History in the Making — An Elder Scrolls Retrospective

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            History in the Making—An Elder Scrolls Retrospective Part 1

By SteerpikeMay 2002

The Start of a Beautiful Friendship

It’s always strange to watch history in the making. Most ironic is that we rarely recognize it for what it is—”history in the making” is usually just some new tidbit until it actually becomes … well, history. Then it may grow and change over time, improving, remaining in our collective consciousness. Whatever it is, it’s something that we know will not be forgotten for a long time to come.

Naturally enough “history in the making” is not necessarily an appropriate term to apply to computer games; we were, after all, just told that computer games cannot communicate ideas and are therefore not protected by free speech (thanks for clearing that up for us, judiciary!), so to call a game series “history” may be offensive to some Hayes Code-worshiping censorniks still lurking out there. “Gaming history” will encapsulate things more nicely and keep us safe from the pundits.

When Ultima hit stores, probably few aside from Richard Garriot himself envisioned the future of the series. Same goes for Wing Commander, Wizardry, and any number of other successful first launches that have spawned franchises in their own right.  I was working in software retail when The Elder Scrolls: Arena came out in 1993; I remember that buzz about the game was very positive (it was one of the earliest first-person RPGs and had arrived amidst the Doom craze, when everything was going to first person), but I have no recollection of thinking that it, too, would be the start of something or that The Elder Scrolls would become such a favorite among gamers.

Nine years later, we know the series to be one of the most progressive and forward-thinking franchises in the history of gaming—a quality that has blackened the eye and the pride of Bethesda Softworks more than once, for the studio/publisher behind The Elder Scrolls has committed just as many egregious errors as it has achieved victories. Bethesda has developed a reputation for releasing games too late, too riddled with bugs, and too insufficiently playtested to be worth the accolades they might otherwise deserve. It’s possible to describe The Elder Scrolls as a study in the disgrace and humiliation of a company that absolutely refuses to let go of its vision for the future of CRPGs—but it’s equally possible to describe the series as the first step on the thousand-mile journey that will finally bridge the gap between computer and tabletop roleplaying, and certainly as a work so immense, so complex, and so stimulating that we may be able to brandish it before the pundits who still refuse to accept our pastime for what it is—an entertainment art form in its thrilling infancy. Like them or not, The Elder Scrolls are part of something the medium needs, something that may one day lift our perceptions of interactive media and our imaginations alike to heights we’ve not yet imagined.

With the big release of Morrowind, it’s time to do a retrospective on the series to remind gamers where it has been and to speculate on where it might be going. For many, many gamers, especially our friends in XBox Country, Morrowind will be the first Elder Scrolls game they play. Some may not realize that though Morrowind is officially referred to as “The Elder Scrolls III,” it is in fact the fifth title to bear that Elder Scrolls prefix.

The Youngest Scroll

According to the documentation, The Elder Scrolls: Arena got the subtitle it did because the vast, sprawling empire of Tamriel in which the game takes place is, by all accounts, a pretty rotten place to live. Stuff is expensive, monsters prowl the landscape, the provinces constantly wage war against one another, and aside from a few relatively civilized areas, the entire nation bitterly resents occupation by the Imperial Province of Cyrodiil, a land of humans who decided, several hundred years before, that they should just take everything for themselves. Each of the provinces is home to a race of your usual fantasy peoples—Dark, High, and Tree Elves inhabit the provinces of Morrowind, Sumerset Isle, and Valenwood respectively; exotic races, such as the tigerlike Khajiit and lizard-man Argonian tribes, live in more distant Elsweyr and Black Marsh. Those directly related to human beings are relegated to the northern provinces of Skyrim, High Rock, Hammerfell, and of course Cyrodiil itself.

Something is rotten in the state of Tamriel, however. When Arena opens we discover that Jagar Tharn, the Imperial Battle Mage and advisor to Emperor Uriel Septim VII, has trapped his former boss in a (presumably unpleasant) alternate dimension. In an unusually well thought-out power grab for a fantasy CRPG villain, Tharn has also assumed the Emperor’s shape and form. No one except you and a handful of others realize that anything is wrong. Your character is stuffed in a dank prison cell for the somewhat dubious crime of “knowing too much,” and it’s your lonely and largely thankless task not only to expose Tharn for the imposter he is, but to drag Emperor Uriel back from wherever he’s been banished.

Sadly, Arena came out before the fantasy RPG renaissance, when developers realized that locating and assembling the disparate parts of some magical object shouldn’t necessarily represent the end all and be all of the player’s goals in such a game. So you have to—wait for it—locate and assemble the Eight Pieces of the Generic Magical Item (in this case, the Staff of Chaos) in order to defeat Jagar Tharn and save the Emperor. Not a particularly creative objective, but a very creative story.

Perhaps sensing this flaw in the execution of their game, the designers did their best to sideline it. A major two-part undertaking is required to locate each of the eight pieces of the staff (there’s one piece in each occupied province), and each instance of this is so difficult that characters really have little choice but to spend lots of time enhancing their own skills by doing odd jobs and adventuring on their own initiative. Magical artifacts also pepper the game, and if you’re lucky someone might make mention of one rumored to be nearby. Generally speaking, however, the side quests in Arena were little more than the “Medieval FedEx Man” tasks that reviewers like me joke about. However, at the time, it was fresh enough that taking objects from one person to another over and over again wasn’t so bad.

Arena is often compared to Ultima Underworld, a game only one year senior, and the comparison is generally a fair one.  Both were first-person, action-oriented, fantasy role-playing games.  Both involved puzzle-solving and communication with others but focused on exploration of vast areas and use of magic and equipment to excel.  But Arena boasted more than 400 unique visitable locations, nearly 12 million square kilometers of in-game landscape to explore, 150,000 words of in-game story, and probably 100 hours worth of play assuming you did nothing but follow the main quest.  And remember that this was all done in 1993, when that level of scope was frankly unheard of. It was, at the time, as close as anyone had come to recreating the pencil-and-paper RPG experience on a computer.

There was a certain sense of “sprawl” associated with Arena; it was easy to get lost in a place as big as Tamriel.  Quick travel was available for crossing long distances, though theoretically a player could walk from one end of the empire to the other—it would just take a long, long time. It’s interesting to note that though the developers of Arena worked hard to create a realistic world map with pleasant rolling landscapes, players rarely used it. The truth is that the majority of the game was spent in town, in dungeons, or looking for the same—though this did nothing to detract from the fun and frolic that was Arena.

Technologically speaking, it was excellent for its time, with a realistic weather system (I used to really dig the snowstorms), day and night cycle, fairly strong sprite-based graphics, and plenty of attractive interiors and exteriors to gawk at. MIDI-based sound that would make gamers chuckle nowadays sounded just fine in 1993, especially considering it was being pumped through a Soundblaster 16. Gameplay in general was just the sort of time-suck people like from quality RPGs; I spent hours playing Arena, sometimes simply to explore and have adventures, other times intent on progressing the story arc. Bethesda did one better than most design studios by allowing great flexibility to the player, including no fewer than eighteen potential character classes to choose from—players could also choose to hail from any of the eight occupied provinces of Tamriel, and each race enjoyed unique benefits and drawbacks.  This was just a hint of things to come; the degree of flexibility found in Arena was nothing compared to its successors.

I know Elder Scrolls fans who to this day swear that Arena is their favorite Elder Scrolls installment—though I think that with Morrowind finally out, we’ll see that opinion changing. And it really did have just about everything you could want from a CRPG: action, tons of adventure, reasonably good story, side quests galore. Nothing was missing, because things that we’d note as being absent today weren’t considerations in 1993’s technology.  Remember that most people played Arena on 486 computers with 8 megabytes of RAM, and you’ll understand why persistent game effects and NPCs that remembered who you were weren’t exactly necessities in the games of the time.

Ironically, the Elder Scrolls as we know them today almost never were. Despite the story above, the truth is that Arena is called “Arena” because the game was not conceived as an RPG but as a first-person gladiatorial fighting game featuring a wide selection of fantasy races and classes coming together to do battle in a huge (you guessed it) arena. Apparently someone at Bethesda thought that a CRPG concept had more promise, and the universe of Tamriel was born.

Arena was big during that glorious gaming summer of 1994, when X-Com, Doom 2, Ultima Underworld 2, Myst, and Wing Commander 3 all vied for attention. That summer was perhaps the best season for game releases in the short history of the industry.  Arena sold well and received very high critical acclaim thanks to its potent degree of nonlinearity, action-packed style, and quality of replayability. Arena was, and still is, a crucial achievement in the world of nonlinear CRPGs. By all accounts it was among the first of the true nonlinear fantasy roleplaying games. And for that alone it would be a classic, but the truth is Arena was much, much more—not only for itself, but for the foundation it provided.

Bugs by the Bucketload

And now for the story of how the sequel to Arena cost me nearly five hundred dollars.

I was a senior in college and very ill the day The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall finally came out in 1996. I remember it well.  A remarkably unfriendly flu had kept me horizontal for nearly ten days, and I’d spent it weakly mousing my way through what passed for the Internet at the time, looking for information on Daggerfall.  We didn’t have sites that tracked the ship status of games back then, so much of my intelligence gathering depended on calling EB and croaking the same questions over and over again: Is it in? No?  When do you expect it? Can you hold a copy for me? A miraculous feeling of health and well-being overcame me when the kindly EB man told me that Daggerfall had finally arrived. Even that foul swine flu couldn’t compete with my pent-up excitement.

In the intervening years since Arena I’d unwisely upgraded my computer to a Cyrix 6×86 processor. Not knowing at the time what a floating-point unit was, I thought it was the bee’s knees (it booted Windows 3.1 in nine seconds)—that is, until I first installed Daggerfall.

The instructions had me in such a state that I could barely make it through character generation. I was so excited to play a game that promised to completely blur the line between fantasy and reality, between computers and tabletop, that I simply didn’t want to deal with the mechanics of getting started. I wanted to be halfway through.  So I raced through chargen, tore through the opening dungeon, and immediately began exploring Gothway Garden—the nearest of more than 5,000 unique visitable locations in Daggerfall—only to experience …

DOS Causeway Error #9. Dagger.exe Has Shut Down

Woe. Torment. Agony. For days I started over again and again. I reinstalled. I formatted. I CHKDSKed. Then the [not particularly] friendly tech support gnomes at Bethesda sent me a sad email. It said, essentially, that Daggerfall was not compatible with my processor. Period. The game would never stop crashing. And while a patch was in the works, I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

Though Bethesda and Cyrix eventually solved the problem, I’d long since gone storming off to Geraldo’s Casa de PCs and gotten myself a genuine Intel processor. So by the time that the patch fixing that particular error came along, I … I was dealing with all the other errors in Daggerfall.

It is impossible to start a discourse on The Elder Scrolls II without focusing first and foremost on the fact that the game was released unacceptably early and so riddled with bugs as to be nigh unplayable. I and other players encountered dozens of crash bugs, kindergarten-level spelling and grammatical errors peppering the million-word text narrative, ghastly tearing and collision, clipping problems, missing quest objectives, bizarre reputation and crime errors, items and capabilities clearly described in the documentation but missing from the game, map corruption, save-game corruption, objects stuck in the walls, and so forth, literally ad nauseam. I can’t track down an official number of patches finally released by Bethesda to make up for the humiliation that was Daggerfall—it appears to be between eight and a dozen—but the truth is, even the final version of Daggerfall was horrendously buggy.

Far be it from me to forgive the company for this massive faux pas; the crime cannot be excused, but it is only marginally offset by the fact that Daggerfall was so unspeakably ambitious.  The amount of play available in Daggerfall cannot be measured in hours. Sure, if you started at the beginning and went straight through the game, focusing only on “story” objectives and ignoring every single divergent path, you could expect to finish in about 200 hours. But you’d be ignoring ninety percent of the experience of Daggerfall, because the point of the game was that you didn’t have to follow the story at all. Here for the first time was a game in which you could buy a house, settle down, meet people, and, if you chose, keep your days full from dawn until dusk fulfilling tasks without ever once repeating a job or embarking on something that actually progressed the story. Daggerfall was immense to the point of incomprehensibility.

One of the good things about Daggerfall was in fact a feature I’d rushed to get through the first time around—the character generation process. New players could choose from a list of predefined classes; create their own by assembling, puzzle-like, the different skill sets, advantages, and disadvantages, or instead answer a dozen questions with varying moral choices and have the system suggest a class based on the answers they gave. Additionally, Daggerfall was the first CRPG to eliminate “experience points” as a tool for advancement. No longer did a thief become a better thief by killing a dragon but not by picking a lock; no, leveling up in Daggerfall depended on your ability to improve key skills related to your class. If you were a thief and you wanted to go up a level, you needed to improve your thiefly skills. All the dragons in the world wouldn’t help you. While this made tremendous sense and has been adopted by many other systems since, there was and still is a small drawback: classes whose key skills were routine requirements (running, say; or jumping or talking to people) were more likely to advance than classes whose key skills were called upon less frequently. Still, it’s much better than a silly and arbitrary numbering system that provides rewards based on actions taken rather than skills gained.

If you did choose to follow the story, you’d find a spectacularly conceived and wickedly intricate murder-and-revenge plot dealing largely with the presence of a very angry ghost—the ghost of the recently killed King Lysandus of Daggerfall—who is inexplicably haunting his former hometown with a spectral army.  Unlike Arena, which took place in the entire vastness of Tamriel, Daggerfall (and indeed all future Elder Scrolls games) focused on what was in fact a very small area of the huge empire. Daggerfall is a city-state in the province of High Rock, at war with a few neighboring city-states in the same province. The entire game takes place in an area around a bay on the western seaboard of Tamriel. Your character is an imperial agent sent to discover the reason for the spirit’s bad-kitty behavior, and, in an oh-if-it’s-not-too-much-trouble sort of way, to track down a missing letter sent by the Emperor to Lysandus’s wife. The letter was “of a sentimental and personal nature,” and the Emperor doesn’t want it falling into the wrong hands, because stuff like that would command a fortune on eBay. Now, if you’re thinking the Emperor Uriel is just getting it on with Mrs. Lysandus … well, if you think that, then you have no idea how devious the writers at Bethesda really are. The reality of Daggerfall’s plot is infinitely more complex.

A new paradigm for RPG design is what allowed the game to be so colossal in scope: terrain, dungeons, and many interiors were generated randomly and didn’t exist at all until you actually approached them.  This made it possible for Daggerfall to ship on only a single CD, but it led to serious problems, especially in the honeycomb of underground ruins beneath the surface of the landscape. The word “large” does not adequately describe the extent of hugeness that every single one of the literally thousands of dungeons offered.  It was so easy to get lost in this underworld that a spell had to be specifically created to get you out once you were in. Weeks of game time could be spent down there, first looking for whatever objective you were supposed to deal with in the dungeon, and then wandering until you find your way back out. The worthless automap did little to help matters.

If you find your life dissatisfyingly lacking in frustration, try this on for size: grope your way through the haunted darkness of a nineteen-floor dungeon just to kill a goblin that’s been eating someone’s cattle. Arrive in the goblin’s room and find it half clipped into the wall so you can’t touch it. Return to the guild that hired you for the job and accept a demotion and decrease in reputation because you “failed” a quest. Because quest objectives were placed randomly inside the randomly generated maps, the object or target you were looking for might just as easily have been ten feet from the entrance as in the deepest, darkest corner of the underground vastness. More often than not, it was impossible to find your objective at all. If you did, there was a good chance it was stuck in the wall and inaccessible. If it wasn’t, there was a good chance you’d get stuck in the wall.

Unlike Arena, the world of Daggerfall was a persistent one. People remembered you if you’d done something to warrant remembering; if you committed any crimes, the city guard would certainly remember you and passers-by would be less likely to help with directions.  This had to be patched, of course; in the original release of Daggerfall, your reputation went up every time you committed murder. I came out of prison one time and found the city idolizing me as a god.  Just another bug in a box full of bugs. Another personal favorite was that though the designers had incorporated the ability to catch vampirism and lycanthropy—on the plausible ground that if you hang out with vampires and werewolves, you might become one yourself—getting bitten by a were-creature always turned you into a wereboar, no matter what, and getting vampirism was simply impossible. When I emailed Bethesda about this, curious as to why a werewolf had turned me into a wereboar, I got the electronic equivalent of a shrug in return. The bug was so insignificant compared to all the others that it wasn’t even on their radar.

Daggerfall was the first game Bethesda produced that used their proprietary new game engine, the XNGine. XNGine was a sprite-based tool, supporting 3D only in software and depending heavily on software fogging to look good. For the time, XNGine looked great, and Bethesda continued using it long after it had ceased to be competitive with other game engines. It was designed to be highly scalable, though that turned out to be slightly less than true in future iterations of the engine.

One of the issues that shortened Daggerfall’s life was that it shipped in the absolute earliest days of the 3D revolution. Sadly, the game never supported hardware 3D—not even in a patch—which took years off its shelf life. Though the blocky, sprite-based graphics looked outstanding at the moment Daggerfall hit shelves, the world was about to be treated to GL Quake and accelerated Tomb Raider. Once gamers saw what the future held, they had little patience for single-surface sprites, inadequate fogging effects, and water that looked like the televised snow that appears when you unhook your cable. Also, though the workhorse DirectX 3 was being widely used, Bethesda chose to ignore it, deciding DOS support was more important. Thus Daggerfall also represented one of the last games that required users to manually configure their hardware to play. Gamers are spoiled now, and we want our titles to work straight out of the box. Lack of DirectX support and refusal to patch the XNGine to support Direct3D may have doomed Daggerfall’s replayability potential.

This is important, because as I prepared to write this article, I gave a lot of serious thought about what really killed Daggerfall for me. Obviously I hated the bugs, I hated the insanely huge dungeons with their absurd jumping and lever-pulling puzzles, their clipping problems, their missing quest objectives. I hated that so many things were promised in the documentation that never turned up in the game. But the truth is, I could live with all that because despite the bugs, the game came really close to blurring the line I wanted it to blur—the line between true nonlinearity and the “faked” nonlinearity of a game like Myst. Too many people think that the ability to accomplish objectives in any order somehow equates with nonlinear play. That’s not true: actual nonlinearity means the ability to do anything, period. Daggerfall nearly offered that, though the bugs ruined the execution. And because better-looking RPGs came out, and they didn’t have the problems that Daggerfall did, I looked elsewhere for the promise of nonlinearity. If Bethesda had ever added Direct3D support, I might be playing the game today, bugs or no.

Bethesda created Daggerfall to prove that a computer game could mimic the tabletop roleplaying experience. They failed miserably, due in part to the inadequate technology of the time and in part to their own unwillingness to sufficiently playtest their own creation.  Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and the best anyone could say about Daggerfall was that it came close to achieving Bethesda’s goals.

Though it was supposed to turn the CRPG world on its ear, in truth Daggerfall wound up being a massive stopgap between Arena, which everyone loved, and Morrowind, which everyone is currently loving. Many of the things they did in Daggerfall were brilliant. Guild affiliation, enchant-your-own-stuff services, reputation, persistent worlds, political intrigue and the value of story, not to mention, of course, the freedom of a nearly true nonlinear gaming experience; all these things were present in Daggerfall. But in the end the mixture wasn’t right. Daggerfall drowned in itself. Gorged on ambition, it choked and withered away, buried under the weight of its own too-muchness.

—Continued in Part 2—

The Lowdown

All Games

Developer: Bethesda Publisher: Bethesda

Arena

Release Date: 1993

Available for: DOS 

Daggerfall

Release Date: 1996

Available for: DOS 

Battlespire

Release Date: 1997

Available for: DOS Windows

Redguard

Release Date: 1998

Available for: Windows

Screenshots

Arena

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

Daggerfall

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge

Battlespire

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

Redguard

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

System Requirements

Arena

386/25 IBM or 100% compatible 4 MB RAM

Daggerfall

486/66 MHz IBM PC or compatible 8 MB RAM 2x CD-ROM drive 50 MB hard disk space Local bus (or equivalent) video card Mouse

Battlespire

IBM and 100% compatibles DOS 5.0 or higher P133 MHz or better SVGA with VESA 2.0 4x CD-ROM drive, MPC Level 2 or better 16 MB RAM 150 MB hard drive space Soundblaster or compatible

Redguard

Pentium 166 MHz 32 MB RAM 350 MB free hard drive space Windows 95 16-bit sound card Supported: 3Dfx video card, 4-button gamepad

Arena Where to Find It

Daggerfall Where to Find It

Battlespire Where to Find It

RedguardWhere to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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33 Responses to Goons Loom at Infinity Ward

  • Meho

    So, you make your company a billion in profits in two months. Next thing you know, you’re investigated for insubordination, sued and sacked. Also, your team members are threatened by men looking like thugs yet not wearing uniforms. I guess Pandemic studios are now happy they were acquired by EA and not Activision. They just lost their jobs after making two moderatly successful games.

    Seriously, breaches of contract and stuff, yeah, I can get behind that but having people threatened and reporting “insubordination” sounds like some proper gestapo shit. One would think that after making the fastest selling entertainment product in history, Infinity Ward would be given SOME credit by their Activision Overlords, but I guess Bobby Kottick was serious about the air of fear and uncertainty he wanted to prevail in the Activision cubicle farms. A fascinating story, can’t wait to hear the rest!!

  • Andrew

    Harsh.

    I’m a little wary calling out anything too early but Activision isn’t exactly know for it’s good closure policy of studios, and removal of staff in the past.

    What transgressions they’ve done as publisher-owned, slightly-more-independent-perhaps CO’s – who knows? Will we ever know? 🙁

  • ajax19

    Now that is how you handle insubordination.  Send in security and throw their asses into the brig (i.e., fire them).  I reckon this will be a long and ugly process as most HR-related matters are.  As an attorney, I have had the (dis)plesure of reviewing various HR complaints and matters in my day.  Needless to say the things people do at work simply boggle the mind.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    It is awfully shocking that Infinity Ward, of all studios, would be made an example of with goons and firings. They’re kind of a golden-egg-laying goose.

    Unless of course West and Zampella were actually doing something wrong/unethical/illegal, in which case I’d have to side with Activision. But if some of the tweets are true, and A/B is just trying to bring a rogue studio to heel, there are gentler ways to do it.

  • Meho

    The plot, apparently thickens:

    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/activision-holding-back-mw2-royalties

    “Website BingeGamer (via VG247) was told by a collection of unnamed sources that not a single penny of the $1bn generated by MW2 has been seen by Infinity Ward. ”

    This is still filed strictly under rumours and speculation but, if it’s true, then it’s fucking bizarre. I mean, I know IW are part of Activision, yet you’d expect their contracts to involve some bonuses on top of the salary should their games do well..

    “The report also states that the “insubordination” IW bosses Jason West and Frank Zampella appear to have been sacked for was caused by secret discussions with rival publishers.”

    Because in corporate America the only secret discussions allowed are those between the senior staff at your company.

    OK, some more linkage:

    http://www.bingegamer.net/2010/infinity-ward-has-not-received-royalties-for-modern-warfare-2/

    Also, just for completion’s sake, a now legendary tweet by Tim Schafer regarding this situation:

    “Getting mad at Activision for this kind of thing is like getting mad at an ape for throwing feces. It’s just how the beast communicates.”

  • Meho

    So, what do we know after one day?

    Activision has indeed sacked West and Zampella. Infinity Ward is supposed to be working on DLC for Modern Warfare 2 as we speak. There will be a Call of Duty title in 2010, made by Treyarch. There will be another Call of Duty title in 2011 although it is not yet clear who is going to be the developer. Infinity Ward is now temporarily headed by Activision’s employees Steve Pearce and Steve Ackrich but Activision also announced that a newly formed studio, Sledgehammer Games will be handling future Call of Duty games and will be “extend(ing) the franchise into the action-adventure genre”. Sledgehammer is headed by former Visceral Games executives Glen A. Schofield and Michael Condrey, which, upon playing Dante’s Inferno, I am not sure is the greatest idea ever…

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    1UP says: “In addition, they have formed a new business unit dedicated to publishing an annual Call of Duty game.”

    Isn’t that just so Activision?

  • Andrew

    Oh! Oh! I can name them! Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: 2010 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: 2011! 😀

    Oooh, wait, but we need other genres, wow! so much chance to have the “Call of Duty: ” namers busy for ages 😀

    Sigh.

  • Mat

    That’s abit unfair, Andrew.

    Aren’t you forgetting “Call of Duty: Modern MMO” and “Call of Duty: Panzer Tankz Mini Kartz Racer!”?

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Kotaku’s really trying to help Activision out: new titles and box art.

  • Toger

    I’d play the Wolveriiiiiiiiines version! 😀

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Hey, the Keeping The Peace version has my childhood neighbors on the cover!

  • Meho

    Modern Gwarfare has practically infinite potential for cross marketing!!!

  • lakerz1

    Call of Duty: Corporate Clusterfuck

    LOL

  • Mat

    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/infinity-ward-bosses-suing-activision

    This isn’t looking like a story that will go away anytime soon.

  • Meho

    No, it won’t. More info:

    http://pc.ign.com/articles/107/1074524p1.html

    and

    http://pc.ign.com/articles/107/1074657p1.html

    Choice quotes:

    “The lawsuit states that in the wake of Modern Warfare 2’s success, Activision refused to honor the MOU or the Emplyoment Agreement with West and Zampella, and instead launched a “pre-textual investigation against West and Zampella to create a basis to fire the two co-heads of Infinity Ward before the first Modern Warfare 2 royalty payment.”

    “”West and Zampella were interrogated for over six hours in a windowless conference room; Activision investigators brought other Infinity Ward employees to tears in their questioning and accusations and threatened West and Zampella with ‘insubordination’ if they attempted to console them.”
    ”

    Anyway, after reading the court document, I’d say it’s ironic that West and Zampella are fighting to retain control over Modern Warfare brand even though I imagine they are sick to death of it by now…

  • ajax19

    It’s not so much ironic that they are fighting to retain control over Modern Warfare brand even though they are likely sick to death of it by now, but rather very tactical.

    According to the court papers and West and Zampella’s side of the story, this MOU gives them control over “Modern Wafare” and rights to certain royalties that were due in the next few weeks based on the sales of MW2.  Control over MW is their biggest bargaining chip here.  They file a law suit asking for that and the money and then when it comes to time for settlement talks they use their (alleged) leverage over one leg of Activision’s admitted three-legged stool as a way to get more money from them. 

    They are suing for $36 million worth of damages, if they “agree” to give unfettered control of the MW series to Activision, they stand a better chance to see more of that $36 million.

    Complains in law suits are often like this.  They ask very everything and anything, because it’s much easier to amend and pare things down than to amend and try to add things be it damages or additional claims.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    I honestly wouldn’t have expected THIS level of greed, even from Activision. I mean seriously, the game made TWO BILLION DOLLARS, people. There’s enough to go around.

    Infinity Ward is wholly owned by Activision, but I imagine all of its employees will probably quit in the next several months. I also wouldn’t be surprised if West and Zampella start a new studio and hire them all back. Doubtless all employees are bound by non-competes, but those are notoriously difficult to enforce, especially in the games industry.

  • Mat

    The overriding feeling I get from this is is that, not for the first time, Activision are just swinging around their weight like some 500lb Gorilla, and whoever gets caught out by it.. well, tough luck.

    This whole situation just smacks of arrogance. Arrogance that they’ve become no strangers to in recent times.. such as slapping a £55 RRP on Modern Warfare 2 in the UK (that thankfully few if any retailers actually stuck with).

    With all this re-structuring (read: milking) I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s afew concerned faces at Treyarch, too.

  • Bowbe

    Ok…aside from all the nerd rage that the “awesome” management of Infinity Ward got fired by their owner corporation lets analyze a few facts.

    Infinity Ward was successful at creating a pretty good fairly engaging and scary single player game. That grossed an estimated 1.5-2.0 billion dollars in the first two months of release. About the third month we realize that the monolithic statue that is Infinity Ward has feet made of clay (about January 2010) when their various patches for the multi player FAIL to stop all sorts of hacks/cracks/cheats that absolutely ruined the game.

    In November 2009 the entire games industry is hailing them as the 2nd coming (again). Their reviews are 9.5+ on every site.

    Now its March 2010 and metacritic fan ratings push the game to a 5.5.

    This same management everyone has hailed were also grossly negligent in releasing multiplayer that was hacked/cracked/and full of about as many horrible cheats as I have ever seen in more than a decade of online gaming. The managment that allowed their code to be accessed by hackers to “look for bugs”. The same hackers who have destroyed the multiplayer experience. I’d fire them too. They really aint worth that much $ in the grand scheme of things and if they broke contract or NDA with another company/entities they DESERVE what they get.

    As for that billion plus it is just a gross. As someone who works in games publishing let me clarify how this works. 60msrp. Retailer keeps $30.00 of that to keep the lights on in their store. Microsoft and Sony have licensing agreements for their perspective consoles that pay them around 1/3rd of the profit up till a game makes “platinum” status then the rate goes down. Its like a movie studio. So of the $30.00 left over after Walmart, Microsoft/Sony get $10.00. Uncle Sam/the Queen/your National Tax Collector gets $10.00 in varied corporate tax, leaving Activision/Blizzard $10 to divvy up as they chose to the creative studio (Infinity Ward). So a big chunk of change but not a Billion dollars. More like $167 million. A very decent chunk of change for sure. But when you consider blizzard/activision gets to keep about $32 million a MONTH from World of Warcraft, its not that impressive.

  • Bowbe

    Likewise since West and Zampella were dumb enough to allow their code to be distributed onthe net I wouldn’t trust them to put out another game that wouldnt be just as messed up as this one was. There were high school kids playing MW2 two weeks before it came out for peets sake. Whent hey logged in after “buying a copy” all their perks were still there. All their points were still there. Now invariably when you play you will see hundreds of players with prestige 10, earned through boosting. The boosting service is SOLD FREELY for about 2000 microsoft points or 3 months live subscriptions.
    My point is, Activision’s strongest case is that someone willingly let a flagship game of their Christmas lineup be hacked and passed about for free diminishing its value and that its value continues to diminish. Someone has to staunch the gouts of blood because quite honestly, folks who prefer a clean multiplayer game will never trust Infinity Ward again. If West and Zampella couldnt or wouldnt find the person(S) responsible for all that out and destruction of their lucrative multiplayer IP then Activision has every right to punish them financially and legally for ruining their good name. You notice the hacking and cracking is very difficult on WOW, it is strictly enforced and checks and balances are put in place to protect the fans. Infinity ward didnt do this or has thus far failed in its obligation ot the fans. Someone has to pay. Simple as that.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    We’ve all seen that pie chart, Bowbe, but I doubt the studio leadership was fired for shipping an exploitable game.

    Are you actually suggesting that Activision fired senior management because of problems with free DLC? Or that Activision cares that there is cheating in the game? Activision sees no revenue from online play. They could care less whether or not it works.

    You’re free to be an apologist for Activision if you like, but your analysis of WHY Zampelli and West were fired doesn’t seem very plausible.

  • Bowbe

    What isn’t plausible about shopping your parent companies Itellectual Property to hacker sites to look for bugs? Thats pretty cut and dried and thats what they did. That would be me posting up chapters of a book for WOTC/Hasbro on a torrent account while also submitting it for publication. You do that in any job you get fired. I’m not apologizing for Activision, I’m pointing out issues of corporate and leadership related negligence that will get you fired.

    Gay bashing. Infinity Ward had two instances of that with this game, once with the youtube vid, 2nd with the in game “joke” about don’t ask don’t tell. Did I think they were funny? Sure because I have a sense of humor. If you work for a big ass company (Bank of America being one) and make a similar joke even on your facebook page outside of work guess what? Fired. Thats corporate culture now like it or not. Unless your a rapper that is.

    Activision may not “make” the dough off the online play as you say but lets call an apple an apple shall we. How many people actually bought the game PURELY to play the 10 hour single player game? 1/10th of the sales maybe? You buy COD games for the online experience. Their negligence ruined the online experience and tell me it hasn’t been ruined after you’ve been buried in three dozen care package strikes. COD MW1 didnt have those issues. This one is rife with them. If your sitting with friends and 8 out of 10 of them agree the online blows and you were on the fence about buying it for yourself are you still going to buy it for full price? No, you’ll pick it up used and Activision certainly doesnt get any $$ off a resale. Check your worship of Zampelli and West at the door please.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Please. I didn’t know Zampelli and West existed until last week. As for the grammatical wasteland that are your comments, if you worked in game publishing then you would know that once a game is bought it’s bought, that its tail is going to be about six weeks, shorter for a game like this because door busters see around 85% of the profit on Day Zero and Day One. You’d also know that as consumers, gamers are mind-bogglingly stupid, and will cheerfully buy games despite warnings of issues just because they’d always planned to.

    Given that Zampelli and West are now suing, insisting that Modern Warfare is their IP, I’m guessing that they probably didn’t knowingly damage it. But who knows? Maybe Activision, a company that has spent the last five years exploiting franchises, closing studios, firing people without reason, arbitrarily raising prices, making stated company policy that an atmosphere of skepticism, pessimism, and fear was desirable at their wholly owned subsidiaries really is the affronted party here. Time will tell.

  • ajax19

    I don’t think anything is “cut and dry” here.  I don’t think anyone is worshipping either of these guys either.

    The only thing we’ve seen to date are Zampelli and West’s allegations set forth in their complaint and the brief, vague comments by Activision about “insubordination”.  That term is incredibly vague and can mean just about anything in the corporate/HR world. 

    Given that this is now in litigation, rumor and speculation is all you’re going to get until more papers are filed.

    As for their claim for damages, the $36 million they allege includes far, far more than just the royalties they think they are owned.  It’s a combination of things.

    As for the value of MW2 and the money Activision made off it, Activision has already announced that the game was incredibly successful and one of the main reasons behind its success last year.  Regardless of the exact total revenue Activision saw as a result of sales (I’m sure it’s easily found in their public filings) it was a significant portion of their overall revenues.

  • Bowbe

    Haha Steerspike. The only point I was trying to make is that if a parent company wanted to axe these guys they have ample reasons to use as their excuses for termination, most of which would stick.

    Thats ALL I pointed out.

    Leaked versions of the game two weeks before release showing you have no control over your own in studio employees or you willingly leaked the game (Check).

    Inability to control the rampant cheating on multiplayer with 2 patches that did not work resulting in dillution of your IP(Check).

    Use of illigitimate 3rd party hacker sites as “sub contractors” to your IP (Check).

    If this was done without the knowledge of the parent company that (Also) could result in a clause for breach of contract.

    Negotiation in private with a rival entity (Allegedly in this case EA?) for re-entry into the EA fold? Didn’t these bozos pull a similar stunt with EA to break from EA and go to Activision in the first place? Thats the big stinker here according to a lot of other sites that are just as informed as the rest of us.

    The rest of us meaning… people who were not in the meeting. I cherish every time someone allegedly or directly affiliated with the “fired side” tries to win the court of public opinion with their lame twitter and facebook updates.

    Is Activision trying to get out of paying their 10% to Infinity Ward? Probably. In this economy anything is possible, especially where stock splits and shareholders are concerned. Certainly not painting them as good guys here, just pointing out several “grounds for termination”.

    You say cool stuff like “Do you honestly believe Activision cares about cheating” Maybe “Activision” doesn’t but the Blizzard wing sure seems to when it comes to cheating in their flagship product.

    You also swing around big numbers like 2 billion dollars and then when I point out the number they recieve is much smaller you go in with the “We’ve all seen that pie chart…” and “Doorbuster specials”. So which is it? They made 2 billion or they suddenly lost their ass on the first two days of sales while Walmart and Uncle Sam reap the reward of Infinity Ward’s valliant effort? Maybe everyone hasn’t seen that pie chart.

    Sorry dude but I’m not trying to sell a bunch of conflicting stories to win an internet argument with you. Note that when combing through my “gramatical wasteland” I again only point out reasons Activision could use to get rid of anyone affiliated with Infinity Ward that they wanted to, and all would be good and legitimate reasons in my book.

    Infinity Ward started with great IP and the potential of a great product with this one. Single player was amazing, but I buy COD games for the online play. So do a lot of other people. I ain’t the greatest at the game but I finish in the top 5 on most rounds and thats good enough for me. CODMW (the first) played for about 6 months solid, had few errors, but bad lag during certain times of the day. There were almost no cheats except for a few wierd places on a couple maps where you could walk the sky and the game was frequently patched and regulated. That was in the day of “good Infinity Ward” They were unshackled by those evil opressive bastards at EA and they were out to make a good name for themselves right?

    This new game was a mess from the get-go that benefitted from lots of hype, fat reviewer scores and millions of dollars in advertising. My friends and I played for about two months almost nightly till all the care package nonsense and the modded guns started showing up everywhere.

    Even in the beginning there were the “turn invisible cheat” in the Afgan map and “unlimited ammo cheats” and “hide down the smokestack and rack up a million kills cheats to get all your nuke patches and what not. Allowing prestige points in private matches? Wow, a booster’s paradise. Thats horrible game design right there. All that is on Infinity Ward and not Activision. They are the studio they designed it, put it out flaws and all as a finished product.

    Too cheap for dedicated servers with that “2 billion dollars” your talking about? Way to piss off the PC gamers and console gamers alike. I should have known something was up when the “online agreement” page flashes by faster than a booster on crack with all run/sprint/knife/akimbo shotgun choices selected. Is that crap Activisions fault or Infinity Wards? Probably a combo of blame in that reguard.

    We waited and checked status of updates/patches and all that came up was “oh we’re working on it,” all the hack tools were available for it before it even launched. Youtube has had daily exploits posted up. People send you messages to you in game wanting 2000 microsoft points or 3 months subscription to LIVE in exchange for 10th prestige.

    All the bells and whistles that should have made the game great are meaningless now thanks to the cheating. All that stuff you strive for as a gamer went up in smoke almost overnight once the non-stop care package exploits were in full swing. I don’t blame Activision for that. I blame Infinity Ward for allowing that to happen on ALL platforms of the game and will likely never buy a game from them or another entity run by Zampelli and West again. IW ruined its reputation with this gamer for sure. I can buy $60 worth of real bullets and have an awesome afternoon at my local gun club instead.

    You are right about one thing though. Gamers are dumb and will knowingly buy a game that is going to break their heart because they “hope” that all the bs will be fixed the next time they play, or when the next version comes out but just like Madden, it never is.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Now THAT’S a good response, Bowbe! I don’t agree, but I respect the use of logic and the lack of bile.

    Allow me to rebut…

    Blizzard can care about cheating until the universe dries up; the position on one game (where cheating might impact PAYING customers) doesn’t dictate company policy. I didn’t intend to imply that Activision doesn’t care about cheating regardless of game, only that they don’t care when it comes to MW2.

    Never argued that Activision couldn’t produce reasons to fire West and Zampelli. Particularly if they were talking to other publishers – which wouldn’t surprise me. Total breach of contract. I never said Activision was acting illegally. The only point I wanted to make was that if I were Activision, and I was faced with losing a studio that just made me *coughcoughcough*illion dollars (no need to incite you further), I might have approached with a different tone…

    along the lines of…

    “Hey, guys, I know you’re looking and I don’t want you to leave us.  How can we work this out?”

    Instead of sending thugs to the office and firing the leads.

    As for the litany of exploits you list, yeah, it’s a broken game. Most games that ship are broken. But the industry doesn’t care about quality – on account of the gamers are stupid thing. All they care about is dollars, and MW2 made a zillion of them. They’re not selling Toyotas, you know. No one dies if a game is shitty.

  • Mat

    The bug issue with MW2 is an interesting one for sure, particularly when you consider what the reaction to so many glitches and cheats would have been if this was Treyarch’s year on the job. I was late onto the World at War scene so barely experienced much of the multiplayer myself, but I noticed the game received one hell of a tough ride from the community about the bugs in the multiplayer. I can’t recall many if any of them being as high profile or consistent as some of the floods of MW2 glitches that have appeared.

    Infinity Ward didn’t come up with anything like Nazi zombies either, and if COD4 is any indication, are nowhere near as supportive of their products with DLC either as Treyarch.

    Still, I don’t really think this is about calling Infinity Ward “awesome” or siding with them against Activision for the sake of it.. or “nerd rage”. IW might have published a buggy as hell game (serves them right for being arrogant over not releasing a beta) but this is just one in an increasingly large number of PR balls up’s by Activision. As Steerpike says, there are surely other ways of dealing with stuff like this other than sending the heavies in and coming out with comments about “subordination” and the like. This is video games development, not an episode of 24.

    Just as an aside, I’ve pretty much called time on Modern Warfare 2 myself now, although that is less to do with the games bugs than it is to do with the simply awful “community” that follows that game around..

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