Nintendo jumped the gun! The bug-fixing patch originally set to be released April 15 has gone live for 3DS and Wii U. Simply go to the e-shop and select “update.”
Also, as mentioned, we have an exclusive interview with the game’s creator. I must admit, this isn’t my first time interviewing Eden Industry’s Ryan Vandendyck, but it is the first time we’ve only focused on Citizens of Earth, his latest game. Ryan’s gone indie, but he’s worked with the big boys before, including (but not limited to) Nintendo, Sega, and Ubisoft. While CoE isn’t his first game, it certainly has gotten a lot of attention. In fact, Atlus has told him that “this was the most polarizing game they’ve ever released.” While I’ve talked about how my feelings of the game have changed since it’s Kickstarter announcement, I had to ask what exactly happened to Citizens of Earth since it left alpha and entered the open gaming market.
How do you feel about the reviews/reactions so far?
Well, the day before release, I went to bed seeing reviews like, “Sets a new standard for RPGs” and “a legend in the making”. I woke up to 6/10 from Destructoid. Those two extremes pretty much encapsulate my experience with reviews. Even Atlus said it was the most polarizing game they’ve ever released.
Personally, I’d say I’m quite disappointed in the reviews. We put so much into the game, but some reviewers only complained about what else we could’ve done. For example, “It’s great there’s a map, why can’t I zoom in?” or “It’s great I can drive around, why can’t I….” on and on. Despite the fact that very few games have all the features we have (no random encounters, drivable vehicles, a pretty robust quest/map system, etc.) we were judged by an impossible standard. How many indie RPGs have the features we do? Yet, I feel like many reviewers only saw what we didn’t have, not what we did have that no one else does. So that was disappointing, and the realization of how people responded to the inclusion of so many unique features will surely affect what we put into future games, especially considering the time and money it took to make them.
What do you feel like (if anything) you’ve gained from the reviews, especially in terms of how you may have done things differently (or will do things differently in future games)?
The reviews have been a very confusing thing for us for this game, so in that sense, I think one thing we learned is don’t put anything into the game that won’t be universally loved. Now that’s a weird lesson to learn for a lot of reasons, one of which is because I personally think we’d be making worse games (albeit possibly better reviewed ones) by just chopping off every fringe feature.
But one thing about Citizens of Earth (and I’ll go into this a bit later) is that it wasn’t intended that you would personally love everything about the game. Even on the development team, some of the Citizens weren’t liked by some members of the team, but my personal opinion of that is, that’s great! We wanted diversity in the cast, in every possible way: race, gender, background, talent, combat abilities, etc. I think we achieved that, but I guess the problem with diversity is that not everyone likes it! Or to phrase it another way, people want to personally love every bit of something, and that’s hard to do when you have such a broad spectrum of experience.
So I think one thing I may try in the future is, if I have a huge pool of features I want to include in the game, only include the best 25% of them or so and leave the other ones out for another game if I can make them worth including. In Citizens, for example, the Weather Lady can change the weather of the game, which aside from one puzzle, doesn’t really do anything except let you play the game in different weather conditions, which I personally love, since running around in rain or snow is just fun to me. But perhaps if I were to employ the method of culling all but the top 25% of features, I may axe something like that in the future before spending a lot of time on it.
Some of the different play styles you put into the game didn’t get the best reviews. I was surprised some reviewers complained about the RPG-style race, which felt fairly innovative to me, though the “music” game did nothing for me. Which addition do you feel got the most criticism and why?
Well a major part of the design of the game was to include a lot of Citizens, a lot of features, a lot of areas, etc. that weren’t mandatory. Sure, if you wanted to complete everything, you’d have to do them all. But the average player could go, “You know what, I’m not a huge fan of the RPG-style race, I’ll just avoid that.” But what seemed to happen was, folks would look at the game and go, “All 100% of this huge amount of content doesn’t appeal to me” and then become very critical of it.
I’d say in a lot of ways we were inspired by Skyrim and similar large, open RPGs where you’re not really expected to personally love every part of it. But rather, there’s something for everyone. But I think folks had a perception coming into the game that colored their experience of that. In terms of the most criticism, it really came down to personal preference. What some people hated, others loved. Which was sort of the point of it, as I mentioned, it’s just sort of unfortunate that some people couldn’t realize that.
Some people have commented that the huge cast made the story line less emotional. Although I felt the psychologist’s recruitment method helped develop the VP more (as well as the game’s ending), the dialogue (written and voiced) needing to be fitted for any combination of characters was a bit of a letdown. Was this a time or money constraint issue, or design choice?
Well it was mostly a time and money constraint. It would’ve taken over $100 000 to voice all of the characters in every scene (not to mention the additional cost of writing the dialogue, getting it translated into all of the languages, etc.), writing unique dialogue for each one. Which of course would’ve been awesome, but was way outside the realm of possibility. Like I’ve mentioned a couple times previously, I think the perspective going in matters a lot. When you play Pokemon or Dragon Quest Monsters, are you overly concerned that your Bulbasaur doesn’t pipe up in scripted scenes with a unique voice? I’d warrant no, but you could say that because the Citizens are more unique, you’d expect them to be voiced. And I wouldn’t disagree.
But I think overall, and this is really my point regarding voices, the numerous features, and everything else, we were sort of hoping people would appreciate what we had in the game, and not always look at what we didn’t have. I mean we’re a tiny team, working with a very small budget. It’s a wonder we even had any voice acting at all, and a wonder we even had 40 characters. I feel that if you look at comparable indie RPGs out there, you’ll find they don’t really have a lot of the things that we sacrificed a ton of time and money to do.
But anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox here in a second, and just say this. I think the game as a whole works very well. The dialogue, features, the characters, etc. So while I think the voice acting we do have is great, I do admit that if you saw that the game was voice acted and then picked up the game expecting the voice acting of let’s say Final Fantasy or one of the Tales games where everyone is voiced almost all the time, yes you will be disappointed in that regard. And if you picked up the game expecting that every Citizen, and the recruitment quest and features thereof, would be specifically tailored to you, yes you will also be a bit disappointed in that sense. But if you just go in as a blank slate, I think you’ll find that Citizens of Earth is a really fun RPG with a ton of heart and is jam-packed with things to do and experience. So it’s all about that perspective I guess!
Yeah, I remember voice acting wasn’t in the demo, or alpha. Heck, I remember seeing one of the trailers and getting you to confirm that addition. What else did you guys change based on alpha feedback? For example, I think Conspiracy Guy used to spend energy to collect information for his almanac. I was pleasantly surprised by the change, and think it was one other alpha testers noted. Anything else?
That was one change we made, yes. Another one was separating item tabs into categories (baked goods, coffee, sushi, pop, and pharmaceuticals). And then there were little changes to improve usability of UI, level refinements, etc. But the item category one is the most specific example I can recall at the moment.
Citizens of Earth launched with a lot of bugs though, more on certain systems than others. However, I personally felt the PC version was cleaner (did the alpha testers from the Kickstarter help a lot with that?). How do you feel about the launch bugs?
I was very dismayed by the number of launch bugs. All I can really say is, Atlus QA reported all the bugs they found, and we fixed all the bugs that they reported. Nintendo and Sony do not allow a game to be released with reproducible crashes, yet 8 different QA teams (across the 4 platforms* and 2 territories) claimed it was fit for release and passed their certification testing. I did not willfully release a game with crashes in it, and the number of bugs was very unfortunate. So I’m not really sure how so many people played the game with no problem and passed it through certification, only to end up with so many problems. If you can glean any wisdom from that, feel free to let me know and I’ll be sure to incorporate it into my plans for future games!
*Note: The game was released on 5 platforms: PS Vita, PS4, 3DS, Wii U, and Steam, but game developers usually use their own QA team when publishing through Steam. Eden Industries used selected volunteers for PC testing, which the author had limited participation in due to NDA constraints.
Why did you include so many different genres of mini-games into the recruiting of citizens?
I wanted recruiting every Citizen to feel as unique as possible. Compared to a game like Suikoden, in which you sometimes get whole groups of people after doing almost nothing, I wanted each Citizen’s recruitment to feel meaningful, memorable, and based on you purposefully seeking them out and doing their quest.
Which recruitment quests are you most proud of?
Overall I’m mostly proud that we could create 40 recruitment quests without making them boring or too similar (I think at least). But in terms of which specific ones I’m proud of, I like the Car Salesman (which, as you pointed out, was not universally loved), Gambler (or more specifically the Blackjack game, which isn’t necessarily part of his actual recruitment), Pharmacist, and Handyman. And the reason is that each of them take the combat mechanic and flip it on its head in some way. Whether it’s playing an RPG-style race or blackjack game, or figuring out new ways to solve combat that doesn’t involve just killing the enemy. I thought it was pretty fun leveraging the RPG gameplay to solve puzzles and interact with new gameplay.
Outside of the VP and his family, do you have any citizens you’re particularly attached to?
I like the School Mascot because his design was loosely based on my own high school mascot, the Captain because the Ogopogo has a special place in my heart (rumoured to dwell in the lake of my hometown), the Superfan because it’s awesome that we have a girl in a wheelchair in the game, the Yoga Instructor because it’s awesome that we have a pregnant lady in the game, the Photon because he’s the main character of our last game, Waveform, and then special mention to Brother, Mom, Conspiracy Guy, Baker, and Barista who were sort of the original Citizens that we developed so they’ve been with me for many years now.
I have to ask this, since while some characters obviously draw inspiration from certain other games *cough* Jewish Mario *cough*, others are more subtle. Is Superfan and her ability related to Oracle by any chance?
Nope! With every Citizen I tried to create from the ground up a combat style that was unlike anyone else in the game and fit into their personality and profession. With the Superfan, she’s such an exuberant, positive girl that I thought rallying and buffing the team was a natural fit. Plus since she’s in a wheelchair, you would probably expect that she wouldn’t have as many physical attacks as other characters so making her a support character also made a lot of sense.
Still, when you make something that tries to include people of other walks of life/ethnicities, you run the risk of coming off as racist I think. However, CoE largely feels like it balanced between honest portrayals of regular people (French painter of African descent) and reasonably acceptable stereo-types (Japanese sushi chef). Was there an effort to straddle that line? Did it effect the humor? Did anything not make the cut because it went too far?
Well early on we knew we wanted to include people from all walks of life. With an inclusive name like “Citizens of Earth”, I think it’s expected! But another key thing was, we wanted the game to always feel positive and upbeat, and so I think that’s why we avoid coming off as racist. No one in the game (except perhaps the VP) is the butt of the jokes. Every Citizen, from all ethnicities and all walks of life, is a hero! And I guess that is sort of our way of saying we believe in that message beyond just the game. But with a focus on inclusivity and positivity, I don’t think it really affected the humor or forced anything to be cut since pretty much everything we developed came from the right place I think.
You said everyone’s a hero and only the VP is really made fun of, and in terms of voiced scenes, I think that’s true. However, there’s multiple times other characters are genuinely being made fun of: the School Mascot for being totally strange, the Lifeguard for being a large muscular woman, and the Baker for being fat, just off the top of my head. Atlus helped with the dialogue though. Were these lines their addition or something added with some calculation (safe enough to hopefully not offend, but humorous enough to warrant the inclusion)?
Yeah, I think those were mostly Atlus additions. I think Atlus did a great job with the dialogue and getting the voice recording done, and while there were a few choices for the dialogue that I wouldn’t personally have done, I mostly left their changes intact unless I was strongly opposed to it since I didn’t want to pick and tear apart individual lines when the overall sense of it hung together pretty well.
How do you feel about the Earthbound comparisons? (both positive and accusations that your game is a clone or ripoff of it)
Like the reviews, the comparisons are so polarizing I can’t really make heads or tails of it. To look at Citizens of Earth and call it a clone or ripoff of Earthbound is so strange, I don’t really know how to respond. It’s obviously a very, very different game. I, and the rest of the team, love Earthbound. We were inspired by it to make an RPG. That’s really as far as the comparisons go. We didn’t set out to make a game like Earthbound, nor an homage, nor a spiritual successor, etc. Just a fun RPG. I think our love for Earthbound comes across through the game, and I believe fans of it will find a lot to love in Citizens of Earth. But so many comparisons go to such extremes that honestly I don’t really know what to say other than, “Have you actually played the game?”
Flushmoore, Big Steppe, and I think Appleton are completely optional locations. Was there originally going to be more involved in these areas, or was this always the plan?
This was always the plan. As I mentioned above, we wanted to include optional areas, optional quests, and have a lot of things up to the player’s whim in a lot of ways. While many games do this and people don’t have a problem with it, I think the perspective some people had coming into the game made them not expect a lot of optional content and possibly they were confused that their expectation did not match the reality of the game.
Any hints at future plans, either for Eden Industries or Citizens of Earth?
Well we’re currently exploring some new ideas, so we’ll see what comes of them. We’d like to work with Atlus again, so hopefully something comes out of that. And while we have nothing specific we can announce at this time, suffice to say we are working on new games so we hope folks look forward to what we come up with next!
Thanks for your time, Ryan! Join me again tomorrow as I look at how Ryan addressed some rarely discussed issues within the games industry, interdependence, and game reviews versus criticism.
Original Author: Laguna Levine