XBLA: 5 Things You Didn't Know About Community Games
The New Xbox Experience is an interesting beast - it's bringing in a whole new style of the Xbox 360. The Community Games feature is great and has a lot of potential - but there are a several things which may end up hindering the experience.
The 5 points below describe some strange choices I've seen with the Community Games experience, and they range from being understandable to being very unnecessary. Let us know in the comments what you think of these currently implemented rules.
1. Community Games require you to be online in order to play them.
This includes games you've bought as well. Trying to get into a game while offline will prompt a "Please sign into Xbox Live" message.
Why this in a part of this system baffles me - it doesn't make any sense. That means if you lose your internet connection you cannot play any Community Games at all.
2. Outside of online play, XNA creators cannot send or receive any information.
What does this mean? No instant leaderboards. Consider just how many different puzzle games will come out of this. It's going to be pretty crazy, and getting high scores are an integral part of that experience now. Online games will also not be able to keep tabs on everyone who bought their games.
A way around this is with games like Lines. Lines has a simple password system that will show up in the game which you then plug into their website. It's about as good as it will get.
3. Community Games do not show up in "quick launch" menu.
One of the new features in the NXE is the quick launch menu. This menu is selectable when you press the Xbox button during a game. From it you can select XBLA titles and it will skip the dashboard altogether. Community games however, do not have the same luxury - you must get them from the dashboard.
4. There is no current way to directly update your game.
Currently there is no way for creators to patch Community Games. There is only one option - to take down the game and resubmit it. That means a few days of downtime, but it also means that to get the updated version you must download the full game again.
5. No Avatar Support.
In order for an Xbox 360 game to include Avatar support, the game must be certified for Xbox Live Arcade. Community Games do not have access to this library, as Avatars requirements make them only available to do E rated activities. As Community Games are unrated, this can't be regulated.
Comments
All 5 things suck. I think Microsoft just wants there to be as much incentive as possible to make a certified XBLA game.
Posted by: JFizzle | November 18, 2008 6:25 AM
1) You only have to be online to start the game. If the internet dies while you're playing it, you can keep playing. It is in there because Community Games are unrated and it plays into Microsoft's ability to make sure you are allowed to play unrated content.
2) True. The team has stated that they hop to get real leaderboard support in the future, but for now there's no good way around it. Lines took one approach. Biology Battle (another game going up soon) did a peer-to-peer approach to try and synchronize high scores.
3) I have no idea why that wouldn't be in there. Perhaps just to prevent it from being cluttered.
4) The game never goes down during this process. The current game stays up until the new one goes to replace it.
5) This one makes perfect sense. Can't really hold it against Microsoft for not wanting to see avatars involved with all sorts of inappropriate things.
Posted by: Nick | November 18, 2008 8:17 AM
1) Not sure either, but what Nick says makes sense to me. All I can comment on is the possibility that most XNA game players are most likely the type to have Live connected at all times, based on the assumption that they are expert users (hopefully that changed by NXE, that will hopefully make XNA and XBLA games far more accessible and visible).
2) I'm not familiar with how Leaderboards are set up, but I've always assumed that there existed Leaderboard servers that handled this data, and so I assumed there were costs associated with it, and thus they aren't available to XNA games. Leaderboards are a next gen feature that add a lot to games, and for some genres it is a crucial feature.
3) Interesting, but something I'm personally not too worried about.
4) I'm assuming that if I've bought the game, I don't have to buy the upgrades? ie. it isn't registered as a completely new title.
5) Makes sense.
Personally I'm glad that it is coming out in the fashion that it is, as it seems to cover a lot of the major bases...that's why I'm not too concerned about these particular nuances. XNA has grown during the past few years, giving more and more power to the developer (one example is online play), and so I expect that to continue.
Posted by: nrXic | November 18, 2008 6:16 PM
@nrXic:
In regards to #4, you do not have to repurchase the game. You can simply re-download it much like any other content that you've previously purchased from the marketplace.
Posted by: Nick | November 19, 2008 8:07 AM
Question: do the games support the achievement system?
Cheers!
Posted by: Rickey Henderson | November 19, 2008 3:10 PM
Nope, no achievements in community games. I really think this will hinder how popular community games end up becoming. I know a lot of gamers that play games obsessively for achievements, and achievements are a driving force behind sales to hardcore gamers. There is a large portion of the market that will probably not play community games because they do not have achievements.
Posted by: TheBlackMask | November 22, 2008 12:20 AM
#1 was the worse for me and my beta testers (and friends)... I was unable to test out my game at any spot without an Internet connection. It is fine for the average Xbox LIVE user, though.
Posted by: Matthew Doucette | November 28, 2008 8:59 PM
The most dissapointing for developers and gamers alike, however, is no leaderboards and no acheivement... We so much want the leaderboards, in our score-running game. Leaderboards can increase replayability like nothing else... They can be "faked" with a p2p solution like Biology Battle, and we might do the same.
Posted by: Matthew Doucette | November 28, 2008 9:02 PM