Games Theatre | Gonçalo Miranda UWL

Week 1: Essay Topic

On our first week, we had to settle on a topic for an essay we had to write. This would be a comprehensive 1800 word document detailing an issue within the game's industry of our choosing. This essay will be posted here on a later week.

For me, it was the increase of game's costs on release, specifically going from 60£ to 70£ for the game's base edition. The problem with this comes with the fact that the grand majority of these games have no justification for having their base cost be higher, especially when games of similar or higher quality and quantity of content are priced at 60£ or even lower than 60£.

My essay would explore the issues and controversies that originated from this and why I personally see it as a step in the wrong direction.

Week 2: Report on an Esport

For this task, i chose a game that is or was once present in the Esports, or Electronic Sports, scene and wrote a short one page report and summary of it's history and influence on Esports.

I chose the Colectible Card Game Gwent: The Witcher Card Game. I chose it because I'm confident not many other student will talk about a game whose Esports presence and audience has long since died out.

YOU CAN READ THE REPORT HERE

Week 4: Games Media Analysis

For this task I was able to simply pick any video I liked relating to the games industry. News, analysis, gameplay, trivia, etc.

I chose to look at a video from a content creator I enjoy, Bricky, where he reviews the recently released Resident Evil 4 Remake by Capcom.

(yes the thumbnail looks weird, I am very aware of this fact)

Video reviews on games are pretty common, especially nowadays. They serve to give people a creator's opinion on a game they're thinking of buying, or simply for entertainment and insight. Which reviewer anyone chooses to watch comes down to the reviewer's opinions on games and how they match your own, this way it's easy to know how much to trust a review of a game since you know you and the reviewer have similar tastes and opinions. Or you simply like their presentation, humour, insight, etc.

This review focuses heavily on entertainment, while giving casual and very personal opinions on the game. It's meant to not be taken seriously or as professional and objective analysis of the game's content but as a look at an average gamer's experience with the game.

Week 6: Loot Box Simulation

Loot boxes are very common in multiplayer games nowadays. As part of Games Theatre, we looked a bit into the place loot boxes take in the gaming industry, discussed some controversies and did an exercise relating to them.

We used Machinations.io, a web tool specializing in simulating many kinds of game systems, existing or original, including Loot Boxes. I decided to recreate the loot box system seen in Warhammer: Vermintide 2, i picked this example because it doesn't rely on real world currency to work, all loot is earned exclusively through gameplay and that got my attention.

Officially published item drop rates do not exist, so i used a mix of previously done research by fellow players to create this simulation. Said research can be found here.

This research does show some flaws and unexpected outcomes, so I changed a very small number of the shown values and percentages to make the simulation resemble my own experiences with the game's system. These changes were exclusively to make lower value items a bit more common than higher value ones.

This is what I came up with:

As mentioned above in the video, Vermintide 2 has multiple chest types, and which one the player gets depends on what difficulty they play at:

Recruit Difficulty gives you Strongboxes, which can't reward items above the Rare rarity;
Veteran Difficulty gives you Coffers, which can't reward items above the Exotic rarity;
Champion Difficulty gives you Chests, which give a small chance at Veteran rarity items;
Legendary and Cataclysm Difficulty give you Vaults, which give the best chance at Exotic and Veteran rarity items.

One major flaw with this simulation is the fact that every loot box gives 3 items to the player, not just one, but i wasn't able to make that detail work with this tool.

So in this simulation, when a vault results in a Veteran rarity item, it's technically inaccurate as it can easily give 2 items of lower qualities at the same time, but if only one item was given to the player, this would be mostly accurate.

Due to WIX's new storage limitations, i moved the contents of this page to a separate portfolio here.

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E3: Greenscreen Exercise (15/10/2020)

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