Trouble at the Top: Infinity Ward Layoffs

Interesting times over at Infinity Ward, eh?

For those of you not glued desperately to an intronet all day long, let me fill you in.  Two of the top hombres at IW, president Jason West and studio boss Vince Zampella (short for Vincent I assume, but as a responsible paraphraser, I take no chances) have been shown the door by Activision generalissimo and all-purpose bogeyman Bobby Kotick, apparently for “insubordination”. Better and more reputable version of the story from our Go-To Guys here.

Strange how Actvision have usurped EA as the big bad wolf of the games industry. A few years back, EA were terrible monsters relentlessly forcing gamers to buy copy after copy of FIFA (it’s a football game, apparently). Now though, EA find themselves the plucky underdog boldly championing poor mistreated proles like me and you, while Activision’s Dark Lord terrorises various news sources with words like “monetize” and phrases about the annual exploitation of intellectual property.* What’s more, ask me about CODMODWAR2’s developers twenty four hours ago and I’d have nothing but venom for them. Turns out we’re now on the same side. Isn’t life funny, eh?

So what does this mean for CODMODWAR? Treyarch take the reins, I assume, and make something even less inspiring than their predecessors. Which, in all honesty, will make very little difference. Gamers will probably buy the next in the series irrespective of developer, as brand recognition is a powerful thing. Did the change of developer do any harm for the Guitar Hero franchise? Did it bums. That’s assuming the developer changes – this is all happening at the top, after all (although fearsome muscle was deployed to the IW offices today to keep those dangerous developers in line, so who knows what’s going on over there).

Whatever happens, casually discarding a pair of gentlemen who played a major role in gift wrapping a vast fortune in greasy cash seems a peculiar decision. Maybe Activision feel confident that the brand is strong enough to sell hugely no matter what – Kotick has been refreshingly up front about not caring about the quality of the games his company produces. It must be a worrying time to be a games designer.

Interesting story, and bound to get interesting-er as time wanders on.

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*Whenever you hear the words “intellectual property”, you know you are in dark and treacherous waters. Who uses those words? Money men, that’s who. As human beings who confine their vicious heartless pillaging and slaughtering to virtual worlds, we quite rightly wish humiliating medical conditions upon these vile creatures.

Cinemania

Sam gets down "to business"

Increasingly, games – particularly first-person-shooters – are guilty of using two words: Realistic and Cinematic. They’re kinda paradoxical in many ways, but used often nevertheless. Case in point: Far Cry 2, a great, albeit flawed shooter that trades on both its cinematic values and realistic combat. Of course, it fails somewhat at both, being neither cinematic nor realistic. But it trades on them all the same. Picking holes in realism is pretty easy. How can a game, for example, possibly be ‘realistic’ if it asks you to fix every single engine ever made with a short twist of a magically appearing screw driver? Only a mini-game would be less stupid. Cinematic meanwhile, is less easy to fault.

The obvious contender is – as always – Call of Duty, a game that actually requires fairly little input to look impressive. Take away the mighty graphics and the noise, you’ve got a game of very little brain. This must be ‘cinematic’. It’s big, dumb and (mostly) fun, but what started with scripted sequences in games like Half Life and Gunman more than ten years ago has been stretched and stretched until you’re left with games that have six hours of gameplay and two hours of ‘cinematic’ mission briefings. Like blockbuster action movies, these games confuse cinematic intentions with real depth, but while ‘real depth’ in a movie means character, narrative, script and so on, in a game it means gameplay.

Rather nicely, this brings me on to Serious Sam HD (HD means High Definition, fact fans), which has recently been re-released both on PC and via the Xbox Live Arcade. It is splendid, and it’s splendid because it reminds of everything that used to be good about first person shooters. SSHD doesn’t claim to be ‘cinematic’ or ‘realistic’, it is a game, and it makes no bones about it. Whereas Half Life says, “How can we make this bridge explode realistically”, Serious Sam laughs and blows it up by throwing angry exploding skeleton horses at it. When Bioshock asks, “What separates a man from a slave”, Serious Sam guffaws and fights hordes of men with exploding hands. Yes, there’s a theme here, and the theme is blowing shit up.

It’s twitch gaming at its utter best – a form of gaming that died out with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament – and it doesn’t care. The irony is that had this been released at the turn of the last decade, it would have been panned as stupid and backwards, but now that all we ever get is ‘cinematic’ and sodding ‘realism”, it’s like breathing pure oxygen. Just don’t have too much, right?