG successor.

#5: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (PC)

Although Warcraft II followed relatively quickly after the original Warcraft, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos saw a much longer development time. Released in 2002, it came seven years after the previous Warcraft release, and followed the Warcraft II Battle.net Edition. The Warcraft II Battle.net Edition itself deserves special mention in this list because it was Battle.net that helped solidify Blizzard’s role as the dominant developer of real-time strategy games in the industry; realistically, though, it’s StarCraft that deserves most of the credit for that development, given that Battle.net was created primarily as a multiplayer service for StarCraft.

Benefiting from the new open multiplayer service, though, Warcraft III quickly became the most acclaimed game in the series. Financially, critically, and in terms of awards, the game was the most successful game in the franchise, winning several Game of the Year awards. It leveraged many of the strengths and lessons of StarCraft, itself arguably the company’s most revolutionary game within the real-time strategy genre, and ported them to the famous and beloved Warcraft universe in a nearly perfect way. The influence of StarCraft is very apparent in the game’s implementation, as many true real-time strategy buffs noted that at its core, there was little to differentiate Warcraft III from its own genre predecessors. The instantiation of those concepts in the beloved franchise, though, coupled with the flawless expansion of the popular Warcraft universe, led to Warcraft III quickly becoming the most acclaimed game in the franchise.

#4: Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (PC)

One of the underappreciated elements that Blizzard pioneered during its age of dominance was the notion of the expansion pack. Expansion packs are, as you likely know, additional content addendums that had to be installed on top of the original game. They added new units, new missions, new content, or new structures to the existing game. Realistically, expansion packs were the 1990s predecessor to modern-day downloadable content; in fact, most downloadable content is itself just an expansion pack that can be delivered digitally rather than requiring an additional disc-based installation. But, I digress.

Blizzard used expansion packs several times in its releases, beginning with Warcraft II’s first expansion pack, Beyond the Dark Portal. The original Diablo received a Hellfire expansion pack while StarCraft also got an expansion pack in the form of Brood War, but it was the expansion pack to the acclaimed Diablo II that is the company’s most notable example of the paradigm. This isn’t meant to denigrate Diablo II itself, a great game that itself deserves the #4 spot on this list on its own; the Lord of Destruction expansion pack, however, did a flawless job of enhancing and expanding the game’s existing appeal. The most notable element of the Lord of Destruction expansion pack was the enhancement of the multiplayer angle, as well as the inclusion of new classes in the gameplay structure. It was clear that the company had learned from StarCraft’s Brood War especially, and this expansion provided enough content to be considered one of Blizzard’s greatest developments in its own right.

#3: Diablo (PC)

Undoubtedly one of Blizzard’s most acclaimed games, however, was the original Diablo. While Diablo II was very popular, the original, created in a vacuum by a company with little to no experience in the genre, remains to this day a masterpiece. Released in 1996 after the company had found significant success with the initial releases in its Warcraft series, Diablo represented an attempt by the company to branch out into another genre. The result is a game in a genre that is actually somewhat difficult define, given that no other company had prior or sense developed a game quite like it; described by some as an action RPG, others as a hack-and-slash game, and still others as a dungeon crawler, Diablo was an entity all unto its own, one that likely could have spawned its own copycat genre had any other developer figured out how to mimic its appeal.

Perhaps drawing inspiration from the popular Doom franchise for its setting, Diablo was set against the backdrop of a battle between heaven and hell. Upon release, it received nearly universal acclaim, as well as several Game of the Year awards. Its complexity, flexibility, and atmosphere all drew special acclaim. One could easily make the argument that it was Diablo that solidified Blizzard’s role as a strong developer for PC rather than just a strong developer of real-time strategy games. The game remains so popular, and its genre so impervious to the iterative developments that cause other games to age so poorly, that to this day it remains a somewhat popular release.

#2: StarCraft (PC)

Given any pantheon of video gaming’s greatest hits every, the top two games developed by Blizzard would undoubtedly be among them. First and foremost, we have StarCraft, arguably the culmination of Blizzard’s incredible prowess in real-time strategy development. Although Warcraft III was even better in and of itself, StarCraft ranks as the greatest leap forward, both within Blizzard’s own releases and for the real-time strategy genre as a whole. Throughout the 1990s, Westwood Studios and Blizzard battled for supremacy in the genre, but it was StarCraft – coupled with Westwood’s unfortunate demise a couple years later at the hands of the ruthless EA – that delivered the genre into Blizzard’s hands.

StarCraft is one of those games for which you could never say enough about its popularity and acclaim. Suffice to say, however, that in addition to being one of the best-selling games of all time and the highest-rated, most acclaimed games ever, its level of cultural penetration is astounding. StarCraft is essentially still the national sport of South Korea, and even the release of StarCraft II has been unable to make a notable dent in the appeal of the original game for that country. It nearly singlehandedly launched the idea of professional gaming leagues as a mainstream idea, due in large part to the brilliant balance and complexity of the game’s structure. Unlike other games that could be "solved", StarCraft never lent itself to any be-all end-all dominant strategy, giving itself an appeal not unlike a modern-day implementation of the most popular game of all time, Chess.

#1: World of Warcraft (PC)

But despite the dominance of Blizzard’s real-time strategy games, and despite the extent to which the company is and likely always will be associated with the genre it helped define, the greatest game the company ever developed remains its most popular, best-selling, and most famous release: World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft’s numbers essentially speak for itself. Released almost eight years ago, it remains to this day far and away the most popular game in one of gaming’s newest dominant genres. With over 10 million subscribers, the online world itself is larger than many small countries. It is the unquestioned king of the MMORPG genre, and every new release in its arena is measured entirely by its capacity to be a "World of Warcraft killer".

Put simply, no game has ever dominated its genre as much as World of Warcraft has dominated MMORPGs. No game has ever achieved a market share over 50%, yet some estimates put World of Warcraft’s market share above 75% at its peak. To make that even more impressive, World of Warcraft dominates the market at a time when it is at its peak; other games might dominate a market with niche appeal or upstart popularity, but World of Warcraft has popularized, actualized, and withstood the changes to one of gaming’s most popular genres over the span of nearly a decade. No game has ever achieved the dominance over its genre that World of Warcraft has achieved, much less at a time when the genre was wildly, wildly popular. After a decade of waiting for a "World of Warcraft killer", it is thus perhaps fitting that it can only come in the form of Blizzard’s latest project, for now code-named only Titan.

Conclusion

Honorable Mentions: The Lost Vikings II, The Death and Return of Superman, Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, Diablo III, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.

Despite the seemingly absolute success of Blizzard over the years, even it has fallen on tough times most recently. Its most recent sequel in one of its acclaimed franchises, Diablo III, failed to impress, receiving positive reviews but failing to live up to the company’s absurdly high standards. The incredible time between releases also contributed to a heightened anticipation for the game, making it virtually impossible for the release to live up to the absurd expectations. StarCraft II, while popular, suffered a similar fate: the time since the original release coupled with the game’s somewhat strange release structure failed to deliver the type of acclaim and hype to which the company is accustomed. Also impacting the company’s development is its 2008 merger with Activision and Vivendi; while the company remains a standalone entity after the merger unlike other companies (and while Blizzard actually is present in the new company’s title), it is difficult to absolutely ascertain the impact that the merger may have had on the quality and schedule of Blizzard’s releases. Yet while Blizzard has fallen on tough times, most recently laying off 600 employees after lukewarm sales of its more recent releases, its "alumni" have been very successful: former Blizzard staff members have created the companies responsible for Rift, Hellgate: London, Guild Wars, Firefall, and Daxter.

If you’d like to join in on the discussion of this list, I invite you to the Top 10 List discussion board, linked on this page. You’re also welcome to contact me directly via the information in my contributor profile, or to come by either of the web sites that co-host these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com. If you have any suggestions for what company I should review next, please let me know!

“Woah.”

Having been released back in March of this year, I’m a little behind the times in reviewing Journey. The downside of this, of course, is that many of the things I’m about to say have already been said a thousand times. We know Journey‘s appeal, its minimalistic presentation, its beautiful collaborative angle, and its breathtaking atmosphere. It’s been well documented as one of the year’s biggest sleeper hits.

But the strength of reviewing it this long after its release, after every other reviewer in the world has already weighed in on it, is that I have the benefit of watching the historical developments that Journey spawned. I’ve written recently that every genre has that game that legitimizes and popularizes it, and that concept extends to consoles and delivery channels: every gameplay innovation, be it within the game design or outside of it, has that game that solidifies that as a significant movement in the industry.

For digital distribution, Journey is that game. Just like Pokemon legitimized portable consoles as legitimate competitors to traditional consoles, Journey legitimizes online distribution as a major player in the video game industry. Before Journey, digital distribution was for fun small games, a step above what you might download on a smartphone. It wasn’t for artistic experience, brilliant gameplay, or beautiful atmospheres. It wasn’t for innovation. It wasn’t a legitimate player.

Journey changes that. Journey is the game that puts digital distribution on the map in the video game industry, allowing us to consider inexpensive, small, downloadable games as legitimate competitors to their big-budget console cousins. Journey also opens up development to companies that never could have afforded to develop a real competitor to Call of Duty or Final Fantasy. Journey changes the industry in the most profound ways, and we will be feeling the ripples of its impact for years and years to come. For that reason, Journey is my pick for Game of the Year 2012.

The Game
It’s difficult to describe Journey. The character you “play” isn’t the focus of the game nearly as much as the atmosphere and structure of the game. In Journey, there are no stated goals, and in fact it might only be the camera cues and the name of the game that tell you what the objective is in the first place. The game is broken into several large “levels” (although they’re never framed as levels), and you, collaborating with a partner, are tasked with getting through each level in order to reach the end of the game. The only objective of the game is to reach the end.

In doing so, you play a nameless, faceless, cloaked character in the game. Your only distinguishing elements are a scarf around your neck and a pattern on your cloak. You have a symbol indicating your identity, and pressing O triggers a visualization of that symbol. Beyond that, your only controls are the Control Sticks to run and control the camera, and X to jump and fly. There are no other controls available in the game. The distance you can jump and fly is determined by a power level that is depleted as you fly, and can be recharged by coming in contact with bits of garment throughout the game world. You can also increase your total available amount of flying charge by finding glyphs throughout the game. These glyphs increase the length of your scarf, which itself serves as the meter for how much flying energy you currently have.

If that description sounds confusing, don’t let it distract you. Journey is such a beautifully minimalistic game that it is actually difficult to describe it in a way that does it any justice whatsoever.

The Good
There are lots of different kinds of “good” games. There are good games that a purely fun, good games that are addictive, and good games that are artistic achievements. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past nine months, you know that Journey falls into this last category. But what exactly makes Journey such an incredible artistic achievement?

Wordless Cooperation
The element on which most people focus when discussing Journey‘s brilliance is the collaborative angle. As mentioned above, every level pairs you with a partner. The partner has nearly no distinguishing features; they have a scarf of a certain length, may have a pattern on their tunic, and they have a unique symbol that appears when they press the O button. That is all. There is no talking, there is no text, there is no complex communication. The only way in which you and your partner can communicate is through your gameplay styles and that one button.

You are first introduced to your partner at some point in the second level, and the experience is nothing short of breathtaking. I discuss having a partner here because it is such a core part of the gameplay experience that it is impossible to discuss the game without referencing it, but if you are lucky enough to play Journey without knowing that element, then the moment you encounter a partner for the first time is an unforgettable moment. It is without a doubt one of my favorite moments in video game history. At the point when you encounter them, you’ve already been playing for a few minutes and learned the ins and outs of the control. You’re completing a task that involves assembling a bridge by going around and activating various “switches”. At one point, you might look up and realize that more of the bridge is constructed than you have put together. You might wonder why. Then, you look over and you see another character running around. Is it an AI? No, its movements are too smooth and natural for it to be computer-driven. Then you remember that the game requires an internet connection, and suddenly it clicks — you’re playing with someone else.

That moment is one of the most beautiful moments in gaming, realizing for the first time that you have a partner in this unique, beautiful world. But collaboration in video games isn’t a remarkable idea. Many games nowadays have a collaborative element, and oftentimes they give their games a bad name rather than a good one. The stereotype of collaboration in gaming being completely populated by 12-year-olds with colorful language is pretty commonly known. What makes Journey‘s unique is the narrow channel of communication. As mentioned above, the only thing you can do is press a button to show a symbol. There is no way to be a jerk in the game. You could choose to just not play very well, but even then it isn’t clear to your partner whether you’re actually be a jerk or if you just don’t really know what you’re doing. And even then, although the game is easier to play with a partner cooperating, it isn’t impossible with a partner ignoring the regular flow of the game.

The narrow channel of communication might sound silly, and you might think that the result is that people just don’t collaborate at all. In reality, though, what it provides can be absolutely beautiful. You and your partner develop an unspoken pattern of collaboration. In an incredibly short time, you develop a shared understanding of when to stick together, when to split up, and who is leading who. The game’s ever so subtle indicators of status — scarf length and patterns on the cloak — help new players and experienced players differentiate one another. New players, then, can go in with the understanding that the experienced player can lead them through the challenges more aptly than they could do so on their own. Older players can see that new players are inexperienced and help them along.

Of course, the notion that older players can help new players might seem like idealism. What experienced player would waste their time helping a new player along? The remarkable thing, though, is that it does happen. Throughout the game are glyphs, and collecting glyphs lengthens your scarf, which in turn allows you to fly farther before needing to recharge. You can only collect the glyphs once, though. In playing, however, I encountered an experienced individual as my partner, and in every area, he went out of his way to lead me to the glyphs I hadn’t found. He didn’t have to do that. He could have just run through the area without me, leaving me to fend for myself. He could have led me through the area as fast as possible, but made no effort to show me where the glyphs were. Something about the simple collaborative structure of the game, however, makes altruism and guidance a very natural behavior. Without any behaviors by which to judge the other player, the assumption is that they are a person who you would like to help.

Later in the game, once my partner switched, I found the roles reversed. Even though it was my first play-through of the game, the length of my scarf suggested that between myself and my new partner (for whom it was also the first play-through), I was the more qualified one. I began leading him, and wordlessly we adopted an understanding that he would move when I would move, and stop when I would stop. We had no words, we had no text, we had nothing to actually communicate and agree on that approach; yet, wordlessly, using only the very subtle cues the game provides, we came to that agreement almost immediately.

The entire system is downright beautiful, but what makes it even more beautiful is that in many instances, you aren’t even aware that your partner has shifted. If your partner lacks any discernible markings — a particularly long scarf or decorated cloak — as well as any particularly notable behaviors, you might never know you had switched. At the end of the game, the game reveals the screennames of the players with whom you collaborated, and that itself can be a beautifully revelatory experience (or depressing, I suppose, if you find out that the partner you enjoyed working with holds the name “[yourteam]sucks” or “Ispankedyourmom” or something). In my first play-through, I thought I had played with four different partners, but the final screen revealed I had played with five: the individual I thought was my first partner was actually three different players, and the two individuals I thought were my last two partners were actually the same guy twice!

Journey has many great features, but the incredible execution, simplicity, and beauty of the collaborative co-operative play is the element that transcends gaming. My definition of a “9/10″ game is one that does something special to go beyond the normal expectations of its genre, while also being an incredible game on its own. This collaborative element is what sets Journey apart as a truly special game.

Brilliantly Minimalistic Controls
It’s well documented that I’m a fan of minimalism. Shadow of the Colossus and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves are two of my favorite games, in large part because both provide a beautifully minimalistic angle on an industry that can often times can overly bogged down with systems and structures and control schemes (I’m looking at you, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Final Fantasy XIII, and almost every other game I’ve played in the past few years). To really create a sense of pure gaming flow, it’s important to strip out the unnecessary frameworks and simply let the player play.

Journey does that. As mentioned previously, the control scheme in the game is remarkably simple. One control stick controls the camera, the other runs, X jumps and flies, and O is an ‘action’ button that displays your symbol, either to activate markers around you or communicate with your partner. The only real ‘system’ involved in the game is the flying system, and to call it a system is a little silly. At any time, you have a certain amount of flying energy as measured by the length of the design on your scarf, and holding down X uses up that energy. That energy is replenished by coming into contact with pieces of red cloth throughout the world, as well as coming into contact with your partner, encouraging the two of you to stick close together. Other than that, the only other thing you ever do is use the O button to activate markers or revive pieces of red cloth around the game world.

Of course, simplicity in and of itself isn’t a worthwhile goal. A simple game can be a very boring game. The strength of simplicity is that it makes the game easy to play, which in turn allows the game more immersive than it would be otherwise. The key word there, though, is allows. Simple controls allow the game to be immersive, but they do not make the game immersive. Immersion has to come in other ways, and one way is in interesting and engrossing gameplay. Making gameplay simultaneously simple and entertaining is an enormous challenge, but it is one that Journey executes with flying colors.

The key to balancing these seemingly competing demands is to make a variety of gameplay puzzles and styles emerge from a simple set of controls. Take, for example, the gameplay mechanic of recharging the amount of flying energy your character has by touching red cloth. In some areas, there are long cloth pillars that stretch high to the ceiling. That means that the character can ascend these without worrying about using up their energy because the energy is replenished the entire time. The mechanic hasn’t changed, but the way in which it is used is changed. In another example, the player encounters a series of flying octopi made of the red cloth — this enables the player to leap and fly from octopus to octopus in order to ascend an otherwise insurmountable height.

Nearly every level in the game somehow leverages this simple idea. Later, new mechanics enter the fray, such as a flying beast that attacks the player and freezing wind that freezes the player, but again in both cases these are simply extensions of the existing mechanics. Falling victim to one of the beast’s attacks merely reduces the length of the player’s scarf, while freezing temporarily removes access to the scarf until the player thaws again by sticking close to their ally. The player spends the entire game leveraging the skills they know in new and interesting ways, and that, to me, is the hallmark of good game design. Anyone can throw new mechanics or gameplay in at every new level; it takes very special skill and design to use the same mechanics in a variety of interesting ways.

One additional element that makes the controls of Journey so strong does not evolve from the simplicity of them, but rather complements it perfectly. In addition to being simple, the controls are also reasonably fast-paced and, for lack of a better word, “flowy”. The player does not feel like they are actively, deliberately interacting with the world, but rather flowing through it. The flying mechanic is manifested as a quick jump, a steady ascension, followed by a slow descent, leaving the impression of less control than a normal platformer’s jumping mechanic. Many levels are also built on an almost “snowboarding”-like mechanic, allowing the player to quickly slide down long hills. Those mechanics together contribute to the pleasant pace of the game, which feels relaxed without feeling slow.

Beautifully Subtle Gameplay Cues
A simple control scheme isn’t the only thing involved in making a game simple. Without changing a thing about Journey‘s controls, you can imagine a rather complicated interface. You could have a meter on the side of the screen indicating your current level of flight charge, along with an annotation on it indicating how many glyphs you’ve gathered and how much they’ve added to your potential flight charge. You can imagine a minimap with icons representing your ally’s location and locations of cloth, flying beasts, glyphs, and the exit. You can imagine an icon over your ally’s head that becomes an arrow pointing off screen whenever he isn’t in sight. You can imagine icons indicating your ally’s flight charge as well, as well as icons indicating various other elements of both your and your ally’s play history. There could also be a series of highlighted checkpoints indicating where to go next. All of that would be fairly standard for the way games are designed nowadays, but it would also be in direct conflict with the way in which Journey presents its gameplay otherwise.

Instead, Journey finds ways to present all that information within the game itself, all in beautifully subtle, yet still visible and usable, ways. Rather than a meter indicating how much flight charge your character can hold, the length of the character’s scarf is used as an indicator. Then, that scarf is ‘filled’ with glowing characters when charge is available. That glow decreases as you fly, giving a very clear indicator of how much you can store and how much you currently have, right there on your character. On top of that, the indicator is consistent between you and your ally, making it easy to tell your ally’s status as well. Rather than a minimap, the various elements of the game are readily visible (except for the ones it wants to be challenging to find, of course, like the glyphs). The game does give an indication of where your ally is when he is off screen, but rather than a bold arrow, it’s a soft white glow on the side of the screen in the ally’s direction. The size of the glow changes to indicate whether your ally is just off screen or way over to the side as well. Rather than ‘emblems’ to indicate your play history, beating the game and unlocking certain achievements opens up certain embroidered patterns on your cloak. All of these are done in subtle, unobtrusive ways that still present the information very clearly.

The most remarkable one, though, are the subtle cues that serve to guide the player where to go. With game worlds becoming more and more dynamic, it has become more and more of a challenge to make the actual linear path clear to the player without overly restricting the visible world. Many games, like Final Fantasy XIII, solve this issue by making progress through the game a series of checkpoints. That, clearly, would be again at odds with Journey‘s structure. Instead, through a combination of brilliant level design and beautiful camera work, Journey just somehow seems to always let it be obvious and natural to the player where to go next. Part of this is through the way the levels are structured, with seemingly open areas only having one logical path. Part of this is through camera work, where the orientation of the camera naturally highlights the path the player should take. Part of this… well, honestly, part of it I can’t even put my finger on. There were times when I was playing where I actually said to my wife, “I think I’m supposed to go that way. I don’t know why.” and it turned out that the direction I was looking was correct. I don’t even know how the game made this obvious in some points, but it certainly did so, and that is a beautiful thing.

Breathtaking Atmosphere
Immersion does not solely come from gameplay, of course, and in the case of Journey, much of that immersion actually comes from the game’s extraordinary atmosphere. From the very beginning, Journey creates a very unique world, and it does so with the simplest of devices. You see panning shots over large landscapes that serve little purpose beyond revealing to you the enormity of the world you are about to traverse, but in that enormity is the game’s entire appeal. Despite taking place over only a couple hours of playtime, Journey is among the most epic journeys I have ever witnessed in video gaming. It does this without the benefit of a world map, dialog, or a strong driving plot; simply through its immersive atmosphere, it paints a breathtaking story of traversing an incredible landscape with a companion.

I often use ‘atmosphere’ as a catch-all for the various elements that contribute to it, and in this case, the atmosphere is a combination of a wide variety of elements. The music, among the best released in any video game this year, complements the game’s structure and style perfectly with a breathtaking simplicity that itself drives some of the heightened moments of achievement. In many instances, the music is the primary cue that something significant is about to take place. The visual style of the game is included here as well, painting a very cohesive world for the player to traverse. Even the subtle sound effects and the whimsical walking and flying animations play a role in creating this relaxed, engaging masterpiece.

Perfectly Sized
One of the only criticisms directed by some at Journey is its size; if no major obstacles are hit, the game provides a total of two hours of playtime for a given playthrough. For many, that seems short, even for Journey‘s low digital distribution price point.

In my opinion, however, Journey is perfectly sized for its style and structure. First and foremost, the style of Journey is such that it is clearly intended to be played in one sitting, and with that in mind, a main plot length that runs over a couple hours would be too long to fit into the session length of the average gamer. The game is perfectly sized to allow the player to experience the rising tension and scale of the game as it goes on. Leaving the game and returning to it is a jarring experience as the game builds upon itself; it lulls the player into its world and the mood that it creates, and leaving and returning to it in a separate sitting loses a lot of the affect that the atmosphere has on the player. At two hours, the game is the perfect length for one epic play session.

The length also makes the game ripe for replay value. Replaying the game isn’t a long, drawn-out achievement spanning multiple play sessions; the game can be picked up quickly on a lazy afternoon and beaten in a couple hours. It’s more like the old Star Fox 64 in that way; the game’s structure isn’t intended to be beaten once and never played again, but rather the player is expected to play it over and over, pulling more out of it each time. At two hours, replay value is still very much on the table, and it can be played through numerous times.

While replay value is a great goal in and of itself, in the case of Journey, it has an added purpose. The collaboration angle relies in many ways on the accessibility of players of different skill and experience levels. New players are expected to learn from and follow older players, and older players are expected to lead new players through the game’s challenges. Therefore, it is important for the game to have players who are playing the game through for the second, third, or fourth time in order to link them up with newer players. Without this, the game would still be good, but it would lose the beautiful collaboration that results from uniting players of different skill and ability levels.

The collaboration angle dictates the length of the game in one other way as well, although in this case, it does not leverage it so much as it dictates the small structure. The game relies on the ability to pair players up very quickly on every level. With only a finite number of players playing at a given time, it would be important to have a relatively small pool of levels to assign them to in order to guarantee that almost every player always has a partner. If the game were composed of 50 levels, it would get more and more difficult over time to ever guarantee that there exists another player in the world playing the same level as the current player. With only a handful of levels (eight to be exact), the game can be reasonably sure that there will always be a partner for every player, even months and years after its release.

Marvelous Attention to Detail
The final touch in creating this beautiful game experience is what I would describe as polish. These are the little things that some games have that add just that extra tiny finishing touch to the game. You might never miss them if they were not there, but they complete the experience and reflect the attention to detail that the developers emphasized in the game’s creation.

The top element of polish in my opinion comes in the pause screen. When pausing the game, there is a visible indicator to your partner that you have paused: your character sits down. On your screen, rather than just a static image, the camera pans over your current area in real-time, showing what is happening and your current status in solving the given area.

There are numerous other elements of polish in the game, many so subtle that it actually is not possible to even describe them explicitly. Combining them all together, though, enhances the gameplay experience immensely.

Invisible Execution
This last positive point is less of a praise of the game experience and more a praise of the development. The player, in playing the game, is never aware of the back-end. There is no match-making screen, no “finding partner” bar, no connection meters. There are none of the elements that are typically present in a game that involves a multiplayer component. Everything is executed invisibly, and I am honestly amazed by that.

I played the game nine months after release, and yet I always had a partner in every level. How do they ensure that every player always has a partner? This isn’t just about having enough players, but also about assigning and allocating them well. What if I start a level that no one else has started recently? How does the game ensure I have a partner? It always succeeded in that, but it did so in a way that never let the player be aware of it. How did the game deal with lag? You are never aware of another player’s character jumping or teleporting around or moving unpredictably as happens in almost every other game. How do they manage that? Everything is executed beautifully invisibly in the background, and while that plays an obvious role in enhancing the conscious game experience, the engineering marvel itself deserves credit on its own.

The Bad
Journey is a nearly perfect game. It may be the closest I have ever seen a game come to perfection in my eyes. I commented to my wife once while playing that Journey might receive the first 10/10 I have ever given. In the end, however, two elements represent minor but notable knocks against its overall perfection. One of these could have certainly been fixed. The other is nearly an inherent part of the game design, but it deserves to be noted nonetheless.

Not Impervious to Glitches
The game does have some glitches. Or, at least, it has a glitch. I’ve heard of other glitches, but I myself encountered one significant one that caused me to get stuck in one of the final areas (a snowy area toward the end). I had to turn off the game and restart it to restart that area.

Glitches are never forgivable, but in the case of Journey, it takes on an additional meaning for several reasons. First and foremost, Journey is a small game; it should not be hard to make it glitch-free. For some games with massive worlds and numerous switches and variables, glitches are nearly unavoidable, but for a game as simple as Journey, glitches should not be an issue.

Secondly, glitches are a problem in Journey because of the lack of an in-game ‘restart’ option. When trapped in a snowy area, the only way I could continue the game was to turn it all the way off and open it up again. The glitch didn’t freeze the screen or anything, but because it was not possible to restart the area through an in-game menu, I had to turn the game off to restart the area.

But the third problem is the most significant, and in order to describe it, I’ll describe the specific circumstances regarding my instance of this glitch. I had been partnered with an experienced player for a few levels. That player had shown me several glyph locations, walked me through several puzzles, and was generally excellent. The glitch is what prevented me from continuing the game with that partner. Over the course of those travels, you actually develop an attachment to your partner; the lack of an open communication channel means that there is nothing to differentiate him from yourself, and thus it is very easy to see him as part of your own ‘in-group’. You become linked, attached, and it is legitimately sad to see them go. For that to happen because of a glitch, then, is even more frustrating. To restart the chapter and be partnered instead with someone much less skilled is disheartening, which leads us to the last point…

Play Experience Dependent on Luck of the Draw
As mentioned above, this last criticism is almost an inherent part of the game. You can’t force people to play seriously, you can’t force people to be competent, and you can’t force people to share the same goals. Your experience with the game is determined in large part by your partner. If they are willing to cooperate and work together, then the game is absolutely beautiful. If they leave you behind or refuse to follow, the game is still enjoyable, but lacks that very special additional quality.

In my case, my best experience with the game was with the seasoned veteran I joined. He led me through several levels, directing me to glyphs and helping me understand the overall structure of the puzzles. After the aforementioned glitch forced me to reset, I was partnered with someone far less skilled, and as a result my experience shifted from easily traversing a complex world to trying to figure out my destination. It was still enjoyable, of course, but the enjoyment was changed significantly with a different partner, and I can only imagine the frustration that would come from a partner that truly was not putting forth any effort to succeed. Thus, part of the game’s appeal will always be partially constrained by the partner you randomly draw. It’s a necessary evil to make the rest of the game’s appeal a reality, but it’s an evil nonetheless.

The Verdict
Journey is an historic achievement in nearly every possible way. It is one of those rare games that not only is strong in and of itself, but also has a major impact on the industry as a whole. On its own, the game is beautiful, with a minimalistic charm and a simple game structure that together create one of the most uniquely moving game experiences of all time. Make no mistake about it, Journey is an all-time great on its own, easily worthy of inclusion in the conversation with Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy Tactics and Okami, and more recent titles like Braid and Limbo, as among the most beautifully artistic games of all time. In fact, gun to my head, I would take Journey over any other game I’ve ever played in a heartbeat as the most beautiful example of video games as works of art.

But Journey is not just an incredibly game on its own. Journey is one of those rare games that changes the industry as well. It changes the industry in some ways by being another reminder (although we should know this by now) that video games can deliver a truly unique artistic experience unparalleled by any other medium. More importantly (at least from a sales and future development standpoint), though, it changes the industry. It legitimizes downloadable, digital distribution games. It shows that a $15 game downloaded over the internet can compete with the big boys, the Call of Duty and Mass Effect and Halo franchises and every other major big-budget release, and still hold its own. In fact, it can do more than hold its own. It can win. Journey is the best game of 2012, and the best game I’ve played in several years.

But none of this should be a surprise when you look at the company behind the game. Thatgamecompany is a group dedicated to the science and art of video games. Its developers and designers are researchers and artists, not profit-minded businessmen. Incubated in academia, Thatgamecompany approaches game design with a unique perspective on psychology, human cognition, artificial intelligence, and every other element that secretly plays into the success of a game. While other developers look at the shadows that players cast on the wall and design games for those shadows, Thatgamecompany looks at the player themselves, their mind and spirit, and designs instead for them. For that reason, Thatgamecompany can produce games that elicit an emotional, visceral experience about which other developers can only dream.

My Recommendation
Play it. No matter who you are, play it. And then play everything else Thatgamecompany has produced, too, while you’re at it.

A few bits of housekeeping before I get started: first of all, game development is an inherently muddled process, and oftentimes it is difficult to draw lines around who developed which game. At times, this may lead to disagreement over who the developer of a particular game truly is; however, with how quickly the industry changes and the speed with which companies are bought, sold, and changed, there is never truly a black and white to what constitutes one developer’s library. Secondly, there will be a lot of differentiation in the sizes of the libraries described in these lists. As such, in certain lists, I will refrain from including more than one game from one franchise and instead use one game as a stand-in for the series as a whole; in other lists, multiple games from the same franchise may be listed. Lastly, while I have a list of companies I plan to look at eventually, I am always looking for suggestions on what company to cover next; if you would like to make a suggestion, you can drop by the Top 10 List discussion board, contact me through my contributor profile, or visit either of my websites that cross-post these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com.

This week, I’ll be talking about Westwood Studios.

So far in this list sub-series on PC games, we’ve covered the company responsible for popularizing first-person shooters (id Software) and the company responsible for popularizing Western RPGs (Origin Systems). This week, we’ll look at the company (half-)responsible for the development and popularization of a third primarily-PC genre, the real-time strategy game. No, I’m not talking about Blizzard; before the time of Warcraft and Starcraft, the genre largely originated with a series of games that refined and explored the possibilities of the game structure, all developed by Westwood Studios. Westwood Studios was founded in 1985, and after a few years of success porting games between console generations, they opened up their own in-house development office. Their early games were harbingers of things to come as early releases Mars Saga, BattleTech, and Eye of the Beholder began forming the basic mechanics that would come to be the core of the genre. This early success led to the acquisition of the company by Virgin Interactive, leading to the company changing its name to Westwood Studios from its original moniker, Westwood Associates. Acquisitions in the video game world tend to be feast-or-famine; either the new ownership gives the company new resources to push ahead its designs, or it hamstrings the company with expectations and micromanagement. In the case of the Virgin acquisition of Westwood, the former is the case, and over the next several years, Westwood Studios came to be known as the first name in real-time strategy games.

#10: Nox (PC)

Not all of Westwood’s products were real-time strategy games, though. While the RTS genre is where the company made its name, it had several successful forays into other genres as well. Released toward the end of the company’s lifespan, the 2000 release Nox is an example of one such (moderately) well-received development outside the company’s usual wheelhouse. An action roleplaying game, Nox also retains the dubious distinction of being largely more hyped than the resultant quality justified. While the game was good and moderately well-received, the marketing campaign for it was brilliant, stirring up plenty of anticipation at E3 and other conventions leading up to its eventual release. At one point praised as the spiritual successor to games like Diablo II, it nonetheless ended up being a quality alternate-genre game in Westwood’s library.

Nox is also notable for playing a significant role in the eventual closing of Westwood Studios. Westwood was acquired by EA in 1998, and the parent company slowly hamstrung the company (as they are apt to do) until, a few months after Nox’s release, EA decided to assume rights for the game franchise. The game had just recently received an expansion pack for its multiplayer aspects and was beginning to develop a following. Rather than continue to support the game, EA shut down the servers and effectively rendered the multiplayer element unplayable, another instance in a long history of EA’s tendency to acquire and ruin quality game companies and franchises (a habit that has slowed in recent years, but was at it peak when EA acquired companies like Origin and Westwood).

#9: Command & Conquer: Renegade (PC)

If there’s one genre with which Westwood Studios is synonymous, it’s the Command & Conquer series, undoubtedly one of the three most famous and popular real-time strategy franchises in gaming history. In 2002, though, right at the end of its development career, Westwood Studios took the franchise in a slightly new direction, experimenting with the series as more of a shooter than a strategy endeavor. Not unlike the famous vaporware title Starcraft: Ghost, Command & Conquer: Renegade puts the player in the shoes of a unit set against the backdrop of the plot of the broader strategy series, playing through an alternate element of the plot involving stories more suited for a first-person player-oriented viewpoint.

One of the more interesting elements of Command & Conquer: Renegade was the viewpoint toggle. Lots of games allow the player to temporarily enter a first-person view or a third-person view in specific situations or for specific purposes, but Command & Conquer: Renegade was unique in allowing the player to choose which to use for the duration of the entire game. Of course, that also ended up being part of the drawback of the game: by facilitating both first- and third-person gameplay, the developers had to afford for both styles, thus limiting the usefulness of actions that would have been restricted to one view or the other. Additionally, it was readily apparent that Westwood had never developed a shooter, and the game was often overly repetitive. Still, however, the move into a new genre was a unique and risky one that has some internal merit on its own.

#8: Young Merlin (SNES)

Like Neutopia, the Zelda-inspired action/adventure game developed by Hudson Soft for the TurboGrafx-16, Young Merlin is another game that, at one point, was praised as the next Legend of Zelda. Released in 1994, it is one of the last games developed by the company for a console besides the PC (although 2002′s Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat, for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, is the company’s final console release). While clearly significantly influenced by The Legend of Zelda in its overall game structure, it also bore significant resemblance to some of the older LucasArts graphic adventure games in its style and presentation.

Where the game excelled, however, was in its graphics. The enemies, characters, and especially backdrops were all rendered with incredible complexity and detail for the time of its release, putting the SNES Zelda games to shame in at least that regard. The game had the potential to spin up into its own significant series, but it was largely hamstrung by the storytelling weaknesses; the game’s dialog is told mostly in pictures, which, while charming, significantly limits the depth of engagement and the complexity of the narrative. The game was also partially doomed by Westwood’s immediately preceding success with Dune and immediately following success with Command & Conquer, which together served to focus the studio’s development focus on PC strategy games. Like Psy dropping an album of romantic acoustic ballads, no one expected this direction from Westwood. Man, that’s a reference that will date this list.

#7: Earth & Beyond (PC)

Released in 2002, Earth & Beyond was Westwood Studios’ final game, at least by the standards I’m using; 2003′s Command & Conquer: Generals, put out by "Westwood Pacific", was really more of an in-house EA product. At the time of release, the MMORPG had been under development for quite some time, originating in 1997. The long development time led to a massive amount of content available in the game, with over one hundred separate areas for interaction.

The most significant and interesting element of Earth & Beyond, though, was the innovative structure of content delivery. Most MMORPGs risk becoming stale over time; the idea of living in a virtual world suggests the world should change, yet the demands of offering a consistent playing experience force developers to assume as much control over the game world as possible. Earth & Beyond remedied this by delivering story updates in regularly-scheduled intervals. Rather than simply providing a backstory that justified the world structure, Earth & Beyond was characterized by monthly developments to the storyline that provided observable changes and trends in the game world. This participation in a real ongoing story with live plot updates provided an engaging new way of presenting the MMORPG genre, and could be said to be one of the influencing factors behind the structure of World of Warcraft’s expansion packs. After EA’s closure of Westwood Studios, they almost immediately thereafter closed Earth & Beyond, only fourteen months after its plot begun.

#6: Blade Runner (PC)

Video game movie tie-ins are almost always awful. However, while writing for a previous Top 10 List on movie-based games, I came to a realization: while movie tie-in games are typically awful, movie-based games that don’t share their release schedule with the movie typically do quite well. Goldeneye 007, the Scarface and Godfather games, the Tron game, and nearly any Star Wars game ever released are examples of movie-based games that were successful while being released long after the movie debuted. Westwood Studios’ 1997 game Blade Runner is another example of this.

The main selling point behind Blade Runner was its claim to be "the first real time 3D adventure game". The "real time" part of this claim was simultaneously a misnomer and the game’s truly unique characteristic. While we might consider "real time" as the opposite of pre-rendered, "real time" in this context refers more to the game’s dynamic world. The world develops and continues regardless of the player’s actions, rather than waiting for the player to arrive at the necessary checkpoints to push the game plot forward. The game was also among the first truly 3D games, using a proprietary engine that Westwood themselves developed. At the time of the release, the game received significant acclaim for nearly every element. It was even voted by some as the game of the year in its particular genre, only to lose out to the great Curse of Monkey Island.

#5: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (PC)

Like Origin with Ultima and id with their first-person shooter triumvirate, Westwood Studios is nearly synonymous with its most famous franchise, and it should come as no surprise that three of this series’ games reside in the top five of this list. The franchise as a whole is typically broken into two separate series, the Tiberium series (encompassing the series’ first game and its direct sequel) and the Red Alert series. Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun is the direct sequel to the original Command & Conquer, and the last Command & Conquer real-time strategy game to be developed by Westwood before its liquidation.

Arguably the most characteristic element of the game was, ironically, its hype. While that’s usually a claim saved for games that failed to fulfill the hype that surrounded them, in the case of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, the hype was simply so significant that it was hard for the game to get out from under it. It still succeeded, though; the game was a mammoth commercial success, selling over a million and a half copies in its debut month. The game was praised for nearly every element, but of special note was its seemingly universal appeal. Even gamers that were not into real-time strategy games could find the movies, plot, or graphics particularly appealing. The only drawback to the game were a few glitches, primarily because EA rushed Westwood Studios on releasing the game. Despite its success, EA still decided to take creative control of the series away from Westwood. Are you sensing a theme here?

#4: Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (PC)

Despite holding the title "Dune II", Dune II is really an original title. The original game, Dune, was developed by Cryo Interactive a couple years earlier. That’s not to say there was anything wrong with the original Dune; it was a strong game and retains a significant fanbase. However, Dune II holds little resemblance to its supposed predecessor aside from being based on the same source material. That source material itself is among the more beloved science fiction franchises ever created. Dune, released in 1966, was an award-winning science fiction novel by Frank Herbert that has gone on to be considered one of the foundations of the modern science fiction genre.

Dune II is a foundation of its own: the game is credited by many as the first real-time strategy game. That’s not to say that elements of the genre did not exist before; several games, such as The Ancient Art of War, Herzog Zwei, and even Lemmings, popularized and developed some of the gameplay concepts of the real-time strategy genre. Sticking with my theory on the four phases of genre development, though, Dune II popularized the genre. It was responsible for formalizing many of the ideas that had been tossed around by previous games, and is among the first games to be visually comparable to modern real-time strategy games. The game has gone on to a reverent legacy, credited by many as one of the most significant releases in video game history.

#3: Dragonstrike (PC)

Compared to the franchises, series, and genres for which Westwood Studios (then Westwood Associates) is most famous, DragonStrike is a bit of an oddity. Actually, DragonStrike is a bit of an oddity in video game history in general. Based on Dungeons & Dragons (like Ultima, but unlike Ultima bearing no real resemblance to the tabletop game), the game is something like a shoot ‘em up built to resemble a flight simulator mixed with significant role-playing elements in a fantasy setting. Its audience has always been limited due to its release on the underappreciated Amiga and Commodore 64 consoles, although it also received a DOS release, one of Westwood’s earliest endeavors on the budding young platform. For those familiar with it, it remains one of the most underrated games ever. The viewpoint and graphics were years ahead of their time, and the gameplay structure is of a type that remains tragically underdeveloped in subsequent video game history. One might consider the genre one that never quite reached the later phases of development.

Unfortunately, for many, the name DragonStrike conjures up images of the NES release rather than the other platforms’ release, and the NES game actually is effectively a completely different gamein every possible way. Rather than the faux-3D viewpoint, the NES version features top-down gameplay more reminiscent of a traditional shoot ‘em up. That’s not to say the NES version is bad (or that it isn’t, I don’t actually know how well it was received), but it wasn’t nearly as unique as the original Amiga release.

#2: Command & Conquer (PC)

Chances are, if you have any familiarity with Westwood Studios, you knew this list would come to this. Westwood’s two best games are the two earliest releases in its most famous franchise, Command & Conquer. The first, released in 1995 for PC and later ported to several other consoles, was released to nearly unanimous acclaim. It is almost surprising for an original intellectual property to have achieved such notoriety; typically at that age in gaming, a significantly successful series was needed to build the hype necessary for sales figures and ratings as high as those that Command & Conquer received.

Command & Conquer received those ratings, though, in large part because it was the second half of Westwood Studios’ popularization of the real-time strategy genre. While Dune had popularized it within a niche audience, Command & Conquer elevated it to widespread appeal. This was the release that put real-time strategy games alongside first-person shooters, platformers, and RPGs as the industry’s heavyweights, and paved the way for Blizzard’s domination in the following decade. The truly remarkable element of Command & Conquer is that due to the unique elements of the genre, it is not quite as prone to iterative improvement as other genres. A good real-time strategy game remains timeless because the important elements – balance, strategy, depth – are not dependent on graphics power or processor speed, but rather are solely dependent on quality game design. Command & Conquer is one of the best-designed games ever, perhaps surpassed in its genre only by…

#1: Command & Conquer: Red Alert (PC)

…its sequel. Well, ‘sequel’ is a bit of a misnomer. Although the game carries the same title as the original Command & Conquer, it is essentially a standalone new franchise; it is billed in some ways as a prequel as well, but timeline discrepancies and retroactive continuity make it arguably better to regard the franchises as distinct, with Red Alert departing from the original game. One of the most captivating elements of the game comes from this departure from the franchise’s previous installment. Command & Conquer: Red Alert is an alternative history game (both within the series and compared to the world as a whole), contemplating a war between the United States and Soviet Union in Europe had the real World War II never occurred.

Alternate history always has some inherent engagement to it, but the quality of Command & Conquer: Red Alert goes far beyond an interesting premise. Its production values and game design are among the best the genre has ever seen, and as mentioned in the previous section, help make the game rather timeless in its genre. Perhaps as a way of repenting for its sins, EA took the unusual step of releasing both Command & Conquer and Command & Conquer: Red Alert as freeware in 2007 and 2008 respectively. That decision means that anyone can now play these two titans of video game history, and if you haven’t yet, you are nearly obligated as a gamer to go do so now. No, seriously. Stop reading. Go play it. Why are you still here?

Conclusion

Honorable Mentions: Eye of the Beholder, The Legend of Kyrandia, Mines of Titan, Emperor: Battle for Dune, The Lion King, Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos.

Like Origin Systems, Westwood Studios fell victim to a power grab by the villain of the gaming industry, Electronic Arts. As we mentioned in discussing Origin Systems, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, EA had a strong tendency to buy successful studios, hamstring them with limited budgets and impossible development deadlines, and then put them out of their misery once they had milked them for all the profit they were worth. Westwood Studios was no different. Purchased in 1998 at the height of its dominance of PC gaming, Westwood was quickly destroyed by EA. Many employees left right away, while others left as the low budgets and rushed timelines took their toll. EA, apparently blind to the idea that the slashed budgets and rushed games were responsible for a drop in the quality of Westwood’s products, blamed the studio. Even after the moderate success of the company’s final product, Earth & Beyond, EA shut the company down. Its developers went on to found two new companies, Jet Set Games and Petroglyph Games, the latter responsible for the popular Star Wars-themed real-time strategy game Star Wars: Empire at War. Today, EA has started to realize that its prior policy was completely non-productive, and has since moved more toward nurturing game development studios rather than sticking them in a blender and juicing them for sweet, sweet profit.

If you’d like to join in on the discussion of this list, I invite you to the Top 10 List discussion board, linked on this page. You’re also welcome to contact me directly via the information in my contributor profile, or to come by either of the web sites that co-host these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com. If you have any suggestions for what company I should review next, please let me know!

“A failure on its own, and an even greater failure for its franchise.”

You wouldn’t know it looking at my review scores, but I’m a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed series. It’s likely one of my favorite ongoing series, and while I’ve criticized many of the games in the past, my criticism is largely born from how much potential the series as a whole has. The underlying concept of the series is so interesting, so unique, and so strong that even when the execution is flawed, the product is still special. That was true in Assassin’s Creed, where the overwhelmingly repetitive and formulaic plot and gameplay structure was still able to illuminate the gaming industry’s most interesting original property in the past ten years. That was true in Assassin’s Creed II, where an abundance of unnecessary changes that distanced the game from its predecessor’s foundation failed to doom the transformation of that franchise into a compelling, deep, and engrossing game universe. That was true in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, where glitches and plot weaknesses remained secondary to a collection of fascinating gameplay mechanics and an increased attention to that all-important gameplay-plot symbiosis. That was even true in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, where, for all its weaknesses, the game was still engaging to play and provided valuable expansions on the plot.

Assassin’s Creed games, in my mind, have a clear modus operandi: poor executions of ideas so brilliant that we almost gloss over the poor execution itself. Assassin’s Creed III holds up half of this tradition: it’s still poorly executed, but the underlying ideas aren’t so great anymore.

I didn’t enjoy Assassin’s Creed III. That’s perhaps as plainly as I can put my criticisms and critiques: with the previous games in the franchise, even though I had enormous criticisms, I still enjoyed the gameplay experience. I wish it could have been better, but it was still fun. Assassin’s Creed III was not fun. Assassin’s Creed III was a glitchy, aggravating, forgettable chore to get through, an experience so bad that I find myself mentally planning to replay one of my favorite games (something I hardly ever do) solely to wash the bad taste of the game out of my mind.

Of course, the game had its high points, as all big-budget games always do, but the high points are few and far between. The same old glitches and design problems are present, but there’s no redeeming underlying qualities behind them to save the game. There’s no fascinating backstory, there’s surprisingly no satisfying play on history, there’s none of that special intrigue that has in the past made the series what it is. There’s nothing but a glitchy, forgettable game with a weak cast and only passing loyalty to the series’ great past and lore.

The Game
The latest release in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed III takes us to colonial times. Playing the role first of Haytham Kenway and later of his son, Connor (all of which is made very clear from the start of the game, as well as in the pre-release material), you find yourself knee-deep in the Revolutionary War, witnessing and participating in several of the most notable events. As you go on, you find out that the Templars are behind several different elements of the war’s ongoing progression in an effort to conquer the new world and form it according to their agenda, and as the only assassin in the New World (so it seems), it is your job to stop them, no matter who that forces you to ally with throughout the game.

Gameplay-wise, the game is pretty standard Assassin’s Creed fare. You exist in an open-world environment spanning Boston, New York, Davenport, and the wilderness in between. Across the world map are mission icons, either for the main mission or one of the game’s several sidequests. Once in battle, the attack system is heavy on the counter-attacking, with an icon appearing above the heads of each particular enemy as they prepare to attack you. There are, of course, changes: they now hold muskets and will fire in tandem at you in the middle of a sword fight, for example. Still, when all is said and done, the gameplay hasn’t undergone a major renovation.

The Good
As mentioned in the introduction, it’s nearly impossible for a big-budget game to have absolutely no redeeming qualities, and indeed, Assassin’s Creed III does have some high points. First and foremost, it preserves most of the combat and game structure from the earlier games, and that in and of itself retains the same appeal it’s always had. I’m not going to give the game adamant credit, though, for not screwing everything about the series up, but it’s worth noting that it does still have the same free-running, ledge-assassinating fun that the other games have provided, as well as a few new tricks as described below.

Series’ Best Melee Combat
Before starting this section, let’s make it clear that I’m referring narrowly and specifically to head-to-head melee open group combat. I’m not referring to any stealth element, any of the assassinations, any of the projectile weapons (bow & arrow and pistol), or any other element of the combat. Of course, considering the melee combat makes up a significant portion of the actual gameplay time, this is still a pretty notable improvement.

One of the knocks against the previous games in the franchise, and more broadly against many recent releases as a whole (I’m looking at you, Batman: Arkham Asylum), is that combat has increasingly become overly reliant on counter-attacking. In the previous Assassin’s Creed games, it was often borderline suicide to ever attack an enemy in open combat when they haven’t just attacked you. Enemies light up when they’re about to attack, ensuring that you can block effectively, and out of the block can come your counter attack. This allows for brilliant and entertaining animations, and it solves some of the issues that would otherwise be inherent to one vs. many group combat. Still, though, it has a strong tendency to get boring, redundant, and tedious very quickly. There is no challenge to it, and the only real test comes in seeing how many enemies you can counter-kill into oblivion without making a mistake.

Assassin’s Creed III‘s combat is still very heavy on counter-attacking, but it does so in a much smoother and more natural way. First and foremost, it is no longer suicide to bother ever attacking an enemy unprompted. In past Assassin’s Creed games, every enemy type had a specific type of counter-attack that would successfully best it; in Assassin’s Creed III, that’s still true, but most also have a way of being defeated that does not rely on counter-attacking. Many of the basic soldiers in the game can very easily be attacked head-on until they die painfully, and for others, there are ways of breaking defense that actually work on the majority of foes. On top of that, the game has finally perfected the franchise’s chain-killing mode. Immediately after killing one enemy, you can move directly on to another one nearby for another kill, even if usually that new enemy would have been more difficult to fell. And as if that wasn’t enough, there is also a pseudo-counter attack that can be used when an enemy is targeting you with their musket or pistol; pressing X grabs another nearby enemy and uses them as a human shield against the gunshot. That particular counter-attack can be used against any type of foe, even the most difficult ones.

Even when relying on counter-attacks, however, the combat is still significantly more smooth and flowing than in past installments of the franchise. In past games, when Ezio or Altair was executing a counter-kill against an enemy, all the others would simply stand around and wait; after the kill was completed, the combat would pause for a moment before another enemy would attack. In Assassin’s Creed III, the enemies will attack halfway through the counter-kill; the original foe is still killed, but the player has to actually react immediately to the new attack or risk losing health. That plays into another improvement on the game’s counter-attacking system: it is no longer sufficient to simply hold down one button and guarantee your character will block every attack. Instead, you need to press the button as the enemy is attacking to initiate the slow-motion counter-attack. In practice, it doesn’t lend any challenge to the game, but it certainly makes the battle system more involved and active.

One of the reasons why battle systems built almost entirely around counter-attacking have become so prevalent in modern video games is because by requiring certain events to take place before a kill happens, the developers can be more narrow in how they script kill animations. Even though the system is loosened up a bit, Assassin’s Creed III still provides some of the best attack animations in the series’ history. Part of this is because many of them are very specifically activated under certain circumstances, such as the camera moving to a cinematic view when you successfully initiate a counter-attack against two foes attacking simultaneously. Whatever the reason, though, the animations are brilliant and engaging, especially considering the overall speed of combat no longer slows down to catch up.

Engaging Naval Sidequest
One of the major promotional clips shown before Assassin’s Creed III‘s release showed the player character steering a Revolutionary War-era warship, engaging in combat on the high seas. The good news is that the sidequest gameplay is as spectacularly implemented as the promotional hype would have had us believe. The bad news is that the feature is tragically underused in the game, relegated to nothing but a sidequest in all but two instances, but at least the sidequest missions are there.

The structure of the naval sidequest gameplay is relatively simple. You steer a ship with the world’s worst turn radius (okay, it’s a ship, it’s excusable) in battle against other ships. You are armed with two types of projectile weapons: the traditional cannons on either side, useful for launching sweeping attacks against other ships, and smaller cannons (called “swivel cannons”) more like turrets, useful for targeted attacks against weaker foes. In battle, you find yourself pitted against a small variety of enemy ships, from small gunboats that can be picked off by the swivel cannons to giant Man of War ships with an abundance of durability and an excessive number of guns. You can also ram ships, and as you learn later, there are definitely missions where that comes in handy.

Battle is carried out primarily via the L1 and R1 buttons: pressing each preps one of the kinds of cannons to fire, starting an aiming process that sees the cannon firing range narrow and glow (or the swivel crosshairs zeroing in on a foe), and releasing completes the firing process. The targeting of both kinds of cannons nearly seamlessly follow the camera’s motion in an incredibly intuitive way; it is never confusing which side of the ship will fire at a given time, and switching between the two is a breeze. The cannons also come with four kinds of cannonballs; one is for wider-area damage against weaker ships, one for heavier damage against larger ships, and one for incapacitating ships without sinking them (when the plot dictates). There’s also a mission where you target a fort rather than ships, but unfortunately, that’s the only one.

In terms of defense against the enemies, there is only one defensive move that can be made: when enemy shots are anticipated (or when a particularly massive wave is coming), the player can press to send the ship crew to cover. This doesn’t remove the damage done to the ship, but it does cut it about in half, helping to save health. Other than that, there is no real other gameplay element to the sidequest: left control stick to steer, right control stick to move the camera and aim, shoulder buttons to shoot, square button to duck. It’s an impressively simple, intuitive system.

The simplicity of the gameplay in the sidequest leaves room for some impressive graphical and cinematic work as well. Without a doubt, the best points of the game graphically are in the naval sidequest areas. The large crashing waves, the rainstorms, and the other ships are rendered beautifully, and the weather effects especially feel truly dynamic. These effects play into the gameplay as well, changing the strategies: in storms when waves are crashing, waves can often interfere with cannon shots or provide cover against incoming attacks. The rain can limit the range of the swivel cannons, forcing the massive ship to wait until the gunboats are close enough to fire back before taking them on. Terrain in many places plays a role as well, limiting how much the ship can move or forcing it to move more slowly to avoid damage.

As mentioned above, though, the naval sidequest has one significant weakness, and that is that it is not well-integrated into the storyline. Like the tower defense game in the previous Assassin’s Creed installments, there is one mandatory mission near the beginning of the game to teach you the system, and one mandatory mission at the end to remind you the mode is there. Outside of those, though, there are several other missions; I lost count of how many total, but I believe around 20, with most grouped into sets of three. Defeating one set of three missions will sometimes unlock another set of three until you’ve defeated all of them.

It’s an impressively designed, visually spectacular sidequest, and it marks arguably the first time Ubisoft’s ADD approach to game design has actually paid dividends. It’s certainly better than tower defense or city-building.

Fixed Notoriety and Health Systems
Two of my most significant critiques of the Ezio trilogy of Assassin’s Creed games was regarding the notoriety and health systems. The health system lost everything that made the original Assassin’s Creed‘s system special and unique; it provided no plot symbiosis and instead introduced some rather strange questions. The notoriety system, while well-intentioned as a way of making the high-profile/low-profile distinction from the original clearer, ended up just being a chore requiring an ongoing scavenger hunt for wanted posters. Neither system worked well in the Assassin’s Creed Ezio trilogy.

Assassin’s Creed III fixes both of these… sort of. To start with the health system, the health system finally answered several of the problems with the system in the previous game. No longer are potions required to recover health every time you jump from too high a point, nor can a strong supply of them save you in a difficult battle. The health system instead has been made almost identical to the prototypical systems from first-person shooters and most other modern games. You have a certain amount of health, and getting struck by enemies, falling from high points, or getting shot reduces that health. Then, when you’re back in safety, the health auto-replenishes. That way, the health is never really a measure of your overall ongoing health points the way it was in previous games, but rather it’s a measure specific to a certain battle. Of course, I don’t like that as much as the health system in the first game, which gave an absolutely remarkable plot justification for an HP-based system, but it’s still certainly an improvement over the Ezio trilogy’s.

In the original Assassin’s Creed, one of the unique elements was the notion of hiding from guards, blending into crowds, and remaining hidden, but the game had a problem in that it was not always clear why guards would pursue sometimes and not others. Assassin’s Creed II and its sequels attempted to fix that by introducing the notoriety system, which makes it concrete how much the guards are looking for you at a given time, but it had its flaws. Reducing your notoriety was tedious, and there was never any reason to actually let yourself become notorious in the first place. There was clear feedback on when notoriety was a risk, and there were posters hanging everywhere. The result, then, was just that it discouraged the player from enjoying the game world and playing around, and it forced the player into those tedious segments pulling down posters before continuing.

In Assassin’s Creed III, the system is broken into three increasing levels: at the lower levels, guards will just be suspicious of you, and if you let them stare at you too long, they’ll attack; at higher levels, they’ll attack you on sight. Notoriety, however, is sort of like health: it’s based on encounters rather than an in-game long-term memory. If you kill a handful of enemies all at once, your notoriety will rise to Level 1; however, if you kill several individual enemies separately in time, it will not rise. The presence of multiple levels of notoriety, and corresponding multiple types of reactions from enemies, is a positive feature, too; you can maintain a low level of notoriety without it majorly influencing your gameplay decisions. Increasing notoriety takes a significant activity as well compared to the previous game; you can kill several enemies and still remain somewhat under the radar.

The notoriety does have two major problems: when your notoriety is high, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of it, and there are frequent places in the game that frustratingly require you to raise your notoriety. However, neither of these are particularly elements of the notoriety system itself, but rather are issues of the way it is used in the broader game.

Interesting Assassin Skills
The Assassin Brotherhood we had in the Ezio trilogy is gone; all assassin recruits are plot-scripted, with a finite number (six) of recruits available. They can still be summoned in battle, but rather than all recruits effectively being the same, these six recruits each come with their own special skill. Summon them in the right context and they’ll arrive and use their skill. Summon them in battle and they’ll simply arrive and fight alongside you.

There are six assassin skills in the game: Assassinate, Lure, Bodyguard, Riot, Covert Escort, Marksmen, and Ambush. All of these must be used in the right context to be effective; for example, Lure summons an assassin to steal from an enemy and then run away, luring them away with her. Bodyguard effectively gives Connor more fighters alongside him, while Riot starts a riot that can distract guards and provide cover. Covert Escort, similarly, summons two assassins in British gear to escort Connor through otherwise-restricted areas (even when the soldiers there are Patriots, curiously). Marksmen and Ambush set up two different ways to kill enemies, and Assassinate, as expected, is the classic vanilla out-of-nowhere assassination.

The skills allow interesting ways to complete some of the in-game missions, although realistically they’re never actually necessary. Still, they are an interesting way to shake up the Brotherhood concept, even if I often found myself missing the ability to summon true stealth assassins to do my dirty work at the touch of a button.

Dynamic World
The final somewhat engaging positive feature of Assassin’s Creed III is its sufficiently dynamic world. It doesn’t come anywhere near the world created by Red Dead Redemption or other truly dedicated open-world games, but it does have some appeal to it. Most of this comes in the Frontier area where Connor can hunt down wildlife, skin it for its pelts and parts, and sell it in local stores (again, the Red Dead Redemption reference is important). The world is more than just random animals running around, though; as you wander, you’ll encounter elk battling, wolves running in packs, entire families of bunnies, and other dynamic events. You can even find bobcats mauling other individuals on the Frontier. All of it combines to give the impression of a real, live, dynamic world, at least in the Frontier.

The game also supplies a surprisingly good day/night cycle, as well as a good weather cycle. Days and nights flow rather regularly, and the weather changes relatively smoothly. The graphics behind both are very nice as well; the rain is actually rendered as realistic-looking rain rather than just fuzziness on the screen the way many games still do. Of course, both the day/night cycle and the weather cycle are basically ruined by the fact that NPCs don’t seem to react to either; the streets are as busy in the middle of a sunny afternoon as they are at 3AM on a rainy night, but considering I’m already grasping for positive things to say about the game, this is still good enough to deserve a passing mention.

The Bad
At the most fundamental level, my biggest criticism about Assassin’s Creed III is that it loses all of what made the series special. It’s lost the real-world tie-ins, it’s lost the alternate history/conspiracy edge, it’s lost any semblance of the stealth focus. The Assassin/Templar dynamic has been relegated to an afterthought, the modern-day plot has gone off the deep end in a major way, and there’s so much irrelevant and distracting side content that it almost doesn’t feel like an Assassin’s Creed game. But even despite all those deep complaints, the remarkable thing is that the top thing I’ll always remember about the game is how it’s so damn…

Glitchy
Assassin’s Creed III is without a doubt the glitchiest game I have ever played in my life. It’s hardly possible to play through a mission without encountering some kind of glitch. The game doesn’t often freeze or anything (it froze once on me in my playthrough), but the glitches can no less be very distracting, annoying, frustrating, and at time, game-breaking.

It became clear that the game had a glitch problem from the very opening scene. The camera pans over a scene with a horse carriage, but nothing is visible because an NPC is standing between the camera and the carriage. Later in that same cutscene (at least, I think it’s the same cutscene, it’s been a while), the dialog fades out halfway through. It’s clear from the characters and camera angle that dialog is supposed to still be occurring, but the audio is gone. That’s actually a persistent problem throughout the game. In many cutscenes and many eavesdropping segments, the audio dialog just randomly drops out altogether. It’s always clear that there’s supposed to still be dialog, but it’s not there. In at least one instance, that dialog was key in understanding what to do next; with it dropping out, I had to run around lost until I figured it out.

Many of the glitches are cosmetic (still distracting, but not outright in the way), but at least a couple really get in the way of the game. For one — and I’m still not totally sure if this is a glitch or just terrible design — several times in the game, while strolling around incognito with no reason for a guard to even be suspicious of me, out of the blue they instantly started an all-out pursuit. I’m inclined to say this is a glitch because it occurred nowhere near a restricted area, and the pursuit is begun even more quickly than if I had been at the maximum level of notoriety. The problem with this is that if you turn around and fight them, it raises your notoriety, meaning that afterwards, they actually are supposed to instantly start chasing you. The notoriety system works because it makes it reasonable to try to keep your notoriety low without completing tedious tasks, but this glitch basically forces you to raise your notoriety. Running away is an option, too, but it’s an annoying option: there are so many enemies in the cities that basically everywhere you turn, another one is there, preventing you from finding a hiding spot. Even when you do find one, you’re likely far away from where you were originally heading anyway. It’s irritating as hell and halfway ruins the quality of the new notoriety system on its own (and I only say ‘halfway’ because another poor design element, covered later, finishes ruining it).

There are other issues that actually interfere with the gameplay as well. For one, there is a fighting sidequest called Boston Brawlers, but the icon for the final portion of the sidequest does not actually appear on the map for no reason whatsoever. After unlocking it, there is absolutely no indication given of where to finish the sidequest, and there is no reminder on the map screen that the sidequest has an unfinished task; the only place to notice it is on the progress screen. In another scene, you’re tasked with chasing down a man who has seemingly gone insane, but the game is ultra-finicky about when it will let you actually kill him; at one point, I stopped chasing him, assuming I was just mistaken in thinking the goal was to catch him. Ten minutes later, after wandering around the entire area trying to find something else to do, I found him again and this time was allowed to kill him. On several missions as well, as soon as the mission starts, you receive a warning to stay in the area or reduce the distance to the target, even though the mission has just begun and you haven’t even had a chance to willfully stray too far yet. On at least two occasions, I “failed” the mission right away for these reasons. On a third mission, the target I was supposed to kill left the area I was supposed to remain within, forcing me to choose whether to be desynchronized for being too far from the target or for leaving my area. On one mission that requires you to stop a man trying to break into a house, the game wouldn’t actually let me punch the guy; I had to restart the mission to complete it. On another, I was desynchronized for losing my target while I stood literally underneath her. In others, I found signs taped to trees that I could rip down to reduce my notoriety, only to find that the game doesn’t actually let you rip marked signs off of trees. As my wife can attest, this game made me very aggravated with all these glitches.

There’s even more glitches that aren’t game-breaking, but sure are distracting. The top one is that after acquiring an item called the “Shard of Eden”, I was alerted that I had acquired it every single time I entered a new area or acquired a new item for the rest of the entire game. That means about every minute that dialog popped up, letting me know I’d acquired that item I’d already been alerted about a thousand times before. In another instance, a man was standing around performing an animation reminiscent of hammering in a nail with no sign or wall anywhere near him. Several places in the game, heralds or newspaper boys come in twos: there are two standing next to each other, mirroring one another’s movements 100%. At one point, you’re tasked with participating in a major battle between thousands of Redcoats and Patriots, and in the middle of the battlefield is a regiment of Redcoats just aimlessly marching amongst the Patriots; their patrol route takes them through that area of the game, and the game doesn’t think to redirect or remove them when an enormous battle is going on. In that same mission, you’re tasked with taking cover behind obstacles, but the game rarely seems to recognize when you’re actually standing near one. In one of the forts, there were several Patriots beating up a Redcoat. The fact that the Redcoat was spawned inside a Patriot fort is stupid enough, but on top of that, when I took the liberty of killing the Redcoat for them, they all decided to attack me; it’s odd enough that the game makes both Redcoat and Patriot soldiers your enemies, but it’s even odder when one side turns on you for killing the enemy they were already attacking.

Now, let me give one caveat for all of these glitches. Glitches are usually the sign of a rushed release, and rushed releases usually come from a company wanting to capitalize on the holiday season or some other milestone. For Assassin’s Creed III, that milestone actually isn’t profit-motivated, but rather comes from inside the game; as you learn early on, the game ties into the December 21st, 2012 lore, and thus the game had to be released before then to retain that appeal. That’s not to say that they get a free pass on how absurdly glitchy the game is (they should have started earlier, dedicated more releases, and maybe delayed it just a couple weeks), but it’s worth mentioning that at least it appears that the motive to hurry the game out was motivated by the game’s internal criteria, not factors external to the game itself.

…and Borderline Glitchy Intentional Design
Even when the game isn’t being glitchy, it sometimes feels glitchy. These are things that clearly aren’t actually glitches, but that are such bad design decisions that they almost feel like glitches. Another way to say it is that these are glitches where the software is working perfectly, but what the programmers and designers tell the software to do is ridiculously flawed.

The first of these plays into the notoriety system again. As mentioned, the strength of the new notoriety system is that it gives the player the adequate level of control over their notoriety. The problem is that there are many side missions (and even main missions) that mandate increasing your notoriety in order to complete the mission. That, again, takes the player’s notoriety out of their own hands and forces them to either flee or find notoriety-reducing individuals as a punishment for completing side missions. There were times I actively opted to ignore a side mission because I had gotten so sick of being notorious after the previous glitch or a previous mission. The system can get so bad and fleeing can be so annoying that there were times when, rather than finding the game-prescribed way of reducing notoriety, I either just let my character die or Fast Traveled to another location; both those reduce notoriety, and are easier than trying to enter a shop in broad daylight on a street patrolled by dozens of enemies to lower my notoriety. Again, when the player has full control over that notoriety, this all works fine; it’s when that control is taken away that things can get frustrating.

One of the systems that I’ll discuss later is the crafting system. The crafting system basically lets you choose a “recipe” for a new item and craft it based on what individuals you’ve recruited to help you and what items you have on hand. The system, however, is terribly designed. First of all, each recipe has ingredients, and many of those ingredients are available for purchase in a separate menu; however, there is no tie between the two menus. Even if all the items are available for purchase, you must pull up the recipe, write down or mentally note what items you need, go to a separate menu and purchase those items, then return to the crafting area, reselect the recipe, and then complete the crafting. On top of that, on the crafting screen, there is no note as to whether those ingredients are available for purchase or not, so you may not even be able to buy all those ingredients. There’s no excuse for there not to be a quick function to “buy ingredients and craft item”. On top of that even, the only way to check the items required for a recipe is to select the recipe; however, if you discover that the recipe cannot be crafted, you’re sent to the very beginning of the recipe list, a menu with ten submenus and a dozen items in each. Navigating back to where you were to explore all the different items to craft is a ridiculous pain.

The game also has a major issue of disappearing items and weapons. Several times throughout the game, I found that significant portions of my inventory — arrows, bullets, animal traps, bait — had disappeared. There was no plot reason given for why these things would disappear, but they were gone and I was forced to buy all-new inventory. The same thing happened with weapons; on several occasions, I found I had somehow lost my sword. If I had dropped it in battle, no indication was given, but at this point I would have to go back to a store or my home to re-equip the sword I had apparently dropped. The same can happen with equipment, too; one piece of equipment available is a double holster, allowing you to effectively carry two guns and fire twice as many bullets before reloading, but at one point in the game my double holsters just disappeared. And speaking of reloading, the game tells you to press R2 to reload, but fails to tell you that if you’re completely out of bullets (as opposed to have 1 of 4 left loaded or something), it’s actually the triangle button that reloads. I played half the game mashing R2 waiting for it to reload my gun with no success.

There are several other instances of very bad game design as well. Items and events appear on the main map too soon, far before the plot gives any explanation for what you’re doing. The trees that the game uses as high points in the wilderness area are all identical copies of one another. When you’re getting closed to a destination you’ve marked on the map, it temporarily completely disappears. Missions like some of the eavesdropping missions are completely arbitrary in their success conditions, leaving the player confused as to the proper way to go about completing the mission. High points throughout the cities no longer reveal the whole map, meaning that it’s not possible to be certain if you’ve completed all the optional side missions without manually running around the entire map. On the sea missions, there are still Animus-induced “area not available” areas, but the ship’s turn radius is so bad that if you see these alerts, you’re guaranteed to get desynchronized for venturing too far out of the area. The game employs a quick-travel system, but only within areas. To go from Boston to New York, for example, you quick-travel to the gates of Boston, take two steps through to the Frontier between the cities, quick-travel to the New York exit from the Frontier, and then take two steps into New York. If you’re going to be quick-traveling all the way, why not just provide a function to quick-travel directly into the other city? I understand that making travel harder is good in some ways, but by allowing it via a chain of quick-travels, all you’ve done is quadruple the time spent staring at the loading screen.

Indecisive between Open-World and Plot-Driven
This is going to be one of the more difficult sections of this review to write because it reflects an overall problem in the gaming industry as a whole, something that goes far past an inherent problem with Assassin’s Creed III. I’ve noted it in Batman: Arkham City and also in previous Assassin’s Creed games, and I’m sure it’s more widespread than that even. If what I write here doesn’t make much sense to you, I apologize; a dedicated article on this might be following soon.

The modern trend in video games is to give every game an open-world structure; it’s up to the player character to decide what to do at a given time. You can pursue sidequests, interact with some of the miscellaneous available tasks, or just play around in the world rather than always being on some part of the direct mission path. Open-world games, when they’re done well, are great. The problem, though, is that it can be very difficult to tell a good, compelling story in an open-world structure because while good stories mandate a strong game-driven narrative, open-world games naturally thrive on giving maximum control of the narrative to the player. Open-world games thrive by allowing the player to effectively live a virtual life of the main character, but life can be boring sometimes. Good narratives thrive by providing tension, pacing, and observable impacts on the outside world of the game. While a game can certainly accomplish both (see Red Dead Redemption for, in my opinion, the all-time best example of an open-world game with a strong plot), it takes paying very special attention to how the plot must be structured.

Part of this is a problem of tension. My main problem with Batman: Arkham City is that throughout the game, there is a high tension surrounding getting to the next location; either someone is about to die, a hostage is being held, or there is some other reason your character should be hurrying. When are you supposed to pursue the sidequests, then? There is no natural place where it makes sense for your character to divert attention from the problem at hand and go around solving riddles to pick up trophies. Assassin’s Creed III suffers from this problem as well (although not to as large an extent). A significant portion of the game is spent with a pressing need to get to the next mission, yet pursuing such missions as would be natural for the character cripples any participation the player might have in the sidequests.

The real problem with Assassin’s Creed III in this realm, however, is two-fold. First of all, the more clear and easily articulated issue is with the game’s control of the player characters and time as a whole. The game starts out with the player taking the role of Haytham Kenway, followed by a young Connor Kenway, followed by the adult Connor Kenway. As Haytham, the player can start to participate in the sidequests, but that participation carries over to Connor. One sidequest, for instance, involves gathering almanac pages that have been lost around Boston and New York. Any almanac pages gathered by Haytham get carried over to Connor. Not to spoil anything, but the relationship between the two is such that there is no logical way any items could have been passed from the former to the latter. In another example of this same concept, one of the sidequests provides the player forts to liberate from British control and hand over to the Patriots. However, the sidequest allowing you to liberate those forts is available long before the Revolutionary War actually begins. You can liberate a fort and hand it over to Patriot control before the Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, or any of the actual events that led to the Revolutionary War. How does it make sense for a Patriot army that does not yet exist to take control of a fort from the British army years before the war starts, and yet have that event not itself spark the war? To put this succinctly, the open-world structure of the game provided a sidequest, but the plot-driven element of the game made this sidequest make little sense at all.

Granted, those issues could have been fixed. Almanac pages should have been inaccessible until you begin playing as Connor, forts should have been locked down until after the memory sequence corresponding to the beginning of the war, and just like that, the issue is resolved. But a more serious and similar issue emerges with regard to the time pacing of the game. At several points in the game, as dictated by the plot, the game jumps forward in time by months or even several years. All told, the game covers over 50 years in American history, and yet you only play a small subset of points in time throughout that larger window. At the same time, though, you’re supposed to be effectively living Connor’s life. In addition to running around participating in the Revolutionary War, you’re also managing a homestead, developing new items, sending out convoys, and building wealth. Are we supposed to believe that Connor just completely puts everything on hold for nine months while the plot jumps ahead? That nothing at all changes during that time, but as soon as the player is given control again, suddenly the area roars back to life?

To provide an even more humorously nonsensical example, there is one particular sidequest in which an individual asks you to meet him in Boston to provide safety as he visits his old store (I believe, anyway — the details are fuzzy). I triggered that request, then continued with the plot, planning to complete the sidequest when I was next in Boston. As it turned out, the next visit to Boston was a couple large plot segments away. By the time I finally got to Boston, the game stated that it was over five years later, but yet there was the man, ready and waiting for me. Am I to believe he waited there for five whole years just to walk a few blocks with me? Of course not, that makes no sense; but that is the kind of awkward conflict that arises when a game paints itself as an open-world endeavor while also trying to let the plot take significant control of the game world.

The other part of this problem is that it also forces certain game mechanics to remain consistent regardless of the plot progress of the game as a whole, which itself leads to some ridiculous oddities in the game world. This happens when the plot dictates that some change must happen in the game world, and yet the game world, in the interest of preserving its open-world structure and flexibility, has to remain fundamentally the same. The major example of this is that throughout the game, both the Patriots and the Redcoats are actually Connor’s enemies. The Redcoats make sense, but for the Patriot troops to attack Connor, to be suspicious of him and investigate him, or to be valid targets for his own attacks is never adequately justified. The game does give some passing plot explanation for it (which I won’t spoil), but it’s never really an effective justification. It leads to some extremely strange occurrences as well. In one instance, I entered a fort I had liberated for the Patriots. For some bizarre reason, a Redcoat had spawned inside, and he was fighting the Patriot troops. That by itself was cool; what is strange, though, is that when I killed the Redcoat, the Patriots all turned on me. These are troops that were just trying to kill that Redcoat, and troops that are only residing in this fort because I liberated it; yet, they turn on me, because the game dictates that they are enemies, and whenever an enemy witnesses a kill, he attacks Connor.

The entire dynamic of Patriots being enemies is one of the more difficult issues the game encounters. Again, plot justification is provided for it at one point, but it isn’t very satisfying or compelling. More importantly even, it isn’t provided until longer after the gameplay has made it clear that Patriots are enemies. They appear as red dots on the map, they are valid targets for your attacks, and they have their own notoriety account of you — even those residing in the forts you liberated for them. The plot explanation for Patriots being enemies doesn’t arise until one of the very late sequences, but it has already been clear throughout the gameplay that they are rendered as enemies in the game. But the reason is simple: the gameplay and open-world structure dictates that at all times, there must be an enemy faction at war with Connor. Therefore, even though Connor is involved in the Patriots capturing Boston (actual American history doesn’t count as a spoiler, sorry), those same Patriots have to be his enemies in order to preserve the game’s stated structure.

Those are the conflicts that arise when a game tries to balance an open-world structure with a significant plot focus; if it isn’t done right, things just break down altogether. The open-world tasks start to make little sense and the plot-driven elements start to become very contrived as they have to internally justify why the world does not actually seem to change in response to catastrophic or revolutionary developments. Again, none of this is to suggest that it isn’t possible to balance these things correctly. Red Dead Redemption does it brilliantly. There is a strong overall plot goal that has a compelling tension, but not such a strong tension that the player feels the character would be persistently compelled to take care of the plot progression immediately. The plot never demands a fundamental and far-reaching change to the world as a whole. The player is left to feel like they are playing a virtual life, and the story emerges from that life.

In actuality, though, the failure of Assassin’s Creed III (and, more broadly, the Assassin’s Creed series as a whole) isn’t that it fails to adequately balance these competing drives. The failure is that it tries to in the first place. None of the stated appeal, goals, or style of the Assassin’s Creed series relies on an open-world structure. The majority of the game’s appeal could have been preserved with an entirely mission-based structure, taking the player directly from mission to mission. I’m not saying the entirety of the content could be stripped out as-is leaving only the main missions to buoy the game, but rather that if the game was designed from the outset to be more linear (like Uncharted, for example), it would still retain much of its same appeal, while allowing it to go even further in enhancing what actually makes the series special.

Enormous Missed Plot Opportunities
My best friend and I were ecstatic when we heard that the next Assassin’s Creed game was going to be set in the Revolutionary War. The idea of seeing the Founding Fathers as characters in the game amazing, especially considering what the series had previously done with Leonardo da Vinci, the Medicis, and other real historical figures and families. Adding to it, there seemed to be an ample amount of lore to draw from: stories of the Founding Fathers as Freemasons and Templars and members of other secret societies and conspiracies are already far-reaching, inspiring dozens of books and movies already. It seemed like there was an absolutely enormous amount to draw from to make the game particularly special.

And then… nothing. There’s no reference to Freemasonry. There aren’t very interesting liberties taken with the allegiances and motivations of the Founding Fathers. George Washington figures heavily into the game, but not in a very compelling way as it turns out. He plays essentially the historical role we learned about in history books, the leader of the Continental Army with some controversy on the side. The game does an admirable job of portraying the events in a neutral way, painting Washington not as the borderline deified father of our country present in popular culture but rather as a flawed, realistic person, but it does not move toward truly involving him in the Templar-Assassin macro-plot. The historical figure it does involve in that plot, Charles Lee, is a relatively unknown disgraced former General in the Continental Army. It’s a convenient selection that allows them to play into some internal strife within the Patriot cause, but given how little is popularly known about Lee, it isn’t a very interesting selection.

Aside from that, there is hardly any leveraging of the Founding Fathers at all. Several are present in some form in the game — Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, and several others — but none are truly injected into the game’s plot. Rather than painting a sort of alternate conspiracy-laden history the way other games in the series do, the game seems extremely hesitant to paint new motives for known events, and instead simply suggests that there was an ongoing battle underlying the conflict that was suppressed and eradicated. While we see many historical events, we are merely spectators; they are not incorporated into the Templar-Assassin dynamic. This fact is especially frustrating considering that, if I recall correctly, there were glyphs in the past games that suggested a prominent Templar influence on the Founding Fathers. Regardless of whether the glyphs suggested such or not, that was what made the prospect of a game set in the Revolutionary War so compelling. Which Founding Fathers were Assassins? Which were Templars? Were Adams’ Federalists, who lobbied for increased federal government control, actually the prominent Templar faction, put down democratically by Washington’s and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans? Were the Articles of Confederation originally an assassin-driven document with their emphasis on states’ rights, and was the following Constitution actually a Templar creation, foretelling the earlier games’ predictions of a heavy Templar presence in the nation’s highest offices? There was an enormous amount of potential here for a strong connection between the Templar-Assassin war and American history, but unfortunately, nearly every opportunity was left unrealized.

Meandering, Anticlimactic Plot
The above section may read as a complaint that I didn’t get exactly what I wanted out of the game. It’s of course entirely possible that the game could be very good while still not delivering exactly what I expected or desired. Unfortunately, it’s not. The plot that it provides in the place of the potential outlined about is meandering, lazy, and anticlimactic. There’s no strong overarching goal to it, and at times it has a strong tendency to appear as a tour of significant Revolutionary War events.

To give fair warning, this paragraph will contain pseudo-spoilers. They aren’t actually spoilers in that all the events are known parts of American history; the spoiler is that in the game plot, Connor is involved. I don’t consider them spoilers considering the fact that these events happened is common knowledge, but if you’d consider knowing what role Connor played in the Revolutionary War a spoiler, I’d suggest skipping the remainder of this paragraph. Part of the reason why the time structure (as outlined a couple sections ago) in the game is so jumpy is that the game attempts to give the player a tour of all the major Revolutionary War events, and to suggest Connor was essentially responsible for, or at least a witness to, every single one. Connor nearly stops the Boston Massacre from occurring; Connor dumps the cases of tea into the Boston Harbor (and, it not-so-subtly implies, is the reason why it’s reported that the Patriots were dressed as Indians); Connor visits the training ground at Valley Forge; Connor rides with Paul Revere yelling “The British are coming!”; and more historically less-notable events. It does not play very cohesively at all, and more often than not really does feel like the game is trying to pack as many memorable Revolutionary War events into the game as quickly as possible. In doing so, it paints little of interest regarding these events beyond the takeaway that Connor, apparently, was there.

Because the game takes such an effort to railroad you through these significant battles and events, there’s little overarching plot device to motivate anything that actually happens. Somewhere in the back of the game is the idea that there are seven Templars you must eventually kill, but that motivation is inherently lazy (Assassin’s Creed II did the same, and did it better), and what’s more, the game never really brings it up as the driving force. Instead, it plays more as an unrelated string of missions tiled end-to-end — which, actually, would be a decent plot structure for an open-world game, but the game still screws that up by allowing this meandering plot to take significant control over the process and flow of the game world as a whole. At no given point in the game could I really give any indication of what my goal was beyond, “Kill [insert name here].” Even that wouldn’t have been so bad if every mission proceeded with a clear tie to that overall plot goal, but that isn’t the case either; many seem arbitrary and as if they’re just there to fill in the mission tree.

On top of all that, the game is anticlimactic in several ways. The game sets up tension surrounding a few different eventual events very well, most notably the eventual confrontations between Connor and certain enemies. You know that such confrontations are guaranteed to take place, and while there is little overarching narrative to the story, you still find yourself exciting about eventually witnessing these battles… only for them to come and go entirely anticlimactically. They’re entirely dissatisfying, and give the player far too little actual playtime in what could have been the most epic encounter in the series’ entire history.

Unfaithful to the Series’ Gameplay, Themes and Appeal
The fact that this point is so far down in this section is perhaps itself one of the saddest reflections on Assassin’s Creed III there could be. If this were the top criticism I had of the game, it would still be an enormous problem. It’s all the way down here as my sixth-most significant criticism. That does not bode well.

One of the biggest problems I have with Assassin’s Creed III, even despite all of the above, is that in the end, it really isn’t an Assassin’s Creed game. Sure, it has all the superficial similarities; it has the hidden blade, free-running around rooftops, stealth kills, eagle vision, vantage points, and the Animus, but those aren’t what defined the series. The series was defined by the two words in the title: Assassin‘s Creed. The game was about assassins, and the game was about the underlying creed that differentiated them from their arch-nemesis, the Templars. Assassin’s Creed III is about neither.

For starters, assassinations play very little role in Assassin’s Creed III, itself an enormous problem. While the previous games went to great lengths to set up the “correct” way to kill certain targets (and the Ezio trilogy went the extra mile of awarding extra synchronization for performing the kills in the proper way), none of that is present in Assassin’s Creed III. The stealth component as a whole is entirely deemphasized; there are missions where “remain undetected” is still an optional objective, as well as others where it is not optional, but it isn’t woven into the fabric of the game as a whole. If anything, the game seems to emphasize Connor’s skill as a face-to-face killer, going to great lengths to initiate open combat as often as possible. Eagle vision, the bedrock of the original game and still an important feature in the Ezio trilogy, is essentially completely irrelevant, used only occasionally to pick a target out of a crowd. All of this combines with the prevalence of an absurd variety of other gameplay tasks to radically reduce the importance of the “assassin” in “Assassin’s Creed”. “Errand Boy’s Creed” might be more appropriate.

Minor spoilers may follow in this paragraph. What about the “Creed” part? That’s essentially gone, too. What the game has lost is the actual meat of the Assassin/Templar dynamic. Rather than actually clearly differentiate the two sides, it simply labels the bad guys “Templars” and the good guys “Assassins”. When given the chance, they of course spout their viewpoints of control vs. freedom, but that never actually channels into either side’s actions. Both are trying to fight the British for the colonies’ freedom. Both are trying to put their own people in charge. The differences in ideals only manifest in dialog, not in actual actions. Heck, their goals are so similar that they even join sides briefly in the game, an idea that any previous Assassin’s Creed‘s characters would have regarded as ludicrous; but that’s just how watered-down and irrelevant the Assassin/Templar dynamic has become in Assassin’s Creed III. The idealistic differences in the sides are relegated to nothing but conversation pieces in the assassination scenes, and there is no indication that either side’s actions are in any way informed by their supposed ideals.

But all that was only half of the Templar/Assassin plot. The other half happened in the modern-day portion. Is that still preserved? Not at all. The original games painted the Assassins and Templars as two organizations that persist to the modern day, with the Templars taking the form of a massive company called Abstergo while the Assassins are forced into seclusion in the farthest corners of the earth. In Assassin’s Creed III? The Templars are portrayed as out-of-the-loop idiots that really have no idea what’s going on in the world. They’re no longer the enemy at all, except that they hold the pieces necessary for the Assassins to achieve the true objective. Our modern-day crew spends their time trying to find a way to save the world from an impending solar flare (all details revealed at the end of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations), reading prophecies and messages from an ancient race of supernatural goddesses. None of that is in the least bit necessary. The plot of the entire series would have been perfectly fine revolving around its original direction toward an eventual Templar plot to control the minds of all humanity. Instead, the Templar/Assassin dynamic is relegated to nothing but an afterthought in the modern-day plot as well.

Making this problem even worse is that the unique symbiosis between the ancient and modern sections is essentially absolutely gone. One of the things that made Assassin’s Creed so interesting is that there was a constant communication between the present and the past. Vidic actually spoke to Desmond as he played the life of Altair, and even into Assassin’s Creed II, there was still a lot more back-and-forth between the modern day and ancient times, both in the dialog and in the actual structure. In Assassin’s Creed III, though, there’s none of that. There is literally no communication from the modern-day individuals with Desmond while he’s in the Animus. Even the reasoning behind getting into the Animus is contrived and phoned-in; Desmond randomly faints, and of course, their response is to pop him into the Animus. There’s no real back-and-forth between the Animus and the modern day either; there are three (or four? I’m not even sure, they weren’t very remarkable) linear platformer missions in the modern setting that get completed in between memory sequences under the guise of looking for a “power source”, itself something clearly created solely to justify doing something in the modern time. Aside from those missions, the only modern-day interaction is with a series of conversations with those goddesses, basically just telling the history of their civilization and their own demise. There’s no back-and-forth, no symbiosis, no real relationship between the two.

The series has basically lost all loyalty to its own origins, themes, and appeal. If it weren’t for the clearly iconic superficial Assassin’s Creed elements (including the Animus), it could easily pass for another game altogether. That wouldn’t be so bad if the original themes had little potential, but they did; Assassin’s Creed III is deeply disappointing in its failure to explore them.

Forgettable Cast
It’s almost laughable that a game set in the Revolutionary War could have a forgettable cast. The writers had such a rich array of potential characters at their disposal that they could use and explore that you’d think the cast would be by far the least of their worries, but as stated above, the historical figures that were available for exploration were tragically underused.

I’ve already discussed in the earlier portions of the review that the game missed an enormous opportunity by essentially whiffing on making the Founding Fathers interesting characters; it hardly chooses to leverage any of them at all (Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin are three that play little or no role in the game despite being seemingly ripe for parody), and those that it does use remain rather boring. The most interesting characters in the game aren’t historical at all, and in fact the game’s most interesting and appealing character is actually a villain. When you do a better job making the antagonists appealing than the protagonists, especially when you’re dealing with popular and commonly known historical figures, you’re doing something wrong.

But since I’ve already commented at decent length about a significant portion of the cast, let me zero in on the most important element: the protagonist, Connor. Connor is boring. There’s no two ways about it, he’s the most boring protagonist the series has had by a long mile — and that’s including Desmond, one of the most boring game characters ever. Every element of him is lazy. he lacks any discernible personality at all, to the point where a last-minute revelation that he was secretly a time-traveling robot would be a welcome change rather than a contrived twist (not really, but that’s not far off). His diction is akin to the speeches given in the second week of a community college Public Speaking class. Nowhere in the plot does it show him paying attention to the lore and history of the Assassin Brotherhood in the way that Ezio did in his games. That itself was one of the elements that made Ezio, and Altair before him, such a great character: he was a combination of muscles and mind. Connor is nothing but a musclehead with little intellectual depth, worsened by his lack of character development.

Irrelevant and Silly Sidequests and Modes
In the Ezio trilogy of Assassin’s Creed II, they introduced a system of shop ownership whereby Ezio could renovate towns and cities by buying shops and opening them back up. It was all kind of silly, in my opinion. In Assassin’s Creed III, it’s been replaced by the “Homestead”. The Davenport Homestead is essentially an entire city-sized district belonging in some way to Connor and his mentor, Achilles; even if the land is not technically owned by the two, it is an open wilderness where people are welcome to come and settle. While Connor goes about his business throughout Davenport, Boston, and New York, he’ll encounter missions involving other inhabitants of the area. If he completes these missions, those inhabitants will move to Davenport Homestead and open their shop there. As the game progresses, you can unlock a Blacksmith, a Lumberjack, a Doctor, an Innkeeper, a Seamstress, a Farmer, and several other individuals to live around you. Once unlocked, these individuals will sell and craft goods for you. You can buy ingredients from them and then craft them into new weapons, items, or general goods. Then, you can sell these goods via convoys to local shops. You can also complete missions for these individuals while they live on your Homestead, leveling their shops and unlocking new goods for you to purchase or new items for you to craft (although humorously, the missions that lead to shop leveling rarely, if ever, have anything to do with the shop actually leveling — “You helped me deliver my baby! Here, my shop is better now.”).

Truth be told, I actually kind of like the Homestead system… for another game. It’s irrelevant, silly, and out-of-place in Assassin’s Creed III, but it has a certain charm to it. What charm it has, though, is entirely sabotaged by a wide collection of bizarre weaknesses. One of those I’ve already covered above with the crafting system: there are items to buy and items to craft, and the items to craft are mostly made up of items you can buy, and yet the game gives no system for easily purchasing items specifically to craft with them. You have to go to the recipe, view the items required, go to the shops (a menu over), find out if the items are for sale, buy them, return to the recipe, and craft them. There’s no reason for there not to be a buy-and-craft option to quickly craft any item for whom the ingredients are purchasable in the next screen. There also should be an easier way to navigate the available recipes, but again, that’s been covered before.

The major weakness in this entire system, though, isn’t even the shopping and crafting system; it’s the convoy system. The convoy system is nearly entirely responsible for the entire Homestead system being completely irrelevant. For starters, selling via the system is an enormous pain. You can only sell a very small collection of items in each convoy (items don’t stack, so each individual instance of a single item takes up a spot), and you can only send out a very limited number of convoys at a time. The prices that you earn for those items are typically relatively low, and finding a way to make a notable profit takes an unnecessarily large amount of time. There’s no easy way to browse the prices available; you have to individually scroll through and check each individual store for what they’d pay for the item rather than viewing them in any kind of chart format. On top of all that, you can only manage your convoys at shops and at the Homestead. There aren’t that many brick-and-mortar shops in the game, so it’s really necessary to make a special trip out of your way to manage your convoy, limiting how often you actually do so.

The worst part of the convoy system, though, are the ambushes. There’s a very non-trivial chance that when you send out a convoy, it will get ambushed. If it gets ambushed, you have less than 5 minutes to get to it and defend it. The ambushes always seem to occur on the Frontier as well, a giant amorphous area that’s difficult to navigate. That means when a convoy gets ambushed, you essentially have to instantly drop everything and go quick-travel across the entire map, from loading screen to loading screen, to defend it. If you don’t, you lose the goods and the convoy itself. It’s enough of a pain and hassle to completely destroy any desire to use the convoy system at all.

The natural reaction to that criticism is to say, “Well, that’s the reason why making money is challenging, you have to work for it.” And that’s true, making money is challenging this way. You have to be vigilant and ready to act on a moment’s notice, which is all unnecessary because money is completely irrelevant in the game. The only things that cost money in the game are weapons, ship weapons, maps and outfits, and the goods themselves. Weapons are irrelevant; even though technically some more expensive weapons have better stats, it’s easily possible to get through the entire game only using the axe with which you’re initially equipped. Ship weapons can easily be paid for with money you make hunting while walking around the Frontier from mission to mission, as well as from the money you earn on the treasure sidequests. Maps can be paid for easily this way as well. There’s just nothing in the game that costs enough to make paying attention to anything in the dedicated money-making portion of the game worthwhile.

The other sidequest system in Assassin’s Creed III is the dispatch system, and the only way I can describe it is obligatory. The Brotherhood system, as described above, has been boiled down to six plot-dictated assassin recruits. Still, since there was a dispatch system in the previous games, and since there’s thirteen colonies to play with, Assassin’s Creed III seems to think it needs one, too. It takes the form of thirteen sets of six missions, each taking a bit longer than the previous one. You assign up to three assassin recruits to each, wait, and get the prize when they return if successful. The entire thing reeks of obligation, although at least it isn’t as needlessly complicated as the analogous system in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

Insultingly Easy
Although the combat plays much more smoothly than that of games in the past, it hasn’t received any new challenge. In fact, it’s actually gotten even easier. Whereas in past Assassin’s Creed games, at least there were enemies that were legitimately difficult to defeat, Assassin’s Creed III has none of those. Even the most difficult enemies can be defeated by a single type of counterattack (sometimes followed by mashing the attack button for a while, granted). The basic enemies are killed by a regular counter-attack. Nearly every other enemy, if not vulnerable to a simple counterattack, can be disarmed when you counterattack, allowing you to then mash the attack button and hack away at them until they accept your tomahawk’s dream of being embedded into their frontal lobe. I can think of only one enemy that was not susceptible to counter-disarm, and that one was vulnerable to counter-throw, allowing you to throw them to the ground and then hack away at their skin’s pesky insistence on clinging to their body. On top of that, I can’t recall a single enemy that wasn’t vulnerable to a counter-shoot, allowing you to shoot them in the head with a gun or bow and arrow immediately after blocking their attack. And on top of that even, nearly every enemy is susceptible to your own “Break Defense” move. In the entire game, I only died from combat unintentionally (remember the notoriety issue) once, and that was against a gang of five enemies I had never previously encountered and therefore for whom I did not know the weakness. I’m not that good at video games. I should be dying more often.

At one point, I handed the controller to my wife while I went to grab a drink. I told her to just press Circle whenever she saw a red icon appear, then press Square whenever the game went slow-motion after pressing Circle. I came back a minute later and she’d won the fight. My wife hasn’t played a video game in ten years. She’s never even held a PlayStation controller. Admittedly, the fight was against just a group of the easiest grunts, but still.

No Assassin’s Creed Magic
Finally, the last criticism I have of Assassin’s Creed III is a bit more amorphous, but it’s also among the most serious. It plays into what I said above about the game losing any faithfulness or loyalty to the series’ premise or structure. Put simply, Assassin’s Creed III has none of the magic that the series typically has.

By “magic”, I mean those extra features and sidequests that really set the game apart. The glyphs from Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood are the best examples. These were puzzles that leveraged historical photographs, documents, and real modern history to weave a complex, dynamic, and downright engrossing picture of how the battle between the Assassins and Templars played out through the ages. It was, at times, creepy, haunting, mysterious, and eerie, and it set the series apart as something more than a video game series. These things were, in my opinion, what helped Assassin’s Creed, for all its flaws, transcend its natural limitations and become something truly special. These were something no game had tried before. These really connected the game to the real world. These were special.

The glyphs weren’t the only example of these. The mystery surrounding Subject 16, the previous Animus occupant, and his cryptic messages left on the walls of Abstergo played into it as well. The mystery surrounding the Apples of Eden, devices that for whatever reason have become effectively irrelevant in Assassin’s Creed III, was part of it. The connections with real history, from the Crusades to the heart of the Catholic Church to any number of U.S. Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, and other world politicians, were part of it. These were the elements that set Assassin’s Creed apart as a series. These were the things that made the series special.

Assassin’s Creed III has none of those things. The best it can muster is an attempt to leverage December 21st, 2012, the supposed date of the end of the world, but even that falls horribly flat. The modern sections, while well-designed as video game levels, completely fail in their attempts to deliver the same kind of intrigue as the previous games. Not even the immediate connection between the game’s events and the current calendar can salvage it. The previous games in the series, for all their flaws, set Assassin’s Creed III with the potential to be one of the most magical game experiences of all time, and the game falls flat in every single conceivable way.

The Verdict
Assassin’s Creed III is a deeply, deeply unsatisfying video game experience. It’s unsatisfying as the third installment in its acclaimed series, it’s unsatisfying internally due to its own glitches and weak design decisions, and it’s unsatisfying as a whole due to its incredible squandering of unbelievable potential. What limited appeal it has in its engaging naval sidequest and its classic Assassin’s Creed gameplay is wasted on a glitchy, disloyal mess.

As a game, Assassin’s Creed III fails first and foremost due to its glitches. The game was not ready for release by any metric. A massive patch was released only two weeks after release, and I didn’t start the game until after that patch, and the game is still glitchy as hell. The glitches aren’t minor, either. They’re frustrating, aggravating, and break any semblance of flow that the game could have developed. And when the game isn’t being glitchy, it’s exhibiting dozens of highly suspect design choices. For a company with so much game design experience, you’d never know the game wasn’t designed by amateurs. Basic principles of usability and design are violated left and right, and the overall structure fails to deliver a cohesive experience. All that is before the game’s internal conflict between its open-world structure and its plot-driven elements, and even that comes before the wild weakness of the game’s plot and cast of characters. All this failure mapped against a rich historical background that could have been leveraged is unforgivable.

And that’s not even the half of it. Not only is the game dissatisfying on its own, but it’s almost insulting to the series from which it comes. Assassin’s Creed II was disloyal to many of the elements that made the original Assassin’s Creed good, but at least it was still a fun game that preserved the series roots. Assassin’s Creed III does neither. It’s not a fun game, but it also doesn’t even stay true to the series. It completely loses the Assassin/Templar dynamic on which the series is built. It has little or no connection with the modern day world the way its predecessors did. Where Assassin’s Creed II told an incredible story about the history of the world from the Renaissance all the way to the present with its glyphs and hidden documents, Assassin’s Creed III, a game built on the origins of the very country that those glyphs dwelled on, provides no such substance. Instead, it gets incredibly distracted by veritable montage of iconic Revolutionary War moments and a series of utterly irrelevant sidequests in a needlessly open world. It’s not a good game, it’s not an Assassin’s Creed game, and it has hardly any redeemable qualities whatsoever.

My Recommendation
Most of my criticisms run a bit deeper than the things that will annoy many fans. If you like the franchise just for its slashy stabby action, then you might still find Assassin’s Creed III entertaining. Even then, though, the glitches and lack of challenging gameplay remove almost any appeal the game could have. For those that appreciated the series for its plot, engaging story, and unique structure — or basically for anyone that appreciated the game for anything more than a slashy stabby visual spectacle — avoid Assassin’s Creed III. You’re better off forgetting it ever existed. It supplies nothing of value to the series whatsoever.

A few bits of housekeeping before I get started: first of all, game development is an inherently muddled process, and oftentimes it is difficult to draw lines around who developed which game. At times, this may lead to disagreement over who the developer of a particular game truly is; however, with how quickly the industry changes and the speed with which companies are bought, sold, and changed, there is never truly a black and white to what constitutes one developer’s library. Secondly, there will be a lot of differentiation in the sizes of the libraries described in these lists. As such, in certain lists, I will refrain from including more than one game from one franchise and instead use one game as a stand-in for the series as a whole; in other lists, multiple games from the same franchise may be listed. Lastly, while I have a list of companies I plan to look at eventually, I am always looking for suggestions on what company to cover next; if you would like to make a suggestion, you can drop by the Top 10 List discussion board, contact me through my contributor profile, or visit either of my websites that cross-post these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com.

This week, I’ll be talking about Origin Systems.

There are a handful of genres whose origins (and, for some, whose natural homes) are squarely on the PC. One of them, covered last week, is the first-person shooter, which was born and matured on computers before making the successful leap to consoles. Another is the Western-style RPG, and just as id Software had a prominent role in sculpting and forming the first-person shooter genre, Origin Systems played the role for Western RPGs. Founded in 1983, the founders of Origin Systems already had some significant experience with game design: the Garriott brothers had developed games in the past, but after having trouble collecting the promised funds from publishers, they decided to start their own company (although I’ll be retroactively filing their earlier creations under Origin’s banner as well). The company’s major contribution was long to the Western RPG genre, starting up one of the first and arguably most influential game series in the genre’s long history. Origin didn’t exclusively developer Western-style RPGs, though; among their other important games are a strong series of simulation games, along with some first-person shooters, action/adventure games, and even an MMORPG. Under the guise of the Garriott brothers, the company found strong success in its early years, earning a significant payout when acquired by Electronic Arts in 1992, a partnership that brought the company’s founders a financial windfall, but which would ultimately come back to hurt the company.

#10: BioForge (PC)

Released toward the later years of Origin System’s activity, the 1995 release BioForge is in some ways the company’s attempt to branch out into new and emerging genres, perhaps to try to have the same influence over these new areas that they had on the Western RPG genre with their popular Ultima series. The game was notable for a wide variety of reasons, starting first and foremost with its production values and cinematography; BioForge was one of the first games to frame itself in some ways more like a film than a game, with a large cast of voice actors, a significant plot focus, and a high priority placed on strong computing resources.

The game’s genre was survival horror, but like the older variety of survival horror games, the focus truly was on survival; this was not a first-person shooter with some more horrifically-themed monsters in the way that modern games of the genre tend to be. The game was also notable for featuring one of the more extensive early examples of player involvement in determining the identity and characteristics of the player character; rather than simply playing a fictional character in the game universe, the player takes an active role in determining the kind of character they will be. The decisions that the player makes influence the game in a variety of ways. Although the game did not sell well, it has gone on to achieve a sort of cult appreciation, highlighted by a recent re-release compatible with modern systems.

#9: AH-64D Longbow (PC)

During the mid-1990s, one of the seemingly emergent genres was the combat flight simulator; in fact, for a time, it looked like it would be these sorts of flight simulators that would define the next generation of PC games. Toward that end, EA pushed for its own series of combat flight simulators during this time period, tapping Origin to develop one of the games in their Jane’s combat series. Jane’s, if you’re unaware, is a very old publishing company specializing in content on military vehicles and weaponry, named for Fred T. Jane (information that helps understand the title of the franchise). EA purchased the right to use the name Jane’s to lend credibility to the franchise.

Origin’s contribution to the series, Jane’s AH-64D Longbow, is one of the best both for the company itself and for the franchise and genre as a whole. It was nearly unanimously chosen by every major publisher as the flight simulator of the year at a time when the genre actually had quite a few contenders for that title. The most notable feature of the game was its ability to mesh entertainment with realism; a common problem with realistic flight simulators (and realistic simulators of anything, really – the real world is a boring place) is that they lose some of the entertainment value that a game would otherwise provide. Oftentimes, the very features that make a game more fun are the features that make it less realistic (regenerating health, for instance), but Jane’s AH-64D Longbow managed to walk the line between realism and entertainment with seeming ease.

#8: Ultima VII: The Black Gate (PC)

Without a doubt, the most recognizable product that Origin Systems ever produced was the Ultima series. Spanning ten games across three distinct trilogies and over a decade of releases, the Ultima franchise was a key player in defining the PC RPG industry, and more broadly the Western RPG genre as a whole (although comparing it to the other major Western RPG franchise, The Elder Scrolls, reveals that there are relatively few consistent features to tie the various versions of the genre together). By the time Ultima VII came along, the franchise had garnered a significant following, resulting in significant expectations placed on the game. Hardly any video game series had been as long-running as Ultima at the time of Ultima VII’s 1992 release, either, so the idea of a seventh installment in a video game series was still uncharted territory for the franchise.

Far and away the most interesting element of Ultima VII, though, are the references to Electronic Arts. Although the latter company would later purchase Origin, at the time of Ultima VII’s release, the two were competitors. Ultima, thus, invoked EA in its antagonists of the game in various ways; the motto of the antagonist is a direct rebuttal to Origin’s own company motto, some evil characters in the game are named after the company’s initials, and the icons of the antagonists are modeled after the EA logo itself. Personally, I like to think these questions all came up in early meetings about the buy-out, accompanied by a very awkward silence.

#7: Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (PC)

Aside from the famous Ultima series, the second most-famous franchise developed by Origin Systems is the long-running Wing Commander franchise of simulated space combat. Broadly, this franchise is one of the largest and most undernoticed video game franchises in the industry, spanning over 17 years and more than a dozen releases. The fame and notoriety of the franchise has led it to spawn all of the usual accoutrements that come with a famous series, such as a TV series, a collectible card game, a series of novelizations, and an awful feature-length film starring Freddie Prinze, Jr.

Rated by some as the best game in the franchise, Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi is responsible for several revolutionary changes in both the series’ history and in the history of gaming in general. For the series itself, the second game in the franchise pushed the series toward more of a narrative focus, with a more concrete campaign structure and less of an open feel; these changes guided the further development of the series, although they were not popularly accepted by everyone, and some preferred the original game’s more open structure. The more significant innovation of the game, however, was the inclusion of voice acting, then a revolutionary new element for the gaming industry as a whole; at the time of the game’s release, 1991, companies had not yet mastered the art of including voice acting for cutscenes on games that were still restricted to floppy diskettes.

#6: Crusader: No Remorse (PC)

Released late in Origin Systems’ life, the Crusader series is an action/adventure series with a distinctly Western RPG feel to it; the isometric viewpoint that Origin Systems helped popularize with its Ultima series makes its way here as well, with a significant resemblance to X-Com and other more recent games with similar points of view; in fact, the game is actually built on the Ultima VIII engine, despite sharing relatively few genre elements with the other game. The plot of the game revolves around a futuristic dystopia run by a corrupt world government and one technologically-enhanced soldier’s attempts to overthrow it.

Crusader’s contribution to the gaming industry comes in the vast amounts of environmental interaction that it facilitates. Rather than the typical liberal helping of indestructible elements that can miraculously withstand rocket fire, grenades, and nuclear bombs, the majority of Crusader’s environments are in some way destructible or modifiable. This extends to the doodads and traps in the game, which often can be leveraged against enemies. This combination of interaction styles and flexibility allows the player to find multiple different ways of getting past the same area, a unique element for a game of this style. The success of the first game, Crusader: No Remorse, led to a sequel, Crusader: No Regret. The former was awarded the Action Game of the Year award for the PC for its release year, and has received attention as one of the best PC games ever released.

#5: Ultima I (PC)

Released back in 1986, Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness predated some of the most significant developments in the history of the video game industry and the genre which it largely defined on its own. The game is the product of Richard Garriott, the co-founder of Origin Systems, but itself predates the company; in fact, Origin Systems was founded in large part to lend more development manpower and publishing might to Garriott’s Ultima series. Interestingly, though, the official title of Ultima I always was, in fact, "Ultima I"; even from the beginning, it was intended to be a series, and the first iteration was named to reflect those aspirations.

At the time of the release, Ultima I had relatively little to go on in the industry; RPGs were in their infancy, and the genre as a whole was waiting for a game to – as I referenced in the previous list – popularize them. Ultima I was that game, creating many of the common genre conventions like tile-based graphics and isometric view points, as well as shifting the view point between the world map, dungeons, and battle screens. The most clear influences on the game, interestingly, are tabletop RPGs, reminiscent of how many early role-playing games were simply computer incarnations of existing paper-and-pencil games. Many of the ideas now core to RPGs, such as hit points, experience points, magic points, and currency, originally came from Dungeons & Dragons and other similar games. The game was also influenced by Garriott’s previous success, Akalabeth.

#4: Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (PC)

The Ultima franchise is broken up into three distinct trilogies, dubbed the Age of Darkness, Age of Enlightenment, and Age of Armageddon trilogies. Of these, commonly recognized as among the best games in the series are the first game within each trilogy; we’ve already covered the first and seventh Ultima games, originators of the Age of Darkness and Age of Armageddon, but the series’ fourth installment, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, played a more significant role in redefining the franchise.

The most significant element of Ultima IV is the significant shift it applied to the series’ focus. Before Quest of the Avatar, the Ultima series most heavily resembled what we would now call dungeon crawlers, built more on hack ‘n’ slash gameplay than RPG elements. That would seem to bode strangely for a series that I’ve credited as helping define the modern Western RPG genre, but it was Ultima IV that moved the franchise more in this direction. The game provides a much stronger focus on the story of the game, painting a broader world for more believable events and increased character development. The gameplay itself is rebuilt around this character-driven plot focus as well, with the character customization portions instead taking the form of ethical dilemmas posed to the player, not wholly unlike the modern Mass Effect games. The entire gameplay, in fact, has been built around an aspect of the character’s development, with eight virtues mapping to three principles that then impact the player’s underlying stats.

#3: Ultima III: Exodus (PC)

While the first games in each of the trilogies are often praised as the best Ultima games produced, the one that has actually received the most acclaim is the final game from the first trilogy, Ultima III: Exodus. In my previous list, I referred to the notion that every genre goes through four stages of development: experimentation, popularization, actualization, and normalization. For this early form of the Western RPG genre, this experimentation happened before Ultima, while Ultima I was responsible for popularizing the genre. Ultima III, in turn, actualized it.

What makes that remarkable, though, is that Ultima III was released in 1983. 1983 in video gaming was otherwise famous for games like the original Mario Bros. arcade game, and… not much else. Very little else was going on in the industry at the time, and yet Ultima III provided a depth and complexity that would remain modern for a decade hence as arguably the most defining game in the history of early Western RPGs. Tiled graphics had been around since the original game, but Ultima III demonstrated how these could be used to construct a stronger world. This was made even better by the animation of characters across those maps, a first for the industry. The game went on to play a major role in influencing later releases in the RPG genre, not least of which were Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. It was awarded several game of the year prizes, even for years after its release, and received a dozen ports and re-releases.

#2: Wing Commander (PC)

Origin Systems’ other main franchise, the aforementioned Wing Commander, got its start back in 1990, after the company had already made quite a name for itself with the Ultima series. This was still a remarkably early time for the PC industry, however; Wing Commander demanded a state-of-the-art gaming PC for the time, with a blazing fast 12 MHz processor, full 640 kilobytes of RAM, built-in hard drive (still not standard at the time), and video card capable of 256 color rendering. Clearly, this was not for casual gamers.

At the time of its release, Wing Commander was ridiculously well-acclaimed. For many of the reviewers, it blew their star rating systems out of the water, forcing them to give it scores above their own stated maximums (a symptom of score inflation, one of the biggest issues with the game reviewing community). For example, it remained Computer Gaming World’s best-reviewed game ever until its own sequel displaced it. It won several Game of the Year awards even from publications that did not focus on PC games, and subsequently earned ports for every active console of the time, including the SNES, Seda CD, 3DO, and Macintosh, and even one more recently to the PSP. The game also received a pair of expansion packs, and the re-releases for other consoles were sometimes enhanced with improved graphics and sound. It remains present in some corners of the public consciousness today, with credit given in the past two years alone by Maximum PC and Time Magazine.

#1: Ultima Online (PC)

Many modern MMORPGs can trace their roots to previous single-player games, not least of which is World of Warcraft, itself based on the long-running Warcraft real-time strategy series. That dynamic, though, can trace its origins to Origin, specifically with Ultima Online, released in 1997. The game was to the Ultima franchise what Final Fantasy 11 and Dragon Quest X were to their respective franchises, albeit several years earlier; in fact, Ultima Online was the first significant MMORPG. It was not the first, of course – Neverwinter Nights (little relation to the modern game) came first, and then Meridian 59 and The Realm Online, but it was Ultima Online that popularized the genre and set up later successes, including EverQuest and, of course, World of Warcraft. To give an idea of how influential Ultima Online was over the MMORPG genre, it was Richard Garriott himself that first coined the term MMORPG.

Despite its position early in the genre’s history, Ultima Online was still a very strong MMORPG, a particularly remarkable achievement considering the company had relatively few conventions or established principles to go on when it was developed. Ultima Online in many ways became a microcosm of the genre as a whole as its developers had to learn first-hand about how community interaction, psychology, and in-game economics would combine to influence the game’s trajectory. Studying Ultima Online became in many ways like studying a real world, where the principles that govern gameplay are not yet known. No element is more telling of Ultima Online’s success, though than this: today, it is still up and running. For several years, Origin Systems existed only to support the game, but to this date, it is still available and playable, a remarkable achievement in the age where supposed "World of Warcraft" killers are announced and die every month.

Conclusion

Honorable Mentions: Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress, Space Rogue, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Autoduel, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony, Wing Commander: Privateer, 2400 A.D., Tangled Tales: The Misadventures of a Wizard’s Apprentice, Omega, Wing Commander: Prophecy, Crusader: No Regret, Jane’s Longbow 2, Ultima VIII: Pagan

As mentioned above, a significant portion of Origin Systems’ later years were spent primarily maintaining Ultima Online. That itself was something of a sad development considering the earlier success the company had had in the industry as a whole. In 1992, though, the company was acquired by Electronic Arts. The combination of that acquisition and the success of Ultima Online came back to bite the company: because the industry seemed to be moving in the direction of these online games, and because Origin Systems had already demonstrated a knack for the genre, EA decided that henceforth, Origin should solely develop online games. That quickly gave way to EA cancelling Origin’s other projects, online and offline (and several online projects, including a Wing Commander online game and even an online Harry Potter game), to force them to focus on simply maintaining Ultima Online. Although the game lasted and lasted (and outlasted the company, which EA finally disbanded 2004), its success was Origin’s downfall. Richard Garriott left the company he founded, losing the rights to the Ultima franchise. He and brother Robert then founded Destination Games (a name-play on their original "Origin" name), which itself focused primarily on online games like Tabula Rasa. Through a partnership with South Korean developer NCsoft, Destination Games has been renamed NCsoft West and focuses primarily on localizing NCsoft’s projects. Garriott, in turn, has moved on to starting a third company, Portalarium, which has thus far primarily focused on casual Facebook games. However, Garriott has suggested that the company is working on a sequel to Ultima Online; little is known of the effort yet.

If you’d like to join in on the discussion of this list, I invite you to the Top 10 List discussion board, linked on this page. You’re also welcome to contact me directly via the information in my contributor profile, or to come by either of the web sites that co-host these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com. If you have any suggestions for what company I should review next, please let me know!

A few bits of housekeeping before I get started: first of all, game development is an inherently muddled process, and oftentimes it is difficult to draw lines around who developed which game. At times, this may lead to disagreement over who the developer of a particular game truly is; however, with how quickly the industry changes and the speed with which companies are bought, sold, and changed, there is never truly a black and white to what constitutes one developer’s library. Secondly, there will be a lot of differentiation in the sizes of the libraries described in these lists. As such, in certain lists, I will refrain from including more than one game from one franchise and instead use one game as a stand-in for the series as a whole; in other lists, multiple games from the same franchise may be listed. Lastly, while I have a list of companies I plan to look at eventually, I am always looking for suggestions on what company to cover next; if you would like to make a suggestion, you can drop by the Top 10 List discussion board, contact me through my contributor profile, or visit either of my websites that cross-post these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com.

This week, I’ll be talking about id Software.

I’ve now written 16 lists in this "Top 10 Games Developed By…" series, from Konami to Square-Enix. A few weeks ago, though, I received a very valid criticism: all of my lists were very console-centric. Not a single PC game was featured on any of these lists besides the occasional cross-platform release. Part of that is because I, myself, am more of a console gamer, but part of that is also because in most cases, companies tend to focus on either console games (occasionally that receive PC ports, but it’s clear the focus is on the console release) or PC games. Few companies make developing for both a first-class priority. So, to make up for this negligence, I’m going to spend the next several weeks focusing on companies that primarily develop for PC, starting with arguably the most iconic PC developer ever, id Software. Started in 1991 primarily by John Carmack (along with John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack), id Software is one of those rare companies that truly revolutionized the gaming industry; they nearly single-handedly ushered in the age of the first-person shooter, still to date the most popular genre in the industry. Most notably, id did not solely have this impact through the games themselves, but also through the availability of the engines (itself a PC gaming hallmark) which became the foundations for dozens of other acclaimed games.

#10: Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars (PC)

But before the days of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, id Software got its start with Commander Keen. Commander Keen was a platformer game not at all unlike the extremely popular Super Mario Bros. that came before it; in fact, it has been suggested that Commander Keen was effectively a way for the PC gaming industry to leverage the success of platformers as spawned by Nintendo’s popular franchise. Still, the similarities are very apparent, and in fact Commander Keen got its start (at least conceptually) as a developed direct PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3, a product Nintendo declined the opportunity to purchase when approached.

Commander Keen wasn’t merely a take-off on the Mario games, however; it provided its own significant improvements as well, most importantly the smooth-scrolling capability that visually set the game far apart from both other PC platformers and their console-based counterparts. The young company partnered with a developer, Apogee, to release the game to a large audience, laying the groundwork for the partnership that would make id Software’s later releases so successful. This publishing partnership also led to one of the unique elements of the game, its episodic shareware model: players could typically play the first episode for free, while the next two episodes required payment. Based on its success (and, arguably, on the success of the company over the next several years), the game earned several sequels and, eventually, a Game Boy Color release, titled simply Commander Keen.

#9: Rage (PC)

From the earliest days of id Software’s history, we fast-forward to the latest days, the company’s 2011 release simply titled Rage. Primarily a first-person shooter, the game also shows influences from racing games and open-world games. As the first original (non-sequel) first-person shooter released by the most famous first-person shooter developer in over a decade, Rage was met with a significant level of anticipation prior to its release, if only for the reputation of the developer. The final product, however, fell a bit short of expectations. It was no doubt still a high-quality release, garnering several awards especially for the E3 demonstrations, but it did not define its genre and change its industry the way many of id’s prior releases had.

Rage is also important for being the first game developed on the id Tech 5 engine. As we’ll discuss at length later, one of id Software’s greatest strengths, both as a company and as a developer, is that it develops very full, modular, and accessible engines to support the majority of its games. This development paradigm allows the company to outsource its engine to other developers, enhancing the quality of their game while also increasing their own power as a developer (and their bottom line as well). With id Tech 5, however, the company departed from its predecessors in that it has not been made available to licensees outside of id’s parent company, ZeniMax. As a result, the only games to be developed on the id Tech 4 engine thus far are Rage and the forthcoming Doom 4.

#8: Quake III Arena (PC)

Despite the subtitle, Quake III Arena is the third game in id Software’s hyper-successful Quake franchise. The subtitle ‘Arena’ comes from the game’s ultimate eschewing of any single player mode at all; the only single-player mode available in Quake III Arena is a typical multiplayer mode played against CPU-controlled bots rather than a story campaign or series of custom single-player missions. That change came from the fact that the vast majority of the popularity of the previous Quake games had been in their multiplayer function; Quake and Quake II, as we’ll discuss later, became most famous for their head-to-head modes.

For whatever reason, however, Quake III Arena has never reached the level of cultural penetration and popularity that its two predecessors reached. That’s not because of the quality of the game: the game was still among the most advanced first-person shooters ever at the time of its release, arguably surpassed only by the original Half-Life. It could be, though, that the lack of a single-player mode alienated part of its audience. Nonetheless, the game became a popular event in professional competitive gaming leagues because of its balance and cutting-edge power. The game was also important as the first game to use the new id Tech 3 game engine. That engine has gone on to be used in several other very popular games, including American McGee’s Alice, the Star Wars Jedi Knight series, the original Call of Duty, and one of the early Medal of Honor games.

#7: Hovertank 3D (PC)

With those three games aside, the remainder of this list will read something like a history lesson of id Software. That’s not to say that these rankings were solely driven by recapping the history of the company; in my opinion, these rankings still hold true for describing the quality, impact, and significance of id Software’s major releases. It just so happens that they occur in chronological order following the developer’s increased aptitude in developing first-person shooters.

The very first first-person shooter that id Software developed was its 1991 release for DOS titled Hovertank 3D. Although the game was not the first 3D DOS game, it was among the first to gain notable popularity, as well as among the first in the shooter genre to make the jump to 3D. Like the rest of id Software’s early shooter releases, the 3D element of the game was actually "faked"; whereas modern 3D games create an actual world and position a virtual camera within that world, Hovertank 3D operated instead by scaling the sprites directly based on the distance between the player and the enemy. Were it not for the title ‘Hovertank’, though, the player might never even realize they are technically controlling a moving tank; it is very easy to imagine the game more as a traditional first-person shooter. Unlike the later id Software games, Hovertank 3D was not built on an independent library, limiting the extent to which the mechanics behind Hovertank 3D might be generalized to other franchises.

#6: Catacomb 3-D (PC)

id Software is typically recognized as having one particular "holy trinity" of 3D first-person shooters, but before those shooters came two predecessors: the aforementioned Hovertank 3D and the first true id Software first-person shooter, Catacomb 3-D. Unlike Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3-D wasn’t an all-new franchise; John Carmack, independent from id Software, released Catacomb and Catacomb II, but both were 2D games. Catacomb 3-D, in a shift, was (as the title gives away) rendered in 3D. Like Hovertank 3D, the 3D element of the game was in some ways more mimicked than real: rather than relying on the virtual camera, Catacomb 3-D still scaled enemies according to the distance to the player.

Other than that, though, Catacombs 3-D was the necessary iterative expansion and improvement on the Hovertank 3D engine and design. The most major development in the game was the texture mapping that occurred in the game’s backgrounds. Texture mapping, for those unaware, is when the game engine takes a rendered shape, like a wall, hill, or road, and places the repeated texture over it. In Hovertank 3D, for example, the walls were shown in bright single colors because no texture mapping was present; in Catacomb 3-D, the walls are texture-mapped with images of bricks, decorations, and other objects. This might sound like a trivial problem, but it actually represented one of the most major early challenges for the video game industry and its transition to 3D gaming; texture mapping was a non-issue in 2D, but in 3D, where the player’s position must be taken into consideration, it represented a significant obstacle.

#5: Wolfenstein 3D (PC)

With the origins of id Software’s strength in developing 3D games established, we now move on to the aforementioned "holy trinity" of shooters that the company developed; these are the three series that put id Software on the map and made it the most successful and recognized PC game developer of the 1990s. The first of these three games is Wolfenstein 3D, originally released in 1992 for the PC and subsequently re-released a dozen times for nearly every console, from the PC to the SNES to the modern PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, and iOS.

In my opinion, every genre goes through four stages distinct stages in the drive toward popularity: experimentation, popularization, actualization, and normalization. The experimentation stage occurs in the genre’s infancy, when it experiments with new ideas and finds what works; the genre doesn’t reach popularity, but it advances itself, as seen in Hovertank 3D and Catacombs 3-D. Wolfenstein 3D, then, pushed the first-person shooter genre to the second phase, popularization. This game took the concepts from the earlier releases and deployed them in such a polished, engaging package that mainstream audiences started taking note. Like the previous releases, Wolfenstein 3D is rendered more in 2.5D than in actual 3D; in fact, Wolfenstein 3D represented a relatively modest technological step forward from Catacomb 3-D, running on even underpowered PCs at the time. The game instead succeeded based on solid gameplay design, going on to win several awards and established id Software as the preeminent developer of first-person shooters.

#4: Doom (PC)

While Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D developed the first-person shooter genre and Wolfenstein 3D popularized it, it was Doom that actualized it. By ‘actualized’, I mean that it was Doom that picked up the genre and really demonstrated what it was capable of; Wolfenstein 3D showed that first-person shooters could be fun, but Doom showed that they could be fantastic in every possible way. Released a couple years after Wolfenstein 3D in 1993, Doom is likely id Software’s most famous release; in fact, many people would have chosen it for the #1 slot on this list.

One could write an entire dissertation on what made Doom a high-quality and popular game, but in this limited space, two features stick out the most. The first of these is the technological achievement that Doom represented; whereas Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3-D, and Wolfenstein 3D all were rendered (ironically) in 2.5D (where the 3D elements are, in some way, ‘faked’), Doom was the first full-3D game that id Software released (although some would argue it is still 2.5D given that the player cannot look up or down, in my opinion it falls closer to the 3D end of that spectrum – if you’re feeling pedantic, call it 2.75D). That improvement relayed quite nicely into the second major strength: Doom was built on the first modular engine that id Software created, the Doom engine (retroactively retitled id Tech 1). Among the other popular games that used this engine are Strife, Heretic, and Hexen. In that way, Doom set the stage for what would become id Software’s hallmark, and what would go on to define a generation of first-person shooters.

#3: Doom II (PC)

The second game in the series, Doom II: Hell on Earth (typically referred to simply as Doom II), mirrored Wolfenstein 3D in many ways. Like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom II did not represent a major technological leap forward for the series and company the way that Doom did; it was built on the same Doom engine, rendered in the same nearly-full 3D, and provided the same overall aesthetic. What set Doom II apart, though, is the actual game design. Whereas Doom was a monumental leap forward for the industry from a technological standpoint, Doom II took that technology and presented it in a polished, accessible package.

The first way in which Doom II was launched more accessibly was in the release mechanism; whereas the original Doom was performed with Apogee’s usual shareware/mail-order dynamic, Doom II was the first game by id Software to receive a traditional commercial release, opening up its audience to the broader public. The game also moved toward improved systems for inventory maintenance and management, a broader, less episodic level design (more suited for a single full release than the previous shareware releases), and significantly emboldened level design; the last of these features also lent itself to the release of several level packs for the game, most notably Master Levels and Final Doom, demonstrating the game’s customizability. Overall, while the improvements and enhancements made to Doom II over Doom were largely incremental rather than revolutionary, the close proximity of the release dates and the more accessible release paradigm are enough to bump Doom II ever so slightly above the original in my opinion.

#2: Quake (PC)

The top two games on this list derive the majority of their significance not only from their quality as a standalone game, but also from the importance and significance of the libraries that underlie them. For Quake, the game was a significant departure from id’s previous Doom series; or, at least, it was as significant a departure as one can expect while staying within the same genre. The development team was something of an all-star cast, including all the usual id Software honchos along with American McGee (later of Alice fame) and Trent Reznor of the Nine Inch Nails. The storyline of the game, previously concrete and rather well-formed in the Doom series, was rather loose and served only to facilitate the sequence of levels – but in the end, that didn’t matter. Critics praised nearly every element of the game, most notably (for this paragraph, anyway) the level design, atmosphere, soundtrack, and balanced gameplay mechanics.

What truly set Quake apart, though, was that it was the first true 3D first-person shooter in id Software’s library. Doom and Doom II, for all their realism, did still execute a sort of "2.75D" mechanic that restricted some elements of the player’s interaction with the world (such as the inability to look up). In Quake, the rendering was in full 3D, allowing seamless, smooth interaction with the environment. The engine that underlies the game (Quake engine, sometimes also referred to as id Tech 1) went on to be used in Hexen II, Laser Arena, and, most notably, Half-Life.

#1: Quake II (PC)

I’m not sure what defines one game as a sequel to another. Quake II is presented as a sequel to Quake, although there is no plot similarity (granted, neither game really cares about its plot at all). Regardless of whether or not Quake II is a true "sequel" to Quake, it remains to this day, in my opinion, the most significant release in id Software’s illustrious history. As a game on its own, the game was more than an incremental improvement over the previous Quake; instead, it played the part of normalizing the first-person shooter genre. Out-of-the-box, it provided all the necessary hardware infrastructure to run what was then the most graphically advanced game ever released, and the style and structure of the game presented a much more generalizable and accessible view of the genre.

The most significant element of Quake II, though, as with the previous Quake and Doom, is its engine. Quake II runs on the id Tech 2 engine, arguably the most significant first-person shooter engine yet conceived. Other major releases, including Heretic II, UFO: Alien Invasion, Blade, Daikatana, and Anachronox, were built on top of this engine, making it one of the most influential pieces of software in the first-person shooter genre at exactly the time when the genre was becoming the driving force behind the industry (although it is important to note that the engine was not solely used for first-person shooters). It was the Quake II engine, through its easy access to OpenGL and other advanced libraries, that opened up development of first-person games to the mass of companies, helping popularize the paradigm.

Conclusion

Honorable Mentions: Final Doom, Rescue Rover, Doom 3.

After several years of independent development, id Software was finally acquired by ZeniMax Media in 2009. Given the company’s track record, this move did not represent a major change to id’s operating procedures, but instead gave them a more sound financial backing for their projects. In many ways, the goals and objectives of the company have not changed much over the years; they still focus on first-person shooters and still make an active effort to separate out the engines from the games themselves, allowing them to both leverage their work for multiple releases and to license out that work to other developers. With the acquisition by ZeniMax Media, though, the latter element of that is a bit more restricted; for the time being, only other ZeniMax Media-owned companies can develop on the engine, theoretically giving the company quite a leg-up over the competition. In reality, however, the gaming industry has come along so far that good engines are no longer as hard to come by; although id Software’s id Tech 5 might be the best presently in existence, others are more than serviceable and largely more accessible. Time will tell whether this move will come back to hurt the company, although Carmack has repeatedly stated that one day, id Tech 5, like all its predecessors, will be released in an open-source format: likely after the parent company has milked its profitability for all it’s worth.

If you’d like to join in on the discussion of this list, I invite you to the Top 10 List discussion board, linked on this page. You’re also welcome to contact me directly via the information in my contributor profile, or to come by either of the web sites that co-host these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com. If you have any suggestions for what company I should review next, please let me know!

A few bits of housekeeping before I get started: first of all, game development is an inherently muddled process, and oftentimes it is difficult to draw lines around who developed which game. At times, this may lead to disagreement over who the developer of a particular game truly is; however, with how quickly the industry changes and the speed with which companies are bought, sold, and changed, there is never truly a black and white to what constitutes one developer’s library. Secondly, there will be a lot of differentiation in the sizes of the libraries described in these lists. As such, in certain lists, I will refrain from including more than one game from one franchise and instead use one game as a stand-in for the series as a whole; in other lists, multiple games from the same franchise may be listed. Lastly, while I have a list of companies I plan to look at eventually, I am always looking for suggestions on what company to cover next; if you would like to make a suggestion, you can drop by the Top 10 List discussion board, contact me through my contributor profile, or visit either of my websites that cross-post these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com.

This week, I’ll be talking about Square-Enix.

When we last left Square, they were riding high on top of the video game world. They embroiled in one of the most significant and prolonged periods of dominance that any company has experienced in the gaming industry, and in 2003, merged with one of their chief rivals, Enix, to form what seemed to be an unstoppable development machine. Enix had long been a publisher (not a developer) of many of Square’s chief rivals, and thus the union brought Square a level of control and power in the industry that seemed to be unmatched. The new company was dominated by Square employees and executives and also retained control over significant other industry players as well, such as Taito (BlazBlue, Space Invaders, Cooking Mama), Eidos (publisher of Batman: Arkham Asylum, Deus Ex, and more), Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider, Legacy of Kain), and IO Interactive (Hitman, Kane & Lynch). Early on in its new form, Square-Enix also realized its second major console coup: beginning with the seventh console generation, its biggest titles were released for both the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360. It was during this time that Square-Enix demonstrated just how strong it believed its brand to be; in an interview, Square-Enix vice president Michihiro Sasaki openly stated that his company would have a significant role in determining which consoles won and lost the seventh generation, saying, "We don’t want the PlayStation 3 to be the overwhelming loser, so we want to support them. But we don’t want them to be the overwhelming winner either, so we can’t support them too much." As time would show, however, Sasaki may have overestimated Square-Enix’s power.

#10: Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (PS2)

I’ll make you a deal on this top ten list. Ready? I’m going to include one of my personal favorite games even though it didn’t receive a lot of critical acclaim primarily because I like it (and because, on a more unbiased front, I think a decent case can be made for its quality and significance), and in exchange I’ll also include a game that received pretty universal acclaim that I personally can’t stand. Sound fair? Alright, let’s move on – the first game in this trade is the first game in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Dirge of Cerberus.

On a personal note, I like Dirge of Cerberus because it stars one of my favorite gaming characters of all time, a character that I never felt got a fair treatment in the original game due to his optional nature. More significantly, though, Dirge of Cerberus was the major-console game release in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. Released almost ten years after the original game, Dirge of Cerberus had the deck stacked against it: Final Fantasy VII had gone on to become the most popular video game of all time by many estimates, and developing a sequel after that much build-up and anticipation was a daunting task. Dirge of Cerberus did not meet great acclaim upon release, considered by some to be subpar for its genre and others to be a confusing departure from actual Final Fantasy VII lore and canon. Despite the criticisms though, considering the challenges faced in development (of which I’ve only detailed a small portion), Dirge of Cerberus remains one of Square-Enix’s successes.

#9: Final Fantasy XII (PS2)

The PlayStation 2 was the fourth console generation for which Square (now Square-Enix) developed their flagship series, and they broke with an established formula in a modest way. Previously, Square had released three Final Fantasy games for each console generation (I, II and III for NES; IV, V, and VI for SNES; VII, VIII, and IX for PlayStation), but the release of Final Fantasy XI as a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG changed things a bit. Although the game was released for the PlayStation 2, it attracted a different type of audience with a different overall structure, thus robbing the fanbase in some ways of a third traditional RPG. That meant also that the time between Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII marked the longest period of time in which no new main-series single-player Square RPG was released. With all that said, the anticipation for Final Fantasy XII ran high.

Final Fantasy XII presented the series with one of its most radical departures in structure and style. Although the plot still centered around a band of adventurers traveling the world to save it (as any good RPG plot does), the battle system departed radically from earlier more traditional RPGs. Heavily influenced by Square’s previous foray into MMORPGs with Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy XII worked with an active battle system leveraging many established MMORPG concepts, including agro and character roles. A gambit system was introduced as well to mimic the MMORPG structure in a single-player environment, an innovation that was preserved in some way in Final Fantasy XIII.

#8: Kingdom Hearts II (PS2)

The first direct sequel to 2002′s runaway hit Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts II was, as far as I know, the first major-console release in one of Square’s most prominent series after the Square-Enix merger (Final Fantasy XII, the first Final Fantasy game after the merger, came a year later). In many ways, however, the deck was stacked against Kingdom Hearts II in the same way that it was stacked against Dirge of Cerberus. Kingdom Hearts was in some ways a surprise hit; in retrospect it seems a foregone conclusion that the game would succeed, but at the time of its release, the relatively bizarre concept was risky. With the success of the original game, though, Kingdom Hearts II faced the delicate challenge of attempting to recapture the balance that made the original so popular.

In the end, though, the game was a rousing success, receiving numerous awards and Game of the Year consideration. It did not quite match its predecessor’s reception, but it still receives credit as one of the best RPGs ever made. Perhaps even more notably, Kingdom Hearts II went a long way toward maturing the franchise; with the original game, it was impossible to be too serious while still starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, but with the sequel, a degree of maturity and lore was necessary in order to keep the game universe interesting and expandable. Kingdom Hearts II introduced many of the most notable plot elements that have driven the franchise to this day.

#7: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (PSP)

One might think that the merger between Square and Enix would reduce the company’s reliance on its most popular franchise for success; however, whereas my list on Square itself featured five Final Fantasy games, by my judgment six of the newer company’s best games are in that main franchise. Two of these come from the off-shoot Compilation of Final Fantasy VII sub-series, with Crisis Core the second one listed here.

I’m not going to lie, I didn’t actually care for Crisis Core (it’s not the previously-mentioned popular game that I hate, though). To me, it was a textbook example of Square-Enix’s obsession with creating new content rather than exploring existing content – but if you want to hear more of my opinion on Crisis Core, my review is sitting there waiting for you. What I can say to the game’s credit is that as much as the deck was stacked against Dirge of Cerberus, it was stacked against Crisis Core even more. The game was tasked with retelling one of the most iconic stories in all of video game history, a flashback sequence that has become one of the most memorable scenes of all time, in an all-new medium with modern graphics. While the new technology might seem like a benefit, oftentimes it can be a drawback; the older art style allowed a level of charm and suspension of disbelief that modern consoles do not have, and thus the task facing the game was difficult from the start. It still could have been done better, of course, but the battle system and other elements were solid enough to make Crisis Core one of Square-Enix’s best.

#6: Dissidia: Final Fantasy (PSP)

Somewhere around the Square-Enix merger, I think Square decided that it needed to start milking its most famous franchise for more money. Several games have followed recently that seem to be cash-grabs, games that they know will sell on the strength of fan service alone. In a testament to Square-Enix as a company, though, these games have still largely been well-executed; it might be true that the inspiration for the endless Final Fantasy compilations and Final Fantasy XIII sequels is extra profit, but the actual games that are created to milk that profit tend to have high production values, even if the design and story decisions are often odd.

Dissidia Final Fantasy is the first major example of one of these inter-game compilations, starring the protagonists and antagonists of several of the franchise’s most popular games. With the series falling on harder times starting with the latter half of the PlayStation 2 era, it might have been an attempt to rekindle interest in the franchise as a whole. Nonetheless, Dissidia Final Fantasy went beyond fan service to deliver a very solid fighting game experience for both Final Fantasy fans and fighting game fans alike. Not to be outdone, the game’s direct sequel was even better (although only incrementally), featuring a larger cast, a more fleshed-out story, and a more solid overall game experience. Of special note in both was the way they each ported RPG elements into a completely new genre, similar to how the same achievement was executed with Theatrhythm Final Fantasy.

#5: Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (PSP)

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep is the sixth game in the Kingdom Hearts series, and the fifth developed by Square-Enix (making all but the first game the product of the newly-united company). To briefly recap, the original was followed by a Game Boy Advance game Chain of Memories (later ported to the PlayStation 2), then the first direct sequel for the PlayStation 2, and then two portable games, coded and 358/2 Days. These games served to continue the maturity that the direct sequel had given the series, shifting the focus to a more united Disney-based world and a cogent backstory, but it was (in my opinion, as always) Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep for the PSP that truly solidified the series and completely that maturation process. In terms of scale and canonical significance, Birth By Sleep is also the closest thing the franchise has to a true Kingdom Hearts III.

A prequel to the original game, Birth By Sleep was successful in shaking off many of the remaining shackles on the franchise from the strange series origin. By shifting the attention to the prequel, the game was able to partially reinvent the tone and atmosphere, moving the focus to the Disney worlds and reducing the reliance on the player’s familiarity with Final Fantasy canon. Given the series’ ongoing transition into a solid standalone franchise, this shift was critical as it increased the accessibility of the game for fans that lacked experience with Final Fantasy’s long series history.

#4: The World Ends With You (DS)

Alright, now I’ll make good on my half of that earlier bargain. You let me include a game I enjoyed that wasn’t well received, so now I’ll include a game that was very well received that I personally couldn’t stand. That game is the 2007 Nintendo DS release The World Ends With You. The World Ends With You is one of the new intellectual properties Square-Enix developed in the latest console generation, and it has gone on to become the most acclaimed new property as other released like The 3rd Birthday and The Last Remnant have failed to find a significant following. An iOS port has further increased the popularity of the game, and the game was so well-received that it became one of those rare portable games to actually receive notable attention for Game of the Year in its release year.

An RPG in name only, The World Ends With You is an incredibly unique release in nearly every way possible. The battle system relies on touch controls rather than traditional turn-based combat, and to this day remains one of the most notable Nintendo DS games to truly execute the touch controls in a non-contrived manner. The tone of the game was an enormous departure from any other RPG I’ve ever seen as well, taking place in a modern setting with a jarring and immersive backstory more akin to modern anime series – an interesting twist considering the visual style of the game is unique as well, with little similarity to anime otherwise. As for my personal opinion of the game… well, once again, my review is sitting there for you to go read.

#3: Dragon Quest X (WII)

In an interesting twist on the stateside success Square and Square-Enix have experienced throughout their histories, two of the top three games on this list actually have not yet received an American release. The first among these is Dragon Quest X, whose full name Dragon Quest X: Mezameshi Itsutsu no Shuzoku Online translates to Dragon Quest X: Rise of the Five Tribes Online. For a little backstory, Dragon Quest was Enix’s main property before the merger with Square (although the individual games were developed by Chunsoft, Heartbeat, and ArtePiazza). Unlike Final Fantasy, however, Dragon Quest’s main appeal remained in Japan, and the game never reached the level of cultural penetration in the United States that Final Fantasy was able to achieve.

Dragon Quest X is the first Dragon Quest game to be almost completely developed in-house by Square-Enix (with help from Armor Project, the company headed by the creator of Dragon Quest, Yuji Horii). In many ways, the game is the "Final Fantasy XI" of the Dragon Quest series, the first step into MMORPG territory for an established traditional RPG. Like Final Fantasy XI before it, Dragon Quest X has become a significant hit, successfully bridging the jump to the MMORPG genre. Perhaps most remarkably, the game is available for the Nintendo Wii, a console notoriously adverse to the types of structures necessary for a successful MMORPG. The game also remains more true to its traditional RPG roots than many MMORPGs, retaining an appeal sure to translate to the eventual Wii U re-release and, hopefully, an American localization.

#2: Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)

Inarguably one of the most polarizing games released this console generation, Final Fantasy XIII was greeted with all the fanfare and anticipation of any main-series Final Fantasy game (even though the series hadn’t had a true killer game in eight years). As the first release for a new console generation, the series had an enormous reputation to live up to: it beget natural comparisons to several of Square’s all-time greatest games, including Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy X. Each of those rang in a new console generation, and each of those went on to be regarded as among the greatest games ever created.

With the absence of a revolutionary hardware change akin to the transition from 2D to 3D, though, Square-Enix had to find other ways to make Final Fantasy XIII stand out, and it was the design departures and decisions made here that served to make the game so polarizing. With this new release, Square-Enix pushed all-in on the graphical capabilities of the new system and decided to make the game as cinematic as possible, with everything from the regular world interaction to the battle sequences being rendered as beautifully as a FMV. In order to make that happen, though, they were forced to take control out of the player’s hands in many ways with a more scripted and AI-driven battle system, an incredibly linear world layout, and an overall removal of many traditional RPG elements like towns and shops. These decisions were polarizing, but for those that can appreciate Final Fantasy XIII for the unique release it attempts to be, the result is breathtaking.

#1: Final Fantasy Type-0 (PSP)

Released over a year ago for the PSP, Final Fantasy Type-0 has yet to receive an American release. What’s more, no definitive answer has been given to the question of when, if ever, the game will be localized to the United States; the most recent word from director Hajime Tabata suggests that there are actually currently no plans to localize the game at all, not even for the PlayStation Vita (potentially due to the console’s poor sales in the United States). All that is a shame because, in my opinion, Final Fantasy Type-0 is actually the best game yet released by Square-Enix.

Initially announced by the name Final Fantasy Agito XIII, Type-0 nonetheless retains many of the elements from the Final Fantasy XIII franchise, including the notion of branded l’Cie tasked with a particular Focus to complete. Aside from these shared elements, though, there is little if any actual continuity between Type-0 and Final Fantasy XIII. Instead, the game focuses on an all-new world centering around four battling nations and a class of fourteen selectable characters. The game was released to nearly universal acclaim in 2011, and by many estimates was Square’s best-reviewed game since Final Fantasy X. The game seems to strike the balance that Final Fantasy XIII missed, adequately counterbalancing story, gameplay, and graphics. With the solid reception and associated Final Fantasy brand name, Final Fantasy Type-0 is sure to become one of the most hotly-anticipated localization efforts of the near future.

Conclusion

Honorable Mentions: Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Front Mission 4, Mario Hoops 3-on-3, Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, Code Age Commanders: Tsugu Mono Tsuga Reru Mono, Front Mission 5: Scars of the War, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, Final Fantasy XIII-2, The Last Remnant, The 3rd Birthday.

As sad as it is, since the merger with Enix, Square has not been able to recapture the dominance that it experienced throughout the 1990s. Its recent releases have largely been forgotten, panned, or hotly debated, and while polarizing games are not bad games, they don’t quite match a company whose prior reputation had been for developing nearly-universally loved games like Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Final Fantasy X. But while the merger may have hurt the game development portion of the Square-Enix business model, the company as a publisher has never been stronger. In recent years, you might have been surprised to see the company’s name on numerous unexpected releases, such as Sleeping Dogs, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Just Cause 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. The company is even the Japanese publisher for what will likely be the year’s best-selling game, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, as well as all the recent Call of Duty games. With the revenue from the new Final Fantasy games (regardless of how much popularity and critical acclaim they may receive) and the income stream as a recognized and respected publisher, Square-Enix’s financial future is certainly secure for the foreseeable future, even if their golden age may already be behind them.

If you’d like to join in on the discussion of this list, I invite you to the Top 10 List discussion board, linked on this page. You’re also welcome to contact me directly via the information in my contributor profile, or to come by either of the web sites that co-host these lists, DDJGames.com or GamingSymmetry.com. If you have any suggestions for what company I should review next, please let me know!