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3886200-638175Assignment game designThree games that are financially and visually successful:Skyrim, Minecraft & Forza 4 Skyrim This game requires: 32-64 bit systems and supports Quad-core Intel processors and AMD CPU possessors. 4GB of RAM and 6GB of HDD space, DirectX sound cards and DirectX Video cards and finally internet access for PC steam account users.Skyrim is an RPG/action/fantasy and adventure game and is part of a series called The Elder Scrolls; Skyrim is the fifth (V) and latest game in the series after Oblivion (IV), Morrowind (III), Daggerfall (II) and Arena. The developers who work on and produce The Elder Scrolls series are called Bethesda Game Studios with the publishers of Bethesda Softworks.Firstly, Skyrim is set in olden times in a medieval and fictitious era but would be similar to around the 10-14th centuries in real-life. Skyrim is the only game of the series with a dragon threat. The previous game Oblivion focused on the struggle for imperial rule. Skyrim is situated in the region of Tamriel surrounded by other countries that form the settings of the previous elder scrolls games. These countries include: Cyrodill from the Oblivion game under Imperial rule and is south of Skyrim; Morrowind from the Morrowind game, home to the High Elves (East of Skyrim); High Rock from the Daggerfall game, home to the Breton race, West of Skyri; Finally, Hammerfell not seen in any games in the Elder Scrolls series but is said to be home to the Redguard race. 420052536195Plot: The player becomes the main character ‘Dragonborn’ who is introduced at the beginning of the game on an Imperial cart with other captured rebels plus the leader of the rebellion. At first this creates mystery as to who the protagonist is and why he’s been captured. The story unfolds and the conflict between the two human races- Imperials and Stormcloaks (rebels) is shown. The main character has to decide which side to join, either choice will bring the character to the Jarl (leader) of the city of Whiterun- who sends you on your first main storyline quest where you uncover the knowledge that you have the power of dragons. The character finds out he is an ancient descendant of the bloodline of Dragonborns. This leads the Dragonborn through the story to decide Skyrims ultimate rule (imperial or stormcloack) and eventually to defeat Alduin-the evil leader of the dragon race, to free Tamriel of Dragon rule and obtain equilibrium.2667000304800At the start the, you chose what race you would like to be. There are many races in the Elder scroll series, however there are 10 races that are playable in Skyrim to gamers, these include Bretons, Imperials, Nords and Redguards that are forms of the human race category. High Elves, Dark Elves and Wood Elves form parts of the Elven Race and Orcs and Khajit form the Beast race. There are lots of other races that can’t be played but are encountered during exploration. Many are enemies like Vampires, Dragons and Falmar (mutated versions of the Elven race). The presence of both fantasy and human-like races in the Game has helped create a fantasy aspect to the Elder Scroll series. The characters have the full range of human characteristics – both good and bad – and this gives the game realism. The multiple race elements to the game therefore adds interest and depth to the story and world and gives more variety and choice to the customization feature when designing the gamers playable character. Everyone who plays Skyrim, loves the details and can see the large amount of effort put into all aspects of the game, for example 35147252019300not only are the races in variety but have certain perks and special abilities unique to their race which helps gamers connect their style of gameplay to the style of the characters abilities. 34671001285240In addition, the visual style and effort put into all characters; especially the civilians, perfectly suit the era and background story, such as the hardened and strong facial and physical features to all characters; this matches the harsh cold environment and the look of medieval life. The concept and idea of the Dragonborn character is new and completely different to any other game, the main character can earn an awesome special ability that allows him to shout like dragons forcing high amounts of energy forwards killing anything in its way. The most popular feature of the Skyrim game is the beautiful mountainous open world environment, with the ancient Nordic ruins channelling underground and deep in the side of mountains. The geography in the region of Skyrim is completely different, no mountain is the same nothing is duplicated with the exception to rocks and trees; people have even made YouTube videos simply to show off beautiful areas for people to find. Skyrim has shipping ports for trading Nord ale throughout Tamriel, ale which can only be produced in the climate unique to Skyrim. This is one example of how the game includes cultural aspects, enhancing believability and showing the developers attention to detail. Like real medieval history, humans believed strongly that there were gods and that they would help them through prayer, this is used as another aspect of civilian culture in Skyriml. Bethesda developers wanted to portray actual gods in spirit form and so add to the amount of emergent story- quests. Gods can be seen as both evil and good that can provide daily perks for the character such as disease healing spells. The second most popular aspect to the game is the action-packed gameplay that has improved greatly since the first Arena Elder Scroll game. The player uses typical medieval-style weapons like axes, swords but also magical weapons and staffs. The uses of spells have been wired into every Elder Scroll game since the first one. The graphics of the spell animations has improved with realistic effects and character movements to accompany them. Bethesda released a small update including “kill-cams” showing different points of view of enemy death with any weapon and spell. This amplified the already amazing highly-rated gameplay. Before this update Bethesda included a good range of other assassination moves.Skyrims gameplay gives the gamer the idea that the sky is the limit, the gamer can literally attack anything that breathes, even friendly NPCs, and any animal can be slain from dragon to skeever (rat). The gamer is able to climb the tallest mountain and the deepest valley in the vast 45 cubic miles of terrain. The total average of gameplay from the main quest is around 140 hours, however, including exploration of all areas and triggered and emergent storylines, the gameplay could reach 1500 hours. The gameplay is like real life as every decision is vital to the changeable storyline. The amounts of stories fused into the game are so diverse that an accidental or deliberate death of a civilian could stop another potential emergent quest.3857625165100The game has a huge reward system; every level up gives the option to increase the characters health, stamina or magic. Furthermore, once one of the three options have been picked the gamer can pick a new skill or upgrade to the characters abilities, the skills are displayed in something called a “skill-tree” shown in the image to the right. It holds a giant total of 251 individual perks which is a reason why the gameplay never gets boring. I have played Skyrim for just over 300 hours and have finished the main storyline but have completed only 20% of all side quests and I’ve had the game since releas. I am still gripped and loving the gameplay and think the visual look will beat many new games released this year. Financially, Skyrim made huge amounts of profit after the 3 and a half years of production and the release date on 11/11/11. Since July 2012, the sales income was $620 million, making $535 million profit on top of developing and marketing. In 2 days, 7 million copies of Skyrim were sold creating $450 million. The 2012 gamer review for Skyrim is 92/100 and in some cases 10/10 by Eurogamer, which was well deserved for such a well thought out game. The game sold on 3 platforms- Xbox, PC and Playstation 3, 59% of games were bought on the Xbox platform, 27% on PS3 and the rest 14% on PC. This may have been because the Xbox dashboard had large advertisements and held E3 presentations on live event player for all to watch. However Skyrim was available on Steam and had the additional feature called the Creation Kit. This allows any player with a steam account able to create whole levels, characters and weapons as “Mods” and extras to the game, and this also became popular to show on YouTube. In total, 90 Developers were employed for the production as well as 85 people to do character voice-overs for the civilians and main NPCs. Due to this giant result I expect people decided to get the previous games in the Elder Scrolls series as I did and most of my friends. This is the most financially successful out of the three games I’ve chosen. In addition and after the success at release, in the same year Bethesda studios produced 2 DLCs; one adding a large storyline about the conflict between two races- the Dawnguard; a human race with a well armoured castle and the vampire race in search of the ‘Elder Scrolls’ and the extinction of the Dawnguard; The other a small but creative “build your own house” feature for yet more hours of fun play.Finally Skyrim got 25 awards in total, some including: E3 2011 editor’s game winner of the year, Golden joystick awards, game critics award winner and many more. Also called” mind-blowing” by the Guardian, adding a 5 star parisonAs the Elder Scrolls skyrim (V) has evolved through the fantasy/adventure RPG genre. Another game series that have developed the same way would be the Dragon Age series particularly Dragon Age 2 released in November 3rd 2009 on 3 platforms including Xbox, PC, PS3 and Mac. Though Dragon age 2 is 2 years younger than Skyrim, Dragon age 3 is yet to come out in 2013 so I think Dragon age two is a great comparison as there are similarities and differences. The plot of dragon age 2: dragon age starts by creating a character under the family name of “Hawke”, the story is Hawke’s rise to power in a place called Kirkwall he becomes Kirkwall’s champion during world war conflict. The game story is pretty linear which can seem boring at times, however this helps show progression in story and in character power. Dragon age 2’s character race choices are now limited to only allowing playable characters as humans but different classes. This is different from Skyrim as there are 10 playable races which make it better. Skyrim doesn’t have character classes but it is handled well, so that during gameplay, the gamer can equip any weapon they enjoy using therefore creating their own class and character armour type preferences. Furthermore both games do give the feature of character size and facial customization therefore benefiting the gamer as to how they want their hero designed. Dragon age does allow more than one character to control during gameplay and can switch between these to aid battle in different ways.41757601083945In addition, the system of choice dialogue, allows the gamer to choose what they want to ask, and answer, both games therefore want to give gamers a more interactive feel but Skyrim enhances this system making the choices key to defining the gamer’s story throughout the game. It also shapes the NPCs views towards the gamers character, either to be loved, hated or feared, which sometimes affects special quests and to how much an NPC will help you. There are problems with the dialogue in dragon age 2 that can seem funny at times, furthermore the animation during dialogue is repetitive and stiff which tends to annoy people.Levelling up layout for Dragon Age 2 Again, Skyrim is better with a larger variety of skill perks available to the gamer than in dragon Age 2. Skyrim, during levelling up perks, upgrades the damage of magic and attack and defence numbers but what Dragon Age does differently is the levelling brings up a page with a list of attributes for the character for the overall totals of effectiveness. This page is less creative than Skyrim. One unique thing that Dragon Age 2 does differently to most RPGs is that it has a “friendly/rivalry bar”, that determines the friendship or hate of the companions which can lead to them staying or leaving the party. This feature in my opinion is not as appealing as Skyrims. Another big difference is the useable interaction of the dragon age 2 environments, even though dragon age 2 has big areas with nice visuals, the player can’t jump or climb over rocks or stray off the ground space and paths, so compared with Skyrim, dragon age 2 environments seem small and restricted and so less of an open-world feel. Dragon age 2 becomes tiring when seeing the same sights more than once as its all based in one place and so objects are reused multiple times, where Skyrim has views that never get boring and are graphically stunning. Dragon age 2 financially didn’t sell well, the amount of sales and income weren’t as close as BioWare (the creators) wanted them to be. During the first 2 weeks after game release the game only hit around ?2,000.000 and then dropped in future sales drastically, after the first 2 weeks the previous dragon age game “Origins” sold far more. Overall Dragon Age 2 got a reasonable rating of around 8.5/10 but in comparison Skyrim dwarfed Dragon Age 2 financially and visually 3476625181610MinecraftMinecraft is a first-person and multiplayer on/offline 3d game. Mine craft has been released on many operating systems like mobile/android, PC, Xbox 360 and java platforms. Minecraft was made by the developers and publishers at Mojang in November 18th 2011 and solely for PC. 38385752634615The gameplay solely focuses around the theme of creativity and exploration of randomized worlds, the game allows absolutely anything to be made the sky literally is the limit, even then there is allot of it. Not only can the gamer build anything he/she likes, the gamer has to create certain tools for the creative process, the Creative element is present on both game modes called creation mode and survival, in survival the gamer must live out their world exploration whilst under never-ending threat of surprise monster attacks, these monsters include Creepers(monsters that explode when near inflicting demolition and damage created from a development bug.) standard attacking zombies and many other forms of creatures. Minecraft has an emergent gameplay style as the game uncovers underground caves and canyons when exploring. There are few achievements to the game like additional gamer points for Xbox, however there is no reward for anything created in the game, the game is developed to be endless with no limit, gamers always have a sense of achievement when finishing designs and giant structures and so this leads gamers to continue building and actually becoming a highly addictive game. The game defies the most important features of great games such as stunning detail and graphics, other necessities like storyline and background stories. Instead developers at Mojang ignore this and creates a phenomenon game that earns an amazing feat of ratings like - 9.0/10. This game like other unique games get cult status, cults of Minecraft have produced websites with forums, galleries and videos to share together. Many Minecraft gamers upload their work onto YouTube, Financially, for PC alone, since release until 2012 there have been 44,000,000 users that have registered for accounts to play Minecraft. Around 7.800,000 people have bought the PC version of minecraft. Just over 3.000.000 sales have been recorded for the Xbox 360 version. The overall income made my Minecraft since launch till 2012 has totalled around ?80,000,000 which is a big feat from such a simply made game.Like Skyrim, Minecraft was awarded many gaming awards, these including: the innovation award, best downloadable award any many more.Finally there is controversy over whether Minecraft is a “game” as it is so different from other games. Minecraft is sometimes conveyed as educational as especially for younger children it develops their creativity skills. The game not only appeals to gamers but to parents as well, as the content in Minecraft is clean no explicit language or killing of people so many parents gladly let their children play it. 39179501179195It is hard to decide what type of genre game Minecraft is as there are many elements of: adventure, survival/horror, action, sandbox and indie, though I’d say that the main feature is the sandbox creativeness therefore I could only compare this game with other sandbox style games. Therefore I did some research into other similar style games which lead me to a game which has a almost identical idea and sandbox gameplay style, the game is called Terraria. This comparison with Terraria in my opinion is relatively fair as the gamelay and visuals are so alike. 38481001142365Terraria is an RPG/sandbox, adventure/action game. The game was made in 2011 by developers - Re-logic for the Microsoft windows platform running on 16-bit sprites, Terraria supports 1.0 GHz processors, 512MB RAM DirectX 9.0c and 200MB HDD space. Furthermore the game is actually shown in 2D which is the main difference to Minecraft as its shown in 3D. Both games have the same visual style with the same coloured underground layers of grass, dirt, stone etc. Night and day brightness changes during gameplay as it does with Minecraft, Terraria are similar with the idea of underground caves full of lava or water also with the threat of attacking monsters above and below ground. The games can’t really be compared 2D against 3D and so is a matter of preference for the gamer. The gameplays are different as Minecraft is emergent but Terraria events are triggered randomly with meteorites and groups of enemies storming you. The sounding of the game are neither better nor worse, they both have quiet background songs that repeat multiple times during 2 hours gameplay but seem to be light-hearted and so don’t get annoying. The sound effects are pretty realistic and feel like you’re in the game.Minecraft has a wide range of Mods available to download of the internet, this is only for PC version but future DLC will apply this to Xbox and possibly PS3 consoles, Terraria doesn’t have any Mods allowed in the game yet. This ability connects the gamer with their designed world more as they can produce any Mod that is going with their unique designs. Financially Terraria has sold 630,000 copies of their game since 2011 and is slowly continuing to rise, where as Minecraft has achieved greater success selling 7.8 million copies and slowly rising, Minecraft has 44 million registered users on their site, The reason why Minecraft made more income was because Minecraft is being sold at ?20 per copy were Terraria is selling at ?10 per copy though this doesn’t tell why it sold more, id say for Minecraft that the cults and popularity and advertisement of the game in America helped allot as they decided to sell to the UK to further their success, another reason is that it has sales on multiple platforms where Terraria sells only on PC.3562350157480 Forza 4 Forza 4 was created as a new game for the Forza series, this game was released from the 11-14 of November 2011 this being two launch dates for both America and the UK. Forza 4 is a car racing simulation genre game. The developers of the Forza 1, 2, 3 and 4 games are Turn 10 studios with their publishers at Microsoft studios selling the games solely for the Xbox 360 platform. 3614420955675This game (as well as controller based play) was launched with the new feature called Kinect which allows the gamer to interact with the driver through motion detection. The Forza series has been greatly successful and since 26th of October 2012 this year has again released another instalment to the series called Forza horizon, this game I have not played yet and so I know more about Forza 4 as I have got it. The Forza 4 game allows any person any age to be able to drive with adjustable difficulty settings like Easy-hard and professional, the game has stunned existing driver game enthusiasts with the wide list of drivable vehicles with their awesome attention to detail to go with the games new and improved graphics. This game delivered well on all elements of driving games, the graphics and lighting plus the real-life physics of cars were tested and almost perfected as much as the developers could. The most 2990850-38100important aspect that was trying to amaze the gamers was the graphics and detail on each and every car, these including form spoiler movements to overheating of tyres and the movable body parts of the car when (gravity + air) force is applied to them. The lighting was actually quite a tested part during development; it was made with the image-based lighting system used in the Pixar industry. Turn 10 wanted to add these real-life scientific features to the game so that gamers can explore the car in third person view more often, They even released a unique feature different to any other car game, which was the ability to walk around the car as a human view, this helps gamer see the aesthetics of the car related to themselves, it also is a way of Turn 10 showing off the details to the cars because the gamer can select individual icons around the vehicle allowing 35909252809875them to hear a background voice talking and telling the gamer about each feature of the car. Forza 4 was incredibly successful with this feature as they partnered with a well loved television program called TopGear, this gave the gamer much more interest to what the TopGear presenters have to say about the car with their likes and dislikes. Another small temporary partnership was made with the current designers of halo at the time which was wanted so that Turn 10 could promote some of halo with a new halo Warthog design. The sounding of Forza 4 has trumped every other driving game before it each car has an individual sound, research was done into every car sound, using real-life cars to record on to the sound database, this really impresses critics and gamers with perfectly realistic car sounding from tyre screech to door handle openings and to the vehicle engines. This is impressive as the game holds 500 different usable cars. 38823901200785This game was said by critics that it was excelling the Gran-Turismo series mark which is a similar driving simulation game but for PS3 only, Gran-Turismo was leading the genre since the first of their series however since Forza 3, Forza has bypassed the newer Gran-Turismo games this including Forza 4 and Forza Horizon. Critics also gave Forza 4 a great review really praising Turn 10 with a 90-90%/ 100 review score. Critics later reviewed the kinect system which they praised however was frustrating and scored a lower review score. 3819525802005Gameplay: the gameplay is well developed adding to the feature of “cockpit view”, this view is in a range of gameplay views including: first person view (bonnet), further first person (headlight view), third person (all of car behind view) and further distance view (behind car + more view of environment and track). Cockpit view has amazing detail from leather scratches and creases to window marks from impact damage; overall this gives gamers a sense of what it looks/feels like to drive. 3238500209550ComparisonAs a result, a game that I would compare this with would be Gran-Turismo 5 (GT5) as it is another driving simulation game. 39719252308225Gameplay: both games have multiple game modes, the game modes are well balanced compare to the daunting Gran-turismo hardcore modes. The menus in forza 4 are easy to follow and aren’t as hard to manoeuvre around as Gran-turismo 5. Both games give the option for single-player campaign mode, forza 4 has a long and rewarding system in this mode as every successful race results in more triggered and emergent events like new seasons and endurance days, the rewards are well placed as every “level up” till level 50 grants the player an option of 5-6 well balanced cars to extend their garage and the amount of races available especially to certain cars. Forza 4 has the possibility as well as Gran-Turismo 5 of local co-op play and online play. If I was to be more critical of Forza 4 id say the feel between car and road are still to be improved as it has an icy feel as if driving on ice because of the lack of tyre traction sounds, though this is usually whilst going under 60mph. GT5 has a less rewarding car upgrade system as it doesn’t give many upgrade choices to the cars; this feature has weakened since the Gran-Turismo 4 game where there were discount shops and manufacture shops and several upgrades for a variety of cars.3781425202565Forza 4 outdoes Gran-turismo 5 with the online multiplayer; there are so many new online modes that even include car football; a popular idea expressed in TopGear. Forza 4 also lets more amounts of people race online in the same race; it has a maximum of 1-16 players which can provide a real sense of competitiveness and realistic crashing possibilities. Forza 4 gives more variation of difficulty setting and can be customized a lot more, the difficulty effects the amount of percentage of money earned from each race as to how hard the settings are on. Forza 4 has another advantage with the online auction, not only can the gamer buy cars from manufacturers like in Gran-turismo 5 but can buy cars from other gamers for discounts and is another balanced way to earn money. These games are top of the racing genre best games and they both financially did very well, Gran-turismo 5 however got 3.5 million more sales this is largely to do with Gran-Turismo’s bigger fan base as they have produced many more games than the Forza series, the amount of money put into the marketing of Gran-turismo 5 helped a lot. Forza 4 was launched later and during a time when other big action games like Batman Arkham city and others, so it was a slightly rivalling other releases at the time. On the whole if financial gain was more important, then Gran-turismo would be more successful. Finally in my opinion, I’d say forza 4 was differently successful as in it more fun to play, this would be due to the partnerships with halo and TopGear for making the car information really interesting and the on/offline gameplay was more fun as Forza 4 had better visuals from the car and lighting details. My opinion is also backed up by the scores that they got from their reviews, as Forza 4 achieved a higher metacritic score of 91% where Gran-Turismo got lower at 84%.43529251041402nd Comparison There is another rival to both Forza 4 and Gran-turismo 5, it is again a Sim racing game and is called Need for Speed Shift or (Shift 2) the game was developed by Slightly Mad Studios and published by Electronic Arts. 33528001574165NFS shift 2 is not one of the first games thought of when thinking of Racing games. However the Need for Speed series has been successful with all their games and have many fans who would say it’s better than both Gran-Turismo 5 and Forza 4, I’ve only played demos of this game and I prefer Forza 4,this is largely down to the better graphics and lighting and the engaging online racing however what I liked more about Shift 2 was the engine sounding as it features a more mechanical V8 explosive rumble to each car, though some weaker cars like a smart car sound weird with this the sounding suits and amplifies most cars sounding a lot better than Forza 4’s V8 engine cars. Forza 4’s car colour and vinyl customization is brilliant and is hands down better than GT5 and Shift 2 as well as the amount of cars usable in the game as Shift 2 has 145 cars when Forza 4 has 500. Shift 2 has managed to avoid the problem of the icy traction feel, though at times silences the vital realistic sound needed from the tyres by the load engine. The sales of Shift 2 were not as great as they only sold 0.33 copies; this was down to the amount of people that think the Shift part of the Need for Speed series is no good. The Shift 2 game also had its own TV advert previous to the games launch so the promotion aspect was covered. End. ................
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