Category: News

Dean Evans, best known as the creative director on Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, has departed Ubisoft after 12 years at the company during which he contributed to the Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed games. 

Evans had been working on a project that was shelved by Ubisoft, who then offered him a position to join the editorial leadership group in Paris (headed by chief creative officer Serge Hascoet), but he declined. 

As reported by Game Informer, Evans left Ubisoft on good terms, citing the desire to move back to the United Kingdom and take time off to travel instead of moving on to other opportunities right away. 

“I’ve been in the business now for over 20 years, nearly 12 of those have been at Ubisoft,” Evans told Game Informer. “I’ve never really taken much of a break.”

As the 2018 Game Developers Conference draws to a close today, writer and videographer Matt Baume took to the stage to talk about some of the ways games are intertwined with the LGBTQ community — and what game devs can do to better support and speak to queer culture in their work.

This is important because queer people are people — people who make games, play games, critique games, sell games, talk about games, and contribute to all parts of the game industry.

But Baume, a journalist who produces podcasts and YouTube videos, says he and his collaborators took a long look at the industry and felt like there was a lack of discussion about how it succeeds — and fails — at being inclusive of queer culture.

“We saw a need to talk about the ways game culture and LGBTQ culture intersect that wasn’t really being met,” said Baume. So he and his team filmed interviews with over 125 people around the world, compiling over a hundred hours of footage as part of their ongoing documentary project Playing With Pride.

Clips of those interviews made up the bulk of Baume’s talk, and are well worth watching over on the Playing With Pride website. However, Baume was quick to point out that these are personal stories that are intended to provide you with new insight and perspectives, not a total understanding of how queer culture and the game industry intersect.

“These are stories from people we talked to; it is not the complete queer experience,” Baume said. “For many of the people we talked to, when they were young…games were safe. When they got older, that changed.”

‘Game culture’ can often feel directly at odds with queer culture

Baume says a lot of queer folk have often felt cut off from game culture. Often, they felt like being queer and being “into games” were mutually exclusive; they’d be ostracized by many game enthusiasts, and they also have a hard time talking about their passion for games while dating.

“I thought the queer world was pride parades, and clubs and stuff,” said one game dev interviewee. “And then there was the game world, where I had to be super serious and just make this shit.”

“The feeling that a lot of people [we interviewed] talked about, about feeling unwelcome, closed a lot of them off from games,” sid Baume — who counts himself among them. “For most of my 20s, in the 2000s, I just didn’t see queer people in games. And I felt like I was intruding whenever I’d talk to ‘real gamers’.”

But games can also be a safe place for queer people to express themselves and meet each other

Baume says many of the folks interviewed for this project sought out games that intentionally included queer people, or used their imagination to insert themselves into games’ stories.

He played a long clips reel of many different interviews, and in many of them people celebrated strong women game characters like Samus Aran and FemShep as being deeply important and meaningful to them.

“Peach was a big one growing up… I always really identified with her, and it was nice seeing her up there on the screen,” said one transgender woman. “I was actually really aware of what I was doing; I was like, I’m picking her because I identify that way.”

Robust character creators were also a very big deal for many of the folks interviewed. Baume says that character creators can help transgender people experiment with their virtual body and appearance, for example, if they’re gathering courage to express their gender in real life.

“Character creators were such a safe place,” one interviewee said. “Where I could just pick whatever gender, and the character creator would let me create it.”

On top of that, Baume says many queer folk get a lot out of the intersection of character creators and romance in games; when devs take the time to implement these systems well, they give players space to create their ideal self-image, or their ideal partner — and then play through that relationship in a very safe way.

“We like to make big muscle guys with beards and mohawks” said one interviewee.

“When we play Saints Row we like to build big guys and run around naked,” his partner added, with a laugh “It’s all about the beards and the muscles, really.”

Many queer folk interviewed said they also appreciate online games’ capability to bring people together and afford them a safe space to build relationships together. Baume himself met his longtime partner James (who’s a veteran of the game industry) through a mutual love of Final Fantasy.

“That was how we got talking to each other, because we’re both shy nerds,” he said. “It’s just this common thing, that games bring couples together.”

“Confirmation that you exist is an amazingly powerful thing”

Baume says many of the people he and his team talked to experienced significant changes when they encountered elements of queer culture in games. It’s an acknowledgement of their existence, their validity as people and as game enthusiasts, and help them assert themselves authentically.

“Confirmation that you exist is an amazingly powerful thing,” said one interviewee.

“Seeing the character in Undertale portrayed as they…it’s validation,” said another. “It’s seeing that somebody out there is willing to sing part of your song.”

Representing queer people in your games isn’t just validating and reassuring to people like them; it can also comfort and appeal to folks who are adjacent to queer culture. 

“Right after my sister passed away, I got a key for Gone Home, and there’s this moment in [the game]….call it an epiphany, or an ah-ha moment, but a character is doing a bit of voiceover, and what the character is voicing about her sister is really echoing a lot of the feelings and emotions I had about my sister and her sexuality,” said one interviewee.

“I guess you could say it revealed to me some of how she might have been feeling. It put me in her shoes, in a way. It was kind of like, this might sound odd, but it was kind of a way for me to get closure…it really gave me some peace, honestly.”

Things are better now, but there’s still work to be done

Baume acknowledged that a lot of good progress has been made in the past few years; a number of folks interviewed said they now felt comfortable and included in game culture at times, especially at offline queer-focused games meetups like GaymerX.

“It’s a really supportive, positive, and unique space,” he added. “The community in more cities has really expanded compared to where we were at 5 years ago.”

He says that’s slowly but surely changing the way queer people interact with the game industry — many of those interviewed said they felt more comfortable now making games and talking about games publicly.

“The whole reason I started my Twitch channel in the first place was because of all the homophobia and homophobic stuff I was seeing from so many gamers and streamers,” said one interviewee. “It’s now my job to help [queer people] create a safe space on there to share their stories with each other.”

“A lot of gay people, a lot of trans people, will come and ask me a lot of questions when I’m streaming, “said another. “It’s because they don’t have any other outlets.”

And when game makers listen to these queer voices and work with them in good faith to build better, more representative games, the results can be a big success. One clip in particular, featuring Dragon Age Inquisition lead editor Karin Weekes talking about the origins of Inquisition‘s well-written transgender character Krem (pictured), was particularly striking.

“The character [Krem] in Dragon Age Inquisition actually came pretty much out of…sort of a panel, more of a discussion we had at PAX Prime,” said Weekes. “And it was specifically geared towards the LGBTQ community, and it was pretty much…what do you want to see more of, what are we doing right, what are we doing wrong. And a trans woman got up to the microphone and said: ‘I’d love to see someone like me in a game, who’s not a monster.’”

In the end, many of the people Baume interviewed said that making games that authentically represent and support queer culture feels more feasible now than it has in a long time — though there’s still a lot of progress to be made.

“What we’re seeing now is that a lot of companies are changing their practices to listen to those voices and incorporate their feedback into the production process,” said Baume.

“Video games are what I love to make and they also pay my bills,” said drag queen Kitty Powers. “Having suffered for so much when I was a kid, I thought ‘well if all these young kids are going to be watching video of this game [Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker] being played then at least they’re getting some kind of exposure that I didn’t get.’ If kids can see that, and see that’s being treated as normal, that’s a good thing.”

“I own a game studio now, and that was my literal dream when I was six,” said Lab Zero Games chief Peter Bartholow.

“People aren’t being quiet about it anymore, and that’s a great thing, “said another interviewee. “But it can’t just be the tiny indie studios….it needs to trickle up to the big studios.”

BONUS: Devs curious for more examples of games which handle this subject well should know that after the talk, Baume asked the audience to share some examples of games that represent queer culture in a way that resonated and inspired them. Lots of great answers were shared, including Night in the Woods (specifically, Angus and Greg’s relationship), The Last Of Us, and the works of game developer Robert Yang.

Hello, and welcome to the first of 2018’s GDC x One Life Left shows, presented by Gamasutra! We’re joined by an array of incredible guests as One Life Left‘s Ste Curran and Ann Scantlebury and Gamasutra editor-in-chief Kris Graft bring the best of the show to you.

Tune in as we chat about the future of board games, storytelling in wrestling, what PlayerUnknown hopes to learn at GDC this year, and much more.

On the sofas today were:

• Jonathan Ying, Independent
• Kate Edwards, Geogrify
• Anna Lapinsh, Playmore Games
• Gabby DaRienzo, Laundry Bear Games
• Luis Fernando De Leon, 2401 Studios
• Brendan Greene, PUBG Corp
• Tammy Duplantis, Independent
• Ben Myers, Nyamakop

The future keeps getting older.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Star Fox for SNES released in North America. It was Nintendo first real foray into 3D gaming and the start of a years-long push of squeezing every ounce of power out of their aging 16-bit hardware.

As Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn loomed, here was Nintendo, with the help of technical wiz kids from England’s Argonaut Software, pushing the kinds of polygonal graphics onto home television screens that until that point had only been seen on arcade cabinets like Starblade.

“I think it was sort of an experiment for Nintendo,” says Giles Goddard, one of the game’s main programmers, “to see whether a 3D game would sell.”

The experiment was a grand success: In June of 1993, Nintendo touted Star Fox as “the fastest-selling video game in history,” with 1.7 million sales in Japan and the U.S. through March. A sequel on the Nintendo 64 would cement the franchise’s place in the Nintendo canon.

But the series would only produce four more original games in the two decades since. After a propulsive start, Star Fox has become something of an enigma: Rabid fans clamor for new entries and in-game quotations permeate the popular culture, all in the face of mixed critical and commercial success for the rare new title.

“All three of us game side programmers [including Dylan Cuthbert and studio founder Jez San] had a hand in everything basically. That’s how games were made back then.”

In many ways, the gaming industry has moved on, exploring wide open spaces and never-ending universes instead of Star Fox’s tight, corridor-based dog-fighting action. But a generation of developers who grew up playing as Fox McCloud and saving Slippy Toad are now taking us flying in their own kind of cockpit.

I spoke with two developers whose work has been influenced by Nintendo’s polygonal debut and one who actually wrote some of the code for the original game himself. At a quarter-century old, is Star Fox getting long in the tooth? Or is there hope yet for our favorite wise-cracking animal pilots?

Shaping a generation of game devs

Tyler Tomaseski is co-founder of Polyknight Games, developers of this year’s free-flying game InnerSpace. He first saw Star Fox at a friend’s house. Though playing it today reveals a kludgy frame rate and a screen filled with simple flat shapes, in 1993 the experience was a revelation.

“I got to play through Corneria and fight the Attack Carrier,” he wrote me in an email. “The graphics and the gameplay blew my mind… It was the coolest and most epic game I had played up to that point.”

Aaron San Filippo, who with his brother Forest co-founded Flippfly Studios, drew on Star Fox’s style and design in making their 2013 game Race the Sun. “I love how focused the game is. It just puts you right in the action, and asks you to master a very simple set of skills.”

Back in the early ‘90s, though, creating a polygonal 3D space-flight game on underpowered hardware was no simple task. The team that made Starfox was well-practiced. In 1986, Argonaut Software released Starglider on the Atari St; the arcade flight game used wire-frame graphics reminiscent of Atari’s 1983 Star Wars arcade game.

After putting out a sequel in 1988, the studio was commissioned by Nintendo to make X, a Game Boy space tank shooter that employed similar technology. The Kyoto-based giant was impressed by the work of these young lads from Britain. Argonaut was brought in to help build the Super FX chip, which, when embedded onto certain SNES cartridges, allowed for polygonal graphics and 3D movement.

[embedded content]
1992’s X for the Game Boy

Goddard remembers the task fondly. “All three of us game side programmers [including Dylan Cuthbert and studio founder Jez San] had a hand in everything basically,” Goddard tells me in an email. “That’s how games were made back then.”

“If I was proud of something, it would be the macro-based scripting language I made for the enemies. The entire game was programmed in ASM which made programming enemy strategies very tedious without it.”

In an age where AAA games are built across continents by hundreds of people, it’s difficult to imagine a high-profile, first-party game built by essentially three people. But the small team allowed for each member to have a sense of ownership over the title.

“If I was proud of something, it would be the macro-based scripting language I made for the enemies,” says Goddard. “The entire game was programmed in ASM which made programming enemy strategies very tedious without it.” And that back-and-forth tension between your pilots and the enemy ships would prove to be one of the more enduring elements of Star Fox’s design.

Long before becoming a game designer himself, Tomaseski recalls feeling the immersion created by Goddard’s careful scripting of enemy movement. “Getting messages from your squadmates throughout a mission really created a sense of comradery and shared danger,” Tomaseski recalls. “They each accepted the same risk and you were going to try and help each other… It’s a pretty rare emotion that few games of the era created.”

Indeed, the storytelling within the gameplay elevated Star Fox among its peers. When many CD-ROM games were leaning on mid-mission cinematics to make us feel we were playing a lo-fi TV show, Star Fox’s mid-battle babble between pilots and the possibility of losing your squadmate for the next mission gave each playthrough an escalated sense of drama.

But at the time, the big draw was the graphics itself. It was a peek at the 3D battle to come.

“The FX chip had very primitive texture capabilities,” Goddard says, “hence the sparse use of textures in the game. So we knew that would be the next big thing for 3D.”

Star Fox 2 running on the Super NES Classic Edition

That ‘next big thing’ approached so rapidly that the 16-bit sequel, Star Fox 2, was scrapped for fear of looking primitive next to the new wave of 3D games on PlayStation. “It was interesting seeing the different approaches that Sony took versus [Nintendo with] N64. Sony sacrificed pixel quality for speed whereas [Nintendo] went for pixel quality over fill rate. Both were equally valid routes to go down at the time.”

And Goddard would know; he left Argonaut to join Nintendo in Japan, programming Mario’s elastic face for Super Mario 64’s iconic title screen and working on 1080 Snowboarding among other titles. When asked about the fate of his first big game, Goddard remains nonplussed.

“I think the linear corridor design was what made the game special”

“To be honest, I don’t think it had much of an impact on the industry,” he admits. “As a genre, it had already been done in the arcades with Star Wars and Starblade. The timing, of course, was important; it was the first time 3D could be played on a home console. So that was new.”

San Filippo wonders whether Star Fox’s waning influence is because of the franchise’s widening ambitions. “I think the linear corridor design was what made the game special,” he says, referring to the limited horizontal movement and on-rails focus that drove the player forward. “I was sad to see the follow-ups move in another direction.”

With Star Fox Adventure’s on-foot sections and Star Fox Command’s touch-based strategy leanings, the series certainly expanded beyond the original’s scope. Such ambition is to be commended. But as often as players say they want new things, they also want old favorites to stay the same. If Star Fox is to be revamped for the future, perhaps it will only find success in a return to the original’s stripped down roots.

Goddard’s company, Vitei, responsible for Steel Diver and Tank Troopers on 3DS, has pivoted toward virtual reality in recent years. The shift has him back at the forefront of technology, again working in a cutting-edge field where the rules have yet to be made. Maybe this is where Star Fox deserves to live; Not as a full-fledged blockbuster tent-pole, but as it began: An experiment.

“I’ve actually talked to Dylan [Cuthbert] quite a lot about this and we both agree on what [Star Fox] would look like if we did it now with today’s tech,” Goddard says. “It would concentrate on the the fundamental dynamics that made the original fun and do away with some of the gimmickry introduced in remakes. We just need a couple of million dollars and Nintendo’s blessing.

2017 was Steam’s most profitable year yet, claims Sergey Galyonkin and the creator of SteamSpy, a website that, since 2015, has provided estimates on the number of game sales on the titular digital game store.

The digital store made revenues of $4.3 billion in 2017, a large proportion of which, he claims, was facilitated by the popularity of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, the unrivaled hit of last year. There are now 291 million Steam accounts, 63 million of which were created last year.

Speaking at GDC 2018, Galyonkin revealed a slew of statistics that show the yawning gap between the winners and losers on the service.

“Half of all the money is made by a small subset of games,” he said. In fact, of the 21,406 games currently on Steam (7,696 of which were released in 2017) those that manage to break into the top 100 make the majority of the money.

PUBG has sold, Galyonkin said, close to 28 million copies, generating $600 million in revenue. This is followed by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with 12.5 million sales, and revenues of $120 million.

A game must make $22 million in gross revenue to break into Steam’s top 20, a figure which has remained the same. “Hits like these are what make money for Valve.”

This data has been harvested by Galyonkin’s SteamSpy, which works by monitoring around 800,000 user profiles each day, using a three-day sample to estimate the basic statistic’s via on Steam API. Galyonkin prefaced his talk by saying that Steam Spy does not work in real time — it takes four days to “catch-up”, he said — and is “not precise” and “very inaccurate” for small games.

The technology only tracks owners and players, not sales, is unable to distinguish between games sold on Steam, sold elsewhere, and given away for free, and currently does not track refunds.

Nevertheless, Galyonkin is confident in stating that Steam “is not slowing down”. 57 million players were active in the past two weeks,  he said. 25 percent of all Steam account holders have played a game in the past two weeks, he said.

“It’s not all great through,” said Galyonkin. The median user owns only two games, while the mean average is 10.8 games, numbers which have fallen in recent years. 

While the service is not as saturated at the App Store, Galyonkin said, “discoverability” is becoming a major issue on the platform; around 30 games launch each day, more than one per hour.

“We have too many games,” he said. “It’s not only impossible for a user to buy them all; it’s impossible for a user to even scroll through them.”

While China is the largest market, the most represented nationality on Steam is American. “13.9 percent of active players are American, said Galyonkin. “And the average American use buys six times more games on Steam than an average user from China.”

The number of Steam accounts has risen sharply in 2017, said Galyonkin. This is because Cybercafes in China are “installing Steam so their clients can play PUBG,” said Galyonkin. The average Chinese player spends more than twice as much time playing PUBG than the average American.

The fastest growing game tag on Steam in the past five years is “dinosaurs, ” followed by “conspiracy.” The number of games tagged “Team-based” and “PVE” have fallen the greatest in the same period.

As well as running Steam Spy, Galyonkin also works as director of publishing strategy at Epic Games. “Our publishing strategy at Epic Games,” he quipped, “is to not put our games on Steam.”

Technology has created new ways to remain connected throughout long distances, but accessibility doesn’t hold the same weight when trying to communicate with loved ones seeking refuge in a different country.

“Nowadays, every migrant has a smartphone. But for them it’s not a luxury, it’s the only way to keep in touch with friends and family.” 

This was the message from Bury Me, My Love‘s  game designer Florent Maurin, who explained how he confronted players with a feeling of helplessness through a series of design choices to put forth the idea that games don’t always have to put the player first. 

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this afternoon, Maurin explained how designing outside of conventional norms by taking agency away from the player served to help create the feeling of helplessness experienced throughout Bury Me, My Love. 

“We wanted you as players not to live their lives, but to empathize and understand what those people go through,” said Maurin, who collaborated with a Syrian woman named Dana on the narrative.

Using Dana’s experience of keeping in touch with friends and family with a messaging app as she traveled built the foundation of Bury Me, My Love. 

Through listening to migrants, Maurin learned that no matter how they prepared for their journey, things would always go sideways.

Too many things can change, and being able to adapt is key. The biggest takeaway in these situations, however, is that “you’ll feel like you’re not in control.”

How was that helplessness translated into the game? 

In Bury Me, My Love, the player is not on the ground, meaning that they aren’t the ones going through the experiences of a migrant. Nour took that role, and the player embodied her husband Madj instead. Maurin expressed that making Nour feel “real” was pivotal in making the player feel as though they were talking to a real person. 

Because the game passes in psuedo real-time, sometimes Nour will take hours to tell the player that she’s reached a destination safely.

Sometimes she’ll type out a sentence and an animation will pop up indicating that she’s responding, but will suddenly stop. This helps to enforce a feeling of helplessness in the player, who isn’t on the ground with Nour to provide advice.

The player spends 99% of the time waiting. “Most of the time, Majd is in the dark, and she doesn’t have time to chat with you all the time.

She’s the one who’s living through the things, you’re just there to support her.” When Nour goes offline, that’s when the sense of helplessness creeps back in. 

“Why is she offline? Is she in a zone with no signal, or did something worse happen? You won’t know. And since you’re not on the ground, you won’t know until she comes back.” 

Maurin emphasized that these lapses in communication were to enforce the fact that the player is never in control. “We tried to do that to portray how She’s living the things while you aren’t.” 

While Nour can die in the game, it’s meant to emphasize how cruel the world can be. “We wanted to make clear that to migrants, life is not fair,” said Maurin.

“We’re talking about real people who are risking their lives. Would it be disrespectful to keep her alive?It would have been disrespectful not to put death in the game. They are risking their lives, and it shouldn’t be ignored.” 

It’s important to make the player feel frustrated and helpless by putting them through unfair situations, and there will be many unexpected moments to compensate for a lack of control.

“The only thing migrants have is to live in the moment. It will matter at the time, but they take one day after another, and it’s the journey that matters. We wanted you to feel that way, to care about the journey.” 

After reaching the end of the game, there are two options: never play the game again (which Maurin expressed was “completely okay”) or restart from day one. There are no save points for a reason. 

“Nour is a metaphor for the thousands of people who actually did this journey. We wanted you to feel this way. Every time you play this game, you play a new person who is facing a new situation.” 

Game director Yuya Tokuda and senior manager of global production Peter Fabiano played to a packed room today at GDC 2018 with their postmortem of Monster Hunter: World.

The game debuted early this year and proved a smashing success, especially in the West, where it seems to have been embraced by more players than any other entry in the long-running series — in part because it’s a bit more approachable and forgiving.

Nevertheless, Fabiano says that it was designed to be very much in line with the three core pillars of the Monster Hunter franchise: compelling action, convivial multiplayer, and an engaging upgrade loop for weapons and equipment.

From the beginning, Tokuda’s goal with World was to create a game with a dense, seamless world; Monster Hunter was the game series that inspired him to join Capcom, and as a director on World he wanted to try and break down the artificial barriers between zones which have been a hallmark of the series.

Breathing life into the World of Monster Hunter

He showed footage of an early prototype (built by 50-70 people in about 18 months) of World, highlighting multiple examples of how the team took pains to try and make this game feel more “alive” with little touches like making player characters animate in specific ways to look at nearby creatures, or fine-tuning monster movement code so they would move naturally through the environment.

“In previous Monster Hunter titles, the routines for movement where such that monsters would actually get stuck in between the trees,” said Tokuda, by way of example. “What we did this time around was we customized the tech so that we could have monsters move around without getting stuck.”

The team also tried to make the environments of World feel more alive by fiddling with the creatures to make them more life-like, taking pains to ensure that monsters would attack and interact with each other like real animals. In World, for example, the smaller “fodder” monsters will sometimes gang up and attack the larger trophy monsters, giving the player a bit of help.

“Up until now, the smaller monsters were only enemies,” Tokuda continued. “But with this game we wanted to show they can be either friend or foe.”

He also said the team took special pains to make confronting the big monsters feel dynamic, devoting resources to expanding and refining the process of taking down a big enemy — each of whom is created with a very clear theme.

“With each creature, we also wanted to have a very unique sort of characteristic that stood out and made them unique,” he said. “[For example] their attack style, maybe a creature moves very mechanically and so has an almost bulldozer-like attack; that becomes a motif for the creature. Having said that, we also then have to go back and make sure it fits into this living, breathing environment.”

The team spent a lot of time fine-tuning the ways a player can “mount” a monster and move around while riding it, for example, and they also invested heavily in ensuring that bosses would be vulnerable to environmental dangers — either those crafted by the player (flash bombs, triggerable environmental hazards) or those inherent to the environment, like fast-flowing rivers or other, bigger monsters.

“You spend so much time with the boss battles in Monster Hunter, so we tried to utilize a broad number of methods to have a good variety, and keep a good tempo going,” he continued. “This is how we were able to realize Monster Hunter: World’s most ambitious change: to make it possible to use the environment.”

Bonus Round: Making Monster Hunter more approachable

In responding to audience questions after the talk, Tokuda opened up a bit about how Monster Hunter: World’s was designed to be more approachable to a broader variety of players. It’s an interesting subject given how well the game has done internationally, and Tokuda said a lot of it came down to playtesting this game with Western audiences.

“For the Japanese domestic market, we did not do any playtesting; we have resources internally, and obviously as a Japanese team we have those sensibilities and we think we know our audience pretty well,” he said. “For overseas, we actually had two testing opportunities, one in North America and one in the UK…in addition, when we were out at conferences and events, we could get live feedback and playtesting on our demo.”

In response to another question he gave a specific example of how this Western playtesting pushed the team to change something that’s core to the Monster Hunter franchise: how the player understands how much damage they’re doing in combat. World gives players the option to see damage numbers pop off every time they hit n enemy, something Tokuda said Japanese players would not appreciate.

“We felt like perhaps the Japanese userbase may not welcome this change: to show damage, up until now you would have to judge from the reaction of the monsters,” said Tokuda. “But the Western users, when we did a lot of focus testing, the feedback was that they wanted to see something immediately. But the Japanese users might not want this option, so we included it as an option to show or not show [how much damage you’re doing].”