This week saw the release of the first teaser trailer for Hitman: Absolution, the first proper confirmation of the highly-anticipated game’s release and confirmation that it’ll be showing up at E3 2011 behind closed doors. This should’ve been a time for punching the air – a great story to close out a day released at 5pm for the Brits, while the American reporters could start their news day with a bang. A positive event – except it wasn’t.

Instead, Press were irritated and annoyed by the announcement. Why? Well, I’ll let Nathan Irvine, Associate Editor of GamesRadar.com; explain by quoting his tweet around the time of the announcement.

“AWESOME GAME ANNOUNCEMENT TRAILERS SHOULD NOT BE FUCKING DELIVERED AT 4:54PM IF THEY CAN GO UP AT 5PM.” he angrily tweeted – quite right, too. He wasn’t alone. VG247′s Johnny Cullen soon retweeted and explained a little more calmly what had gone down. “To add more context to my earlier tweets, the email carrying the embed code arrived at 16:53,” he wrote. That only gave the site seven minutes to prep the story.

That’s seven minutes to write some coherent copy, double-check it and publish it – and god help you if you’re on a system like the one I’m on where you’re encouraged to actually upload the video to your own servers rather than embed it – I’d wager it’s actually impossible to encode, upload and format the video in addition to writing the story in fifteen minutes, leave alone seven.

The secretive nature of Square Enix as a company and the fact they’re Japanese factors into this stuff in a big way, but there are also plenty of Western-based publishers guilty of the same activity for major stories. Sometimes things have to be kept secret until the last minute, until the bomb is dropped – I understand that – but in the case of a teaser trailer for a game we all knew existed, the secrecy seems over the top and unnecessary. It happens all the time.

A lot of people such as the GJAIF guy shout and stamp their feet about how games bloggers rush. Many don’t proof read or spell-check or have two sources for every claim they make as journalism degree students are taught, but part of the reason that this is so common amongst games writers is thanks to things like this.

What’s here, then, is a publisher seemingly actively encouraging that race to the publish button, as whoever gets there first on that trailer is going to soak up thousands of valuable page impressions. There was no time for anyone to do any of that stuff in this case – no time at all. It sounds silly to blame the publishers, but one thing that is definitely true is that the more this stuff happens the more it’s driven into the heads of games journalists both green and seasoned that it’s okay – or even necessary – to race through a story in order to be first off the blocks.

I’m guilty myself. I remember publishing my Fable II Review exactly two-and-a-half minutes before embargo time to be the first on N4G. I also remember feeling like a rogue or a knave for it. For the sake of 150 seconds it seems ridiculous. I couldn’t give a shit now, but back then that was important to me, and so were the page impressions to my then-small site. I’ve grown as a person and a writer, but that itch still appears every now and then but now I’m wiser it manifests itself in a more mature way – usually leading to great stories written quickly and concisely. That’s nice.

As well as encouraging bad practice, the delivery of the trailer so close to the embargo demonstrates a crippling, saddening lack of trust from publishers in journalists. There’s no surprise, when VG247′s Pat Garratt is tweeting in dismay at other sites ‘bargo busting’ on a semi-regular basis, but the lack of trust is still sad.

We’re not innocent, of course. Half the time the leaks are coming from journalists who love games and love their jobs. They’re excited, and they want to show their fellow fans. PR is all about control, and this takes control from the hands of the PR team – and that’s the opposite of what they want – so they treat many of the journalists like children to protect their product. It’s an unfortunate situation for all parties involved – and what’s needed is a middle ground where the journos get a decent lead-in time but the PR folks keep complete control over the product being promoted.

It should be simple, really. Build up a good relationship; get added to the list that becomes privy to information a decent chunk ahead of time. If you fuck up, you get struck off the list and end up having to scramble to get things up quick – even if your site is massive. Simple. Efficient.

You might argue that under this system it means that the big sites soak up all the impressions from those stories – that the rich get richer – but in my eyes this isn’t actually a bad thing. It means new sites and upstarts will have to work for their growth, earning it off quality writing and features rather than from repeatedly being the fastest fingers with the least interest in proofreading.

That’d be better, surely?

With all that said, it’s not all bad. The very next day Rockstar Games demonstrated how it should be done, and Johnny Cullen was there again, but this time with praise. “Now THAT’s how you release a trailer to press: with an hour’s heads-up. Well done Rockstar.”

You know what? I didn’t get that trailer. Not angry. Not bothered. Clearly, I just need to work harder, chat to the Rockstar PR team more, build up my page impressions some more and earn their trust. That’s hard work – but that’s exactly how it should be.

I thought it was about time I started using this place not only as a depositry of work I’ve done over the years but also as a place for me to air my thoughts – and pondering on what subject I should tackle first, this jumped out at me – my methodology for working with the fans of series’ like Final Fantasy.

After all these years running UFFSite – aka the Unofficial Final Fantasy Site – I’ve had a lot of of contact with the fans of the Final Fantasy series. Running this site is a risk, as it could easily be seen as a conflict of interests for my other work – if I’m so invested in the fanbase and product portfolio of Square Enix, how can I be trusted to write a review of a game like Final Fantasy XIII? I gave the game an 85, but I wouldn’t blame anyone if they accused me of being so invested that I was too critical or so invested that I went easy on the game. For somebody who hadn’t given things as much thought as I that’d be a distinct, if not likely possibility.

UFFSite was founded on June 28th 2000. Back then it was UFF9 – the Unofficial Final Fantasy 9 Site – and only covered FF9, which wasn’t out yet. I wasn’t a part of the site until the back end of the year 2000, but those who founded it were clever in their attitude – they picked out the unreleased FF title and offered unrelenting coverage and translations from Japan. That built the site up quickly. By the time that I was taking control with two others – Mike and Phil – the site was massive – one of the largest Final Fantasy sites online.

It goes to say something of the resiliance of the site and its power as a ‘fan brand’ when UFFSite served almost 2.5 million page impressions to 1.5 million unique users in 2010 – its largest year ever – in spite of the fact the forums have quietened to a whisper and the site has no traditional information (guides, walkthroughs, maps, weapon lists etc) on any recent Final Fantasy titles. We have no sections for titles like Crisis Core, Dissidia, Versus XIII or Type-0 (nee Agito) – and while our blog-style news page still covers unfolding events about those games, the vast majority of our traffic comes in off the legacy pages for titles such as Final Fantasy VII, I and IX.

There’s a reason that UFFSite has dropped off the radar and become largely a legacy site with news postings – and that is all to do with the birth of RPG Site – which is exactly what it says on the tin. In 2006, Final Fantasy was lagging – and UFFSite’s page impressions were shifting to match that. The lack of a ‘proper’ FF in XI was part of the problem, and XII being delayed into Oblivion was another (it’d launch late in 2006 in the US and in 2007 in the UK – but development on it had begun in 2001!) In order to broaden our audience, we made the decision to launch a site dedicated to the RPG genre in general.

RPG Site has been hugely successful for us, and we’re proud of the prestige it has managed to achieve. Learning that the developers at Bioware have read your review, printed it out and used it when considering design elements for Mass Effect 3′s RPG elements is gratifying, and an amazing feeling – one we’d never have gotten out of Square Enix. That said, RPG Site’s success has left us with a bigger question: What do you do about a problem like UFFSite?

It’s a tricky situation, as you have to avoid looking bias. We don’t want UFFSite’s existance to colour the tone of every Square Enix review on RPG Site (and now on The Gaming Vault, our general gaming site) and so it requires the most gentle, softly-softly approach we can imagine. That was when UFFSite became a news portal and little else. Now, though, I know that approach was wrong. It took analysing some ‘best practice’ approaches to the fansite formula to make me realize that.

Two communites were vital examples to me in this – Sonic the Hedgehog and Koei. In both cases I managed to find a fan site which didn’t have the same predicament we were in – but one that, arguably, was even worse. Sonic Wrecks is the fansite of one ‘ArchangelUK’ – all innocent enough – until you realize he works for SEGA. As I understand it, he actually got his Community Management position thanks to his efforts to cultivate the Sonic Community as a fan first and foremost. I think he was first bought in on an advisory role – helping the PR team to understand the fanbase – and then moved into actually working on the team proper.

This is a wise decision by SEGA – if you want to touch the fans, employ one of them – but the way AAUK has handled Sonic Wrecks since being at SEGA is interesting. I know him from my dealings with SEGA as a Journo – and I’d never have known had I not searched the connection out, and were it not for “Summer of Sonic”, the hugely successful Sonic fan convention in the UK where SEGA and a few fansites including Sonic Wrecks and The Sonic Stadium take over a hotel for the weekend, get down some special guests and generally meet and bring the community together.

The way in which he disconnects the two is important, though. As a community manager, he has constant contact with the Sonic fans and promotes SEGA products in a professional manner, but he’s also seen by the fans as a friend. It’s a tough balance to strike, but he’s managed to do something amazing in that he’s managed to keep the friendships with the fans and the fansites that were forged before he joined SEGA. He’s also managed to fight off – or avoid entirely – any nastiness or jealosy from other site owners at him landing what is undoubtedly to them a dream job. All at once he’s a figurehead for the fan community, a voice of authority for the SEGA and Sonic brand amongst the fans and a fan himself, with opinions and thoughts on the games he promots that he actually does express on his podcast – albeit after the games have been out for a while. It’s a great balance.

He’s a trusted source, and while a company denial of a particularly big rumour might be met with skepticism from the fans, if AAUK denies it they believe him because they trust him. That’s important, and I’m sure in years to come the approach he has taken with the Sonic Community here in the UK will be looked  upon as a key example of how to handle the community of a large, ever growing franchise. Ultimately, it all comes down to the fact he’s still a fan. Even his Bio on Sonic Wrecks reveals his true desire – to be important enough to be remembered by the Sonic Community properly. “99% of all the cool community stuff and competitions to do with Sonic is as a direct result of his work,” his Bio says, continuing “it might even garner him a place on the Sonic Retro wiki sometime.” Still a fan.

Similar to AAUK there’s Chin Soon Sun, formerly of Koei Dynasty Warriors fansite Koei Warriors. Chin is a similar story to AAUK – he’s a fansite guy hired into the company he had such a passion for – but he made the decision to step down from  Koei Warriors, the website he created, when he landed the job. He handed it on to others, and now lists himself cutely on his Twitter Bio as being “retired” from that position, now the Community Manager of Tecmo Koei Europe. Despite leaving, Chin, like AAUK, keeps himself deeply involved in the day-to-day movements in the Koei fan community. He blogs about the games often on his personal blog, and his twitter is choc-full of him talking with fans about the games. He’s always deeply involved, and like AAUK, he’s not just Managing that Community like a puppetmaster but he’s also a member of that community – sleeves rolled up, getting stuck in, taking a hands-on approach, being a friend to the fans, but remaining professional.

I don’t work for Square Enix, but reviewing these two and the way they’ve gone about things reinvigorated me with new ideas for the future of UFFSite and the approach we should take. For me it is important I don’t put the journalistic integrity of the other network sites at risk with any actions we undertake on UFFSite, but now I feel we can finally foster the same sort of connect/disconnect that the likes of Chin and AAUK have achieved with the fanbase. We are the only English language fansite out there to have regular day-to-day contact with Square Enix’s PR and Marketing teams, and I count several members of those teams as personal friends as well as professional acquaintances.

We’ve got a redesign of UFFSite coming up that’ll remake both the front and back ends of the site. That’s a start. I also fully intend to start trying to pull something Summer of Sonic-ish together for the UK Final Fantasy Fan community. I still have that domain name for Final Fantasy Festival, after all, and the upcoming Distant Worlds Concert in London this coming November seems the ideal time to arrange a large-scale fansite fan meet-up. I know the webmaster of our French brothers and sisters at FF World is heading over.

We’ll also be shifting UFFSite from opinion to more fan-based stuff from now on. We’ll present the news and the facts and the walkthroughs and stuff like that, but we’ll be inviting top, clever fans in to contribute other aspects of the site – Editorials on matters big and small, from the quality of recent games in the series to a question like, say, how the hell did the Tseng survive getting stabbed by Sephiroth and then having the Temple collapse on top of him in FF7? Much like Kevin and Chin, I, the staff, and the site in general should act as moderators and facilitators for the fanbase – we should be a guiding hand, but we should also let them decide what to do. UFFSite is a site for them – it’s a site that they should decide the destiny of. They are the members who drive it.

Square Enix are themselves offering up some community tastings of their own, but right now I feel their vision doesn’t really intersect with ours much. While the vision is definitely there within individuals, with that company it is often about persuading the Japanese side of the company to sign off on something they see as risky. We all know about the “closed mega theatre” antics that company pulls, and the Japanese side largely believes in a hands-off approach to marketing and community – and that is going to take some time to change.

In that time, I feel fansites like UFFSite can chisel themselves a niche which Square Enix themselves will struggle to hit with their current approach – while still remaining above-board and legal. Unlike some of the stuff SEGA have done, Square Enix’s approach still does feel a lot like a marketing department rather than fellow fans, which leaves space for us. Square Enix definitely are changing their game up, and in this respect they should be regarded as rivals as well as friends to us.

They should be watched – and worked with – closely. When it comes down to it, we are in the same business in the end. They’ve just hired the awesome Jem Alexander to contribute to the blog, and he used to do a bang-up job on the Playstation Blog, so I’m interested to see what they do with him – but I also think the approach for Square Enix’s portfolio – or at least the Japanese side of the portfolio – needs to be drastically different to the approach on the PS Blog. That style will work great for titles like Tomb Raider and Deus Ex, though.

Jem is really talented and I’m excited to see what he does over there, and he’s joining a team that’s already clearly hugely dedicated to the cause of taking Square Enix Members Europe and making it an example for the rest of the company. With the right steps that site will one day be viewed as a prime example of digital marketing done right, though I still believe the Japanese product portfolio in particular could use some proper community love, as I argued on UFFSite not too long ago. Hopefully that day comes – studios like Crystal Dynamics, IO and Eidos Montreal have their own community guys – it’s crazy to my mind that FF, KH, Tactics Ogre and other AAA Japanese franchises don’t have someone to cultivate that base in the West.

Back to UFF – by inviting the members to contribute, it gives them a reason to return. Right now, we avoid some of the things Final Fantasy fans love on UFFSite. There’s no soundtrack downloads, for instance, and there’s certainly no ROMs of older FF games or anything like that. Those things are, frankly, disgusting on other sites. We want to encourage fans to buy the soundtracks and support the efforts of Square Enix Music and the composers who toil on each game. We want them to track down old games on ebay, and not pirate them. We can hold our heads high and say we have the moral high ground, but ultimately this isn’t easy for us – not having such things damages the ability of the site to perform. Even if UFFSite is a better, more regularly updated, higher quality website than its rivals, some fans will eschew us in favour of them in order to get their free FF MP3s or ROM downloads.

This means content we do produce has to be high quality and thought provoking and also appropriate for all ages – we have to understand that while we’ve gotten older the kind of fan who looks up and visits fansites tends to be younger – between around 13 and 16. We need to accomodate for the older fans but also remain friendly and keep the site content from being either too deep and complex or too adult and sweary.There are other, legal areas where we can claw back users, too – I hope to get our friends at Square Enix to dig through their archives and give us some high-res renders and artwork we can release. A lot of this stuff would’ve been released to magazines back in the day for their content – but now the day of those games has passed I’m hoping we can release those PSDs in a high quality. And it’s legal! Hurrah.

That approach should also mean UFFSite is doing its job. A thriving community in itself is an amazing, strong advertisement for a brand. Word of mouth is powerful marketing indeed – if not the most powerful – so UFFSite can be seen as a powerful marketing tool by Square Enix. To be clear, it isn’t a marketing tool – it’s a privately owned site that is more interested in fans than anything – but being seen as such is an important issue of perception for us. The more importantly we are viewed, the more content we can secure direct from Square Enix that will help the site to grow and forge a seperate identity from both RPG Site and the other Final Fantasy fansites out there.

So it’s doing everything it was designed to do – it’s informing the fans, it’s strengthening Final Fantasy as a series, and hopefully thanks to our contact with Square Enix it can help to facilitate dialogue between Square Enix and the fanbase – it can be something of a middle-man. We’ll also expand the UFFSite coverage out to cover more Square Enix titles. Eventually, I hope the site can stretch as far as Tomb Raider, Kane & Lynch and so on. It’ll start with the easy stuff, though – Kingdom Hearts, Star Ocean and so on.

Those who want the critical edge and verdict on Final Fantasy and Square Enix titles can head to RPG Site, and they’ll get it in detail. While there’ll be tough questions asked and a critical eye cast on older releases, with newer stuff our intention is to largely let the fans make the critical judgements on UFFSite – we’ll largely step back. We’ll provide the news and subjects to discuss and an exciting, interesting, intiutive environment to interact with other fans – and hopefully that, combined with our efforts and Square’s help, should drive the site to even higher levels of success than it sees currently.

I’ll probably have even more to say on this subject as we continue to develop the site. Comments, thoughts and such are always welcome, so please do drop ‘em in below.

It’s strange, then, to see the gaming media compare Alan Wake to Heavy Rain. Both have put a massive emphasis on plot, but when push comes to shove Microsoft’s latest exclusive blockbuster has more in common with the Uncharted series than Quantic Dream’s ‘interactive experience’.

Strip away the storyline and Alan Wake is an interesting if slightly repetitive third person shooter which mixes guns with light, an overarching theme of the entire game. Enemies in the game are humans taken over by the darkness, and the dark energy which takes the form of a mysterious tar-like substance must be burned away from them with a flashlight, flare or other light source before you can shoot to kill.

The action in the game controls wonderfully, with the same slack character movement but tight aiming you’ll find in games like Uncharted and Gears of War, though here precision accuracy isn’t the real core of the gameplay – it’s more about crowd control, using light to deal with and hold off the melee-using enemies, with the shooting a secondary element.

In line with that the Left Trigger ‘boosts’ your flashlight, making the light more deadly to enemies but reducing its battery charge while the right trigger fires and the right bumper uses your secondary weapon – which could be flashbang grenades or flares. The flashlight is thankfully unlimited in Alan Wake, recharging when you’re out of combat, and in combat you can switch batteries to remain combat-ready at all times, though batteries are finite.

The Left Bumper sprints, but in combat it has a secondary function – dodging. Remedy’s Max Payne pedigree shines through here as most dodges will initiate a brief sequence of bullet-time, with the camera panning around Alan as he narrowly misses the pitchfork or knife he’s avoiding an attack from. It looks pretty damn cool, and the animation in these sections looks great.

The Max Payne effect continues in other areas, with sweeping camera movements when you pull out a flare or commit to other large actions in combat, though some of the most intense moments in Alan Wake’s combat for me came when I had next to no ammunition or flares, and I was left to run from light source to light source with a ton of enemies chasing after me – it gets intense.

As well as the regular flashlight, there are a few upgraded flashlights and other light sources – car headlights, spotlights, street lights and so on. The car driving controls are a bit floaty, but even that is still very solid, and it’s fun to run down enemies thanks to the power of a car’s headlights.

In addition to the shooting mechanic there’s some collectables to grab and things to collect. While a few are useless, most – like TV Shows, Radio Shows and Manuscript pages – provide you with something to watch, listen or read that fleshes out the town of Bright Falls, its inhabitants or help to clear up the mystery of what’s happening to Alan Wake – they’re rewarding to find.

Past the above, Alan Wake is all about the story. It’s not the longest story in the world, clocking in at about a dozen hours, but for those hours you’ll almost certainly be on the edge of your seat and desperately waiting for the next twist or reveal.

In terms of a summary, all you need to know is that bestseller novelist Alan Wake’s wife is missing, he’s missing a week of memories and he’s finding pages of a book he can’t remember writing – and the pages are coming true. Dark creatures are trying to kill him, a kidnapper claims they have his wife – and he’s trying to unravel the mystery.

The story is admittedly cheesy and hackneyed, but this seems to have been a deliberate decision from Remedy, with the game quite openly flaunting its inspirations of late 80s/early 90s thriller TV and slashy thriller novels, embracing the cheese of the medium and being all the better for it.

The narrative somehow manages to be self depreciating but thrilling at the same time, and the mystery of what has happened to Wake kept me playing while the script did a fantastic job of getting me invested in all the major characters, especially Alan and Barry, best friends and colleagues.

To further the TV or novel-based feel of the game, the action is split into episodes or chapters – six in total – with each episode ending with a big cliffhanger and beginning with a nice little ‘Previously on Alan Wake’ montage.

Each episode also ends with a musical number, and that makes this a good time to mention the soundtrack, which is a wonderful mix of licensed music and pieces composed specifically for the game, ranging from old country music that fits Bright Falls perfectly to the spooky strings you’ll hear whilst in the woods and, yes – a bit of heavy metal in a surprising but awesome section of the game.

Wake narrates most of his experience with a sort of internal monologue, and it only adds to that TV-thriller atmosphere the game exudes. While story is Alan Wake’s strong point, arguably the best facet of the game is in fact the atmosphere, and how it’s constructed a seemingly alive world out of the spooky town of Bright Falls.

That’s accomplished through the previously mentioned TV and Radio shows, which can be found and watched or listened to at set points in each chapter, but also through the in-game dialogue as Alan comments on things as he walks past them and banters with whoever he’s with at the time.

Bright Falls is an incredibly well-accomplished little backwater town, and it’s without a doubt one of my favourite game locations in years. The game gets a lot out of what it’s based off and where it’s set, and it really makes the most of the characters, setting and mystery at hand.

It’s difficult to talk about the story without spoiling it, but it’s an intriguing, exciting and awesome ride as it twists and turns and leads invariably to its exciting climax, which goes a long way to indicate a sequel is all but certain – no bad thing in this case.

The same little touches also make the gameplay more fun, too. You’ll find messages on walls that only show when you’re shining your flashlight at them, pointing you to secret areas where extra weapons can be found. Meanwhile, pages of Wake’s manuscript you find can be read and often foreshadow events before they happen. I knew I was going to face a possessed bulldozer before it happened thanks to the manuscript, and so I saved a few flares to help me deal with it – an awesome touch!

All that stuff is awesome, but Alan Wake still has flaws. The combat is repetitive despite being fun, and this isn’t helped by the variety of enemies being limited to four or five different kinds. There’s also objects that can be possessed and will attack you, like the aforementioned bulldozer, but the enemy variety leaves much to be desired.

The game is also remorselessly linear, driven solely by the story and nothing else. This, again, is similar to Uncharted, though Alan Wake lacks any multiplayer component unlike the second in that series. In a game where the story is as tightly woven as this, that can hardly be argued against, though.

In the dark Alan Wake manages to be one of the best looking Xbox 360 games around, with impressively realistic looking lighting and shadowing, but in the few daytime scenes there are it begins to look a little rough around the edges – thankfully most of the game takes place in the dark, where it looks fantastic.

Alan Wake suffers from a number of problems, but in the grand scheme of things it’s a real achievement of a game, managing to do things with story that many other games have failed to do while also managing to have an engaging if repetitive combat system and an absolutely superb atmosphere.

Remedy have proved that they’re not just a one-trick pony, creating a game that’s starkly different to Max Payne but also deeply referential to it. The clever story, great voice work and presentation all work to sweeten an already sweet deal, and while it’s been a long time coming in the end it’s clear that Alan Wake was well worth the wait.

8.7

Originally Published on Strategy Informer.