Today is kind of a big deal for Denki as it’s the day Quarrel finally launches on Xbox! If you’d rather stop reading at this point and go grab it from Xbox LIVE for only 400MSP I won’t be the least bit offended. No, really, go right ahead! 
Still with me? Well, in that case you might be interested to know it’s more than four years since the initial “Eureka!” moment, and more than two years since the game was fully finished and ready to launch. And, in case you haven’t already heard, getting this game launched wasn’t exactly a smooth ride for us. To give you some idea of how not smooth let’s just say it was rejected by almost every games publisher in the world. Sometimes twice; occasionally three times.
And not because their game acquisition teams didn’t recommend signing it you understand, oh no. Almost without exception every acquisition team we showed it to thought it was a certifiable, bankable HIT – just as we did. The problems only started once they’d passed Quarrel up the decision tree to their finance and marketing teams – the bit more commonly known as “The Industry“.
“This game is fundamentally broken – how can I possibly win with only 3 letters when my opponent has 8?”; “We could never sell this because it’s English language only”; “It looks like a kids game, but it’s way too hard for kids” and everywhere (trust me – everywhere) in between. We heard the same justifications for passing on it over and over again ad nauseam.
However, one signal came through clearer than any other among the general noise of reasons why Quarrel wasn’t for them, and that was this: “Gamers don’t buy word games”.
Really, I thought? That’s odd, because I’m a gamer, and I’d definitely buy a word game. And most of my friends and colleagues are gamers, and I know they’d buy a word game. In fact almost everyone I know is a gamer; I’m sure most of them would buy a word game. And even the many hundreds of people who played the game during its development said they’d buy a word game. Providing it was good of course. So are you absolutely certain gamers don’t buy word games?
Yes. Yes they were. Definitely.
So who’s right then: Gamers like myself? Or the Games Industry? Well, Wednesday January 25th 2012 is “The Day Of Reckoning”. It’s Gamers vs The Games Industry, and one of us is definitely wrong.
My money is (quite literally) on The Games Industry being wrong. I remain convinced that Gamers know a good game when they see one and will happily invest in it – even if does involve making words instead of headshots. That certainly seems to be the case if the reaction to the iPhone version is anything to go by anyway, but maybe console gamers are different? What’s most exciting is that we don’t have to wonder or debate much longer because we’re actually going to know the answer soon enough.
What we’d really appreciate though is your support in proving “The Industry” wrong on this one, and there’s two ways you can help ensure victory for Gamers everywhere:
* First is obviously to buy a copy of the game (or four – it’s only 400MSP and supports up to 4 player online multiplayer, so why not gift some points to a few friends who are always kicking your arse at CoD and see how clever they are when it’s about words rather than guns?);
* Second is to tell everyone you can about the game. Seriously – discovery remains the single biggest challenge facing original games these days by far. I usually assume everyone else already knows about whatever great games I’m enjoying by the time I’ve discovered them, but it always surprises me how often that’s not the case. So please take time to tweet, blog or whatever else you can do (however small) to help us spread the world about Quarrel – it all makes a difference. Reference it in your latest film, tell your MP how disgusted you are at its nefarious pseudo-educational undertones, slag it off for not being CoD, despair at the number of obscure or overtly Scottish words it has in its dictionary, rage at all the rude words you can make when the parental controls are off, write a song about it – anything – so long as it helps spread the word! Whatever helps people to hear about it and not simply ignore it would be most welcomed by us. Particularly as Microsoft seems to have gone out of its way to relegate games to an afterthought in the most recent redesign of the Xbox dashboard.
Lastly, Quarrel’s come a long, long way since it first appeared looking like this, and has taken a lot of effort from a lot of people to see the light of day. So a huge THANK YOU again to everyone who has contributed to Quarrel along the way. There’s a hell of a lot of you, far too many to list here, but whether you pitched the original idea to Dragons’ Denki back in 2007, filled in a questionnaire at Carronade in 2008, or saw the whole thing through from start to finish in 2012 you have my sincere and eternal gratitude. You’ve all made Quarrel in to what I consider the best game I’ve ever had the honour of working on – and that’s saying something, as I’ve been lucky enough to work on some great ones.
It wasn’t the easiest journey to get here, that’s for sure. There were many times when it would have made far more sense to throw in the towel and get on with making another dual-stick shooter or match-3 game. But for whatever reason we just couldn’t bring ourselves to give up on Quarrel. After all, as Zaphod Beeblebrox would say “Hey this is terrific. It means we really must be on to something if they’re trying to kill us!”
We’re all very proud of the Xbox version of Quarrel – the iPhone version is great too of course, but it was originally built with XBLA multiplayer in mind. We believe that’s where Quarrel moves from being a good game in to being a great game. But ultimately, regardless of what those of us who made it might believe we have to leave that for those who play it to decide. Something we’re only too happy to be able to do at long last.
We hope you like it as much as we do.
See you on the leaderboards!
Colin.
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Congrats, chaps. Eagerly awaiting getting home and buying myself a copy. See y’online!
Congratulations an an awesome game guys. Hope it sells well on XBLA is certainly deserves all the praise it gets.
Congratulations, guys! I’m so happy it’s finally out.
Btw, I got an Xbox LIVE Gold membership just for this. Now I’m just waiting for work to be over so I can rush home and start playing! ^^
This is massive and I’m so happy for the game!!!! IT deserves to be in peoples lives!
Hip Hip Hooray! I will shout about this for all I am worth. Congratulations on your hard work finally paying off…
B.
Congrats folks – no doubt a difficult task to create this title on a very different platform from the original!
Finally, finally, finally. Hopefully it does as well as it deserves too on its final intended home platform.
Excellent
We’re rooting for you!
It would be great to see a local multiplayer (even if we need to close our eyes, whatever). Or a release on PC so we can play online for free
Anyway, excellent game demo.
Im so chuffed for you all…this deserves to be HUGE…
All the best
Ged
Very well done folks…though really, I have to regularly surrender ‘my’ iPad to the missus so she can play Quarrel as it is (let alone to my 8 year old)….now I may lose the XBox too…this has gone far enough!!!
The game looks very good, but I am afraid as part of the games industry, let me tell you: Console is SO much the wrong target audience.
Go PC – get on Steam or Desura (which is far easier) – and you’d honestly have a HIT on your hands. Here’s where people play Words With Friends. Here’s where we Scrabble on the Orange Gameschannel.
Here, on PC, is where people have been waiting for ages for a new You Don’t Know Jack game – a brand that bombed and self-destructed when trying to go console, by the way.
I genuinely hope I’m wrong, but do let me know when we’re getting a PC version.
Well said Colin, and congrats on Quarrel finally coming out for 360. I see Eurogamer liked it
Congrats guys on the game. It looks very good indeed and well worth the 400MP’s.
Just one thing though (before people start complaining). The Collins Official Scrabble Dictionary has been recently updated, so the 2007 2nd Edition is actually outdated now.
The new wordlist can be found here:
http://www.zyzzyva.net/lexicons/CSW12.txt
Yay! I’ve been waiting for this for over 2 years since I got to playtest it. I will definitely spread the word that Quarrel is finally gracing XBLA with it’s presence.. Congrat’s Colin and crew!
Just wanted to say how very pleased (and surprised) I was to find this on XBLA today when I logged on. I downloaded the demo and within minutes of starting the tutorial, backed out and purchased the full version. You’ve managed to combine a word game with Risk mechanics and, for me, that is a combination that WINS!
I will be sure to tell everyone I know about this game.
Best of luck Denki!
any thought to bringing this game to windows phone? this would be the perfect async live game!
I’d love to see a local multiplayer version on tablets, similar to the way scrabble works where you could have the world tiles for each player on their own ipod or ipad and the ‘board’ on a centre ipad, appletv or PC. This is the future, make it happen!
The Wii U version should rule
Thanks for the support everyone – always appreciated and never assumed!
@Vex: The reason it ended up on XBLA rather than PC is an even longer story than the one above. Maybe for another day… In the meantime I hope we get the chance to bring Quarrel to PC at some point, but I rather suspect that will depend on how well (or not) it does on XBLA.
@Murrell: Many thoughts but no definitive action as yet. As with PC it’s likely to depend on the kind of response the game picks up from XBLA gamers.
@Simon: Yep – we’d love to see this version happen too as we think Quarrel’s perfect for showing off any connected platform. So fingers crossed!
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I’m going to get the XBLA version because I want the online play, but I hope you will also add online play to the iOS version too, with chat (ideally voice chat – is that doable?). It’s a great game on iOS, just missing online play.
Also I don’t see why local multiplayer couldn’t be split screen. No need for hiding eyes – if you’re copying a word off of someone else you are inherently going to lose because if you spell the same word, but take even a second longer, you lose. Plus everybody usually has different length words they are allowed to make anyway. I haven’t tried the demo yet, but will be disappointed if there really is no local multiplayer.
Hi,
I’m getting horrible sound problems on the Xbox version of this. It started out as screaching, white noisy artefacts when the music got loud but as I play more it builds to the point when the soundtrack is just constant deafening static.
Any ideas?
I don’t think it’s my setup as everything else (other games, dashboard etc) is fine.
Thanks in advance.
So glad to see it’s finally out! Buying it today and spreading the word to everyone I can. Congrats Colin, Sean, Gary and the rest of the Denki crew!
Hi!
Any chance for a multi-language support(italian, french, spanish)?
The game looks great on XBLA!
Hi, I love this game.
I have encountered a bug and I can’t find anywhere to post it to let you guys know except here.
As a developer myself I know i’d want to be told. Basically my xbox has totally frozen twice now, both times were just as I pressed Y to submit a bonus word just as the second battling players submitted his word.
Make that 3 times now.
Same thing just happened to a friend on live same scenario, different xbox.
Also “dice” and “gnarl” are totally real words.
Oh and “spice”
“basic” “kilt”
Thanks for the continuing support everyone!
@Crunchewy: I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed if you’re looking for local multiplayer in the XBLA version – sorry, about that. Hopefully the online multiplayer option goes some way towards making amends though.
@Ian: Thanks for letting us know. We’ve heard of similar (though not identical) audio problems from others, so we’ve passed it on to Ignition who are handling support for Quarrel.
@Calu: Not at the moment, but just like Scrabble, if the English version takes off it’s entirely possible we could see it being translated to other languages. We prototyped a German language version during development so we know it can definitely work in other European languages.
@Glen: Yes, thanks – we appreciate hearing about anything that’s not working as the more data we have the better chance there is of pinpointing what’s causing the problem. Again, we’ve heard similar reports from a few people since the game launched, so we’re passing all the information along to Ignition to try and shed more light on it. With regards the “real” words issue I’d refer you to this article in Escapist: http://bit.ly/xCVHyN – we completely agree that the words you list are real; particularly “kilt” of course!
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Thank you Colin.
I bought the game and it’s great. Obviously I can’t compete against english players (online) or high level AI (offline)… but I can improve my dictionary waiting for an italian version.
[...] Somehow, for reasons that Colin (Anderson, managing director, musician and nice-guy) alludes to in his latest blog post, it has taken until now for the XBLA version of the game to see the light of [...]
You seem like nice guys, but your game is broken to the point of being unfixable. The problem is that you don’t know what words are.
Just because you can add a modifier to a word doesn’t mean that it’s a word.
Rancidly. Not a word. If food goes bad, it tastes RANCID, not RANCIDLY.
Also not a word: AUTOCUES or FEDEXED. Wow. That’s a brand name, You can’t use brand names in a word game.
Oh, and another one, vanload. Not a word. That’s two words. A lot of your “anagrams” are just two words you decided worked well together.
You even use abbreviations like FUBAR (funny btw) which are definitely NOT in the scrabble dictionary.
The biggest problem with all of this is that the AI knows your fake words, so they can always use them. I would never try to spell out “vanloads” because it’s not a word! Kai loves using it though! Totally unfair to the player.
Your game would have been awesome if you played by the rules and used actual words. Now its unplayable.
@Bookworm: According to the Collins Online Scrabble Checker, all the words you mention definitely are completely valid Scrabble words.
Autocue and Fedex are indeed brand names, but like Hoover and Xerox before them (also both allowable words), they have passed into standard everyday generic usage. Language (especially English) changes constantly in many ways, sometimes in ways that we dislike. Disliking something isn’t the same as that thing being wrong, however.
@Bookworm – Thanks for taking the time to share your concerns. We recognised that frustrations with what constituted a “valid” word would prove divisive early in development which is why we licensed the Official Scrabble Dictionary from HarperCollins. Our reasoning was that if a word was good enough for Scrabble players then it would probably be good enough for Quarrel players too.
There’s more information about the dictionary the game uses in our FAQ if you’re interested. It explains the criteria for what constitutes a valid word in some detail and you’ll find it here: http://www.denki.co.uk/games/quarrel/quarrel-faq/#dictionary
I hope you find that useful.
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Downloading the demo – will try it out tonight with girlfriend.
If you fancy a new project – I swear there’s a hole in the market for a good quiz game.
I would love to have this on my WIndows Phone too. Any plans for that? Love the game. Great work gents!
Great game. Really, well done. Amazing fun.
Few issues with words though as previously mentioned. If an update was made that would be brilliant.
Most recent point in case being that my friend and I both formed the anagram “genocide”. Both of us were not allowed to submit it. Both shouting at the same time “That’s IS a word!” (We are closely matched). The real rub lay in the anagram being revealed as…you guessed it….”genocide”.
Help!!
Thanks again for all the great feedback on Quarrel! We really appreciate it.
@RooAh: I’m not aware of any Windows Phone plans at the moment, but I’m sure it will be on the cards at some point if the XBLA version proves popular.
@Neil Duncan: This sounds like another word that falls victim of Microsoft’s “special” word filter (as described in more detail here: http://bit.ly/xCVHyN). We haven’t heard of “genocide” being disallowed before, but we know “sexuality” suffers from the same issue so thanks for telling us. Our apologies – we’re hoping to get this addressed as soon as we can, so thanks for bearing with us in the meantime.
Great game guys, great price too. A friend tells me his achievements aren’t being awarded, are you aware of this? Great game by the way, and such a great price.
Fun game, I’m probably going to give up out of frustration over trying to beat the best AI opponents but I can’t say I haven’t gotten my 400 points worth. Like others, I find some of the words problematic but the biggest problem for me is the AI. After playing for about an hour and finally getting Kali (Showdown final match) all the way down to one square only to have her come all the way back and beat me with anagram after anagram after anagram and some of the aforementioned iffy words (I’d add Jellos to that list) I figured that enough is enough. It’s usually not my thing to whine about difficulty because I’m a long-time gamer who has beaten lots of really tough games, but seriously I don’t think it would hurt to nerf Kali just a touch, and maybe Helena too. I’m guessing a lot of people are just going to try to use an illegitimate method to beat them.
But anyway, I think the game is a great buy for just 400 points as I’ve spent more time on it than a few games I paid $60 for and haven’t even finished the single player stuff. I think it’s a good addition to XBL and I hope a lot of people catch on and pick it up.
@Martin: Nope, haven’t heard of achievements being a problem on XBLA; we did have some issues on iOS because GameCenter’s a bit flakey if you delete the app and reinstall, but nothing on XBLA so far. Thanks for letting us know though; we’ll keep our eyes peeled.
@John F: Thanks for the feedback – we all share your Helena and Kali pain at Denki I can assure you!
We know they’re incredibly punishing to play against, but it’s worth remembering that’s what they were designed to do; at least in part. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the single player version of Quarrel wasn’t really meant to be a game people played through to finish so much as a gym to train in for competitive multiplayer matches. As much as I often feel incredibly frustrated playing against Kali or Helena (and sometimes Rex too) I know that they force me to up my game significantly, and that pays dividends when playing online against real people. I always make a point of going a few rounds with Kali before I even think of taking on Gary Penn, because I know I’ll never last 5 minutes against him otherwise! Glad to hear you feel you got your money’s worth at least.
BTW folks – if anyone’s going online to play Quarrel over the weekend we’ll be using the #playquarrel hashtag to try and organise matches on Twitter.
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@Dave T
@Denkicolin
I’ve never heard of the Collins Scrabble dictionary before and I’m glad I haven’t because it obviously doesn’t follow official scrabble rules – rendering it completely useless.
It even clears you for “words” like VANLOAD that aren’t even it its own dictionary! Once again, that’s because it’s not a freakin’ word. And even it can’t find RANCIDLY.
That same dictionary says that FUBAR and SCUBA are words. But they’re not, once again, they are in direct violation of Scrabble’s official rulebook, which clearly states no anagrams. Why you would choose to use a Scrabble book that doesn’t understand the rules of scrabble is beyond me.
And besides, even if you were right and those were words, it wouldn’t fix the fact that the game is fundamentally broken online, the AI cheats and your sound is buggy as hell.
@Bookworm: Just to clarify, we’re not claiming we’re right about what is or isn’t a word – I’m sure the point you make about certain ‘words’ not being words is perfectly valid.
All we’re saying is that Quarrel uses the Official Scrabble Dictionary, which is the word list that is used as the authority at international competitions such as the World Scrabble Championships and at national competitions such as the UK National Scrabble Championship. That’s the reason we chose this dictionary over any other.
So if they accept it then Quarrel accepts it by default; Denki has no control over it. Any concerns would be better directed towards organisations such as the World Scrabble Players’ Association whose members decide what words are acceptable and what words are not. More info here if you’re interested: http://www.denki.co.uk/games/quarrel/quarrel-faq/collins-faq/
That said, the AI “cheating” and the sound being “buggy as hell” is entirely our doing – sorry about that!
WRT the sound being buggy as hell – are you remembering to call Update() on your AudioManager object (assuming the XBLA classes are similar to the XBLIG ones anyway) – that’s usually the cause for dodgy audio issues
I did also notice the achievements not being awarded if I bought the game having started from the trial – if I quit and restarted the game from the dashboard then it started awarding achievements as expected.
@Alex: Thanks for the audio tip – we’re looking to get a patch out to fix that and the multiplayer crashes as soon as possible, so I’ll pass the info on to Aaron. He has a post in to MS support at the moment, but they’re being rather slow in getting back to him, so this might give him something to look in to meantime.
And it sounds like we should probably ask him to check the achievements while he’s at it!
Much appreciated!
Love this game! It’s a ton of fun. Lack of local play is a must update; we’ll figure out how not to cheat among ourselves. Even team based local players vs another team over Live would be cool. None the less, it’s still a great game sans local play, but I’d gladly pay a couple extra $ for an update! TY DENKI for the great game. My friends and I love it.
So who was right, the industry or gamers?
I like Quarrel. Maybe in a later post you can update everybody as to the success or failure of Quarrel.
@Myles: Thanks, and glad to hear you’re enjoying it – we’ll add your vote to the “local mutliplayer” item on the feature wishlist!
@KitesAreFun: Will do – it’s still too early to be calling it quite yet, but it’s clear from the initial sales and Metacritic score that there’s definitely an enthusiastic audience for word games on XBLA. I’ve just provided some comments on this to Gamasutra today in fact, so look out for that soon.
The only thing I think we’ve still to see is how big that enthusiastic audience turns out to be. After all, the industry never said it wouldn’t sell at all, they said it wouldn’t prove popular is all. We shall see…