Mark of the Ninja Message Board

Campo Santo is a new studio made up of top tier talent from – DEEP BREATH – Double Fine, Klei, Telltale, and 2K Marin. OK, that didn’t require much air to say out loud at all and I can type without breathing for probably, like, hours, but you get the idea. With the powers of Mark of the Ninja lead Nels Anderson, Walking Dead: Season One leads Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, ex-Irrational and Double Fine man Chris Remo, and artist Olly Moss (among others) combined, we get a story-based mystery about isolation, the creeping unknown, and human relationships set in… rural Wyoming. Huh. It’s called Firewatch, and it seems interesting. I think. Also incredibly orange. Scant first details below.

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Many games let you hack things. Too many, I might argue, especially when the result is some half-baked mainframe-smoking minigame. Inference, however, is taking a far more interesting approach, allowing you to hack reality in order to stealthily maneuver around dead-eyed killbots in a cyberpunk noir sidescrolling world. Basically, think Mark of the Ninja, but levels are both playgrounds for the fleet-footed and Rubik’s Cubes for the gargantuan-brained. It’s a neat setup, but based on a newly released free demo, it still needs a fair amount of work.

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Valve? Making its own OS for living rooms? Madness. Pure, coldly calculated and entirely premeditated madness. But SteamOS’ success is far from guaranteed, and it’s got some serious hurdles to overcome before it can establish a New World Order. Last time around, I gathered developers of games like Project Eternity, Gone Home, Mark of the Ninja, The Banner Saga, and Race The Sun to discuss who SteamOS/Steam Boxes are even for and the relative “openness” of Valve’s platform in light of, er, Greenlight. Today, we dig even deeper, into the strange, nebulous guts of Linux and what sorts of challenges and opportunities Valve’s crazy, newfangled controller presents. There are even some hands-on impressions from Dejobaan and Paradox. Read on for THE FUTURE.

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You probably haven’t heard, but Valve’s officially going forward with its plan to launch its own Steam-centric OS, living room hardware, and a crazy, touch-pad-based controller to back it all up. I know, right? It’s weird that no one has been talking about it incessantly. But while Valve preaches openness and hackability, it’s downplayed an ugly reality of the situation: smaller developers still face a multitude of struggles in the treacherous green jungles of its ecosystem. SteamOS and various Steam Boxes, however, stand to bring brilliantly inventive indie games to an audience that doesn’t even have a clue that they exist, so I got in touch with developers behind Gone Home, Race The Sun, Eldritch, Mark of the Ninja, Incredipede, Project Eternity, and more for their thoughts on SteamOS, who it’s even for, Valve’s rocky relationship with indies, and what it’ll take for Steam to actually be an “open” platform.

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Klei only removed the cloak of shadows (but thankfully not the trench coat; that would be weird) from espionage XCOM-ish strategy Incognita a couple months ago, but you can already play it. As in, right this very second. Following in the footsteps of endlessly bizarre survivalist megahit Don’t Starve, a paid alpha was in the cards from the get-go, but it’s still a pleasant surprise to see it on these rainslick, cybertronic streets so soon. What is Incognita’s alpha hiding? Tread lightly and you might just be able to sneak up behind a trailer and some impressions after the break.

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I’ve been saving Mark Of The Ninja for the winter months. Dark nights, curtains drawn, the room lit by a candle light that’s been strategically placed in a breeze to create rippled shadows. I might even move to Japan to enhance the experience. I’ve put it off this long, what’s a few more months for an unnecessary and stressful intercontinental move? And to everyone about to say “You should have played it already”, well waiting means I get to play the game with the newly announced DLC in one big pile of 2d stealth fun. This new DLC only adds a new prequel level and two new items to help you play more stealthily, but the biggest addition is my favourite game extras: a commentary track.(more…)

Guysguysguysguysguysguysguys! HOLD THE PHONE. Are you holding it? Physically? Cradling it, perhaps, like a precious infant or a 20-strong stack of the world’s most delicious pies? OK, good. Here goes: Mark of the Ninja’s adding a mode with non-lethal takedowns. Their absence, if you’ll remember, was one of my only real grievances with what’s otherwise one of the best stealth games in years. This is probably the most exciting thing to happen since man landed on the moon or I built that pie tower earlier today. Oh, but Mark of the Ninja: Special Edition has other things, too – including a new playable character, prequel level, and heaps of developer commentary. Details and some pictures that move with remarkable speed in spite of their baggy stealth pajamas after the break.

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It’s a semi-well-known fact that real ninjas did their best work in the shadows and – unless their express objective was “be hacked into ninjiblets by a vastly superior opponent” – rarely emerged into open combat. Clearly, however, someone forgot to tell videogames about this, resulting in a new breed of ninja that’s basically just a regular ol’ mass murderer in silly feet pajamas. To put things in perspective, Rambo (circa the first film, of course) was more of a ninja than our modern crop of videogame Rambo ninjas. Strange times we live in, right? Happily, Klei Entertainment’s decided to sheath its shank and go for a nice evening skulk about the town. But does it succeed in crafting a multi-faceted, occasionally murderous game of hide-and-go-seek? Here’s wot I think.

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"I wish more people would acknowledge the fact that all games are really shit for a long time,” said Mark of the Ninja lead designer Nels Anderson.

It’s easier, of course, to say that when much of the world has declared your latest game a massive success.

Anderson just returned from a two-week jaunt to Ireland and Scotland, a well-earned break following the launch of Mark of the Ninja. The reprieve ended as quickly as it began. Upon his return, Anderson was right back into the thick of it, helping his team prepare the acclaimed 2D stealth game for its PC release. That happened today on Steam.

When Mark of the Ninja’s life began, Anderson wasn’t even employed at the Vancouver-based Klei Entertainment. It wasn’t his fault, though. He was laid off from Klei following a project cancellation in early 2009, and he moved onto the Deathspank games at Hothead Games. Anderson did come back to Klei in late 2010, around the time Microsoft had signed off on a pitch for a ninja-centric game from Klei called...Ninja.

This is the pitch video that sold Microsoft on what would eventually become Mark of the Ninja:

Klei Entertainment presented this to Microsoft, and the company signed up for what would eventually become Mark of the Ninja.

None of that is playable. Zero. It was all built in Flash. Klei built the video in about three weeks, which was followed by months of contract negotiations with Microsoft. In the meantime, Anderson was recruited for the project. On the surface, so much much of what became Mark of the Ninja would become seems apparent in the pitch video.

“When you look at that, it’s like...it’s not that far off, really,” he said. “Obviously, none of the visual perception stuff is in there, but otherwise, it kind of feels like the game. It’s a little more brawler-y maybe, but it’s not that far off.”

Anderson had much to do with Mark of the Ninja’s development, but nothing to do with this video. Klei CEO Jamie Cheng showed Anderson the video upon his return to Klei, and immediately became excited about its prospects. A longtime devotee of Thief, Metal Gear Solid and other stealthy games, it was a chance to contribute to the genre.

The pitch video is flashy and neat, but not representative of the work ahead for Anderson’s team, which is why I asked him to send along of the video after the real work of building it had started.

“I looked at that and just went ‘oh, holy shit,’” he said.

After two months of work, much of the groundwork had been laid for Klei's 2D stealth game, but it was early days.

The time stamp on that video is April 2011--two months of work on Mark of the Ninja. The game was finished in August of this year. The temporary sound effects are hysterical, and the amount of on-screen text explaining the game makes you wonder if the game was, at one point, much more hand-holdy than it eventually became.

“That was, basically, to help Microsoft understand what we were trying to do with those phases,” he said. “If you know what’s going on, you can see through it and get it, but if you don’t really know what’s going on, it’s really easy to not pick up on that stuff, especially when the fidelity is so low and everything else is so rough."

Klei had a much different vision of the structure of the game around this time, which Anderson compared to Super Meat Boy. There would be six distinct worlds, each with a different, central motif, and every stage would have a handful of encounters for players to work through. The plan was for roughly 60 stages, with the player ultimately working towards the assassination of a single target.

“Constructing the levels in that way was alright, but it just didn’t have a super strong sense of place,” he said.

Narrative designer and former Kill Screen editor Chris Dahlen was not involved at this point, and there wasn’t much of a story. The game did have several boss characters, one of which was a CEO-type that would become Karajan in the final game.

You'll notice the main character keeps slipping in and out of linework in the video. That’s because, at the time, all of the animation frames were being hand drawn. This was a different approach from the two Shank games, which used character builds. In essence, a character build is created with a bunch of modifiable pieces, and those pieces are altered to create the animation. That’s an oversimplification of the process, but it’s what allows for a hand drawn look without actually drawing every individual frame. Mark of the Ninja embraced hand drawn before memory constraints on the Xbox 360 forced them to retreat. In retrospect, though, Anderson said it was right decision all along; if the team spent hours on animation that had to be ditched because a feature didn’t work, that’d be demoralizing.

There are plenty of other gameplay flourishes touched upon in the video that never materialized, too.

Klei planned for surfaces to produce varying levels of noise, but couldn’t find a way to represent it easily in 2D. There was a killing dart that playtesting revealed broke the game--players slaughtered everyone. A mortar and pestle item was rolled into the smoke bomb. Objects once had flammability attributes, so players could have more ways to distract the guards. The team worked through three different design ideas for combat, including one that gave players the ability to run around with a sword and hack dudes up. Another resulted in one-on-one parrying matches.

Every ditched design idea was in service of making a better game, even when it was painful to do so.

Perhaps the most substantial change was completely getting rid of an additional range of movement. For a while, the game provided players three options: run, walk, sneak. Sneaking produced no noise, walking produced a little noise, and running produced a ton of noise. Sneaking and running were mapped to the triggers, and in order to pull off movements like crawling up building edges, you’d have to hold down the stealth button.

“No one moved at the walking speed--ever," he said. "In all the playtesting stuff we did, either people were sneaking or running. They were never really walking. What’s the point of having this here, then? The only reason that was meritorious was it provided a contrast. When you pulled down that sneaking trigger, you really did feel like you were sneaking, but that alone was not enough to keep this thing that wasn’t giving us anything else.”

The other problem? The team ran out of buttons on the Xbox 360 controller. Serendipity.

Between the pitch and prototype video, it looks like so much of what would come to define Mark of the Ninja had been worked out early on, but Anderson painted a much darker, more frustrating picture.

“The funny thing about Ninja is that getting the baseline stuff up and running wasn’t that tricky--we had that going,” he said. “But then there was this big, big, big gulf. Getting a little bit of the way? Really easy. The next big chunk? That was the stuff that was really, really, really, really hard. If you look at that level, as an example, it doesn’t seem in any way, shape or form like a real place. It’s just some bullshit nonsense--platforms, walls, whatever. Even that seemingly mundane thing, where we need to make this space feel grounded and real, but still afford all the gameplay stuff we want to do, was not easy. Watching the prototype video. All of the sound and perception stuff is there--but without the sound rings being there, I’m like ‘how the hell did we think anybody would ever play this?’”

It’s easier to laugh about it now, given how well the systems now interact, but Anderson expected Microsoft to drop the hammer at some point. There was a long stretch where Mark of the Ninja was just not very fun to play, and though the team was making progress in the right direction, it was hard to remind yourself that on a day-to-day basis.

“Probably about this time last year, we were ‘oh, god, they’re totally going to pull the plug, they’re totally going to do it!’” he said. “And they never did.”

One of the biggest hurdles for Mark of the Ninja was iterating on the game’s core: stealth. While Mark of the Ninja was finding itself, the team knew it was onto something with 2D stealth, but it wasn’t clicking. Discouraged, the team focused on expanding combat and other elements, including a focus on psychological warfare. The game had “terror items,” and a bigger focus on manipulating guards against one another. All this did was distract Mark of the Ninja from its original vision, and push the team away from confronting the game’s most pressing problems.

“We were treating the symptoms of the stealth not being super fun but by adding something else to accommodate for it,” he said, “rather than figuring out why the sneaking bits aren’t fun. I’m glad we didn’t keep going down that road.”

Obviously, it worked out. Mark of the Ninja is great. Really great, actually. You should play it, even if you don’t care for stealth. For Anderson, it’s rewarding to know he’s contributed to a genre he cares so deeply about.

“I do like these games so much, and it’s really cool that maybe I can offer other people a window into why the hell I like them as much as I do,” he said.

In news that should shock absolutely no one, Mark of the Ninja is also coming to to the PC. It’s scheduled for a release on Steam for $14.99 on October 16, and without Games for Windows Live hooks.

Mark of the Ninja follows a typical pattern for “exclusives” on Xbox Live Arcade, in which Microsoft ties up the game for a certain amount of time, and then it's released elsewhere. Sometimes the exclusivity is longer or shorter, but eventually, it leaves the nest.

Considering how great Mark of the Ninja was (make sure to read Brad’s glowing review over here), I’m happy to see the game come to a wider platform. All of you really need to play it.

Really.

Remember that moment in Batman: Arkham [Batplace] when you figured out you could perch atop a gargoyle and just mess with people? Confuse them, terrify them, boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew, etc? Well, Mark of the Ninja‘s a lot like that, except with more weapons of mass distraction and in 2D. Also, there are swords. It is, in other words, among the better stealth games to skulk out of the shadows in a long while, and – as many suspected – it’s officially headed to PC. Details on when, where, and what that suspicious sound you just heard was are after the break.

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A look at Xbox Live’s front page over the past few weeks included a big, fat advertisement for Mark of the Ninja, quite possibly this year’s best release for the platform. When Mark of the Ninja was released on Friday, September 7, however, there wasn’t one. Okay, that’s not completely true--it was on the games tab.

But who actually navigates to the games tab to learn about new content on Xbox Live? I don’t. Do you? We head to the games tab to purchase something we’ve already been convinced on.

Microsoft should be applauded for crafting an interface that, while rightfully scrutinized in recent revisions, can prove useful to the user and creator, and help expose them to one another. That’s not as easy to do on Wii or PlayStation 3, and having to open a store will always mean some never see it. It's an important distinction.

It’s frustrating, then, to turn on Xbox Live and see nothing but advertisements for movies and politics. (Though, good on Microsoft should for attempting to inform a demographic of the electorate that is historically finicky when it comes to voting.)

Ads promoting Mark of the Ninja, a Microsoft-published release, were nowhere to be found on Friday, September 7. It was Microsoft’s decision to publish Mark of the Ninja on that day. It was, then, up to Microsoft to give up one of its likely lucrative advertisements slots for it. And that’s where I'm guessing the rub is. Promoting Mark of the Ninja might end up with more sales for Mark of the Ninja, and thus more profit for Microsoft, but it’s not a guarantee. If no one clicks on the advertisement to download Snow White and the Huntsmen, Microsoft still pockets the ad money.

Yeah, Microsoft eventually gave Mark of the Ninja prominent placement on the dashboard, but like other media, games typically do their best business on the first day of release. It’s where you build momentum forward. Mark of the Ninja was released on a Friday, and that’s when reviews and social networks were buzzing about the game.

“Better late than never,” said Supergiant Games creative director Greg Kasavin to me Twitter.

Kavain was responding to a photo (pictured above) where I showed relief that Mark of the Ninja was now promoted. Another user asked whether or not days later was a big deal, which Kasavin was quick to discuss.

“Late isn't a stretch,” he said. “Many games do their best business on the first day of release and then it's all downhill.”

If someone had seen an advertisement for Mark of the Ninja when booting up their Xbox 360 that night, maybe it would have helped pushed them over the edge. When a title's within the games tab (or, worse, buried in the games library), the chances of just finding something become more and more remote. These games deserve better.

Friday has become a new, unexpected slot for XBLA releases. Mark of the Ninja joins Fez, Joe Danger: The Movie, and others. In the TV world, having a show on Friday night is a death sentence, as many consumers are out enjoying the weekend. Discoverability is huge problem on XBL, and prominent ads are one way, albeit not a great one, to combat that. If a user boots their Xbox 360 once that weekend, possibly for a round of Call of Duty, that ad is vital.

Microsoft is under no obligation to make the front of Xbox Live wholly dedicated to video games, and I’m not expecting or asking them to. That said, video games are the reason Microsoft’s box is in a position to compete as an all-in-one media solution, the holy grail when it comes to today’s television, and the games aren't getting their due.

I asked Microsoft to provide some clarification on how its advertisements for self-published games are determined, and got this statement in response:

...which is exactly the answer I expected, and I don't blame Microsoft for not saying anymore. Ads are determined on a game-by-game basis, and are often part part of contrats between Microsoft, both as a platform holder and a publisher. Getting ad placement can, for example, change the royalty share on a game. That's not true of every game, but it happens, and shows the kind of power Microsoft wields when it comes to discoverability on its service.

This isn’t the first time it's happened, and it probably won’t be the last (see: Joe Danger). I’m not sure why this particular situation incensed me so much. Maybe it's because I’ve heard similar stories of developers upset at the disconnect between the internal teams at Microsoft who handle game development and game promotion. Maybe it’s because Mark of the Ninja is just a damn good game, and it’d be an awful shame if more people didn’t play it.

More than anything, though, XBL has the power to expose great games to more people. It's a tool of money and power, and it has the ability to do more than I ever could. Can you fault me for wanting Microsoft to use it well?

If you think stealth games are still stuck in a rut, you haven't played Mark of the Ninja yet. It does exactly what a stealth game should do, giving you a wide variety of tools and abilities with which to conduct your stealthy business, and gracing you with the absolute mobility to actually use them. Too many stealth games depend on rote memorization of enemy patterns and more or less go to shit every time you trigger an alarm, but this one, by contrast, empowers you to toy with the enemies like a stealth god, and still ably disappear unscathed back into the shadows even when the lights come up. You know that feeling in a stealth game when everything feels like it goes just your way, and you clear a whole room of witless guards without so much as a sound? I haven't gotten that feeling since Arkham Asylum, but Mark of the Ninja has it. That's the highest praise I can think to give this game.

The designers at Klei made things easier on themselves by smooshing Mark of the Ninja's action down to two dimensions, which naturally gives you less spatial data to process than a 3D scene and consequently helps you maintain a more confident feeling of control over everything around you. For instance, it's a lot easier to predict enemies' line of sight when they can only be facing one of two directions. But it goes beyond that. As a bonafide ninja, your mastery of the environment is total; you can climb up walls and across ceilings, duck into ventilation ducts, dart between cover, and grapple all over the place faster than guards can possibly keep up with you. The game simply wouldn't work if you weren't so incredibly nimble, and it's that basic control and mobility that makes this game as fun as it is. It also helps that you can pause time whenever you want, to quickly queue up multiple abilities which then play out as soon as you resume the game.

The design of the game is eminently impressive at every layer. On top of the core movement, you've got a wide array of abilities that let you focus on very different styles of play. You've got a category of distraction items like a noisemaker and chemical flare that are useful for getting enemies right where you want them. Then there's an attack category that includes stuff like spike traps and ravenous, flesh-eating insects, in case you'd rather just murder everyone directly with your tools. Or you can just rely solely on your trusty sword, since there's a whole list of stealth kills that let you take out guys while behind them, while in cover, while on the other side of a door from them, while hanging above their heads... This focus on multiple play styles reaches its peak with a series of unlockable ninja outfits that dramatically improve your abilities in one area (say, letting you carry two distraction items at once instead of one, or speeding up the process of stealth kills) while hampering you in another area (for instance, preventing you from restocking your items mid-level, or taking away your sword entirely). So if you want to go all the way in one direction, you can.

The game even rewards you if you want to do none of this, since the single biggest bonus you can get at the end of every level comes from not killing a single enemy. There's an exceptionally elegant three-way objective system in place, with three types of objectives and three of each type per level (for a total of nine). Three of these are simple haiku scrolls hidden in the level, which dole out little bits of story as you go. Another three are level-specific objectives that push your stealth abilities. And the last three are tiered score objectives, the first (and probably second) of which you'll get as a matter of course. Getting the high score objective on each level requires you to really use your abilities to the utmost, though, and since you get points for practically every positive interaction with a guard--distracting them, terrorizing them, slipping by them unnoticed, hiding them after they're dead--you're encouraged to tackle each scenario as thoroughly and elegantly as you can for maximum score. I was immensely gratified when I started nailing all nine objectives (which result in more upgrade points on the skill tree) in each level about halfway through, but the game isn't shy about ramping up the difficulty in meaningful ways. You'll still be running into crazier types of obstacles and more well-equipped enemies all the way up to the last couple of levels of the game.

Klei sort of established itself as the fluid hand-drawn 2D art studio with the Shank games, and while those games looked great and moved with style, the depth of gameplay wasn't really there to keep them totally interesting all the way through. Mark of the Ninja makes good on that potential for marrying beautiful art and engaging design, with in-game action and hand-animated cutscenes every bit as good as the Shank stuff. But this game could use stick figures on blank backgrounds and it'd still be a ton of fun to play. It's so rewarding that, time permitting, I'd love to go back and get every objective on every level, and also finish its new-game-plus mode; in other words, I'd love to do everything there is to do here. I can't say that about many games. Mark of the Ninja executes its formula to such a high degree of near-perfection that I could hardly think of a way it could be meaningfully improved the whole way through it.

If you remember Shank, you might also remember that he was less stealthy than Andre the Giant driving a monster truck across a minefield. Mark of the Ninja shares a developer and has a similar graphical style, but it is all about stealth, at least when it’s not about beetles swarming over and consuming people. That can probably be quite noisy. Already out on XBLA, Blue notes that a Steam content description for Klei’s latest side-scrolling stab ‘em up has been spotted. Give the jollity that’s met the Xbox release, that’s reason for excitement. Given that I haven’t played it, take this next bit with a sizeable pinch of salt. It’s 2D Arkham City. The trailer below is proof!

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