Penny Arcade Adventures: A Cautionary Launch Celebration

The big releases for this spring/summer are sure things: GTAIV was more or less guaranteed to be the biggest launch in gaming history months before it hit shelves; Metal Gear Solid 4 won't be as big due to its PS3 exclusivity, but it's still going to be huge, and probably move thousands of consoles for Sony. Wii Fit will sell like crazy if Nintendo can actually produce enough to keep up with demand, something I kind of doubt given the abysmal job they've done getting Wiis into stores. But the game I'm most excited about this summer is much riskier, from the creative, critical and business standpoints. That game is, of course, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the first installment in a new episodic RPG from Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkis and Mike Krahulik, and Hothead games. To celebrate its release tomorrow, I'll be looking at why this title has a hard road ahead of it.

The Critical Factor: Penny Arcade has spent years celebrating great games and haranguing bad ones, and has in the process has allowed its creators to live what many gamers (and, truth be told, probably some critics as well) would consider a charmed life. The fact that Holkis and Krahulik actually make a living off of their comic and its satellite activities (including their own convention, Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX) and still find the time to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash, games and consoles for their Child's Play charity every holiday season has caused a fair bit of jealousy and indignity to be sent their way by gamers and hack web comic artists. But PA's satire has never been restricted to games themselves, and has at times bled over into criticism of the gaming press, and this is where the problem comes in. While most critics will probably view the game objectively, others will almost certainly see their reviews as an opportunity to put PA's creators in their place. While I would be shocked to see any truly awful reviews (if only because I doubt Holkis and Krahulik would have gone ahead with the project had the game been bad enough to deserve them), I will not be at all surprised by nitpicking and general snippiness.

The Fanboy Factor: If Penny Arcade Adventures faces some difficulties with critics, the reception it will likely have to endure from hardcore gamers can only be called a shitstorm of legendary proportions. As others have noted, the core of the gaming community does not realize that there is a middle ground between "ZOMG" and "epic fail", and this attitude has always applied to anything associated with the Penny Arcade name. But for, arguably, the world's best-known game satirists to dare to make their own game...let's just say it's a safe bet that none of the hardcores are going to be typing "meh" in response.

But why, exactly, is this a problem? Everybody knows at this point that message boards are not indicative of the general population. For every hundred people who go on boards and complain about a lack of hardcore games on the Wii, there are a million people buying Game Party. But there are two differences between the Penny Arcade game and most major retail releases: (1) at launch, it will only be available through digital distribution and (2) it will be well below the radar of most people not already familiar with Penny Arcade. In other words, people aren't going to be walking into Best Buy and Gamestop and seeing big posters advertising the game (or even a box). And casual fans online who may be only marginally (or not at all) familiar with PA might end up being swayed not to by the game if they stumble into a troll-fest. Now if critical reception turns out to be generally positive, this problem will be more or less neutralized; but given that most people who don't spend a lot of time online reading about games are not familiar with Penny Arcade, it could end up being very tough for the game's audience to expand beyond the comic's devoted fans.

The Price Factor: Another reason the game is going to have a tough time attracting curious outsiders is its controversial price tag: $19.95 through PA's new Steam-like service, Greenhouse, or 1600 Microsoft points ($19.95 plus tax) on XBox Live. With roughly six hours of gameplay being promised, some are finding this hard to swallow. Now it may be that this is not a valid complaint: after all, Valve recently released a standalone version of Portal, which shouldn't take more than four hours on a first run, and which experienced players can easily finish in less than two hours, for $19.95--and this after the game has been available as part of The Orange Box for over six months. It may be legitimate to argue that Portal, one of the most critically acclaimed and innovative games of 2007, is not the same thing as Penny Arcade's episodic RPG; but when the entirety of one's argument is "no six hour game should cost $20", Valve--who no reasonable person would accuse of being bad at business--has already made a powerful case to the contrary.

Again, though, setting aside any issues of quality, the $20 price point is likely to deter a lot of the game's potential "pedestrian" audience. Think about Portal again: it's a game that has not only received glowing reviews from every major gaming website, but it has even had its own story on NPR and has been mentioned in other mainstream media outlets. PA Adventures is unlikely to enjoy the same sort of coverage, so it's going to be a lot harder to sell someone unfamiliar with the comic on shelling out $20 to see what all the fuss is about--especially when the comic is right there for free.

The Creativity Factor: So far, the problems that we have looked at for Penny Arcade Adventures are of a sort that would only affect the game's potential casual audience. But I want to close with one that might affect the game among its core audience: its creative direction. Now before I go any further, let me say that one of the most appealing things to me is the "alternate universe" direction that Holkis and Krahulik have taken for the game, casting PA stars Gabe and Tycho as supernatural detectives in a turn of the century, Lovecraftian world. But is this what most hardcore PA fans want? I'm reminded of my childhood, when a game would come out based on a popular cartoon license, and it would turn out to be a generic platformer with no relation to its source material outside of its main characters. And in a way, this is exactly what Penny Arcade Adventures is--the characters are there, but everything else has changed. Furthermore, is episodic content the right format for a game whose creators have repeatedly expressed disdain for continuity in their comic strip?

Again, I don't doubt that the final product here will satisfy me as a Penny Arcade fan; but I think it might be a legitimate concern that some fans will be turned off by the sweeping differences between the game and the comic. The sort of gamer who wants movie games to just reinact the story of the movie might very well be disappointed by the revelation that this will not be a game about Gabe and Tycho inflicting violence on each other in series of scenes parodying other games. As banal as I personally think that would have been, it is still a reason some might find to not pony up the money for the game at launch.

Hopefully none of these factors will adversely affect Penny Arcade Adventures. If I have ever been rooting for a game to do well, it's this one. But given the attitudes of the gaming community, the minor controversy over the game's price, and its bold creative direction, there is a chance that On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness will not live up to its sales potential.